So you angrily repeat things and shout a lot?

In other words - basically nothing has changed over the past several millennia.

Yep. When I took an advanced calculus course, my instructors idea of teaching/lecturing was to read from the book in a (highly accented) monotone.

I don't see a rash of bans, but I do see the same abusers of moderation given all the mod points they can use every day.

You can thank student loans for that. Earlier generations got their schooling subsidized, but now people have to get loans to pay for it themselves instead. Colleges therefore could raise tuition. Then a bipartisan effort in Congress was launched to make sure we couldn't discharge those loans through bankruptcy like you can gambling or other personal debts, which was led by Joseph R Biden. I think we know how that turned out, forgiveness for a few of the worst abused players, and blaming inability to keep his campaign promises related to partial forgiveness for all buyers blamed on Congress while he went around them to fund genocide in Gaza.

Yes, but in this case the US Government is the bank... China owns $700b of their debt, and can effectively either ask them to pay it back (cash out) when the bonds mature or dump some - or all - of them on the bond market at any point they choose.

Dumping them reduces their value, including any of China's remaining holdings, but would almost certainly cause the US' credit rating to be downgraded - and therefore the interest required to service its debt - all $38 trillion and counting of it! - to go up. It doesn't take many fractions of a percentage point increase to cause the US economy real problems in that scenario. If they decide to cash out mature bonds, then the US either has to pay up - which basically means balancing cutting budgets and raising taxes to raise the cash, or printing more money and devaluing the Dollar to pay for it instead; meaning prices of US imports and the cost of servicing the remaining debt both go up again. Neither are going to be popular with the US electorate.

The final option would be the nuclear one; default. That would crash the US economy completely, and bring most of the rest of the world's down with it, but especially those that have a significant slice of the global financial markets and a heavy reliance on imports (US, UK, EU...), but less so for those that, for various reasons, don't import much and are less dependant on the financial markets (BRICS). A default would also mean that the US' credit rating and value of the USD would go way down, so interest rates go through the roof and the cost of imports would skyrocket. On the plus side (if you can call it that), with the USD being worth less compared to other currencies, and perhaps significantly so, it could become *really* easy for the US to export anything it can still produce once the dust settles.

So, I take it you didn't read and understand my comment? At no point did I say China's imports are considerably smaller than their imports - I actually stated the opposite (see the last sentence of the first paragraph) - just that it's not quite the almost absolute "all or nothing" OP implied.

To re-iterate: Plenty of countries make stuff China wants, and they do indeed import in significant quantities from many different countries, contrary to what OP implied, it's just that despite all those imports their exports *still* massively outstrip their imports (as your linked data clearly indicates). Also, OP implied they were just sitting on the resulting surplus as cash (virtual or not), which was the real point of my post - that they are not doing that at all. They are, in fact, weaponising it and turning it into the economic equivalent of an aircraft carrier by buying government bonds (e.g. the national debt) of countries that they may have a problem with in the future. Many of the rest they are shackling using Belt & Road loans. If it comes to it, being able to crash an adversaries economy by dumping those bonds, then hitting it with a barrage of cyber attacks, there's a pretty good chance they'll be on their knees and have a panicing population to deal with before anyone even needs to fire off any kind of conventional weaponry.

Most houses will not have a charger just go in without some form of renovation to the house. You would be pretty lucky to have a breaker panel in your garage with a spare circuit.

And we all know that won't happen.

The thing with fines is that all the people ACTIVELY involved have interests that don't align with the public and taxpayers.

The shops are ok with fines if they happen rarely and in manageable amounts. Then they can just factor them in as costs of doing business.

The inspectors need occasional fines to justify their existance. So, counter-intuitively, they have absolutely no interest in the businesses they inspect to actually be compliant. Just compliant enough that the non-compliance doesn't make more headlines than their fines. So they'll come now and then, but not so often that the business actually feels pressured into changing things.

You misunderstand wealth.

Most wealth of the filthy rich is in assets. Musk OWNS stuff that is worth X billions. That doesn't mean he as 140 mio. in cash sitting in his bottom drawer.

Moreoever, much of the spending the filthy rich do is done on debt. They put up their wealth as a collateral and buy stuff with other people's (the banks) money. There's some tax trickery with this the exact details I forgot about.

So yes, coughing up $140 mio. is at least a nuissance, even if on paper it's a rounding error.

The actual story that got buried is that the filthy rich are now in full-blown "I rule the world" mode when their reaction to a fee is not "sorry, we fucked up, won't happen again", but "let's get rid of those rules, they bother me".

These automated tags are about $15-$20 each. If you buy a million you can probably get them for $10, but still. Oh yes, and their stated lifetime is 5 years. And you STILL need an employee to walk around updating because it's done via NFC.

In many cases, there are modern tech solutions, but pen-and-paper is still cheaper, easier and more reliable.

It's not necessarily malice. What I mean is: They are certainly malicious, but maybe not in this.

Now THAT is a rare example of an actually smart law.

No government funds needed to enforce the policy, while the stores have an incentive to post the right prices. Why the max $5 though?

My grandparents and parents sometimes talked about how mail used to work.

Delivery within the same city within a few hours. The mailman would come to your house several times during the same day. Every day.

Telephones changed that. With phones, if something is urgent but not so urgent you go yourself, you can make a call. So the demand for same-day-delivery disappeared. Visiting each house only once means a mailman can cover more houses in the same amount of hours.

Privatizing mail delivery is an astonishingly stupid idea, given that what is left in physical mail delivery is often important, official documents.

Ok it's just that it seems EV proponents want them to become mainstream. I just point out the problems that will prevent them from becoming so.

Those types of fishing expeditions run counter to the basic principle of "presumed innocent until proven guilty", at least in my mind. So I'm not crying over this news.