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)

...involved

National budgets simply do not, and cannot, work that way. Taxes go into a central pot, and then get assigned out according to the priorities of the state as interpreted by the government that currently controls the national purse strings, ideally without having to borrow any additional money although that seldom happens and is deeply unpopular when it does (see "Austerity" - governments typicallydo not live within their means, yet usually expect their publics to do just that). For the whole system to work, they have to both tax things that are easy to collect the tax on, and over tax those things to make up for the costs of things where it is not easy to tax. If you want any taxes spent to be proportionate to what they are raised from, then the outcome will be a LOT of essential services that are currently supported by the public purse seeing drastic cuts, forcing more people to go private or join a *long* waiting list, and requiring suplemental per-use fees.

For most people, sure the odometer will be fine, but some of us live in rural communities and have vehicles that are used a significant amount of time off public roads, but still need to be taxed for their on-road usage - think tractors or road-legal quad bikes, for a couple of very obvious examples. A simple "per mile driven" based on the odometer is not the perfectly fair "one size fits all" solution that it might at first seem to be if those kinds of vehicles go electric at some point, so I think a little more nuance may be required before this scheme sees the light of day. Privacy concerns aside, many of those issues could easily be addressed via GPS-based tracking of just public road usage, and could also enable more nuanced billing to try deter drivers from using busy roads at peak times, effectively turning any road that is applied to into a toll road.

It should also be noted that this is on top of existing vehicle tax, which is paid as an annual fee in the UK. People with large SUVs and commercial vehicles will still be paying more to drive those vehicles per year, but whether the plan is to shift more of that tax to the per-mile rax rates based on criteria such as the likely amount of road surface wear they will create, e.g. different per mile rates for larger vehicles, isn't yet clear, either. Overall, it's probably the fairest system for users of different types of vehicle classes and power trains to pay their share of the public highway costs, but the devil is always in the details and at this point there are scant few of those available to see where the issues people ought to be concerned about might lie.

Dog-whistle for "vagina"

But my dictator can beat up your dictator!

It will take a really annoying or long outage before people notice they've been screwed by Big Money.

It's hard to know what industry or company Xi is subsidizing, as their system is not transparent.

Give me 5 million and I'd do it, I confess.

> It used to be my go-to site for all things computer related.

Me too.

They were slightly cheaper than Amazon for the same product, then I did a big project which got slightly downsized and I wound up with $400 in "restocking fees" for a couple of pieces of factory-hologram-tape sealed network gear, after I paid $100 in return shipping.

Learned my lesson real fast.

Sure do :) I can provide more if you want, but start there, as it's a good read. Indeed, blind people are much better at understanding the consequences of colours than they are at knowing what colours things are..

But "95% of international traffic" is not the same as "95% of traffic". You are slicing the wrong pie, Happy Thanksgiving!

That's the problem: they are not a web. The original idea of the internet was to have a web of connections so that a few cables or nodes going bad wouldn't stop data movement, it would route around the bad spots via going through adjacent parts of the web. Seems we have to return to the original vision.

Technically they usually route around damaged sea cables via a larger scale redundancy, such as through another continent, but the webbiness needs to be per sea based on the rate of damage so far.

"Epstein diddit"

The congenitally blind have never seen colours. Yet in practice, they're practically as efficient at answering questions about and reasoning about colours as the sighted.

One may raise questions about qualia, but the older I get, the weaker the qualia argument gets. I'd argue that I have qualia about abstracts, like "justice". I have a visceral feeling when I see justice and injustice, and experience it; it's highly associative for me. Have I ever touched, heard, smelled, seen, or tasted an object called "justice"? Of course not. But the concept of justice is so connected in my mind to other things that it's very "real", very tangible. If I think about "the colour red", is what I'm experiencing just a wave of associative connection to all the red things I've seen, some of which have strong emotional attachments to them?

What's the qualia of hearing a single guitar string? Could thinking about "a guitar string" shortly after my first experience with a guitar string, when I don't have a good associative memory of it, sounding count as qualia? What about when I've heard guitars play many times and now have a solid memory of guitar sounds, and I then think about the sound of a guitar string? What if it's not just a guitar string, but a riff, or a whole song? Do I have qualia associated with *the whole song*? The first time? Or once I know it by heart?

Qualia seems like a flexible thing to me, merely a connection to associative memory. And sorry, I seem to have gotten offtopic in writing this. But to loop back: you don't have to have experienced something to have strong associations with it. Blind people don't learn of colours through seeing them. While there certainly is much to life experiences that we don't write much about (if at all) online, and so one who learned purely from the internet might have a weaker understanding of those things, by and large, our life experiences and the thought traces behind them very much are online. From billions and billions of people, over decades.