The federal gov gets a LOT less (very roughly 1/3) in tax than they give out in subsidies yearly. The states make roughly 20-30x the tax that the fed gov does. So it's the states that care about the gas tax revenue. However the side costs of gas cars effect both the federal gov and states, and the costs are huge -- annoyingly they are amorphous: The cost of the war in Ukraine is due to gas cars and fossil fuels in general, as Russia, like a lot of countries we bump with militarily, is a petro-state. The cost of asthma and other health issues is born largely by the sates. The cost per mile of gas cars is much higher when people are able to charge at home, and so the people bear the brunt of the gas car cost directly. All in all, gas cars are a massive drain financially on the US and the world.

It's really our inability to focus on many aspects at once which makes it difficult for us to move in a way which benefits all of us financially.

(EVs are currently a gain for people with personal garages and not a cost-benefit for people without them. We should be figuring out how to maximize the ability to cheaply and conveniently charge EVs overnight for city-dwellers, so everyone can pay less for transportation and the massive hidden costs of gas cars.)

Someone has to pay the massive subsidies the fossil fuels companies get to deliver you gas... Hint: It's YOU.

(Also for the asthma and other issues the pollution the gas cars make, and the wars with petro-states, the decay of materials due to smog, etc. All of that costs money.)

EXCELLENT of you to point this out.

For the lazy: "Congressman Michael McCaul, who represents Texas's 10th congressional district, remains one of the most active stock market traders in Congress. ... Rep. McCaul invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Intel (INTC:US) on October 13, according to filings."

No, you need to rethink the whole dumb thing. People are morons in many different ways, and old lawyers/politicians are really, really dumb on technology. The know less than their own 12 year olds. Plus you have to factor in cynical blinders -- if they think setting fire to nuns to solve the disappearing socks problem makes them look good to their voters, they'll pretend to not know nuns are not the ones hiding people's socks. They'll say/do anything, ANYTHING, no matter how destructive it is to their constituency, to get re-elected.

This is dumb on two levels -- This is (partially) open source, so the same logic implies we should not compete with Microsoft. And Risc V has plenty of proprietary crap going on and there's no need to make everything open anyhow.

Farsi is the French word for Persian. Why use a colonizer's word when you have one of your own?

Does breaking seawater into hydrogen, and then burning it work well for desalination?

Well put.

Go is a badly-named language. Who picks an unsearchable name for something you're going to need help on? If you don't know to look for 'golang' you're hosed, and who knows how much useful info isn't findable by that?

Go is a restrictive language not by syntax but by the libraries -- what system allows you to spawn many subtasks but doesn't let you COUNT them?

Go has no standard commandline parsing system except for a completely inept one implemented to replace the even more inept one, which lead to many replacement ones, none of which are simple/good.

Hello World takes a huge fraction of a second to run on a good-size linux box. Go is useless for small scripts in a normal computing environment. It's only good for cloud computing where you don't notice short times because there's so much startup overhead anyhow.

Go is a steaming pile. There are good ideas in it, but the language is not a language -- it's a cloud computing-specific product.

Having the customer pay the airport fee fixes the problem but not in a way the airlines like and so is not going to happen.

(Note that they'd still have to prepay that, as no airport is going to want a detention room/system for people who didn't bring any money.)

Nah, they're forcing the customer to consume the product. It's the same.

If I buy tickets to an opera and my ass hurts 30 mins in and I leave at the intermission, I can.

If the airlines want to market tickets to fly, rather than flying contracts, which is what they're really trying to enforce here, then they should be explicit about that. This is a fraudulent marketing problem, and should be mended as such.

Note that once the airlines honestly say what they're selling, they can be as crappy as they want and bill people MORE for missing the last leg -- whatever. But they need to make it clear to the consumer they are not buying a product. Their ass in the seat is something the airlines are getting for the exchange.

I own an old EV which now has only a range of 40 miles. (Batteries decayed on the really early EVs -- It doesn't happen quickly anymore, and is not something you need to worry about in a modern EV.) 40 miles of range leaves you worried all the time. If you're driving 30 miles a day, you really want closer to 80 miles of range, so that your normal curve of trips never brings you to a point where you're worried. When you're going cross-country, you really need a completely different car.

So Suburban people with a garage can have two cars -- one cheap one for daily driving, and one with a big battery which is also presumably a bigger car.

For people in apartments, this sort of logic doesn't work. We need a good network of long-distance rental cars close to the people who need them. So cities need easy to rent Escalades and such. But since they're rentals, having all the big cars be luxury cars makes no sense -- they're not going to be luxury for long.

Right now the EV market is trying to wring as much money out of early adopters as possible -- the cars are massive, luxurious, and with relatively high profit margins. What we need is not small-battery EVs, per se -- we need a market of a bunch of battery sizes, car shapes, luxury levels, etc. Look at the EVs for sale in the US right now. THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME. You have Sedans and SUVs and trucks which are clones of their gas counterparts.

Europe has a much better selection -- The VW ID3, for example, instead of like in the US where we have only the absurd ID4. Even Jeep has a nicely-sized SUV in the EU, which they don't sell in the US.

But more than just smaller cars, we need minivans, Bongo trucks, station wagons, and new designs. All cars need a bump in front for safety, but the amount of equipment needed up there is a LOT less than in an ICE car. US automakers have generally kept the ridiculous front on their cars and made a frunk. Cars in 10 years will probably make those look like chromed tail fins on cars from the 1950's.

If you have a garage, I strongly suggest you buy a very cheap used EV. Once you've started using an EV, you'll be much better able to think about EVs -- the whole world seems different. They are really cheap to run, and require almost no maintenance. You never go to a gas station or a charger outside your garage. For a short-range EV, the whole charger thing is largely a myth/red-herring -- they're only relevant for longer-range EVs because you view those differently. I personally have never had to use on in my short-range car. (I used a couple when I first got the car just to see how that worked, and then never bothered again.) You just charge in your garage.

Essentially there are three kinds of cars (not trucks) right now: Gas cars, long-range EVs, and short range EVs. All the struggle we're seeing for making EVs work nicely is happening in the long-range EV space. The short range EVs just WORK, but we don't make them, basically -- you can only buy them in the used market.

If you spend $7k-$11k for a used EV and use it for grocery shopping, dropping the kids at school, etc, you'll absolutely love it. And it'll change how you view the car situation in the US and how you view your own "main" car, which is probably a gas one right now.

Agreed.

Yeah. Pascal makes much more sense if the idea is an "instructional language" -- but I think funding for this stuff comes from corporate America and they want a glut of people they can hire cheaply. So java it is.

C++ is a wordy mess like java.

C is vastly more pleasant than java, but the lack of memory protection and understandable results when you pass data boundaries does kill the joy for students.

Surely there must be a simple C with great memory protection and pleasant error messages about array over/under-runs.