This is the follow-up experiment to one run in the Netherlands over 20 years ago with LPG cars. (Did you know you can convert your car to run on natural gas, and have a switch to flip between the that and gasoline, for about $3000? Who knew?)

But rather than drive adoption of this by letting the much cheaper natural gas work its magic, they slapped a huge annual tax on said cars, so you would have to drive the equivalent of ~20,000 miles just to break even.

From that observation, pointing out how government concern for the environment was just lip service compared to its voracious desire for money, I predicted similar things for other developments in the future.

Well, here we are. Note in both cases they do this before, not after, achieving the ostensible goal of getting most, or even many, people on board such cars.

"They just want your money" -- 89,768-0 in predictive analysis of government action.

He also ignores that officials, happy to buy votes by spending taxes, will tax what the market can provide, so to speak, rather than what is needed.

This is why they mentally tie spending, taxing, and borrowing to the GDP rather than population or necessity. They want to be as high a fraction of that as possible. There's always more votes to buy.

It has nothing to do with necessity or population.

But the cost incurred by the single tractor-trailer is also spread out among everyone who benefits from the truck (in the form of increased shipping costs). So I don't really see how the difference in utility really matters here.

Is this a serious question? Just look at the number of comments a story like this gets compared to others. In my feed this story has more comments than the four stories surrounding it. These stories even get more posts than flame war bait about IDE, OS, or language choice.

Sure, but still: help wanted signs up in the $10/hour suburbs, and not in the $15/hour downtown Seattle shops. Could be something else, too, of course, but I really notice the difference.

The real minimum wage is always 0. I work in Seattle, where they recently did this. Entry level places where I live (not in Seattle), where the minimum wage is $10/hour, all have help wanted signs out. In downtown Seattle, however there was a wave of restaurant closings, and I don't see help wanted signs anywhere. Could be other causes for the difference, of course, maybe it's something else - but it's not a promising sign for teens looking for that first job.

Yup, it's their version. Forbes compares them. The fixed price is nice on the Google side, but there's no 2-minute warning before termination on Google like you get on AWS, and AWS launched a new Spot Fleet product the same day Google announced.

Either way, you need to be doing the kind of work where you can lose VMs on short notice and keep going, but it's a very nice discount if you can.

The food we have available to eat isn't more than the food we grow. The cars we have available to drive are the cars we manufacture. We can cheat a little through trade, of course, or "we" can be understood as "humans".

Sure, the government could take and hoard/destroy some of that for no good reason, as often happens under communism, but it can't make more stuff by fiat. So anything the government "buys", wherever the money came from, reflects manufacturing capacity that's now making what the government wants, instead of what the people want. However you look at it, it's still effectively a tax.

And of course, when the government just mails checks to people (which is most of the budget), that doesn't change the amount of available "stuff" at all - the government could print everyone a check for $10k/month without any taxes, sure it could, but we wouldn't have any additional stuff as a result.

The original vision of Apple (and Microsoft) of screen-oriented but Internet-derived entertainment was correct; they just found it better to make feeder devices for the big iron screens, which at least 3 other guys are doing, too.

show me where and when rights granted to religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities is as good or was better in as large an area for as large a time, in any previous time period or location

it never was. not even remotely close

oh yes, there were fleeting utopian fragile experiments in tiny areas, or fragile decrees by enlightened rulers that the status quo thugs quickly erased

but what we have now is a large amount of dominant powers in the world and large areas of the world granting a robust spectrum of rights, and have been doing so for some time now, extending them every year

the rights we grant people today was never extended to so many, over as wide an area, for as great a time. never. not even remotely as close and not even remotely as robust as the rights we have now

not that our rights aren't threatened today. our rights are always threatened and always will be. rights require maintenance. we don't live in a utopia, and we can certainly do better

but we are definitely doing better than any other time period in any other location, by a long shot

learn your history, don't subscribe to ignorant mythologizing

I would like to see Game of Thrones and Orphan Black thru Netflix rather than having to subscribe to those packages through cable. Cable only, like HBO Go is a step in the right direction.

AMC for Walking Dead, online watch, the thru-cable-company unlock was designed by a chimpanzee.

Earning are the yardstick by which CEOs are measured - they live and die by 1 cent differences in earnings per share. Everything is about making earnings appear as high as possible. You seem to know very little about all this.

Would it have killed you to have read the next sentence in the post you're responding to before posting?

Also, your post is BS. No amount of government money printing changes the amount of stuff that gets made. All we have is all we make, and nothing is free, regardless of currency games.