But taxing the shipping companies is essentially the same as the consumer.
Yes and no. Not all products are shipped by truck the same distance. And once the road damage externality is eliminated, companies will find ways to reduce the amount of trucking and increase other means of transport, such as trains, and as a result, most of those costs won't get passed on to the consumer.
Currently the top earners pay most of the taxes and higher percentages than the bottom earners.
Actually, that's not really true. Many top earners get most of their income in the form of capital gains that are taxed at only 15–20%, which is lower than all but the lowest nonzero earned income tax bracket. It's only the top-earning plebs in the tech industry that end up paying a disproportionate percentage of taxes.
It's such a waste of productivity that I'd favor a consumption tax on non-essential items or a simple progressive rate with less deductions as long as it's somewhat in line with what most people currently pay.
Agreed. IMO, the only deductions should be for state taxes (not paying taxes on money that was never really yours to spend), charitable giving/mileage, and the first... say... $30,000 of long-term capital gains per year, to cover turnover in people's managed retirement accounts, increasing to $60,000 after age 65, adjusted annually for inflation. After that, it should be a progressive tax on all income, including capital gains (regardless of how long you've held them).
Taxing capital gains at a low rate for the first bit and then like ordinary income above a certain threshold would do more to shore up the federal budget and improve tax fairness than just about anything else you could do. And it would drastically simplify the unholy nightmare that is my taxes, thanks to retirement accounts doing all sorts of tiny transactions and getting lots of tiny bits of dividend income that each get different tax treatment.
Even your numbers are actually low by an order of magnitude. Comparing with the original article's 4,000 pound weight yields a factor of twenty, so that would be 160,000x as much damage. Put another way, assuming those numbers are correct, a fully loaded semi driving for 1 minute does as much damage as all of the other Bay Area traffic put together does in an hour.
Either way, taxing passenger cars to pay for for road damage is like taxing kindergarteners in New York to pay for the cost of the police force.
You presume that a tax being regressive is a bad thing. There are other ways one can evaluate a tax policy. For example, does a tax incentivize good behaviour, and minimize externalities?
And an income tax beats a sales tax there, too. Sales taxes discourage spending, which depresses the economy. Income taxes discourage trying to make more money, which if unspent, is doing nothing for the economy but taking it away from someone else who would have spent it.
If the government taxes gas, poor people pay more of the road repair bill. More poor people have older cars, and more older cars use gas. However, taxing gas instead of electricity reduces the number of gas cars on the road. Higher gas prices mean more people choose to get an electric car. Move the tax to electricity, and some of the gas car users will find it economical to stay with a gas car for longer.
Which is worse for the environment, and ultimately worse for humanity. You're screwed either way.
But the bigger problem is that the current gas tax scheme creates a huge externality, and charging taxes on electricity would make it even worse. As it stands, shipping companies can use fewer drivers (and thus provide fewer jobs) by using bigger, heavier trucks, and as a result, they do orders of magnitude more damage to the roads, but they do not pay anywhere near their fair share of the maintenance. In fact, they pay about a quarter of one percent of their fair share.
The reason for this is that the amount of damage that a vehicle does increases proportional to the fourth power of its weight. Double the weight of the vehicle, and you increase the damage by a factor of 16. So a big rig does about 410x the damage of an average car, despite weighing only about 4.5x as much.
So the right way to provide for roads is to almost exclusively tax commercial use of the roads. If you want a tax that is actually fair, you should reduce the gas tax from 35–-50 cents per gallon down to 3–5 cents per ten gallons, and you should increase the tax on diesel fuel to about $35–-$50 per gallon, except when provided in gas stations that cannot accommodate large trucks. This would, of course, require the shipping industry to find better ways of transporting things, increase the use of trains, etc. It would also eliminate this externality that currently artificially favors Amazon and big-box stores over more local production and distribution. This, in turn, would result in more jobs at the local level.
That's what prisons are for — to take the sorts of people who would fraudulently cut corners on parts in a way that puts lives at risk, and lock them away from civilized society for the rest of their lives.
Maybe, just maybe, Tesla is better at designing than manufacturing? And they've yet to learn what everyone else in the industry has learned over many decades?
Actually, I'd argue that they're good at manufacturing, and bad at design. Components should be designed to handle a reasonable amount of manufacturing variance, and theirs just aren't. That's also why my charge port door stopped closing without assistance on about the second or third time I opened it. Everything seems to be designed under the assumption that it will be put together perfectly, like it's a laptop instead of a real-world car, and when (not if) things are just a little bit off, nothing works correctly.
