ExFed

Forested wetlands (aka swamps) are ecologically rich and diverse places. All that “drain the swamp” has done is turn them into Superfund sites.

I got the joke…

But then you’d need two completely separate drive trains up the length of the chassis … I guess that’s not too far out of Subaru’s norm.

The ability to weaponize capital markets doesn’t make them inherently bad.

It also doesn’t help that it seems to conveniently forget that the fossil fuel industry is an international cartel. It breaks capitalism by virtue that it can control its entire market and a great many markets (and governments) to which it’s connected.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

What? You mean global cartels controlling a plurality (if not majority) of the world’s wealth break the free market? Say it ain’t so!

Seriously, getting everybody to forget the basic fact that the fossil fuel industry is a cartel is one of the first priorities of the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda playbook. This article might as well be written by one of their FUD propagandists.

Y’all realize that the fossil fuel industry already isn’t a capitalistic entity, right?

An entire article about capitalism and the economics of fossil fuels? Surely they’ll mention the fossil fuel industry is NOT a capitalistic free market, allowing it to actively suppresses the process of internalizing externalities (via environmental cost accounting), right?

No mention? Bummer.

They’re arguing the opposite? Whacko.

No no no you see George Washington was an avowed Marxist.

Time travel was definitely involved.

No no no you see it’s all about MORE SUNSHINE. Can’t you read? Everybody loves more sunshine! Daylight Saving Time is all about SAVING DAYLIGHT! Permanent Daylight Saving Time means Permanent Daylight!

Okay I’m not a good satirist. You know how long I’ve been using the exact same argument? I’m done with Government-mandated clock manipulation. God put the Sun directly above our heads at noon. Permanent Standard Time is the only righteous policy.

R1 zoning

It’s not a “one or the other” situation; it’s both over-regulation and under-regulation.

An odometer is a device that measures distance driven by a vehicle. Is that your missing detail?

Think for about 30 seconds after rereading this thread. I believe in you. You’ve got everything you need.

Did you read anything I wrote about electrification? The moment you add a battery it stops reflecting usage.

Sorry, I missed the point where registration includes odometer readings. Sure, it’s possible that someone could be driving 10k miles off-road and 100 miles on-road, thereby paying for more than they’re using, but it seems quite niche and less complicated a trade-off (and much less tied to fossil fuels) than gas tax.

Bear with my ignorance, but what are the issues you see with registration-based usage taxes?

Electric usage tax has the same problem as a gas tax in that it’s decoupled from actual public road usage.

edit: hit “send” before actually done writing… Whoops.

It seems to me that registration should be the point where a vehicle owner has to pay for public road usage. Some vehicles that need gas/diesel aren’t registered for public road usage (e.g. farm equipment), and some vehicles which don’t need gas/diesel are registered for public road usage (e.g. EVs). Therefore gas taxes are misaligned, but registration is by definition aligned with public road usage.

The only thing you lose out on is the fuel economy heuristic that bigger/heavier vehicles cost more to fuel (there’s some physics to back it up: heavier vehicles take more absolute energy to accelerate up to a given speed, and an ICE only converts energy one way – potential to kinetic – so it’s all eventually lost to heat via the brakes), therefore they’ll pay more in taxes. But adding any kind of electrification into the mix (BEV, PHEV, or mild HEV) invalidates the physics behind the heuristic (electric motors can recover kinetic energy), thus the gas tax is supremely irrelevant and we instead need a different mechanism for funding roadways.

So at what point is highway maintenance more expensive than a railroad?

It’s not that my brain is tired or even that I trust LLMs, I just don’t have time and either an LLM can create the thing I want or I do without. If the project fails, nothing of value is lost.

At home, that’s the summary of so many of my hobby projects lately. At work, however, there’s one phenomenon that I don’t know if we have a name for yet: loss of job satisfaction because a large part of the joy of creative problem solving comes from the process of wrestling with a hard problem, making a breakthrough, and genuinely learning something. LLMs make it too easy. I don’t feel like I’m learning anything of value. I’m just regurgitating some version of the LLM’s solution back to my coworkers during stand-ups. And so, if anyone really pressed me on the details, I would have a hard time coming up with anything. For this latest release on a project that I’ve worked on for most of a year and given demos for in the past, we unleashed AI. I’m genuinely nervous to give an upcoming customer demo for this release because I don’t really feel like I understand the changes were shipping.

At first, I thought it was just a problem I was experiencing alone. But then I started hearing others express very similar sentiments. At least one person mentioned that they chose to work on hobby projects without LLMs, precisely because they wanted to recapture that joy they lost from their career. Even though I’ve finally started knocking out quite a few ideas from the backlog that had accumulated over the years, it’s hard to really reach that same level of satisfaction.

Is there a balance point where I can stay on top of the backlog while feeling like my brain hasn’t fallen out of my head?

pizza dough makes pretty good bread