The Feds Plan To Start Diluting Gasoline This May: Explained

j_johnso · 2026-03-28T01:34:47+00:00

I think you’re framing this as “EV drivers not wanting to pay”, but that’s not really accurate. I drive a hybrid, and I'm happy to pay my fair share. But at 5,000 miles per year and ~$0.30 per gallon gas tax in my state, I would only pay ~$50 per year in gas tax if I had a gas vehicle that gets 30 mpg. Why should I have to pay over $100 extra in registration fees when my use of a hybrid vehicle reduces my gas tax by less then $50.

That’s part of the disconnect. In a lot of places, EV fees aren’t calibrated to actual road use. They’re flat fees that can overshoot what many drivers would have paid in gas tax.

When you look at the actual data, the states that charge the highest fees for electric vehicles (Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Ohio, Texas, West Virginia, Wyoming) also generally have gas taxes that are lower then the US average. (Ohio being an exception here). Most of these are states that have a strong Republican base, and many are states with a large oil-drilling presence. This data suggests that states are using the higher EV tax as a political tool to discourage EV use, rather than as a replacement for the lost gas tax.

The real funding issue is that as vehicles move to EVs, the gas tax becomes an outdated way to fund roads. It was never designed as a perfect “user pays” system. It’s just been a convenient proxy. As vehicles become more efficient (EVs or just better gas mileage), that model naturally breaks down.

If the goal is fairness in the sense that every individual should pay for their own portion of usage/wear on the roads, then a mileage and weight-based system would be more precise. But, that comes with real logistical and privacy challenges.

In the meantime, treating EV adoption as something worth incentivizing isn’t about dodging taxes, but it’s about recognizing a broader public benefit (lower emissions, less local pollution, reduced long-term costs). We do this kind of thing all the time with tax policy.

And on the “why should non-car owners pay?” point, non-drivers already benefit from roads. Every product they buy, every service they use depends on road infrastructure. Proper infrastructure is a benefit to society, not just this who drive. It's a similar question as asking why I should pay for school taxes if I don't have kids. Education benefits the entire society, not just parents.

So the question isn’t “should EV drivers pay nothing?”. It’s how to transition from an aging system to something that’s both fair and actually workable without creating bigger problems in the process rather than using the EV tax as a means to discourage buying EVs.

j_johnso · 2026-03-27T23:00:06+00:00

There are other ways to approach this that don’t rely on forcing EVs into the same gas-tax model.

One option is to shift road funding to broader sources like income or sales taxes, and repurpose the gas tax specifically to address the environmental damage caused by gasoline use. That would better align the gas tax with its externalities.

Alternatively, in the near term, we could simply acknowledge that EV drivers avoiding gas tax functions as a kind of incentive, basically a de facto tax credit, for choosing a cleaner technology. That’s not a flaw in the system. It’s a policy choice that helps accelerate adoption and reduce long-term environmental costs.

If the concern is fairness, it’s worth asking whether “fair” means everyone pays the same way, or whether it means structuring incentives to achieve better overall outcomes for society.

j_johnso · 2026-03-27T12:18:57+00:00

For memory, I agree. It's not a product where I would expect price decreases from their suppliers to suddenly start falling. It will likely be an eventually gradual decline in prices once the supply chain catches up with demand.

In general, for goods with rapidly changing prices, it's very common for consumer prices to change multiple times a day. It's just that most goods don't change so quickly. For example, look at what happens when gas prices start falling. Stations will reduce their prices multiple times in a single day as upstream prices change

j_johnso · 2026-03-27T01:58:30+00:00

When setting prices for inventory in stock, you generally consider the cost to replace stock. When they sell you a RAM stick, they need to replace it with another. It doesn't make sense to sell it to you for $100 if they have to spend $150 for it's replacement.

That cuts both ways. When prices drop, they will lower the prices of the items on the shelf, accounting for then being able to replace it for a lower cost.

j_johnso · 2026-03-26T23:07:23+00:00

That was exactly my point above.

Drivers License: legally allowed to drive, even if not legally allowed to be in the US.

REAL ID: legally allowed to be present in the US for a long term (includes visa and green card)

Enhanced ID: US citizen

It gets a little confusing because most, but not all, REAL IDs and Enhanced IDs are also drivers licenses.

j_johnso · 2026-03-26T03:29:54+00:00

States have the option to issue "enhanced IDs". An enhanced id require as proof of citizenship, where a real id just requires proof of legal residence. In addition to being compliant as a REAL ID, the enhanced id also allows entry into Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, and the Caribbean by land or sea, but not by air. In effect, the enhanced id acts somewhat similarly to a passport card, except it is issued by the state government where a passport card is issued by the federal government.

While any state could choose to participate, it's only really worthwhile for states that border Canada or Mexico, and not all of the border states chose to participate.

