Wellm, yes I think we're in violent agreement. Those features were availble but they sucked.
Exactly; they sucked so bad that, to me, they were mostly completely unusable (esp. the camera and texting and email).
He's mid 30s, so of course spent quite a while without any of those facilities, so I guess he doesn't mind the lack as much. Social life is arranged by email. And calling home, I guess not. We survived before without cellphones. He still seems to manage fine (he's actually a she, btw).
I'm 40, and I certainly can't imagine going back to "the old way". Mid-30s is young these days, way too young to be that old-fashioned. I know people around 50 who are as reliant on their smartphones as 20-somethings.
50 years? The US, after it won WWII, took control of both Germany and Japan and reworked the governments there. Did it make them adopt presidential systems like ours? Nope, they both got parliamentary systems. Hmm.....
Firefox works great. A couple years ago, it definitely had some problems, it crashed all the time on me, but lately it's been working just great, much faster and much less memory usage than Chrome. If you haven't used it recently, give it another shot.
Yes, Gnome sucks, but this has nothing to do with anyone taking over the project. The Gnome devs are the same as they've been for ages. They were on a minimalization trend when they created Gnome2; Gnome3 is just the logical progression of their efforts to remove all choice and configurability from the user.
This is a very useful comment and a good option for some people I suppose, however I will point out that it seems to hinge on you having very good WiFi availability wherever you go. If you don't, and rely on 4G data most of the time, it won't work.
It doesn't help that at most free public WiFi hotspots, you have to screw around with opening a browser and agreeing to the terms of service every time you connect to the hotspot before you're able to actually access anything.
I'll also point out that this wasn't possible before modern smartphones, since tablets are really nothing more than big-screen smartphones without the LTE radio.
Um, have you ever heard of exaggeration or hyperbole? Yes, I realize feature phones, as horrible as they were, made better photos than the meager color pallete of a mid-80s 8-bit console gaming system could display.
And smartphones have crappy games because the only input device is a flat sheet of glass.
Yes, compared to a PC or a real gaming console, phone games are crappy. Compared to featurephone games from 10+ years ago, they're light-years better. I can actually play my crosswords just fine on my 4-year-old smartphone (which has a smaller screen than modern phones which are really "phablets"). This simply wasn't possible on a feature phone, not only because of the lack of keyboard (there's no way in hell I'm going to screw around with entering crossword letters on a 0-9 keypad), but because of the lack of resolution and screen space, which makes it impossible to actually see the whole puzzle.
Plenty of feature phones had slide-out QWERTY keyboards.
They weren't very popular and almost no one had them. And Blackberries had a huge cost premium.
SD card and dedicated MP3 decoder chip. That's why a lot of them could play MP3 but not Vorbis.
My Android phone plays Vorbis great, which is a feature for me. But even ignoring that, those SD cards back then weren't large enough to store much. I can (and do) store my whole library on my phone now. I couldn't back then. Case closed.
A dumbphone is enough for that
Yes, but what you said was that he doesn't use a cellphone at all, smart or dumb. Obviously this is completely tangential to the whole smartphone vs. featurephone debate.
Yes, but the cameras were almost useless. The photos they produced looked like something you'd see on an 8-bit NES.
3. feature phones sometimes came with IMAP clients (some Nokia ones)
It wasn't much use: the screens were too small to read messages, and there was no realistic way to reply to them since there was no keyboard.
5. Feature phones had J2ME, and I loaded mine up with a few games.
They were crappy games because the screens were too small and had terrible resolution.
6. um, looking outside works pretty well...
-1 Stupid. There's a reason we have weather forecasts, because you can't predict the weather by just looking outside. It might be warm and sunny now, but a storm is on its way and in 6 hours you'll be going through a flash flood.
8. older phones did this
No, they didn't. There was no keyboard. Typing messages on a 0-9 keypad is shit.
9. older phones did this
No, they didn't. They didn't have any real storage capacity or enough CPU power to decode MP3s.
10. older phones did this
I never saw any that let me set 8 different alarms if I wanted.
