Direct benefit? Maybe not, if you don't have kids that participate in 4H, have a home garden, raise bees, or work directly in rural employment. Indirectly, we're talking about supporting agriculture and farming which everyone benefits from.
Pick an arbitrary person and an arbitrary thing and I will find a tenuous chain where the person benefits from the thing. I could probably justify a 90% marginal tax over $100k for you using this if you can give me your zip code.
Agreed - I'm rather fond of Extension programs. It's more a note that rural Colorado receives a great deal of benefit from Denver taxpayers, and that somehow never gets a hand wringing article about out of touch ranchers.
Look at commercial zoning fire protections for your zip code and apply those standards to residential.
Additionally, use non-combustible external materials and incorporate an exterior fire suppression system that draws from your own underground water source. You'll need to have your own power source and battery backup to run these pumps. You're looking at $100k for a modest residential structure. Insurance does not give you break for having this in a residential, outside of an insurance rating with -W modifier for the water source.
Even commercial buildings are built "fire-resistant" and often built to contain interior fires (a commercial kitchen fire is a matter of when, not if).
You'd want to go beyond that to specific materials and thought thereof if you want to survive with a usable building in a wildfire - things like working out of the concrete will be stressed by the heat, etc.
Vehicle mileage is taxed at the pump and at the charging station. The material is taxed at sale. Charging an excess tax is just. . . In excess.
The pedestrian crash problem has more to do with our terrible alternative transportation traffic mixing. If the US took a more serious approach for bike lanes and pedestrian accessible infrastructure, the injury rate would decrease. Heavy vehicles is not a new problem. Look at gross vehicle weights of cars and light trucks before 1980.
This I've heard several times recently but it's not really true. The current 4-door Bronco is larger in every direction and 900 pounds heavier than a 1976 Ramcharger, which we used to think of as a benchmark for way-too-big cars. The best-selling car from 1976 weighed 3700 pounds, only 3-5% more than the best-selling Toyota Camry of 2022. The 1976 Ford F-100 (the best-selling truck of that year) base weight is the same as a 2023 Ford F-150 base, at 4000 pounds.
Former USAF pilot candidate: there are physiological reasons specific to high-G maneuvering in fighter jets that taller people are disqualified for as well. Shorter people have less challenges with GLOC or loss of consciousness.
I would encourage you to revisit the research around firearms used in self defense. 500,000 to 3,000,000 encounters where a firearm was used in self defense in the US is what I was able to find. Doesn't sound minuscule.
Some popular firearm magazine a coworker used to keep on their desk always had references to news stories with summaries of encounters of legal self defense using firearms. Some months they had as few as 5, some as many as 20. If you assume they found as many as they could, that would be not much more than one hundred per year. They only used cases where the assailant was actually shot, and only cases that made the news. But it is still indicative that millions is probably a vast inflation just as your link indicates. Is the fact that excercising the right is rarely warranted or effective, and outweighed by the danger of doing so a valid reason to abolish it? My intuition is that it is not, but I'm not at all sure. I tend to gravitate towards fairness of a policy over its actual outcome. The notion that doing an injustice to accomplish a good is immoral is probably naive, but it is my instinct.
It's NIMS - FEMA lingo, which predates ITIL. Which was developed in USFS wildland firefighting, which predates FEMA. It's incident management all the way down.
