I actually have a credit card through Citibank and another through Discover. I have maintained the Citibank card since around 1990 (I got it my first year in college and it was my first credit card) and the Discover card for over 15 years. The reason it's basically a free ride for me is because of the fees they collect from the sellers. The credit cards are paid off automatically through electronic fund transfer from my credit union checking account (again, no fees). I have never had a credit card canceled on me and I maintained a credit rating of around 800 with no loans and never an outstanding balance.

You need to research the different cards that are available.

By paying off a credit card every month I am not paying any fee to use my money. In this case the seller is paying the fee and I collect on the benefits. On one card I earn cash back and on the other I earn airline miles which I have used to fly all over the country with very little out of pocket for the tickets (mostly various airline fees and taxes). I don't pay one cent for the use of my credit card. I don't pay interest or fees. In my case, the sellers are paying the credit card fees, not me. I'm basically getting all of the benefits at no cost to me being paid by the companies I purchase from.

The scam is when you end up paying fees to use a credit card or when you don't pay it off and pay obscene interest rates. I could see someone doing that on a rare occasion like an emergency, but it should be paid off as soon as possible. Carrying debt for the sake of carrying debt on a credit card is stupid. I have never done this and always had a very high credit score.

All of my regular banking is through my credit union where I do not pay any fees to use my money. I don't pay ATM fees at any other credit union (and they'll reimburse me for any). The more I hear about banking through the big banks the more disgusted I am.

There is nothing wrong with using credit and loans as long as they are used responsibly. All of my cars up until my latest one were paid with cash. When I could get a 2% interest loan for my latest car it made a lot more sense to get a loan than to pay cash. If I can earn more than 2% on my savings then I am ahead. That's easy to do today. In the case of my house I did everything I could to pay of the principal as fast as I could. I also use my credit card for most things but I always pay it off in full every month. That way I get all of the benefits and protections it offers and none of the downsides. While I may have a car loan I certainly do not feel that I am in debt, especially when my savings exceeds my debt and is earning more than the debt is costing me in interest. I could pay off the loan any time I want to but it is in my best interest not to.

I find that there are more benefits to using a credit card and paying it off every month than just plain cash. For one thing, I earn bonuses and have flown for free all over the country using them. Second of all, if there is a dispute it gives me far more leverage. Third, in a number of cases it offers me a better warranty. There is nothing inherently wrong with credit cards as long as they are used responsibly. I ALWAYS pay it off every month so I never pay any interest or fees to use it. It saves me from always hitting the ATM machine, many of which charge an obscene amount of money to use. I can get reimbursed for the fees through my credit union but it's always a pain to have to always enter in the amount of fees I pay for a transaction. I can also use my ATM card, but the protections on credit cards are far better than those of ATM cards. It's a lot easier to deal with someone getting my credit card number than if someone somehow steals my ATM card number and PIN, which has happened at a number of places in my area. One of the big grocery stores in my area had someone running a scam where they were stealing the ATM card numbers and PIN numbers and it's also happened at a number of gas stations and even ATM machines.

The few times I have had my credit card number stolen and used I never paid a cent in fees or anything else.

The credit score is based on credit. My score was quite high even though I never carried a balance and did not have any outstanding loans. Credit scores, sadly, do not look at savings. Years ago when I went to buy a house I had no problems getting a rather large loan at the time even though I had never had any other loan before in part due to my credit card usage because I always paid cash for my cars.

In time I eventually paid off my house. When I went to get my new car I ran the numbers and with the insanely low interest rates it was far more economical for me to get a loan for the car than to pay cash. Since the loan is at around 2% all I have to do is see if I can do better than 2% with my savings. If I can do that then I'm ahead and it makes more sense to get a loan.

Even though I have a lot of savings I use my credit card for most things. By paying it off every month I get all of the benefits without the downsides. Debt is not always bad. I could pay off my debt in an instant but it makes more economic sense not to as long as my savings is growing at a faster rate.

