It's the inevitable result of a system that treats procurement contracts primarily as opportunities for handing out corporate welfare or redirecting taxpayer money into your cronies'/family's/biggest donors' pockets.

While you may occasionally luck into a quality deliverable, actual meeting of requirements is definitely not at the top of the list when it comes to deciding whom to hire.

In my experience around both courtrooms and university professors from a variety of fields, they tend to fall all over themselves leaping at the chance to be expert witnesses.

It's a LOT of money for very little work, typically way more than they'd make on even a typical Ivy League full professor's salary or an academic book deal. And yes, I am including putting together a fully researched report on those findings as part of that work. Even in highly-compensated fields like CS, law, or business, the number of folks, even "titans in the field," whose salary calculus would make it sensible to pass up $2M, or even a tenth of that, for a week's part time work is so scant as to be non-existent as a practical matter.

The places where they don't tend to be willing to play ball are where they are asked to testify in a way that obviously undercuts their own research, but most experts are savvy enough to couch and qualify their testimony in ways that avoids this pitfall.

Dead company? Shows what you know. eBay's market cap is higher now than it has been in over a decade, and they are making money hand over fist. No, they are not in the league of Amazon or AliBaba in terms of revenues, but they are way, way ahead of competitors like Etsy and Wayfair.

Any school that allows students to even have their phones on their person, let alone out, during regular school hours isn't doing its job.

Collect them in a bin/cubbies at the start of class or require them to be put in a closed compartment under their seat, and problem solved - you can satisfy the no-risk-assesment-skills kobs panicking that they won't be able to reach their children on the miniscule chance that there is a school shooting without permanently wrecking the quality of the kids' education.

If kids take the phone out during class time, send them to the principal's/give them detention (again, with no phone access) just like you would for any other major class disruption.

The irony of whining for cogent arguments in a thread whose OP is Valgrus Thunderaxe is hardly going to be lost on many here.

I know this site like kes to single Gates/MS out, but the joke selection of Thiel raises an uncomfortable point. Pretty much ALL billionaire donors with the wherewithal to fund large university buildings projects are truly awful people.
How do you think they got to be billionaires in the first place?

This "journalist" is a joke and a disgrace to his profession. The fact that he has the chutzpah to claim that it his "work," or even to call it work at all without being run out of the industry is enough to declare the fourth estate dead, dead, dead.

Who knew that the defining characteristics of the "brave" new world would be abject laziness and cowardice?

Would to just shut the fuck up already? No one wants to hear your whining anymore.

The Constitutional argument holds no water. Even leaving aside such a ban would only apply to folks/insurers under the jurisdiction of the United States, and we are talking about a scam taking place in Nepal with climbers from all over the world, interstate/international commerce is perhaps the most regulable thing there is under the Constitution. It's right there in Article I, Section 8.

A minibus tour might not really tell you all that much, considering intense physical exertion is often one of the key factors in triggering altitude sickness.
Exertion at altitude is even more risky for those carrying the sickle cell trait, particularly common among people of black African descent. It has bitten multiple NFL players who have played in Denver (5,280'/1610m) and had sickling crises/splenic infarction triggered, notably Ryan Clark, who almost died as a result of it in 2007.

KBJ has undergrad and JD degrees from Harvard, where she edited the Law Review, clerked for Breyer, and was a distinguished federal district and circuit court judge on the D.C. Circuit, the country's "second highest court."
THAT'S who you're using as your example of an underqualified diversity hire?

The article's lead authors are reputable scholars with numerous peer-reviewed articles under their belts.

Yes, it's a pre-print, but calling it "slop" is hardly warranted.

The headline (AND the summary, AND the article) literally says "surrounding areas," i.e., ocal warming, NOT global warming.

The only person claiming this is about AGW is you. Poor reading comprehension, or intentional disingenuousness? Folks can come to their own conclusions.

You're wrong.
A meteor is a piece of naturally occurring space debris that has entered and is traveling through earth's atmosphere. A meteorite is a portion of a meteor that has survived the trip through the atmosphere and landed on the ground.
The thing that "rumbled over Houston" was most definitely a meteor. The fragment that landed on the bed was a meteorite. The article and summary use the terms correctly throughout.
All meteorites start out as meteors, but not all meteors lead to meteorites.
It might be space-related, but it ain't rocket science.

The rare exception to the general rule that you can't win the lottery if you don't play.