Look at Tmobile. When my contract is up with ATT I will be switching, and getting unlimited minutes and getting a wee bit of free hotspot use and nearly cutting my bill in half. The price difference will pay for new phones in a couple of months.

I have type 1 diabetes, and when I was paying for humalog out of pocket it was amazing how motivating it was for me to have to think about how many dollars worth of insulin a meal would cost. 100 calories worth of carbs requires far more insulin than 100 calories worth of protein or fat. Of course I probably cut more carbs out than I should have, but I have to admit, I splurged a lot less than I do now that I can just take a little extra insulin and don't have to worry about the cost. Also, taking less humalog and eating fewer carbs means less up and down movement with my blood sugar. It is not clear from the OP whether we was claiming type 1s could eliminate insulin use completely, which is of course absurd, but one can definitely reduce it if there is a reason.

Obligatory car analogy:
A car gets lighter as it burns up its gas faster than you put gas in. Of course, if the gas is obstructed from going to the engine as quickly as you like, that doesn't mean you violate the laws of the thermodynamics. It means your car doesn't move as fast as it you want it to.
Maybe you have a citation showing that metabolic disorders don't exist? That there is nothing that can go wrong with someone's body that would interfere with its ability to provide the energy required to the muscles to move as requested?

Or even better: Allow the whole sentence. Give people 128 characters for their passwords and they can craft lots of memorable secure passwords. What really gets me is when I am required to have an ungodly complex password but limits it to 8 or 12 characters. There are hardly any valid passwords left if you force a number, punctuation, lowercase, and uppercase, and disallow dictionary words and runs of numbers.

I have one service that doesn't allow dictionary words of 3 or more characters anywhere in the password along with requiring numbers/symbols. Your password would probably not be allowed as "baa" is the sound that sheeps make.

I meant few in regards to a city that doesn't have more roads than some states. LA is on the extreme end of things obviously. The point I was trying to make was that making contractors responsible for a zone of the city would be more easily managed than letting any contractor in town sign up to fix individual potholes. It would also encourage prevention as opposed to waiting for a pothole to get large enough to get paid a chunk to fix it. And I did not mean to give the impression that contractors are a bad idea. I just don't think hiring contractors will suddenly make it economical to fix _all_ of the potholes right away, which was what I thought you were originally saying.

Okay. I was reading your comment to imply that no potholes on any roads for any length of time are acceptable. I agree that potholes on major roads seeing that much traffic are unacceptable and there is no reason to disrupt day traffic to fix them. I stand by my statement that you will pay more to have it done at night, however it is more than offset by savings of all the travelers during the day on much trafficked roads. I have never lived in a town that let potholes sit on the busiest avenues, and I don't visit multimillion person cities very often so I probably underestimate the scale of what is left undone in some places.

The only issue I had with the contractor idea was the per pothole part because that adds a layer of unnecessary complexity. It is easier to evaluate one or a few contractors on how well they kept the whole or their part of the city pothole free than to evaluate lots of contractors on lots of individual potholes.

Quick googling gives flat fee per year for contractors fixing pot holes and that seems like it would be cost saving, but didn't find any info on a per hole system. The fact is that many streets are so badly designed that is not economically feasible to keep them pothole free. They are poorly designed and built because the voters pressured their city leaders to cut costs. So drainage is poor, streets don't get resealed frequently enough if it at all, small cracks are left unfilled, etc. Any given street can be fixed relatively easily, but most of America has more infrastructure than it can afford to maintain. Check out what the American Society of Civil Engineers says about this if you want details. The fact is that a lot of our roads will never pay for themselves in economic benefit even without taking into account maintenance and repairs.

I agree that drivers should actually pay the bulk of the costs for the roads. They should also have to pay fees to pay back all the subsidies they've gotten over the last 100 years to get the infrastructure in place that they are now using. As it is nondrivers subsidize drivers. I am willing to accept that a small portion of road funds should come from general revenue to account for use by emergency services and general economic benefits that accrue. If you don't think drivers should have to pay off all the subsidies then I don't see why mass transit should be forced to compete without subsidies. This is like making special accommodations for a cable provider and helping them pay for new cable being put down and after they are established declare that everything works better with a free market and all new cable providers should compete on merit and price. Also mass transit provides much greater benefit to nonusers than auto travel in that if you remove 10% of peak traffic you reduce congestion and travel times by far more than 10%. Mass transit also exposes nonusers to much less risk than autos do. Mass transit also helps to keep dangerous drivers who know they are dangerous off the roads, saving lives and property. Mass transit also helps people the too poor to own a vehicle to work, reducing drain on other public resources and reducing poverty induced crime. These are all cost savings to nonusers. So if project B improves the value and cuts the cost of project A, it would seem reasonable to that project A share some of its saving with project B.

