A 35 cent fee is so small it is hard to see why it would matter very much to anyone except an Amazon seller. Ordinary inflation is a much bigger deal that affects everyone, even those people already willing to pay the extra costs associated with purchasing small dollar items on Amazon - and those aren't trivial, more like a good way to pay twice as much as at the local store.

Taiwan is not and has never been part of the People's Republic of China. It is all wishful thinking, a figment of their imagination. They are missing an international treaty or two, not to mention a desire on the part of the Taiwanese to be ruled over by a genocidal police state.

It sounds like they need to decide whether they are accepting deposits or selling shares in an investment. Why would a deposit have anything other than a nominal rate of return, if that? And if an investment, your money is at risk just like any security.

When there is a temporary power shortage the wholesale price of power goes way up. They can't sell power at anywhere near that rate most of the time, but when demand peaks when there is little spare capacity $2 / kwh is realistic.

    Electrical distribution utilities have to charge more most of the time so they can afford to pay exorbitant marginal rates at times when there is a grid wide shortage. In unusual conditions they have gone bankrupt. They avoid the full impact of such shortages by buying wholesale power even a year in advance. High marginal rates are more typical of additional power they will need tomorrow, or worse in the next fifteen minutes, if the grid is nearing capacity.

It is into that market that Tesla wants to sell from this sort of virtual power plant. Some operators do it with their own batteries, charge them up during off peak (and hence less expensive) parts of the day, and then sell into the real time market during peak hours with the highest marginal rates.

If you have a solid case - of a patent violation for example - you can block imports and pursue them for damages in this country.

Signing up for a sufficiently bad deal is basically like volunteering to be ripped off. If the project in question is not viable enough as an economic enterprise for someone to put their capital at risk, it is dangerously likely not to be viable at all. Berkshire Capital is in the habit of making these kind of proposals, i.e. we do something, you bear all the risk and we still make a guaranteed profit. That is worse than crony capitalism, it is more like crony socialism.

Why would any sane utility sign up for something like that? They could just pay someone to build a comparable installation and operate it themselves. Unless of course they already have rip off level guaranteed profit margins and are just joining forces with the other rip off artists.

It is always convenient for thieves to establish a guaranteed theft option. It doesn't mean it is a good idea to go along with it.

Unless you take physical possession of stock certificates, stock trading works basically the same way - your stocks are held on deposit with your broker and your only protection if they go bankrupt is through the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, or SIPC.

It is also worth noting that your broker doesn't generally have possession of stock certificates either, since the early 1970s they have generally been held on deposit with the Depository Trust Company and cleared through a related institution.
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> They don't need 60 votes to ban it. They just need the presidency, vice-presidency, 50 votes, and a Senate rule change to abolish the filibuster.

There aren't fifty votes in the Senate to get rid of the filibuster, and probably won't ever be. Enough senators respect the ideal of bipartisan consensus and deliberation to change the Senate into a version of the House.

> Why not? Getting an abortion is an act of interstate commerce, or else an act in which commerce within a state affects interstate commerce. The courts have granted the government fairly broad leniency in that area before.

It is hard to say. Laws against abortion hold someone criminally liable for abortions that violate state imposed restrictions - to date more a matter of state criminal law than interstate commerce. Congress is not usually in the habit of taking over entire areas of state law and telling states they can no longer legislate in that area at all, and criminal law has generally been understood to be an area where states have primary responsibility and Congress has secondary responsibility.

As far as affecting interstate commerce is concerned, Wickard v. Filburn is considered by conservatives to be among the worst (and least justified) Supreme Court decisions of all time. I wouldn't rely on the Supreme Court to expand or rely on it to cover a major new instance of Congress using it to supersede state law without state consent.

Sure. A great deal of the blame belongs to the FAA for certifying defective equipment here. Not the FCC, it is not against FCC rules to design your equipment to receive garbage (unless you are trying to spy on someone perhaps). The integrity of a receiver for FAA purposes, on the other hand, matters quite a bit.

Suppose you are allocated a 200 Mhz band in the 4.2 Ghz range. A 200 Mhz guard band has been preserved immediately below that no one else can use. Do you think it is legitimate to squat on a frequency band from say 3.5 Ghz to 5.5 Ghz just because your equipment is defective?

Filters what are those? Let's just listen to the entire spectrum while we are at it, and complain if anyone transmits any signal anywhere on the off chance our defective equipment might have a problem with it.

The 5G users paid a fortune to gain rights to the spectrum allocation in question. Tens of billions of dollars. It does not overlap the radio altimeter band and there is in fact a sizable guard band in between.

For better or worse, if the plane owners have equipment that is overly sensitive to signals far outside the assigned radio altimeter band, it is defective, potentially unsafe, and they are going to have to fix it. The 5G people didn't make the Boeings of the world adopt defective designs for their radio altimeters after all - as long as they are within the legal limits of their spectrum allocation, they are in the clear. It is not an easy problem, but basically the radio altimeter designers cheated by assuming there wouldn't be any substantial transmissions within a very large frequency range of their assigned band. Defective, by design, from the beginning.

The altimeters stay in their band transmission wise. The problem is that they are sensitive to signals far outside their band reception wise, and so when some noisy neighbors showed up in a neighboring band it caused potential problems with the over-sensitive altimeter reception of signals in those bands.

> The FED is not a government agency in that they are a independent organization that doesn't have the oversite that other agencies have.

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors is a government agency. The regional Federal Reserve banks are not. Guess who makes monetary policy?

It is also worth mentioning that the Federal Reserve banks are required by law to forward almost their entire profit to the United States Treasury. The dividends the nominal shareholders get to keep are a rounding error by comparison. The benefit member banks derive from the Fed comes by other means - mostly protection during a financial crisis.

> It's a Republican party takes Congress in the presidency again or gets a big enough majority to override presidential veto then abortion will absolutely be banned federally.

It normally takes sixty seven votes in the Senate to overcome a presidential veto, something that is so rare that it almost never happens. Getting sixty votes to overcome a filibuster is hard enough. It is quite rare that one party controls that many seats, which means that most legislation must pass on a bipartisan basis.

Not only that, an absolute ban on abortion - no exceptions - is so far from the political consensus in the country that it would be difficult to get twenty senators to vote for it, let alone sixty. And there is a serious question whether Congress has the power to enact an abortion ban at all. That is normally the prerogative of individual states - or in the event of an overwhelming consensus one way or the other, a constitutional amendment.