I'm curious what country you live in. Certainly here in the United States we never tried anything like UBI. The few things we did do continue to be successful, although the Republican party at state levels is trying to sabotage them as much as they can.
Want to drive your car? The car vendor is well within their rights to eliminate your ability to drive in certain areas. That's just market segmentation.
Many rental car companies actually do restrict where you can drive your car, for example, by forbidding off-roading, or from taking the car over state or country borders. Most restrict rental cars from being used for commercial purposes (meaning in this context, food deliveries or rideshare services).
If you want to treat your car however you like, you can buy a car and abuse it to your heart's content.
If there were just 2 car manufacturers (which there is in the GPU space) I would agree with your counter argument. But there are plently out there. If Ford said you couldn't drive your car in the snow and labeled their cars as such at point of purchase well then you are free to by GM, Toyota, Tesla, Mazda, Kia, Honda, Subaru, etc etc etc etc.
You can get a non-fixed portable generator modified to run on propane or natural gas fairly inexpensively (the "gas adapter" mentioned above). That can be hooked to either a large fixed propane tank or be used with the smaller tanks often used with gas grills (or be permanently connected to natural gas, but then just get a fixed install generator). Advantages of propane are that it's stable (gasoline and diesel degrade), readily available, you can simply be well-prepared for a heavy grilling season if you don't need to use the generator, and because it's stable and stored you can be somewhat insulated from price swings.
There are calculators available to determine appropriate sizes and approximate runtime based on generator size, load, etc. but a simple rule that I saw was that a 3000 watt generator would likely run for 45 minutes to an hour on a 20-25 pound tank depending on load and inverter setup.
Yup, especially when those tanks of propane work for hot water and cooking too.
There's a lot of crossover with RVs, industrial, and even marine when you use propane. The cabin I'm writing this from has a battery bank and a standby generator salvaged from a touring bus.
In Texas griddy exposes you to real time spot pricing. I was frequently getting paid to use electricity at night due to excess generation by wind. As an electric car owner this was fantastic as I frequently got paid to recharge my car. My average delivered rate before this week was 7c/kwh all in.
Marginal. I was doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation about getting an EV and realized that the $/mile cost to charge it would be about the same as paying for gasoline on a car which gets 30 mi/gallon.
t seems like you're exactly the sort of person that both the letter and spirit of the law are supposed to help. It's not supposed to be a system just for, say, Nobel Prize winners.
Thank you! Yes, it worked well for me, but I can't help but think the real intention of the visas is just to bring "extraordinary people" to the US. Saying that, I have no idea how to devise a fairer criteria to judge that (because I'm not that extraordinary, obviously). In my mind, I'm thinking of some people I know who are definitely a lot smarter than me but just don't have a PhD and publications. Some of the best people I know don't even have degrees. How can an immigration official with little knowledge of the area of expertise differentiate those people and bring them here?
They want to be an employee of a company in California, while living and working in Canada. This sounds like it's going to be complicated, and a blanket answer of "you don't pay US taxes" seems unlikely to be correct. They're also going to face issues like on day 1 when they walk into the office and they're going to have to go through the whole I-9 thing (https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central) - waving hands and saying I'm going to live in Canada seems like it's not a solution.
They can't be an employee of a US corporation (as in, a person who gets a W-2, etc).
What they can do is either a) have the US employer set up a Canadian subsidiary that handles their payroll or b) set up their own Canadian legal entity (corporation, sole trader??) and execute a services contract between the two companies. Then they can pay themselves under Canadian rules out of that company, or do whatever plumbers do in Canada -- sole trader or whatnot.
