The CC is one of VW's most expensive sedans. The Passat is considered a midrange sedan and clocks in at only $24k, which is physically about what I would compare the Tesla model 3 to. But hey... don't take my word for it, look at what the Consumer Reports has to say about buying Sedans:

... there are plenty of fine midsized cars priced under $25,000.

That Tesla compares well to cars that sell for about the same price doesn't do Tesla any favors when you can actually still spend a whole lot less on an automobile and get something that is equally sized, looks just as good, and is is just as utilitarian in all other ways except that it runs on gasoline instead.

It doesn't even compare with 25k cars which you can easily buy a midsized sedan for

What if you're one of those people who has gone around the track long enough to understand that sex divorced from reproduction is meaningless

Ultimately everything is meaningless. Sex is meaningless, having a family is meaningless. Continuing to breath and thereby extending one's life is meaningless. Eating nice food is meaningless.

But to many people living life and enjoying it feels worth doing. In that sense having non reproductive has as much or as little meaning as anything else.

who always wanted to have that family that everyone seems to want to be "liberated" from taking responsibility for?

I don't want to be liberated from the responsibility, I have on desire to spawn. Many people do and seem to have no problem settling down and raising kids.

Reproductive sex isn't boring, like something out of a Puritan movie. It's just as nasty and wild and passionate and kinky as it always was.

Unless you're pretty infertile or want a LOT of kids, then there's an awful lot less of it.

But, it's overlaid with the knowledge that, in that moment, you're like God, reaching down to create life, and your dick is his finger, and this might be the moment that your child is created. It's like taking everything that was pleasant about sex and elevating it to a spiritual level without taking anything away from it.

got nuthin'.

Contraception takes all that away, and renders sex with a woman no different from sex with an apple pie, or a man, or a dog.

I know from experience that beating off (though no direct experience with warm apple pie) is less fun than having sex. I suspect many here will corroborate that. And as for having sex with a man? Well, I'm a guy, and I'm not gay so I don't fancy men. I'm pretty sure the body hair, beard and lack general of boobs and other femal parts would make the experience substantially les enjoyable for me.

And a dog? Gross. Why would I want to spend my time doing something I think dounds really gross?

Now that I realize I'd have an easier time finding a unicorn in this culture than a woman who will truly commit to creating a family,

Da fuq? Given the number of women who seem to really want to hae families, I suspect the problem lies with you, not their non-existence. The suspicion is the word "truly" in there. I strongly suspect you have some weird-ass conditions that disqualify 99.99% of eligable women. Because just going on observation, women who want families is not a rare thing.

Sex is all about trust.

No it ain't, it's about shagging.

The argument that all the money you will save on gasoline makes it somehow worthwhile is entirely irrelevant when the car is still priced at over double the price of what are otherwise physically very comparable cars by other manufacturers.

When some manufacturer comes out with an electric vehicle that looks nice (which Tesla is very good at, by the way), and costs roughly the same amount as any otherwise physically comparable car (which Tesla is currently bad at). The model 3, discounting the fact that it is all-electric, is otherwise physically comparable to many mid-range vehicles by manufactures such as Volkswagen, Dodge, and others, that still cost quite a bit less than what the model 3 is even alleged to ultimately go for, to say nothing of how much less than what it will actually go for once its actually out.

And of course, this is Tesla's "economical" model.... where most manufactures have economical models that run far less than even their mid-range vehicles.

The conclusion is irrefutable. Tesla is a luxury brand.

Except the Tesla model 3 is physically comparable to other vehicles in or around the $25k range...

Bottom line, Tesla is still a luxury automobile.

Was that from the list provided by Bennett Hassleton?

(Sorry Bennett. If you're reading this, I have actually really likes some of your posts, but you've become something of a meme around these parts)

The Iowa class wasn't the last battleship ever built. That was the HMS Vanguard.

The vanguard had much, much more advanced radar, including separate fire control radars for a number of the different Bofors clusters. This is not very surprising as the vanguard was newer at a time when radar was advancing very fast.

Costing a little more is fine.... and entirely understandable owing to inflation. Costing more than double the price of what was considered a mid-range car that we bought brand new in '09 is not.

Even $35k, which it wouldn't cost, by the way, is about 70% more than what we spent on our current car.... and Volkswagen's midrange sedans go for about $25k CDN. not $35-$40... at those prices with a VW, you are easily looking at their higher end vehicles.

I am expecting the model 3 to check in next year at about $45k CDN.

Make no mistake about it, I'd certainly deeply want one... but at those prices, the gasoline saving are entirely irrellevant when you can't afford the monthly payments on the car in the first place because they are more than what you ordinarily pay plus the cost of gasoline combined.

A fat lot of good all the money it can save on gas in the long run will do if the car is so expensive to begin with that the difference between the monthly payments on it versus a gasoline vehicle is more than double what you'd be ordinarily pay for gas anyways in the interim. Of course you could reduce the monthly payments by stretching out the loan over a longer period, but then you are paying even more money for the car, causing it to take even longer to pay for itself with the gasoline that you aren't buying, and running the risk of the car never being cost effective before its battery dies and needs to be replaced.

The summary was talking about the late 1990's, not the late 1980's.

Novell had been almost entirely supplanted by Windows NT server and other alternatives by the turn of the century, largely owing to the fact that just as the Internet was just starting to become the next really big thing, they were still entirely dependent on IPX/SPX instead of TCP/IP.. By the time they corrected this oversight, they had lost such a large percentage of the market in which they were once dominant that they never recovered. They were about relevant in the late 1990' s as Windows 3.1.

But at least you don't have to recompile the executable 20 times for every different flavour and you don't have to mess with GNU Make or GCC, which I consider bonus points

The only time you need to recompile for different distros is when you really, realy don't understand how building works and are making use of features pretty unique to FOSS operating systems.

To avoid recompiling on Linux, or BSD for that matter, you simpy do what you have to do on Windows and OSX anyway: link in known versions of any libraries you use which aren't system libraries. If you're depending on a library from a random package, don't do it.

An affordable vehicle is one that actually is about the same price as any other kind of vehicle that is physically comparable to it.

Last I heard, the model was expected to cost no less than about $45k CDN... which is more than double what my wife and I spent our current automobile.

That's the thing though: why did LISP never take the world by storm?

I have ideas on the matter, but basically even though LISP does everything the way it does it is more computer friendly than human friendly.