I remember reading about the fight between polished aluminum planes and painted. The paint adds weight, and thus increases fuel consumption, but the paint lowers maintenance costs.
A dirty airplane can absolutely burn a noticeably larger amount of fuel.
A car is operating at much lower speeds, generally, so the effect is probably much less.

Porque no las dos?

I'm surprised at appealing. That will likely cost more than the fine.
Still, not wanting the precedent is a thing.

NASA contracts out missions, they don't really do missions in-house. SpaceX is currently winning the launch and visit ISS missions by a mile. Competition like Boeing is more expensive and less reliable.

$500 hammer was actually a set of hammer, shovel, and pick. It had to be non-magnetic, non-sparking, yet durable enough for work. Intended use was for digging out old unstable explosives that the government had let sit around for far too long after WWII.

Pencil that could write in space - standard pencils use graphite, and shed graphite dust when used. Graphite is carbon, it is both conductive and flammable as a powder. Can one see why that might be bad in zero g constrained atmospheres?
The Fisher space pen was developed by Fisher, on his dime, and subsequently sold to both space agencies, US and Russia.

The USA is not "literally Russia". There might be the occasional commonality, but the problems Russia faces are far more severe and deeply run.

I don't understand what the endgame is supposed to be for all of this. The numbers being thrown around don't make any sense at all--trillions of dollars in spending chasing billions of dollars in revenue looks insane and even worse than the dotcom era.

There's a meme out there that I can't help but agree with: "The reason RAM prices went up 4x is that a massive amount of not-yet-manufactured memory was bought with money that doesn't really exist to be put into GPUs that haven't been made yet, to be installed in data centers that haven't been built, powered by infrastructure that may never exist, to satisfy demand that isn't actually there, in order to generate profits that are mathematically impossible."

Short of simply outlawing the collection of this kind of data (which is problematic in the US), that genie is out of the bottle and is never going back in. You don't even need license plates, just access to enough cameras. It isn't exactly hard these days to track e.g. a blue 2008 Honda Civic through a well-covered area, and coverage is filling in by the day. Things like supermarket loyalty cards, credit card transactions, property tax records, etc, can answer the "who's doing the driving" part.

Ever growing automation is going to make for nice searchable databases. Which surely will never, ever, ever, be used inappropriately by those with access to them.

Weekend fun car would be the summer car.
Remember, the winter car is used for dirty tasks even in the summer.

This is the most "correlation vs causation" quote ever. If you were in any kind of position of authority related to nuclear weapons, it would be Jurassic Park levels of hubris.

You do have people doing that in the UK, but it is more people with million pound incomes.
I also lived in the midwest and never had seasonal cars. Now I have a car and a truck. I drive the car unless I need the truck.

In this case, the prime manager, the mayor, had just been replaced inthe election.

Actually, management was blamed left and right, the audit helped force the contracting companies to eat far more of the cost, etc...
Trick i failed to mention, it was the NEW incoming mayor that ordered the audit, and less than 1% of project cost to date.

I looked at a waterfall project where the mayor ended up spending $3M to have an audit done on the current state of a project that was way behind on time and way over budget, only for them to come back and say that it'd be cheaper to burn all the effort to date and start fresh.

They arent selling the product, most likely, a reseller or importer is.
With zero presence in country, they use a 3rd party for shipping, it is basically impossible to go after them.
Think like a small time comic artist selling art getting a commission and mailing it to the country of the buyer, only to find out that the art was 'illegal'.
Thus the go after amazon thing, because they are the enabling party inside the USA.
Another issue is jailbreaking the bikes.
A bike that can do the legal limits with a 200 pound adult on it can do quite a bit more with the limiters removed and a kid only weighing 100 on it.

Look, I'm predisposed to be on the side of the farmers rather than Monsanto, but claiming "deep pockets" is the reason these lawsuits turned out the way they did is absurd. See Bowman v. Monsanto Co., 569 U.S. 278 (2013), and Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser [2004] 1 S.C.R. 902, 2004 SCC 34 for the actual reasons for the lawsuits.

Further, Monsanto has explicitly declared that they will not engage in the behavior that you are saying is it issue here: "We do not exercise our patent rights where trace amounts of our patented seeds or traits are present in a farmer’s fields as a result of inadvertent means." They're certainly capable of going back on their promises, of course, but an innocent farmer would be able to use that statement in their defense... unless this was more than "pollen that came from a neighboring farm."

Monsanto is a shit company that does shit things. Shit on them (rightfully) for that, not the things that are made up or taken out of context.

Swiss Dual Income No Kids Robinson. :)