The problem you have is that you think that any solution to an environmental problem must be completely free of adverse side-effects. Nobody ever said banning CFCs would be easy, just like nobody says that a wide-scale change to renewable energy would be as simple as flicking a switch (it wasn't called An Inconvenient Truth for nothing). But the mistake was not the banning of CFCs, the mistake was using them in the first place.
I said no such thing. What I said was that the benefit from eliminating the relatively small amount of CFC loss by air conditioning pales in comparison to the elimination of the huge amount of CFC loss from its use in situations where you literally spray it straight into the atmosphere, and that we could have just as easily and completely healed the ozone layer with more sensible laws that mitigated some of the worst side effects of those laws.
Anyway, I think you are a bit late in trying to deny the science regarding the ozone depletion.
Who the h** is denying anything? The science showed that the ozone depletion was caused by the release of CFCs. I'm not denying the actual science. I'm denying the overreaction by politicians who chose to ban CFCs outright, rather than limiting their use to refrigeration, where (notwithstanding leaks) the CFCs are typically contained and thus do no harm to the environment. It's the same level of stupid as banning plastic bags instead of levying fines against garbage haulers that leave uncontained garbage blowing around, and ignoring the rise in salmonella poisoning from reusing grocery bags or the rise in phosphate pollution from millions of Californians washing all those extra grocery bags. Congratulations. Instead of saving fish, you caused a red tide.
I'm very much pro-science and pro-environment. I'm just anti-stupid. Environmental laws must make a reasonable attempt to limit harm. Environmental laws that fail to do so inevitably turn people against the environmental movement, and in the long run, that's far more damaging to the planet than the tiny amount of CFC leakage from air conditioners. Just saying.
You are kidding right? Do you actually think that pollutants rise straight up and then never move from that spot? You sound like someone who has never heard of the wind. The ozone layer was thinning in general, but atmospheric conditions like the polar vortex meant that it was more pronounced over the polar regions. But there were multiple holes found; Tibet was another example.
This is why it was important to stop the continued growth of the holes. I never disagreed with that. You're picking at nits, presumably because you can't find fault with my main point, which is that the use of CFCs as contained refrigerants was not the cause of the ozone holes to begin with, and the regulations were poorly constructed in ways that caused significant harm to a lot of people, when they could have just banned CFCs in aerosols and required refrigeration to use other substances except when it is impractical to do so, rather than banning use in refrigeration completely, and it would not have caused the harm, but the ozone layer would still have healed at approximately the same rate.
What's interesting is that ozone is often used in office environments as a way of getting rid of other odors (e.g. mold). So there are several possibilities:
Ozone could just be a convenient way to measure overall outdoor air pollution, and we have no idea which specific contaminants are at issue.
Ozone itself causes problems, and we should stop using it to eliminate odors.
Ozone is an indication of the workplace trying to cover up something else, and that something else is responsible.
I think this calls for some more direct experimentation.
My Model X came off the line with a bad charge port that was almost impossible to supercharge. I later found out that this was a widespread manufacturing defect that occurred in cars made over a period of weeks in late 2017. As a result, they ran out of (non-defective) replacement charge ports for the entire region, and had to send out field techs to manually file down the defective plastic guides in the charge ports of a large number of vehicles.
The cost of these mistakes to Tesla has to be just incredible. They would be much better off financially if they added an additional validation step early in their supply chain, even if that meant eating the cost of a few parts.
And this doesn't just affect their new cars. These Model X charge port issues happened more than two years after production on the Model X began. That's insanely late in the production cycle for manufacturing tolerance issues to suddenly crop up. Very bizarre.
You sound like someone that doesn't understand how serious the ozone hole issue was. What you're proposing would have kept it around for at least another decade or two killing or making sick hundreds of thousands more through skin cancer and costing billions in property damage through increased radiation exposure.
You sound like someone who doesn't know how little of the ozone layer problem was caused by refrigerant leakage. At the time, companies were using CFCs as propellant in hair spray and other similar products. Nearly all of the CFCs that we emitted came from those sources, not from incidental leakage of refrigerant over the course of years. They could have skipped the regulations on refrigerant entirely, and the ozone layer would have recovered almost as quickly.