11. older phones had calculators
Not RPN ones with all the functions of an HP48. Anything else is basically unusable.
However a lot of the features were actually there pre-smartphone.
They were there only in completely unusable forms, because of the lack of screen space or keyboard, not to mention CPU power. It's like comparing a 2015 BMW to a car from 1895. Sure, the car from 1895 had 4 wheels, but it could only go 5 mph and didn't even have a steering wheel (they used tillers back then) or a roof.
he reasoning being "if I'm free to talk to people/do stuff, I'll be in my office and if I'm not free I won't be able to answer the phone anyway".
I guess he never travels? I don't know about you, but when I'm traveling somewhere, there's no way in hell I'm going back to paper maps and asking for directions when I can just bring up Google Maps and have it guide me turn-by-turn in a city I'm unfamiliar with. Does he never leave his office? Does he have any kind of social life? He never needs to talk to his wife when he's at the grocery store or something?
It is unfortunate, and it's different person-to-person. I know 50+ year old people who use smartphones and find them indispensable. Even my 75-year-old mom has a smartphone (and a tablet computer), and she was never all that tech-savvy.
I wonder if someone's made a smartphone app for that: every time you press the button to turn on your phone's screen, it chirps with the Star Trek sound.
Here's the reasons my smartphone is extremely valuable to me: 1) Mobile internet access / WiFi hotspot: I can use my phone to give my laptop internet access anywhere there's cellular data service available. 2) Camera: it's not as good as a dedicated camera, but it's better than no camera at all, and is really handy for taking quick photos of things if image quality isn't paramount. Also can take reasonably good videos. You never know when you'll need to film the cops beating someone. 3) Email access: While definitely not as powerful as reading it and typing on my laptop, it's handy to be able to check my email on-the-go. 4) Voice mail: With Google Voice, I can see a transcript of people's rambling voicemail messages. I can read them in seconds, instead of having to waste time listening to them drone on and on. 5) Games: I like doing crosswords when I'm stuck somewhere and bored and have nothing better to do. The "Shortyz" app is brilliant for this. 6) Weather: My phone tells me what the temperature in my zipcode is, and can easily bring up further weather info. It's nice knowing what the high and low will be without having to watch the weather report on TV like in the bad old days, or having to get to a computer to look on a weather website. 7) Google Maps: I use this for navigation all the time. I really don't know how I ever got along without it; oh yeah, I do know, it was horrible, as I had to mess around with paper maps, stopping and asking for directions, making wrong turns, getting lost, etc. Maybe if you never leave your little town or go anywhere new, you won't see the point of this, but for those of us who travel a lot and move frequently it's a godsend. It's also amazingly useful for finding businesses, looking up their phone numbers, seeing their hours at a glance, etc. 8) Texting: For close friends this is pretty handy for staying in touch at times, though I don't use it that much. Smartphones make this better with an actual (on-screen) keyboard, instead of the shitty dumbphone method of using the 0-9 keypad to try to type messages. 9) Playing music (like a "walkman" if you remember those): I can store my entire music collection in my phone and play anything I want through headphones, like when I'm at the gym. No need for a separate iPod. You can also use internet music services like Pandora. 10) Alarm clock: I not only don't need a separate alarm clock, I can set multiple alarms for all kinds of different events. It also has a stopwatch and a countdown timer. 11) Calculator: With the "RealCalc" app, I have an on-screen calculator and looks and works a lot like my old HP-48G RPN calculator. 12) Flashlight: It's handy to have a flashlight on hand sometimes. 13) Uber/Lyft: With these apps, you can call up a ride easily, see where the car is, and pay for it all with your phone and without having to mess around with calling for a cab and talking to people.
If you don't see the need for a smartphone, you probably live an extremely simple life consisting mostly of sitting in a rocking chair on your porch and watching the world go by all day long. For those of us who aren't retired and idle, it's an enormous convenience.
