Even as someone who votes left more than any other way, I'd be entirely okay with killing the AMT. It is a huge pain to deal with.

The real problem, IMO, is that Congress needs to get off its a** and pass laws requiring brokerages and retirement plans to provide all of the tax data in a fully computed form so that you can fill in the boxes on your tax worksheet and be done, rather than having to look through every single line and figure out which ones were short-term, which were long-term, which had foreign tax, etc. Even with TurboTax, even with basically everything coming from Edward Jones, it *still* takes me two or three hours every year to fill in the information correctly for my taxes. I can't imagine trying to do that by hand on paper.

The real problem with requiring icons to be a specific shape is that it makes apps harder to recognize. Just look at how much confusion Google's icon rebranding has been, with every icon looking a lot like a multicolored square, and you'll understand what I mean. Now imagine every app icon on an entire operating system being a rounded square.

Certainly true for highways, yes. There's also next to no good alternative to individual cars for highway driving, though. Amtrak is very, very limited, Greyhound is slow *and* very limited, airplanes are grossly fuel inefficient and are generally limited to relatively long distances, and that's about it.

Not sure why you think people would drive fewer miles. Most people in cars are trying to get to a specific place, not driving just to drive. Would people plan shorter trips? Maybe for some small percentage of leisure driving, but leisure driving is already a small percentage of driving, so that's a small reduction in fuel use for a small percentage of a small percentage of trips. That's hardly worth the negative impact on everything else.

That's not how stock grants work. That trillion dollars doesn't come from Tesla. It comes from the stock market through share dilution. The company can absolutely still be profitable no matter how much equity it chooses to give out.

Contemporary home-school does not look like it did decades ago.

We home-school and from what I can tell from the homeschooling community is that like us most of the kids participate in one or more co-ops that where groups of parents collaborate to deliver a course that are more hands on like science and music. Local YMCAs, gyms etc, offer classes during the day like Home School PE.

So homeschoolers get quite a lot of repeated and consistent interactions with other children. How 'diverse' those others are probably varies a lot by the size and makeup of where you live.

Yeah, your definition of "mega-mansion" definitely is a starter house. My parents' home was two stories plus a basement. I can think of plenty of three-story houses that aren't even remotely mansions (e.g. row houses in San Francisco).

Penalizing people for using space efficiently by building up just leads to more suburban sprawl and lower housing density. It's the opposite of what any sane urban planner would recommend.

I would argue that having newer houses in your neighborhood is a sign that your neighbors probably aren't crackheads, so it should make your house look more attractive by comparison. The only time that might not be true is when the nicer house is also for sale at the same time yours is.

Also, those "mega-mansions" (which, based on having known a bunch of people who use phrases like that, are probably what we used to call a starter home back where I grew up) mean higher property taxes, which means better schools, which also increase the value of your property.

Wow. I looked it up, and today I learned that it actually is available to non-seniors. I'm kind of surprised. Of course, the median wait time is measured in significant fractions of an hour, so even the elderly prefer to get rides from other people when they can. Either way, there's no advantage to a van that drives around and picks up one or two people at a time and takes them to their destination compared with a private car (and actually a huge disadvantage from a fuel economy perspective). It's just a glorified Über service, but with the most fuel-inefficient vehicles on the road.

My actual small town that I lived in until I was 22 currently has almost no houses within a twenty minute walk of any of the grocery stores. Maybe a few of the houses closest to the front of one of the wealthiest neighborhoods are close enough to Walmart. E.W. James (oops, that apparently just became a Save-A-Lot) is on a highway with almost no houses for probably a mile. Ruler Foods is within a mile of maybe a half dozen houses.

The Big Star store that went under in the 1980s (IIRC) was within walking distance of maybe a dozen mostly low-income houses, plus some university married student apartments, and *barely* within walking distance of some of the other university housing, but that has been gone for decades. The old E.W.'s was within walking distance of maybe low-double-digit houses before it moved across town in the late 1990s to where Ruler is now, and then again to its current location. IGA was also kind of near some houses, but again, that closed in the 80s or 90s when all the businesses moved to the west side of town to be near Walmart after it moved.

But even if you distributed them as evenly as you could, with only three real grocery stores, you'd still only have maybe 10% to 15% of residents within a reasonable walking distance of a grocery store. At 850 people per square mile, you just can't sustain a lot of grocery stores. And that's before you factor in all the people out in the country. For that matter, my current city has trouble keeping more than about three grocery stores in business at anything approaching *bikeable* distances even with 7k people per square mile. The economies of scale just lend themselves to a smaller number of larger grocery stores, rather than a larger number of smaller stores.

Except that this isn't true. Yes, above a certain speed, you rapidly lose energy from wind resistance. But at lower speeds, you're not getting the maximum advantage of higher gears. That's why most cars are more efficient at 55 to 60 MPH than at 40 MPH. So lowering the maximum speed will NOT necessarily reduce emissions.

Here's a graph of a few vehicles' efficiency versus speed. Going significantly over 60 MPH usually results in a significant reduction in efficiency. Below that, though, you're just as likely to make emissions worse by slowing people down as you are to make it better. It depends entirely on what speeds just happen to be at the sweet spot in the torque curve of a particular engine with a particular gear ratio. You really can't fix the environment with that approach. All you'll do is make people late all the time.

