The space pen myth perpetuates itself not because of any kernel of insight, but because it's the kind of story that people latch onto and want to be true. Because it's funny. Because it lets them laugh at those fools who think they're smarter than everyone else.
Notably it doesn't illustrate the point you're trying to make, because in the case of space pens vs. pencils the high-tech solution is in fact superior. If you want a parable, I suggest you first find one that properly illustrates what you're trying to say, and then spread it as a parable - not as fact.
It's fine to put some focus on the shortcomings of a new technology, if that leads you to say "these are the things that need to be improved". If, as you seem to imply, it only leads you to say "see, this wasn't worth all the trouble", that's not so good. That would have mankind still in the stone age. Trendy as it may be to say "well, I think that would be better", what you're really advocating if you say that is more war, more mass starvation, and a global poulation cap well below our current numbers.
There are plenty of things eBook readers are good for. It's to be expected that we won't know which things they aren't good for until we try to use them in those applications, which is exactly what happened here. Where the Kindle doesn't have an analogue for something a student would like to do with a regular book, they can say "how can we model that"; where it has an analogue but it isn't satisfactory, they can say "how do we make this more acceptable to the user".
Or, I suppose, they can throw their hands up and say "never mind the advantages this brings to the table, it wasn't perfect in the first implementation so we're going back to the Old Ways".
The article and summary are horrible, but so is your understanding of what's going on. This is fundamentally different from a "normal" lense, but not in the way TFA suggests.
This is not a "time iense" that focuses time in the way an optical lense focuses light. It is a time domain lense that focuses light in the time domain in the way that traditional optical lenses focus light in a spatial domain.
It's worse than hyped-up marketing; it's a non-scientist who doesn't understand what he's talking about spreading confusing misconceptions about what actually is pretty cool science, making it all the more incomprehensible to readers who also don't "get it", increasing the public perception that science is just to hard to be worth grasping.
Go read what the service provides, and explain specifically what valuable information you think someone can intercept in this way. "Details of your bank accounts" is too vague to mean anything.
There are many reasons for the U.S. to want Iran not to have nukes. Intent to invade might be one possible reason, but not a terribly convincing one IMO. In any event, saying that the policy "proves" the motive is pretty much always foolishness.
1) A small nuclear capability is not enough to destroy the U.S. If the U.S. really were bent on destruction of Iran, one or two nukes that they may well be unable to deliver anyway wouldn't change anything. Japan - a relatively small country compared to the U.S. - surrendered not because we hit them twice, but because they thought (incorrectly) that we could keep doing it.
2) Nuclear weapons may not deter a conventional attack anyway. They only work if the opponent believes you'll use them. If you're going to be wiped off the map anyway - i.e. in the event a nuclear superpower has already launched nukes at you - you probably will use them. In the face of a lesser defeat, you (and your opponant) are going to be thinking about how much worse you're willing to make your own situation by launching a nuclear first strike.
Two much more plausible reasons for the U.S. to insist on Iran not getting nukes:
1) The U.S. doesn't trust what Iran will do with them. You assume they're to be used as a MAD stockpile; the U.S. officially notes that they might "accidentally" lose one or two to terrorist organizations they sponsor, with the idea that their declared enemies might "find" them without being able to pin a nuclear strike directly on Iran. You can debate whether it's the U.S.'s right to impose its will on those grounds. In theory that's what the UN is for. (The UN opposes nuclear proliferation; is this "proof positive" that the UN wants to invade Iran?) In practice it's just international diplomacy as usual - everyone wants to be sovereign and everyone wants to influence everyone else.
2) It is in every nation's interest to keep the global nuclear picture as simple as possible. That includes keeping nukes out of the hands of any country that doesn't have them and reducing stockpiles in countries that do (including the U.S.). U.S. action has been inconsistent and no doubt there is political motivation for that. However, that does not negate the validity of the goal; much less does it "prove" that the U.S. is planning to attack Iran.
