I lived in LA a few years ago, and I remember there being plenty of places to walk in LA (few roads without sidewalks), so long as you don't mind the stares you inevitably get for not being in a car.

That varies tremendously by neighborhood, especially depending on when the neighborhood was built. Most places where the street network was put in before WWII have good sidewalks. Some cities kept at it after the war, but lots of places started treating them as optional or as afterthoughts. In my area, I rarely need a sign to tell when I'm walking across the Pasadena city limits because the sidewalks in Pasadena are much better than the ones in surrounding communities.

Geography is the core problem. There simply aren't many good routes between the San Fernando Valley and the LA basin, and the best routes are already filled with freeways. Not to mention that the routes for any new freeways would run through extremely pricey neighborhoods that would make them both politically and financially impractical, and that the construction would take a very long time even if/when those hoops were jumped through.

It would be a much better idea to build a light rail line paralleling the 405- call it the Sepulveda Line- from the Orange Line in Van Nuys down to the Green Line near LAX or even the Blue Line in Long Beach. It might need to tunnel under Sepulveda Pass to keep the grade reasonable, but it would let you put in more new capacity for the amount of space consumed than any freeway alternative.

"ongoing investigations" becomes a catchphrase to cover a lot of potentially shady things.

I think that's a bigger concern if the result of declaring an investigation ongoing is to make it easier to discard evidence rather than to retain it. It's always possible to discard or seal evidence that's being kept, but it's not generally possible to recover evidence that's been discarded. Therefore, the general position should be to discard only recordings that can easily be categorized as not evidence and keep any that might possibly be evidence.

Keep the videos for 180 days or a year and delete unless they're part of a court order to keep.

I think you would want to broaden that to include anything that's part of an ongoing investigation. Something like a missing person case can involve an open-ended investigation, and the courts are unlikely to be involved until/unless there's evidence of a crime. The police should maintain the records for that kind of investigation as long as the case is still open.

Third, even if they do apply, they can be denied for valid grounds - for example, if they contain personally identifying information, underage nudity, or other public safety issues - it's going to be on a per-municipality basis.

In this case, I think the police department would be justified in denying the request as unduly broad and burdensome. There's a huge difference between requesting all the footage associated with a specific incident or investigation and demanding all the footage period. Most public records laws allow the government to charge the people making requests for the costs of providing the records, and the police would certainly be justified in demanding upfront payment in this case.

Who would mandate this compliance?

A combination of the insurance companies and the state governments. State governments already mandate that people have insurance (or post a bond that's out of most people's financial reach) in order to drive. If the insurance companies start refusing to offer insurance to people who refuse to have GPS trackers installed, it's very close to a state mandate. At the very least, they'll treat it as an admission that you're a highly unsafe driver and give you very high rates, so that most people won't be in financial position to say no.

that is exactly what the government does with the CAFE standards.

No, it isn't. The CAFE standards traditionally used the weighted harmonic mean of the mpg values, which gives exactly the same result as the weighted arithmetic mean of the economy expressed in gallons per mile. There are some other quirks- dual fuel vehicles are treated much more favorably than they probably ought to be, for instance- and the standards were recently changed to give bigger vehicles a break. But the larger point is that the EPA isn't completely stupid and does realize that the arithmetic mean is not the correct way of calculating average fuel economy.

One more case where SI units are easier to use. 1 liter/kilometer is 1 square milimeter. Isn't that so much simpler?

For what it's worth, the physical interpretation of this would be that a car with a fuel economy of a given area would be able to drive without needing on-board fuel storage if it were following a trail of fuel with that cross sectional area.

Employers want more to drive prices down, workers want fewer to reduce competition. Employers have more money and a better lobbying arm, so their opinion is the one we tend to hear.

It depends on the start mechanism of the ballast. Rapid start and programmed start ballasts give very good electrode life, but at the cost of reduced efficiency. Instant start is most efficient, but it substantially reduces electrode life. Given that lamps are generally rated for substantially longer life with programmed start than instant start, electrode life must be the limiting factor in at least some cases.

Who thinks it's okay to sit on their phone?

You can flip this around and ask what company bases their product on theoretical ideas about how people ought to use it rather than watching the way people actually do? I don't think it's sensible to drop a phone in water, but that hasn't stopped companies from making phones that are water and drop resistant. People in the real world also tend to put their phones in their back pockets, especially bigger ones that may not fit comfortably in a front pocket, and that inevitably means they get sat on. A company that makes a phone that's likely to be sat on needs to make it durable enough to hold up when that happens, or they'll be rightly criticized for failing to produce a quality product.

Yes, that's a premium price for a 28" 4K display. Dell is currently selling theirs for $430. Note, though, that the relatively inexpensive 28" 4K displays are using TN rather than IPS, which is a big reason they're relatively cheap.

Increased efficiency could actually help with cost, even if it makes the actual LEDs more expensive. First of all, improved efficiency would reduce the number of individual LEDs needed for a given amount of light, which would counteract some of the increased cost. Second, the LEDs are only a small part of the package, and improving their efficiency would make everything else easier. It would mean cheaper power electronics, which reduces cost. It would also mean less waste heat, which would mean a smaller heat sink, which is the single biggest thing in most LED lights.

And those electrodes are probably a big reason many people have much lower than expected lifespan for their CFLs. The electrodes undergo a lot of wear during the initial power surge when the light is turned on, so ones that are turned on and off many times per day will die long before their rated lifespan.

It doesn't decrease the incentive to produce software nearly as much as the threat of being sued for violating patents that never should have been granted. There's plenty of software out there that attracts customers by being good and doesn't need the threat of patents to succeed.