Price cuts are quite usual late in a product cycle. The Model S is now an 8 year old model, with its facelift in 2016, 4 years ago. Its tech and manufacturing methods have been superseded by the Model 3/Y, even leading the the call to manufacture a "long" version of the 3. At the price point of the Model S other manufacturers have better models (though the fanboys will surely disagree).

I hope this means a Model 3mk2 will be announced in the near future. This will show Tesla is more and more capable of churning out new cars. A feature I'm hoping for is invisible: I hope they create a platform and use that platform to create new models: Model S Sedan, Model S Stationwagon (very popular in Europe!), Model X, maybe even something like a Grand Tourer, or a convertible. Why not? :)
Also something I hope for: less powerful motors. In 2012 powerrrr was THE killer feature making electrical drive cool. Now we now you get to do the 3 sec launch to 60 a couple of times and then get bored of it. Paying for such a powerful drive train is a colossal waste of money. Make the car less powerful and less expensive. With the powerful motor as an option, of course.

Tesla, as every automaker, has the rights to emit a certain amount of CO2 per car. However all their cars emit zero CO2, so therefore they've got a lot of unused carbon rights.
They sell those rights to traditional automakers whose cars emit too much CO2. By buying these rights they avoid even higher fines.

Without selling those rights, Tesla would make a net loss.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/g...

But VW didn't. They did what they excel in with ICE cars: building a platform on which a range of cars can be built.

Their ICE platform MQB has over 20 models in 4 brands running on it. A factory can switch between different models in a short time. This gives them a lot of flexibility in regards to models and production capacity.

Now VW has developed their new electric platform MEB. On this platform they released 5 models THIS YEAR. Now VW has more electric models based on MEB than Tesla currently produces. And there are lots to follow.

You can be sure these models will be of excellent quality and no such thing as 'production hell' will occur.

And yes, Tesla has the lead in the EV game. But VW is catching up fast. Very fast.

And I'm sure other brands will too.

Voter registration is quite specific to the US I think. It seems to be designed to create a barrier for voters, which inevitably will hit low income areas the most. The extremely low turnout of about 55% seems to underpin this.

In my country you don't have to register for anything. Everybody over 18 years of age automatically gets invited to vote. Turnout is above 75%.

More barriers for transparant elections are the electoral college, sheer number of additional simultaneous elections, etc.

So yeah, there is a lot to be fixed in the US during the democracy 101 class..

Americans will use just about any system of measurement, as long as it's not metric.

Well call our star "Sun". What other civilizations call their star is up to them and unknown to us.

They do get vaccinated against it though. And they have a base immunity due to similarity to other influenza viruses.

About 50% of children develop red spots within a week of receiving vaccination against measles. My kid didn't, he only had a fever for an afternoon.

Trust me, it's normal.

> Around one-third of people vaccinated with the Covid-19 vaccine without acetaminophen experienced moderate or severe chills, fatigue, headache, malaise, and/or feverishness. Close to 10 percent had a fever of at least 100.4 degrees and just over one-fourth developed moderate or severe muscle aches

So in other words, the vaccin triggers an immune response. That's a good thing, and to be expected.

Every parent knows their children get 'sick' after receiving vaccination. It's a normal thing, the body simply responds to the intruder by triggering an immune response which creates the antibodies. But also a fever, headache, etc.

Please do a proper trial. One where all residents will receive the UBI and all working residents pay for it. It's pointless to only give UBI to residents without a job. That's just welfare and bound to be a great succes.

The most interesting part is to have people pay a LOT of taxes in order to pay the UBI of everybody (and themselves receive UBI of course).

It probably results in a 100% income tax for incomes below UBI level and close to 100% for just above UBI level. Higher incomes will have to accept a very steep income tax, but still earn above UBI level. The trial should prove if higher incomes are willing to pay up and lose some of their incomes. This is FAR more interesting than the part where people receive free money.

Nope. But the US is on track for achieving herd immunity. There is a non-zero chance this may prove to be the most effective response. We'll know when history books get written in a few years.

For now I'm surely am glad I don't live in the US though.

You're absolutely right. Only when we're a few years in the future, we'll start to understand what tactic worked best.

I personally believe minimizing infections will prove to work well for fully developed nations, like in western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, New Sealand, etc.
Maximizing infections without swamping the health system may work well for developing nations such as the USA (social security is poorly developed in the USA, resulting in way too many poor or even homeless people).
Doing very little to stop the virus will probably the only option for poor countries, like most of Africa.

So yeah, in short I think the USA is choosing a tactic which is best fit to their development status. But only time will tell.

Yes, death rate will probably drop below average, if it hasn't already. I'm Dutch and in the Netherlands we've had that happen.

So, it's true most deaths are happening a couple of months sooner than they would have happened without Corona.

It's also true that the huge spike in hospital admissions, intensive care admissions, deaths, recovered persons with damaged lungs, etc, have happened in spite of the measures taken. Without measures the IC would have overflown and doctors would have to choose who to treat and who to send home to die.

That's what these guys are trying to achieve: https://gatewayspaceport.com/

They seem to have trouble getting out of the fantasy realm tough.