Comment Re:I still can't for the life of me (Score 1) 285
OTOH, some of the mid-range Android stuff is quite good, and much cheaper than iPads. There may be better edu software for iOS, though, as another commenter claims.
An SUV does NOT fill the role of a pickup truck unless you don't actually need a pickup truck. You need a pickup when you are toting things that you do not want to carry in the interior of a vehicle like loose dirt, stone, certain bulky supplies, trash, etc. Messy stuff. Very bulky stuff. If you can put what you are likely to carry in an SUV then you don' t actually need a pickup.
An SUV plus a utility trailer does fill the role of a pickup truck.
Why would you "need" a commuter vehicle? The cost of any commuter vehicle is going to hugely outstrip any fuel savings you might possible generate.
The cost of a minivan plus a pickup plus the fuel to commute in the pickup is greater than the cost of an SUV plus a small sedan plus the fuel to commute in the sedan.
Depends somewhat on lifestyle. If I'd had a minivan, I'd also have needed to buy a pickup truck. An SUV fills both roles. Neither quite as well as the ideal vehicle, but well enough that it makes more sense than two vehicles... actually three since we also needed a commuter vehicle.
The Minivan is the practical and logical choice
Agreed, unless you also need to tow stuff and/or go off road. Even if you don't do that stuff very much, renting an SUV or truck for those occasions isn't feasible, because as far as I can tell all rental car companies prohibit towing and off-road use. I do tow stuff regularly (boat, camp trailer, ATV trailer, utility trailer), and need to seat at least six people, which has made an SUV the practical and logical choice.
Now that my kids are moving out I no longer need so much seating, so a pickup truck is becoming the practical and logical choice. I'd like to upgrade to a bigger camp trailer, so one with a powerful diesel engine is looking particularly attractive.
Almost no site I give a damn about relies on advertising.
Do you ever search for stuff?
Free TV in my country (Denmark) is mostly free of advertising.
Are you one of the people who pays no taxes?
My son is certified as a Microsoft Architect and at one point in his career was a senior Microsoft executive.
He described the upper levels as very political. There was little team spirit.There was a lot of jockeying for position, backstabbing and attempts to degrade people to to elevate yourself.
He eventually left and started his own company (which is doing quite well. He just bought a 40' RV)
I'm honestly not trying to Godwin anything but that sounds alot like career politics in the Third Reich.
With the small difference that in the Third Reich those who failed badly enough at the politics ended up with a bullet in their brain.
It sounds a lot more like career politics in most corporations. Not all, certainly, but most.
Watch out for key loggers. It is pretty easy for the bad guys to get your info. They do it all the time
If the bad guys are installing system-level software, or -- even worse -- plugging hardware into your box, you're sunk. There's basically no defense against that. Two-factor auth helps, but only for sites that support it, and even then a real-time attack can get in.
A carbon tax does not affect every business equally.
But it will generally affect competitors equally. Two different taxi companies, or two different electricity generating companies that use coal. Or two different hotels of the same class and size in the same city.
And since competing businesses tend to have to lower prices in order to remain competitive in the same market as they pursue the same prospective customer, the tax burden is going to raise costs (and lower margins) more or less the same for both (or several) parties.
The entire idea is that businesses will strive to become more efficient such that they produce less pollution so that they'll be taxed less.
But because such penalties impact all businesses in whatever country is collecting them, it won't really change things - because all of those businesses will simply pass along the new government-mandated increase in their overhead along in the form of higher prices. To the businesses in question, it just goes in one door and out the other. You want to use the heavy hand of the tax collector to damage people's behavior in a way that makes them go out less, drive less, spend less, do less? Tax citizens directly, with a very special line item they can't miss, that says "carbon tax, because you exist" - and they'll act. Well, mostly they'll act to elect people who will undo that tax, but they'll act.
Not to mention it will probably have a police override allowing them to remotely either stop it
No need for any special remote control. One of the laws the driverless car will obey is the rule that requires you to pull over and stop when emergency vehicles approach with lights and siren. Emergency vehicles like, say, police cars.
Whoever at the FBI said this really didn't think it through.
Unless you count gas-taxes re-appripiated for mass-transit as a 'profit'.
Most of the Interstate is supported by fuel taxes. Fuel taxes are paid for by drivers. Who use the Interstate. So, I'd say that it's a pretty good case of 'user pays'.
Your argument would work if the fuel taxes funded the construction and maintenance of the interstates. They don't. If we wanted them to, we could get there without raising the fuel taxes paid by passenger vehicles, in fact those might possibly be reduced (though the reductions should probably be replaced with carbon taxes, used to fund carbon sequestration). Taxes on the fuel (or whatever) paid by trucks, however, should increase several fold, since they cause the vast majority of the highway construction and maintenance costs.
I really wish we'd fix up our highway funding so that it is usage supported, ending the massive subsidy we give the trucking system. Doing that would cause most of our bulk freight to move from the highways to rail, which is more energy-efficient and would make passenger highway travel safer. Unfortunately, it would also cost a lot of jobs in the trucking industry which wouldn't be offset by jobs in the more manpower-efficient rail industry, and that makes it politically impossible.
There was no point in saying it unless you thought I felt otherwise.
You mean unless I thought Kjella thought otherwise, since that's who I said it to.
And my response would be that libertarians' response is in turn that people would willingly contribute to a fund to improve the air we breathe.
Some would say that, sure. I wouldn't, and neither would many others.
Yep, as opposed to the morons that use password keepers and safes where all you have to observe is One password and then you have everything.
One password which is never sent anywhere from their device, plus you also have to get their device.
I don't think that word "moron" means what you think it means.
I think you'd have a very hard time finding anyone who self-identifies as libertarian who would agree that "money should be forcibly collected from everyone in order to cover the externalities".
Yeah, you assumed you knew what I meant, but there's an opposing possibility which is just as valid which is what I actually meant. What I meant is that there's plenty of Libertarians who don't think that any way should be found to account for externalities.
Which view is perfectly consistent with the bit of my post that you quoted. A belief that no effort to address externalities and a belief that we should find a way to internalize them are both consistent with the statement that money should not be forcibly collected from everyone to cover externalities.
I didn't dispute your claim that some libertarians think no effort should be made to address externalities. I did say that "most libertarians would be just fine with using government to find a way to internalize the externalities", which may or may not be true, though I obviously think it is, or I wouldn't have said it.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
