You can lament all you want, Ken Fluffernutter, but I will not work to pay for your vacation. That's not going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen.

No amount of definition twisting and and grandstanding will change the fact that no, I will not pay for your plane tickets and parcel deliveries.

The taxes I pay are extracted from my income. And my income is compensation for the time I spend working away from my family, breaking my back or numbing my brain and a return on the the skills and education I spent years and many thousands of bucks to get. With the costs of living and housing rising sharply, it's difficult enough as it is. I will NOT spend a single dime on taxes to pay for the vacations of other people.

Not happening, Ken. Pay for your own stuff.

Where did you learn to use a calculator? I didn't even check your sources and values, because the math, logic and subject area knowledge alone are terrible enough.

First, maths: you're off by one order of magnitude. 26,8 billion dollars for 16,4 million flights is 1'634 USD per flight. So it's 1,6k per plane, not 16k.

Second, logic: you've duly noted that only 55% of those 16,4 million flights are passenger flights, but calculate them as if they're all passenger flights with 104 pax average per flight, even compounding rounding errors as you go, omitting the 45% cargo-only flights and pretending that shippers for cargo don't need to pay for air traffic security.

Third, subject area knowledge: there are no true scheduled "passenger-only flights" in commercial aviation. What laypeople call "passenger flights" are actually only flights where some air cargo capacity is used by passengers and their luggage. Especially on transcontinental and long-haul flights, "passenger planes" carry an extraordinary amount of air freight and their profitability is hugely dependent on that as well. Making the airline passengers pay the entire flight security tax of that flight would mean the cargo shippers ride tax-free. That's not what we're after.

Cargo shippers, commercial operators, producers, assemblers, too, have their choice of using long-haul trucking, trains, air freight, boats, pigeon carriers or switching to localized production, bulk transport, to and from just-in-time logistics etc.. If company A wants to avoid setting up a warehouse near their production facilities to store all the bits and pieces they need on-site and with sufficient stock to allow for bulk transport, that's their prerogative. Only they can know if the capital assets locked in raw materials are too much compared to just-in-time logistics buying and transporting only the part that's actually needed right now. And air freight costs and air traffic costs play right into that. If company A wants to do just-in-time logistics and company B and C optimize their logistics, localize their production, keep reserves on site? Guess what, A pays the air traffic safety tax, B and C don't.

Same thing. And we can't count the number of boxes or metric tons of cargo vs. passenger counts and the number and weight of their luggage to even properly estimate the actual cost per passenger.

To re-use your simplification to get the absolute upper bound of that tax: if all those 16,4 million flights were passenger-only, air cargo didn't exist like you pretended, and all the flights had 104 passengers on average, then the cost would be 1,6k per flight or 15,71 USD per flight per passenger. Fifteen bucks per flight, at the very maximum, if air cargo didn't exist or was tax-free. And 104 passengers per plane is an absolutely ridiculously low number that applies only to the US domestic market. It doesn't even include the transcontinental flights coming and going to the US, because those are wide-body twin-aisle aircraft that have a LOT more than 104 seats. The top 10 current wide-body aircraft models for long-haul routes have over 200 (737) or over 800 seats (A380). Except these two extremes, most other types carry between 300 and 400 people. They're not flying 70% empty for that "104 passenger on average" number. If airlines actually allow to fly their planes half-empty, that's not a problem for the taxpayer to fix.

No taxation without representation. No taxation to correct or support voluntary and luxury decisions by others. You want it, you pay for it. End of story.

Any plane will only be given takeoff clearance, if all the costs required to guide it safely to its destination have been paid for.

Anyone who takes off without that clearance gets forced to land by air defense and will be forced to pay for all the costs involving that. Nobody will risk that.

Anyone who lies about the payment of the costs to get that clearance gets docked with these costs and a punitive fine after that. People who risk that will pay later or lose their license to operate an aircraft.

And all of a sudden, all the air traffic safety expenses are paid in full, before the plane took off in the first place, so no plane is ever in the air without air traffic safety.

If air traffic is a benefit to you, you can pay for air traffic.

I don't pay for your air traffic because you find it too expensive to pay for your air traffic all by yourself.

You can always choose a different mode of transport for you and your package. You chose air traffic, because you wanted that package tomorrow, not next week. You chose air traffic, because you chose to spend your vacation 1000's of miles away. You choose, you enjoy the benefits, you pay the costs. End of story.

Of course we can attribute the ENTIRE cost structure of air transport to actual users of air transport. We can and we must do that.

If people decide to NOT transport themselves or their things by air they should NOT pay for others that do. Yes, services increase in price. But taxes will go down.

Yes, and we fully, absolutely, vehemently expect all the people who choose a mode of transport to pay for the cost of their chosen mode of transport.

And that includes taxing people for driving on public roads and excluding any and all road building and road maintenance costs from all other taxes. If that makes suburbian asphalt deserts unsustainable, too bad.