Nit: To the best of my knowledge, there are no rare earth minerals in EV batteries. They are, however, used in a lot of EV *motors*. Lithium, cobalt, manganese, iron, etc. are anything but rare.

The full extent of the damage will take years to fully appreciate. That's half the reason people like him get elected. By the time the full extent of the damage is know, you're two presidential cycles later or even three.

It's really not *that* bad. They just have to sell them for more money. The tax credit doesn't magically make them unprofitable unless they haven't paid off the R&D costs. Otherwise, it just reduces their sales volume or forces them to take a lower profit per unit to keep the volume up.

It's stock. It's funny money.

Not at all true. The numbers are kind of nuts, but they are also tied to growth targets, so if Tesla doesn't grow, he doesn't get anything. It doesn't really devalue the shares, and this style of compensation scheme is pretty typical, though again, I won't argue that the numbers seem questionably high.

It already did, at least in the U.S. As soon as the tax credit expired, buying cratered. The company most likely to weather this is Tesla. Tesla already lost their tax credits, and their sales didn't crater before, so they probably won't crater this time, either.

But the rest of the industry? Dealers at the major car companies want to *avoid* selling EVs, because they don't get all that lucrative service business — oil changes and brake jobs and oxygen sensor replacements and so on. They have no incentive to sell EVs, and without tax credits to push people to choose EVs, sales dry up.

In other words, Ford ditching their electric trucks is *entirely* plausible. (I could maybe even see Tesla ditching the Cybertruck, because its sales suck for... let's just say design and implementation reasons.)

A *school* bus? Or a city bus? Because nowhere I've ever lived had school buses that took people home except at the end of the regular school day.

Where I grew up, a town of about 10,000 people, the total extent of "public transit" was a van service that served the elderly and disabled. Zero buses, zero *taxis*. You drove or you didn't get there. So I'm not sure what your definition of "rural" is, but it sure as h*** doesn't match up with the decades that I lived in a rural area.

WTF are you talking about? You're talking about huge cities here. I'm talking about small town USA. So unless your idea of "different choices" means not living in a rural area (and good luck finding food on your table if everyone did that), you really don't know what you're talking about.

Sure. But my point was that trying to eliminate cars can't work in rural areas, and doesn't work well even in suburbs. That first part is not solvable by moving everyone to cities, because we still require food, and you can't grow that in a dense urban areas, because there's not enough arable land. And people live in suburbs precisely because they don't like living in cities, so eliminating cars in suburbs isn't going to fly, either.

Why would it?

The FAA could make the fee schedule in a way that encourages whatever behaviors congress sets out as desirable in its charters if it were made more independent. Nothing would stop them from say charging higher fees to file a flit plan for a cargo plan vs one with commercial passengers. No reason they can't do that even on a per source or destination airport basis. Want to fly cargo into LAX - $$$$$ but if you land it in some less busy airport a couple hours away in the desert its only $. Where a passenger flight plan with an LAX terminus might only be $$.

They can similarly drive more or less revenue for certification of aircraft. Maybe domestically manufactured craft get cheap certs, and AirBus gets bent over the counter and thoroughly reamed. Tons of opportunities and lots of potential stability improvements if you make it a little bit more removed from the executive branch, without an need for your basic plane fare to change a much. It would just be one hand giveth the other taketh.

If that is true, and I am not saying it isn't then everyone will pay for it anyway. It will show up in the cost of products etc.

The FAA and everyone who flies, registers an aircraft, etc already interact directly. It would not even be inefficient to just make the FAA operate more like the post office, a government sponsored by not directly funded agency. It will insulate it from things like Finding Spats and shutdowns.

Actually turning the skies into a toll road seems like a pretty smart move.

The financial bullshit started long before 2008; it just took that long for the system to break. Bill Clinton removed a lot of the rules governing investment banking being separate from the S&L world.

Of course Republic Congress enacted the repeal; but that was bipartisan 343-86...

Hey no need to let facts get in the way of good story right, much more fun to just blame the other guy because calendar happened to roll over at the right time, that low-information-voters (also know as Democrats) will be easily suckered.

No but the Senate makes its own rules, and one of those rules is a tradition of unlimited debate. Until there are no objectors or a super majority agree the discussion should be terminated, legislation cannot be voted on.

For decades now minority parities have leveraged this to block the bodies business when it is doing something they don't like.

It is possible for the majority to simple 'change the rules' but nobody really wants to do that because they know the shoe will be on the other foot in another election cycle or two and don't want be railroaded when its there turn.

So the 60 vote majority requirement persists, as removing it is basically a mutually assured destruction situation, that will hold until one party feels they are certain to have a sustained comfortable majority going forward - I expect. The moment that happens and if said party has anything hovering right around that 60 mark which could become 59 or whatever the rule will be eliminated so fast your head will spin - I also expect.

The typical increase when the enhanced subsidies go away is like $150 a month. You act like it is apocalyptic but it is anything but..Green New Deal driven inflation cost these people more. Hell Cash for Clunckers probably drove up their annual transportation costs more then these premium supports expiring do!