Two comments:

1) Your preferred candidate model is at odds with the _data_. Observational data is what you have to test a model against, and your preferred model fails spectacularly: it can't explain the baryon acoustic oscillation spectrum, or the large scale intergalactic structure, or the polarization spectrum of the microwave background, or the accelerating cosmic expansion rate. That's _why_ the current concordance model became accepted as most probable: it explains the data ... even data that were not collected at the time it was proposed! You might try reading about the successes and challenges of the Lambda-CDM: model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Whether the dark matter and energy eventually have a particle solution or not - and this hasn't been "proclaimed" by anyone, there are many competing hypotheses - the data very strongly require more types of physics than are currently described by the Standard Model of particle physics.

2) People like to rag on the aether model, and it's true that we no longer believe there is an aether, but that's because the _data_ don't require it. However, it was _not_ a crazy expectation. All wave phenomena known to the time required a physical medium to propagate in; light was a wave; ergo, the hypothesis of the aether as the medium to support light propagation. The aether fell out of favor because every attempt to measure its properties failed, and physics eventually relegated it to an interesting historical footnote.

As others have mentioned, muon tomography can be used to study geological structure and do non-desrructive searches of shipping containers, for dxample, for fissile materials. Muon spin resonance can be used to study the magnetic structure if materials. They also do chemistry, so they can be used to understand properties of chemical compounds.

Yes 50 ... under the XII Amendment

"But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote"

Bingo ... you got it. Many schools won't even accept donations of used equipment, because the cost of supporting and maintaining a heterogeneous fleet of hardware in the hands of schoolchildren and non-tech-expert teachers vastly outweighs the benefits. My childrens' district purchases hundreds of identical machines every few years to replace the previous fleet ... and then they donate the old fleet to non-profits or dispose of them, because no other schools want the "old" fleet due to support and maintenance costs of aging equipment.

Private home sales in the US usually come with lots of inspections of various things:
1) Most buyers demand a physical home inspection by a professional home inspector, looking at physical condition of the property and the mechanical systems. But, no one is an expert at everything, and most home inspection agreements disclaim liability for missing major issues.
2) Most mortgage companies/banks require an appraisal of value before agreeing to the loan. Ironically, most appraisals find the value of the home is just slightly higher than the agreed upon sale price. This is the issue being discussed here.
3) The mortgage company can also demand its own on-site inspections, including such things as radon inspection, pest inspection (termites, carpenter ants, etc), lead paint certification, asbestos certification, etc.
4) The mortgage company will also demand a number of legal investigations: deep historical inspection of title, liens, outstanding permit issues, etc. They'll also demand associated title insurance to protect them if the title search misses something. Most buyers also purchase their own title insurance.
5) Mortgagers also demand that you pay for home insurance for at least the duration of the mortgage.
6) Often, the local municipality requires homes to have a certificate of occupancy, and will demand their own inspection of the home and property at sale for code and safety issues which must be fixed before occupancy by the new owners is permitted.
7) In some jurisdictions, there can be additional legal issues that need to be investigated, such as mineral rights, flood inspections, etc.

There are probably a few others that I'm forgetting.

No, the CRA requires rulemaking decisions by Executive Agencies to be submitted to Congress for review, and it provides for expedited congressional action to override that rulemaking that bypasses the normal rules of the House and Senate. Overriding the rule is done by passage of an act, and that needs a presidential signature, or a veto override by the normal means:

For a regulation to be invalidated under the CRA, the Congressional resolution of disapproval must be either signed by the President or passed over the President's veto by two thirds of both Houses of Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You forgot to factor in Locality adjustment. DC area base at step 10 is $126k. Additionally, federal employee benefits are very generous, including pension benefits that are generally unavailable in the comparable private sector jobs.

Or sending a train at 55mph into a block occupied by a stopped train that it should have known was there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Except it did. The Supreme Court of the U.S. dramatically reduced the number of cases it heard—from an average of about 75 cases in previous years (and 80 in 2015) to only 25 in 2016.

That case count is incorrect. The Court's annual term starts in October. I see 67 arguments on their docket for the OT2016 term, of which 25 have already resulted in opinions. Since there are also consolidated arguments and per curiam opinions, they have accepted more than 67 cases already. And they may still add cases to the term (although that is unlikely at this point). In OT2015, they decided 82 cases, not all of which had oral arguments. They are behind their previous pace, but not by a factor of 3 ... more likely by about 10%. https://ballotpedia.org/Suprem...

They already did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

5) On ice or other slippery roads, it is often impossible to avoid collision with breaks alone

Then you're either the conditions are too poor to drive at all, and you should stay home, or you are tailgating and driving too fast. There is never a time when you as the driver have an excuse for being unable to brake in time.

No ... over the last hundred years, with improvements in public hygiene, water supplies, and vaccines, we have essentially conquered lethal childhood disease. We have effectively conquered food-borne illness. We have found effective anaesthetics and antibiotics and discovered effective methods of surgery so that essentially no one dies of minor trauma. The same techniques mean that most birth defects are now survivable.

Heart attack, cancer, etc haven't skyrocketed as causes of death because of our diet ... they've skyrocketed because we now live long enough for these to be the primary things that take us out, because we've beat all the other stuff! All these diseases have (obviously) existed for millions of years, but essentially no one ever succumbed to them because they didn't live long enough!

Can most of us eat better and exercise more and eek out a few more years? Sure. But I'd much rather our situation today than that of our forbears of even a hundred years ago.

For both JFK and Newark (both of which I fly through a lot), it depends on the terminal. Newark A sucks, hard. Newark C is quite nice since the renovations. JFK 8 is also pretty nice.

I would go so far as to say they would have required the companies that recorded the data for billing purposes to remove it when the bill was paid without dispute instead of hanging on to it at all.

That's a patently silly claim. There were certainly business records in the 1790s; if they were going to outlaw keeping records after billing was concluded, don't you think they would have done that in, say, the 1790s? They pretty clearly didn't do that...

"Not subject to FOIA" is not the same as "we refuse to respond to FOIA requests" .... the Administration is certainly not forbidden from providing more than is required under the law.