Word: costly
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...answer is cost. In the West Virginia drug-testing case, which is currently working its way through the federal court system, Judge Joseph Goodwin of the U.S. District Court noted that it costs about $44 a pop to do urine tests, which would cost the West Virginia school district in question about $37,000 a year. (Here's a PDF of Goodwin's preliminary injunction against drug-testing.) That same $37,000 could easily pay for a full-time teacher, meaning that drug-testing would have to be sufficiently valuable to displace an entire teaching position...
...difficult to make sure that we avoid squashing new life as we search it out - although doing so could add considerable cost to any space mission. Probes like Phoenix can be more fully sterilized before launch, and debris from any unmanned craft could eventually be recovered. The real challenge will occur if and when humans set foot on Mars or any other planet and begin establishing a more permanent presence, especially if we explore beneath the surface, out of the reach of the sterilizing solar UV radiation. When that day comes, we'll need to step carefully to make sure...
...good at coping with snow would be to exercise British understatement. Heavy snow is too rare to warrant serious investment in equipment, especially in London and the southeast, where this was, as excitable weather forecasters declared, the biggest "snow event" in 18 years. The heavy fall may cost some 3 billion pounds (about $4.3 billion), since a fifth of the workforce took a "duvet day" and businesses stayed shuttered. It also stopped Tube service, caused chaos at airports and closed schools. Thousands remained shut for 48 hours, suggesting that Londoners, even more than Washingtonians, lack the "flinty Chicago toughness" President...
...devastating ice storm hammered the Southeast, killing 55 people and leaving 1.3 million homes without power. Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear called the storm the worst in the state's history and asked the White House to declare disaster status, which would provide funding to help cover a cleanup whose cost has surged past $45 million...
...framers of the constitution protected freedom of the press, but they didn't mean that the press ought to be free in the sense that no one ought to pay for it. In fact, they believed that the cost of not having a free flow of information in a democracy was too high to pay. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be," wrote Thomas Jefferson...