I think it really depends on your use case, your commute, and lifestyle.
For me an EV has been great, but it’s not my only car. I can charge at work for free, or at home with solar. Even if I’m paying 30-60 cents/kWh, it’s way cheaper per mile than my gas cars.
Maintenance… there’s none. Just consumables like washer fluid, tires, wipers.
But that said you need to be able to charge at home, and your range needs to be right sized to your commute/lifestyle. When correct it’s better than a gas cars- it’s always full and ready to go. If the range is wrong or you can’t conveniently charge it, it is a chore.
Personally an automatic transmission does nothing for me, I’ll take the unrelenting acceleration of the EV over that any day. But a 6spd is more fun!
> The tax savings were relatively small for many families, however. The middle fifth of earners got about a $780 tax cut last year on average, according to the Tax Policy Center.
> The top 20 percent of earners received more than 60 percent of the total tax savings, according to the Tax Policy Center; the top 1 percent received nearly 17 percent of the total benefit, and got an average tax cut of more than $30,000. And that’s not even factoring in the law’s huge cut to corporate taxes, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy households that own the most stock.
Don’t be part of the problem Marcus. The reality is cutting taxes for the poor by $2/day, for the rich by $80/day, and telling everyone they got a tax break with a straight face… while you simultaneously cut services, issue policies that cause inflation, and levy taxes domestically on the poor through tariffs is the republican way!
> The tax savings were relatively small for many families, however. The middle fifth of earners got about a $780 tax cut last year on average, according to the Tax Policy Center.
If you take someone who pays a small amount of taxes (the middle fifth paid $2170 in taxes in 2017), and give them a big tax cut ($780 in savings would mean they got a ~30% cut), the number is still small. Pretending that this is insignificant is just goofy.
> The top 20 percent of earners received more than 60 percent of the total tax savings.
People who pay the most taxes get the most out of tax cuts? Scandalous! Income taxes paid by quintile:
Lowest and fourth got a tax increase. Middle class got a minor tax cut, the middle-upper class got a decent cut, and the upper class got a large cut.
It's also worth noting that the cut in question also had temporary provisions that expired, causing a tax increase for nearly all brackets except the upper class.
There has also been a massive cut in social services, which primarily affect the lowest/fourth brackets, which means they're paying more taxes for fewer services.
It's hard to interpret that "tax cut" in a way that doesn't scream "we're increasing taxes on most, and cutting services, to give the wealthy a tax cut".
It’s your link buddy, just quoting your own source.
$780 is insignificant.
Tax policy is written by humans, and they can do what they like with it. If you want to cut taxes for the poor, you do. If you want to cut taxes for the ultra wealthy, but make sure the statistics say poor people got a tax cut, you can do that too.
If you paid 1M in taxes, a 30% cut is 300k, and if you paid 1k it’s $300. One person will buy some bitcoin or a Porsche, the other will be lucky to buy some gas and groceries.
Both got a 30% tax cut, but it would be goofy to claim they have equivalent value.
If you wanted to be an honest person, maybe you correct the poster that there were tax cuts for the poor, but also point out that the cuts heavily favored the wealthy. Which by the way, was their argument.
Yeah, just stating your opinion isn't an argument.
> Tax policy is written by humans, and they can do what they like with it.
Insightful!
> If you want to cut taxes for the poor, you do.
What taxes? The poor pay negative income taxes. Did you read the post you're responding to?
> If you want to cut taxes for the ultra wealthy, but make sure the statistics say poor people got a tax cut, you can do that too.
I would love for the poor to pay zero taxes. It would be an improvement over the amount they "pay" now!
> If you paid 1M in taxes, a 30% cut is 300k, and if you paid 1k it’s $300. One person will buy some bitcoin or a Porsche, the other will be lucky to buy some gas and groceries.
Okay.
> If you wanted to be an honest person
You don't have to seethe, you know. You can be wrong without letting everyone know that you're miserable and angry about an internet post.
> ... maybe you correct the poster that there were tax cuts for the poor, but also point out that the cuts heavily favored the wealthy. Which by the way, was their argument.