Also, you sound like someone who doesn't understand geography. The ozone layer hole was over the south pole. There weren't (and still aren't) hundreds of thousands of people living under the area that the ozone layer hole covered. Given that there were only about 4,000 people living within the affected region, even if the ozone hole had caused the skin cancer fatality rate to increase by a factor of ten, only about one extra person per year in Antarctica would have died from it, and that's assuming the age range of the Antarctic population is much more diverse than it actually is, and that people there are outside much more than they actually are. In reality, it's probably more on the order of one extra death every thousand years.
Don't get me wrong, preventing the ozone layer from further depletion was a laudable goal. But the ends did not justify the means. Banning CFC use in hair spray was good, because it provided a huge benefit with almost no real impact on anybody. Banning CFC use for refrigeration was bad because it had significant negative impact for almost no benefit.
BTW, the reason that the heat exchangers are so much larger is that they are less efficient. So everyone in America is also using more power for their air conditioning, refrigerators, etc. than they were before the refrigerant change. So for that negligible change to CFC loss, we dramatically increased our country's CO2 output. It wasn't just a stupid decision from an impact-on-people perspective. It was also a net loss for the environment, too.
Like the restrictions on the use of CFCs to combat the hole in the ozone layer. Despite the similar nay-sayers of the time, the restrictions didn't cause the world to end - either economically or environmentally!
No, but there are a lot of unforseen side effects. For example, heat exchangers that use newer freon formulations are inherently larger than the ones for older formulations. A lot of homes with water source heat pumps got seriously screwed, because the new units wouldn't fit in the closets where the units were stored. This resulted in having to add new plumbing to put the water-side heat exchanger in a different location and then run freon lines up to the fan/air-side coils at a cost of many thousands of dollars per house on top of the cost of replacing the units when they fail (which they do, with alarming regularity).
The problem with regulations is that they are usually written by people who don't understand the real-world consequences of those regulations. For example, the freon regulation should have included an exception for specialized replacement equipment designed to fit within an existing space, and should have allowed the continued manufacturing of freon to the extent required for maintaining existing systems, without any specific phase-out timeline. Many houses could have accommodated the larger units, and would do so. The ones that couldn't would need more expensive replacement units, but at least replacement parts and replacement units would still be available. And over time, eventually the technology would improve so that the newer tech could fit in the same space as the older tech, and those exceptions would become less and less frequent. With that change, the regulation would still have had probably 99% of the impact that it did, but without the serious side effects.
Also, contrary to left wing propaganda, torture does work. That's why the armed forces have classes in how to resist torture. The final lesson of that class is that you will break but whatever 'secrets' you have are only useful for about 24 hours. After that, any damage that results is on your commanders for ignoring you were captured and knew the 'secret'.
That right there is the very definition of "not working". If the people who actually have useful information can be trained to not give it out, or to give out a specific subset of information that won't be useful by the time you get the person to a detention center, then torture won't provide any meaningful intel from anyone who matters, and anyone claiming otherwise is just plain lying.
At best, you'll get some minor bits of trivia from low-level grunts who aren't trained to resist torture, and you could almost certainly get the same information from them just by offering them freedom and relocation under an assumed name instead of beating them or drowning them.
In other words, contrary to authoritarian propaganda, torture doesn't work in any meaningful sense of the word, and this has been proven time and time again in study after study.
PG&E has a plan for EV owners that charges 12c/KWh during the night (11pm to 7am weekdays).
Sadly, where I live, we're block-metered. The mobile home park gets bulk metered and passes on the charges to us at residential rates. As far as I'm aware, time-of-day metering isn't possible for block-metered houses. (This is also a problem for solar.) But it's good to know that for people who don't live in shared-meter apartment complexes, shared-meter mobile home parks, shared-meter condos, etc., power isn't quite as extortionate.:-/
At almost a thousand bucks per year for the tags, versus a little over a hundred for my ICE backup car, I figure that's the equivalent of the gas tax on 1500 gallons of fuel, or about 30,000 miles per year. They're getting plenty of money from us.
Mountain View. I've had to wait for a spot after midnight.
All the Bay Area superchargers are apparently pretty bad, from what I'm told, unless you count the far-flung stations like Gilroy. The rule is, if it shows either full or one spot empty, that means there's a line. If it shows two spots empty, there's probably a line. Basically, the Sunnyvale and Cupertino superchargers can't come online too soon....
I suspect it is more the cost of needing to build a lot more supercharger stations, and using higher prices to raise revenue to cover those costs. My supercharger has a *median* wait of probably three or four cars beyond full, peaking into the mid-teens. They literally need twice as many superchargers right now, and it is getting worse over time. The only way the whole system won't completely come crashing down is if the cost of charging is high enough to make all the new Model 3 owners think twice until they're able to build that extra infrastructure.
