jrs100000

Sales taxes, including VAT, are inherently regressive. Normally things like unprocessed food are exempted to minimize impact, but it does still affect the poor more than the rich. Why keep them? They are easy to collect, hard to avoid and can bring in lots of revenue without people noticing or complaining.

Im going to guess its a proportional cost issue. Drivers take up a much larger percentage of the cost of shipping a ton of cargo by truck that the cost a human engineer on a train.

Cause the FBI are the keystone cops of the intelligence world. Theres a reason they spun off a whole new agency rather than just give the FBI unlimited resources for the war on terror.

Also the government is not all one monolithic entity. Just because the NSA has a backdoor doesnt mean theyll hand that information out to anyone who asks. Maybe if the CIA fills out a ton of paperwork, but if its the FBI theyll laugh in their faces and tell them the data doesnt exist.

Ok, so if the only change is that RF radiation is not emitted…I guess blackbody radiation breaks, Earth becomes uninhabitable and everyone dies. Not sure exactly how long it would take, maybe weeks or months? Maybe years?

Radio waves are a pretty big part of the EM spectrum. Do you mean like sudden intense jamming from outer space, or like physics just stops suddenly?

If its the former, its going to depend on what parts of the spectrum are being jammed, but most modern militaries are actually pretty prepared for radio jamming and have alternate systems for most critical applications. The scenario is fairly similar to the EMP saturated environment expected in a nuclear war. The military has spent a lot of time and money preparing to moderate the worst of those effects. Civilian systems would not handle things very well at all. Expect lots of catastrophic cascading failures and instances of permanent damage.

If its the later, all bets are off any time physics breaks.

Edit: thinking about it a little more, I think the biggest risk would be that a nuclear submarine might in interpret sudden intense jamming as evidence that a nuclear war had in fact occurred and decide to fire its missiles when it was unable to contact anyone on any frequency.

Its not really the airlines in charge on this one. Maintaining a strong domestic aviation industry is an absolutely critical national security concern for…well, every industrialized country on the planet. At a minimum they want a pool of pilots and mechanics that could be drawn from in the event of war. For wealthier countries, the industrial capacity to build and maintain aircraft is vital to maintain an independent defense posture.

Its just unrealistic to use anything else at the moment. Current batteries are only at like 250 wh per kg while av-gas sits at around 12,000. And liquid fuel gets lighter as it is consumed. This is not an impossible hurdle for something like a car, where fuel is a tiny fraction of total weight, but for an aircraft its totally unrealistic unless you are willing to dramatically cut speed and cargo capacity.

Universal karma wouldnt work for gate keeping or weighting in a federation anyway. Since the internal activity of each server is opaque to the others, theres no practical way to verify that karma reported by a different server is genuine and not internal bot activity or just manually edited by the server owner.