You're almost caught up! Now that argument was I making in response? If you tried to understand instead of trying to misunderstand (or worse, just vomiting angry words without any substance to them), you might learn something!
The USA has no negative income tax. There are programs like the EITC which provide benefits to the poor and can be larger than their tax burden depending on the specific circumstances.
The EITC was initially signed into law by Ford (R) and expanded by Reagan (R). Regan apparently called it "the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress".
I'm sure you knew all this, so thanks for being honest in this post about the fact that you would like to dismantle this particular social safety net.
Seething comment sounds like projection btw, I'm not mad. The whole point of HN is to have the discussion expand in detail. Seems like it's working:
- Someone generalized
- You called them a liar
- We found out the generalization wasn't strictly correct, but basically true in spirit: the wealthy received the majority of the benefit, the poor got a small token for the sake of statistics / sound bytes.
They're called refundable tax credits. They result in people being net recipients of the income tax after refunds are paid out. This is a negative income tax.
> Someone generalized - You called them a liar
They didn't "generalize", they made a claim which is literally and undeniably untrue. That is a lie.
> We found out the generalization wasn't strictly correct, but basically true in spirit.
We found that the people he claimed didn't get a tax cut actually got a 30% tax cut. That's an obvious, blatant lie.
How much extra do you need? Enough that a pilot/crew doing their job properly will never run out of fuel and crash.
So yes they will do an "investigation". It's not a criminal investigation. It's to understand the circumstances, the choices, the procedures, and the execution that ended with a plane dangerously close to running out of fuel.
This will determine if there were mistakes made, or the reserve formula needs to be adjusted, or both.
Don't tell me about cost, just stop. Let MAGA-Air accept some plane deaths to have cheap fares.
I tried to buy a Prusa. Even after I paid them they couldn’t tell me when the order would ship or be delivered.
Instead they pointed me at some webpage with a lead time table? Pretty sure the table also changed/slipped over the eight days I waited for them to get their act together.
If someone from Prusa is reading this: I don’t want to hear about your internal manufacturing lead times. Especially if they’re going to slip. Commit to a ship date you know you can meet and deliver.
When I found out that Prusa had absolutely no clue what the ship date would be, I cancelled my order and went with Bambu.
Say it ain’t so- a right winger who is either intentionally lying or can’t do basic math.
Will it be someone else’s fault? Will they admit their mistakes and change their opinions? Or will they brush aside their published reasoning and say it doesn’t change anything. Check back at 11.
That's not what the article is claiming. According to TFA, GenAI/agents will be used to assist operators with data interpretation. It will increase grid efficiency only in the sense that it may help surface anomalies faster for the people managing the grid.
AI is demonstrably not reliable. It cannot be made reliable in the long run either, and it can be poisoned. You must treat AI like its a convincing but ultimately lying deceitful individual, which negates the entire purpose of using AI for any purpose. You have to retain the domain knowledge capable of checking whether its correct or not, so it can't replace; but that is the profit objective that is happening with regulatory failing to act appropriately to everyone's detriment.
The electric grid falls into a special class of risk that is both life sustaining and life critical for the entire pool of residents in the affected area.
Put as simple as it comes, mistakes cost lives, and there will be mistakes if AI is involved.
It doesn't matter how efficient it might make the grid. You can get 100% efficiency for a short time while wiping out the human race.
What happens when the analysis it makes says a catrastrophic failure is occurring, and its been right the past N times for little things, but not about that and its not obvious, and you can't wait. Cascade failure.
You have an artificial thing that is not reliable giving you as the operator managing a portion of the grid false information, that leads to loss of life in a way where there can be no accountability. You integrate it, and you can't remove it when it fails.
You can't hold AI accountable for the deaths of your loved ones because a surgery ward went dark during their surgery at the worst possible time.
You can't hold AI accountable for the loss of your things, or family members when a water pump fails from lack of power in the middle of a fire and they couldn't get out.
You can't hold AI accountable for causing a nuclear disaster.
