Well, slaves actually did have substantial market value. Piketty has an interesting section on this in "Capital". Quoting from it :

What one finds is that the total market value of slaves represented nearly a year and a half of US national income in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, which is roughly equal to the total value of farmland...

In practice, in the antebellum United States, the market price of a slave was typically on the order of ten to twelve years of an equivalent free worker's wages... In 1860, the average price of a male slave of prime working age was roughly $2,000, whereas the average wage of a free farm laborer was on the order of $200.

For reference, the US National Income in 2012 was $15.7 trillion, i.e. a few percent less than the GDP. 150% of that is about equal to the total value of all residential real estate in the US.

Go ahead and try to argue why it's not true, I'll wait. In every area where achievement is objectively measurable, it is true. For example, The world record marathon time was 2:26 in 1950, but the top 50 finishers of the most recent Boston Marathon all beat that time. So, what you need to prove is that something about modern times has had such an opposite effect -- in subjective pursuits only -- as to outweigh the nearly insurmountable odds of a growing population with growing freedom times the impact of technology.

All that experience can be accumulated hundreds of times faster in digital where you can see immediate results. Tomorrow's experts will be more expert than yesterday's experts, just as the 20th century saw huge leaps in athletic performance such as running and swimming races, weight lifting records, etc. There are also thousands of artists today that equal the top handful of masters of old times, it simply isn't acknowledge because it is subjective, and appreciation is inherently relative, in the same way people love 60's sports cars even though they are actually slow and poor-handling.

Another possibility is that the model 3 will eventually hit its price point but miss its delivery date. If demand for the S remains strong enough to gobble up battery production, Tesla could just keep making those, while reduced battery prices increase profit, and/or reduce the selling price to extend demand even further, thus pushing back the Model 3.

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The basic oddity of the Model 3 plan is Tesla's intention to jump all the way from the $80K S down to half of that on the next model. An electric car doesn't really need to be as cheap as $35K, since the S has demonstrated demand for a higher price if the car is good, and since the average price of a new car is already $28,400, and those cars will burn tens of thousands of dollars of gas over their lifetime.

One way or another there is going to be a financial incentive to feel their way down the price point more gradually, although I hope they remain committed to, and are able to pull off, the revolutionary approach.

A society that doesn't allow math won't last long.

How often will we fall into trap of taking headlines like this at face value? Islam, not even radical Islam, is anti-math, as far as I have ever heard.

Read further into the (short) article, and you hear actual quotes from the new policy, which are more what you would expect:

Educators cannot teach nationalistic and ethnic ideology and must instead teach "the belonging to Islam ... and to denounce infidelity and infidels."

Books cannot include any reference to evolution. And teachers must say that the laws of physics and chemistry "are due to Allah's rules and laws."

...all of which is still bad, albeit all-too-familiar. But I will be $5 if you asked ISIS director of education if they were "anti-math" he would take it as an accusation.

Actively funding both gives you a VERY easy way to reward and punish - simply move the needle a little either way in the next round of funding. Once you've committed to one or the other, the incumbent gets entrenched and very cozy.

Which is the entire point of a "global plan."

they'll just pass the extra cost on to their customers

If that is true, then the taxes won't cut into profits, so the businesses won't raise any objections to the taxes. Is that what you're predicting?

Hasn't the RIAA been filing suits against people for downloading music without paying for it for a decade or so?

You paid for this music when you bought the phone.

Keep trying.

The "ride-sharing" services believe that smart phones are the enabling technology that explain why Things are Different Now and taxi laws should no longer apply. I would guess the rationale for this is the same. Of course a lot of people already had cell phones way back in the dark ages of Kozmo.com (2000 or thereabouts), but I'll grant relatively few people had GPS, especially linked to their phone, which would be very useful for automated dispatch optimization. Combining trips would be the key for making this viable.

Because your immune system is likely to kill you when it kicks into hyperdrive to clear the pathogens from your system:

The presence of microbial pathogens in the bloodstream triggers systemic inflammation and can lead to sepsis, which often overcomes the most powerful antibiotic therapies and causes multiorgan systems failure, septic shock and death. Sepsis afflicts 18 million people worldwide every year, with a 30-50% mortality rate even in state-of-the-art hospital intensive care units, and its incidence is increasing because of the emergence of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms.

The use of magnets here is not magical, just a way to pull out the nanobeads. They are coated with a human-derived factor that does all the hard work of pathogen selectivity:

These capture agents are composed of magnetic nanobeads coated with a genetically engineered version of human MBL that binds to a wide variety of pathogens and is easily manufactured but lacks key functional domains that could complicate therapy.

4K camcorders!

That's like saying you can take a car so long as you own the slim jim you use to get in it. You didn't make the asteroid, or oil deposit, or whatever it is. You have no inherent right to it.

You can only lower taxes if you lower your spending. I have yet to see any government entity, Federal or State, do so.

Further, if you have read The Federalist Papers you will see both how naive Madison, Hamilton and Day were on the tax issue, as well as their ideas on taxes in general. They square, more or less, with how things are done in that those who make more should pay more not as a form of punishment but only because they can.

However, this should be taken in context as in their day the difference between the rich and everyone else was just as wide as it is today but it was somewhat easier for a person to move up the financial ladder than it is today for numerous reasons.

As to taxing the rich, see above. It's not a punishment, regardless of what some on the left will say, but only the fact that they can afford to pay more without that extra money affecting their lifestyles. Compare someone making $50K/year who has a 2% increase in their federal tax rate to someone making $250K/year. That 2% impacts them significantly more than the second person even though the amount is more in the latter case.

If we're going to lower taxes we need to make across the board cuts. There are no sacred cows. Reduce the Social Security programs, cut out military projects, stop most food and fuel subsidies, remove tax loopholes and tax benefits to a bare minimum (mortgage deduction, depreciation, etc), and so on.

At this point there is no other way to lower taxes other than cutting what we spend and having, in this case Nevada, spend over $1 billion of its taxpayers money does not help the matter. That lost money has to come from somewhere and it will not be made up by those employed at the plant, those who build the extra road and development, the ones who feed these people and everything else. It won't happen. A large portion of that money will never be recovered in any form.

So the argument becomes, if we want to lower taxes we have to cut our spending or if not, the tax code needs to be rejiggered so more money can be found to keep paying for all the subsidies and the like we keep spending money on.

It happens regularly in this country. The taxpayers get the shaft so private industry doesn't have spend their money. Our football teams (U.S. football, not your football), when they need a new stadium, threaten to take their team to another city unless the taxpayers cough up their money to build the new stadium and related matters, while the team continues to charge exorbitant prices.

This country wastes hundreds of billions of dollars each year by making sure private industry doesn't have to suffer the pangs of going out and getting financing for its projects like the rest of us do when we want to buy a home or do major repairs.

Don't forget we used several trillion dollars to prop up our banks and financial firms when, through their own incompetence, our financial system went into meltdown. These folks then used the taxpayer money to give themselves bonuses for the great job they did AND have told us taxpayers to go pound sand any time it is mentioned they should thank us for protecting them.

For all our talk about free markets and capitalism, we are incrementally closer to fascism than we are to a representative democracy. Industry, as a whole, gets what it wants, even if it means the taxpayers have to bend over and take it.