Yeah, that roughly matches up with my numbers. 12 gallons of fuel in my Rav4 = about 90 kWh in my Model X. So $36 in California gasoline = about $21 in supercharger fees even at these new rates (if I didn't have unlimited supercharging).
And of course the superchargers are intended for occasional, rushed charging with the assumption that most of the people most of the time will use home/work trickle chargers paying market rates of closer to $0.12/kWh. or about $0.042/mile.
That part seems a bit unrealistic to me. My marginal price for electricity at home is, IIRC, $0.38/kWh, or 13.3 cents per mile. Residential energy prices are deliberately much higher than commercial in California, so IMO, unless you have solar panels at home, charging at home probably isn't viable unless you use almost no electricity for anything other than your car.
What kind of LCD panels do you buy? Every panel I’ve ever seen has an internal PSU, because it makes the inverter for the fluorescent backlight tubes cheaper.
Since space and weight are usually lesser concerns than life expectancy in a home UPS, wouldn’t it make more sense to use a bank of supercapacitors and leave the short-lived chemical batteries in the past where they belong?
I said nothing about pseudonymous works, but if you read the very next line on Wikipedia after the bit you quoted, you'll see that I am correct:
"Although the Berne Convention states that the copyright law of the country where copyright is claimed shall be applied, Article 7(8) states that "unless the legislation of that country otherwise provides, the term shall not exceed the term fixed in the country of origin of the work",[7]".
Notice that "the country where copyright is claimed" is contrasted with "the country of origin", which is to say that they are explicitly not the same country. Parsed correctly, that sentence means that the law in the country where the violation was alleged to have occurred applies by default unless the rules in the country of origin are more lax.
The paragraph in question is talking about the opposite of what I was referring to in the GP post — specifically that if the country of origin no longer recognizes a copyright as valid, then no other country is expected to continue to recognize it unless that other country explicitly passes laws that say that the longer term should apply for such imports.
In other words, local copyright law always applies, but by default, it applies only if the work is still under copyright in the country of origin. Once a work passes into the public domain in its country of origin, absent explicit laws to the contrary in some other country, it is public domain everywhere.
For example, U.S. law currently allows copyright for life + 70 years. If India changed its law to allow copyright for life + 200, unless the law in India explicitly says that the life + 200 policy applies to works even if after they become public domain in their country of origin, the copyright term in India for an American work would be life + 70, rather than the longer life + 200 allowed by India's hypothetical law.
Not true. There is no inherent link between the two. Perhaps, if you've got a flat city and you can manage to put in bike lanes without taking away traffic lanes that might be true, but that's not something that can reasonably be assumed.
It's not true, period. No matter what, pedestrians slow down traffic, because they have to cross in front of traffic, and they cross far more slowly than cars, which means you have a minimum traffic light cycle time, and often means cars having to wait to make turns while someone walks across.
The only way pedestrians could not slow down traffic would be if you have second-floor pedestrian bridges between buildings like they do up north (or basement or whatever).
Don't believe me? Take a look at which traffic lights in the Bay Area have the worst problems with traffic backups, and you'll find high-pedestrian zones at nearly every one of them (with the exception of a few that back up because of freeways).
So yes, you can sue and get your claim recognized in India. No idea if you have to sue in India or in US, though.
You have to sue where the violation took place, and it has to be based on violation of the law where the violation took place. Which is exactly what I said.
The Berne convention requires that a country extend their own copyright law protections to works made in other signatory countries, ensuring that they are treated with the same amount of protection that they would have if they had been made locally. It does not extend the reach of any country's copyright laws over citizens of any other country.
For example, suppose U.S. law changed so that copyright lasted for life + 200 years, but India law only allowed only for the Berne minimum (life + 50). Under the terms of the Berne Convention, my copyright would still expire in India 50 years after I die, not 200. You get the minimum term of the country of origin or the country where the copies were made.
No, that's exactly how copyright works internationally.
Nothing you just said counters anything I said in any way. No one is questioning whether the works in question are governed by Berne Convention copyright requirements, which U.S. law greatly exceeds. The Berne Convention does NOT give you the right to apply copyright law in one country over people over another. Rather, it prescribes a minimum level of copyright enforcement that each country's laws must comply with. U.S. law goes way beyond those minimum requirements, so if your claim is that you can somehow use U.S. noncompliance to allow a change of venue, yeah, good luck with that.
It also enforces a requirement that countries recognize copyrights held by the citizens of all other parties to the convention.