Usually the recharge times don't matter. I own a Tesla model S and sold my gas powered car. For most of my driving I just plug in at night and have the equivalent of a full tank every morning. It's only on long trips where the superchargers come in to play. I rarely bother with public charging stations since I don't need them. Now on long trips the superchargers come into the picture. In my last trip to Reno I stopped in Folsom to charge up. It took about 40 minutes during which time I got a nice lunch, took a bathroom break, etc while spending not a dime on fuel. Granted, more range is always better for long trips, but having to take a 30-40 minute break after several hours of driving is often a good thing.

The extra time spent waiting to charge during long trips is more than offset by the time not spent going to gas stations when most of my driving is under the range limits of the car. I typically spend 5 seconds plugging in at night and 5 seconds unplugging in the morning rather than several minutes at a gas station waiting in line and filling up.

There are plenty of car chargers out there like Chargepoint which basically use a RFID credit card. You wave the card in front of the charger to activate it and it bills your account for charging. They've had this for years.

Google for the Leaf issues in hot climates like Arizona and Texas where some owners lost 40% of their capacity in two years. There's a reason why most EV manufacturers have active battery cooling.

I picked up some 3-packs of 40 watt equivalent chandelier bulbs at Costco that work quite well. They seem brighter than the original incandescents though I did have one fail within a day which Costco let me exchange without question. They also dim just like the bulbs they replaced. They're only 4.8 watts instead of 40 watts. I put in 2 months or less even though other than the single failure I have not had any other LED bulb fail on me and I'm up to around 20 bulbs so far. I don't think I'll buy another incandescent or CFL ever again. I still have a lot of CFLs to use up though.

We're having the same problem. Trying to find an experienced embedded boot loader developer is next to impossible. I'm currently swamped and anytime we find someone who's decent we're one of many companies making offers. Certain skill sets are damned near impossible to find, like someone who is good at understanding both software and hardware, people who can work on the Linux kernel, or the GCC toolchain, U-Boot, UEFI, etc. I could care less about IT people, but good software developers who understand low-level stuff are hard to find. A vast majority of those I interview seem incompetent when pressed with some C programming problems or when asked about CPU archecture, stuff they should know from a decent CS or CE degree. I have to work on everything just about everything, from CPU related stuff to SATA, USB, high-speed networking, NAND flash, eMMC/SD, etc.

I don't see what the big deal is. I'm currently working with early silicon on a cache coherent 48-core 64-bit MIPS chip with NUMA support and built-in 40Gbps Ethernet support. The chip also has a lot of extended instructions for encryption and hashing plus a lot of hardware engines for things like zip compression, RAID calculations, regular expression engines and networking support among other things. It also has built-in support for content addressable memory.

It also has a network on-chip where each core or group of cores can have its own network interface to other cores. This is useful for things like virtualization or when you want to run multiple Linux kernels and other applications side by side since we also support running binaries on bare metal without an OS underneath.

http://cavium.com/OCTEON-III_C...

The thing is that when you're doing research there will always be failures. If you don't have failures you're not trying very hard. That is why Silicon Valley is so successful. For every success story there are ten failures. The VCs know this. The loan guarantee program Solyndra was under was extremely successful, despite Solyndra and Fisker. Note that in many cases the loan processes started when there was an R in the Whitehouse. The problem is that there is a certain wing of the political spectrum that seems intent on keeping the status quo at all costs due to political donations from certain industries.

Solyndra made perfect sense when it was started. The cost of silicon was quite high and they had a method to reduce the amount needed for their panels. Then the Chinese started dumping solar and the price of silicon dropped to around 1/20 and there was no way Solyndra could compete.

The difference is that water vapor tends not to stay in the atmosphere very long and the amount is relatively constant due to precipitation. CO2, on the other hand, tends to accumulate in the atmosphere. The oceans absorb much of it but there's only so much that can be absorbed and the oceans are acidifying due to this. Water vapor also tends to form these white things called clouds which reflect a lot of sunlight back in to space.