The answer is pretty simple: we need to throw out the Constitution, and switch to a Parliamentary style government like every other democratic republic in the world (except a few crappy places like El Salvador and Honduras). I read a great, though lengthy, analysis of this not long ago, but can't find the link now, but the main problem with presidential republics like ours is that the President has too much power, can't be replaced easily, and worst of all is frequently at odds with the rest of the government due to the way elections work. When the Executive and Legislative Branches are in conflict, then the business of running the government screeches to a halt, and can stay that way for months or more. When Clinton and Congress got into it over the Lewinski affair, the federal government basically stopped operating for over a year. This never happens in a Parliamentary system: there, the Prime Minister is selected by the ruling party in Parliament. If there's a big problem, Parliament can be dissolved and new elections held, and the government can get back on track very quickly.
Microsoft has not contributed any useful code to the Linux kernel. Their "contribution" was drivers so that Linux could work on their hypervisor. If you're not running a MS server with MS Hyper-V, then their contributions are useless to you.
Yeah, it's nice they're playing a little more nicely with Linux now, but don't pretend their "contribution" had any altruistic component to it at all, because it didn't. It was only done because customers were demanding that they be able to run Linux virtualized on MS systems. MS did the bare minimum needed to enable this, and that's it.
most of the negative externalities on car use are experienced globally, e.g. global warming. I suspect that taxes on fuel are as much a revenue stream for governments (spent on road infrastructure and all government services, doesn't matter here) as an incentive to use less fuel.
We're probably quibbling here, but I disagree: while global warming is obviously a problem, we're only recently starting to see really bad effects from it. Cars impose a huge cost on society to support them: roads, bridges, parking lots which consume massive amounts of space, injuries and deaths from accidents, pollution (not just global-warming kind, but the more immediate kind, though this is much less of a problem now than it was with cars decades ago; you used to be able to smell car exhaust easily, now they burn much cleaner), poor health/obesity (from not walking enough), I could go on and on. Now of course, they also enable us economically in many ways, and some of these things would still be present even if everyone took public transit, but cars make things much worse. Having high fuel taxes actually makes more sense than what we do in the US: in the US, we're effectively subsidizing cars because everyone gets taxed to pay for roads and bridges, not just the car users. With high fuel tax, you shift more of the burden for the infrastructure onto the car drivers.
Encouraging people to use less fuel, with high fuel taxes, means fewer driving trips, which means less traffic which means less road wear and less need for more lanes on roads. More people will use public transit which (in theory, not necessarily in reality) means less fuel consumption overall, less traffic (lots of people can be packed into a bus or train), less need for parking lots (thus more efficient use of valuable city real estate, and higher density which again means less need for fuel or any kind of transit), etc.
Now of course, electric cars still have many of the same problems as gas cars: roads/infrastructure, parking, accidents, etc. But the pollution and economic benefits (like not needing to import so much foreign oil; maybe not a problem for Norway but it is in the US) are probably worth it, so a government exempting such vehicles from certain taxes makes sense, at least until there's sufficient adoption. The taxes can be raised later, just like how hybrid vehicles in California got a free pass on HOV lanes for a while, but eventually they stopped that because there were so many hybrids.
or higher road tolls, or something, to keep things in balance.
Yes, of course: the government has to change taxation over time to keep up with changing realities.
the country hands out money for the small, wealthy minority that can afford electric cars
You don't have to be wealthy to afford an electric car. The Nissan Leaf and Chevy Spark are not expensive. They might be more expensive (here in the US) than a comparably-appointed (read: econobox) gas car, but they're by no means expensive, compared to the price of new cars these days. I think Mitsubishi has a low-end EV too.
new taxes are likely introduced once electric cars are widespread, meaning the current policy transfers economic benefits to buyers of electric cars now.
Yes, of course, that's obvious. They keep the cars tax-free (or have a tax credit in the US) precisely to encourage people to buy these things, because they believe it's better for society overall to encourage adoption.
I just bristle at the idea of it being phrased as "the government pays you..."; that's not how tax incentives work, they work by exempting you from tax, so you might be swayed to do something you normally wouldn't. You still have to buy the car, which costs money, and in the absence of such incentive you can always avoid the tax by not buying a car at all, buying an older used car (still taxed, but less), keeping your existing car longer, moving within walking distance of work, etc.
