It's not just the EU, you can see these organizations in Canada and in Japan. For example, I watch youtube channels ostensibly created to discuss Japanese Real Estate (I'm thinking about Rakumachi) which suddenly pivot to posting American right wing talking points in Japanese on their shorts channel. (Their long form RE content is usually interesting)
I don't know. Using Reddit mode like that is often a waste of time for me.
The LLM does pokes holes but often it is missing context, playing word games, or making a mountain out of a molehill. In a conversational chatbot setting it is just being contrarian, I don't find it helpful.
I prefer using the LLM to build out an idea and then see if it makes sense before asking someone else.
In the end though, I usually DO get pushback from ChatGPT and Claude. Gemini, not so much, but it is still worthwhile.
I'm glad people still care about stuff like this. It drives me insane that the simplest form-based software that I build and compile ends up being 50-100 MiB; several times video games from the 80s that I grew up with that did much more complex work, graphically and computationally, on a tenth of the space.
Alberta is imposing a charge on EV registrations, and they increased it again this year. At some point I'm hoping courts curtail their attempt at imposing gas cars but given how Canadian courts are hamstrung at obvious human rights issues in places like Quebec, I doubt they will do anything about Alberta either.
The issue is not paying our fair share, the issue is paying more than we would if we drove gas vehicles. They assume we drove X miles (I’m in Washington state) and that is not even close to what I actually drive (it’s much less, I could game it if I drove more than the C miles they compute the fee on, but I don’t need to drive that much).
Are you seriously comparing the number of people? That's silly. It's the amount paid per person. You pay so much in gas, I pay so much for my EV. For the same amount of driving, I am paying more than you do. That's the problem.
The issue is not paying our fair share, the issue is paying more than we would if we drove gas vehicles.
Perhaps in Washington State that is your issue, but that is not what we are discussing here.
The poster I was replying to lives in Alberta, and your experience in an entirely different country, in that state, has nothing to do with what they pay. Or whether what they pay is fair. And this point was not raised as a concern by the original poster.
Their only concern was paying any tax at all. Their concern was paying for road maintenance costs, period.
So about 50 cents per litre for both federal and provincial gas tax, which disappears if you charge at home. And yes, the federal tax counts, as the federal government transfers funds to the provinces from that tax, and to municipalities, and also gives additional grants to municipalities from that tax.
All which vanishes without a gas tax.
So that's around 1/3 to 1/2 of the price you pay at the pump.
Municipalities also sometimes add additional tax.
All said?
A good average for gas tank size might be 50 litres. Gas prices are typically over $1.20 / litre. So maybe $70 per fillup, which seems fair. Let's just pick $30 in tax per fillup.
I'm being generous here, as most EVs are as heavy as a truck, and cause more road damage than a gas car. And I'll also be more generous, and just say $20 per fillup in lost tax.
This figure, $20, is way below the actual lost tax. I expect this to be more like $50 lost per fillup, with the above logic (weight of vehicle, use of taxes, local taxes).
So with this extremely generous number of $20 per fillup, a yearly registration of $200, is the same as 10 tanks of gas of travel per year.
Or less than one fillup per month for a gas car.
This is obviously meant to be an average, and there are people which drive 200km per day. Others may almost never drive, but that's how averages work.
I have a very, very hard time seeing this as unfair.
I feel it is very, very low compared to what is collected from the gas tax currently.
The only other option is to have odometers inspected yearly, and a tax levied on actual distance driven. In as the tax is very very very generous, and only 40% of what I suspect the actual loss to be, very very very low at $200, few would be better off with a tax on actual distance driven.
Not to mention, a yearly inspection would have additional costs (re: taxes) for the whole administrative framework to do so.
All in all, Albertans seem to be paying far less than people driving gas cars, in tax.
But of course, you did the math before complaining about Alberta flat gas tax, right?
So if so, what is your complaint with this flat tax?
That some people might be buying at $50k CDN car, and only drive it less than 400km per month, and so unfairly pay? Because that's the equivalent tax being levied here.
I'll be very blunt. I find such complaints to be frivolous.
It will be unfair one way or the other. Washington state has a high gas tax by American standards (60 cents a gallon) but I only drive around 30 miles per week. I would need one tank of gas a month on my previous ICE car, and the gas tank took 13 gallons, so I was paying around $100/year in gas taxes. I pay $250/year surcharge for having an EV, so I’m definitely paying more (my EV is a compact rather than a sub-compact I had before, so I would lose some mileage there, although not enough to make such a huge difference).
I get it though, other people pay less. It really should be by mileage and weight, but privacy advocates blow a gasket when someone proposed to track vehicle mileage either in real-time or through yearly odometer gauge checks.
Reducing carbon emissions most certainly is a human rights issue. I absolutely can not breathe when I go to large cities. I live in a village, drive an electric, and charge it from rooftop solar.
You actually can breath in "large cities", unless you have a pre-existing health condition. Otherwise, all the people in those "large cities" would already be dead, and they'd cease being "large cities". Or at least, populated ones.
"Carbon emissions" is a human rights issue, just as 1000 other things are. Whether "reducing" carbon emissions is determined to be a right is not black and white as of yet.
Regardless, leveling a road tax has nothing to do with that. It is merely a tax to be inline with what everyone else pays. You may as well say you have a right to a free electric car too, or maybe a right to get 50% off.
You do realise the roads have to be maintained, yes? And that's what the tax on gas is for, yes? I assure you, endless environmentalists which don't drive anything at all, and see the construction of roads as an annoyance, would be upset at the idea of cars, any type of car, electric or otherwise, as bad. And are very upset at any sort of car being subsidized to increase adoption.
But of course, because you own an electric car, it's now a human rights issue that you get to pay less. Right?
I may have exaggerated. In large cities the air is significantly less comfortable to breathe.
> because you own an electric car, it's now a human rights issue that you get to pay less. Right?
No, why would you think that? It is only fair that electric car users, myself included, pay for the proportional damage and wear to the roads.
Now tell me why the polluting carbon-burning vehicles don't have a separate tax to repair the damage they do to the environment, e.g. climate change? How much would that tax cost?
I agree with you. I also need to shout at the clouds on this because the experts who make the argument for time changes drive me crazy.
I live in Calgary. At a previous grade school my daughter went to, school started early enough that she left in pitch black conditions in winter, regardless of "experts" and their precious daylight savings time.
'You need sunshine when you wake up' is really a ridiculous argument, there is no sunshine even with DST.
Get rid of it. Maybe egg the houses of the "experts" too.
(As for my kids, thankfully, they did remote school during Covid (hence late mornings) and then I moved to a place where the school starting time was later than 8.)
Yes, a lot of griping about "standard time" is really griping about winter. There are fewer hours of daylight in the winter. That's just the way it is. You can't fool time.
> The EU is destroying itself both economically and *culturally*
I understand the former. Can you clarify the details around the later? I hear this often, but the people I hear it from are not the most trustworthy or the most knowledgable.
I mean I understand the argument that Europe is in decline economically (the argument is that the price of energy goes up therefore industrial production goes down). I don't understand anyone claiming European "culture" is in decline, unless you are comparing it to some pre-world war 1 era of world-wide dominance.
Maybe public diplomacy is simply adjacent to local politics to the US. I still think this will backfire spectacularly over the medium term.
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