Or individually wrapped cookies.

Unless you are a very unusual consumer, the number of bags acquired on a normal shopping trip is roughly 4x the number of bags needed to hold the trash from purchased products. Most shopping bags are too small to hold the trash from larger purchases. So yes, buying dedicated shopping bags will decrease substantially the number of bags used by the average consumer. Every region that has passed such bags has seen such decrease. Moreover, most consumers are not reusing shopping bags ever. So kudos to you, but please support the ban.

Ah. Thank you. I hadn't seen the connection.

> everybody talks to the people in their party, but nobody talks to the people in the other party,

EXACTLY THIS! Historically it was very common to have acquaintances and even friends across the aisle. Those links formed because the congress folks were often roommates with each other or at least socialized with each other in the evenings. But about 20 years ago, I don't know exactly what changed, but it became financially much more feasible to go home every weekend, except for Hawaii and Alaska. The House is particularly driven by the need to campaign, so House members started doing that a lot. And the number of cross-party links crashes down from that point forward. Combine that with a crash of home prices, a lot of senators bought their own homes and then sold them on to the next person elected, which means fewer of them were rooming together. The net effect is to speak only to the ones that you have a reason to talk with in committees and conferences -- and conferences are generally split by party.

If you go to a conference, one of those with lots of learning sessions, compare how much you get out of one where you're in person vs. attending online. By being able to go home in the evenings, most attendees surveyed in the last couple years find that they get a lot less out of the conference because they aren't spending the evenings talking with people who were in those sessions and continuing the discussions. That same effect is running through the modern Congress.

Where I think you and I can agree: I would support putting Congress on a train and having the whole bunch of them move from city to city across the USA, a new city each week. They'd get to experience more of the country, they'd be together to talk more, and the lobbyists would have to chase them around, increasing lobbyist costs.

Note: until 20 years ago, it was fairly rare to leave DC during session, so Congress folks got to know each other a lot more.

Iâ(TM)ve interviewed a couple senators and a rep on this topic. All three said that not knowing each other was making it harder to understand the needs of other parts of the country and therefore to find compromise. They all laid the problem at the fact that so many members do leave Washington every weekend to be in their districts more. Thatâ(TM)s a major problem, according to the ones I talked with, because it limits how much they see themselves as working for the whole country compared to working for their districts or states.

Lobbyists will find them anywhere they go.

And the TFA simplified to make an absolutely understandable point for laypersons who are not actuaries.

There is evidence that 0 is the amount humans can tolerate well, but the cost for getting to zero is way high. Human life is not worth that much.

HR department executes decisions. It does not make decisions. Your friend may be correct that someone is doing this, but your friend is placing blame in wrong place.

It is not the Dems that are holding up the budget. GOP-controlled House has to start the budget process, but has not.

Not paying them means we still do not get a budget since many (especially in the House) would need to go home â" a large percent of them need the stipend to afford DC. Better is if they do not get a budget on time, they cannot run for reelection.

It worked out with a moon landing? Seems like a success to me. Your tone implies this was a failure?

That would be long-term profitable not short-term profitable. In the short term, it's always better to let the finance folks make decisions. And therein lies the problem: hit one bad financial quarter, need to let the bankers steer the ship, and then discover they don't easily let go of the reins.

JSON's lack of support for NaN, Inf, and -Inf in numeric fields is also a major problem.

That is a reasonable limit on my argument, but this tech still represents a ratcheting up of the division, and my point about why this is different from books stands.