"Substantially different" isn't building on, it's being inspired by. The beauty of Cinderella is that everyone could tell their own Cinderella and explore different variations of the story without having to independently invent an entire backstory and setting for it. That lowers the barrier of entry so much anyone can do it, and you get a huge forest of different expressions from which you can pick the few gems and discard the rest. But we can't do this anymore. Instead we are force fed Peter Jackson fanfic, and pretty bad fanfic at that, and no one else gets to have a go.

Today's new cultural content should be based on works from the 50s, or from the 80s, or from the 2000s - but it isn't because nobody wants to go to prison for 10 years.

Instead we are doomed to just keep mindlessly gulping up new variations of what they had back in the 1800s. You can't build on top of Disney's stories because is verboten. You can't build on Rowling. You can't even build on Tolkien. Your only legal choice is eternal stagnation.

You had me at pro-tip and lost me at SJW.

Anything against the law? Really?

You should try thinking things through before posting them.

The entire point of the Bill of rights is to list some things that are innate rights even if there is a law against them.

If you are trying to tax robotic labour by counting robots then you run into some fairly difficult problems. What is a robotic unit? A human unit is easy to identify and measure, but a robot as you point out can be anything.

If you tax per physical unit then instead of building a factory with a hundred independent robots in it, the company will build a fully integrated factory and call it one single robot.

So what else can you do? Tax per kg of robot perhaps, although this would seem to heavily skew the tax burden over into heavy lift tasks and again you'd get out of it by removing the brain part of your 10 ton excavator and putting it into a separate 5kg "pilot bot".

You could tax by algorithmic complexity maybe, however you might measure that. 1 robotic tax unit per human-brain-equivalent. Or tax per robotic manipulator, but do all useful robots have easily countable manipulators?

It would seem very much simpler to me to increase existing taxes on production and compensate employers of humans by reducing the employer tax burden, and leave robot inventors with the freedom to make their robots as production efficient as possible instead of having to tax tailor them for no good reason.

As I remember it they had written into the script for the show that they would run the Tesla Roadster around the track until it was out of juice, and then push it into the garage with some suitably disparaging comments. What they found when they got on the track however was that the car had far too big a battery and they far too little time to actually drain it all. This is of course no technical obstacle to filming by the script since you cannot tell by looking at the car that it's still got lots of energy left and so they proceeded as planned. They only got caught because Tesla could tell from the logs it was far from out of battery.

If Top Gear is a consumer information show then this is fantastically dishonest and a big screw you to its viewers. It is not however, it is a sitcom with cars and making jokes is more important than informing the viewer.

The take home of all this is: whatever you see them doing on Top Gear, know that it was scripted and not much influenced by what they actually discovered in the field. If a car wins a "race" it's because the script said it should win. If a car breaks down it's because the script said it should break down. If a car looks like it's somehow better than another car, it's because the script said it should.

This is why Norway has cut all taxes on EVs, bringing them down to the same price region as ICEs. Up until recently there have been few EV models available though and the most interesting ones (Teslas) have been in the luxury segment. While they compete favourably there this segment is out of reach for many, and your main alternative has been the Nissan Leaf which may or may not have the necessary range.

There is also a lack of a decent sized second hand car market for EVs, simply because the good models are so new their owners aren't looking to sell them yet. This makes it difficult to get a cheap used car which is important to many.

By 2025 these problems will be long gone, there will be myriad models available in all price segments, and there will be no rational reason to buy ICE vehicles anymore. Which is essentially what the Norwegian government is saying.

EVs are still very expensive, and additionally people are a little afraid of this new technology. These two conspire to drastically limit the number of car buyers willing to switch from ICE to EV. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, we'd just give it 20-30 years and the problem would sort itself organically. Given that cutting ICE vehicles represents one of the easiest ways to reduce global pollution, however, accellerating that switch through legislation has become attractive, maybe even imperative.

In a well designed EV the cold isn't a problem. I have owned a Tesla since 2012 and driven it through both freezing cold and Norwegian blizzards, and the main problem in the latter case is visibility. But that's not an EV issue.

The values do but the laws don't. If you look at European freedom of speech laws then they all basically say, in different languages, "freedom of speech is guaranteed, insomuch as it's speech the government doesn't find objectionable". The exception is codified into the law itself.

When your legal guarantee for freedom of speech is this vague, you only have as much freedom of speech at any given time as your govt is prepared to give you. Europe survives this by having a very strong tradition for freedom of speech and so for the most part your govt will let you say a lot of really stupid stuff before they lock you up.

If one man can destroy your culture then you had a shitty culture and you need to try again.

Borderless is coming, and it's coming fast. An increasing number of people are developing their networks and friendships online and they don't care what country their friends are in, but they do care that silly border laws are keeping them from meeting in person. The next generation will change how we think both about nationality and about territory-based borders.

Which is exactly what you do: plugging it in every day ensures you don't go below 20%, and the car itself stops charging at 80% or so by itself.

When was the last time you took your car to car spa aka gas station?

This is way too complicated a product to try to sell to the average household. It's the sort of pricing scheme they might market towards professional customers.

That depends entirely what kind of insurance they have and with this kind of car my guess is they're in one of two categories: either they're rich enough they can easily replace it out of pocket and so they only have the minimum insurance required by law and the parents care more that she's safe than about the relatively minor expense incurred; or else they have the expensive no-questions-asked insurance that pays out in full whatever the circumstances surrounding the loss may be.

(Assuming that option is available there, I know that's what I have here in Norway.)

Brain Exploded: final realization that that is exactly what your teenager daughter wants too.