And the landfills.

US drivers effectively indirectly subsidize the transportation industry through their gas purchases, and get their shocks and tires prematurely worn out as thanks.

Which indirectsly subsidizes the delivery of all the stuff that the drivers buy.

I stand corrected. However, does gas tax and VED revenue match or exceed road construction and maintenance expenditure in the UK?

In UK, the gas taxes pay for the roads. In the USA, gas taxes cover less than half, with the rest coming out of general taxes. And the US has about four times the length of road per capita than the UK does. It is not that UK gas taxes are low, it is that US separates tax source from target to avoid discouraging driving. Remember, what's good for GM is good for America.

The US dollar has value because that is what you need to pay your taxes. Everybody needs to pay their taxes, so they need the money. There is demand, so there is a value.

Should I halt work on the next version for a month to do custom work for this important customer?

Should I save time by making the system very inflexible in this regard to get it out the door for a narrow market at the expense of a wider market later?

Should I follow the spec that management and business analysts wrote even though it seems wrong, or go up the chain or to the customer and likely fix or rewrite the spec?

These are the kind of business decisions I used to find myself making. In most cases it turned out that I made the correct decision in hindsight, but I got a lot of fighting from management in the process about that not being my job, even though there was nobody else competent to do it.

The biggest problem I run into is that the management assumes that the engineers are completely unable to talk to customers and look at outside non-technical specifications. I have found that engineers tend to be better at it than managers and all but the best business analysts.

Because shit won't break trying to upgrade from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008?

1. Buy one of several sub-$2000 electric mopeds on the market.
2. Put a Tesla badge on it.
3. ????
4. Profit

They do already. Gas taxes provide less than 50% of the road maintenance cost in the US. The rest comes from general taxes, which the cyclists and pedestrians are paying to subsidize the drivers.

Gas taxes go to roads, and they cover less than half of the road budget.

It is the taxpayers' money to begin with.

Where do you think the shortfall is going to come from? Either reduced services to taxpayers or higher fees (e.g. speed traps, bogus parking tickets, etc.).

Oh, right. They are too cheap and reliable. We need big business to be able to make money on bicycles, otherwise they are just toys.

That does not address the issue they are trying to address here.

Also, there are so many people using addresses in 10.0.0.0/8 but not in 10.0.0.0/12 that you would have to give years lead time to let them get that changed. May as well go to IPv6.

It is not okay for a state to tell an individual person who he must do business with.

It is okay for the state that sanctions the legal constructs called "corporations" to tell those corporations who they must do business with.

NYC sucks because the downtown area is so big and expensive that residential areas (e.g. neighborhoods with reasonably well packed houses with small yards) are too far from the city center. Smaller cities (100,000-500,000) are great. The downtown areas are small, and surrounded by reasonably priced houses. I live in a house, and can walk to restaurants and grocery stores out in my neighborhood, and ride a bike downtown in 10 minutes, or get a bus in 20. It isn't too crowded, it doesn't smell, and it is not expensive.

The problem is that most of the tech companies want to have spiffy new building out in the strips at the outer ends of the suburbs, so there are a ton of people driving out of the city every day while half the buildings downtown are empty. The 1%ers like it becaues they live even further out in mansions in huge sprawling developments, but it sucks for those of us who need a car to drive 20mph on the expressway for an hour a day.