And THAT is the correct interpretation.

The government collects a tax explicitly earmarked for air traffic and air safety from air passengers and air package deliveries. And then it lumps these taxes together with all other taxes and doesn't pay it out to the thing it was explicitly earmarked for.

That is corruption and a failed state. It is defrauding the tax payers.

I want air passenges and air cargo recipients to pay for air transport. John who receives the package will pay for the cost of transport. Steve who does not receive the package does not pay for the cost of transport.

Cost of transport includes everything that is needed to make the transport safe.

He said "chosen at the setup screen".

They could easily have two options: "Install everything from the get-go (RECOMMENDED)" blinking and flashing and a tiny option in text-only link below that, labeled "Manual install" (everyone hates everything manual). And the user would need to type in a CAPTCHA and click a big "I know what I am doing" checkbox to have the phone accept the "manual install" variant.

And "manual install" comes with nothing but Settings and App Store. I mean nothing. Not even the "phone" and "camera" apps. No thing.

That would be absolute bliss.

And phone makers will never never never do that, because all these devices are sold as data vacuums first and usable devices second. Try buying ANY non-smart TV nowadays. Try it, look for a non-smart TV. Set your budget to the moon, if you must, but there will not be ONE model that is not hoovering your data.

I understand this is a partisan fight issue, our policy of most rationality vs. their utter barbarism type of discussion. But please:

Air traffic safety is an important service. Why would that need funding from the government, if so many customers need and purchase that service?

Every flight passenger is using this service to get from A to B safely. Every flight passenger is buying a ticket that includes all sorts of fees and taxes, including airport security. (we disregard a debate about the TSA for now).

Why don't all airlines PAY for the FAA service proportional to the number of flights they perform? Why would "the taxpayer" have to fund and subsidize "the airline passenger"? Why would the state go into more debt to pay for something that is a commercial service to a select few people, many of which are tourists or foreigners who don't even pay US taxes in any substantial amount.

Use a service -> pay for that service.

If John is purchasing a flight ticket and boards an airplane, his ticket must include all the costs required to do that safely. John cannot expect some random Steven and Michael to pay for that with their taxes. It's John's flight. John pays for John's safety. Steven and Michael aren't traveling right now and so they don't pay anything. If they were to travel later, they, too, will pay for safety of THEIR flights, respectively.

Everything else is immoral. I don't understand why this is an issue at all.

"Woman Wrongfully Accused by a License Plate-Reading Camera" .... no, she wasn't.

LPR cameras don't accuse people, nor do they order their arrests. An LPR camera takes a picture of a license plate, reads it using standard image processing algorithms, and provides the plate number and plate image to law enforcement for verification.

What happens next depends on the police. This wasn't a failure of technology, but instead a failure of investigative procedure by the Columbine Valley Police Department.

It was also a failure of Ring cameras, which are absolutely abysmal for security purposes. As the article pointed out, the porch pirate was never recorded getting into the Rivian. That's because Ring cameras don't provide continuous-time internal recordings, since it would interfere with Ring's subscription model. Even a $50 Wyze Cam + memory card would have shown who got into and out of the vehicle.

The accused woman's Rivian was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and captured in the background during the recording of a crime. The CVPD added 2 plus 2 based on incomplete evidence, and got 5.

Today, white males are a tiny minority on the net.

Everything that you experience about it, might be a result of that.

And half of all Indians are still offline, remember that.

as long as the topic is not controversial and political.

The problem is that the Wiki mods are VERY VERY biased. Not just a little. I have run into this personally just trying to make very simple edits. They would not accept simple facts that I had backup sources for.

This was just for movie credits for an actress that at some point had turned conservative...

So for anything political, Wikipide will be factually wrong, sometimes (or often) egregiously so.

But that's ok if it's only for political content right???

But there's the trouble you see. It affects what is political TO THEM in ways you cannot comprehend, so ANY page might be touched by the corruption of the Wikipedia moderator biases. I wouldn't think a simply actress filmography would be affected yet it was. No visitor other than that page would ever know it was inaccurate or incomplete.

So you can trust absolutely nothing from Wikipedia without extensive checking of what facts they refuse to list. Which makes the entire body of work garbage - I have not used it for years now.

If they import one hundred million foreigners driving up competition for housing (housing costs rising) and employment (wages stagnating or decreasing), they also break the social contract.

And if they bribe up all the politicians to further this and buy out all the media to make this palatable to the masses, then they are doing what they have been doing for 3000 years in every society they've ever lived in. And for some reason it's illegal in many places to say that.

If you make me talk to some AI bot, I'm hanging up and calling the competition. Plus, Salesforce is expensive. If a premium product can't deliver a premium experience, the sale is lost.

A more interesting question I think is, does anyone own this AI actress?

That is to say - if a company took her likeness, and used other AI to make porn - could "her" agent sue them?

Or in other words, is a purely AI generated likeness even copyrightable, when technically no human made it?