Roads are only partially covered by fuel taxes. It's been many years since fuel taxes covered more than 50% of the cost of road maintenance and construction in most areas of the US. The rest comes from general funds at whatever levels of government are doing the maintenance.

That's incorrect.

Pedestrians walking in the roadway should walk facing traffic. Pedestrians can stop and change direction effectively instantly so it's to their benefit to see oncoming traffic. They have different motion characteristics than wheeled vehicles. The CDC page on pedestrian safety agrees with this.

Cyclists riding on the roadway should ride with traffic and follow traffic rules and behave as a part of normal traffic.

The CRC program isn't new - I have a friend who managed to miss the W years by getting a CRC chair shortly after he was elected. It's a very good program that attracts a lot of international researchers, both US researchers and people who might otherwise have gone to the US. So it's not a handful of academics, it's a steady stream, and it's no so different from how the US became a research powerhouse. The US research community is very far from homegrown - it came about because from WW II at least through the cold war it welcomed researchers from around the world and gave them a comfortable lifestyle that made it attractive to stay rather than returning to their home countries. It may not be enough at a time to be noticeable in the US research establishment, but it's very effective in enhancing Canadian research.

Property taxes have also historically deductible at the federal level - what does it matter at the federal level how it's applied at the state and local level if it's still federally deductible?

And those states are by no means "sticking it to people in other states by shifting part of their federal tax burden". Those states tend to be payer states that get back less than they pay to the federal government - in many cases they would be better off independent. If we want things to be all fair across states, each state should be getting back from the federal government the same amount that it's residents paid in, no? The states that *are* sticking it to people in other states are the ones that choose to have very low taxes and low services and take large amounts of spending from the federal government. Curiously, those states that are receiving far more from the federal government than they pay in tend to vote consistently republican.

People who make enough to itemize in high tax, high cost of living states are subsidizing both those within their state (via state taxes) as well as other states via federal taxes. US federal income tax has historically (at least for all of my life) allowed taxpayers to deduct taxes paid to other entities from their income (not their tax). This includes state income tax, property tax, car registration tax, and even sales tax (yes, you can deduct sales tax on big ticket things). In order to simplify the tax code, they also created a thing called the "standard deduction" which is large enough that it's more than a large fraction of taxpayers would get to deduct if they went to the trouble of itemizing everything. So the standard deduction is effectively a subsidy of people with lower incomes who don't itemize. I have enough deductible things that I itemize. I'm also fine with people getting a benefit from the standard deduction (and wouldn't mind it being higher, either). But don't make it sound like people who pay enough taxes to itemize are getting a special break, particularly when it's just state and local taxes, it's actually the other way around.

You don't pay for a PhD in STEM in the US except in the form of lost income. Virtually all STEM grad students are supported by the grants that fund the research that they're doing or teaching assistant positions - you get a tuition waiver and a salary that's enough to live on, though not have much of a life (incentive to finish and get a job that pays). If you get into a PhD program and they don't offer you some deal that pays your tuition and a stipend, you didn't really get in.

It's been done. Way back before modern car batteries, there were cold places that had electrical outlets attached to the parking meters so you could plug in your block heater while you were parked. Modern parking meters have no trouble reading credit cards and charging your account. Integrate the two and you're done. It wouldn't be cheap to do all at once, but it's certainly doable by cities as a long term program.

It depends on the agency - the gov't can and does do R&D contracts where the deliverable is demonstration of performance, sometimes on a best effort basis. Sometimes the only deliverable is a report on what they've done.

If the driver behind the Tesla was any good, they were looking well beyond the collision and reacted before seeing any brake lights on the Tesla.

I don't think they even looked for an excuse - they were having trouble getting any plane at all. The first plane (already the smaller one) was MX'd out at the beginning of the day to the extent that they couldn't even tow it from the gate. They after a bunch of gate drama they managed to get a plane and a gate at the same time and it left about 25 minutes late.

I've done this many times. Usually at the end of a vacation where I have some slack and I'm in no hurry to get back to work. I've never had work even close to rigid enough that I couldn't just send an email "Got bumped, will be back a couple days late, call/email if there's anything urgent". In some cases it's when I'm going to spend the night at home no matter which end of the trip I'm on (either parents home at holidays or partners home when I was bicoastal.) It's not that different than weather delays, which happen all the time at the holidays. As soon as they're having weather and my flights look questionable (you can track your aircraft several legs prior to your flight with FlightAware), I'll get on the phone and ask them for alternatives that are convenient for me. It's generally easy to get them to make a free change that relieves them of having to deal with an extra body screaming for a flight while sitting on the couch eating cookies and watching netflix (and arranging for a few extra days of that).

There are other times when there's no way I'm going to take a voucher (coming home on the third transcon RT in three weeks, all of which were on less than 24 hours notice and were 12-14 hour days at the working end. On those flights I'm going to buy the upgrade to first when they offer it at check-in!)

Not if they sell refundable or changeable tickets. Every seat is paid for until suddenly someone goes online and makes a change and it's not. If they do that close to departure time then the airline risks the seat going out empty, which is essentially product spoilage for them. So they overbook, counting on a certain fraction of travelers to change their plans at the last minute and have the plane go out exactly full.

The typical counterargument is "well, they should just make tickets non-refundable within X hours of departure", except that their reliable customers are business customers who like the flexibility and are willing to pay for expensive refundable tickets, expensive last-minute tickets, and change fees if they're buying non-refundables. The excess that those customers are willing to pay for the flexibility more than compensates for what they have to bid for one of 75 or more people to take a $200-$400 voucher to accept VDB. So they can sell tickets to business travelers right up til departure on most flights, counting on the ability to get someone to take a voucher in return for accepting a later flight.

Last week or two? I think about 90% of my tickets for work travel in the past 10 years were booked less than a week out, and I regularly change flights within 24 hours before the flight, often after check-in, for reasons that many others have listed.

Adding flights in a busy airport can be non-trivial. They are often constrained in takeoff, landing, and gate slots and can't simply add flights without several years of politics and infrastructure improvements.

UA was offering $800 vouchers on a flight that I was on earlier this week because they'd downgauged to a smaller aircraft and needed to get rid of 14 or so people. As far as I can tell, they did. Whenever I've been on flights with people getting IDB'd they call them to the podium at boarding time. Once they announced $800 they seemed to have no shortage of volunteers (they probably threw in hotel, too). They couldn't offer a seat til the next day, and I wasn't interested in waiting around that long or renting a car one-way, so I declined and took the flight as planned. There are plenty of other times I might have taken that much (and have in the past). Back in the 80s and 90s when I took VDB I ran about 50% on getting first class on the new flight.