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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1366485)	7/12/2022 7:43:52 PM
From: Doren	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573927

> GAS TAXES Just for the sake of debate: First of all my carbon footprint is smaller than anyone I know. Has been for 5 decades. However, again for the sake of debate 1) gas taxes hurt the poor - gas taxes are regressive rich people couldn't care less. What's $10 gas for a guy makin' $500/hr? I work for rich people. They drive SUVs and don't give a shit. Gas taxes DO HURT a Mexican dad droppin' off his kid in the only vehicle he could afford which is a gas hog, on his way to a low paying drywaller job that used to be a union job until immigrants came and worked for less and destroyed the drywall union. And remember registering that car and the taxes on when he bought it hurt like shit too. White collar people can take mass transit. Blue collar people cannot haul their ladders and toolboxes onto busses. They cannot recharge their car in the desert where they are fixing the plumbing in someone's vacation home. They cannot haul their janitor gear onto a train that never arrives at the white collar home they clean. Busses suck. Trains to white collar suburbs are great. White collar mass transit is subsidized about 15 times as much as inner city mass transit. My experience with mass transit is terrible. I ride a bike... I'll not go into detail how shitty I was treated trying to do good using the red line in LA with my bike. 2) California has $100,000,000,000 surplus... a HUNDRED BILLION. They can't give us a break? The roads in my city look like goat trails. I just paid $700 to fix my front end damaged by potholes and a turn around that I couldn't see because some bureaucrat didn't want to put reflectors on it. My neighbors and I kept putting up cones, they took them down, we put them back up, but after a few months and hundreds of other people hitting it they painted it yellow... half assed if you ask me but better than nothing. 3) the roads are designed by idiots... most traffic jams could be easily fixed with better signage and preventing people from passing on exit lanes. See Richard Ankrom who "fixed" a sign in LA that was wrong for decades. Friend of mine, he was just angry because that friggin sign had been causing traffic jams for DECADES. He embarrassed the shit out of Caltrans. BUT there are still multiple signs that are wrong in all California cities. Still causing angry, snarling, traffic jams with millions of cars doing nothing but stop and go for hours belching pollution worse that if they just did speed limit all the way home. Most traffic tickets are given in the fast lane. Most accidents happen in the slow lanes... ever known anyone who got a ticket for tail gaiting? Tail gating is the #1 cause of accidents and accidents cause massive traffic jams. Some common, non-white collar, sense would go a long way making our lives easier, using less gas, and belching less pollution and CO2. Please do not lecture me that more people will drive more if we fix the roads. Poor people have no choice, rich people in luxury cars don't care in their wombs with nice radios, TVs and internet. And nobody thinks "Lets go get in a traffic jam for fun!"

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1366485)	7/12/2022 10:11:44 PM
From: Wharf Rat	2 Recommendations Recommended By Doren sylvester80 Respond to of 1573927

'Why so generous?': Inside Italy's scheme offering huge subsidies towards low-carbon eco-homes 21 October 2021 at 11:17pm When the UK government announced this week it would be giving grants of £5,000 to up to 90,000 homes towards replacing gas boilers with heat pumps, it was widely criticised as being nothing like enough. Expensive as the promise may be, it is dwarfed by what’s being offered elsewhere, and nowhere more so than Italy, which is currently giving Europe’s most generous subsidies to convert homes into low-carbon eco-homes. If you live in Italy and want to insulate walls and windows and install a heat pump boiler or solar panels, the government will pay you 110% of the cost. Yes, you read that right. All of it and then 10% on top, to be offset against your taxes over the next 5 years, up to a maximum of €100,000 per home. It is an enormous offer that is being taken up by huge numbers, leading the government in Rome to claim that in the first eight months of this year they have reduced emissions of CO2 from home heating by as much as they did in the last 20 years. The cost in 2021? A cool €9 billion. Why so ambitious? They believe that it is the only way to convince people to get work done on their homes. Paying a proportion of the cost just doesn’t work. Most people either can’t afford to pay the rest, or have other more urgent priorities. And if, for example, the residents of a block of flats would like to get insulation or solar panels installed, it only takes one to say “no, I don’t have the money” and the whole thing stalls. Why so generous? Do they really need to over-offer not just 100% but a whopping 110%? Again, it is all about persuading people there is no downside. The money comes back through one’s taxes over 5 years but has to be paid upfront. These tax credits – a guaranteed stream of money from the government – are very attractive to financial institutions, but at a price. People are selling their credits to, say, a bank at a discount of 10% or so, thus breaking even but no longer having to put any money upfront.The big downside seems to be overheating the building industry with so many trying to take advantage of this offer before it expires in a year or two’s time (an end date is still up in the air). What began as an effort to stimulate a moribund building industry, is turning into a scramble for labour and materials, inevitably pushing up prices. As an economic stimulus, post-pandemic, the 110% super-bonus is proving pretty effective, with some of the money coming from EU stimulus funds, with Brussels approval. The plan is likely to be extended into the future to give more people a chance to take advantage, but it seems the super generous terms may be scaled back towards 75-80% of the total cost. Even if that is how things eventually pan-out, the scheme will remain much more generous and ambitious than anything on offer in the UK. itv.com