If you were bitten by one, would you have the proportional strength of a spider or of a goat?

Sigh - ½ should just be 1/2. Beta mucks me up again.

Heck, it is worse than that. It is not just between consenting adults, it is for perfectly legal services.

In the US, it is estimated that ý of all cash transactions are for illegal services. Of those illegal services, about ý are for grey market services. That is, legal services where the parties don't report the income to the tax man.

Here is a old article, from 2009, but I found it helpful.

http://www.economist.com/node/...

It was also a plot point for the Big Bank Theory - season 6 - where Lenord goes off in a ship in find such things.

Oddly enough, according to the article, one of the criticisms of the project is that there will be too much oxygen, not the lack of it. They plan on growing their own food, which means the plants will need to intake CO2. There will not be enough humans / animals to convert oxygen into C02. Over time, 62 days according to the article, the amount of oxygen will go up and the plants will die off, and with no food source the humans will die.

Are you sure? I thought that GM and Chrysler had to sell their finance division when they slid into bankruptcy.

So let me ask a follow up question. How do you and your dealer know that your leased car's residual value is less than the market value? Answer – because there is a robust 3rd party market for those vehicles. Compile the national data from the auction sales, extrapolate the differences between sold cars and yours (basically mileage and options) and you have a pretty good idea of what is happening.

But what if Tesla grabs a good portion of that data because they are running the leased cars through their own system and not sharing that data. Thinner public sales means you need to kick out your confidence intervals. This strengthens Tesla's hand because they actually know what is going on.

I am pushing things a little, but I can see this giving Tesla a slight advantage.

Well, no – not directly – that is why I said subtle. An analogy might be made to Apple's iPhones. Apple can't legally prevent you from going to a 3rd party repair shop. However, they do make things difficult. If you do so you void the warranty, they use special screws, they don't publish repair manuals, etc. I think this might be more akin to a nudge than a full out assault.

You are half right - but that means you kind of misses my point. What happens to leased cars after they are returned?

Technically they revert to the leasing company, not the dealership or manufactory. In practice this means that they get dumped onto the used car market. This means when the lease holder drops off the car at the dealership (which is a franchise) at the end of the lease, they tend to have the same dance as when bringing in a trade in. Not exactly the same – leases throws in some weird quirks – but it is in the same class.

I have seen some weird conflicts of interest between dealerships and manufactures. Manufactory put out a sweet lease deal 2 to 5 years ago, and then the cars start getting returned with a high residual value, so there is a large dump of overpriced vehicles onto the used market. Nobody comes out a winner here.

Which is why I think Tesla might be doing this. It would give them greater control over their used car market.

As for not owing the car – technically correct but that misses some points. In some ways it is better than owning a car. All auto leases have option for you to buy the car at the end of the lease. This puts the leaseholder in the proverbial driver's seat. I have seen people execute the option, buy out the car, then turn around and sell the car for a higher price. I have seen other people return the car and then buy it back from the dealership for thousands less. (Personally, I don't like leases because I think they have a higher total cost of ownership. But that would be a different thread.)

1. Almost all auto dealerships are franchise operations. Tesla owns theirs outright.
2. Most used cars are not sold through a dealership.
        Private sales and 3rd party dealerships are common.
        Even when somebody trades in used vehicle for a new one it rarely shows up on that dealer's lot. Normally it goes to auction where some other used car dealer buys it up.

Is this a subtle assault on the 1st sale doctrine, keeping the cars within Tesla's system?

If that were true, wouldn't they be picking Detroit instead? I mean, it is in bankruptcy. You should be able to pick it up for pennies on the dollar.

Sure. Can you be a bit more specific on what you are looking for? The M&A academic field is huge. Do you want to talk about 1980s style turn and burn? Those where abusive thanks to a flaw in pension accounting. However, that flaw has been fixed. Zombie companies? Bank mergers of the 90s? Give me some place to start.

I think you are missing a subtle point. Men do enroll in fashion, it's women who don't enroll in auto repair. Men are in widely dispersed fields, women tend to clump in a few. Even within a field, such as law, women tend to clump within a discipline. Oddly enough, they tend to clump in professions that offer good life / work balance. Culturally they are still expected to take care of the kids and grandparents - so no - I don't think they should shut up. However, this means there are too many women pursuing the same job thus driving down wages, so the current generation is screwed. But they did better than the last and hopefully the next will do even better.

The study was done on Americans between 57 and 85, so we can strike most of your objections. I don't think many died from gas leaks or rancid food.

The researches did consider the link between smell, apatite, and caloric intake and where able to account for that. So strike that.

A hint is that the study was inspired for the search for neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Being able to smell depends on stem cells rejuvenating the bits of the nose that we smell with. If those stem cells stop rejuvenating, does that mean that brain cells stop rejuvenating? The nose is the only sense that is directly connected to the brain. The jurry is still out on that question – but that is why I think it is a promising line of research.

The "Corn Flake" issue does not apply here. If that were true than people who could smell and had cancer would die at about the same rate as those who could not smell and never have had cancer.

A big issue is the small study size with limited data.

So, it more points to promising lines of research than proving anything.