they're not exactly fudging numbers

the FHWA puts out numbers valuing travel in terms of dollars. they do this for travel time and mileage, for both passenger vehicles and commercial trucks. how they get these numbers is questionable, but it's basically a combination of the money people earn from their jobs versus the length/duration of their commute. there are also breakdowns for different types of trips (work, shopping, leisure) and the length of the trip itself (a short trip has a different valuation per mile than a long one).

what the insurance people have done is to take these values and work them against the cost per mile of the variable-priced insurance policies and the average cost per mile of the fixed-price insurance policies. given some data on average trip lengths and distribution of trip purposes, you can build a monetization of travel under the two schemes.

the carbon savings comes from people driving less due to the higher cost of insurance relative to their valuation of their travel. if you're paying more for insurance because you drive to the liquor barn every other night to pick up a fifth of whiskey, you might think twice about obtaining such libation. saves money on liquor, too.

frankly, if this does go through in california and elsewhere, it could start to shift the USA away from suburbia hell back towards walkable town centers.

the modern ability to manage and/or cure a number of life-threatening conditions is greatly impacting the evolution of our species as well. people who would never have made it to adulthood a century ago are now passing on their crappy genes to their kids.

while you can mark up your HTML with CSS for print media, why bother? when i send documents around i almost always send PDF's since they'll look the same in just about every reader. if it's something somebody else needs to edit, then i usually go with an MS Word document, which is a very portable format these days.

The editorial page is a free-for-all -- journalistic ethics don't apply. The editors don't do any verification of the identity of people sending in letters because 99.9999% of people send in their own letters. The newspaper did nothing wrong here. The malicious action rests entirely with the principal.

the Internet!

you're probably more free as a citizen of your native UK than you would be as a foreign worker in some other country

think about it like being on a vacation. you can't fill every minute of every day with something unique and fun. the problem with being on a space station is that you're on a space station. there isn't much to do up there to begin with.

The trade-off is performance vs size. You can take this thing anywhere and you don't need to plug it in to the wall.

Have you heard of Ford? What about GM? They compete! Believe it or not, they make similar products targeted at particular markets. They use marketing and pricing in an attempt to gain a greater share of these markets from eachother and other companies in these same markets.

Those rich people contribute a great amount to government coffers, but consume relatively little. As revenue declines, services suffer. If the top earners continue to leave a state, the revenue will continue to go down and poverty will get worse as the government has fewer funds available to pay for social services.

A) I'd like to eliminate both! Businesses contribute a very small portion of tax revenues already. The potential for job creation and general economic growth that would result has the potential to bring in that lost revenue and then some through personal income taxes.

B) Have you heard about this thing called competition? It's when businesses compete for greater shares of a market by lowering prices or increasing the quality of their product.

You're right, you'll spend the money either way. Eliminating business taxes has numerous benefits, however. It will eliminate the need for offshore tax havens, bringing mountains of capital back to the states. It will eliminate the need for businesses to jump through hoops for tax planning purposes, vastly reduce compliance and accounting costs, etc. Businesses spend great deals of time and energy dealing with the tax system, distracting them from the actual work the business does. I'd say it would be a huge benefit. And what better way to attact more investment and domestic economic growth than to dump business taxes?

Infrastructure is usually tied to gas and/or property taxes.

Business taxes should be the first to go, because businesses don't pay taxes. Their customers do. The only thing governments accomplish when they tax businesses is they raise the cost of goods and services.

The point is that tax revenue suffers. This has nothing to do with how much the rich pay relative to their income, it has to do with how much they contribute to the state relative to total tax receipts.