Typically, taxi medallions aren't sold by the government anymore. They're typically sold by their previous holders and the high prices reflect their scarcity and perceived value. The market decides this value (even when they're auctioned off by the state), so there isn't any guarantee that they'll maintain that value. Any contracts that exist say nothing about limiting the supply or compensating medallion-holders for any speculative prices they paid. Buying a medallion for $800k is just as speculative as buying an $800k house or $800k worth of stock. There are no government guarantees that they will maintain value.

tl;dr... The economics of the taxi medallion situation are extremely similar to shares in a company. The "contracts" that you're referring to don't exist (at least in the form that you image).

Uber drivers are subsidized by everybody else. Taxi drivers have to pay high insurance rates because the act of driving a long distance every day for a ton of strangers is a job that inherently leads to a much higher statistical rate of payouts. If they're driving as a taxi on regular car insurance, it's you that's paying the bill for their swindle of the insurance system.

Screw you, SourceForge!

Yeah, wouldn't that be great if I had linked it in my first post, and then if you had actually read my post well enough to see it?

I thought you were going to under-bus your governor for his FaceBook posting. The one in response to the SCROTUM decision that fell short of giving me legal cover to marry a horse. Chiefly due to those penguins being a bunch of hyper-conservatives and stuff.

Great, since now I'm in their car. What do I do now chief? Jump out?

Anecdote time!

I live in the DC area. So about a month back, my parents were visiting. we went to a restaurant that was not terribly near to either our home or their hotel. As the weekend metro was being the weekend metro, we decided to cab back to our respective locations. I called an Uber for them since I figured it would be easiest. Since you can only dispatch one Uber per account, me and my wife had to take a cab. Looking at the difference between those two rides is why I stopped taking cabs.

My parents uber arrived promptly, it was clean and comfortable. It took them to their destination quickly, and the pricing was transparent and conveniently billed to my card.

When my wife and I finally hailed a cab, it was dirty, and the air conditioning was broken (It was about 90 F) The front seat had been pushed back as far as possible, and was in fact kind of bowed. The driver attempted to take some odd circuitous route back to our home until I asked him to take a more direct route. When we got there he tried to get us to pay cash.

This was an extreme example, but it made me think of all the other negative experiences I'd had with cabs in the city, they have been on the whole uncomfortable, inconsistent, dirty, poorly maintained, and discourteous (including drivers that pulled away as soon as they heard where I was going). At that point I realized that Uber was a better option. The worst Uber experience I've had so far was one that smelled slightly strange. For my area, it really is no contest, Uber is just better than the cabs.

How do you come to that assumption?

By linking to a peer-reviewed paper on the subject?

A nuclear warhead has lots of trouble to even "hit" an asteroid.

Essentially every space mission we have launched for the past several decades has had to navigate with a far more precision than that needed to get close to an asteroid and activate a single trigger event when close by.

We send spacecraft on comparable missions all the time. And it doesn't really take a spectacularly large payload to destroy (yes, destroy) an asteroid a few hundred meters in diameter. 1/2-kilometer-wide Itokawa could be blown into tiny bits which would not recoalesce, via a 0,5-1,0 megatonne nuclear warhead, a typical size in modern nuclear arsenals (in addition, the little pieces would be pushed out of their current orbit).

I know it's a common misconception that "nuking" an asteroid would simply create a few large fragments that would hit Earth with even more devastation, but that's not backed by simulation data. And anyway, even if it didn't blow the asteroid to tiny bits (which simulations say it would) and even if it didn't push the remaining pieces off trajectory (which they say it does), anything that spreads an Earth impact out over a larger period of time is a good thing - it means the higher percentage of the energy that's absorbed high in the atmosphere rather than reaching the surface (less ejecta, lower ocean waves, a broader (weaker) distribution of the heat pulse, etc), the weaker the shockwaves, the weaker the total heat at any given point in time, and the more time for Earth to radiate away any imparted energy or precipitate out any ejecta cloud. If the choice is between 15 Chelyabink-sized impactor (most of which will strike places where they won't even be witnessed) or one Meteor Crater-sized impactor (same total mass), pick the Chelyabinsk ones. 50 10-megatonne meteor crater impactors or one 500-megatonne Upheaval Dome impactor? Pick the former. The asteroid impacts calculator shows the former generating a negligible fireball and 270mph wind burst at 2km distance, while the latter creates the same winds 25km away (156 times the area) and a fireball that even 25km away is 50 times brighter than the sun, hot enough to instantly set most materials on fire.

But that's all irrelevant because, quite simply, simulations show that nuclear weapons do work against asteroids.

What we need is enough detection lead time to be able to launch a nuclear strike a few months before the impact date (to give time for the debris to disperse). There is no need to "land" or "drill" for the warhead. There is no pressure wave; instead, an immense burst of X-rays is absorbed through the outer skin of the asteroid on the side of the explosion, causing it to vaporize (unevenly) from within, especially near the ground zero point, and creating powerful shockwaves throughout its body. In addition to ripping it apart, the vaporized material and higher energy ejecta flies off, predominantly on the side where the explosion was detonated, acting a broad planar thruster.

Chaos is coming.

I meant to. Tl;dr: gummints gonna gum.
Or, you seem to imply a foreign policy exceptionalism for the U.S. whose existence is uncertain.

Let me be perfectly clear. Christianity may be my personal life's meaning. It informs my church activities explicitly, my online interactions less so, and is mostly implicit in business activities. That is, I don't run around evangelizing on the job, for all my work activities are not in opposition to my faith.
Government is a wholly secular affair. Despite the occasional "In God We Trust" flourish, I'm quick to point out that "Christian nation" is an oxymoron. Christianity is not carried out at the national level, and the Carpenter didn't lay it down for the United States as such.
All of which leads up to my bewilderment at

Why wouldn't I? Christianity is like chess. It's all there, in plain view, the whole time. Countries are more like poker, bluffing and cheating like. . .governments.

On the other hand, if they're doubling capacity, then you only need half the number of cycles (it actually even works *better* than that, as li-ion cells prefer shallow charges and discharges rather than deep ones - but yes, fractional charge cycles do add up as fractional charge cycles, not whole cycles). If you have a 200km-range EV and you drive 20 kilometers a day, you're using 10% of a cycle per day. If you have a 400km-range EV and you drive 20 kilometers a day, you're using 5% of a cycle per day.

Top commercial li-ion capacities are about 30% more than they were 5 years ago. And today's batteries include some of the "advances" you were reading about 5 years ago.

I'm sorry if technology doesn't move forward at the pace you want. But it does move forward when you're not looking. Remember the size of cell phone batteries back in the day?

ISWYDT