You are bad at math and erading comprehension

From the article: "in the absence of more targeted grant or scholarship programs, more people are taking out student loans, and they are borrowing more. All that borrowing adds up to a total of $1.3 trillion, nearly triple what it was a decade ago."

The per-person debt is only up by about 70% (not 2.4%, I have no idea how you managed that number) but the TOTAL debt held by all people has tripled over ten years according to the article.

Why do the tax incentives have to fall away? That has never happened for the oil industry and it is the main reason why the price of energy is so low. If you remove the wind subsidies, remove the fossil fuel subsidies as well and you will find that the price of generation goes up for all sources and wind will remain competitive.

Of course this is not likely to happen since Republicans will cut wind while continuing to give huge tax breaks to their buddies at ExxonMobil, etc.

This is an easy one: In Star Track [sic] there are no problems with network security or unethical corporations that will scoop all your personal information onto a remote server from which it can never be deleted, let their employees snoop around in it, sell it to third parties, and then suffer a data breach where everyone in the Federation (or other real or fictional society) finds out that you misplaced your (hypothetical) dildo, bag of weed, etc.

The problem isn't the technology, the problem is the shitty companies that control it.

It is renewable: it is being heated continually by radioactive decay (see my other post in reply to the original post). No need to worry about cooling off the core.

You appear to think that most of the heat at the earth's core is residual, in which case presumably tapping this heat would "let it out" and we would eventually run out. This is not the case. The vast majority of the heat (90% or more) is from the decay of radioactive elements. Thus, the heat is being produced continually and is renewable until the radioactive elements decay (should be a good source of heat for at least a few billion years, probably much more). This means that tapping into the earth's core is not going to ruin the insulation of our crust and cause all the stored up heat to get out, because the core isn't really hot because of residual heat – regardless of what people are taught in grade school.

Saying geothermal heat like this is not renewable is ultimately like saying that hydropower is not renewable because at some point the sun will expand and the earth will get so hot that all the water in all the rivers evaporates – which

There's definitely a problem that we've been fed a lot of misinformation, but those problems are generally facilitated by lack of scientific data. I think the case of multivitamins is a good example. The creation of multivitamins was spurred by the realization that there are different types of compounds that we must consume in certain amounts in order to maintain health. Then someone saw an opportunity to pack all that stuff into one little pill and sell it at a huge mark-up. There hasn't historically been a lot of evidence supporting multivitamins as a maintainer of good health. Instead there's been a lot of evidence that we need the stuff that is in multivitamins. Just because a multivitamin contains what you need doesn't mean your body can access those resources. Now that there's finally research coming out about the effects of multivitamins, the studies are proving that in many cases multivitamins at best have no effect on health.

There's still a lot more to be researched on this issue, but that's the point, the scientific community never knew a lot of this stuff in the first place. It's been both the media trying to sell newspapers and companies trying to create new products without actually researching what those products do.

Another great example of this is the inclusion of vitamin A in topical products like moisturizers and sunscreens. Companies started putting vitamin A in these products because vitamin A is important for healthy skin, so they assuming that slathering it on your body would benefit your skin. Now that research has finally been done on these products, it is now believed that using this product can increase risk of sunburn for as much as a week afterwards!!!!

We should stop blaming science and start blaming those who either manipulate scientific studies for profit or rush products to market without actually using scientific methods to test that the product is safe and does what it is intended to do.

Disruption and contamination is a constant concern in an ecosystem ecological research, particularly microbial work. I think of it as being somewhat akin to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the more deeply you investigate an ecological system, the more likely you are to mess up the that system.

That being said, these folks are professionals, I guarantee you that the first thing they did was collect the microbial samples. Further, there are sterilization protocols in place to limit contamination:
http://www.nature.com/news/lakes-under-the-ice-antarctica-s-secret-garden-1.15729

From the article:
"Although contamination is always a concern, researchers not connected with the Lake Whillans project say that the sterilization precautions seem to have worked well. One sign is that the microbial density of the drilling water in the hole was 200 times lower than that of the lake samples, says Peter Doran, an Earth scientist at the University of Illinois in Chicago, who worked with the US National Research Council for ten years to develop guidelines for sampling Antarctic lakes cleanly. Doran was convinced by the evidence of diverse microbial life in the lake. “They found it in such a way that it can't be questioned. It's pretty iron-clad,” he says."