The simple fact is, for the moment Tesla is an expensive car but not a luxury car. It gets the smooth ride part right, thanks to the non-reciprocating motor and no gearshifts to manage, and that's great, but compared to a similarly piced Merc or Lexus it's lacking (and at the unsubsidized price, where the S-Class lives, it's embarrassing).

But that being said, Tesla company-wise is like nothing the industry has ever seen. They keep improving cars they've already sold. No one does that. Many of the "luxury features" on a luxury car aren't actually very expensive, they're just a matter of seeking every possible improvement, from better window laminates to keep the car cool in the sun, to a slightly better feel to the sun visor when you swing it thanks to not using the cheapest possible part. I'd bet that Tesla will catch up fast - I've never seen such rapid incremental improvement in a model line in my life.

While some features do add a bunch to the cost of the car, I think Tesla, thanks to it's top-notch ride, could be fine alongside the E-Class / GS / Dozen or so other cars in it's price range in just a few years, of Tesla's rate of improvement continues. Unsurprisingly I guess to us geeks, they take a software-company view of "1000 incremental improvements? no problem, here's how we'll roll em out" that may leave the execs at Mercedes et al wondering what hit them.

We've done that for most military action. Note that there's no requirement that the bill have the title "Declaration of WAR !!elenety-one!". "Authorization of use of military force" works just as well.

USA Today has stealth-edited the story to be less alarming since I linked it. I'd be annoyed, except it's wonderful the problem is smaller than was thought.

Hitler had no immediate plans to attack America. Sometimes shit just gets out of hand and you have to do your part. The longer you wait, the higher the cost in lives and money when you do.

Looks like this flyer is being denied by everyone in the government now: whether or not it was sincere in the first place, the threat from basically everyone in the civilized world is the needed deterrent to stop shit like this before it gets started.

Not to Godwin the thread, but the new government in east Ukraine is actually registering Jews right now today.

America learned once why it can't let dictators like Putin just invade their neighbors with impunity. How quickly we forgot where this all goes. It will take more than a sternly worded letter, or laughable sanctions, to stop this shit. And it must be stopped. It's on all of us, otherwise.

You nailed it. I found EP 1 tolerable, despite being overly gimmicked, but it did use up my patience. EP 2 was just the camel that broke the straw's back.

Oh, yeah. DNF is special. But it's such a unique gem that it doesn't represent anything going on when it was released. Balls of steel!

Well, monopoly is the wrong word. The problem is barrier to entry. Established large companies just suck in general, never seem to move technology forward even when it's in their best interests. Most progress comes from small companies who embrace every cool new advance just to stay alive, and succeed in changing customer expectations. If the big guy then buys the small guy for that tech, and moves to meet those raised expectations, everyone wins. That happens often in, say, software, but big telcos have always been too steeped in tradition to do anything right, so it all sucks.

Yep - they really suck at coverage. I respect their quality-over-quantity decision, but it's useless to most people. Still, they've been the lead at no-contract phones, practical pay-as-you-go, and so on.

Well, I don't try to argue the Left out of its notion that for every problem the solution is government spending, but the point of voodoo economics was that lowering the frankly abusive top tax rates would stimulate a lot of spending and new investment, and that seems to have happened. Also, tax revenue went up in a very straightforward way: the rich have much flexibility in when, where and how they get compensated. Dropping tax rates caused a bunch of income and gains to "magically appear", as people stopped playing games to hide it. It's much like dropping the price of a computer game below the "easier to buy than pirate" price point can result in 10x sales.

Sadly true, and truly sad. But it would be a shame if we auctioned off all the cool frequencies this year, then invented some amazing new wireless tech 5-10 years from now, and had no place to put it.

Well, I use T-Mobile. I love T-Mobile. It would be awesome if they could get some actual high-speed wireless coverage that was worth a damn. Thus I conclude they won't end up with any new bandwidth - fate is just taunting me.

Well, to begin with, if the big players want that bandwidth they'll just buy whoever buys it. Problem solved. If some of the bidders are shell companies created for just such a contingency, so much the better.

Ronald Reagan's tax breaks resulted in increased government revenue, is the thing. Voodoo economics actually worked. Was can argue about where we are now on the Laffer curve, but we know the Carter-era tax brackets were past the point of negative returns.

Why the asylums were closed is anyone's guess. It seems a huge mistake to me, and it cost very little in the scope of government social programs. I could never make sense of that - not even a tinfoil hat theory.

Shantytowns are also a disaster waiting to happen. While there are certainly cynical reasons for outlawing them, a fire that sweeps a shantytown and kills several people, or a flood where a shantytown was built on a floodplain, is a non-cynical reason (and these things have happened). So now we have trailer parks instead, which are harder to afford to be sure, but not by much. You can be pretty far down on your luck and still manage a trailer - I should know.