for the life of the subscriber

Should be for the life of the structure or replacement structure unless the character of the structure/land changes significantly (such as from residential to agricultural) or until the structure is effectively abandoned for an extended time. Basically, as long as service is being paid for without an extended gap (perhaps more than five years), service must continue to be available.

If it could be done, that would be really great. Until your cell phone battery died....

In most cases that's easily remedied at a person's home. One can maintain a small generator or just use the one that comes with every ICE car - it may not be very efficient, but I can charge many, many phones (even in parallel) with just a quarter tank of gas (and perhaps just the existing 12V battery charge).

Depending on needs I can use various charging strategies. I can charge one phone at a time just off existing 12V battery charge until that battery charge drops below some charge level. Alternatively, I can hook up my cheap 12VDC->120AC inverter to the battery, run the engine at idle, and charge many phones at once (but BYOWW - Bring Your Own Wall Wart as I have plenty of extension cords and power strips but only a few USB wall warts).

With one of my cars, if I inadvertently run the 12V battery too low, I can just push start the car (thanks to manual transmission and perhaps the help of another person to engage the clutch in second gear once I get the car rolling) to get the engine running and get the 12V battery charging (as well as whatever cell phones need it).

Within a ten minute drive of me there are quite a few people who don't have cell service at their homes due to rugged terrain but have had landlines since the homes were built 70 years ago. Their land line service is quite reliable though even during power outages.

As well, a "flat on the side of the road" in this area is not an "emergency" - it's an inconvenience (as the weather is mild) and is (assuming one has had the sense to not buy a car with at least a compact spare) easily remedied via "self help" (get out the jack, wrench, and spare; apply parking brake and put transmission in appropriate gear; loosen lug nuts; jack up corner of car; remove lug nuts; swap wheels; thread and snug up lug nuts; lower car back down; torque lug nuts tight; put away wrench, jack, and wheel with failed tire on it; drive away).

On the other hand, an ischemic stroke is an emergency. If you're at a proper stroke center (which may require a combination of emergency ground transport and helicopter transport) within about three hours of onset of symptoms, you may leave a few days later with few if any side effects. If you arrive at the same stroke center five hours after onset of symptoms, you may be effectively bedridden for the rest of your life (although that life, mercifully, will probably be shorter than it would have been had you gotten to the stroke center a couple hours earlier and gone on to live a normal full life).

But you also ran into issues like 'unable to make a long distance call because all of physical pairs of copper between cities is already in use.'

True. But for emergency services if someone in your home has a stroke ("Time is Brain") a call to another city is rarely needed to summon help - but a call to a local emergency number may well be.

The choice to use ONLY cordless phones and not keep an old $10 "dumb" phone around (even if not plugged in) is a choice of the consumer. One can probably find such phones for free if one asks around.

If one has purchased property with the assumption, based on the universal service requirement, that it would have landline service with its high reliability, elimination of that service is a pretty big deal.

I know people who live in heavily forested hilly areas where there is no cell service, in spite of being within easy commute distance of a well known high cost and high tech urban area, and they rely on landline for DSL and voice. Likely even satellite is not an option due to trees. This area is also subject to high fire danger, high earthquake danger, and suffers frequent power outages (sometimes the power now gets turned off in order to reduce the risk of fires). In the case of power outages caused by storm damage, they are also among the last to get power restored as the utility focuses resources on restoring the most dense urban areas first. Without landlines they would have NO telecommunications access on, or near, their property should they need to call emergency services.

When "real libertarians" are forced to pay taxes and pay for public services it's not hypocritical, unethical, immoral, or inconsistent for them to utilize those public services.

However, when given the opportunity to opt out of those taxes and fees, it would be hypocritical of libertarians to not opt out of all taxes and fees they could but still use the services those fees and taxes fully fund.

Rarely, however, are libertarians given that option as they are subject to the tyranny of the majority.

The new scheme may not be perfect but it sure beats what was before it.

The utility companies must build, replace, and maintain generating and storage capacity as well as distribution infrastructure to meet peak demands - even when the weather is really crappy for several days and solar and/or wind are not meeting demand. That capacity must be built, maintained, and tested regularly even if some of it's used only occasionally and basically sits idle most of the time. If your solar home connects to the grid, the power company has to meet your demand those few hours a year when you choose to draw power - and usually at the same time other solar customers are switching to grid power. This infrastructure must be paid for and the occasional users must pay their fair share just to have it available when/if they choose to use it.

The previous scheme, even once eliminating explicit solar installation subsides, resulted in poor and middle class (and almost all renters and those residing in multifamily complexes regardless of wealth) subsidizing the upper-middle and upper class single family home owners who could afford to install solar and could do so.

Ultimately the feed in rate should be determined by a near continuous auction (perhaps every 15 minute block) with the lowest bidders winning on this spot market. As well homeowners with solar (and perhaps energy storage as well) should be able to enter into futures contracts ("I promise to deliver xKW between 1PM and 3PM a week from next Tuesday") which are also auction based and have severe penalties for failure to deliver for any reason except failure in utility infrastructure such as a down line. Perhaps only the power actually fed in (which the power company could simply reject at the meter if they didn't want it at that time) would be compensated.

Additional allowances could be made for solar customers who are willing to accept more risk. For example, if a solar customer agrees to have their grid power shut-off for any or no reason before others, perhaps they would be paid a 5% bonus for power they feed in while being subject to this agreement. And/or, perhaps If one agrees to "disconnect" in the "inbound" direction for an extended period (such as three years on a rolling basis) they could receive bonuses on power they feed in (as they will never not require any generating capacity from the grid for that forward period of time) during that window.

Just a connection to the grid should cost something that reflects the cost of the distribution infrastructure. Particularly in California, this includes billions of dollars over the next ten or twenty years to underground lines to reduce fire risks. These charges should be paid by net consumers, net producers, and "producers only".

