The range thing is a red herring, and the people who complain about it are short-sighted and stupid. Even right now, EVs are perfectly adequate for most families, since most families have multiple vehicles. It's very simple: one vehicle is electric, and the other is gas. When you need to drive far, you take the gas-burner. For daily commuting, take the EV. For a dual-earner household, obviously this means that one of the spouses will be driving the noisy gas car, but it's better than both driving them. Right now, there's only so many people doing this because EVs are relatively expensive, but that's changing and before long they'll be much more common, even if used mainly for commuter vehicles.

These short-sighted idiots were the same people who said they'd never use a smartphone, and now they all have one. They were the same morons who said they'd never have a computer at home, and now they all have one. They were the same morons who said that 3 TV channels was all they needed, and now they all have cable, and pretty soon even though they're saying they'll never give up cable, they'll be cutting the cord with the rest of us Netflix users. These people are sheep: they follow trends after enough early adopters do it and prove that it works, even though not long before they were loudly proclaiming that "this will never happen".

EVs don't need any more range than current models to be completely viable replacements for at least half of the US's personal automobile fleet. Their main problem is cost: nice ones (Model S) are really expensive, and cheaper ones are $10k more expensive than similarly-appointed gas cars. Hybrids are a decent middle ground, and honestly I'm surprised those haven't done better, but I guess having an ICE plus an electric drivetrain ends up inflating the cost too much, but the Priuses have been doing very well.

Ecars are good for commuters that live in houses. There are not many of them outside the US.

I guess Norway isn't in Europe....

Because the credit card company doesn't know how many gallons of fuel you purchased. If you're trying to track your vehicle's fuel economy, you need to know that number.

It's already going that way. "Service stations" are completely dead, and regular gas stations are being replaced by upscale, fancy places like Sheetz in the south where there's tons of food (both packaged and cooked on the spot) and drinks for sale. You can go to one of these places and get a pretty decent lunch. They probably make all their profit on the food and drinks. The clean, nice facilities help draw people in, both for the food and also the restrooms (which used to be a bad joke--2 decades ago no one wanted to use a gas station bathroom unless their life depended on it).

Things have changed a lot in the past 25 years. New cars are frequently offered with loans of less than 1%, and even 0% now. And they don't depreciate that fast any more because cars last so long, and also the shitty economy has made used cars hold their value more (because a lot of people don't have the credit rating necessary to get a low-interest new car loan, and don't have the budget for it anyway).

Your advice made sense years ago; these days it does not. 2-5 year old cars with low mileage don't cost much less than brand-new models these days, unless it's some unpopular model (and they're unpopular for a good reason). If the model is popular and well-known to be highly reliable, it'll keep its resale value very well, making it much less worth it to buy used. Also, $15k in cash isn't that easy for most people to come up with on the spot, so most people have to finance. You don't get 0% interest rates on used cars; the rates are much worse. In fact, those low rates are reserved only for people with a good enough credit rating.

Today's crappy economy and ultra-low interest rates have made it so that buying new really makes a lot more sense than buying used.

In addition to this, brand-new cars have much better safety ratings than even 5-year-old models. You're going to fare much better in a crash with a brand-new model that got top scores on the IIHS crash tests than in anything made a half-decade ago. You seem to be worried about risk, from your line about the potential for value to drop, but you're totally ignoring the risk to your health and safety by driving an older model. 50,000 people die every year in the US alone in auto accidents; you could be the next one.

Complaining about Whole Foods' prices is like complaining about the price of a Mercedes S-class. You're not going to get a car with that kind of quality and amenities for $15k or even $30k.

WF is definitely overpriced for everyday stuff, if you're comparing apples to apples, meaning the exact same product at a "regular" grocery store. But the advantage with WF is that you can get all kinds of foods and brands which you just can't get at a normal store (though this is changing, as regular stores are adding better brands slowly but surely). For instance, suppose you like high-end cheeses; at a normal grocery store, you're just going to find some crappy mass-market cheeses made in the US. At WF, you'll find a huge array of boutique cheeses from France, Greece, Britain, etc. The prices will be high of course, but probably less than you'd pay at a specialty cheese shop (if you can even find such a place nearby). Or maybe, instead of cheese, you really like chocolate, hot cocoa, etc. At a normal grocery store, if you look for hot cocoa, you're just going to find nasty cheap shit like Swiss Miss. At WF, you'll find a huge array of high-quality hot cocoa mixes in metal cans and glass jars. They won't be cheap, but you don't get high-quality food for cheap these days. High-end stuff costs money.

