... there have been many recent developments finding replacements for rare earth metals in solar panels and other technologies.

Besides that, there's this:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/12/japan-rare-earths-huge-deposit-of-metals-found-in-pacific.html

In the U.S., the medical cartel deliberately restricts the number of people who can become doctors in order to justify high salaries. They do this by restricting the number of students who can attend medical schools in the U.S., and by introducing a sort of hazing to reduce the number of people who want to become doctors. Some Americans avoid this by going to medical schools established by American doctors overseas precisely to deal with this problem, but the medical cartel takes other measures to make life difficult for these doctors. For instance, doctors educated in the United States are paid a modest salary during their residency, while American doctors educated to the same standards overseas are required to PAY a similar amount annually during their residency.

Of course the population has grown even as the supply of doctors has remained about the same, so we see two competing interests: one side wants to provide more doctors and reduce costs, so we import doctors from countries that already have too few (and these doctors are far more likely to cheat our healthcare system than locally born doctors), and introduce programs to let nurses do more work traditionally done by doctors, while at the same time we restrict the number of doctors educated in the United States and make it difficult for foreigners or even American doctors educated elsewhere to practice in the United States. We insist that only doctors can prescribe medication, although there are many, many countries that don't require doctor approval and do very well with that. One side wants to restrict the number of doctors to increase salaries, but as a side effect overworks doctors, while the other side insists on cutting costs and in doing so often increases them. The system is a complete mess, but it is very profitable - at the expense of the public. This monopoly can only exist because of government enforcement.

IIRC, negative returns start at about 55 hours - so no company in their right mind would regularly schedule workers for more than 55 hours per week if they want to maximize profit. Of course short term emergencies are an exception, and there are a few workaholics who are exceptions, especially in fields which require a rare level of proficiency. But employers ignore the basic facts at their own peril.

Episode VII: The Whills To Power

Episode VIII: Triumph of the Whills

Episode IX: The Last Whills and Testaments

One problem with straws is that they are so small that they are easier to miss when picking up trash, and small enough that even conscientious people seldom think twice about them - yet they make up a surprising amount of plastic pollution as a whole. Three or four percent, by some surveys.

More notably, they are an easy place to start. I'm particularly interested in straws creating a market for biodegradable plastic. Unlike some other products, straws will not have a serious problem from possibly degrading too soon. They would seldom need to last more than a few hours, and the biodegradable plastics that have been developed last at least a month. But biodegradable plastics need a market before they can be scaled up and perfected. Plastic straws could be that market.

Naturally, plastic lids for cups are another appealing target. They, too, seldom need to last for more than a few hours from deployment. They only need to last longer than the paper cups.

Of course those who litter are individually responsible for their actions.

However, it is virtually impossible to effectively enforce a law targeting those who carelessly discard straws.

On the other hand, this could be an ideal market for scaling up production of biodegradable plastics. Any problems with biodegradable plastics breaking down too soon isn't relevant, as straws wouldn't need to last more than a few hours. But to come into common use, biodegradable plastics need a reliable market. It could be straws.

Agreed. For such an easy-to-replace item, plastic straws make up a surprising amount of the plastic that becomes pollution. There are already plenty of solutions possible: waxed paper, biodegradable plastics, etc. One problem with a biodegradable plastic bottle is that it might biodegrade before you really want it to - but a biodegradable straw does not have this problem. It won't be needed for more than a few hours from the time it is deployed. Straws are a really easy place to start with an impact that is disproportionately large for the effort that is put into making the change.

Even if the CIA did frame him, legally it makes no difference. The charge is for possession. How one came into possession, or whether one is even aware of that possession, is irrelevant to the court.

The gift that keeps on giving ... power to government.

Nothing at all suspicious about charges that never need to be proven because the public is forbidden from seeing the evidence. Nothing at all suspicious about a crime where, if evidence were needed, it could easily be faked.

Move along, nothing to see here. Unless you want to go to jail, that is?

The author may or may not be right, but he gives no examples and names no names. His "article" is just an assertion that is repeated several times. It appears that standards have fallen at Slashdot.