As for compartmentalizing funds, in addition to not always making sense, I don't think that will help when city leaders feel comfortable lying about what is happening to money. If you had a direct reporting of all money transfers to and from the city, you might be able to see how money is spent but I wouldn't be surprised if they still can obfuscate even if you could get such a report. In any case, compartmentalization or no, there are no consequences for city leaders who spend money in a way the public doesn't like, unless it is so bad and gets so much attention that they get voted out. That is small punishment since they have already benefited and is small consolation to the public that was ripped off, especially since there is no reason to believe a replacement will be more responsible.

Better drainage on highways. Higher speeds make pothole cost on highways higher to users. It also easier and quick to resurface 10 miles of highway than 10 miles of city streets. We don't have the money to maintain our infrastructure.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-07/news/30253498_1_ponzi-scheme-infrastructure-liability

Gas taxes don't pay for local roads. Gas taxes don't even cover the bulk of the cost of the highway system. Hybrid use effect on local road funding is minimal. Especially since most hybrids only reduce gas consumption by at most a factor of 1/3rd. Assuming 25% of local road funds come from gas tax (which is the high end of normal from what I can tell) and assuming that vehicles accounting for one quarter of gas usage switched to hybrids, you are looking at reducing road funding by 2-3% on the high end. Actual hybrid adoption is in the low single digits and probably is replacing vehicles already getting good mileage and so representing a small portion of gas use. Our roads look like postapocalyptic cityscapes because we have built so much that it would cost more to maintain them than the maintenance adds in value to the economy.

1. Most towns don't call it a road maintenance budget. It's called a transit budget for a reason. Mass transit for cities of any size are not optional. Individual transportation does not scale as evidenced by every moderately large city ever. Growing medium sized cities would do well to learn from 100 years of cities trying and failing to build and maintain roads fast enough to support their entire population travelling alone in a car. If we hadn't had 100 years of government subsidized automotive travel, we would have gotten to better mass transit solutions sooner and have less road maintenance issues for the people who do drive and continuing to insist that cars should the sole mode of transit in a city of any size whatsoever is stupid.

2. If one pothole shows up in a given region of town each week. You can pay to have a truck and 3 guys go out and patch that one hole and charge a half or a whole days work. Or you can weight until a days worth of potholes show up and pay slightly more to have a truck and 3 guys go out and patch out all of those holes at the same time if you have a record of where all the potholes show up. Then you get in trouble because you wasted money fixing holes on a street that got resurfaced 2 weeks later or dug up to lay fiber optic cable. And you still need a list of locations because you don't want to pay 3 guys to drive around looking for potholes and charging for every mile they drive. Some cities have developed phone apps that let citizens report damaged city property, including potholes, so it is easier to track where maintenance is needed and it has greatly improved maintenance efficiency in terms of cost and time to repair. Nearly every business pays a premium for night shift or it is staffed with their lackies who are slow or incompetent. Either way this increases costs, because the business has to pay for more time or someone has to pay to fix a crappy job. If you think a business isn't going to factor this in when they decide how much to charge, you are nuts.

3. You aren't going to get a contractor to go out and patch one hole one day for the 1/10th the price of patching 10 holes in one day. Any company jumping at that deal is either recognizing that you pay way too much for filling one hole, are going to do a piss poor job, or are going to make sure they have a lot of holes to fill before they go out, which you are so up in arms against. Where do you think this flat rate comes from? The business is factoring in overtime, benefits, wages, etc into what they are willing to accept to fix a hole. You are also adding the headache of verifying hole fixes are done properly. Are you going to have someone on staff who just goes out and inspects holes and keep track of which ones have been paid for? How are you going to make sure they are filling "holes" that an eighth inch deep? Do they need to have photo documentation of each hole prior to being filled or are you going to have your pothole inspector go around measuring holes before they get filled? Either way increases costs and time to filling.

According to skepticalscience.com global cooling warnings were based on the assumption that sulfur dioxide emissions would quadruple, which was apparently a reasonable guess at the time. Then pretty much everybody put limits on sulfur dioxide emissions so the problem went away. The problem with fixing problems before they happen, is that you always wonder if there was a problem to begin with.

If someone's family/religion/sex preference/nationality is an important part of someone's life, it will come up in a genuine response to general interest questions. It is not that you need to know about them to decide if they would be a good hire. It's that the process of getting to know prospective employees will naturally bring up these topics as answers to generic questions for a lot of people.