That's a bad way of wording that, which leads to misunderstanding. The Berne Convention does not require that foreign copyright laws be applied. Rather, it requires that works created in foreign countries be given the same copyright protection that they would get if they were written in that country. So under the terms of the Berne Convention, unless they can prove that copyright was violated in Germany by Project Gutenberg, the laws of the United States apply (because PG is alleged to have violated the copyright in the United States), and the works are protected just as they would be if the work had been written in the United States.
The only exception I'm aware of is that once a copyright expires in the country of origin, it is no longer protected by copyright even in countries where the law provides for longer terms. But if the copyright expires in a foreign country, the laws of the country of origin don't override that.
What we're seeing here is a company trying to use German courts to apply German law to what was, in reality, an alleged violation of United States law, not German law. That's completely and totally improper behavior, and I'm reasonably confident that if they try to enforce any judgment in an American courtroom, the judge will laugh them all the way back to Germany.
That's not the way copyright law works. If I write a book in the U.S. and somebody in India makes copies of it illegally, I can't sue for violation of U.S. law, because a person in India is not bound by U.S. law. I would have to sue for violation of India's copyright law. International treaties (Berne et al) provide a set of guiding principles for how the laws in India must be written. However, if India's law is more lax than U.S. law, I don't get to apply U.S. law to an action that happened in India.
So no, this is not a red herring. The entire notion that an organization in one country can be sued for violations of the law in another country is a fundamental affront to the viability of the Internet as a whole, and simply cannot be tolerated. You don't get to arbitrarily choose your venue based on where you think you might win, and the language in which a book was written does not create any sort of nexus in any sane universe.
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Yes and no. Not all products are shipped by truck the same distance. And once the road damage externality is eliminated, companies will find ways to reduce the amount of trucking and increase other means of transport, such as trains, and as a result, most of those costs won't get passed on to the consumer.
Actually, that's not really true. Many top earners get most of their income in the form of capital gains that are taxed at only 15–20%, which is lower than all but the lowest nonzero earned income tax bracket. It's only the top-earning plebs in the tech industry that end up paying a disproportionate percentage of taxes.
Agreed. IMO, the only deductions should be for state taxes (not paying taxes on money that was never really yours to spend), charitable giving/mileage, and the first... say... $30,000 of long-term capital gains per year, to cover turnover in people's managed retirement accounts, increasing to $60,000 after age 65, adjusted annually for inflation. After that, it should be a progressive tax on all income, including capital gains (regardless of how long you've held them).
Taxing capital gains at a low rate for the first bit and then like ordinary income above a certain threshold would do more to shore up the federal budget and improve tax fairness than just about anything else you could do. And it would drastically simplify the unholy nightmare that is my taxes, thanks to retirement accounts doing all sorts of tiny transactions and getting lots of tiny bits of dividend income that each get different tax treatment.
Even your numbers are actually low by an order of magnitude. Comparing with the original article's 4,000 pound weight yields a factor of twenty, so that would be 160,000x as much damage. Put another way, assuming those numbers are correct, a fully loaded semi driving for 1 minute does as much damage as all of the other Bay Area traffic put together does in an hour.
Either way, taxing passenger cars to pay for for road damage is like taxing kindergarteners in New York to pay for the cost of the police force.
And an income tax beats a sales tax there, too. Sales taxes discourage spending, which depresses the economy. Income taxes discourage trying to make more money, which if unspent, is doing nothing for the economy but taking it away from someone else who would have spent it.
Which is worse for the environment, and ultimately worse for humanity. You're screwed either way.
But the bigger problem is that the current gas tax scheme creates a huge externality, and charging taxes on electricity would make it even worse. As it stands, shipping companies can use fewer drivers (and thus provide fewer jobs) by using bigger, heavier trucks, and as a result, they do orders of magnitude more damage to the roads, but they do not pay anywhere near their fair share of the maintenance. In fact, they pay about a quarter of one percent of their fair share.
The reason for this is that the amount of damage that a vehicle does increases proportional to the fourth power of its weight. Double the weight of the vehicle, and you increase the damage by a factor of 16. So a big rig does about 410x the damage of an average car, despite weighing only about 4.5x as much.