Wrong. Who are Texas's Senators? They're Republican. Gerrymandering doesn't affect Senate races, since every voter in the state has an equal vote in that race. Same with the Governor's seat. Same with the Presidential election. Texas consistently votes Republican in all those races.
especially when it's likely that both sides are more or less equally bought by the industry...
Sorry, I haven't seen this at all. Please point to any instance where Democratic lawmakers were pushing for banning Tesla (or other automaker-direct) sales. This activity has exclusively been in Republican-controlled states, or at least by Republican politicians.
Yes, politicians on both sides are usually bought by industry interests, but not the same ones. It's only Republicans who support franchised dealerships, and also various energy industries. The Democrats are big supporters of the IP/copyright industries (Hollywood etc.). The one industry both sides probably are bought by is the big bank industry.
Basically, this amounts to a No True Scotsman fallacy. The exact same thing can be said of US elections, and people complain about this all the time: "all the choices are bad!!"
Well, show me a majority of democratic countries where the people actually have really good choices, and where the names that appear on the ballot aren't rigged in some way. What you're describing is a problem with probably most democratic nations.
Democracy isn't worth much if it only works well in some fairy-tale country that doesn't exist.
Well, anyone who isn't Islamic seems to be doing a lot better under Egypt's military rule. Islamist governments aren't known for protecting non-Muslims.
Which is worse, the tyranny of the majority, or the tyranny of an unelected cabal?
Yeah, but that's not the point. The OP said he's never replaced the drivetrain on a vehicle; I'm just pointing out that while he might not have, a lot of people do, and it's a big enough business to support a healthy market in rebuilt engines, both companies selling crate motors and companies doing engine rebuilds as a service.
Now obviously, new vs. remanufactured is an issue, as reman engines are a lot cheaper for obvious reasons. It's hard to say if we'll be seeing remanufactured battery packs like this; it's possible I suppose, since each pack is made up of thousands of cells, so if some of those cells fail badly (while others are merely degraded from age), it'd make sense to replace the worst cells and wind up with a pack with a good fraction of brand-new capacity though still less than 100%, for a much lower cost than buying an all-new pack. It's probably a bit early to tell. I have seen one website where some guy rebuilt his Toyota Prius battery pack himself; the problem wasn't the cells, it was the connections, which had corroded I believe. I think he spent maybe $10-20, plus labor, when the new pack was going to cost a few thousand. If problems like this become common, we'll probably see a lot of remanufacturing services popping up for EV battery packs.
Sorry, but the US Supreme Court has already ruled (for Fox News) that news organizations are under no obligation to print the truth, and can just make up whatever they want.
I'd be surprised if not all states collected sales tax when you registered the vehicle. I just went through this in VA. You have to pay sales tax on either the car's price paid, or its blue-book value, when you register. However, there's several exceptions, which most people probably qualify for: if you bought the car within 12 months and can prove you paid sales tax in another state, if you bought the car more than 12 months ago (and can prove it), etc. Basically, they're trying to catch people who go buy a used car from a private-party seller and then try to register it. Since private-party sales don't have sales tax collected by the seller, the DMV has to collect it there to make sure it's paid. Anyone who buys a car from a dealer won't have this problem, and anyone who's owned a car for years before bringing it into the state isn't subject to the tax either since it's assumed they paid any applicable taxes way back when they got the car.
My state university had computer labs (this was when students were now required to have their own computers, but some departments still had labs for equipment students weren't expected to have, like oscilloscopes), and that stuff sure as hell wasn't open 24 hours, since someone would probably walk away with the equipment. And the library closed before midnight too.
Slashdot Mirror
Wellm, yes I think we're in violent agreement. Those features were availble but they sucked.
Exactly; they sucked so bad that, to me, they were mostly completely unusable (esp. the camera and texting and email).
