Fees on one time services are not what this is targeting. This legislation is not meant to address that, and wouldn't apply to that.
They are going after recurring billing (that's what the headline means by "subscription"). It mentions things like gyms, online subscriptions etc.
It would be pretty wild if they had managed to get service fees at restaurants when they were not at all targeting service fees, restaurants or one time in person purchases.
A good tell that someone is utterly full of shit on Canadian healthcare is that they generalize all of Canada.
“Canadian health care” is not a thing. Each province administers its own completely independent system.
Someone on PEI is in a healthcare system that has as much to do with Alberta’s healthcare system as it does their neighbours in Maine. As a result, anyone referencing Canadian healthcare is talking about a dozen or so unrelated systems that do things very differently. The closest it comes is that there are interprovincial billing systems so you don’t have to do the paperwork to get covered for an urgent visit out of province, and not all provinces are signed on.
You can safely dismiss anyone that has reduced that complexity, or is completely ignorant of it. It’s a great way to tell when a foreigner is spouting talking points they picked up from an unreliable source and did not do even a minimal fact check on. “Canadian health care” as it is talked about in the US media is frequently fiction for propaganda purposes.
Canadians almost always talk about problems within a province. What's happening in the Maritimes has nothing to do with BC.
The feds set a minimum standard for a province to qualify for federal funding, and that's about the limit of their influence.
No idea if the rest of his statement is poorly sourced propaganda as the first sentence.
Which is why I'm advocating for them to get built.
I live in a far less wealthy place than you and it isn't an issue here. Nepal has it figured out, so does China.
Sounds like California should work on catching up to Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or China, or any of the many other places that have this problem solved.
Sounds like lack of a good network of fast chargers is a real issue for you. I can understand why you're so frustrated.
If you have to drive 20 minutes to find one in a tier 1 city, you are living in a country that is pretty backwards by modern standards.
In my small rural Canadian town I have to drive farther to get to a gas station than I do to get to a high speed charger. I've also never been skunked on getting a charger. My math works fine here. It works fine in China, and Nepal too. Is Boston still not electrified? Because lack of a grid would be constraint, but otherwise its a very easy problem to solve.
I feel bad that it is made to be so hard for you to do what many, many millions of people around the world are able to manage with ease.
Sounds like my suggestion to use a high speed public charger is perfect for you since that's a solution that scales and makes it so people that don't have a garage can use EVs and keep their windows closed at night.
We could just look at countries like Norway where the internal combustion car is extinct and see how they do it. If you are going to nitpick that Norway has a lot of houses and is rich enough to install chargers in every apartment parking spot, then we can look at Hong Kong, or China, or Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or any of the countries that have mass EV adoption and a variety of conditions including incredible density.
These are solved problems. It is a case of social and political will (or lack thereof) at this point.
> Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week?
Yes. Have you not parked your car in a single place for longer than 30 minutes besides your house? It doesn't have to be a grocery store. It can be literally anywhere that you drive your car that has a power line (its actually pretty hard to find a place where this isn't true). The regional district parks near me offer free 7kw chargers for up to 2 hours. Because our province is a net overproducer of green energy, this is very cheap for the district. Never once had an issue getting a spot. My gym has them too, all new hotels in the province, the hospital, banks, gas stations, Costco, etc. Again, this is all in a small rural Canadian town. It really is a matter of will.
> Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
Only in luddite and backward countries. Most modern, and even less developed countries have figured out how to do this without "getting stupid".
> What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
It looks like a problem that a huge number of countries consider to be solved.
Why are people so convinced that we need an EV charger per car at every home?
We need enough high speed chargers in the right places. The average American drives 37 miles per day. That pencils out to less than 30 minutes of charging per week using current high speed standards (which will continue to drop). Your friend could take their car at 20% if they knew that they could charge quickly at their destination.
We don't need a fast charger for every car anymore than we need a gas pump for every car. When I got my EV, I thought I would need to hire an electrician to put in a fast charger. After a week of just running the 1.5 kw slow charger I realized that was fine. Even using just that charger I am able to get 43 miles of range on my 10 hour overnight charge in an SUV. If you told me I was never allowed to charge at home, I would still use an EV. Parking at the charger while I shop once a week is fine. Most people with EVs that I talk to have the same feeling. Charger anxiety ends up being a non issue except for outliers that drive a lot, or in bursty patterns.
We need to have enough high speed chargers in spots where people spend at least 30 minutes per week, and that will cover the huge majority of driving.
Put high speed chargers at malls, grocery store and workplaces and it doesn't matter if you have a charger at home, you can just charge when your car is parked away from home.
I'm not even sure it's that big of a buildout that's needed. Where I am, there are far more public chargers (level 2 or better) than gas pumps. If I want to charge my car while I'm out and about, its pretty hard to find a commercial district where I would have to be more than 2 blocks from a charger (and I live in rural Canada).
This feels like a political problem (and maybe consumer perception) a lot more than an intractable one.
He doesn't have a negative bias towards tech if you pay attention. He often talks about how he personally uses AI.
He has a negative take on a lot of the business practices around AI and tech. While he is consistently harsh on that front, I don't find it to be weakly supported at all, especially when you realize his criticism is focused on business and implementation, not the tech.
They are doing incredible things with world models, and have an economy that really could do incredible things with robots wired to effective world models.
It won't surprise me at all if in 10 years LLMs are less of a big deal than world models
A country is not tied to ethnicity but this thread is about how German is an ethnicity.
I’ve heard plenty of arguments about the German Volk as a distinct entity.
The argument was pretty decisively lost according to my grandfather.
Tell me, where does my Jewish German heritage fit in to Germany as an ethnicity? For some reason they didn’t feel very German when they left despite meeting all the qualifications…
Who cares if most people in the US had ancestors that came from somewhere else? My English ancestors have precisely no bearing on the way I live my life any more than my German, Dutch or Polish (well, they came from what is now Poland, but would never have thought of themselves as polish). The child of immigrants in Germany is going to be far more German than I am despite my ancestry.
American culture is undeniably real. American values and beliefs likewise.
Is the only thing that decides an ethnicity how far back your ancestors have been procreating within a country’s current borders?
Culture and values is a better delineator, and it is pretty undeniable that America has a distinct culture and value set.
Your argument is that a group of independent states spanning a huge part of a continent that banded together into a country in the 1800s forms a country that is also an ethnicity, but that a group of independent states spanning a huge part of a continent that banded together even longer ago is not a country that is also an ethnicity?
If German is an ethnicity, I don't see why the US, which is older than the German Confederation (let alone the subsequent countries that have existed since then on that same land) has a distinct culture and set of shared values, cannot be.
They are going after recurring billing (that's what the headline means by "subscription"). It mentions things like gyms, online subscriptions etc.
It would be pretty wild if they had managed to get service fees at restaurants when they were not at all targeting service fees, restaurants or one time in person purchases.