Tesla is not yet making money, they currently lose about $15K on every car sold.

I know, right? That Elon Musk has no business sense at all.

It may have been an existing service, but one of the reason why it became known as the "Obamaphone" is because it was under the Obama administration that they started paying money to TV and cable channels for commercials to advertise how easy it is to get one

That's not true. They have become known as the "Obamaphone" because after the Republicans gave it that name, the Obama Administration just went ahead and embraced it (just like "Obamacare"). So when it turns out the program is successful and popular, Obama gets all the credit because the GOP gave it to him.

This is the reason Obama's been able to run circles around Republicans for eight years. As horrible as he is, he's about 10 times as clever as Republicans.

"Use a library!"

"But they closed all the libraries due to public spending cuts. They said everyone already had smartphones!"

"So use your smartphone!"

"While Fox News said Obama was handing out free iPhones the reality is that it's not actually a smartphone"

Also, if you read the article (I know, I know, who has time for that before coming here to lay out their highly informed and expert opinion), you'd see that the money is not an "increased" expenditure, it's just a provision to allow the already allocated funds to be used for more than simply a landline since the legislation was written during the Reagan era and doesn't explicitly mention broadband for some reason. You think they'd have written it in if they meant for your precious taxes to be used for it, but such as it is. I can't think why they'd need to review the documentation.

Tesla marketing starts with some sort of vague "cost" of a car after various "savings + incentives".

But those "savings and incentives" don't come from Tesla. They're not saying, "If you buy a car today, we'll give you a $1000 cash-back incentive". They're saying, "If you buy our car, you'll save money on gasoline, etc etc.

You must be able to see the difference.

Generally these companies are niche and don't have to rely on tricking or motivating a customer to switch

At least you admit that coupons are "tricking" customers.

"Limited-Time-Only!" Discounts are not an "All-American" practice -- they are a practice of global fucking civilization, you idiot.

Invented in the USA, perfected in the USA. Before you make a statement, do you even think to check whether or not it's true?

http://couponing.about.com/od/...

. So they sell them at a loss (or just break even) for a few weeks, get people hooked on them so you're never at a bbq without one, and THEN they yell out "Time to pay the piper, faggots!"

It's Friday, and that means they're fumigating 8chan. That's why they come here.

So have I. And I my specialty is in R&D of industrial control systems. Although I have never sent anything into space, I have been designing controls that if they crash, or even if they crash-then-recover, must do so in a graceful manner to avoid causing damage to equipment, or even injury or death.

For instance, one of my first embedded projects was a controller for a dynamic balancing machine. This particular dynamic balancer happened to be spinning-up Flywheels for Caterpillar Earth-Movers. Each flywheel was about 4 ft. in diameter, and weighed about a ton (literally). Then we spun it up to 1800 RPM, and figured out where the imbalance(s) were.

I figured out REAL early on (and without a "team") that if I "watchdogged" (or otherwise found myself back at the start of the code), that I couldn't just ASSUME that I could re-initialize Ports, Data-Direction Registers, etc; but rather had to "look around" at various inputs to see WTF was the REAL state of the machine, THEN try to do an ORDERLY shutdown and restart. Never once caused a flywheel to act like a Frisbee...

BTW, at that time, I was 20 years old, and completely self-taught.

So sorry; just because you are an "engineer", doesn't automagically make you a better Developer. Stupid is as Stupid Does.

Oh, and then there was the Project where I was contracted to develop a "Failover" system for Handicapped vans. Worked a treat. Never failed to detect input/output mismatch or switchover to the backup systems, and in far less time than a human driver could detect the failure, let alone reach for the "switch to the backup" switch while trying to keep their out-of-control van from flying into the ditch...

This is rocket science we're talking about. It's hard.

So are a LOT of embedded industrial control tasks. And MOST of them don't really allow-for a simple "Reset" in the middle of a Run-condition without "Very Bad Things"(tm) happening.

Moral of the story: You don't need a degree; you need an IQ. And experience.

LOL! No fooling!

And there's a feedback loop here too, because you a) have less life left to live and b) is generally weaker you get less treatment. A relative of mine is dying from cancer and it's low intensity life-prolonging treatment. If he was 20 years younger, they'd put him on high intensity drugs that would keep the cancer suppressed much, much longer. If he was 50 years younger, they'd probably try a full bone marrow transplant which is a massive procedure that is not only ridiculously expensive but likely to kill the old by itself. So being forever young wouldn't just avoid age-related diseases, it'd open up far stronger treatments as well.

Never. Now bow down before your DICE overlords peon.

Why artificial? All the blueprints are in my DNA. On severe burn victims they do muscle and skin grafts, with sufficiently advanced technology we could grow pretty much anything. The non-ethical way would be to just clone me, zap the higher brain functions and keep for 15 years in a vegetative state you'll have all the organs to fit an adult man. The ethical way would be to find ways to grow just that organ in a lab. It wouldn't be the cure to everything as you could have brain tumors and whatnot but you could get pretty far that way.

I AM NOMAD!

Sterilize! Ster - I - LIZE!!!

J.C. Penney tried this. It's become a textbook case study in retail management as to how not to run a retail store. Unfortunately, the "feeling of getting a bargain" is a powerful psychological motivator to purchase; treating customers like rational people is not.

That's why Tesla is failing so badly. They treat customers like rational human beings and don't give "incentives" and "cash back" and "0% financing".

And I guess that means that before coupons were invented, every company simply failed.

You're just a pleb who doesn't actually know what he wants nor understands game-ification.

"Game-ification" is marketing-speak for "how we fuck our customers, but good".

Basically, you're saying humans should be more rational than we are.

No, I'm saying that "marketing" makes us less rational than we are.

I think it's pretty amazing that spacecraft can survive at all out there, given the sort of particles flying around - individual cosmic rays with the energy of fast-pitch baseballs. Thankfully, particles with such high energy have tiny cross sections (they prefer to move through matter rather than interact with it), and when they do hit something and create a shower of particles, most of the progeny is likewise super-high energy and will most likely just move through whatever it's in.

It's more interesting when they strike the atmosphere - each collision creates a new shower of other high energy particles, more and more, spreading out the energy as they descend. In the end, detectors on the surface over an area of dozens of square kilometers simultaneously pick up different pieces of the same cascade kicked off by a single cosmic ray collision.