NEWS: Norway plans to eliminate its main subsidy for electric vehicles over the next two years, the government said today adding thousands of dollars to the cost of new cars like Tesla's Model Y, the country's top-selling automobile.
"We have had a goal that all new passenger cars should be electric by 2025, and ... we can say that the goal has been achieved," Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement. "Therefore, the time is ripe to phase out the benefits."
For years, oil-rich Norway exempted EVs from all taxes applied to combustion-engine vehicles to speed up the transition, a policy that came at a cost of billions of dollars annually in lost revenue for the state.
In 2023, however, it introduced a 25% value-added tax on the portion of an EV's price over 500,000 crowns ($49,508), affecting mostly high-end models such as the BMW iX, Tesla X and Porsche Taycan, while shielding mass-market cars.
But in 2026, Norway plans to lower its EV tax exemption to 300,000 crowns, the government said in its proposal for next year's budget, and begin collecting VAT on all versions of the Model Y and similarly priced mid-market cars like Volkswagen's ID.4.
In Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey’s reaction to watching video messages of the children was real.
He hadn’t seen the videos before. Nolan filmed them in advance.
It was his first time seeing them. He was so affective he did it in one take.
After spending 10 years thinking about Money & Bitcoin, here's the simplest explanation I can come up with:
Money is a technology to move Value across Space, Time, and Scale.
Value is the utility humans derive from Goods & Services.
Value is highly subjective, and it changes across Time and Space.
Unbeknownst to them, Economists have defined these functions as:
- Store of Value (Time)
- Medium of Exchange (Space)
- Unit of Account (Scale)
Throughout History, no monetary system has managed to satisfy all 3 functions of Money at once. This is where the idea of Backing Money and the necessity of separating Money and Currency come from.
This trade-off can be described as a Money Trilemma: you can optimize for 2, but not all 3.
Gold is great at Time & Scale, but not Space.
Fiat is great at Space & Scale, but not Time.
Until the invention of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the first form of Money that successfully excels at all 3 functions simultaneously.
It achieves that by perfecting all the properties of Money, with no extra space for improvement:
Bitcoin is:
- Infinitely Divisible
- Instantly Portable
- Forever Durable
- Mathematically Finite (what is mistakenly called Scarcity)
- Perfectly Fungible
Bitcoin is the final Evolution of Money.
The World just hasn’t figured it out yet.