Of course, I don't know any more than you do what the chances are of the U.S. deciding to attack Iran. I do know that demonstrating a willingness to manipulate diplomatic attempts at getting them to give up nukes while secretly doing whatever they want is a good way to increase the odds of a military solution being attempted.
I don't see the point of the service, but then I don't use Twitter.
I also don't see the point of all the critics. Everyone alludes to how easily someone can steal your money with this. Ok... how?
I see a bunch of functionality where you can monitor your account status. The only thing I see that mentions affecting your account status is transfering money within your account. I guess that's enough that you could mess with someone, but where's the profit motive? You're going to commit wire fraud just to piss someone off?
"You are interested in non-criminal law being respected. You do not want everybody to pass when traffic lights are red. It is not criminal laws but you still want it to be enforced."
I notice you went out of your way to say "non-criminal" rather than claiming that traffic violations are civil, so I assume you already know that you're muddying the waters.
Traffic violations are prosecuted by the government, not raised in private law suits. In court, nobody is named as a plaintif but rather the government is the prosecutor. It is true that minor tickets ("infractions") are often referred to as "not a crime"... but then more serious offenses are classified as misdemeanors or even felonies.
Whatever you choose to call them, traffic tickets are not civil law matters. If you apply the arguments I've made in my previous posts to traffic laws, you will find that they are much more like criminal offenses than civil offenses. I don't have the time today to do legal research and see if they're technically part of the body of criminal law, so if you like you can consider them a third category of law. This does not change the fact that the kind of law you sue over -- civil law -- does not include running a red.
"I think it is all about incentive. No one is going to sue for 10 bucks but a lawyer will sue for million he will get. If I was a company perhaps I will think about it before trying something illegal no individual will complain about."
If the individual damages were really only $10, that would be a good point. The reality is, most plaintifs in class-action suits never get compensation anywhere near enough to cover real damages.
Nor do I believe that most companies are really deterred by being ordered to give out a bunch of coupons that will bring them more business from the people they wronged. By contrast, in an individual lawsuit if the judge and jury want to send a message to the defendant they can award punitive damages which really do hurt.
Of course the court might impose injunctions on them as a result of a class-action. They could do that in an individual suit as well.
"I believe that law should be respected. full stop."
Civil law is not intended to be a rulebook for society. That's what criminal law is for.
"My interest as a citizen of a country is that laws are respected"
Hmm... ok, well the law does not respect your claim that you have an interest in seeing civil law used to resolve disputes of which you are not a part. Do you respect the law in that regard, or only the laws you agree with?
"I believe US laws allow a lawyer to sue in the name of someone that may not agree with the lawsuit"
I suggest you research that belief more fully.
"I think it is linked with class actions"
In some cases, lawyers can try to gain class-action status for a collection of existing suits, and if they succeed the class will likely cover plaintifs who weren't in the original suits. However, each individaul still has the right to exclude himself from being a plaintif in the suit.
This is a matter of administrative expediency and is actually a compromise against how the law "ought to" operate; and even so, a plaintif with standing had to be involved to start; and even so, if you don't want to be part of the suit you don't have to.
In any case, class action suits as implemented in the American law system are anything but an example of how a sane system might work. The only party that benefits from most class action suits is the lawyer; the plaintifs who don't opt out typically get $10 coupons for the defendant's product or service.
"Any sane legal system should let ANYBODY sue over ANY illegal thing"
Say what?
First let's put this in context: people sue over civil matters - not criminal ones. Indeed the case in question - a GPL violation - is a civil matter. So what you're saying is "if I do something that makes me liable to Bob, Jim should be able to sue me".
What if Bob and I are perfectly happy to resolve the matter out of court? Why, then, would it be any of Jim's business? The civil courts are there as one means of conflict resolution - and most reasonable people consider them a last resort. If you're not part of the dispute, you don't get to decide what method should be used to resolve it.
