I think "c" will be the biggest roadblock. The cell companies make a killing off of the replacement phones and insurance, and possibly other charges.

Here is an example of how T-Mobile tried to make money off of a stolen phone. My stolen phone that is. Unfortunately this was just slightly before the days of iPhones so no remote wipe was possible:

1) Phone is stolen.
2) Thief uses it to call Guatemala and Honduras, runs up a ~$900 bill.
3) I report phone stolen
4) They inform me of the charges.
5) I remind them that when I signed up for their service I said I would only do it if they DEACTIVATED international calling. So how did these calls go through in the first place?
6) "Oh, I see that right here in the notes Mr. Ed. We will give you $50 off as a valued customer. How do you want to pay the remaining $850?"
7) I decline to pay and refer back to #5.
8) Proceed to accuse me of orchestrating the theft myself and charging someone to use the phone.
9) Call my wife a liar and a thief when she talks to them.

I obviously haven't paid them a cent in spite of their repeated efforts to collect this over the years. I bet their are people that do though, presented with the same scenario. Regardless, I wont trust a cell company to act in a rational way when there is a dollar to be made, extorted, or stolen from their clients. If remote bricking cuts into their bottom line it will never happen.

The real trick to charisma is to manipulate yourself with falsehoods, to the benefit of others. Well, maybe not falsehoods, but untested and unproven assertions.

Anyways, just try this for a while and see if it doesn't work. Every time you meet someone new, before you have a chance to say something and hopefully before you even make eye contact, try to find at least one thing about them that you like, admire, or want to be more like yourself. Make something up if you have to, but be consistent about it. You might be amazed at the results.

I think the conversation, and the resulting political tie-in, is more about US franchise law and auto dealers dependence on said laws, than they are about an electric car, conservative ideology, or any particular politician.

Auto dealer groups comprise a powerful lobby with massive dollars to spend on politicians and long standing relationships with our governing bodies. These dealer groups are by and large threatened by Tesla's "direct to customer" model because it cuts them right out of the picture. Their greatest fear is once Tesla has cemented this as a viable and legal distribution method for their cars, what will stop other manufacturers from following suit and putting the franchise auto dealers out of business?

Thus, state and national auto dealer groups have been exerting whatever influence they can to maintain the status quo concerning franchise law, and this means standing in opposition to Tesla's business model. It really has nothing to do with the car, nor does it have anything to do with conservative thinking, or even that the car is electric. It is merely about the fact that lots of people who have been making lots of money for a very long time under current franchise law don't want to see that change. If it does you might begin to see manufacturers buying out their franchise dealers and running their own operations for sales and service in the US.

If all manufacturers go to this distribution model, or have it as an available choice, what does that mean for us?

1) Does that mean some of the prohibitive barriers to successfully producing and marketing a new car make have suddenly disappeared? I think that may be a yes, and that's possibly a good thing. More choice, more avenues for innovation and economic opportunity. On the downside, a lack of required infrastructure, like service facilities, dealerships where they have staff on hand to take care of the customers, etc. can make the ownership experience particularly daunting. I think Tesla has handled this right, however another company coming along after them might not. This is a major point of contention in the franchise law battle. Currently manufacturers are required to have a certain number of service facilities and sales floors.

2) Would widespread adoption of Tesla's business model by other manufacturers adversely affect prices? I think it *could* result in lower prices for cars and related services as you could cut out a middleman. However, imagine if every Ford dealer in your state was owned by the same company. That would reduce or even eliminate competition, and make it very easy to have institutionalized price fixing that would be very difficult to detect and prosecute. Less competition is bad for customers in general, and bad for companies as well as there is no drive to perform better, work harder, give better customer service than the other guy.

3) How will this affect jobs? The economy, etc.?

This really needs a lot of thought put in to it. Its not as simple as just saying, "Hey, its Tesla, its an awesome car, and an awesome idea, lets just let them do it." Its about all of the other manufacturers that are eying this exchange and getting ready to start pushing boundaries themselves. Where that will lead is really uncertain.