Solar customers should, of course, be free to disconnect from the grid permanently as long as they can demonstrate and maintain (perhaps checked via regular inspections) that they are generating and storing their own power without the use of CO2 emitting generators. Reconnection, however, may cost tens of thousands of dollars so such arrangements must be disclosed in real estate transactions.

The claim that NYC designated Social Media as an "Environmental Toxin" seems, from a quick scan of the advisory release from the NYC Commissioner of Health and Mental Hygiene, to be hyperbolic. The words "toxin", "environment", and "environmental" don't appear anywhere in the release nor does it seem to imply any such thing.

HP argued that ink cartridge microcontroller chips, which are used to communicate with the printer, could be an entryway for attacks.

So HP is arguing that it designs inherently insecure products? Or am I missing something?

Wouldn't the correct solution be to have an interface (if it's necessary at all of course) between the ink cartridge and the printer that is secure - perhaps a "rouge" cartridge could report that it had ink when it didn't, but that's hardly an "attack".

Shouldn't the printer validate the input from the cartridge, discard (and perhaps report to the extent that wouldn't enable a DOS attack) any input that's not following the protocol, and perhaps check for reasonableness of supplied data values or the frequency of the inputs.

You are correct that "most" is an overstatement - Intuit estimates that "only" about 37% of filers qualify. That may not be "most" (as in over 50%), but it's a lot and certainly "many".

Since SALT are no longer deductible, fewer people itemize than they once did.

In Tax Year 2020 the IRS estimates that 164,358,792 1040/1040-SRs were filed. Of these, only 15,812,365 (i.e., 9.6%) filed Schedule A which is necessary if one is itemizing. That's way below your estimate of "over 30% of Americans" (assuming that you meant "federal income tax returns filed by Americans" rather than "Americans").

Similarly, only 25,991,494 (i.e., 16%) filed Schedule D where long/short term capital gains are shown if one sells stock which is well less than your "up to 60%" estimate implies (yes, technically "up to" would include any number less than 60% but it certainly implies to the casual reader far more than 16%).

I'm also quite sure you're substantially overestimating when you imply that the number of "Americans" who earn money as contractors are "up to 30%" (again, true that 0% is also "up to 100%", but such interpretation is misleading - whether intentionally or unintentionally). This may be true in your circle of friends, but I very much doubt it's true across the broad swath of those filing federal tax returns.

It is free to customers who have simple returns (as many, many do). Most people, in spite of what the article claims, meet those requirements.

Their web site says that the free product includes, for example, all the ACA forms (anyone who got an Advance Premium Tax Credit to help pay for their health insurance premiums must file a return - although I know some that took the APTC every year and the IRS hasn't bothered them yet over a decade later).

It's like advertising "free drink with entree" doesn't mean that every possible drink the restaurant offers is free.

Now if the limitations were not clear and only made clear after you had invested significant effort into filling out forms and providing information, that would be a problem. However, if the limitations were shown early in the process I see no problem with it.

I suppose TurboTax will just advertise "Free Tax Filing For Most Taxpayers" to get around this. Just as every pharmacy around me advertises "Free Flu Shots" and at the bottom of the sign in smaller type says something like "For customers with qualifying insurance" - they don't give you the shot and then tell you that you don't qualify for a free shot.

But the IRS will still, at the point of a gun if necessary, take tax money from the residents of the states which chose to eschew federal funds because the voters in that state believe that the federal requirements are ill advised.

So, it's really not the "free choice" you make it out to be.

Suppose that the federal government announced they would withhold medicaid funds from any state that didn't ban abortions? Would you be good with that also?

Be careful for what you wish for.

One good thing that came out of Job's foolishness is that it moved the consequences of rejecting science based treatments in favor of fantasy treatments to the forefront for a little while.

Although it is likely impossible to determine the impact of this, I suspect that there are some number of people alive today who would not be if they hadn't been tipped over to the "conventional treatment" rather than "fantasy treatment" side by Job's idiocy.

At least it appears Quicken's owners have been consistently optimizing for poor performance over the years. I suppose they should get some credit for being consistent.

Agreed. But it's worth noting that the savings of software developer time by not writing efficient code can be a fraction of the additional time spent by end users due to the resulting inefficiency. The more widely deployed and frequently used the software is, the higher the resulting total cost across the user base even though the cost to the typical individual user may be quite modest.

One product I use daily is Quicken (now "Quicken Classic") on Windows which is an example of this. It is, admittedly, an extreme example as the software is SO inefficient and became so some years ago via at most a few software updates that added no substantial user function. For example, "accepting" even just one already downloaded transaction into an account takes several seconds due to the software updates from some years ago. While this is a small cost, I incur it on a nearly daily basis multiple times (due to multiple financial accounts). We do have a fair number of accounts (perhaps 30) across numerous financial institutions (perhaps 10) but we don't have many transactions as we are not "traders" and don't buy a lot of stuff. All of these parameters are WAY below the "supported" maximums. For example, the supported max number of financial accounts per category (spending, credit, investment, etc.) is 512.

The vendor probably saved a few thousand dollars by hiring incompetent programmers, but it's costing their customers much, much, much more than that. Sadly, there isn't any viable competition anymore in this niche so, of course, the vendor couldn't care less.

Sadly, this product, along with HR Block tax software, is the only reason I'm still running Windows on my "daily driver" as Linux versions are not available and WINE is NTA (Not The Answer)

(I suspect that part of the problem may have originated from reports that the application window wasn't being updated correctly in some corner cases and the "fix" that "saved programmer time" (or saved hiring competent, but higher priced, programmers) was to just update the window at every opportunity rather than when needed or when processing of an end user action was fully completed).