He's mid 30s, so of course spent quite a while without any of those facilities, so I guess he doesn't mind the lack as much. Social life is arranged by email. And calling home, I guess not. We survived before without cellphones. He still seems to manage fine (he's actually a she, btw).
I'm 40, and I certainly can't imagine going back to "the old way". Mid-30s is young these days, way too young to be that old-fashioned. I know people around 50 who are as reliant on their smartphones as 20-somethings.
50 years? The US, after it won WWII, took control of both Germany and Japan and reworked the governments there. Did it make them adopt presidential systems like ours? Nope, they both got parliamentary systems. Hmm.....
Wrong, and wrong.
Firefox works great. A couple years ago, it definitely had some problems, it crashed all the time on me, but lately it's been working just great, much faster and much less memory usage than Chrome. If you haven't used it recently, give it another shot.
Yes, Gnome sucks, but this has nothing to do with anyone taking over the project. The Gnome devs are the same as they've been for ages. They were on a minimalization trend when they created Gnome2; Gnome3 is just the logical progression of their efforts to remove all choice and configurability from the user.
Windows 7 isn't rocket science, can do anything you need it to do, and is solid. Windows isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Windows 7 is already obsolete and being EOLed. Choosing this for a new deployment makes no sense at all.
This is a very useful comment and a good option for some people I suppose, however I will point out that it seems to hinge on you having very good WiFi availability wherever you go. If you don't, and rely on 4G data most of the time, it won't work.
It doesn't help that at most free public WiFi hotspots, you have to screw around with opening a browser and agreeing to the terms of service every time you connect to the hotspot before you're able to actually access anything.
I'll also point out that this wasn't possible before modern smartphones, since tablets are really nothing more than big-screen smartphones without the LTE radio.
Photos on an NES would have had 2 bits per pixel,
Um, have you ever heard of exaggeration or hyperbole? Yes, I realize feature phones, as horrible as they were, made better photos than the meager color pallete of a mid-80s 8-bit console gaming system could display.
And smartphones have crappy games because the only input device is a flat sheet of glass.
Yes, compared to a PC or a real gaming console, phone games are crappy. Compared to featurephone games from 10+ years ago, they're light-years better. I can actually play my crosswords just fine on my 4-year-old smartphone (which has a smaller screen than modern phones which are really "phablets"). This simply wasn't possible on a feature phone, not only because of the lack of keyboard (there's no way in hell I'm going to screw around with entering crossword letters on a 0-9 keypad), but because of the lack of resolution and screen space, which makes it impossible to actually see the whole puzzle.
Plenty of feature phones had slide-out QWERTY keyboards.
They weren't very popular and almost no one had them. And Blackberries had a huge cost premium.
SD card and dedicated MP3 decoder chip. That's why a lot of them could play MP3 but not Vorbis.
My Android phone plays Vorbis great, which is a feature for me. But even ignoring that, those SD cards back then weren't large enough to store much. I can (and do) store my whole library on my phone now. I couldn't back then. Case closed.
A dumbphone is enough for that
Yes, but what you said was that he doesn't use a cellphone at all, smart or dumb. Obviously this is completely tangential to the whole smartphone vs. featurephone debate.
Intel also contributes a lot of money to the foundation which employs Torvalds. Microsoft does no such thing.
2. phones had cameras before smartphones.
Yes, but the cameras were almost useless. The photos they produced looked like something you'd see on an 8-bit NES.
3. feature phones sometimes came with IMAP clients (some Nokia ones)
It wasn't much use: the screens were too small to read messages, and there was no realistic way to reply to them since there was no keyboard.
5. Feature phones had J2ME, and I loaded mine up with a few games.
They were crappy games because the screens were too small and had terrible resolution.
6. um, looking outside works pretty well...
-1 Stupid. There's a reason we have weather forecasts, because you can't predict the weather by just looking outside. It might be warm and sunny now, but a storm is on its way and in 6 hours you'll be going through a flash flood.
8. older phones did this
No, they didn't. There was no keyboard. Typing messages on a 0-9 keypad is shit.
9. older phones did this
No, they didn't. They didn't have any real storage capacity or enough CPU power to decode MP3s.