You think this is just the "Republican" way? Democrats are all about redistributing wealth, but not of the 1%. Methinks your "hate-tinted" glasses need to be cleaned. Everything you said in your post after that may be true, but the Democrtats are just as complicit and guilty of pandering to the top 1% and ensuring their position at the expense of the rest of us.

I dont know the rest of your posting history, but whenever I see anyone with that strong of feeling towards either one of the parties foisted upon the US electorate I have the same response you did: "You are a slave. They won, you lost." Even worse, you're a house slave. You're defending them and attacking their supposed enemies. Good slave, keep up the good work.

Very true. However, in addition to the obvious harm caused by ridiculous prison sentences, court costs, fines, and the inevitable medical problems from tainted and impure illicit chemicals, there are negative repercussions from the stigma and mental attitudes towards individuals with substance abuse problems. These attitudes are perpetuated and heavily reinforced by criminalization. The feelings of "they deserve what they get" and "well they shouldn't be doing drugs" when someone with substance abuse issues meets an untimely fate or experiences catastrophic problems is insufficient to fostering individual and societal health. These attitudes cause harm to addicted individuals and society alike.

Bear in mind that many of the addicted have untreated mental health issues that prevent them from interfacing with society normally. They "cope" with their mental problems, which could be easily addressed by any number of widely available pharmaceuticals, with illicit drug use. Many of these individuals could be returned to happy, healthy, productive members of society if they were able to interface with medical professionals that could not only help them with their addiction, but also address the underlying problems that led them down the path to addiction initially. The main roadblock to identifying, treating, and ultimately healing these people is directly traceable to the criminalization of drugs.

The irony is that criminalization doesn't stop them from acquiring and using drugs, it just stops them from getting off of drugs.

Exactly right. There are two political parties in the US, but their not the republicans and democrats. They are those who are elected to office and those that elect them. Forgetting this is the root of just about every political woe we face in the US.

Damn right! Not only would we reduce violent crime and incarceration rates, we would also give uncounted masses of chronic drug usesr that are in desperate need of mental health assistance a chance to interface with medical personnel. Removing the perjorative aspects of drug use is the first step to removing the stigma. It is the stigma (well and fear of prosecution) that keeps underpriveledged and dispossesed addicts from seeking mental health assistance that could get them off of drugs and into real treatment of the underlying causes of addiction. Namely, untreated psychological disorders.

But what to do with all of the infrastructure, ingenuity, business acumen, and cut throat (literally!) tacticians that have made the drug trade so profitable and effective? I say we harness the power of prohibition! Since prohibition is so great at forcing the development of low cost methods of acquisition, production, and distribution it would be a shame and great disservice to just let it collapse on itself and atrophy. Let's outlaw alternate fuels and green energy. Lets outlaw cybernetic implants. Lets outlaw safe sex! Then we will be certain to have a constant supply of these newly banned services at unheard of low prices and without even a the faintest hint of elitist bias in distribution. And why should this work? Because, well, that's just the nature of prohibition, and man for that matter.

All we need is automated mining and smelting equipment, some fancy 3d printers, and programmable assembly robots. Then we can Von Neumann the shit out of the moon and asteroids!

Most of their mass is not worthwhile to transport back to Earth, but would make fantastic raw materials for more robots, spare parts, spacecraft hulls, etc. Building a massive iron spacecraft is not a thing we would do on earth due to the expense of getting it out of ye olde gravity well. However, if its assembled in space who cares!

The valuable "trace" elements could be accumulated and sent back to earth or used in-situ for electronics, catalysts to process CHON into chemical propellant, or whatever is neded.

Pie in the sky bootstrapping, I know. But let a boy dream, eh?

My axiom for scary situations is: "When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!"

Any chace this behavior fits their target exclusion profile?