So the right way to provide for roads is to almost exclusively tax commercial use of the roads. If you want a tax that is actually fair, you should reduce the gas tax from 35–-50 cents per gallon down to 3–5 cents per ten gallons, and you should increase the tax on diesel fuel to about $35–-$50 per gallon, except when provided in gas stations that cannot accommodate large trucks. This would, of course, require the shipping industry to find better ways of transporting things, increase the use of trains, etc. It would also eliminate this externality that currently artificially favors Amazon and big-box stores over more local production and distribution. This, in turn, would result in more jobs at the local level.
That's what prisons are for — to take the sorts of people who would fraudulently cut corners on parts in a way that puts lives at risk, and lock them away from civilized society for the rest of their lives.
Actually, I'd argue that they're good at manufacturing, and bad at design. Components should be designed to handle a reasonable amount of manufacturing variance, and theirs just aren't. That's also why my charge port door stopped closing without assistance on about the second or third time I opened it. Everything seems to be designed under the assumption that it will be put together perfectly, like it's a laptop instead of a real-world car, and when (not if) things are just a little bit off, nothing works correctly.
I said no such thing. What I said was that the benefit from eliminating the relatively small amount of CFC loss by air conditioning pales in comparison to the elimination of the huge amount of CFC loss from its use in situations where you literally spray it straight into the atmosphere, and that we could have just as easily and completely healed the ozone layer with more sensible laws that mitigated some of the worst side effects of those laws.
Who the h** is denying anything? The science showed that the ozone depletion was caused by the release of CFCs. I'm not denying the actual science. I'm denying the overreaction by politicians who chose to ban CFCs outright, rather than limiting their use to refrigeration, where (notwithstanding leaks) the CFCs are typically contained and thus do no harm to the environment. It's the same level of stupid as banning plastic bags instead of levying fines against garbage haulers that leave uncontained garbage blowing around, and ignoring the rise in salmonella poisoning from reusing grocery bags or the rise in phosphate pollution from millions of Californians washing all those extra grocery bags. Congratulations. Instead of saving fish, you caused a red tide.
I'm very much pro-science and pro-environment. I'm just anti-stupid. Environmental laws must make a reasonable attempt to limit harm. Environmental laws that fail to do so inevitably turn people against the environmental movement, and in the long run, that's far more damaging to the planet than the tiny amount of CFC leakage from air conditioners. Just saying.
This is why it was important to stop the continued growth of the holes. I never disagreed with that. You're picking at nits, presumably because you can't find fault with my main point, which is that the use of CFCs as contained refrigerants was not the cause of the ozone holes to begin with, and the regulations were poorly constructed in ways that caused significant harm to a lot of people, when they could have just banned CFCs in aerosols and required refrigeration to use other substances except when it is impractical to do so, rather than banning use in refrigeration completely, and it would not have caused the harm, but the ozone layer would still have healed at approximately the same rate.
What's interesting is that ozone is often used in office environments as a way of getting rid of other odors (e.g. mold). So there are several possibilities:
I think this calls for some more direct experimentation.
My Model X came off the line with a bad charge port that was almost impossible to supercharge. I later found out that this was a widespread manufacturing defect that occurred in cars made over a period of weeks in late 2017. As a result, they ran out of (non-defective) replacement charge ports for the entire region, and had to send out field techs to manually file down the defective plastic guides in the charge ports of a large number of vehicles.
The cost of these mistakes to Tesla has to be just incredible. They would be much better off financially if they added an additional validation step early in their supply chain, even if that meant eating the cost of a few parts.
And this doesn't just affect their new cars. These Model X charge port issues happened more than two years after production on the Model X began. That's insanely late in the production cycle for manufacturing tolerance issues to suddenly crop up. Very bizarre.
You sound like someone who doesn't know how little of the ozone layer problem was caused by refrigerant leakage. At the time, companies were using CFCs as propellant in hair spray and other similar products. Nearly all of the CFCs that we emitted came from those sources, not from incidental leakage of refrigerant over the course of years. They could have skipped the regulations on refrigerant entirely, and the ozone layer would have recovered almost as quickly.
Also, you sound like someone who doesn't understand geography. The ozone layer hole was over the south pole. There weren't (and still aren't) hundreds of thousands of people living under the area that the ozone layer hole covered. Given that there were only about 4,000 people living within the affected region, even if the ozone hole had caused the skin cancer fatality rate to increase by a factor of ten, only about one extra person per year in Antarctica would have died from it, and that's assuming the age range of the Antarctic population is much more diverse than it actually is, and that people there are outside much more than they actually are. In reality, it's probably more on the order of one extra death every thousand years.
