It's not solely about phones impacting mental health. The presence of smart phones in classrooms also serve as distractions to learning, and for that, I don't think the school needs to rely on formal research for what it empirically knows to be true.

Finally, the boycott I started in 2001 is beginning to have an impact! Die, you worthless waste of an electronics store, DIE!!!

Look at the raw numbers. The sharp drop happened in May 2020, well before the election and takeover of govt by Dems. Production went from a peak of 13 million barrels a day, to about 11 million barrels a day, well before the election, and has held roughly steady at that level over all of Biden's term. If you are going to use data to support a narrative, at least be competent about it

The thing I don't understand about short selling is how does the broker of the shares make money. The idea is that a broker buys some shares and lends them to you, which you then hopefully return back to them when they are worth less money. How can that be profitable for the broker? Is it just that there are far more losers in short selling than winners?

I prefer my salmon to be cisgenic, thank you very much! **ducks**

While it is certainly a laudable goal that all government documents should be made public as soon as they are created, that is simply not practical (as pointed out by DG above). For example, what sort of system do you propose that federal agencies put into place to make employee emails available for everyone to read? How many man hours do you devote to figuring out - a priori - which emails are considered to be official federal records and which ones are just the wife sending you an email to tell you to pick up milk on the way home, or your email to a colleague in the other building asking her if she wants to grab some lunch?

Seems like the better approach is to just store information until a FOIA request comes in, then charge the interested individual the relevant fees associated with recovering that information. That way, the tax payer is not on the hook to pay for tracking, storing, and automatically sharing every trivial, uninteresting detail of an agency's business.

Document stores in federal agencies contain a much richer and wider variety of information and formats than you would give them credit for. It is not only about protecting peoples' social security numbers.

How do you automate regular expression pattern matching on documents from the 80's that were scanned into electronic form as TIF images? Or documents that are stored on microfiche? The documents could be OCR'd but that process takes a bit of time and effort.

And while it may indeed be possible to automatically scan modern electronic documents for personal information (my agency has scripts that it runs periodically on all the files on its network drives to scan for inappropriately stored PII), what if the document happens to contain some company's proprietary data that doesn't match some pre-defined pattern? How do you automatically tell the difference between some company's proprietary cost proposal for a potential contract and an agency's internal budget document?

The price of gas operates this way. For a given locality, if there is no other gas station around, the prices tend to be 5-10 cents higher per gallon than areas that have lots of gas stations nearby. In the areas with high competition, the profit margins tend to be razor thin and prices tend to fluctuate in accordance with the underlying cost of oil. If the price of oil drops, the price of gas drops because once one station lowers their price, all the others in the same area have to as well or risk losing their customers.

I think the price of music has also dropped for the most part as the technology has changed from CD's to mp3's. Before iTunes distribution took over, it used to be that you couldn't go to Sam Goody or FYE or Tower Records and purchase a new release of a popular band on CD for less than about $16, and less relevant bands or older releases from the popular bands for about $12. Now I can get all the songs on a current album from iTunes for about $10-12, and older releases for popular bands in the range of $7-10. Some are admittedly more than that because the album price is now determined on a per song basis, but from my perspective, I am spending less overall than I was before. (and arguably receiving less, mind you, so this is not a perfect example).

Ultimately, it just depends on how cut throat the competition is and what the barriers to entry are in that particular market. More competition will drive prices down if the current margins can be squeezed while still turning an acceptable profit.

Maybe what we need is a compromise. I for one, am going to start pushing the term "Amerusian" (pronounced AM-ER-OOZIAN).

the click-clack of abacus beads hitting one another. I imagine this one wins on length of time in use.

The question in my mind, however, is - if they do shut down this agency - then what will they do with all the old paper-only reports that were published before the internet and electronic documents came about? Presumably, all those old reports have been scanned into microfiche, ready to be reprinted on demand. What happens to those? I would hope that before eliminating the agency, there would be an effort to scan all those microfiche to pdf and make them available for free on the web. Or maybe just hand them over to Google and let them scan it all in and host it.

Correction: there can be no copyright on work created by government employees. Work created by contractors on behalf of the government CAN be copyrighted, if the contracting officer allows it. Also, the government can hold copyright when said copyright has been transferred to it.

See the FAR Subpart 27.4 as well as 52.227-14.

Also, there are exceptions to the rule. NIST and Dept of Commerce maintains a government-asserted copyright to much of its property data, for example the IAPWS steam tables. The reason it is allowed to do this is because there is a law passed by Congress that creates an exception to the normal Code of Federal Regulations that allows NIST to do this. Don't have that handy to reference but I have seen it.

nuclear weapons are never designed to just go "critical". Nuclear reactors go "critical" (or even slightly "super-critical" for short periods). Nuclear weapons go "prompt-critical" (which is just a fancy way of saying "really, really, really super-critical"). The distinction is not just semantics, but is germane to the physics of what is happening.

As the earth cools, its average density goes up, causing the planet to shrink. All just depends on whether the rate of expansion is enough to counteract the rate of contraction.

The AC is right. You are just introducing a strawman into the argument. If you are going to argue the monetary costs of a fuel, then you really shouldn't introduce human-contrived externalities into the mix. The danger in doing so is that then you have to figure out where to draw the line. Because whose to say that wind and solar don't have their own problems that are centuries in the making, as well? Oh, say like the future scarcity of silicon from manufacturing solar panels, or impact to migratory birds from windmills.

I am exaggerating the impacts from solar and wind here, but the point is that if you are going to insist on including the costs of CO2 emissions into the subsidization equation, then you also should include the future environmental costs of the other "green" methods as well. And the trick here is that it is really hard, if not impossible, to predict how future generations are going to place value on aspects of these technologies that are currently not seen as having a societal cost.

The only reason you want to account for the costs of CO2 emissions is because you, along with many other humans, are placing a (negative) value on that. I am sure there are Eskimos living in Alaska that would place a positive value on a warmer climate. Shouldn't you attempt to include their feelings in the matter? Why is your opinion and valuation more important than the Eskimo's? Whose to say the world wouldn't be an overall better place to live a few degrees warmer? Maybe we should be charging more for wind and solar because they ultimately would be preventing us from reaching such a panacea?

Far better to just avoid playing these "what if" games.