To be fair, if your residential AC is 10 years old or older, and in need of repair, the service people are going to sell you a new one, compatible refrigerant or not, since the expected service life of the system is only around 12 years. (YMMV)

The charge is for smuggling HFCs, not CFCs. HFCs do not deplete ozone, and are replacements for ozone-depleting CFCs.

He also smuggled R22, which is a HCFC, and does deplete the ozone.

Except that the guy was smuggling HFCs, not CFCs (like Freon).

Except that he was also smuggling HCFCs (R22), which do deplete the ozone as well as being greenhouse gases.

Fluorocarbons are legal, and the specific fluorocarbons he imported are also legal.

He not only imported HFCs, he also imported HCFCs (R22 according to TFAs). IRRC, you can only legally use recycled HCFCs. TFAs were not specific on whether that was virgin R22 or used.

Unemployment is at historically low levels. The fact that more software developers were hired during the pandemic than are currently needed is not really related to any Biden policies, economic or foreign policy.

You seem to be arguing that raising the minimum wage caused a rise in rents. You could have just as easily argued that rising rent was the reason the minimum wage was raised. In either case correlation does not mean causation.

A woman is an adult human with XX chromosomes. A man is an adult human with XY chromosomes.

So what about people with XY chromosomes that have complete androgen insensitivity syndrome? People with that condition develop as female and often don't realize that they have that condition until they try to have children.

I think there will have to be some big shift in the overall thought behind current-gen AI systems before we see any real progress . . .

I believe that to get over the hump there needs to be a way to marry the neural net machine learning models with logic-based expert systems. How to do that is an exercise left to the reader.

Japan is about half the size of Texas and manages to run their own independent power grid.

Japan has 2 mostly separate grids, one running at 50Hz and one running at 60Hz, with not much interconnectivity.

If people were getting burst pipes from freezing often enough then they would not consider running pipes outdoors.

According to ASHRAE, the 99.6% winter design for Houston ranges from 33.5F at Hobby to 31.4F at Bush to 29.8F at Hook. On average it's that cold or colder 35 hours a year. Yet it's common to have some exposed aboveground water piping, e.g. at outdoor hose bibbs. If you don't protect that piping with some insulating cover at the beginning of winter, you're asking for trouble, and occasionally that's not enough.

Vaers says right in the FAQ that it cannot be used to count cases of anything

True - it's full of anecdotal information and coincidences. Still, it's used as a place to get an idea of where to start looking for potential issues.

. . like a fire alarm can't tell you what room the fire is in.

In any large building, the fire alarm will have an annunciator panel including information on where the fire is, though probably not down to the exact room.

Every tech company I've worked at (and I'm old) has had parallel tracks for engineering and management.

Every engineering company I've worked at (and I'm old) has had engineers as management, (except for the HR/legal department of one of the larger firms).

Is it just poorly worded? When I read it I thought it was just plain broken English

Just missing a couple of commas.

Well, I worked 8 hours a day, 4 days a week for the last year and a half before I retired this past January. I got paid 20% less, but, hey, I was retirement age, anyway. I found that I usually got as much work done as in the five 8 hr days a week I was working before that. Only usually, because there were a couple of times where a push was needed to get something done on a day I was off. It made a big difference in how good I felt about working, much more than I had thought it would.

How many data center back-up generators run on natural gas rather than diesel? Very few, I would estimate. Not that diesel is good for the environment.