Car dealers take up more property than, say, Tesla showrooms. Figure that a Tesla showroom usually has a few cars on display in the nice, climate-controlled, showroom and a few cars parked in the lot for test drives. You aren't walking into a Tesla showroom and driving out in a brand new Tesla. Since your property tax relates to how much property you have, these showrooms pay less property tax.

I remember there was some local pain when GM closed down Pontiac and Saturn dealerships and, suddenly, some nice property taxes stopped coming in from those dealerships.

The only advantage I can see to it is that it's small enough to work as a one-person bicycle. Various transit systems won't let you bring tandem bikes on trains, the racks on busses are too small for them, and tandem racks can be a nuisance.

That said, I agree. I wouldn't want to ride one for any kind of distance...

New Hampshire.

Live free or die, bitches!

...and most libertarians don't have them because the gub'mint can use them to track you and feed the info to the UN's black helicopters.

This reminds me of a 1990 Chrysler Lebaron I drove for a bit. If you mashed the accelerator to the floor, the car would think, "He wants to go fast--let's downshift. Oops! We're over-revving, let's shift back up. But he wants to go fast--let's downshift. Oops! We're over-revving. Shift back up."

It would do this three or four times before finally deciding to downshift.

But if you put it about 3/4 of the way down, you got pretty good acceleration.

It's another reason why I dislike automatics.

Why?

Consider "the rock we are on." What makes this rock so interesting? In theory, there are lots of rocks out there like ours. If they're able to get to us, they've certainly been to other rocks and ours isn't all that special.

Consider "Us." I won't go off on humanities foibles, so the only interest in us would be biologically or sociologically. Biologically, they can just show up and take samples. Sociologically, we might be interesting, but introducing themselves would change us--which would sort of negate the observation.

Uh...isn't TuneIn free?

Remember that if the service is free, you are the product.

Didn't you hear? There's a revolution going on.

Personally, I've always thought it would be amusing to hack one of those signs and I've never heard of the game "Watch Dogs."

"Help! I'm trapped in a highway sign factory!" is the most obvious message, but I'm sure I could come up with a bunch of random messages to put in...

More like 2004. if you're in Korea.

One reason for the million dollars worth of insurance is that you may be carrying more than one person. Pick up three or four people, have a heinous accident, and you could end up with a million dollars worth of medical expenses.

Part of the reason for the special license is that cab drivers also have their own rules for where they can pick people up or drop them off and we want to be certain that drivers know those rules. For example, where I live, drivers can't just stop on the street and block traffic to pick up a fare. They have to, at least, pull off the road.

...and then adding a third--triangulation.

As I understand it, though, it's a little easier said than done to get the required accuracy for E-911. But it isn't impossible. I believe it was AT&T that went the triangulation route and it was Verizon that just put GPS in all the phones. But I could be wrong...

Yes.

As I understand it, E-911 required that the carriers tell the 911 where the person is to within 300 feet. To handle this, some carriers just mandated that the phones have GPS. Other carriers used triangulation from the cell tower. So you can use a cellphone without GPS, but that doesn't mean that the carriers won't know where you are.

In fact, the carriers used to (and perhaps still do) have a service where they would text you directions to where you wanted to go based upon where you were. No GPS required.

It's a worthwhile point, but the difference is that a business opportunity exists for dealing with this because there are so many cars on the road that need just this kind of maintenance.

Conversely, batteries like this will be pretty rare, so the bi-monthly stop at Jiffy Lube for car maintenance probably isn't happening. Initially, you'll have to keep track of it yourself.

Still, if these can be installed, an appropriate idiot light, "Hey, battery needs refilling!" would be useful.

The Earth wanted plastic.