National Gas Tax suspension to fuck you over later, they are looking to suspend the tax.The current tas is at 18.4 cents a gallon. Notice the wording suspend. Not stop, likely they are going to not collect it and than raise it to 36.8 cents to make it back . Basically they are just giving you a defered loan.
President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are proposing suspending the federal gas tax amid soaring prices at the pump caused by the war with Iran. The gas tax is currently 18 cents per gallon, and gas prices in the U.S. are about $4.50 per gallon on average. Voters are souring on Trump’s economy ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, and high gas prices are only adding to consumer discontent.
This is a deferment of 112.4 million a day!
Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday that he would “reduce” the tax, shortly after saying in an interview with CBS News that he wants to pause the tax “for a period of time.” “I think it’s a great idea,” he said in the CBS interview. “Yup, we’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time, and when gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in.”
Sure, the Administration will defer it till the next election and blame the democrats when a billion dollar bill is due back at the pump. People have no idea how much this would affect the national infrastructure system, all of the bridges, other things that would fall into disrepair due to federal funding being frozen due to this.
Trump cannot declare a gas tax holiday alone, since Congress has sole authority over taxation. But several Republican lawmakers on Monday floated suspending the gas tax, which clocks in at 18.4 cents per gallon, the same amount it’s been since 1993.
This is unlikely to pass, but this gas lay-away plan will hit the pumps when you least expect it.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., on Monday said he would immediately introduce a bill to suspend the federal gas tax in a post to X. And Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said she would be “introducing a bill in the House to suspend the federal gas tax in light of Trump’s recent remarks.” “American families need this relief on gas prices. My office will be working directly with President Trump to ensure we deliver this win for the American people,” she said in a social media post.
This is not relief, this is Gas HELOC plan. It will come back with interest later, because the 112.4M a day gains no interest, It is just a payment plan that is put back on the national debt. The other thing is if you look at the highway Adminstration, the infrastructure money will run out just before the election and who over gets the handoff on “The roads are falling apart” will be the media screaming for months.
Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla “American families need this relief on gas prices. My office will be working directly with President Trump to ensure we deliver this win for the American people,” she said in a social media post.
This is not relief. its like a fart with the gas prices.. By holding the fart you save current environment because it seems not to stink, but it when comes to release and if you try to force it (collect the federal gas tax deferment) it gonna stink like when you are sick and can’t hold it anymore, and you try to let a little out and you shit yourself..
Gas prices in the U.S. currently sit at about $4.52 per gallon, according to AAA’s national average, approaching the highest recorded average price of $5.02 in June 2022. Slashing the federal gas tax would bring that down to roughly $4.34 per gallon.
This is just is a credit card at the pump, you save 18 cents at the pump and by the time the next time it comes to collect the taxes you’ll have to pay 36 cents because of interest.
In the end with a 14 gallon tank you save $2.58 and you can maybe afford cheap gas station coffee, that you have to pay back later. It’s a sham if they defer costs.
While the bill has not been filed yet. this is my thought on a gas tax moratorium to delay or defer gas taxes, in the end it will effect more than saving on your gas.
Attributions from:
CNBC: Trump, congressional Republicans float suspending federal gas tax amid Iran war
Is $9 for a Starbucks coffee a “premium experience?” The company’s CEO has defended it as such
$9 coffee?! NINE FUCKING DOLLAR COFFEE?! Moreover the Premium Experience? I want a coffee not a fucking show. I walk in to dunkin donuts and I walk out with a coffee in less than 3 to 5 minutes. Starbucks, You walk in to music that is almost too loud, 12 influencers mobbing the cake pops, A line 10 deep, 6 people waiting for a coffee, A dog and Usually a layout that makes you wonder who got drunk with the floor plans.
He explained that Starbucks is doing “really well” with Gen-Z and millennial consumers, and that the K-shaped economy — which refers to the growing disparity between high-income and low-income Americans — is not impacting Starbucks’ business, where the “average spend” is just under $10.
My guy I want my coffee flavored coffee, in a cup , not be given a sonnet , a poem or any other shit. The fact that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol thinks getting a coffee is an experience. Starbucks trying to sell coffee as an admission fee is the same shit as software as a service. if a person drinks 1 coffee a day from starbucks 5 days a week. You are spending more than 2,349 dollars in a year.. for the same amount you can buy a BLACK&DECKER CAFÉCRAFT 12-Cup Coffee Maker for 30$ and 178 Cans of Maxwell House Smooth Bold Dark Roast Ground Coffee, 26.7 oz Canister for 13$ a Can.. 601 pots of a coffee if my math is right. Meaning A pot of coffee every day of the week and leaving enough room for Almost 2 pots every 3rd day.