10. older phones did this
I never saw any that let me set 8 different alarms if I wanted.
11. older phones had calculators
Not RPN ones with all the functions of an HP48. Anything else is basically unusable.
However a lot of the features were actually there pre-smartphone.
They were there only in completely unusable forms, because of the lack of screen space or keyboard, not to mention CPU power. It's like comparing a 2015 BMW to a car from 1895. Sure, the car from 1895 had 4 wheels, but it could only go 5 mph and didn't even have a steering wheel (they used tillers back then) or a roof.
he reasoning being "if I'm free to talk to people/do stuff, I'll be in my office and if I'm not free I won't be able to answer the phone anyway".
I guess he never travels? I don't know about you, but when I'm traveling somewhere, there's no way in hell I'm going back to paper maps and asking for directions when I can just bring up Google Maps and have it guide me turn-by-turn in a city I'm unfamiliar with. Does he never leave his office? Does he have any kind of social life? He never needs to talk to his wife when he's at the grocery store or something?
It is unfortunate, and it's different person-to-person. I know 50+ year old people who use smartphones and find them indispensable. Even my 75-year-old mom has a smartphone (and a tablet computer), and she was never all that tech-savvy.
I wonder if someone's made a smartphone app for that: every time you press the button to turn on your phone's screen, it chirps with the Star Trek sound.
Have fun living in the past.
Here's the reasons my smartphone is extremely valuable to me:
1) Mobile internet access / WiFi hotspot: I can use my phone to give my laptop internet access anywhere there's cellular data service available.
2) Camera: it's not as good as a dedicated camera, but it's better than no camera at all, and is really handy for taking quick photos of things if image quality isn't paramount. Also can take reasonably good videos. You never know when you'll need to film the cops beating someone.
3) Email access: While definitely not as powerful as reading it and typing on my laptop, it's handy to be able to check my email on-the-go.
4) Voice mail: With Google Voice, I can see a transcript of people's rambling voicemail messages. I can read them in seconds, instead of having to waste time listening to them drone on and on.
5) Games: I like doing crosswords when I'm stuck somewhere and bored and have nothing better to do. The "Shortyz" app is brilliant for this.
6) Weather: My phone tells me what the temperature in my zipcode is, and can easily bring up further weather info. It's nice knowing what the high and low will be without having to watch the weather report on TV like in the bad old days, or having to get to a computer to look on a weather website.
7) Google Maps: I use this for navigation all the time. I really don't know how I ever got along without it; oh yeah, I do know, it was horrible, as I had to mess around with paper maps, stopping and asking for directions, making wrong turns, getting lost, etc. Maybe if you never leave your little town or go anywhere new, you won't see the point of this, but for those of us who travel a lot and move frequently it's a godsend. It's also amazingly useful for finding businesses, looking up their phone numbers, seeing their hours at a glance, etc.
8) Texting: For close friends this is pretty handy for staying in touch at times, though I don't use it that much. Smartphones make this better with an actual (on-screen) keyboard, instead of the shitty dumbphone method of using the 0-9 keypad to try to type messages.
9) Playing music (like a "walkman" if you remember those): I can store my entire music collection in my phone and play anything I want through headphones, like when I'm at the gym. No need for a separate iPod. You can also use internet music services like Pandora.
10) Alarm clock: I not only don't need a separate alarm clock, I can set multiple alarms for all kinds of different events. It also has a stopwatch and a countdown timer.
11) Calculator: With the "RealCalc" app, I have an on-screen calculator and looks and works a lot like my old HP-48G RPN calculator.
12) Flashlight: It's handy to have a flashlight on hand sometimes.
13) Uber/Lyft: With these apps, you can call up a ride easily, see where the car is, and pay for it all with your phone and without having to mess around with calling for a cab and talking to people.
If you don't see the need for a smartphone, you probably live an extremely simple life consisting mostly of sitting in a rocking chair on your porch and watching the world go by all day long. For those of us who aren't retired and idle, it's an enormous convenience.
