Every automaker in the US was ready and able to meet the requirements which were backed off.

If what you were actually trying to say is that corporations will only do the right thing when forced, I agree.

THE GENERAL FUND

YOU FUCKING CLOWN

I started PC programming in 1982, had to teach myself asm almost immediately in order to write a hardware interrupt handler for the serial port.
Back in those days code size was important, and for any driver/TSR type program it was simply crucial. Here in Norway we needed to load the KEYBNO.COM program which took over the keyboard interrupt and provided the official Norwegian layout, including the 'æÃÃ¥ÃÃÃ...' keys for our 3 extra letters in the alphabet.
Over the years, Microsoft/IBM had many version of this driver, the final one which also did text more font layout changes (at least for the default 25x80 mode) was up to 60 kB. This was large enough that lots of US-developed engineering/DB applications simply didn't fit, so I wrote a replacement:

All keys (including Ctrl- and Alt- modified combos) were handled, along with font remapping for 25x80, 43x80 (EGA only) and 50x80 (VGA only) screen layouts, using a total of 704 bytes. It became so popular that Compaq/HP stole it to give to their customers, then when we caught them red-handed (they had not figured out how to get rid of my startup Copyright message) they refused to pay but promised to not do it again.

Half a year later we caught them again, they had started telling customers that they had to keep it a secret.

Terje Mathisen

Good thing you wrote a related comment, ensuring further discussion of the issue

China wants to sell them more crappy hardware like the tires that failed during the invasion of Ukraine first.

All of the wiring should be silicone-jacketed already. PVC is flammable AF and is also toxic AF when it burns. It's not that you want to huff burning silicone jacketing, but it's a lot less toxic than PVC, which produces large quantities of dioxins because of the chlorine involved in its makeup. And finally, silicone wire is a lot less likely to combust in the first place. The majority of car fires are caused by electrical faults (specifically shorts) occurring in the engine bay, then the insulation catches fire and burns merrily, and goes on to burn flexible fuel lines. (Most of the rest of them are caused by direct failures of those fuel lines, which in turn is caused by poor routing and/or clamping designs by automotive engineers.) Using silicone jacketing would actually reduce car fires, and probably by a substantial percentage. There's now even foamed silicone jacketing which has a great tendency to self-extinguish.

Automakers are shit and mostly the same all over the world. They will keep making cars with PVC wiring insulation as long as they're allowed to, because they don't give a fuck about us. People think the American automotive industry is substantially different from others in this, but any difference is minuscule. They're all fucking us over as hard as possible.

This is, of course, completely wrong.

What you want from a gas tax is for it to maintain the roads, right? And you'd think that the heaviest vehicles, which do the most damage to the roads, pay the most, right? And they sort of do, but not really, because the heaviest vehicles only use a few times more fuel but do multiple orders of magnitude more damage. Passenger cars do basically zero road damage, unless the road already has big holes in it, in which case it's possible for them to wear away at the damaged edges and make the holes bigger. Heavy trucks do basically all of the road damage. The pass car gets what, 40 mpg? The heavy truck gets around 8-10 while cruising on flat land, maybe as little as 2-4 while pulling a grade, so: It can use an order of magnitude more fuel but mostly only uses two to four times as much, but does more like two orders of magnitude more road damage all the time.

The trucking industry will happily tell you that those numbers come from a study they think is discredited because "When a highway is properly designedâ¦it will not be damaged by the traffic it is designed to support" but it isn't, for reasons described in the summary of this report, mostly this:

Federal weight limits do not apply to at least 95 percent of the Federal-aid highways. In addition, a grandfather clause in existence since origination of Federal weight limits in 1956 stipulates that truck weights which were permissible in individual States at that time can remain in effect indefinitely.

IOW, while what they say about correctly designed roads is essentially true, it's irrelevant. It's also not completely true, because those roads also have to be correctly maintained. How many times have you driven on a bad patch intended to be temporary, where a section of road really needs to be re-laid because of damage to the roadbed? How many times have you still been driving over that "temporary" patch years later?

TL;DR: The gas tax was always a handout to trucking companies and therefore also oil, rubber, and gas companies; The gas tax always hid the true costs of modern interstate commerce, when the shippers always should have paid more and those costs should have been rolled into the price of the goods to which they apply, so that "the market" could make corrections through price pressure, but that was deliberately suppressed through the use of a "gas tax" which you're now lauding.

Now this is 100% spot on. The road network benefits everyone and therefore it should be paid for from general funds, to the extent to which that makes sense. That is to say, less money should be spent on it, and more on rail, where these issues are much easier to mitigate. A rail line can carry much more mass with less impact than using highway lanes, it's easier to maintain the rail bed (you can see and access it) and anywhere the traffic justifies it, it's a much more sensible solution. And it's one we would have been using a lot more for right now if not for the laughable gas taxes for road maintenance bullshit.

Rational solutions require not expecting public services to turn a profit, so we cannot have nice things as long as we are doing that. Only one party is like that. We must destroy that party if we are to progress as a society.

The plan is to correct it over the short haul, which is why they are fucking up education and health care. They want us to die fast.

Your population reduction agenda would be charming if it didn't support the worst people's desire to murder the best people.

AGI will do that. AI as sold today won't.

Otherwise, you're right. Anything that doesn't solve the problem long term is just kicking the can. The fake-AI LLM bubble proves that when AGI does come along we are definitely fucked.

But the lesson there isn't "our leaders need to come up with a better solution", it's that We The People do, because TPTB's solution will be to kill most of us off. And we need to figure it out before AGI exists, or we will definitely lose.

They would either migrate to another social network, or another social network would spring up to serve them and they'd migrate to that. But either way it would make Facebook smaller, so it would be positive for humanity

Who is it about, then? It's clear that Trump cannot shepherd a complete cogent thought from one end of his brain to the other.

If you can't understand that some of what you're experiencing is flaws in the technology and make allowances for that, you're a big dumb-dumb.

This is what happens when you dumb people down to create low information voters, you wind up with a populace that doesn't know how anything works, including themselves.

Our road network, free for all to use, was once a crown jewel of America.

Now they're picking the jewel out of the crown, smashing it, and running off with the jagged pieces as if they were prizes.

Next I guess I should do the rail network. If you could arrange all US freight trucks end to end in the right place, they would reach the moon. And then you'd have a cool physics toy!

Speaking of cool physics toys, next conversation, AGW

The rich voted themselves lower taxes year after year for decades and now there's not enough gas to make the car go, and they blame the little people they're driving over like they're nothing but speed bumps.

There are many small businesses out there, but most have a handful of employees or fewer, maybe just one. It seems to be very difficult for them to grow past that stage, especially when they hit certain magic numbers of employees that require them to provide more services to them or to do more reporting. It looks like the system is designed to all but require M&A to grow past that point.