This means that you can't count expenses, notably the power and the card against the profit.

Sure you can. The tax ugliness for assets only comes when you're trading existing assets. The rules for manufacturing are different.

I think it's harder and harder to avoid registering your car. There are automated license plate checkers now - a cop can drive down the street and have the system check for registration on every single car driving the other direction. I think they're used in some places in the US, though they're not widespread.

Yes. But technically you have to do the same thing if you buy and sell euros or yen.

Indeed. Snowden should release a letter of regret to the NSA, thanking them for their interest but indicating he can neither confirm nor deny possession of any NSA files as a matter of personal security.

Hit a little too close to home? For all but a tiny fraction, environmentalism is all about moral preening. It melts away when sacrifices (well, sacrifices to one's own standard of living) are in the offing.

...or maybe people don't really like electric cars as much as they say they do.

I was referring to your knee-jerk reaction referring to "cell-phone cameras", not to the (lack of) desirability of carrying interesting payloads.

There was nothing knee-jerk about it. I'm tired of people spouting idiotic nonsense about magical sensor packages.

Of course, you don't carry satellite quality sensors on reconnaissance planes because reconnaissance planes are not satellites. They don't have to qualify for the environmental condition ranges peculiar to space operations, they don't even have to endure the kind of maintenance-free operation that is regularly required of space equipment. (And also, since they operate in the stratosphere, not in the exosphere, the design considerations for the same objectives are different - different focal lengths required, different speed of the imaging platform, different ways of coping with seeing and other atmospheric influences, etc., but I digress here, as this is not as much about equipment quality but rather about its purpose and design.)

When I say satellite quality sensors I"m talking about things like resolution and tracking. Obviously.

Is it really that hard to understand? For the multi-spectrum, satellite quality sensors you're going to find in a high altitude spy plane the extra ton the U-2 can carry is a real operational consideration.

And yet the U-2 is still flying. The reality is the SR-71 was retired because it was too expensive to operate.

You see them as deluded fools because you're deluded fools.

Not actually true in practice.

These aren't cell phone cameras we're talking about here. One of the reasons the CIA has sort of grudgingly continued U-2 flights in lieu of the RQ-4 is the latter doesn't have enough payload (along with other considerations, like price).

What we should do is execute people by running them over with expensive German luxury cars. Enough with the cheap grace - let's find out if Germany is willing to pay a non-inconsequential price for its principles.

We moved away from firing squads because for particularly heinous crimes the executioners were deliberately shooting to wound instead of kill. I support capital punishment, but I think it should be as quick and painless as possible.

And if that means the end of your happy motoring society and a disallowal of nuclear power, STFU and adapt.

So... not happening, then.