Not in a single CPU instruction it can't.
Nope. You're not a big corporation, so Citizen's United doesn't apply to you.
The answer is pretty simple: we need to throw out the Constitution, and switch to a Parliamentary style government like every other democratic republic in the world (except a few crappy places like El Salvador and Honduras). I read a great, though lengthy, analysis of this not long ago, but can't find the link now, but the main problem with presidential republics like ours is that the President has too much power, can't be replaced easily, and worst of all is frequently at odds with the rest of the government due to the way elections work. When the Executive and Legislative Branches are in conflict, then the business of running the government screeches to a halt, and can stay that way for months or more. When Clinton and Congress got into it over the Lewinski affair, the federal government basically stopped operating for over a year. This never happens in a Parliamentary system: there, the Prime Minister is selected by the ruling party in Parliament. If there's a big problem, Parliament can be dissolved and new elections held, and the government can get back on track very quickly.
I thought Rust and D were really aimed more at replacing C than C++.
Microsoft has not contributed any useful code to the Linux kernel. Their "contribution" was drivers so that Linux could work on their hypervisor. If you're not running a MS server with MS Hyper-V, then their contributions are useless to you.
Yeah, it's nice they're playing a little more nicely with Linux now, but don't pretend their "contribution" had any altruistic component to it at all, because it didn't. It was only done because customers were demanding that they be able to run Linux virtualized on MS systems. MS did the bare minimum needed to enable this, and that's it.
most of the negative externalities on car use are experienced globally, e.g. global warming. I suspect that taxes on fuel are as much a revenue stream for governments (spent on road infrastructure and all government services, doesn't matter here) as an incentive to use less fuel.
We're probably quibbling here, but I disagree: while global warming is obviously a problem, we're only recently starting to see really bad effects from it. Cars impose a huge cost on society to support them: roads, bridges, parking lots which consume massive amounts of space, injuries and deaths from accidents, pollution (not just global-warming kind, but the more immediate kind, though this is much less of a problem now than it was with cars decades ago; you used to be able to smell car exhaust easily, now they burn much cleaner), poor health/obesity (from not walking enough), I could go on and on. Now of course, they also enable us economically in many ways, and some of these things would still be present even if everyone took public transit, but cars make things much worse. Having high fuel taxes actually makes more sense than what we do in the US: in the US, we're effectively subsidizing cars because everyone gets taxed to pay for roads and bridges, not just the car users. With high fuel tax, you shift more of the burden for the infrastructure onto the car drivers.
Encouraging people to use less fuel, with high fuel taxes, means fewer driving trips, which means less traffic which means less road wear and less need for more lanes on roads. More people will use public transit which (in theory, not necessarily in reality) means less fuel consumption overall, less traffic (lots of people can be packed into a bus or train), less need for parking lots (thus more efficient use of valuable city real estate, and higher density which again means less need for fuel or any kind of transit), etc.
Now of course, electric cars still have many of the same problems as gas cars: roads/infrastructure, parking, accidents, etc. But the pollution and economic benefits (like not needing to import so much foreign oil; maybe not a problem for Norway but it is in the US) are probably worth it, so a government exempting such vehicles from certain taxes makes sense, at least until there's sufficient adoption. The taxes can be raised later, just like how hybrid vehicles in California got a free pass on HOV lanes for a while, but eventually they stopped that because there were so many hybrids.
or higher road tolls, or something, to keep things in balance.
Yes, of course: the government has to change taxation over time to keep up with changing realities.
the country hands out money for the small, wealthy minority that can afford electric cars
You don't have to be wealthy to afford an electric car. The Nissan Leaf and Chevy Spark are not expensive. They might be more expensive (here in the US) than a comparably-appointed (read: econobox) gas car, but they're by no means expensive, compared to the price of new cars these days. I think Mitsubishi has a low-end EV too.
new taxes are likely introduced once electric cars are widespread, meaning the current policy transfers economic benefits to buyers of electric cars now.
Yes, of course, that's obvious. They keep the cars tax-free (or have a tax credit in the US) precisely to encourage people to buy these things, because they believe it's better for society overall to encourage adoption.