The technical issues may be too complicated to work out, but a political fix would be to designate the facility its own 911 area, have all calls from the facility directed to an in-house "dispatcher" who will simply answer every call and, in the odd event that it is a real call for assistance, forward it to the city's 911 service.

Indeed - and the book makes clear that the franchise had been limited precisely because democracy in the hands of an electorate that had no skin in the game, that was willing for others to sacrifice but unwilling to make any sacrifices themselves, had ended in disaster. It was the veterans of the war voted on by people who paid no price themselves for their errors who established the rules after that war. All citizens in that world had the same rights except one: only those who had proven their willingness to serve were allowed to vote.

Quartz Media is shilling for the opthamologists. There's no other explanation for it. No wonder their website provides no contact data for themselves, no place to leave feedback, no way to comment.

Was the actual purpose to replace every transaction in the world, or to provide the foundation for a new system to replace the existing banks, and especially the SWIFT system for interbank transfers?

First of all, let me say that your son's attitude is a very good sign. Teenagers often engage in very black-or-white thinking, with little tolerance for anything in between. The only thing that will break them out of this is real world experience. It is excellent that he cares about doing the right thing.

Second, get some good firsthand historical accounts. Let him read for himself what leaders of rebellions were thinking when they led their rebellions. He will quickly learn that many of them were actually defending the law as they understood it against "legal authorities" who were blatantly violating the law. Sometimes they won, sometimes they lost, sometimes they had good ideas, sometimes they had bad ideas; but they all recognized that authorities could persist in doing bad things, and that sometimes the people had to act against such authorities.

Personally I like first or secondhand accounts of the American Revolution (but not the superficial overviews typically called "history books") - the sort either writing about their own experiences or the author writing directly from the participants' notes with frequent quotations, especially if written in the immediate aftermath. I like this period particularly because there were so many well-educated and literate people commenting on why they were doing what they were doing. Of course, many of the sons of those revolutionaries sadly failed in the third war for American independence, but many of them also recorded their opinions. (And Clyde Wilson's recent short book of essays, "The Yankee Problem", gives some good insights into the origins of that conflict.)

But accounts from many periods and places are similar. The one book I recommend to everyone is David Livingstone's "Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa", because Livingstone was in a unique position to be a qualified proto-anthropologist who was also the first European to contact, and write about, numerous tribes in the middle of Africa who had essentially no contact, even indirectly, with European culture prior to Livingstone's arrival. Livingstone himself already spoke the language of one of the chief tribes in the area, having previously spent years with a related tribe that spoke the same language. His account gives a sympathetic but realistic view of humanity without the influences of the modern world, and personally I think it should be required reading for anyone in the humanities.

But that said I also particularly recall reading about Axum (or Aksum) and the Axumite empire; Schiller's account of The Thirty Years War in Germany, and R. B. Cunninghame Graham's accounts of the history of Paraguay, including the Jesuit Wars and the War of the Triple Alliance which was the most devastating war in modern history. Despite his socialist leanings (somewhat forgivable seeing as the full horrors of socialism were not well understood at the time - and illustrated in "A Vanished Arcadia" which was supposed to demonstrate how socialism could work but really only showed that when Guarani Indians, a relatively advanced tribe, were forced into political associations by external threats and placed under the leadership of some of the most intelligent and capable men from all of Europe, they could sort of manage to get by on a small scale as long as they adopted some capitalist principles, but not so well that they didn't all leave every time the external threat receded) he was an excellent writer and historian. (Cunninghame Graham was also a friend of the author Joseph Conrad, and several of Conrad's most famous characters are based on him.)

Incidentally, the books mentioned above by Livingstone, Schiller, and Cunninghame Graham are available free from Project Gutenberg. I would also recommend the biographies of Francis Marion available there, particularly the ones by Simms and James. (The Weems hagiography of Marion is useful primarily as a demonstration that books are not always to be trusted. Weems, who famously told a lie about George Washington never telling a lie, was well known for his fabrications.) I know about these books because I put them them online in the 1990s. You should also be able to find an excellent book about Aksum by Dr. Stuart C. Munro-Hay, via Google.