The secret to using WF is to buy all your mass-market-brand stuff at the normal grocery store or Walmart at cheap prices, and go to WF to get the fancy stuff that you're willing to spend extra on. Don't buy mass-market brands at WF; on that stuff, they're just taking advantage of people who are too lazy to shop at different stores and want to get everything in one trip.

There's a difference here. A public beach is a public area, by definition, and you don't really have any expectation of privacy there (beyond, say, being stalked or harassed). A private residence's back yard with a 6-foot fence is a totally different matter. You can legally film people in a public area in most places (though the stalking/harassment stuff still applies, so don't focus too much on any one person without permission), but you cannot film people in a private area without permission.

Also, a house's front yard and back yard are very different, especially if the back yard is fenced. People are allowed to walk into your front yard and knock on your front door, though they have to leave the premises if ordered to by the resident. They're not allowed to wander into your fenced-off back yard. They're also allowed to photograph your front yard (within reason: the Google car is OK, stopping for a long time and taking zoom shots in one house's window is not). Photographing a fenced-in back yard is not allowed, and falls under peeping tom laws.

If you shoot and injure (or kill) a 15 year old who is running at you with a knife and appears intent on causing you bodily harm, you will be charged. But you will also be allowed to argue that you were acting in self-defense. If the jury believes you, you will go free.

This isn't universally true, it depends on state laws.

In some states, the decision of whether to charge someone for a crime rests with a Grand Jury (Texas is one state like this). The facts are presented to them and they decide whether to charge or not. If they don't think it's a chargeable offense, then you don't even get charged, much less go to trial.

I have no idea what the law in Kentucky is.

I think you're missing that that's still a bunch of money coming from the Federal government, even if it is a minority of their overall funding. The Republicans would just love to eliminate that expenditure altogether, and move it to the defense budget (even if it is puny in comparison already).

That just sounds like "regulation"; Europe is known for being more regulated than the US, and for a lot of things, that's a good thing. Just look at the privacy laws Europe has; they prevent a lot of the abuses going on in the US now. The downside to regulation, of course, is that it makes it very hard for new businesses to start up and grow quickly; there's a reason Silicon Valley is in the US instead of Europe. However, for large, established industries, Europe generally does them much better than the US. What kind of fool would choose a Lincoln over a BMW or Mercedes, for instance? Also, have you ever taken a cruise on a multi-billion dollar cruise ship built in the US? Of course not, because the US can't build such a thing. All those ships are built in Europe. Government regulation doesn't seem to be a problem there. They also build a lot of high-end airplanes and helicopters in Europe.

And since when does industry in the US cling to traditional values of right and wrong? Corporations in the US are infamous for being completely sociopathic. I don't think I need to go into too many examples, but the Ford Pinto is a pretty good one (they decided to allow people to die in crashes and just pay out settlements because it was cheaper than adding a $1 part to prevent the cars from catching fire). For a more recent example, look at GM and their ignition switch fiasco which they actively covered up and refused to fix. Strange that I never see that kind of stuff from European corporations, or Japanese ones. The US is also the home of patent trolls. They don't seem to have that problem in Europe either, again probably because of regulation.

The problem with regulation, of course, is that you need a government that has a low enough level of corruption to make it work. That's why regulation never seems to work well in the US; the government is far too corrupt. Why European governments aren't as corrupt, I don't know, but I suspect it's because the US is too large, powerful, and diverse.

How many Americans never leave the country in their lifetime? Probably a large majority of them. So how's being stuck in Russia much different?

Apples and oranges. Assange did his playing around in Sweden. Russia is nothing like Sweden, or even the US. Accusations of date-rape in Russia are probably laughed at.

(first off, teacher pay isn't in the same money bucket as NASA, they do not compete).

This is totally incorrect. They're all part of the overall government budget. Yes, a lot of funding for schools is at local levels, but not all. And there's plenty of politicians who would love to eliminate one or the other, or better yet both, and use the savings to pay for tax cuts for the rich or for more bloated defense programs.

Exactly. The only rock involved is the pedestal it's sitting on (which actually is a pretty impressive piece of work by itself).