Dark coloring makes perfect sense. Think about it. If you created a prehistoric sea beast that was half shark/half alligator I bet you would paint them black too. It just looks more awesomer! Now, if they could only find a test to see if any of them had frickin lazer beams strapped to their heads...

Worse, Consensus != Correct Response.

And even worse than that, Fact != Correct Response.

I have not heard one single suggestion from those that associate themselves favorably with the idea of "climate change" that wasn't foolish, irrelevant, or even outright destructive. So what if they are right, it just means we are all fucking doomed. They are wasting all of their vast media exposure, grassroots support, and political clout on things that won't make a damn bit of difference if the Earth's future is anything like its past. We will just be another species in the 98% column.

I am not a "believer", nor am I a "denier". I am a realist. As a realist all of the causes, predictions, models, and wild empassioned gesticulations around the subject of "climate change" are inconsequential. I will say this again, the causes, at our current level of preparation, are irrelevant. What is relevant is the Earth has been both hotter and colder than it currently is, intolerably so, and innumerable times in repeating cycles. We are living in a generouosly temperate era, a fortunate anomoly that has given us the ability to cover this planet with people. Regardless of what we do, this Elysian comfort we are so dependent on will eventually end. A realist knows that the only logical result of these facts is to prepare for the worst our planet has to offer, or suffer extinction.

Of course a realist also knows that a species that uses the spectre of global climate change to manipulate markets, expand taxation, circumvent rights and priviledges previously guaranteed, and as a political power grab deserves whatever it gets. Stupid humans.

As a self-admitted deist, I have come to the conclusion that both atheism and deism are intellectually inferior to agnosticism. There is insufficient provable evidence for both the existence and non-existence of any supernatural, universe creating entity. And, while that may lead some on the path of least resistance to atheism, I dont think it is intellectually superior to agnosticism.

Oddly, I came to this conclusion by reading "The hero with a thousand faces" by Joseph Campbell. His attempt to distill and illuminate the coincidences and commonalities in religious mythos got me thinking of this as well. I noticed that a common thread throughot most religions is the concept of "free will" coupled with decisions or actions. Whether that is exemplified by the call to believe or to excercise some ritual, the core is that deities respect free will and demand people use it to confirm thier acquiescence to their diety.

It is then no strech to say that a deity that respects free will cannot "stack the deck" in their favor by creating a universe where their existence is undeniable without invalidating that free will. To take this thought even further experimentally, consider that if we existed in a universe where god was provable, choosing to believe or have faith in a deity would be meaningless, which would invalidate all this effort on the part of the deity to make human decisions so eternally important. Your choice would be to either acknowledge a fact or to wilfully ignore the evidence.

Not much of a choice, which brings us back to the idea of free will. I posit that if a universe creating deity exists, and specifically creates beings designed to make free decisions for or against that deity, it must create a universe for those beings to live in that is identical to one where god does not exist. So, in order to preserve the freedom of choice that a diety will ostensibly use to determine our eternal future, that deity has to remove any irrefutable proof of their existence from the universe.

Again, this is just a deists perspective on why I think agnostics hold an intellectually superior position to both deists and atheists. YMMV.

Because men were not the subject of a political hype media campaign by the name of the "War on Women." No one cared tremendously about universal contraception coverage for women before that particular meme was spread by the media in their new role as the servants of certain political agendas. All men need to do is get the attention of a certain political party and convince them to create a "War on Men" flame campaign. Then, after a few months of hardcore media repetetion and perjorative demagoguery, we can ride the resulting social inertia to the promised land of insurance covered condoms, vasectomies, viagra, and penis enlargement surgery!

You just described the term "isagogics", which is an important part of any valid scholarly attempt to understand a theological manuscript. Oddly, most people that undertake an attempt to understand the bible do so without it, and therefore misconstrue, misapply, or even miss completely the meaning of the text.

3. Instead of this highly suspect and unporven technology how about some good old fashioned guns, tanks, and planes?