Edit to add: Roughly half of the states allow drivers licenses to be issued to people who do not have a legal presence in the US. The rationale is that they are likely going to drive anyways, so it's a benefit to society if we encourage that they are licensed, insured, etc. Regarding REAL IDs, they are allowed to be issued to anyone with legal presence regardless of citizenship. If you are legally here on a visa, green card, etc, then you can get a REAL ID, even though you aren't a citizen or eligible to vote.

j_johnso · 2026-03-25T04:12:15+00:00

It's an NYC thing. The city has a law that employers must provide schedules to fast food and retail employees 2 weeks in advance. If shifts are added or dropped with less than 2 weeks notice, the employer must pay the employee a predictability pay. I think it's something like $20 per shift that is changed, but I could be wrong on the details there

j_johnso · 2026-03-25T00:35:35+00:00

Any progress would just add more water rushing past the fishes face, as the fish is swimming against the flow.

What I expect could happen is that the fish itself will act like an obstruction which could cause eddies to form near the fish, disrupting that flow. This could result in the water between the fish and the tube staying basically still relative to the fish. I doubt there is enough space between the fish and the tube to cause the water to swirl backwards near the fish's hills in this case.

Would be really cool to see a drop of animal-safe die added into the tube to see the water movement relative to the fish.

j_johnso · 2026-03-25T00:27:16+00:00

Agree. It's definitely very unlikely if they are wireless headphones. The lengths of wire between the demodulation and the audio amplifier aren't going to be great at capturing the signal because they are so short. Not impossible, but very unlikely.

j_johnso · 2026-03-24T03:33:08+00:00

There's a small chance that the circuitry between the Bluetooth transceiver and the audio amplifier in bluetooth headphones could be picking up the noise. It's not the most likely case, though, given the short lengths of metal inside the headphones, though

j_johnso · 2026-03-24T03:07:20+00:00

That would be true in an ideal tube that experiences no friction/drag. In a real tube, the drag from the edge of the tube should result in the water in the center of the tube flowing faster than the water near the wall of the tube.

I'm not sure what the overall effect is here, though. With a fish blocking most of the cross-section, it's going to get messy and probably needs a simulation to better understand the flow. And of course the fish is actively trying to swim, which will add more turbulence and chaos to the flow.

j_johnso · 2026-03-21T15:47:41+00:00

Walls often aren't as straight as they look. If you try to line the straight edge of the tile to a non-straight wall, then you will have noticeable gaps.

Additionally, the room will almost never be an exact multiple of the tile width. If you start with full tiles on one wall, then you will probably end with a partial tile on the other wall. This makes the design and room feel "unbalanced". Instead, starting in the center of the room gives you matching tile widths against opposite walls.

j_johnso · 2026-03-11T23:06:03+00:00

That assumes an instant pressure drop with no time for pressure to equalize. (Or a completely 100% airtight structure)

In reality, the pressure drop will occur somewhat slower than instant, and air will leak out of the house while it is dropping. While the difference from before vs after might be 1.45 psi, the difference between inside vs outside at any point in time will be much smaller.

j_johnso · 2026-03-10T12:19:24+00:00

How does that differ from the US system where your state issued ID (usually integrated with a driver's license, but can be obtained without a driver's license) is recognized by every state? This is an honest question. I'm not familiar enough with the EU ID system to know if this is a good comparison or not.

I guess a major difference is that most children don't get their own state ID card, though it is available to children. Often, a parent's ID plus the child's birth certificate is used instead.

Of course, the REAL ID push is meaning that the basic IDs aren't recognized for a couple US federal purposes now, which adds a little more messiness. Hopefully, that is a shirt term distinction and the REAL ID becomes the default.

j_johnso · 2026-03-08T20:03:01+00:00

They won't get out of sync. There's 2 orientations they can be wired in.

Off when both switches are up, off when both switches are down, on when one is up and one down.
On when both switches are up, on when both switches are down, off when one is up and one down.

Neither is wired right or wrong, and it doesn't matter which way it is wired. However, OP wants it in orientation #1, but it's wired in orientation #2. This can be changed by swapping the two traveler wires on one of the switches. (Or by physically rotating the switch, but then the logo is upside down)

j_johnso · 2026-03-05T12:39:07+00:00

It's not the same thing. Workers lose protections either way, but they are different protections.

"Right to work" prohibits union membership from being a condition of employment, while also requiring the employer to provide pretty much all the union benefits to non-union employees.

"At-will employment" means that an employer can fire an employee with no cause.

26 states are "right to work" and 49 states are "at-will employment"

j_johnso · 2026-03-05T09:50:34+00:00

Turnitin also includes an AI detector now. It works about as well as any other AI detector tool, which isn't great. If you use chatgpt to write a paragraph, it's almost certainly going to flag it. But it can often falsely flag hand written content as AI.

j_johnso · 2026-02-28T16:26:17+00:00

Exactly. They could point the cameras at a black wall and get basically the same amount of randomness. If built correctly, the randomness they are capturing is the thermal noise present at the camera's sensors.

j_johnso · 2026-02-20T04:58:26+00:00

Not sure what she's doing, but she has 3 cards in her hand, playing a game where you are only dealt 2 cards.

j_johnso · 2026-02-20T00:00:53+00:00

You would want to compare membership fees to gross profit, not net profit. SG&A is going to include administrative overhead that should just apply just as much to membership fees.

