Wow Bill on the front page! For what it’s worth, he’s the only author who has written me back after I sent him a note through USPS. He’s a fascinating, charitable thinker with a multifaceted oeuvre and this text will be a profound addition to it.
Yes, they 100% do bring out unique archival records for you to review. It's one of the neat things about going to the facility!
Sometimes if there's a more extensive process to retrieve the record (i.e. your archivist has to talk to a different government entity or agency to get the information) you might get some facsimiles, but often the information is only captured in the physical document that you're looking at. Moreover, to reiterate my point from above, part of the reason that College Park is making this decision (probably) is because it takes time and coordination to get these documents, and they want to ensure that--with limited staff and resources--they're still able to fulfill their mission of providing access to information.
Most of the records that exist under NARA's purview are not backed up at all. There's a major initiative to digitize existing holdings, but that's challenging/fraught with staffing issues. It's basically an under- or un-funded mandate.
My partner works for NARA, but not in this office. Outside of the large amount of departures and RIF actions taken for the agency, there's lots of challenges regarding staffing for people who come in off the street and do not have succinct, coherent research questions. Staff are duty-bound to respond to all queries, regardless of how good they are.
I imagine this research card policy does two things:
1. Raises an easy bureaucratic barrier for people who just drop in and expect/demand help
2. Gives staff an opportunity to refuse access to people who may have non-research intent from accessing the building
It's likely the example you provided qualifies as a business need. They just don't want you hanging around and getting in the way of them helping people who scheduled a consultation, have an appointment, etc.
Totally agree on the poorly-constructed sentence. I wish they had said it more succinctly/precisely.
There’s definitely precedent for public companies (even international ones!) colluding to artificially increase prices in a sector. Also a hilarious movie with Matt Damon.
Late reply, but yes we had a pilot project with Starlink for a couple of locations which showed great results. Unfortunately we couldn’t use it in all cases because of stringent information security requirements; otherwise, nothing but good things to say.
Great question! One would intuit that the procurement function of a large organization (like one which operates a hydroelectric dam) would be able to see the value of some kind of industrial sensor that minimizes integration costs and provides them with better understanding of operations data, but practically it’s hard enough to coordinate folks to install conduit to route cables! When it requires political capital to get something as simple as cat-5 installed, clear efficiency gains easily fall off the table. It’s sort of like the infrastructure is “set in stone” and built to service the operations of the dam first, and everything else is secondary, as other commenters have suggested.
I used to work professionally in the US doing this sort of task with computer vision. The challenging part isn’t so much the labeling/classification of a fish within an image; instead, it’s a connection to cloud environments to do processing. Most of the projects I worked on were at hydroelectric dams, where-as an ironic punchline goes—it’s punishingly hard to get access to reliable power or water.
If anyone is interested/curious happy to answer any questions on here or via DM.
It seems that the plot of Stanislaw Lem’s “The Futurological Congress”, adapted into the film linked below, is fast becoming reality. The convergence between virtual reality and intellectual property here is a fascinating one.
It’s worth noting that Snowden never intentionally fled to Russia and the US revoked his passport when passing through to another destination, if I recall somewhere in South America. Fast-forward about a decade and a man who is stateless is granted a passport in the country he was de facto exiled to.
Many other commenters have provided high-level background answering your question, but if you want to see how legalization/decriminalization is unfolding across the US, this is a detailed map: https://psychedelicalpha.com/data/psychedelic-laws