The things you are saying is what blind complacent people say that lack any true comprehension of the dangers involved.
If you are familiar with Atlas Shrugged, and I'm loathe to mention this because its quite bad but accurate in this case; think of the decision-making of this fictional story leading up to the Taggart-tunnel collapse disaster. Its at the level AI would make, and what people who follow AI blindly would make.
They don't question the consequences, or the risk in any measured way, because they can't, and the entire purpose of having AI there in the first place is to replace those people managing the grid to lower cost in labor but this raises cost in lives.
Much of the grid equipment cannot be easily replaced. Imagine if AI convinces a person managing it that a line is at a level that its not, the equipment doesn't fail immediately but it does fail, and it can't be replaced in a timely fashion.
What happens when power and the related logistics goes out for more than 3 days, and people have no food, but plenty of guns.
Doing this integration, creates a disaster just waiting for the right circumstances to happen. If flipping the wrong switch in Arizona shut down power to California for 4 days a few years ago, imagine the damage that could be caused.
Imagine it forces a Nuclear Power Plant to shut down. Those plants can't just be turned right back on. Xenon is a real problem.
It takes a bare minimum of 3 days before they can do anything, and if they don't wait because an AI told them so, you get a situation just like Chernobyl.
From what I've heard and read of Chernobyl, they were told they had to turn the reactor back on right after shutdown to run an experiment from the higher ups, and they couldn't question or stop turning it back on. Xenon 135 is formed as a byproduct and absorbs neutrons better than control rods preventing startup in any controlled way. There's a sharp transition as its burned off in startup, and the wait period is entirely based on the halflife of Xe to Iodine 136 (iirc) getting to safe levels to maintain a controlled startup (not-meltdown). You have objective reality, and you have delusion/hallucination. The former always wins and in complex artifacts it has a high chance of causing death or adverse effects when discounted.
No sane person wants AI anywhere near the grid. Its not just transmission lines, its also nuclear power plants, and other facilities that require power and objective measures for safe operations.
Many of the analysis and actions done today keep skills fresh for those operators. As well, you don't want to incentivize the businesses involved hiring low-IQ people (83 or less) for those positions because they believe they can increase profit with AI watching over them. There may be no clear differentiable way showing they can do the job correctly while AI is present (as many in Academia are finding out with the cheating scandals).
Only a fool would want AI anywhere near these safety-critical professions.
Climate change is the source of negativity? In the 90s there was the hole in the ozone layer. Instead of acting like the slack jawed idiots in the current administration and basically saying “LOL FUCK YOU NERDS”, we banned CFCs.
Nothing you listed actually helps most people.
AI? Another way for untalented people to fake it and profit.
Self Driving Car*. Waymo, everything else is trash. Mostly putting a human out of a job.
Access to space? Great for academics and strategic defense. Maybe the common man will get some transport benefit out of it? Not yet.
Autonomous drones? So we can kill each other better. Oh and the drone shows, definitely worth it.
Flying cars? Ha. Hahaha. Ok. A trained pilot got crashed into while landing at an airport, this year. It’s not going to be a thing without being fully autonomous. But killing people probably makes more money.
You're talking pragmatically like someone who's not excited about the future. Of course you can find problems with any technology if you feel negative about it. These things aren't exciting because they clearly meet some need with no harmful side effects but because they leave a wide open future of unknown possibilities.
Yes autonomy is how modern flying cars are expected to be controlled. That's one of the enabling technologies, that you could imagine (if you're excited about the future) leads to a Jetsons style streams of cars in the sky where it's too complex for humans to pilot them directly.
> AI? Another way for untalented people to fake it and profit.
You could also call it another way for untalented people to provide value to society. You want to gatekeep productive work to some elites who "deserve" to profit from it even if that means limiting the amount of good it can do to everyone. You want to stop the world getting better? Why? To protect "talented" people's rent-seeking?
Each year for the past few decades during the Southern Hemisphere spring, chemical reactions involving chlorine and bromine cause ozone in the southern polar region to be destroyed rapidly and severely. This depleted region is known as the “ozone hole”
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