Don't get me wrong, preventing the ozone layer from further depletion was a laudable goal. But the ends did not justify the means. Banning CFC use in hair spray was good, because it provided a huge benefit with almost no real impact on anybody. Banning CFC use for refrigeration was bad because it had significant negative impact for almost no benefit.
BTW, the reason that the heat exchangers are so much larger is that they are less efficient. So everyone in America is also using more power for their air conditioning, refrigerators, etc. than they were before the refrigerant change. So for that negligible change to CFC loss, we dramatically increased our country's CO2 output. It wasn't just a stupid decision from an impact-on-people perspective. It was also a net loss for the environment, too.
No, but there are a lot of unforseen side effects. For example, heat exchangers that use newer freon formulations are inherently larger than the ones for older formulations. A lot of homes with water source heat pumps got seriously screwed, because the new units wouldn't fit in the closets where the units were stored. This resulted in having to add new plumbing to put the water-side heat exchanger in a different location and then run freon lines up to the fan/air-side coils at a cost of many thousands of dollars per house on top of the cost of replacing the units when they fail (which they do, with alarming regularity).
The problem with regulations is that they are usually written by people who don't understand the real-world consequences of those regulations. For example, the freon regulation should have included an exception for specialized replacement equipment designed to fit within an existing space, and should have allowed the continued manufacturing of freon to the extent required for maintaining existing systems, without any specific phase-out timeline. Many houses could have accommodated the larger units, and would do so. The ones that couldn't would need more expensive replacement units, but at least replacement parts and replacement units would still be available. And over time, eventually the technology would improve so that the newer tech could fit in the same space as the older tech, and those exceptions would become less and less frequent. With that change, the regulation would still have had probably 99% of the impact that it did, but without the serious side effects.
That right there is the very definition of "not working". If the people who actually have useful information can be trained to not give it out, or to give out a specific subset of information that won't be useful by the time you get the person to a detention center, then torture won't provide any meaningful intel from anyone who matters, and anyone claiming otherwise is just plain lying.
At best, you'll get some minor bits of trivia from low-level grunts who aren't trained to resist torture, and you could almost certainly get the same information from them just by offering them freedom and relocation under an assumed name instead of beating them or drowning them.
In other words, contrary to authoritarian propaganda, torture doesn't work in any meaningful sense of the word, and this has been proven time and time again in study after study.
Yeah. Soon they'll only be full most of the time. :-D
Sadly, where I live, we're block-metered. The mobile home park gets bulk metered and passes on the charges to us at residential rates. As far as I'm aware, time-of-day metering isn't possible for block-metered houses. (This is also a problem for solar.) But it's good to know that for people who don't live in shared-meter apartment complexes, shared-meter mobile home parks, shared-meter condos, etc., power isn't quite as extortionate. :-/
At almost a thousand bucks per year for the tags, versus a little over a hundred for my ICE backup car, I figure that's the equivalent of the gas tax on 1500 gallons of fuel, or about 30,000 miles per year. They're getting plenty of money from us.
Mountain View. I've had to wait for a spot after midnight.
All the Bay Area superchargers are apparently pretty bad, from what I'm told, unless you count the far-flung stations like Gilroy. The rule is, if it shows either full or one spot empty, that means there's a line. If it shows two spots empty, there's probably a line. Basically, the Sunnyvale and Cupertino superchargers can't come online too soon....
I suspect it is more the cost of needing to build a lot more supercharger stations, and using higher prices to raise revenue to cover those costs. My supercharger has a *median* wait of probably three or four cars beyond full, peaking into the mid-teens. They literally need twice as many superchargers right now, and it is getting worse over time. The only way the whole system won't completely come crashing down is if the cost of charging is high enough to make all the new Model 3 owners think twice until they're able to build that extra infrastructure.
Yeah, that roughly matches up with my numbers. 12 gallons of fuel in my Rav4 = about 90 kWh in my Model X. So $36 in California gasoline = about $21 in supercharger fees even at these new rates (if I didn't have unlimited supercharging).
That part seems a bit unrealistic to me. My marginal price for electricity at home is, IIRC, $0.38/kWh, or 13.3 cents per mile. Residential energy prices are deliberately much higher than commercial in California, so IMO, unless you have solar panels at home, charging at home probably isn't viable unless you use almost no electricity for anything other than your car.
No, it means the law of the country where the violation is alleged to have occurred (the United States) apply.
What kind of LCD panels do you buy? Every panel I’ve ever seen has an internal PSU, because it makes the inverter for the fluorescent backlight tubes cheaper.
