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Submission + - 'Tunnel Girl' granted permit to continue digging bunker under her Virginia home (foxnews.com)

schwit1 writes: The green light has been granted to a woman who went viral for digging a massive tunnel under her home.

"Kala," the supposed name of the homeowner and creator of the TikTok account @engineer.everything, garnered 7.7 million views as she documented herself digging a bunker under her home in Herndon, Virginia.

Known on social media as "Tunnel Girl," Kala posted a video on Monday announcing that her plans had been approved after paying a $2,000 fee. Her project had been halted in 2024 due to potential building violations.

Comment Different rules by vehicle type? (Score 2) 63

Why not tax emissions (highly), and let the market work out where that pollution should come from. We've already had accurate emissions measurement equipment for years.

Once a year you get your car exhaust measured (as you already doing most states for purposes of inspection), multiply that by the change in odometer, and multiply that by the emissions tax rate.

EVs would pay a tax of zero, which would encourage their adoption. "But power plants pollute!" you might say. That's true, but power plants are already required to buy pollution credits very similar to what I describe above. This seems like an unobtrusive tax, simple, easy for an individual to optimize, and benefits the environment to boot.

Comment A different way to reduce particulate emissions (Score 1) 169

Why not simply raise gas tax even higher? At some point, employers will have to pay employees so much extra to commute to work that they will adopt work-at-home policies for day to day stuff, and require in-person work for only the most important things.

This is a morally sound policy as well, because when you pollute by burning gas, you are creating externalities - impacting the health of others who have nothing to do with the particular company or their employees. This is exactly the sort of thing that should be heavily taxed. Determining what that tax rate should be is difficult, so...

Eliminate fixed gas taxes. Instead, auction off pollution licenses and require anyone buying gas to also buy an identical number of pollution licenses. Have a fixed number of such licenses available, traded on a marketplace. (Practically speaking, gas companies could buy the licenses and bundle them with the gas sold, so consumers would never have to deal with the minutiae.)

At some point, buying that Tesla becomes much cheaper than filling your car with $20/gallon gasoline. Then, the only thing decided by politics is how many pollution licenses to sell each year (how much pollution are we willing to tolerate.) Even that could be decided by a sort-of vote where you take the median (not mean) number that voters support. Environmentalists could make a case for a very low number, industrialists could advocate a high number, but I suspect the median (not mean!) would result in a very tolerable amount of pollution.

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