Again, if we were talking about a criminal offense, that's completely different. It would be considered the business of everyone in the society - which is why neitehr Bob nor Jim sue in that case, but rather the state brings charges (potentially even if Bob would rather they didn't).
They didn't sue over the copyright. They sued over license violations that impacted them. The operative words are "that impacted them"; that gives them legal standing.
The license gets its force from the copyright, but that changes nothing. The plaintif had a right which the defendant violated, regardless of the fact that the right in question was granted by a document whose authority came from somebody else's rights.
Depends on if the summary is being honest. For the same of argument, let's take it at face value - that they're trying to make him pay to patch existing security holes he uncovered.
The lack of security cameras in your garage is not a "security hole" that the thief in your story "uncovered". Putting in cameras was not "patching a security hole"; it was a step taken to collect proof of his actions.
Put another way - the purpose / need for your cameras was created by the thief. Until the thief came along, it would not be expected that you should have them. The purpose / need to patch security holes is always present. A particular intruder is not the reason they should be patched.
You can't draw legal conclusions without considering the natures of the laws. The hyperlink as a 'barrier that has to be bridged' might be sensible when the offense is lying about someone but might not be sensible when teh offense is distributing material without the right to do so.
Not sure about Canada, but in the US there are offenses of indirect infringement (or perhaps it's called secondary infringement, can't recall off hand); essentially it can be illegal to facilitate someone else infringing copyright. There is no such thing as indirect defamation.
So I'll stand by my previous comment - the laws are different enough that, while it might be possible to build a case for "linking is not copyright infringement", the fact that linking is not defamation has no place in the building of that case.
I don't know why one would imply the other. The underlying laws (copyright law vs. defamation laws) are completely different in terms of rationale and of what constitutes an offense.
And to me, that's a sign that we're doing it wrong.
Juries are indeed told that they are the finders of fact, yet they are the ones who are asked to make a statement about which crime(s), if any, were committed. In most cases, what they say determines the defendant's fate; hence (among other things) you get prospective jurors citing religious reasons that they are not comfortable "sitting in judgement over another human" when, if the system were set up properly, nobody would be asking them to do any such thing.
(Yes, I'm aware that in many - perhaps most - cases those people are just making an excuse to get out of jury duty, knowing that even if the court shoots them down the prosecutor won't want to keep them around. That is beside the point.)
Rather than give the jury complex instructions and ask them for a "yes or no" on the specific legal counts, why not have the court provide them a list of questions about the facts, sans legal language, and let the judge apply the law to the answers they provide?
"A single Envion unit is capable of processing up to 10,000 tons of plastic waste annually, producing three to five barrels of refined petroleum product per ton of plastic waste."
Not bad; so each unit can produce maybe 50,000 barrels of "refined petroleum product" each year, if there's a sufficient stream of waste plastic.
I don't know how much plastic waste is produced every year, or how hard it will be to reclaim it, or what fraction of it is suitable for processing... At a glance, it sounds like a good idea, but may be little more than an environmentally sound drop in the bucket. (It's hard to hold in mind just how huge the numbers need to be when we talk about the oil economy...)
And you think you can do that while simultaniously negating the inherant regressive nature of an energy tax? I don't agree, but if you think you can I'd like to see how.
Whoa there... you want to tax the car itself based on estimated energy usage, and then tax any energy from charging stations as well? So the only way to avoid being double-taxed is to always charge at home? Besies, using an average expected cost only makes sense when deviations from average don't tend to be very extreme. That's not the case with "energy used per car".
As for the in-home meter solution: The meter on energy coming into your home works because (1) you probably don't have an alternate source of energy that doesn't flow through the meter, and (2) if you do, energy from that source legitimately shouldn't be metered. If you try to meter energy going into my car, you're going to have a hard time making sure I don't just take the energy from a source you're not monitoring. The car is going to need a particular voltage from a source that can carry a particular amount of current. A lot of people can home-brew that if you give them an economic incentive. I suppose you can criminalize that, but I think it's a truly horrible idea.
