It's very difficult for me to see how you could make a consumption tax progressive enough to result in overall progressive taxation when there are people with 10s of billions in financial assets walking around.

Their personal consumption rates are in the fractions of a percent of their income, not say 80% like an upper middle class person.

Ultimately I think the current taxation system is reasonable IF some of the egregious loopholes are closed - particularly the carried interest and in the area of estate taxation.

In traditional societies your children would take care of you in old age.

Maybe if we got away from this nuclear family bullshit parents would pay more attention to their children because the return on investment would once again be important to them.

I am quite happy with my Nexus 4. I could have maybe dealt with the 5 but surely the 6 is more than what is going to fit in my shirt pocket.

Unfortunately our system of economics doesn't capture these diseconomies.

Imported oil is another one. If you factored in the cost of political and military involvement in the middle east the price of oil would look very different.

Sounds like everything I don't use in Windows is getting patched.

My experience in France is that the young people in tech industries speak good English. Not so much the older generation.

The real problem is once you get out in the general public and want to do something like get a train ticket or buy lunch. It makes daily life a problem.

You are assuming there are conveniently placed superchargers. The general rule is that there are not. Two of the routes I take most frequently only have superchargers near the destinations. Completely impractical.

For example there is only ONE supercharger in all of Canada.

Then there is the additional fact that even using a supercharger takes a significant amount of time.

The Tesla is great for commutes, but for road trips forget it.

I thought polygraphs were most notable for giving a lot of false positives.

That's really not such a bad characteristic for security clearances.

There is only one strain of Ebola known to spread through the air, and that has not been seen in the wild since 1978.

Only one human being has been known to be infected with it in all history.

This one isn't all that dangerous either. There have been several previous outbreaks that were controlled without causing world wide panic.

The reason this one is causing panic is because it is occurring in place where there are customs like the entire family getting up close and personal with corpses prior to burial, general lack of medical care infrastructure and superstitious populations who like to do things like attack hospitals to release the patients being treated into the general population.

Simple well known diseases like measles killed 122000 people last year in places like this. Far more than Ebola ever did.

The main reason I like nice cars is for going on roadtrips where I drive 400+ miles a day.

Can't do it in this car. Range is still too short.

Plus I bet that a couple of those 3.2 second starts makes the range quite a bit shorter.

France is a lot smaller than the United States. It's about the size of Texas, with a population about 1/5 of the US.

Just based on that you would expect fewer people to pick it as a destination.

Not to mention who speaks French anymore? It's not even in the top 10 most spoken languages these days. It's much easier to deal with a new place where you have some idea of the language.

Back in 2003 the company I was working for shared a building with GiantInsuranceCompany.

One day coming in to work I noticed that the dumpster near the entrance I used was overflowing with stuff.

The stuff was hundreds of Model M keyboards being thrown out. I snagged about 50 of them and gave about 20 away. Kept 30 for myself. Down to 20 now because I've gifted some more away. Over time I've picked up some new ones from EBay. Including a black one with nipple.

I wish I had appreciated the value of these fully. Back in the 1980's I had a 3101 terminal which had a very clicky keyboard so I knew I liked the feel. But I had no idea these would become almost a cult.

We don't recapture military costs. We don't recapture climate costs (we can't even quantify that). We don't recapture pollution costs. We increasingly don't recapture road maintenance/construction costs.

Some states just dump gas taxes into general revenues and borrow road maintenance costs (Yes NJ I'm looking at YOU).

Plus the tax is ridiculously regressive.

Not to mention roads have a lot of other external economic effects, both positive and negative.

I think we should just get rid of gas taxes. So when something replaces gas we won't be trying to tax that to replace gas revenues.

Law enforcement is likely to be able to get around that.