"Record" as in your odometer read 37K miles at your last MOT, and it now reads 45K miles, so your road tax is based on 8K miles driven in the last year. No tracking needed, so the tinfoil hats can stay off.

The thing is, there's a really simple solution to illegal economic migration. All you need to do is make it a strict liability felony with a punishment of 5 years jail time to employ someone who doesn't have the right to work in the USA. Blam! in one go, there are now no jobs for illegal immigrants, and the pull factor for economic migrants has just vanished.

Of course, there are too many people making too much profit employing illegal immigrants on penury wages for this to fly, but you have to ask why the immediate kneejerk response is "Build more walls!" and "Lock people up!" rather than doing something that might actually fix the problem.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Alternative alternative solution: don't attempt to defraud the government?

If I defraud my neighbour our of $10K, then there will be a police investigation and I'll be sent to jail if convicted. If I defraud the government out of $1M, then I'll almost certainly not be caught and if I am I'll probably get off with a fine.

Why should people who defraud the government get off more lightly than any other fraudsters?

I disagree slightly on the "authors don't owe fans anything". For standalone novels or more open-ended series, I'd agree - if Ian Rankin decides he's fed up with Rebus and doesn't want to release any more Rebus books, that's fine.

I think the exception is where the author released a book that is part of a clearly-defined series, but then doesn't follow up. In particular, releasing "Book! Part 1 of the Wossname trilogy!" and then failing to write book 2 (or worse, book 3) is just false advertising.

Oh bollocks. The global market for cancer treatments is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year, far far more than the total revenue of even the largest pharma company. You don't think that if any of them had the chance to increase their earnings tenfold while stuffing over their competitors they wouldn't do it?

The reason there's no cure for cancer is (a) it isn't one disease, it's hundreds, and (b) it's really really f***king hard to treat as you're trying to kill some of your cells while not killing your other cells which are extremely similar but doing useful things.

If the bank has had poor financial performance (let alone had major failings in internal risk management), then why was the chairman eligible for any share award in the first place?

I have no problem with the C-suite being rewarded for outstanding performance, but if your company is doing significantly worse than expected under your watch then why should you get getting any extra reward over your base salary? There's definitely a double standard here where is the company does well then the C-suite expect bonuses as a result, but if it tanks then they still expect bonuses for "shepherding the company through difficult times" or some such crap. Bonuses and share awards are meant to align the interests of the management with the interests of the shareholders, so if the shareholders are suffering the board and management team should be suffering as well.

There's rules you have to follow. In particular, as this drug is a "monoclonal antibody" (or "mab") the drug name has to end in "mab". It also has to be sufficiently distinct from all of the other "mab" drugs on the market to reduce the chance of someone getting the wrong one by mistake. Once you factor both of those in you end up with weird names.

Bollocks. A cure for Alzheimer's would make an absolute ton of money. You'd easily be able to charge more than $100K for it. There's 6.5 million Alzheimer's patients in the USA alone - that's 650 billion dollars in sales right there. Pfizer's annual revenue last year was ~$40Bn. Do you really think they'd say "Nah, I know this one drug would bring in more than ten year's total profits for the biggest pharma company in the world, but cures don't make money so we won't bother"?

The reason there's no cure for Alzheimer's is that nobody really knows what causes it.

And what proportion of the general population could tell you what version of Windows that they were on now? And what proportion of "How to.." websites for Windows mention at any point which version they are talking about?

It's more onerous because there's no simple way to refer to *which* version of Windows 10 you are talking about. For Debian, you can say "In Buster you did XXXX, but in Stretch you need to do YYYY". In MacOS you can say "If you're running Big Sur, then XXXX, but in Catalina it's YYYY". The vast majority of people running Linux or MacOS have at least some idea which version they are running. Off the top of your head, do you know which version of Windows 10 you are running? If an article about Windows was posed 6 months ago, was it about the version that you were running or a different version? No way to tell: they are all called Windows 10.

The FDA approved the drug, but required Biogen to carry out a Phase 4 study to see if it actually works (they gave Biogen far far too long to carry out that study, but that's a different story).

So, there's a simple solution grounded in consumer law: if you buy something, and it doesn't do what you promised it would, you can get a refund.

Approve the drug, require a comprehensive Phase 4 trial, and require Biogen to provide a full refund unless the Phase 4 trial conclusively proves that it works.

Turning CO2 back into carbon costs more energy than you got from burning the carbon in the first place.

Keep seeing this misunderstanding of corporate taxation. Corporate taxes are paid on profits, not on income. If youâ(TM)re not profitable (and Spotify currently is not) then you pay no corporation tax. Nada, zip, zilch. It doesnâ(TM)t matter how high or low corporation tax is, it will never cause a business to fail. In addition, people seem to have this idea that the corporate response to a raised tax rate will be to be raise prices. Economics 101: the corporation is already charging as much as they possibly can. If you tax Apple more, then Apple will make a smaller profit and will have less money for investment or to return to shareholders, but the price of an iPhone will not go up. If they could make more money by charging more for iPhones then they already would.