Since space and weight are usually lesser concerns than life expectancy in a home UPS, wouldn’t it make more sense to use a bank of supercapacitors and leave the short-lived chemical batteries in the past where they belong?
I said nothing about pseudonymous works, but if you read the very next line on Wikipedia after the bit you quoted, you'll see that I am correct:
Notice that "the country where copyright is claimed" is contrasted with "the country of origin", which is to say that they are explicitly not the same country. Parsed correctly, that sentence means that the law in the country where the violation was alleged to have occurred applies by default unless the rules in the country of origin are more lax.
The paragraph in question is talking about the opposite of what I was referring to in the GP post — specifically that if the country of origin no longer recognizes a copyright as valid, then no other country is expected to continue to recognize it unless that other country explicitly passes laws that say that the longer term should apply for such imports.
In other words, local copyright law always applies, but by default, it applies only if the work is still under copyright in the country of origin. Once a work passes into the public domain in its country of origin, absent explicit laws to the contrary in some other country, it is public domain everywhere.
For example, U.S. law currently allows copyright for life + 70 years. If India changed its law to allow copyright for life + 200, unless the law in India explicitly says that the life + 200 policy applies to works even if after they become public domain in their country of origin, the copyright term in India for an American work would be life + 70, rather than the longer life + 200 allowed by India's hypothetical law.
It's not true, period. No matter what, pedestrians slow down traffic, because they have to cross in front of traffic, and they cross far more slowly than cars, which means you have a minimum traffic light cycle time, and often means cars having to wait to make turns while someone walks across.
The only way pedestrians could not slow down traffic would be if you have second-floor pedestrian bridges between buildings like they do up north (or basement or whatever).
Don't believe me? Take a look at which traffic lights in the Bay Area have the worst problems with traffic backups, and you'll find high-pedestrian zones at nearly every one of them (with the exception of a few that back up because of freeways).
You have to sue where the violation took place, and it has to be based on violation of the law where the violation took place. Which is exactly what I said.
The Berne convention requires that a country extend their own copyright law protections to works made in other signatory countries, ensuring that they are treated with the same amount of protection that they would have if they had been made locally. It does not extend the reach of any country's copyright laws over citizens of any other country.
For example, suppose U.S. law changed so that copyright lasted for life + 200 years, but India law only allowed only for the Berne minimum (life + 50). Under the terms of the Berne Convention, my copyright would still expire in India 50 years after I die, not 200. You get the minimum term of the country of origin or the country where the copies were made.
Nothing you just said counters anything I said in any way. No one is questioning whether the works in question are governed by Berne Convention copyright requirements, which U.S. law greatly exceeds. The Berne Convention does NOT give you the right to apply copyright law in one country over people over another. Rather, it prescribes a minimum level of copyright enforcement that each country's laws must comply with. U.S. law goes way beyond those minimum requirements, so if your claim is that you can somehow use U.S. noncompliance to allow a change of venue, yeah, good luck with that.
That's a bad way of wording that, which leads to misunderstanding. The Berne Convention does not require that foreign copyright laws be applied. Rather, it requires that works created in foreign countries be given the same copyright protection that they would get if they were written in that country. So under the terms of the Berne Convention, unless they can prove that copyright was violated in Germany by Project Gutenberg, the laws of the United States apply (because PG is alleged to have violated the copyright in the United States), and the works are protected just as they would be if the work had been written in the United States.
The only exception I'm aware of is that once a copyright expires in the country of origin, it is no longer protected by copyright even in countries where the law provides for longer terms. But if the copyright expires in a foreign country, the laws of the country of origin don't override that.
What we're seeing here is a company trying to use German courts to apply German law to what was, in reality, an alleged violation of United States law, not German law. That's completely and totally improper behavior, and I'm reasonably confident that if they try to enforce any judgment in an American courtroom, the judge will laugh them all the way back to Germany.
That's not the way copyright law works. If I write a book in the U.S. and somebody in India makes copies of it illegally, I can't sue for violation of U.S. law, because a person in India is not bound by U.S. law. I would have to sue for violation of India's copyright law. International treaties (Berne et al) provide a set of guiding principles for how the laws in India must be written. However, if India's law is more lax than U.S. law, I don't get to apply U.S. law to an action that happened in India.
So no, this is not a red herring. The entire notion that an organization in one country can be sued for violations of the law in another country is a fundamental affront to the viability of the Internet as a whole, and simply cannot be tolerated. You don't get to arbitrarily choose your venue based on where you think you might win, and the language in which a book was written does not create any sort of nexus in any sane universe.