Doesn't that rather depend on the application? I need a controller to tie together a bunch of stepper motors and a GPS module. Do I need a monitor and keyboard?

A used Versa is correspondingly cheaper.

I don't live in CA, but that $2,500 brings it down to almost sensible from an economics perspective. Certainly close enough that if you like it, you'll find a way to justify it.

Well, except for the "cheap" part :)

When a Leaf is $14,000 like the similar Versa, I'm in.

(In all fairness, the build quality is better and the performance is maybe closer to a $16,000 Sentra but with more low-end grunt. But you get my drift...)

It's still pretty outrageous to claim that they survive on the few percent they are saving by not collecting in the few states so small that they don't have a presence there.

OK, so then on to point 2 - unless you think they will be building coal plants in downtown LA.

I don't think a car needs to be all things to all people - we have hundreds of models and sub-models available to us. As it stands right now, no single manufacturer has even 20% of the market - individual models are in the single digit range.

In my family, a cheap electric car with perhaps 40 mile range would be ideal. My wife's commute is 5 miles, all congested local roads. The headroom on the battery would only be necessary for heat/AC while sitting in traffic and to account for decreased range with age. Such a car does not yet exist, but there seems to be progress. We would still have our minivan for my slightly longer commute and long trips.

A couple of things:
1. Coal power is a declining percentage. Stepping up the electric car infrastructure now as coal is declining seems to make sense. In any event, it is much easier to regulate a handful of power plants than thousands of individual cars.
2. Even "dirty" sources of electricity are beneficial in certain areas. Los Angeles is constantly suffering air quality due in large part to the number of ICE vehicles on the road. Even if a coal plant supplies the power, the coal plant can be located somewhere more suitable.

Funny, they collect tax in PA. (And in 23 other states.)

I thought we were talking about IBM?

If that meeting with Bill Gates never happened, IBM would still have found someone to provide an OS for their PC. Apple would have still produced the Lisa, ushering in the GUI era. Only an idiot would minimize MS's influence on computing, but let's not pretend that we would all be using carbon paper and typewriters... the PC market was very active when the IBM clone steadily gained prominence, with several vendors of mouse-driven GUIs.

Done what, exactly? Created a command-line personal computer? There was a healthy marketplace full of those - some affordable, some expensive. Within a year or two of release of the Lisa, there were a bunch of windowing environments - some quite competitive like the Amiga, some terrible like Windows. I don't mean to dismiss the level of prestige that IBM brought to the table as far as businesses were concerned, but it's not as if businesses would not have eventually adopted PCs. Visicalc was already making PCs common in the business environment.

The dissection is going to be... awkward.

Are you the same guy? Anyway... there is inherent value added when you manufacture something from raw materials. The raw materials themselves are also on someone's property. Sand is not "free" and neither are microchips.

On the other hand, if someone is whistling a song and the song winds its way into your head and you start to whistle the same song, you have not stolen anything, there is no moral hazard, and copying the song was completely free.

There's a whole list in Bite magazine :)

"Can you"? Could you clarify? Do you mean legally under copyright law?

I don't understand. You don't force soundwaves to be free. They are free by default. Similarly, bits and bites are free by default. There is nothing absurd about it - proprietary software and singers are in the same boat.