All this complexity, and we're only talking about one particular alternative fuel source so far. I think it's time to accept that the idea of a fuel tax for road funding is doomed.
And what's the advantage of that? If you manipulate Tax A to offset the economic effect of Tax B, you might as well eliminate Tax B and use Tax A to fund whatever Tax B was for. (Sure you may have to tweak Tax A a little when you drop Tax B - but you were just talking about changing Tax A anyway.)
The system of taxation in this country is complex enough as it is. Why add new taxes that require patches in the form of changes to other taxes?
And how, exactly, will you tax "the electricity that's used by cars"?
I suppose you could just tax all energy. This has the advantage that we already have mechanisms for metering and collecting that type of tax - so no need for huge research outlays. Depending on who you ask, it may have environmental advantages. OTOH, it has some significant disadvantages, such as being a regressive tax structure.
Maybe more to the point, a general energy tax doesn't align the taxpayer burden with the taxpayer's usage of the roads. A fuel tax only does so approximately, but it's a lot closer than a general energy tax - and that alignment is kind of the point of a fuel tax. You could argue that in modern society everyone (or at least nearly everyone) benefits from the road infrastructure whether they use it or not. Even then taxing the actual road users and letting the market pass the cost along to indirect beneficiaries might still make sense...
So I can see a lot of different approaches making sense, but I can't see trying to stay with the idea of a fuel / transportation energy tax as methods of powering cars continue to change.
Slashdot Mirror
The space pen myth perpetuates itself not because of any kernel of insight, but because it's the kind of story that people latch onto and want to be true. Because it's funny. Because it lets them laugh at those fools who think they're smarter than everyone else.
Notably it doesn't illustrate the point you're trying to make, because in the case of space pens vs. pencils the high-tech solution is in fact superior. If you want a parable, I suggest you first find one that properly illustrates what you're trying to say, and then spread it as a parable - not as fact.
It's fine to put some focus on the shortcomings of a new technology, if that leads you to say "these are the things that need to be improved". If, as you seem to imply, it only leads you to say "see, this wasn't worth all the trouble", that's not so good. That would have mankind still in the stone age. Trendy as it may be to say "well, I think that would be better", what you're really advocating if you say that is more war, more mass starvation, and a global poulation cap well below our current numbers.
There are plenty of things eBook readers are good for. It's to be expected that we won't know which things they aren't good for until we try to use them in those applications, which is exactly what happened here. Where the Kindle doesn't have an analogue for something a student would like to do with a regular book, they can say "how can we model that"; where it has an analogue but it isn't satisfactory, they can say "how do we make this more acceptable to the user".
Or, I suppose, they can throw their hands up and say "never mind the advantages this brings to the table, it wasn't perfect in the first implementation so we're going back to the Old Ways".
The article and summary are horrible, but so is your understanding of what's going on. This is fundamentally different from a "normal" lense, but not in the way TFA suggests.
This is not a "time iense" that focuses time in the way an optical lense focuses light. It is a time domain lense that focuses light in the time domain in the way that traditional optical lenses focus light in a spatial domain.
It's worse than hyped-up marketing; it's a non-scientist who doesn't understand what he's talking about spreading confusing misconceptions about what actually is pretty cool science, making it all the more incomprehensible to readers who also don't "get it", increasing the public perception that science is just to hard to be worth grasping.
You didn't answer my question.
I'm not asking how you would subvert the system.
I'm asking how you would profit from subverting the system.
Yes, Twitter is insecure. And?
More allusion and still no explanation.
Go read what the service provides, and explain specifically what valuable information you think someone can intercept in this way. "Details of your bank accounts" is too vague to mean anything.
There are many reasons for the U.S. to want Iran not to have nukes. Intent to invade might be one possible reason, but not a terribly convincing one IMO. In any event, saying that the policy "proves" the motive is pretty much always foolishness.
