Hey here is a simple idea... Why not do a toll? You know something simple that they do with trucks. For what I hate about this tax is what happens when you are outside of the country?

The easy way is to check the odometer reading every time you renew. If you decide to lie, well, it's easy to verify because eventually you'll either have to scrap the vehicle or you'll sell it to someone else and they'll have to report the new odometer reading. And it all catches up from there (because the new owner will likely not want to pay for the difference in taxes). And scrapping the car likely needs paperwork so they can cancel the title and deal with tax issues. Of course, if you find a scrapper who is willing to fudge the mileage information maybe you can save some money.

It also makes odometer tampering all that much more criminal since they can then get you for tax evasion.

The reason is simple, Android already offers 2.4/5 GHz. When you go to the hotspot option, the 2.4GHz option is marked "Compatible". Unselecting it means the hotspot will operate at 5GHz.

The reason it generally can't do dual 2.4/5 is because that requires dual radios to operate simultaneously. Your router that does 2.4 and 5GHz has two separate WiFi adapters, one operating at 2.4GHz and the other at 5GHz. These are independent and the underlying software bridges the two with the Ethernet ports.

Phones, generally only connect to one or the other so they only need one radio. This means hotspot mode can only work on one band or another as there's no hardware to work on both simultaneously. (There are two analog sections - because it's hard to re-use the transmitter/receiver hardware for each band. This lets it do a periodic scan of available access points even while connected).

This option lets the hotspot be moved to 6GHz, and depending on the phone hardware, it might be able to do 2.4/6 simultaneously since a lot of 6GHz units have a separate radio unit. But if it's using a single radio triple band, then it can only work on one at a time.

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)

Depends. If it results in people spamming you with AirDrop requests because they can have a tool that just sends AirDrop requests to everyone all the time on Android, Apple might start doing stuff about it.

Of course, if it's because of the DMA, they'll likely leave that as a feature saying - the law makes it impossible for us to prevent this, Too bad so sad. Everyone else though, gets the ability to filter AirDrop spam out.

But chances are Google just reverse engineered the protocol, either with or without Apple's permission. It might even be Apple just gave Google the protocol specifications because it was silly for it to be limited and it's much more useful to be cross platform. (Plus, by giving the specs to Google, it means Apple doesn't have to do any work implementing anything.)

They could make a note of mileage leaving and re-entering the UK.
Penalty for misplacing the documents would be paying for all the miles.
Or keep it in a database for tax purposes.

Lots of "cute" answers I see. More seriously, the FAA is involved because it involved a flying thing. FAA regulations are designed for flying stuff, and wants a high level of safety.

If a self-driving Fedex truck did what you described, the DOT would likely become involved.

We have AI to summarize the AI slop articles.

Isn't Uber still losing money?

Amazon had a plan for profitability, so much so they took on more debt in the early days to scale up. A gamble that paid off because they had a solid plan to begin with, not a "hope the magic beans drop into our laps before we run out of money" type of plan that AI companies have. Uber's business plan was "lets keep doing illegal shit that our competitors cant and just hope we become big enough not to fail".

Erm... that's the whole point of a T&C/EULA/et al. To limit legal liability and as a defence against being sued. Which is one of the reasons most countries do not treat them as binding contracts.

I'm the same, always use a good credit card, but the occasional hassle is worth it. The prices are 1/10th the Amazon ones.

Used to be, but Trump has kinda ruined it for the rest of us. He complained that they were charging Americans more, so instead of reducing their prices, they just increased them everywhere else.

As an example, Mounjaro went from around £180 in the UK, to around £300.

I saw a YouTube video from a guy who bought a mini excavator from AliExpress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's surprisingly good. Japanese Kubota engine, everything else looks decent quality, especially considering the incredibly low price. I've seen similar videos from other people who bought heavy machinery like farm equipment and lathes.

On the one hand it's a shame that our domestic manufacturing is finding it hard to compete. On the other, they aren't doing themselves any favours with things like DRM to stop you working on your own tools. The price competition is a good thing for consumers.

Take Germany luxury/performance cars, for example. The Chinese ones are every bit as luxury and well made, and often exceed them for performance. On top of that, the German manufacturers can't resist screwing their customers with bullshit like subscriptions for heated seats and no owner access to the engine bay.

I regularly buy from AliExpress. Their customer service isn't as good as Amazon's, but the prices are 1/10th of the Amazon ones so even though the odd things gets lost or is of poor quality, I'm still well up on what Amazon would have cost me.

Occasionally I need to do a credit card chargeback. Had to do that on a computer case that got damaged. For small stuff costing literal pennies I don't bother with the maybe 1 in 20 items that is lost or no good.

As you say, it's the same stuff they sell with a hefty mark-up on Amazon, and in every other shop.