Amazon.com charges a restocking fee under exactly the same circumstances that Newegg does... except Amazon can hit you for 20%-50% of the item's price instead of just 15%.

That said, it's always worth shopping around - but I find Newegg pretty consistently has better prices, and lately they even have a price guarantee on some things.
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Excusing you from something *everyone else* has to do - eg pay taxes - is a form of subsidy. It's special treatment. It's a benefit.

A subsidy is any form of financial assistance. If someone else pays your bills (a tax writeoff on equipment is exactly equivalent to having someone else contribute the taxable value of that equipment) then it's a subsidy. The taxpayer is picking up some or all of the cost of doing business.

But fine, if you only want to include direct payments - The fossil fuel industry receives billions in direct payments. $3.4 billion in cash (grants) and another $1.3 billion in preferential loan guaranteed as part of the Recovery Act in 2009. Everyone complains about the $535 mil Solyndra got but nobody seems to care that they gave the oil industry nine times as much cash when they didn't even need it.

Sometimes subsidies are warranted and justified. It's not justified when the person or entity receiving this perk could handily get by without the preferential treatment. If people making over $15,000/yr don't qualify for earned income tax credit, why should a company making billions in NET profit qualify for tax writeoffs and other benefits?
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How are you defining "Easy."

Let me preface this by saying that storage is, in fact, largely overrated for solar power. The vast majority of our energy needs occur during the daytime. Storage is really really nice to have, but is not entirely necessary unless you are producing much more than you need and don't want to waste it (see: Germany)

That said, let's talk "easy"

On a technical level, it's far easier to store electricity. Just need a battery or capacitor. If you want a more general form of solar energy as heat, then you just need a storage medium like water or oil or molten salt or whatever. Very easy and these storage mechanisms generally last a very long time with little maintenance if built properly.

Storing natural gas is a lot harder, again on a technical level. It's lighter than air and a fire/explosion hazard. It's moderately low energy density means it needs to be stored under pressure, so you need compressors and pumps to move it around. This means the very act of storing and transferring needs additional energy from secondary source - usually electricity.

If you define "easy" in terms of final stored density, then yes natural gas wins handily - especially if you liquefy it. But higher density storage requires more energy input, so your efficiency (energy invested in storing the fuel versus energy in the fuel itself) starts to drop.

If you define "easy" as recoverability, then it's a bit more complicated: batteries and capacitors give up their energy readily. Thermal storage requires an extra step to convert to electricity, if electricity is what you want... if you want heat then no conversion is necessary and again it's super easy to take out of storage. Natural gas can either be burned directly from storage if you just want some fire, or it could need converting into something else like mechanical power or electricity which are extra steps. You really need to define what you want to use the energy for to compare them, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

If you define "easy" in terms of infrastructure/investment required, that also gets a bit murky. Natural gas already has the benefit of decades and billions of dollars in storage and transport infrastructure development. Thermal energy has only modest transport infrastructure (district heating/municipal steam systems) and not much int he way of storage. Electricity has excellent transport infrastructure but storage is still in its infancy compared to natural gas... you can find the odd pumped hydro station or massive battery bank but most electricity storage is low energy/high power used for smoothing out spikes and sags.

With regard to your anecdote: Whomever designed it needs a kick in the balls, that's all. There is no sensible reason why a properly selected pump, for example, would fail every two years because of "too much heat." I'm a mechanical engineer with 16 years of HVAC design experience and I've never heard of that. Corrosion is not really a function of temperature - I suppose at the chemistry level it is, but a good and proper tank will be either coated or cathodically protected or both. There are tanks 50+ years old still in service because they were properly designed and installed. Sorry to hear of your troubles but it's just not the technology's fault.
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Does not compute.

Take who's money? I'm talking about making people and corporations who can afford it pay their own way instead of mooching off of taxpayers.

It's a pretty simple concept: Establish a minimum profits:subsidies ratio. Tax incentives scale back as your company becomes more and more profitable until you don't qualify for incentives at all. It's kind of like how social services for poor people work right now, where if your income is above a certain threshold you don't qualify for benefits.

Or is it okay to give away taxpayer money to someone who clearly doesn't need it?
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How do you figure? We already do have different rules - both officially and de facto.

It's just that right now, the rules are almost entirely biased towards the wealthy.
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I dunno, why don't you tell me? Let's go one for one! You name a specific government program and describe how it "reduced total economic viability" and for every one you come up with I'll come up with one that turned out to be a really good idea in the long run.
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Legitimate cost? Sure. But why do they get to write off the cost when they already make money hand over fist?

