Despite the summary, the referenced article doesn't predict the extinction of bananas in general either. The Cavendish is the only cultivar mentioned in the report, and suggests investing research into new, more heat- and drought-tolerant varieties, rather than relying so heavily on the Cavendish variety...

It even mentions significant efforts in Tanzania to breed more disease, pest-resistant, and drought tolerant varieties of bananas. They main problem encountered so far being, apparently, they're not close enough to the Cavendish...

Does it actually cause cancer though?

The consensus among national pesticide regulatory agencies and scientific organizations is that labeled uses of glyphosate have demonstrated no evidence of human carcinogenicity. The Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues (JMPR), the European Commission, the Canadian Pest Management Regulatory Agency, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority and the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment have concluded that there is no evidence that glyphosate poses a carcinogenic or genotoxic risk to humans. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has classified glyphosate as "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans."

As of 2020, the evidence for long-term exposure to glyphosate increasing the risk of human cancer remains inconclusive. There is weak evidence human cancer risk might increase as a result of occupational exposure to *large* amounts of glyphosate, such as in agricultural work, but no good evidence of such a risk from home use, such as in domestic gardening or food ingestion.

Although some small studies have suggested an association between glyphosate and non-hodgkin lymphoma, subsequent work confirmed the likelihood this work suffered from bias, and the association could not be demonstrated in more robust studies.

They kind of already did in a way: The same day that Bezos took his phallic rocket ride, the FAA changed their rules regarding the Commercial Astronaut Wings program. To qualify as commercial astronauts, space-goers must not only travel travel 50 miles (80km) above the Earth's surface, but also "demonstrated activities during flight that were essential to public safety, or contributed to human space flight safety".

Joy rides are no longer sufficient...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fworld...

There's something to be said about taxes and government-imposed fees being separate: the business doesn't control them, and makes advertising across a wide area difficult. Sales tax rates can vary as much as almost 10% between neighboring states...

Reminds me of a Firefly quote: "I got a rule, I never let go of money I don't have to..."

There's also an issue of how effectively the money is spent. When I worked IT for a school system (in California), a lot of money was getting eaten up by administrators, technology pilot programs that went nowhere, and bureaucratic overhead. As a result, increasing "spending per student" didn't necessarily translate to increased student outcomes...

It got to the point where most of the teachers I talked to there would vote "no" on every ballot proposition for more funding for schools.... because they knew it wasn't going to trickle down to the classroom

They'd just buy Canonical if that became an issue...

Tell me you didn't read the summary without telling me you didn't read the summary....

This must be a home-edition thing. Just last week I was running clean installs of Win11, and didn't need to do anything special to skip the Microsoft account. You just say you're setting up the computer for work/school, and hit the "domain join" link when it asks for a Microsoft account. Pretty classic setup after that, drops you into a local account on WORKGROUP...

Hopefully this works out better than the chicken meat grown from stem cells in that episode of Eureka...

Neuroscientist: "The pain only exists in your brain. It's neural activity, which is why it's invisible and uniquely personal. But it's still real."

Also neuroscientists: "that's not real, it's a hallucination"

I imagine they still have plausible deniability. After all, how are these cables usually repaired? But cutting it, dragging it up, and splicing in a repair...

One could claim all they advertised is a better repair tool... which is kind of what the article says: "While it was created as a tool for civilian salvage and seabed mining, the dual-use potential of the tool could send alarm bells ringing for other nations..."

"No Child Left Behind" was replaced a decade ago with the "Every Student Succeeds Act", which also reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, but actually narrowed the Federal government's role in elementary and secondary education.

Without getting too far into the weeds, ESSA/ESEA don't directly establish schools, develop curricula, set requirements for enrollment/graduation, determine state education standards, or develop/implement testing to measure whether states are meeting their education standards.

Instead, what it does do is provide additional funding and grants for things like disability/low-income accessibility, de-segregation, school improvement efforts, career counselors, etc. It authorizes some assessments to make sure schools are eligible for the grant programs, but leaves the States a lot of control on how to make those assessments. Basically: some optional extra money with strings attached. End the only enforcement mechanism is withholding the funding...

And while it varies wildly from state to state, and district to district... it's not particularly a lot. K-12 school federal funding tends to hover around 10% (a bit more lately, with COVID provisions), as opposed to state and local funding.

Given that Congress specified that no provision of a program administered by the DOE shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system... what exactly has been stopping red states from doing it already?

It doesn't appear so. Per the DOE's website:
In creating the Department of Education, Congress specified that: No provision of a program administered by the Secretary or by any other officer of the Department shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, over any accrediting agency or association, or over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, except to the extent authorized by law. (Section 103[b], Public Law 96-88)

Thus, the Department does not:
establish schools and colleges;
develop curricula;
set requirements for enrollment and graduation;
determine state education standards; or
develop or implement testing to measure whether states are meeting their education standards.

These are responsibilities handled by the various states and districts as well as by public and private organizations of all kinds, not by the U.S. Department of Education.