Or to provide more highly-paid jobs for designers of robots to perform the task without human labor.

You should be a little careful with ideas like that... you may end up hurting the people you're trying to help. In many cases, they'd rather have the crappy, exploitive job than starve while watching the machines do what they used to. The machines will come eventually, but taxes like the one you describe will accelerate the process. In general, taxes and other regulatory inhibitors that are intended to fulfill some social goal are viewed by the market as damage, and routed around if at all possible. That doesn't make them useless, but it does mean that you have to step very carefully.

Courting isn't necessary to life, even though it may feel that way. And, actually, diamonds aren't necessary to courting, either. When I got engaged, I was poor and my wife had money, so she bought our rings, both of them. Diamonds are nice enough as long as they are only symbols. If they are more than that, you have a bigger problem.

"Is it more efficient than just using the electricity to charge up batteries in an electric car for example"
Think of ships, planes, and remote locations where you must transport fuel like Alaska.

"You're right that we don't have enough renewable energy yet to make this a useful technology. But hopefully that day is coming."
No it will not.
Nuclear is the key to low carbon power. Wind and Solar will help but they do not work well as baseload. Thorium based nuclear and possibly Fusion aka Lockheeds High Beta reactor is what is needed.

Huh? This makes no sense. If they're Android, they can do an incredible variety of stuff. Being low-end, they might not do it well, but they should run pretty much every Android app out there. If they "can't do much to begin with", they're not Android.

To be fair, there *are* fixed costs to the power company in keeping you connected to the grid, in fact those costs are a fairly significant portion of the normal power bill. It's just that the current fee structure doesn't reflect it well.

By depreciating to zero in 10 years you're implying that a battery with 70-80% of its capacity is useless. That's hardly true.

Absolutely not. They're there for various very important reasons.

However, none of those reasons are the one you postulate. If you look at each of them individually, drop your bias, and think about what benefit there could be to the company in providing that service to employees... it's generally very obvious.

Where do you keep your toothbrush at work? Or don't you brush after lunch? Ick.

Attrition at Google is very, very low, and what there is is mostly people leaving to found their own companies. As for how it sounds to you... you really don't know what you're talking about. Go spend some time with some of said young employees and you'll see why they feel it's fantastic.

Nope, just another SWE.

Salary plus annual bonus and incentive stock. Yes it's the same for pretty much everyone. Why?

There is no doubt that those disease have caused a lot of death, but they still don't seriously threaten our society. Just like the terrorists could attack and kill as many people as they did on 9/11 on a quarterly basis and it wouldn't seriously threaten our society. The threat to society is obviously a bogus argument as our society has already weathered that threat and grown very quickly before we developed vaccines. I'm vaccinated, and my family is all vaccinated. I have sympathy for people who can't be vaccinated and so are at greater risk. But I won't force other people to under go vaccination because it is morally bankrupt in my view. I support a woman's right to abortion and a person's right to assisted suicide for much the same reason.

Do you have an angle regarding how this is a threat to society, that doesn't revolve around an emotional plea like "think of the children"?

"However, the BND did not inform the German Chancellor's office,"
Can you say plausible deniability?