What are "lighter drugs"? Not trying to call you out; I appreciate the level of honesty in your post. But I thought that stimulants were lighter drugs, compared to, say, antidepressants or antipsychotics

Perhaps that says more about the reduction in cultural variances than changes in architectural design. Huge commercial skyscrapers dominate the skyline of globalized commercial centers around the world because globalized commercial centers share the same culture.

Being against this particular transaction is not the same as being against the evolution of language. As far as I can tell, the new meaning of the phrase "begs the question" is the same as "raises the question," except with the additional nuance that the speaker/writer wants to sound like a person who is well read enough to have encountered the phrase in its original usage but, in fact, is not and has not. Being against that does not make one a grammar nazi or language Luddite.

Although the particular person at $115 is pretty rare, they are very important, since they are the marginal buyer at $115. The "rare" marginal buyer at 115, and the "rare" buyer at 116, and at 117, and at 118, etc.create the demand curve.

But there are likely to be discontinuities in the curve, especially at round numbers, so the number of marginal buyers of a 500gb drive from $250 down to $249 is probably a decent sized chunk, whereas the number of buyers from say $257 to $256 is probably not so significant.

Yes clearly my recommendation is jurisdiction-limited. In most countries they would probably wonder why you are talking about a state attorney general in the first place, as I doubt it's a common title outside of the US. Of course, a customer service rep in plenty of countries would probably wonder why you are speaking in English to them in the first place.

But seriously even if I had the choice between a bureaucrat in a well-functioning regulatory body versus an aggressive American lawyer I would still pick the attorney general to best protect my interests.

FTFY. Large companies generally aren't afraid of most government agencies, due to regulatory capture. But tell them that you might be in touch with the office of an ambitious politician with subpoena power and suddenly they become very helpful.

Yes it does. At least, it means more distance is covered during your reaction time, which is the same thing as driving slower and having an impaired reaction time due to not paying attention.

if the IRS should be allowed aggressive auditing powers (and I'm not saying they shouldn't), then it's only fair that an elected body such as Congress should have the right to aggressively audit those audits to ensure those powers aren't being abused. If the IRS can get out of that check by losing particular emails that is a serious problem, just as if the political non profits being audited could avoid problems by disposing of evidence they would rather not have the IRS look at

Unfortunately even that isn't true: see Simpson's Paradox. Not to pick on you, but it is really tough to make strong assertions one way or the other based on social science data. I think the best we can do is a Bayesian approach; start with some prior assumption based on ideology and personal experience, then adjust that prior based on the results of scientific studies. So in parent poster's case, his prior is that guns are pretty good in society, so the reinforcing data point that more guns = less crime makes his belief stronger. Someone whose prior is that guns are bad should probably not be as affected by that data (and if they are being intellectually honest, it would lessen their conviction that guns are bad), and someone who really had no opinion (if you could find such a person!) should be slightly more positively disposed to guns with that data. Of course, another study will typically come out shortly thereafter saying the opposite, so unless you get a series of studies all going in one direction, science will typically not change people's minds.