If you're going to say "any other business gets the same benefit" then I'll preempt that by asking: Why that should matter? Maybe, just maybe, a business shouldn't get to write off expenses if it's fully capable of affording it and still making billions of dollars in pure profit. All that does is subsidize shareholder's dividends payments and CEO's avarice.
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My tax dollars no doubt go towards things you approve of but I do not. Your tax dollars no doubt go towards things I approve of and you do not. You live in a civilized society, that's just the way it's gonna be. I'm generally okay with that, and if you have a problem you're free to go somewhere else... just be sure to leave all the things that living in this society has enabled you to have because otherwise you'd be stealing from everyone else.

As for natural gas: It's not sustainable, so all you're doing it switching from an expensive, limited fuel source to a slightly cheaper, limited fuel source. Congratulations for kicking the can down the road and fucking over future generations with your lack of foresight.

As for tipping point: You're wrong. Solar is becoming more affordable and more common every year. There are more solar power installers popping up every day it seem. It's a booming industry. It makes economic sense for many homeowners and businesses, and with the various subsidies the payback is typically under 10 years - often under 5. That means whomever installs solar will see a net savings after that time, and that means they have more money to put back into the economy.

The same is not true for oil and gas companies that are already making obscene profits. Subsidizing them does not put more money into the economy nearly as efficiently - it just pads their bottom line and benefits a relative handful of CEOs and shareholders. They are fully capable of doing everything they do now without one dime of government money or tax write-off and still being one of the most lucrative industries on the planet.
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Also not including the cost of health care associated with pollution.

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Venture capital and bank loans require a knowledge and quantification of risks. These people want to know when they'll get their money back, and how much profit they can expect to make.

When you are doing things that are very much worth doing (there are lots of great reasons to develop renewable energy; economic, national security, AND environmental) but do not have either clearly defined risks or payback schedules, then you will have a VERY HARD TIME securing capital for those projects. This is exactly the best time for governments to step in and provide that capital. It is not until there is a clear business case that you'll be able to get much in the way of private funding.

We are close to a tipping point with solar PV. Prices have fallen and now it's really installation costs that are the lion's share of a complete system. Businesses - from manufacturers to installers - have taken advantage of the subsidies offered by all levels of government and private industry alike and built business models around PV installation. It's not *quite* self sustaining yet, but it very well could be very soon. I'm perfectly okay with my tax dollars going towards expanding renewable energy.
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Yup. At no point was the telecommunications industry given billions of dollars in loan guarantees, grants, low-cost or even free use of public lands/eminent domain claims, and tax write-offs to build out the national internet infrastructure. That never happened and it most certainly isn't STILL happening. Telecoms are a free-market utopia and a testament to how great private industry is in the absence of government intervention.
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Seriously?

A quick Google tells me that the oil industry has been receiving subsidies since essentially day one, by being allowed to write off the full cost of drilling new wells. Even to this day the oil industry in the US gets $4 billion per year in subsidies one way or another.
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Your information is pretty outdated. You can buy PV panels today that have 20%+ real conversion efficiency, not under lab conditions. Sunpower claims to have panels that top out at 24%.

Tracking is not as critical as you make it sound. The fact that CSP has tracking but most PV does not, and yet the two technologies are very close in terms of cost per watt, should tell you there's either little advantage to tracking or CSP has some large pitfalls that the tracking is making up for.
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PV panels are warrantied for no less than 80% rated output for 25+ years - recently manufacturers are making that 30 years. They generally require no maintenance whatsoever. Panels installed in the 1970s can still be found in service today.

The capital cost with PV is on par with CSP, but has the advantage of being highly distributable (Appl. Sci. 2013, 3, 325-337; doi:10.3390/app3020325). CSP requires a lot of real estate, but you can put PV just about anywhere including (or especially) on existing structures, exactly where the power is consumed.
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A "three-pronged trailer hitch", which I presume is the insert part; a length of 2x2 (or 1.5x1.5) inch square stock with attachment points for multiple sized ball hitches. It's easy to imagine some careless driver forgetting to secure the retaining pin and such an item sliding out onto the roadway. If so, then that thing is a good sized hunk of metal. Okay, maybe it won't "pierce" a leg being pretty blunt, but that's a broken ankle or fractured fibula easily.

As for ride height - one thought is if he was using the Model S' automatic ride height adjustment. If equipped and active, the car gets lower to the ground the faster it goes to improve handling and efficiency. Stock clearance is supposedly 6 inches from what I could gather, and the car will go lower than that at highway speeds. Not sure by how much, but if the max clearance is 7.5 inches then it's fair to guess it could got he same distance in the other direction: 4.5 inches. Pretty low!
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