Well, of course it's easy -- look at what they're teaching in the Business Administration department in colleges: that it doesn't matter what a company does, or what it produces, or what any of the individual employees do in their jobs; someone trained in modern business management can walk in off the street and competently manage the people under them at any level from the work group all the way up to CEO.

More properly, using calculators that lie about being "algebraic" and use a bastard mix of algebraic and RPN are confusing to use. Why do I say this? Think about it. with an RPN calculator, dyadic functions are (number) (number) (function), while monadic functions are (number) (function). With so-called "algebraic" calculators, while dyadic functions are (number) (function) (number) (equals), monadic functions are (number) (function) -- which is RPN.

Yet another reason not to opt-in to data collection...

First he's got to get past Disney lugging another shipping container full of money to Congress to further extend the Mickey Mouse Perpetual Protection Act... err... copyright duration.

"Ye knowe ek that in forme of speeche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do;
Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages,
In sondry londes, sondry ben usages."
-- Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Cressida

("You know also that in (the) form of speech (there) is change
Within a thousand years, and words then
That had value, now wonderfully curious and strange
(To) us they seem, and yet they spoke them so,
And succeeded as well in love as men now do;
Also to win love in sundry ages,
In sundry lands, (there) are many usages."
-- Translation by Roger Lass in "Phonology and Morphology." A History of the English Language, edited by Richard M. Hogg and David Denison. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008)

Leaving aside issues of axle weight and the wear on the road infrastructure, every time I take my car in for its smog check, the mileage is recorded along with the VIN and engine number. That happens every other year, and averaging that distance across the interval since the last smog check would give an average miles per day, which produces an annual miles-driven value for a per-mile tax without any ability to track the location of the vehicle. And for the inevitable 'but this doesn't account for the car being driven out of state' objections, neither does the proposed mileage meters; you can't tell where the car is being driven without being able to track where the car is. And this data is already being collected; there is no additional recordkeeping involved.

Oh, yes; the Democrats should agree to doing it this way so that they can lose the fight over the Affordable Care Act without a chance to preserve it. If they let the House pass bills that fund the government on a program-by-program basis, then the House Republicans will slowly work their way through bills that fund every government program except the Affordable Care Act. And by the time this happens, the Democrats will have already conceded on every other funding issue, so they'll have nothing to use to bargain with the Republicans to preserve the President's signature program, and the Democrats will have allowed the Republicans to kill the Affordable Care Act by inches. And the last few funding bills will be over clearly niggling-cost but high-visibility programs, so that if the Democrats try to get up on their high horse and demand funding for the Affordable Care Act, the Republicans can point at them and laugh at how they're willing to hold up these minor programs in order to get this much bigger program funded, making them look ridiculous. The Democrats can't concede on an a la carte funding process.

Ahh, so that's what they're called. I had a bag of these (wood) when I was a kid, and just called them my 'math blocks'.

“This is the future we must avert. This is the global threat of our time. And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late. That is our job. That is our task. We have to get to work.”

Hardly sounds as if Obama considers "climate change" to be a sideline. You just have to look at Obama's Climate Action Plan to see for yourself. In his speech on climate change in June, he declared that he would be invoking his executive authority to invoke a number of measures aimed at curbing climate change and 'preparing' America for its costly impacts. In that speech, with the quip "We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society", he summarily dismissed any possibility of considering that the holy doctrine of anthropogenic climate change might be wrong, despite the repeated failure of climate models to reproduce the global cooling of the last fifteen years.

--
"You are charged with preaching wrongful, pernicious, and misleading doctrine about anthropogenic global warming."

This also puts an odd spin on H. Beam Piper's "Paratime" stories, where humanity evolved on Mars and colonized Earth as the Martian environment became less and less hospitable, and the various 'bands' across the various timelines were categorized by how successful the colonization was -- First Level, where the colonization succeeded fully; Second Level, where there were collapses in civilization, but they retained their knowledge of their Martian origins; Third Level, where the colonization was mostly unsuccessful, with only a few shiploads of people reaching Earth and losing all memory of their origin; Fourth Level, where the colonization survivors lost all knowledge of their origins and believe that they evolved on Earth; and Fifth Level, where the colonization either failed or was never attempted.

Actually, the US-distribution release of "Quatermass and the Pit" was "Five Million Years to Earth".

If the effects prove out, they had better make sure that they test for side effects at absurd overdose levels, because regardless of how it's intended to be used, there will be thousands if not millions of people who assume that if 100mg a day is good, 1000mg a day will be better -- and knowing what the overdose effects are in advance will make it easier to recognize and treat them.

Not to mention coming up with a workable test to detect its use that the various sports anti-doping agencies will want to use...

Actually, at least at the hospital where I work (and, presumably, through the rest of the military health system, since it's a standard test), it's HgA1c; 'HbA1c' must be a variant usage.

Blocking third-party cookies doesn't stop companies from including advertisements on web pages. What it does is stop companies from being able to collect data that tells them "From our tracking cookies, you went to sites X, Y, and Z, so we should show you advertisements for this group of products because we think that you will be more likely to respond to them than advertisements from that group of products.

"Post hoc, ergo propter hoc" has a long tradition in argument.