not really, especially when you add them all up and hardware to run them on. Sure, you can find some cheaper open-source alternatives for some things, but the lack of exposure to the more commercially available ones can be difficult to overcome.

The office buildings I've been in have also had really high ceilings. You could easily lose a foot to provide room for additional plumbing for the floor above.

Yeah, either do that or raise the floor a foot using the raised floor tiles. Just need to watch out for rodents. Mice love the raised floors.

A minor delay in progress for someone else to be unblocked is generally a win.

That depends on a lot of factors:

* How minor is the delay?

  The more senior the person being asked, the more likely they're working on something complex enough such that the delay incurred by an interruption is non-trivial.

* Is the person asking actually blocked?

  Often times, people get into a mode where they will interrupt others to ask questions they could have answered themselves with a little additional research.

* How important is the blocked task relative to the delayed task?

  More often, the person asking the question is more junior, making it likely they're working on more trivial tasks.  The person being asked, often more senior, is more likely to be working on more valuable tasks.  It's possible even a slight delay in the latter's task is a greater cost to the business than leaving the former person's task blocked.

As an extreme example: you don't want an intern interrupting someone trying to resolve a downtime event just so the intern can get unblocked on a throwaway project.

Fantastic.

The problem is, having a well-organized and cooperative team massively outweights having a bunch of rockstar developers each pulling in their own direction, unless we're talking about the tiniest of organizations. And I'm not going to be on friendly terms with someone I'm not allowed to talk to.

Almost no one is talking about no immigration beyond a tiny fraction on the right and a larger faction on the left using it as a motte and bailey to support unlimited migration. A bigger issue is immigration via refugee status, as the people claiming asylum range from actual victims to economic migrants, and the amount of support needed is often far greater than other types of migrants.

Ticket prices also are likely rising due to physical demand, there's more people and more fans than ever before, but most performers aren't performing at more and bigger venues. IT's the same pressure that exists on real estate, but to a lesser degree.

What I'm saying is that it can be factored in. In this particular instance (PepsiCo and the other companies mentioned) we're not talking about truckers buying electric trucks or quoting for jobs. We're talking about companies like PepsiCo buying electric trucks and hiring drivers to drive them.

And 30 mins of charging every 8 hours is unlikely to significantly change the delivery time anyway.

About 50% of truckers in the US are owner operators, meaning about half of all truckers on the road own their truck and as such buy (electric) trucks and quote for jobs.

Companies are in the business of making money, if a private contractor is cheaper (and faster) than their in-house logistics who do you think is going to be axed?

Even in K-12 reading is hugely important. Grades 2-3 are the transition point where students go from learning to read, to reading to learn. Every year past that point where a student is deficient in reading, causes them to fall behind their peers.

The price will always go up in most long terms. It's going to require massive population decrease within an area to actually drop prices. If you are going to live somewhere for about 5 years buying is worth it financially.

Test questions are written to test varying levels of competence from basic recall to true mastery. It's partially why so many people hate word problems, they don't actually understand the concepts. Many others just can't read.

Test questions can be written to assess true mastery, although it's not so easy as you're trying to make it sound... especially if you want the test to take a sane amount of time, be consistently gradable by different graders, and have any kind of reasonable signal to noise ratio. But sure, you can get there, or at least go a long way toward it.

If you try to actually create tests that way, you will discover that the institutions and political atmosphere around you will punish you harshly. It's "unfair" to give a test that you can't pass by memorizing things, you see. And the people who will ultimately make the decisions about what you're allowed to do with your test are rarely going to care much about actual mastery, and often wouldn't be able to recognize mastery if they did care.

In practice, standardized tests are always going to be easily gamed, so if you make people's and institutions' rewards dependent on them, you will end up diverting more time, energy, and other resources away from actually teaching mastery and into meaningless gaming.

Standardized tests spend the money and time to get those quality questions that are consistently graded. It's not some random folks making minimum wage coming up with questions.

A lot of this is because being overly string is a disadvantage. Body builders can lift more weight, but that's a lot of extra muscle to move when lifting relatively light things hundreds or thousands of times. A body builder could literally be working twice as hard as a wiry person, by having to lift their own muscles.