1) A small nuclear capability is not enough to destroy the U.S. If the U.S. really were bent on destruction of Iran, one or two nukes that they may well be unable to deliver anyway wouldn't change anything. Japan - a relatively small country compared to the U.S. - surrendered not because we hit them twice, but because they thought (incorrectly) that we could keep doing it.
2) Nuclear weapons may not deter a conventional attack anyway. They only work if the opponent believes you'll use them. If you're going to be wiped off the map anyway - i.e. in the event a nuclear superpower has already launched nukes at you - you probably will use them. In the face of a lesser defeat, you (and your opponant) are going to be thinking about how much worse you're willing to make your own situation by launching a nuclear first strike.
Two much more plausible reasons for the U.S. to insist on Iran not getting nukes:
1) The U.S. doesn't trust what Iran will do with them. You assume they're to be used as a MAD stockpile; the U.S. officially notes that they might "accidentally" lose one or two to terrorist organizations they sponsor, with the idea that their declared enemies might "find" them without being able to pin a nuclear strike directly on Iran. You can debate whether it's the U.S.'s right to impose its will on those grounds. In theory that's what the UN is for. (The UN opposes nuclear proliferation; is this "proof positive" that the UN wants to invade Iran?) In practice it's just international diplomacy as usual - everyone wants to be sovereign and everyone wants to influence everyone else.
2) It is in every nation's interest to keep the global nuclear picture as simple as possible. That includes keeping nukes out of the hands of any country that doesn't have them and reducing stockpiles in countries that do (including the U.S.). U.S. action has been inconsistent and no doubt there is political motivation for that. However, that does not negate the validity of the goal; much less does it "prove" that the U.S. is planning to attack Iran.
Of course, I don't know any more than you do what the chances are of the U.S. deciding to attack Iran. I do know that demonstrating a willingness to manipulate diplomatic attempts at getting them to give up nukes while secretly doing whatever they want is a good way to increase the odds of a military solution being attempted.
I don't see the point of the service, but then I don't use Twitter.
I also don't see the point of all the critics. Everyone alludes to how easily someone can steal your money with this. Ok... how?
I see a bunch of functionality where you can monitor your account status. The only thing I see that mentions affecting your account status is transfering money within your account. I guess that's enough that you could mess with someone, but where's the profit motive? You're going to commit wire fraud just to piss someone off?
As opposed to how things are today - install all the plug-ins you want, but you still can't see what people are saying about your site?
If you fear feedback, ask yourself why you fear feedback. If you fear your users talking to one another, be afraid because they already are.
"You are interested in non-criminal law being respected. You do not want everybody to pass when traffic lights are red. It is not criminal laws but you still want it to be enforced."
I notice you went out of your way to say "non-criminal" rather than claiming that traffic violations are civil, so I assume you already know that you're muddying the waters.
Traffic violations are prosecuted by the government, not raised in private law suits. In court, nobody is named as a plaintif but rather the government is the prosecutor. It is true that minor tickets ("infractions") are often referred to as "not a crime"... but then more serious offenses are classified as misdemeanors or even felonies.
Whatever you choose to call them, traffic tickets are not civil law matters. If you apply the arguments I've made in my previous posts to traffic laws, you will find that they are much more like criminal offenses than civil offenses. I don't have the time today to do legal research and see if they're technically part of the body of criminal law, so if you like you can consider them a third category of law. This does not change the fact that the kind of law you sue over -- civil law -- does not include running a red.
"I think it is all about incentive. No one is going to sue for 10 bucks but a lawyer will sue for million he will get. If I was a company perhaps I will think about it before trying something illegal no individual will complain about."
If the individual damages were really only $10, that would be a good point. The reality is, most plaintifs in class-action suits never get compensation anywhere near enough to cover real damages.
Nor do I believe that most companies are really deterred by being ordered to give out a bunch of coupons that will bring them more business from the people they wronged. By contrast, in an individual lawsuit if the judge and jury want to send a message to the defendant they can award punitive damages which really do hurt.
