To the decorative text behind the kitty, I would add that it's almost always helpful to include some form of praise and redirect, for example, "The current approach of doing X has worked well, but aspect Y could be improved by doing Z."
A related alternative would be that the listed tv price included the price of time spent viewing ads, and the sale price of your usage data (and that changing the price, say by showing more ads, required agreement).
A DUMB TV costs $x, while a badly behaved smart TV costs $y up front, plus $z per hour for the next few years, where y is potentially slightly less than x.
Reusability increases costs if you don't reuse often enough.
The shuttle would have been much, much, cheaper per launch if it had flown more often. The expected costs for the shuttle included a range based on how often it flew which turned out to be reasonably accurate. They were much worse at predicting which end of the range they would be flying in. At the rate they ended up flying they had the extra costs of reusability without any of the benefits.
Starship is ludicrously expensive, but still much cheaper than even the best case for the Shuttle, and it has a guaranteed source of launches to help it benefit from resuability.
The figures are about the change rather than the absolute value, so it's not too terrible, but even given that, they could have been normalised by being relative to year 1. A quite warm mess, perhaps?
Was that a complete ban, or was it an attempt to get your phone number and other personal details?
Instagram has always banned my accounts for suspicious behaviour on whatever page is first used after the account is created - the only way they offer to progress is to give them a phone number. It's a pretty transparent grab for more info to sell.
A lot of humour consists of buildup followed by a twist - the humour is in the contrast between the expected and the actual. This is very similar to explaining a concept that is flawed or misunderstood by building up a scenario where the expected outcome can be contrasted with an actual outcome. A smaller set replaces 'actual' with 'nonsense'.
The text may present this as wisdom, but I would say it is both wisdom and humour.
On my map it seemed like the road consisted of a few points, rather than the points plus lines between them (or however it's described). Selecting intersections (maybe bends?) lowered the distance.
I find that students talk to each other and spread interpretations of the assignment. They might be correct, they might not - either way the interpretation spreads (never through anything like 'official' course forums set up for students to ask about interpretations, of course). They've also gone through shared experiences in other courses beforehand and will often simply come up with the same incorrect interpretation. For 5 years the basic assignment was clear and easily understood, then the next year it's almost universally misinterpreted. Those shared misunderstandings have easily outnumbered creative interpretations to help grades in my experience.
Generally, anyone writing a paper about something that could benefit from bugfixes would love to accept them, but doesn't have the time or resources to actually do so - unless there's another paper in it. If they have somehow managed to find enough personal time to have a hobby project, then they probably do accept bugfixes - and you should get them in before that person burns out.
There's already a lot of published work in that area. Are you looking at confirming earlier work, or is there a particular focus that introduces novelty?
Research is also hampered by non-obvious changes in the product. Even when a good, reliable product is released, it can be modified to be cheaper to make/more expensive to maintain with no external indication. This isn't even necessarily about cost-cutting, a component may no longer be available and is swapped for something that claims to be identical but is not as reliable.
Politics has made it very likely that we will never know where it started, but that's okay. More important is how the next one could start, which is being investigated more thoroughly now. If we survive the current and future variants of covid we'll be better placed for the next plague. If not for the systems put in place because of SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2 could have spread far more widely before being detected.
Regardless of the politics, it's likely that many labs have reviewed their procedures to be sure people won't be infected by their work/contaminate their work.
My most cited paper has the head of an institution down as an author. Most, but far from all, of the citations are from students there. A previous paper introduced the concept and tools to apply it, while the cited paper just adds an example application and a host of authors.
To the decorative text behind the kitty, I would add that it's almost always helpful to include some form of praise and redirect, for example, "The current approach of doing X has worked well, but aspect Y could be improved by doing Z."