I just bristle at the idea of it being phrased as "the government pays you..."; that's not how tax incentives work, they work by exempting you from tax, so you might be swayed to do something you normally wouldn't. You still have to buy the car, which costs money, and in the absence of such incentive you can always avoid the tax by not buying a car at all, buying an older used car (still taxed, but less), keeping your existing car longer, moving within walking distance of work, etc.
Wrong. Who are Texas's Senators? They're Republican. Gerrymandering doesn't affect Senate races, since every voter in the state has an equal vote in that race. Same with the Governor's seat. Same with the Presidential election. Texas consistently votes Republican in all those races.
especially when it's likely that both sides are more or less equally bought by the industry...
Sorry, I haven't seen this at all. Please point to any instance where Democratic lawmakers were pushing for banning Tesla (or other automaker-direct) sales. This activity has exclusively been in Republican-controlled states, or at least by Republican politicians.
Yes, politicians on both sides are usually bought by industry interests, but not the same ones. It's only Republicans who support franchised dealerships, and also various energy industries. The Democrats are big supporters of the IP/copyright industries (Hollywood etc.). The one industry both sides probably are bought by is the big bank industry.
Basically, this amounts to a No True Scotsman fallacy. The exact same thing can be said of US elections, and people complain about this all the time: "all the choices are bad!!"
Well, show me a majority of democratic countries where the people actually have really good choices, and where the names that appear on the ballot aren't rigged in some way. What you're describing is a problem with probably most democratic nations.
Democracy isn't worth much if it only works well in some fairy-tale country that doesn't exist.
Well, anyone who isn't Islamic seems to be doing a lot better under Egypt's military rule. Islamist governments aren't known for protecting non-Muslims.
Which is worse, the tyranny of the majority, or the tyranny of an unelected cabal?
Yeah, but that's not the point. The OP said he's never replaced the drivetrain on a vehicle; I'm just pointing out that while he might not have, a lot of people do, and it's a big enough business to support a healthy market in rebuilt engines, both companies selling crate motors and companies doing engine rebuilds as a service.
Now obviously, new vs. remanufactured is an issue, as reman engines are a lot cheaper for obvious reasons. It's hard to say if we'll be seeing remanufactured battery packs like this; it's possible I suppose, since each pack is made up of thousands of cells, so if some of those cells fail badly (while others are merely degraded from age), it'd make sense to replace the worst cells and wind up with a pack with a good fraction of brand-new capacity though still less than 100%, for a much lower cost than buying an all-new pack. It's probably a bit early to tell. I have seen one website where some guy rebuilt his Toyota Prius battery pack himself; the problem wasn't the cells, it was the connections, which had corroded I believe. I think he spent maybe $10-20, plus labor, when the new pack was going to cost a few thousand. If problems like this become common, we'll probably see a lot of remanufacturing services popping up for EV battery packs.
Sorry, but the US Supreme Court has already ruled (for Fox News) that news organizations are under no obligation to print the truth, and can just make up whatever they want.
I'd be surprised if not all states collected sales tax when you registered the vehicle. I just went through this in VA. You have to pay sales tax on either the car's price paid, or its blue-book value, when you register. However, there's several exceptions, which most people probably qualify for: if you bought the car within 12 months and can prove you paid sales tax in another state, if you bought the car more than 12 months ago (and can prove it), etc. Basically, they're trying to catch people who go buy a used car from a private-party seller and then try to register it. Since private-party sales don't have sales tax collected by the seller, the DMV has to collect it there to make sure it's paid. Anyone who buys a car from a dealer won't have this problem, and anyone who's owned a car for years before bringing it into the state isn't subject to the tax either since it's assumed they paid any applicable taxes way back when they got the car.
My state university had computer labs (this was when students were now required to have their own computers, but some departments still had labs for equipment students weren't expected to have, like oscilloscopes), and that stuff sure as hell wasn't open 24 hours, since someone would probably walk away with the equipment. And the library closed before midnight too.