Of course the court might impose injunctions on them as a result of a class-action. They could do that in an individual suit as well.
"I believe that law should be respected. full stop."
Civil law is not intended to be a rulebook for society. That's what criminal law is for.
"My interest as a citizen of a country is that laws are respected"
Hmm... ok, well the law does not respect your claim that you have an interest in seeing civil law used to resolve disputes of which you are not a part. Do you respect the law in that regard, or only the laws you agree with?
"I believe US laws allow a lawyer to sue in the name of someone that may not agree with the lawsuit"
I suggest you research that belief more fully.
"I think it is linked with class actions"
In some cases, lawyers can try to gain class-action status for a collection of existing suits, and if they succeed the class will likely cover plaintifs who weren't in the original suits. However, each individaul still has the right to exclude himself from being a plaintif in the suit.
This is a matter of administrative expediency and is actually a compromise against how the law "ought to" operate; and even so, a plaintif with standing had to be involved to start; and even so, if you don't want to be part of the suit you don't have to.
In any case, class action suits as implemented in the American law system are anything but an example of how a sane system might work. The only party that benefits from most class action suits is the lawyer; the plaintifs who don't opt out typically get $10 coupons for the defendant's product or service.
"Any sane legal system should let ANYBODY sue over ANY illegal thing"
Say what?
First let's put this in context: people sue over civil matters - not criminal ones. Indeed the case in question - a GPL violation - is a civil matter. So what you're saying is "if I do something that makes me liable to Bob, Jim should be able to sue me".
What if Bob and I are perfectly happy to resolve the matter out of court? Why, then, would it be any of Jim's business? The civil courts are there as one means of conflict resolution - and most reasonable people consider them a last resort. If you're not part of the dispute, you don't get to decide what method should be used to resolve it.
Again, if we were talking about a criminal offense, that's completely different. It would be considered the business of everyone in the society - which is why neitehr Bob nor Jim sue in that case, but rather the state brings charges (potentially even if Bob would rather they didn't).
They didn't sue over the copyright. They sued over license violations that impacted them. The operative words are "that impacted them"; that gives them legal standing.
The license gets its force from the copyright, but that changes nothing. The plaintif had a right which the defendant violated, regardless of the fact that the right in question was granted by a document whose authority came from somebody else's rights.
"I don't know if any license fee is involved, but I didn't think so."
Hmm... oh, hang on...
"Don't quote me on that last bit though."
Oh, sorry. My bad.
Depends on if the summary is being honest. For the same of argument, let's take it at face value - that they're trying to make him pay to patch existing security holes he uncovered.
The lack of security cameras in your garage is not a "security hole" that the thief in your story "uncovered". Putting in cameras was not "patching a security hole"; it was a step taken to collect proof of his actions.
Put another way - the purpose / need for your cameras was created by the thief. Until the thief came along, it would not be expected that you should have them. The purpose / need to patch security holes is always present. A particular intruder is not the reason they should be patched.
You can't draw legal conclusions without considering the natures of the laws. The hyperlink as a 'barrier that has to be bridged' might be sensible when the offense is lying about someone but might not be sensible when teh offense is distributing material without the right to do so.
Not sure about Canada, but in the US there are offenses of indirect infringement (or perhaps it's called secondary infringement, can't recall off hand); essentially it can be illegal to facilitate someone else infringing copyright. There is no such thing as indirect defamation.
So I'll stand by my previous comment - the laws are different enough that, while it might be possible to build a case for "linking is not copyright infringement", the fact that linking is not defamation has no place in the building of that case.
You know, if you'd said "for sending malware to a private address", you'd have made a pretty decent point.
Instead you tried to downplay the guy's culpability by describing what he did as "sending an email to a private address", and so you look like a tool.
Funny how that works.