The thing is , Brian Niccol Is not throwing this out for the Adults, he is throwing it out there for the “Influencers” and “Starbucks kids” He knows they will make a run on this because its a “premium coffee experience” because once the blind huddled masses hear about an EXPERIENCE.. they will run for it like the glass bear mugs that nearly get people killed at christmas.
“And then in other cases, people believe, ‘Well, this is a really affordable premium experience,’ because they’re saying like, ‘Well, it’s less than $10 and I get a really premium experience,’” he continued.
You want a premium experience? Stop drinking starbucks coffee for 24 days and Buy Dunkin instead, than with the leftover pay up front for 1 year of netflix up front. This is targeted at tiktok viral trends and sephora kids.
Niccol was named CEO of Starbucks in September 2024 and has since focused on improving the customer experience, including by installing better seating and creating a smoother pick-up process, according to The WSJ.
They forgot literally the stealing kids money for Niccol, The man should be renamed to Niccoltine, he just wants trend addicts to flood his store.
As for me, I’ll be having my own premium experience making my own coffee and using my own flavorings for 1/10th the price of the starbucks “Experience”.
I have been thinking about this for a bit, and removing the voting rights act by itself is a bad genie wish. Yes its removed but, The people celebrating have no idea what is about to be unleashed. Rather than a group now, The individual mandate will apply.
The fact of the situation is before a group could sue the state about being discriminated on by the state. When the SCOTUS ruled to take apart this rule they may have angered the wrong wish genie, Before this ruling, the Voting Rights Act acted as a filter. It forced people into Class Actions.. Now that they have removed this an individual can now sue the state as in individual rather than a class, Meaning whatever complaint you have in a situation if you “feel” it wrongs you now you have the ability to sue for.
Now using Intent as a standard, a plaintiff’s personal experience is the starting point. If you “feel” sorted or excluded, the court is legally obligated to investigate your claim of discrimination. The Trap: Because “intent” is subjective, the court can’t dismiss you based standing. They have to allow for discovery searching the state’s private records, to see if your “feeling” is right.
The thing is the group that wanted this gone have no idea what on earth they just released from pandora’s box. Now that groups can not sue, It will allow for sole people to sue, and sue pro se under the law, it sounds like a bigger hill to climb, but it actually creates the bad wish part, Groups of individuals can no sue pro se and courts can not dismiss these cases in one sweep. where the VRA protected the courts before, The VRA was like a dam it gathered all the voters up into one location and as a single form allowed the courts to see the issue as a singular subject. No more, voters can not all file a case, Without a lawyer, and whereas before you had (Group 1) sueing , now you can have tens of thousands sueing all at once, with Lawyers, pro se, Pro per, and so on. So if this is what the scotus wanted they are going to end up locking up every court from the local level to the SCOTUS.
The absolutely evil end of ending the VRA , is now you can sue the state for discrimination as an individual on, to white, to colored, to disabled, to You don’t like your neighbor voting because of reasons, to you have a gene that someone else doesn’t have, to much violence, to little violence, to many cars, to many bikes, in the most basic form it has opened up warfare by skirmish on every little battle. It causes a skirmish all the way up the chain if the person starts filing on the state level based on the 14th amendment. This is unholy destructive, and now the case can be lodged at any starting point (Town,City,county,State) and how SCOTUS did not have foresight for this is bloody amazing. Given the fact that SCOTUS has enforced the individual mandate now, the ones suing for (Random Voter Discrimination issue) could basically end up stripping every town/city etc of every document they ever had the word “voter” on.
In closing, If 1% of citizens per state files an individual lawsuit due to the math of Intent, The legal system will be so bound up by this that it would effectively paralyze every court in every state. because even if 30,000 suits per state, they would have to pull every judge, every legal aid, every lawyer that works inside the local and state governments to the point of shutting down other courts (Civil, Family, criminal, Enforcement). Normally, the court would try to bundle these but now due to the individual mandate, Every single person could just tell the courts “I hereby refuse class-action status; my injury is personal and based on my specific DNA/neighborhood/feelings,” and the judges would be stuck with tens of thousands of cases, tens of thousands of filings for discovery , Appeals, motions, AMICUS Briefs, Multiplies the damage hundreds of times past the original filings. So in short, Those Judges might want to get their strongest coffee out and make a cup the size of Cleveland. Since Nationwide Injunctions was ended by the SCOTUS, they have created a monster they never had the preemption to notice. The rights of the local courts have lost the power of injunctions, they have lost the power of the stay.. it’s basically no holds barred the way I see it .
