15%?

The Tesla Model S is the single highest selling luxury sedan in the US, beating out the Mersedez Benz S-Class.

It's fair to say that electric cars will be destroyed by fire at a slightly higher rate than brand new gasoline cars, but they are subject to destruction by other means less often.

The fires are contained and, as stated, were sufficiently contained to avoid burning the paper in the glove compartment, and the cabin suffered exactly zero damage, due to the well designed firewalls.

All I have to say is MEH.

That's not how statistics works....

Sorry, what does home heating have to do with cigarette smoking?

Analogy....

I claim eating cyanide is bad for you.

You counter by saying that cyanide is in the wood people use to make backyard decks and the they have dinner there...

Ha!!!

Still confused.

To be fair, TWO of those three people are on record saying they would buy again and don't think the fire was a big deal, given the type of impact.

People are really bad at understanding statistics.

The masses will believe that electric cars are dangerously subject to spontaneous burning as a result of this press coverage, despite the extraordinarily solid safety record of the Tesla cars.

This is (to me) substantially similar to those people who frequently call violent crime a "growing problem" and probably comes from the same lazy, sensationalist reporters.

While the thrust of the military power of the British empire is truly not what it was, he is accurate in saying that "the sun never sets". :-)

Nobody really refers to it as an "empire" anymore, but in addition to Britain and Northern Ireland, the U.K. still controls territories including "Gibraltar, Bermuda, numerous Caribbean islands, Ascension, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha, the Falkland Islands, and South Georgia." Some have argued that the sun finally set over the empire after the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. But some argue this view ignores two tiny but crucial territories which bridge the gab: the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific and the British Indian Ocean Territory -- also known as the Chagos Islands, where Britain and the United States maintain a joint military facility at Diego Garcia. The question is "on midwinter's day in the southern hemisphere, does the sun set over Pitcairn before it rises over Diego Garcia?"

Here's what Peter Hammond's calculations found:
---
[The] results allow for the refraction of the sun's rays when it is close to the horizon. They indicate that, on 21st June, the sun rises over Diego Garcia at 01:22 hrs GMT, more than half an hour before it sets over Pitcairn at 01:59 hrs GMT.
Thanks to Diego Garcia (uninhabited except temporarily by various U.K. and U.S. military personnel) and to Pitcairn (population now about 50), the British Empire appears safe from sunsets for the time being.
---

They're doing *something* onto your children, but I don't think it's called praying....

It was explained in later books of the series that near-relativistic speeds make it impossible to receive communications due to the frequency-shift due to speed.

There's about a page of description of it in Speaker For the Dead and another several pages in Xenocide.

In Xenocide, it is stated that Ender's AI, Jane, can send transmissions to a ship at relativistic speed, but only by using the sustained and combined power of much of humanity's computers at once.

Apple developed their own mapping app and data over the course of the last 3-5 years....

But... not really.

In an area of open conflict, there were skirmishes at least once a week and the embassy was staffed with armed guards.

I doubt the president got on the phone and said "no, no marines".

As far as I am aware, the guys were happily chatting online and were dead within 5 minutes.

Do you think Barak Obama gets on the phone within 2 minutes of every skirmish anywhere in the world?

It seems like a red herring...

Bengazi was a pretty minor thing on any sort of scale that matters to anyone outside politicos with a bone to pick.

Yes, I even knew one of the guys who was killed and it was pretty damn unfortunate and there may have been some warning about potential risks, but overseas facilities such as foreign embassy facilities, especially in war-torn areas are under threat on a monthly basis and I don't see you advocating a full scale mobilization each time it happens.

You should realize that the guys there in Libya were used to random "emergency" situations. He used to drop off his chats with friends at least once a week and say "security thing, gotta go" and would disappear, saying they were being carted off by security staff.

It's more focused on the gullibility of the target.

"you're so gullible, you would buy the Brooklyn bridge if someone offered to sell it to you"

To be fair, even with a strong ND filter, it's pretty apparent that you're looking into a reflective prism.

meh...

I've never had that issue in Munich... (for what it's worth).

You must admit that there is a threshold where the damage caused by "preventing bombs by all costs" is outweighed by the damage caused by the prevention.

Perhaps your line is different than others, but there IS a line.

So, in order to have a semi-rational discussion about this topic, you must start from there.

Accusing someone of encouraging the exploding of airplanes because he feels that line is near (or has been crossed) is an asinine and unintelligent straw man.

I don't think the taking off of shoes crosses that line, personally, but I do feel that some other things they do (like no-fly lists that are impossible to appeal) does.

But perhaps you're someone who values safety over freedom to a high degree. If children if Muslims were rounded up and sent to re-education camps in order to prevent "home grown terrorists" from blowing up planes, I suspect you might object. If so, then we found YOUR particular line.

Think now, of where that line lies and how you reconcile that with others' views.

But "responsible people" were already subsidizing those who aren't. It was just done indirectly and very inefficiently, and with huge gaps in coverage for legitimate illness that otherwise "responsible people" found themselves not covered for.

I see what you're saying, and I agree that the ACA is not an ideal solution. It was only adopted because it was almost entirely Republican-drafted and Democrats assumed that would mean they would get at least some support.

The whole concept of "health insurance" is a bit wonky, because you can be dropped from your coverage whenever by an insurance provider. Insurance is designed to spread the risk of single-event large-scale losses, but health is almost never that. Obviously, there is the catastrophic accident scenario, but that's relatively rare in our hyper-safety society, so the bulk of health issues are chronic and/or terminal.

Having an intelligent discussion on how to deal with chronic illness is a serious concern.

Obvious, systemic issues such as obesity need to be addressed, but I'm not sure that "your insurance will cost more when you're 40" is a sufficient, nor really even a very useful signal to "don't eat ice cream for dinner" to some random chubby 23 year old.

So, on that, I reject the idea that "signaling bad behaviour via the future cost of health insurance" is a relevant marker for the value of a health program.

There are some programs in the world (like Japan) where the government offers universal coverage, but only pays something like 80%. You can buy private insurance to cover the remainder, or you can eat it. People under a certain income get 100% regardless and that moves up on a graduated scale. This gives them incentive to avoid unnecessary procedures, but still offers universal coverage for catastrophic injury and the poor.

I don't think any changes to the healthcare or health insurance system will fix things like obesity or smoking, frankly, because most humans are inherently REALLY bad at planning. So I contend that we can virtually dismiss the "changing habits via the threat of future cost increases" as a viable tool to change public behaviour.

Given that, what alternatives are there that don't completely suck, other than a public-payer system? I'm not sure I see the argument outside that.