In the case of Tesla they have showrooms. They give you a chance to see the car before you buy it and ask questions. The people who work there are not on commission. You can still test drive the car. When you're ready to actually buy the car you go on to their web site and order exactly what you want and they build to order. There's no incentive for the people working in the showroom to push features you don't want.

There is no added value by dealerships. My experience with them is they try and push you to buy a bunch of unnecessary crap.

My father bought a Fisker Karma. The dealership offered no protection from when the manufacturer went bankrupt. The warranty was suddenly null and void. Many Fisker dealerships just disappeared, leaving owners to completely fend for themselves for service and parts. For those that continued to support their customers, any pre-paid maintenance and warranty work now was out of pocket for the owner.

I own a Tesla model S. I have zero complaints about their service. It is better than anything I have seen from any dealership. They don't try and push any unneeded service. They include a loaner car and if a Tesla model S isn't available you can get a BMW, Mercedes or other luxury loaner car, all completely covered by Tesla. In fact, for the warranty they don't require that you have the yearly 12K service done.

When I got my car back from the yearly service, it was washed and vacuumed. They did not have any loaner cars available. I opted to just have them drop me off at work since it was just a few miles away. When they were finished they delivered my car right in front of where I work. My car is a fairly early VIN number.

Tesla also supports independent shops for a number of things. For example, if you need a tire fixed, they won't do it. You go to any tire shop to have that work done. Same thing for body work, though in this case you really want to go to a body shop that has been certified to have the appropriate training, especially since dealing with an aluminum body is different than sheet metal.

For general maintenance you really don't want to go to an independent mechanic for most stuff since they won't be trained. There are a lot of differences between a Tesla and a normal car. The drive train has nothing in common with other cars. Even if Tesla doesn't have a service center nearby, for $100 they will come to you, no matter where you are. If your car failed, they will usually even wave the $100 fee. Many things they can diagnose remotely over 3G or WI-FI so they know exactly what they need to do before they arrive.

For example, my car was one of the earlier VINs that received a defective 12V battery. Tesla contacted me about having it replaced before it failed from their remote monitoring They push out software updates and fixes over the air.

All of the problems I have had with my car were rattles and other issues that have all been addressed in manufacturing for newer cars, yet they will proactively go and upgrade my car to fix these problems or won't ask any questions and just make the changes if I bring it in. My car has a VIN in the low 5000s. Many of these issues require a lot of real-world experience to discover so I give them some leeway there. They have always come through and fixed every issue, no matter how minor it is. Also, they don't wait for mid-year or the next year to update their assembly line. They address the problems immediately. A common problem with the early cars was that the panoramic roof would creek during hot weather. They discovered a shim is required and immediately made the ECO change for manufacturing and went back and fixed all of the cars that experienced the problem. Even if customers don't experience the problem, when the car is brought in for service they proactively fix issues discovered in the early VINs.

No dealership that I'm aware of even comes close to this level of service. Dealerships are leaches left over from a bygone era. There is no reason why one shouldn't be able to just hop on a web site and select exactly how they want their car to be configured and have it made to order.

Also, unlike dealerships, there is no inventory of cars. Every car shipped has a buyer. Right now GM has a huge problem with their Cadillac ELR. They have completely flooded the pipeline such that at the current rate it will take two years for dealers to ship the current inventory of cars. That means a lot of money is wasted keeping these cars on the lot, plus all of the depreciation involved.

One big difference is that with Tesla you typically do not buy a car on the lot. You go to their web site and select exactly which features you want and they build it. If you don't want a certain option, you don't get it. You aren't limited to which choices are available on the lot.

If you don't want parking sensors and fog lights you wont' get them nor will you have to pay for them.

If you want a blue car with a black interior with the panoramic roof, that's exactly what you'll get.

They do a lot of stuff that a typical dealership won't do for that $600/year. You get a free loaner car and your car comes back washed and vacuumed (my Toyota dealership would only wash the car and there was no loaner). In my case I declined the loaner and they just dropped me off at work and when my car was ready they delivered it to where I work.