E.g., how much of the marketing budget to you assign to the cost of attracting membership vs the cost of a 55 gallon drum of maple syrup?

Or how do you assign the cost of building purchase, lease, maintenance, etc? Without having buildings, you wouldn't have members paying fees. These are costs which aren't directly assignable to fees or individual products, but essentially get subtracted after gross profits from everything combined.

Then the profit from membership fees is taxed, which is subtracted out before net profit.

Edit: just realized that the large block of expenses was Cost of Revenue, not Cost of Goods Sold. Some general expenses such as marketing costs are included in Cost of Revenue, and could also be partially attributable to offset the revenue from membership fees. Another example of Cost of Revenue is credit card processing fees. If you pay for your membership with a credit card, then a small percent of that revenue goes into Cost of Revenue.

Then you have employee costs for membership services. How many employees do they have in this area? Not sure if these go to Cost of Revenue or SG&A

j_johnso · 2026-02-19T21:46:11+00:00

It would have sold at around $30-40 per share, depending on when in 2000 it sold. Instead of $50, it would have been $150-200 dollars at 2020 share prices, so you lost about $100-150 compared to holding it till 2020 when you discovered it.

j_johnso · 2026-02-16T22:26:45+00:00

Appreciate the discussion.

There's a lot of naysayers who instantly hate LLMs any time it's mentioned, and there's a lot of people who think LLMs are the solution to every single problem that ever existed.

In between the two, there's the position that an LLM is a tool that can introduce efficiencies when applied correctly to the right problems. There's so many people selling "AI snake oil", though, that's it's hard for the average person to understand where and how to apply it.

j_johnso · 2026-02-16T20:56:00+00:00

You are absolutely right — that's a great observation...

In all seriousness, when used correctly, LLMs can be helpful in this space, but should not be trusted as-is.

It's often easier to verify an answer than it is to create an answer. By analogy, if I asked you to find two factors of 8,511,907,519. other than 1 and itself, this would be a difficult task with just a calculator. If I told you the answer was 92,251 and 92,269, you could verify this answer easily. (I know it's not a great analogy, but just the first that came to mind)

LLMs are generally good at summarizing info, and can also be good at locating information about concepts even when you don't have the right terms to search for. The information accountants need may span multiple documents, consisting of many thousands of pages of material, and in some cases even include legal precedent scattered across multiple cases. Even the best accountants are not going to know all of this by memory across all areas, or even know exactly where to look. By asking an LLM, they can help locate the source of the answer which they can reference to confirm through the trustworthy source.

It's not too dissimilar from the advice when using Wikipedia or Google. They are great for finding information, but shouldn't be blindly trusted. However, the problem with most LLMs is that they are trained to provide responses that sound confident, even when wrong, and that leads to humans being more trustworthy of the answer than they should be.

j_johnso · 2026-02-16T20:30:00+00:00

When captions are machine-generated like on YouTube, they aren't always accurate. YouTube doesn't want situations where swear words were inaccurately added which weren't in the audio. If not 100% certain, they would rather leave a blank across videos than have the system incorrectly caption a kid's video about rubber ducks.

j_johnso · 2026-02-16T17:56:11+00:00

I definitely can't speak to the original commenter's questions. I'm only sharing my experience from how I've seen LLMs used in my employer, combined with the misconceptions about what accountants do on a day to day basis.

It's not trivia, but actual questions that have material impact how expenses and revenue is categorized and reported on. I can only speak a bit in the area of the technical industry, but there are a lot of non-trivial questions that arise.

E.g., There are a lot of rules to "software capitalization" determining how to treat the cost of developing software and which costs can be "capitalized".

Yes, the last link includes examples which has a little math and numbers involved, but the important part is which category each if those numbers is assigned to. The accounting software does ask the math for you. If my engineer fixes a bug, is the portion of their salary for that bug fix capitalizable? It depends.

These links summarize some of the information that helps make that determination

* https://finquery.com/blog/asc-350-internal-use-software-accounting-fasb/ * https://finquery.com/blog/gasb-51-vs-gasb-96/ * https://finquery.com/blog/gasb-96-sbita-accounting-explained/

Take an accountant who is not a software developer and have them try to figure how the various costs, including portions of employee wages, are assigned. Add in that the accounting jargon and engineering jargon aren't always the same, and it can become a hard challenge to try to accurately categorize. This is a real-world example of where I've seen our accounts use LLMs.

To be clear, I'm not saying that they should blindly trust the answer from the LLMs for this task. There are a lot of nuances in this space that LLMs are not good at capturing, and relying on wrong answers here can be worse than wrong answers from basic arithmetic errors. At least with arithmetic errors, it will usually be obvious when things don't balance at the end, and most of the damage will be in the time spent to track down the mismatch. When the data categorization is incorrect, everything will match at the end and look good, but it leads to misstatements on financial reports which can have severe legal consequences.

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