The keyword for the problem you're talking about is the "long tailpipe theory." [1] I was just reading Wait But Why's article [2], which concluded that the overall greenhouse impact will still be lessened by using electric cars over internal combustion.
I didn't dig into the sources enough to conclude that it's truly a better option, but those articles are a good place to start.
It's not really a fixed cost. Batteries aren't good for forever. They have a limited lifespan.
An electric car could be thought of as a gas car with a very, very large, magical fuel tank. If a battery costs $20k (like a Tesla) and I spend $200/mo on gasoline then that's 100 months (simple interest) or about 8 years, before we even talk about the cost of the car or the cost of the electricity.
I know that this doesn't feel good to talk about, but economics is more about numbers than feelings.
That economic analysis is flawed because you're ignoring the externalities of burning gasoline (health costs, climate change). Only if there were high enough taxes on gasoline to mitigate those effects, then you could accurately do that sort of dollar-cost analysis.
Sure but then every analysis is flawed because everything has some kind of externality that's hard to measure and account for.
How much fuel is burned to make the cells? How much pollution happens to mine the rare earths for the cells and the motors? It's super easy to poke holes in both sides of the argument because building a car is so damn complicated whether it's an ICE or electric.
Right but that's incredibly naive and uncreative. It presumes that fossil fuels are the ONLY way to do certain things, unless you can spend millions of dollars proving otherwise.
For example, right now most steel is made in electric furnaces which can be powered by coal, nuclear, gas, oil, solar, hydro, etc. What's the right tax for imported steel then?
Let me now make a list of a bunch of other things that are in a similar category: aluminum, most other metals, rubber, plastics, glass, etc.
Machines that are used to process raw materials may themselves be made of raw materials which are sourced in various ways. And those machines may be powered by dirty fossil fuels or clean renewables. Which means that components -- as opposed to raw materials -- are also going to be very difficult to properly classify and tax.
The same for subsystems and full assemblies and entire products.
It's a lot more complicated than "do some math and then apply a tax"
I really like the use of tools that make focus the default, low-motivation option. If you're not on a Mac, Firefox has LeechBlock[1] and Chrome has StayFocusd[2]. Also, if you're on HN, there are built-in settings under your username you can use to limit how long you can access the site for every few hours.
Ironically, that's why I'm on HN now. I know I only have 15 minutes and then I won't get to use it for another few hours. :)
Or even worse - it's not inconceivable that some a bit too clever firmware for a ethernet or wifi device could be exploited by a specially crafted IP package that could be sent over the public internet. As such a device usually has DMA access that would be really bad. I don't think even "High" would be sufficient in that case though.
Have you tried setting her up with a standard user login by default? I did that with my folks and the number of computer questions seems to have gone way down.
Do you think that another danger of inconveniences is that it's easier to make an inconvenient mechanism more and more inconvenient than to start restricting something that hadn't been restricted before at all? Like having a tiny inconvenience at first somehow "reserves your right" to add more restrictions in the future?
I didn't dig into the sources enough to conclude that it's truly a better option, but those articles are a good place to start.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe
[2] http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-lif...