Now I am not a lawyer, I just analysed an a chain of thought of how SCOTUS’s ruling might backfire in theory. It might come back to bite them hard in the end.
It would seem my want of a good Non-AI coffeepot has been reinforced yet again. The IoT coffeepot has been caught spying.
A cluster of seemingly unrelated incidents ranging from exposed enterprise AI tools to a breached coffee machine has revealed the daunting reality that modern cyber risk is no longer confined to servers, endpoints or even employees. It now increasingly spans ecosystems, vendors and even the delivery mechanisms for the very tools designed to drive organizational productivity.
The problem with AI is it is veiled in a ton of secrecy that is no good for anyone. Because once the bad agents start figuring it out. We are in deep trouble. The convenience of the AI coffee pot might be nice but it comes with a ton of drawbacks most people don’t account for .
A digital forensics investigator, identified only as TR, was called in when a client suspected a rival had infiltrated their systems after a data breach. Instead of finding malicious software, TR discovered that an internet-enabled espresso machine, equipped with a default password, an outdated operating system, and no firewall, was the source of the leak. Threat actors exploited this device, which was connected to the client’s secure network, to exfiltrate sensitive data. The machine was sending packets internationally every time someone brewed a cup, bypassing all the client’s advanced security measures.
This does present the facts of IoT machines need just as much vetting as computers on a network, if your IT guy doesn’t find every IoT devices on the network he is creating a leak, and the corporate moto of just buy the cheapest thing is normally a recipe for disaster.
Firstly, Keep all of your IoT shit on its own network, If you have a store named BOBcorp, Put all IoT devices on BioT29384 network that is isolated from the main network. Second, You want a network monitor IoT devices are chatty in nature but if your network traffic jumps sniff it out and make sure its sanitized. IoT companies should give a master list of where their devices connect to. That way if your AI coffeepot is connecting to Nigeria you know something is wrong. Either that give google, Apple, Amazon, and other Hub Devices a choice to go through a master server on the devices Hub of choice, That way if all of the corps go through the hub device the IT staff have an easy way to poke at what the IoT stuff is doing.
By having a master hub list of devices if a device starts misbehaving or an attack vector is found. They can deauth the device. It stops companies from just vomiting out “smart” everything devices, That way if they lose there auth they will act fast to restore the trust in the devices.
Another thought here is with security layers is, that most IoT have BLE enabled by default, After pairing there should be a dipswitch to turn off the BLE until its needed for repairing to the network. BLE is notorious for sniffing what is around it .
FirstNet Trusted™ Could really do something to come out on top here. Because of corporate laziness of “just buy the cheapest thing” leads to the problem in the first place. since they are part of AT&T and there network knowhow.
Even passed that Cellphones on the corp networks need to be on their own network, Workers who place IoT or cellphones on the larger corp networks need to be taken off and the employee trained for network safety, it would create a top down security that would even extend to the workers home after. Rather than finding out too late that there beloved AI coffeepot has been stealing secrets for Months.
In the end, You are better off with a Coffeepot with a switch , and if you need it smart. Add a smart plug to it and than you can control it from afar without having so much bloatware you never know what it is connecting to.
Today will be interesting, we will learn how much large corps are going to play the shell game with earnings.
Amazon (AMZN) will report its first quarter earnings alongside rivals Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Meta (META), and Microsoft (MSFT) on Wednesday, with investors looking for more signs that the company’s massive artificial intelligence spending is paying off.
My personal feeling.. No. However this does not stop them from playing the shell game of hiding costs and contracts that have not been put to action yet. These companies account for 650 billion of cape ex spending.
The problem here is the market is betting the farm on a large loss leader. Big Tech knows this and they are trying to engineer there way through this problem by throwing more money and more power at it . AI as it stands right now is about as efficient as a 16 cylinder engine with only one sparkplug working. The problem is with AI being a subsidized land grab at the moment the scale is not fit for its current market. With A Slop being the top thing with AI right now and your average query to AI wasting enough power to light a lightbulb for months. In part why the Sam Altmans and the Bill Gates of the world looking for nuclear power plants to offset these cost to the of thousands of GWh of power.
