i've been using ~email~ to send SMS messages from the desktop for 15 years

yes indeed!

Thanks to anti-worker or at best worker-apathetic politics and budget priorities, it's hard to get OSHA to force companies to even offer sufficient protection from hazardous chemicals like hexavalent chromium. The car parts factory in my town with several hundred employees on the shop floor was giving workers latex gloves and dust masks for protection while chroming bumpers until it was hit with a whopping $10,000 fine after many years.

The darkly amusing punchline to this anecdote is that the guy who owns the factory & built his fortune with it has given millions of dollars to the local university to help them put up a new building for their school of medicine.

A single $1 billion desalination plant near LA will provide 50 million gallons of fresh water per year. California consumes 40 billion gallons of fresh water per day.

~Actually~, lazy eye is not a physical malady, but is a condition where the brain suppresses visual input from one eye, for whatever reason. Misaligned, crossed, or drifting eyes are reasons why some people develop lazy eye, but there are other causes that have nothing to do with "kinetically challenged" eyes. The misimpression that amblyopia is necessarily a physical problem is stoked by it's colloquial name "lazy eye," but humorless nerds should know better.

How do you know? Are you sure you aren't confusing lazy eye (amblyopia) with some of the physical conditions that can cause lazy eye, such as crossed eyes or a drifting eye? Without looking through your classmates' medical records or personally conducting eye exams on all of them, you really have no way to know how many of them have brains that suppress vision from one eye.

Misalignment or poor coordination of the eyes (strabismus) is just one cause of lazy eye, so this therapy can help a subset of people with lazy eye. It's worth noting that drifting or crossed eyes can cause lazy eye, but lazy eye itself is an error in the way your brain processes visual information regardless of whether the cause is simply structural.

the *debate* is entirely political

well there is this: http://www.motherjones.com/tom...

link to click http://www.motherjones.com/tom...

since brewing waste was added to pig feed a few years ago, an unprecedented problem has emerged at hog farms around the country -- explosive manure foam. several barns have exploded, in one instance killing hundreds of pigs. more commonly, the noxious foam seeps up from the shitheap underneath the barn, through the slats in the floor, and into the pens. this widespread, extant problem is being addressed by these new regulations.

Can't tell if they're trying to pull my leg.

Most people need clean water on a regular basis and cannot accommodate waiting for a tree to grow to quench their thirst.