Odometers aren't all that reliable in general. A few percent at best. They don't account for things like putting different size wheels on the car either, and can be wrong if the wheel size is set wrong at the factory.

Doesn't excuse Tesla illegally voiding warranties.

I haven't been able to find a source for this 12,000 claim, but it seems likely that it's untrue.

My guess would be that they simply looked at every arrest where evidence included social media posts, e.g. if someone was assaulted and the attacker happened to have posted on social media about it, that counted.

I am no fan of the UK or the way it is going, but there were clear directions from the government a few years ago that social media posts should only be the basis of arrests in very specific and fairly extreme circumstances, e.g. where it is reasonably believed that there is an imminent threat of violence.

That was not a joke, that was part of a very long running campaign to incite violence against trans people.

Graham Linehan has just been convicted of smashing a child's phone when she confronted him about the months long harassment campaign he waged against her on social media, which included attempts to dox her.

He got off extremely lightly, all things considered. The only reason he beat the harassment charge was because the judge didn't think that the victim was sufficiently harassed, and the prosecution didn't prep her very well.

He's a bigot and a convicted violent criminal, and has gone straight back to harassing people.

The biggest problem for the government is that the welfare bill is expected to rise by around £90 billion/year by 2030 (OBR forecast), and half of that is pensions alone. The population is ageing and also turning against immigration of the young and healthy workers we need.

Mistakes were made going back to the 1960s and no government has the will to address them, only to kick the can further down the road.

The more expensive public charging is about on a par with a decently efficient fossil car. When it can get expensive (aside from rip-offs) is when you also have to pay for parking, which is common in London.

If you can charge at home then it is much cheaper, around 2p/mile, or free if you have solar.

It's not about fairness or who wears the road out the most, it's about what the economy needs. Because we destroyed much of our rail infrastructure, road is the only way to move most goods. If you tax it too much, it damages the economy. Same with work vans.

In the UK we have an annual inspection, but not until the car is 3 years old (from the point of first sale). They have said they will have a free odometer reading at the same place that does the annual check for the first two times.

The more annoying part is that you have to pay up front, i.e. estimate your annual mileage and then at the next odometer check you get a refund or pay more depending on if you are under or over. I can see why they did it, car tax is paid up front for the year too, and it allows people to spread it over monthly payments.

I'd be happier about this if they hadn't also frozen duty of fossil fuels for cars. The cost per mile for EVs has gone up 150%, or rather will do in 2028, if they don't cancel it first.

150% is based on charging at the 7.5p overnight rate and typical efficiency, resulting in 2p/mile energy cost.

The people who get them have usually suffered some kind of extremely traumatic injury. IIRC the first woman to have one was mauled by a dog, which literally ate her face.

Before face transplants, the only option was to take skin from elsewhere and use it to repair the face as best as possible, to he point where it looked awful but at better than having no skin. The upside was that because the skin came from their own body, rejection wasn't a big problem.

Face transplants were supposed to offer better functionality (ability to talk, eat and breathe more normally, as well as facial expressions) and look cosmetically a bit nicer.

There does seem to be some kind of issue with "external" transplants like this. I recall someone who had a whole hand transplanted, but wanted it removed. Even aside from issues like parts of the transplant not getting enough blood flow and dying, it seems that having part of someone else's body visibly grafted onto you (not an internal organ) comes with psychological challenges.

Canada is just ceding ground to other countries, who will race ahead with clean tech and lower costs.

"Against oil" (meaning, development, business, jobs, etc) has been the big conservative complaint against the Liberals, that they sacrifice prosperity and jobs for their (wrong anyway) environmental tenderness.
They're now giving away precisely nothing: the commitment to get all the approvals through, the environment compromised, for a pipeline that's never going to happen.

The money simply isn't there for such a mammoth multi-project. Money is definitely there for tweaks and tricks to squeeze and extra million barrels/day out of the tar sands, and to get that extra million down various improved pipelines, for "just a few billion" in upgrades:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada... ... the 80/20 rule, as it were.

But to fill a whole new million bbl/day pipeline, you'd need a major new oil sands mine, like the Kearl Lake Projects back in 2013, which added 880,000/day for a grand total of $20B. (Not just a new mine, you see, but facilities to dilute the bitumen, a pipeline from Edmonton to send diluent, another to send diluted bitumen back, at a billion each...15 years ago.)

So, even if there are new efficiencies, $25B for the sands expansion is conservative, and so is $25B for the next pipeline, even without the pandemic and giant '21 flood that put the last one up to $34B. After recent inflation for construction costs, $50B is really a rock-bottom estimate.

So, if they deliver a million barrels a day, each barrel has to pay the interest on $50,000, and then make a profit. They need over $40/bbl for operating costs, so they really must have over $50/bbl global oil prices...from 2030 through the early 2040s before they get into the gravy. Nobody not paid to be delusional thinks that prices will not go lower and lower as the market starts to decline. The Saudis will probably crash the price (as they did in 2014) just to drive competitors broke.

Nobody's going to risk that. That's the conclusion of the retired Imperial Oil economic/market analyst, Ross Belot, in Canada's Macleans:
https://macleans.ca/economy/wh...

So Mr. Carney can promise to shoot whales personally if they'll just build a pipeline, in the serene knowledge that it isn't going to happen. The only thing he has to do to stop a pipeline is not promise a penny of public money to back it. Since the government already had to pay for the last pipeline, he's got a popular excuse.

While this is an option, reliability would go waaay down for multiple reasons.

FYI, their statement about Iceland is wrong. BEV sales were:

2019: 1000
2020: 2723
2021: 3777
2022: 5850
2023: 9260
2024 (first year of the "kílómetragjald" and the loss of VAT-free purchases): 2913
2025: 5195

Does this look like the changes had no impact to anyone here? It's a simple equation: if you increase the cost advantage of EVs, you shift more people from ICEs to EVs, and if you decrease it, the opposite happens. If you add a new mileage tax, but don't add a new tax to ICE vehicles, then you're reducing the cost advantage. And Iceland's mileage tax was quite harsh.

The whole structure of it is nonsensical (they're working on improving it...), and the implementation was so damned buggy (it's among other things turned alerts on my inbox for government documents into spam, as they keep sending "kílómetragjald" notices, and you can't tell from the email (without taking the time to log in) whether it's kílómetragjald spam or something that actually matters). What I mean by the structure is that it's claimed to be about road maintenance, yet passenger cars on non-studded tyres do negligible road wear. Tax vehicles by axle weight to the fourth times mileage, make them pay for a sticker for the months they want to use studded tyres, and charge flat annual fees (scaled by vehicle cost) for non-maintenance costs. Otherwise, you're inserting severe distortion into the market - transferring money from those who aren't destroying the roads to subsidize those who are, and discouraging the people who aren't destroying the roads from driving to places they want to go (quality of life, economic stimulus, etc)

Probably the fact that Trump recently clawed back the previous 6GHz spectrum allocation so he can give it to his billionaire buddies.

Road maintenance isn't the only cost. Automobiles have a lot of externalized costs that are bared by the government besides just building roads. You need to constantly be building out new cities with new infrastructure in order to make room for cars and a car centric society.

You could tax the car companies themselves to pay for it but good luck with that. Realistically if you have the political power to do something like that you probably wouldn't have a car centric society that shifts billions of dollars of cost on to consumers.