Right now with power costs soaring, the cost per query is not sustainable, When your average British person can warm there tea 50 times over for a slop query. The problem here is the rate of return on LLM’s is degrading, as LLM’s are looking for more training data they are getting flooded with the very slop they are creating, The people now jailbreaking and hijacking AI’s to act like spongebob squarepants the sexy pirate is filling AI’s systems with irrelevant data to the point its becoming its own fever dream. So the 650B investment is poisoning the future well of returns.
For the quarter, Amazon is expected to report earnings per share (EPS) of $1.62 on revenue of $177.2 billion, according to Bloomberg analyst consensus estimates. The company saw earnings per share of $1.59 and revenue of $155.6 billion in Q1 last year.
Sure a revenue of 177.2 billion. but they are spending like they have a blank check. Eventually when that check clears will Amazon have enough in the bank to cover the check. When Returns on AI is only 15b the rate of return is much slower than the spending. They are building out now and hoping that the machine will have a return later or get bailed out in the end. We’ve heard this all before “too big to fail”. To any person that knows what that line means they just clenched their anus.
But in the end these calls will be interesting, If the earnings call shows a positive it shows that these companies are playing the shell game. Amazon is only getting 15b return per quarterly run shows that the math is flawed. To get that expensive back that will take 3.33 years, if Amazon stops investing today.
And the final flaw is , What if some other game changer comes out of a garage that has a home grown AI out of there garage that makes all these data centers look like nothing more than space heaters for towns. Deepseek has constantly outdone large llms for less than 5% of the money and that’s a secret that the hyperscalers hope you don’t see.
Post mortem: It would appear that all of the companies are posting strong numbers. How long this will last is the greatest question. Further is the biggest question. Metas numbers was the 8k layoff and 6k closed positions a part of there jump?
Every company beat there expectations, what does that mean to the little guy. Absolutely nothing. no lowered prices, it just means some CEO was able to light there cigar with a 100$ bill today.
Putting the #1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 12 all in the same room? There is something wrong with the USSS.
There was enough members in that room if there was a MCE, that for the first time in 249 years the Gov would of been headless and left with no way to certify. #3 cant get a new #7 , congress would of had to cobble something to get something in place. #7 is also acting with a dual role , which is bad because it was already a contested position.
Holy hell.. this almost sounds like a bad Marvel Cinematic Universe film…
In order to show some sort of profit, meta is firing 10000 people and closing 6000 open positions, This is biting off your arm to save your foot.
Meta said on Thursday it plans to lay off roughly 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 people, the latest in a string of tech industry layoffs fueled in part by artificial intelligence.
The company is also closing around 6,000 open roles, Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, wrote in a memo published by Bloomberg that Meta confirmed to CNN.
This is insane. They are firing workers to replace with AI , the problem is AI can’t walk, it can’t improvise its position, and lastly without AI the only innovation they get is AI hallucination.
The company has also been splurging on talent for its superintelligence lab and has acquired buzzy AI startups like Moltbook and Manus as part of its ongoing efforts to compete with OpenAI and others.
The problem here is that in the past Meta had people working on all sorts of things. now they are doing a ground level overfocus and are putting all of the eggs into one basket and I feel like the payoff is not going to be what meta wants. Give or take companies are all jockeying for position to hit the innovation jackpot on AI. the problem is most of the companies that are playing the CAPEex game is doing it by scaling and not code.
Amazon said in January it would lay off 16,000 workers, its second large-scale layoffs in three months, emphasizing the need for efficiency. fintech firm Block’s announcement in February that it would lay off 40% of its workforce, more than 4,000 people, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at the start of this year that the company, which has invested heavily in AI, could see workforce changes because of the technology. On Meta’s January earnings call, he called 2026 “the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work.”
“We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person,” Zuckerberg said.
Here’s my counter-point to this, You fired 16000 positions, if this person is supposedly replacing that many workers, what happens when your Very Talented Person gets sick? Or, a power outage? Or, LLM data loss. Now if your Very Talented Person gets sick your output goes from 14000 to … 1 , Whereas before one person gets sick your output goes from 14000 to 13999. And lets just say for instance the person that would of replaced your Very Talented Person makes an innovation that improves working by triple, you end up having your Replacement guys efficiency 13999 to 41,997.
Like many big tech companies, Meta eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in 2022 and 2023, reductions that were largely attributed to right-sizing after Covid-era spikes in usage and hiring. Last year, the company said it would cut about 5% of what it called its “lowest performers,” although it planned to backfill many of those roles.
This is not right-sizing, this is full on cannibalization, Everyone is jumping for the AI goldrush while some chinese man in his garage is laughing at the Cape-ex and deepseeking the best coffee ideas.
