The article describes analysis based on layers of extrapolation.

The first layer, is the analysis of initial studies that show that microplastics, when "taken up by" plants, reduces the efficiency of photosynthesis. But...is the level of microplastics "taken up by" plants in these studies, representative of the levels crop plants are exposed to, or the levels marine algae are exposed to? The article doesn't say, but I'd guess that the levels in the studies were significantly higher than the levels seen in the actual environment.

The second layer, is extrapolating these reductions in photosynthesis, to crop yields, a relationship that has not been established.

The third layer, is extrapolating predicted reduction in crop yields, to levels of starvation. Most starvation is not caused by lower crop yields, but by government corruption or social issues. In the US, for example, no one would suggest that there isn't enough food to eat. The people who struggle to get the nutrition they need, struggle for other reasons, such as poverty, drug addiction, and mental illness. These problems are real, but aren't related to microplastics.

In my experience, I get more productivity out of people who WFH than who work in the office. Typically, there are a lot less distractions at home.

Somehow, it doesn't have the same ring.

Yes, worse. Because most PDFs come in two flavors:

Flavor 1: A scanned document that has been OCR'ed. The OCR text is not grouped in paragraphs or connected, as you would expect when trying to analyze a document. It's strictly placed on the page based on position. The text in a field might be split up into fragments, because the OCR doesn't care about field boundaries.
Flavor 2: A machine-generated document, like a fillable form. This is better, but still often lacks associations between fields and labels.

Because there is this intermediate step that confuses the document, it's harder to analyze than paper would be.

Where I live, in the middle of the US, it's unusual to walk into a restaurant and find that they have QR code menus. Those went away in about 2021 or 2022, once people started venturing out after the pandemic. The restaurants quickly realized people hate QR code menus.

Oh, they can, they just don't want to. The "actual cost" would encourage more people to skip buying the tickets altogether.

I've flown Southwest many times, and I never had any trouble being able to sit next to my family. The only people that have issues with this, are those flying standby. Anybody who has an actual reservation, is likely to be able to find several seats together.

The LV Sphere lost $500 million last year, despite high demand. https://www.sportico.com/busin...

With smaller spheres, you lose economies of scale. Production costs for performers would be equal to production costs for the big sphere, but ticket sales would be much lower. I don't get it.

In Texas, where summers are hot and the sun is scorching, that peak output lasts considerably longer.

Be glad you *aren't* in California, where the average electricity rate is 30 cents / kWH. https://www.energysage.com/loc...

Despite the governor's crusade against green energy, its lack of regulation has allowed green energy companies to proliferate, making it by far the #1 state in green energy output, and new green energy installations. https://electrek.co/2025/03/10....

You're right, a worse idea would be keeping track of everything on paper. Other than that option, pretty much the worst idea.

For one thing, anybody can change anything in the sheet at any time. There's no integrity checking, no reliable cross-checks, nothing to tell you if a step was missed, nothing to tell you if the total includes all the cells it should include.

It's hard enough to run an organization using *real* enterprise management software. Trying to run it in Excel is asking for disaster, it's just a matter of when the time bomb explodes.

And your system is probably more sophisticated than this spreadsheet.

This is a *public* healthcare system. It's not a corporation looking for profit.

Hell is a good word for it. I've seen these kinds of large spreadsheets, used typically by departments of a company that didn't want to mess with migrating to real software. They're constantly broken. Moving to a new year, or a new month, is a manual copy-and-paste process. Formulas stop working because they were coded to work only in the year the spreadsheet was created. Nobody knows how many formulas are broken, because there are so many of them, and there's no easy way to inspect the spreadsheet to find the ones that are broken.

I don't know how many times I've been asked to look at a spreadsheet like this, with the question, "Can you figure out why this is broken?" No, sorry, I can't, and nobody else can either. Nobody even knows what the spreadsheet is intended to accomplish any more.