Let's see they started by loaning 161,000 devices, and nearly a year later, a total of 210,000 devices were loaned (given) out. So an extra
Hm. That's an extra 1,300 devices per week. The arithmetic seems ok to me.

I becoming even more concerned about American schooling.

Gosh, such peremptory dismissal of a simple, low maintenance, and cheap communications system that has worked for hundreds of years.
Sound has huge advantages over radio - it is localised, directional, and readily available. And, every human has a transmitter and receiver with acceptable bandwidth built in - and very reliable. I'd be surprised if it doesn't get used in some way on Mars.

Probably the most important thing in getting children to read is - parents reading to them

If parents read to their children - yes, a bedtime story - it will encourage them massively.

This is well known. But it's a challenge for over worked, over stressed, exhausted parents, possibly with reading problems themselves. Not to mention the challenges of single parenting, and drugs.

It's a vicious circle.

It can be broken. Most schools have reading times, where outside folk can read to children. It's well worth volunteering if you can make the time.
But first, read to your own children!

The great thing about snow, though, is that it melts. And then it flows back into rivers. Whence it may be extracted, purified, and consumed again.
So calling it water "consumption" is a little misleading. It's use, certainly, but temporary! There will be some loss due to evaporation, but surely the vast majority will melt.
It does consume a fair bit of energy, but that's a different problem.

My mouse remains sluggish and really hard to use throughout a video conference. It may be related to the video card, or some excess usage of CPU, I don't know. My machine is reasonably powerful with loads of RAM and should not be troubled by a mere video conference - but it is with Teams.

I am forced to use teams, working remotely.
It's a pain. The chat looks ok, until you try to send a file over it - but no, you have to do that in a special area called chat. Hmm.
But worst is the horrible way it eats your computer, rendering it unusable whilst running a video chat. The mouse is weird, in fact everything goes a bit weird. What is it doing?
And just to add insult to injury, there's some weird bug (how do you even DO this?) so the text entry does quite work properly if you try to edit it. It's a strange bug.
Summary - I don't like it. It has potential, but is not quite "ready".

I just recently bought a Micro Four Thirds camera (Olympus EM-10 - not too expensive with a couple of lenses) because, well, I haven't had a camera with interchangeable lenses since, oh, 1979. (A Canon A1 - massive and heavy camera, albeit capable).
It's nice to use, sure, if biggish compared with my Lumix TZ220.
But it makes an annoying "thunk" on taking pictures - whihc I initially thought was generated, but no. I gather it has, to my surprise, a mechanical as well as an electronic shutter. There is a rather restricted "silent" mode where it doesn't do that, presumably just using the electronic shutter, but it all seems a bit silly.

China has much lower wealth disparity than the USA. Also, an actual healthcare system (as opposed to the “wealthcare” system the USA has).
I’m not a fan of planned economies, but the American system of anything for short term profit, and if in doubt, sue - certainly isn’t very efficient. Wonderful stuff has appeared, but the lot of the common man has not improved much (real wages haven’t moved in decades).
It’ll be interesting to see this play out. The ussr eventually collapsed, partly due to ever expanding military expenditure, but I don’t see China doing that.

Just like pure hydrogen, ammonia is a medium for the storage of energy (actually hydrogen). It’s much more convenient to store than pure hydrogen. The question are how densely it store energy (ie hydrogen) per kg and lt, and how efficient are the processes for getting to and from ammonia. It sounds like this is a more efficient way to split out the nitrogen and hydrogen (though the extract doesn’t actually mention hydrogen at any point, which is weird as there’s three times as much hydrogen as nitrogen).

A couple of years ago I went on a five week tour of Southern Africa. We went through at least six countries (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Swaziland (now Eswatini, as they were concerned people might confuse it with Switzerland), Namibia, I kinda lost track). I was looking out for them, but didn’t see any solar panels anywhere.
I found this incredible, and very sad. I saw housing varying from huge mansions (with barbed wire, electric fences, and dogs), to literal mud huts.
No solar panels on roofs, no solar farms.
Amazing. You’d think them ideal for charging mobile phones (yes, they are everywhere, I was impressed), a bit of light, a television, a fridge. But no.
Much to be done.

The last n years of "business improvements" have all been invented by extraverts. Introverts have been horrified by open plan offices, constant meetings, and, horror of horrors, hot-desking.
Introverts can be incredibly productive if you stop messing with their lives.
I'm convinced Agile is just a bit trick to enable more micro managing, and more bloody meetings.
Enough, I say!

"Hijacked by non-engineers" ... I'm sure I've heard this before ... DEC ... HP?

When I ran a PC Support company, in the mid-1980s, I had a special "Swiss Army Knife" 3.5" floppy disc.
It was bootable, had a full operating system, Norton (for sorting out disc problems), an editor (WordStar), a virus checker (I think), and miscellaneous other useful files.
All in 1.44mb.

Now get off my lawn, you're taking up too much space!

Just because the American constitution says something, that doesn’t mean it is right, or correct.
“Just ignore it” sounds a great idea, but this is not what actually happens.
It’s like giving sexual advice as “abstinence” it doesn’t work, you end up with more unwanted babies.

The question is, do you want this pandemic to stop, or do you want it to continue?
If you want it to continue, then allowing anti vaccine propaganda to be widely available on social media is a good way to do this.
Alternatively, if you’d like the pandemic to stop, and vaccines are the best route for this, then less anti vaccine propaganda is a good idea.

If you think that a few words on an old document are worth the death of a million Americans, then I deem that foolish.

But perhaps I’m missing something here. If the main groups following this anti vaccine propaganda are Republican idiots (I’m hoping this is a small subset), then this should improve the Democrat vote in subsequent elections. Also, old people die in disproportionate numbers, so that should reduce aged care costs and also increase the Democrat vote.

Is this your plan? It’s very sneaky. Also evil. But definitely pro Democrat.

Social networks are not owned by the government. Free speech rules do not apply to them, they can do whatever they like.
But if they start promoting memes that cause death, I think this is unacceptable. Excessive dieting, cutting, suicide, vaccine opposition, etc.

Does anybody actually think it’s a good idea to encourage people to do things that cause them to die?

Isn’t the first job of a government to protect its people?