I don't know why one would imply the other. The underlying laws (copyright law vs. defamation laws) are completely different in terms of rationale and of what constitutes an offense.
And to me, that's a sign that we're doing it wrong.
Juries are indeed told that they are the finders of fact, yet they are the ones who are asked to make a statement about which crime(s), if any, were committed. In most cases, what they say determines the defendant's fate; hence (among other things) you get prospective jurors citing religious reasons that they are not comfortable "sitting in judgement over another human" when, if the system were set up properly, nobody would be asking them to do any such thing.
(Yes, I'm aware that in many - perhaps most - cases those people are just making an excuse to get out of jury duty, knowing that even if the court shoots them down the prosecutor won't want to keep them around. That is beside the point.)
Rather than give the jury complex instructions and ask them for a "yes or no" on the specific legal counts, why not have the court provide them a list of questions about the facts, sans legal language, and let the judge apply the law to the answers they provide?
"A single Envion unit is capable of processing up to 10,000 tons of plastic waste annually, producing three to five barrels of refined petroleum product per ton of plastic waste."
Not bad; so each unit can produce maybe 50,000 barrels of "refined petroleum product" each year, if there's a sufficient stream of waste plastic.
I don't know how much plastic waste is produced every year, or how hard it will be to reclaim it, or what fraction of it is suitable for processing... At a glance, it sounds like a good idea, but may be little more than an environmentally sound drop in the bucket. (It's hard to hold in mind just how huge the numbers need to be when we talk about the oil economy...)
And you think you can do that while simultaniously negating the inherant regressive nature of an energy tax? I don't agree, but if you think you can I'd like to see how.
It's cold in Alaska.
I can count the number of lightbulbs I've lost to lightning on one hand. Even if you cut all the fingers off that hand first.
Whoa there... you want to tax the car itself based on estimated energy usage, and then tax any energy from charging stations as well? So the only way to avoid being double-taxed is to always charge at home? Besies, using an average expected cost only makes sense when deviations from average don't tend to be very extreme. That's not the case with "energy used per car".
As for the in-home meter solution: The meter on energy coming into your home works because (1) you probably don't have an alternate source of energy that doesn't flow through the meter, and (2) if you do, energy from that source legitimately shouldn't be metered. If you try to meter energy going into my car, you're going to have a hard time making sure I don't just take the energy from a source you're not monitoring. The car is going to need a particular voltage from a source that can carry a particular amount of current. A lot of people can home-brew that if you give them an economic incentive. I suppose you can criminalize that, but I think it's a truly horrible idea.
All this complexity, and we're only talking about one particular alternative fuel source so far. I think it's time to accept that the idea of a fuel tax for road funding is doomed.
And what's the advantage of that? If you manipulate Tax A to offset the economic effect of Tax B, you might as well eliminate Tax B and use Tax A to fund whatever Tax B was for. (Sure you may have to tweak Tax A a little when you drop Tax B - but you were just talking about changing Tax A anyway.)
The system of taxation in this country is complex enough as it is. Why add new taxes that require patches in the form of changes to other taxes?
And how, exactly, will you tax "the electricity that's used by cars"?
I suppose you could just tax all energy. This has the advantage that we already have mechanisms for metering and collecting that type of tax - so no need for huge research outlays. Depending on who you ask, it may have environmental advantages. OTOH, it has some significant disadvantages, such as being a regressive tax structure.
Maybe more to the point, a general energy tax doesn't align the taxpayer burden with the taxpayer's usage of the roads. A fuel tax only does so approximately, but it's a lot closer than a general energy tax - and that alignment is kind of the point of a fuel tax. You could argue that in modern society everyone (or at least nearly everyone) benefits from the road infrastructure whether they use it or not. Even then taxing the actual road users and letting the market pass the cost along to indirect beneficiaries might still make sense...
So I can see a lot of different approaches making sense, but I can't see trying to stay with the idea of a fuel / transportation energy tax as methods of powering cars continue to change.
Yeah, sure.