Throw in the food waste, I forget the figures but there is an amazing amount of food wasted between what people don't eat, what is wasted between farm and consumer and what the farmer wastes. Then throw in the inefficient crops including those that don't even go for food but rather things like ethanol at an energy loss and then eliminate cows from the food chain, some chickens, goats, pigs, or sheep are way more efficient resource wise then a cow and possibly we're up to feeding all those 4 billion, especially if similar things were done world wide, especially the wastage caused by warlords

One thing is that in most states the laws were written to protect franchises against the car manufacturers but in this case there are no franchises to protect to often these laws don't apply.

This podcast gives a lot of insight as to why the dealerships are so anti-consumer blood sucking parasites.

http://www.thisamericanlife.or...

One other thing to keep in mind is that the dealership model has changed significantly. It used to be a bunch of mom and pop dealerships throughout the country. These aren't the dealerships complaining about Tesla. Instead it's the huge dealership conglomerates that have gobbled up and consolidated many of the smaller independent dealerships. These are also huge political donors in many states, getting laws written to protect them, often to the detriment of the automobile manufacturers.

Part of it is the way the car manufacturers have the dealerships competing against each other, giving them huge incentives to sell a certain number of cars by the end of the month, etc. The dealerships also make a lot of their money off of service, whether it be warranty service or just plain service.

Tesla does things differently. The people who work at the showrooms do not earn commissions on cars sold. Their job is to show the car, not play all these silly games pushing cars that people don't want to get their numbers.

Also, Tesla generally does not maintain an inventory of cars. Every car is built to order with only the features the buyer wants. They don't have huge lots of cars that they have to push since every car is already spoken for.

Their service is also different. They have publically stated that their goal is not to make a profit off of service. I have had to have things repaired that were not covered by warranty (I broke some clips). The cost to repair was actually fairly reasonable and was much less than what the cost would have been had the same sort of thing happened to my Prius.

My biggest complaint about service is that there is often a long wait to get an appointment because they're having trouble keeping up with the growing number of cars out there.

Tesla took a cue from Apple with the Apple stores. They want to provide a consistent experience for their customers without all of the hassles and problems often encountered at dealerships. The company has also consistently bent over backwards in favor of their customers. When news of the fires hit they quickly extended the battery warranty to cover fires caused by hitting objects then actively worked on methods to mitigate it. They retroactively increased the drive train warranty to unlimited miles.

Ignoring how communism enabled Russia to go from feudal to space fairing in less then 60 years while making huge sacrifices to win WWII and suffering from totally nutty authoritarian dictators (is there any examples of really successful capitalistic dictatorships?), perhaps the biggest thing it did was make the capitalists share the wealth with the average worker so they didn't get killed in a socialist revolution.
Things were pretty bad under pure capitalism (think Dickinson England) with the exception of areas where land and resources were freely available to the common person for the cost of a bit of genocide.

So about the population of communist China.

How about bluetooth pairing? I have a bluetooth adapter and all I have to do is hold my phone up to it and it's automatically paired with it. I have a little bluetooth sticker in my car. I just hold my phone up to it and my phone reconfigures itself to how I want it in the car. The one on my keychain basically gives some contact info if found (i.e. email and phone number). There are a lot of interesting uses for NFC besides payment.

Single payer is where we should have gone for basic services. It relieves a whole set of current issues, including using the ER as your regular doctor for the uninsured.

How on earth (pun intended) can you know that you've found 10% or 95% of anything that you don't know the full set of?

Note also that most of these efforts looks at the plane of the solar system, what about extra-planar objects? Granted, most of those are comets, but then again, comets can be big too.

Old and ridiculous news. I'd say 10Mbps is actually too slow. 10Mbps up is a bare minimum, 50+ each way is closer to what needs to exist. If you don't think so, just try showing Grandma that 4K home movie you take in a couple of years. We shouldn't be looking at what the minimums should have been 5 years ago, but what they need to be in the next 5. 50-100 Mbps up is going to be a minimum, if we are to see real use of the internet. All those phones shooting 4K video will need to share it somehow, and going across a 4Mbps uplink (yeah, show me where I can get that reliably around here) you'll spend more time waiting on the upload than you did shooting, editing, and compressing it to try to make it smaller for the transit.

Honestly, 10 Mbps up right now is too slow for today's needs, if you're doing any of the related things just with a simple communication with Grandma. Video calls? You need a good upload link if you're going to make that work, or the quality is so crappy it won't be workable.

While I don't get snow where I live from everything I've heard the Tesla does quite well despite being rear-wheel drive due to how smooth the electric motor is. I also understand the 19" tires last quite a bit longer. The 21" summer tires are crap in cold weather and especially in snow. I had to drive from Reno NV to the Bay Area last March and hit snow coming down and it wasn't too fun, especially since the 21" wheels cannot use chains. The traction control on the Tesla is better than most cars since the electric motor is much more responsive. I read that the TC is able to monitor and control the wheels around 1000 times/second. My experience is my model S is a hell of a lot better than the Toyota I used to drive. That car would lose power for a good second if I so much as ran over a pothole and good luck if a tire slipped on snow. My model S P85 is able to keep the wheels just on the edge for acceleration.

When I was driving back the snow was starting to really come down. I had just beaten the chain requirement. It was not fun with my tires but none of the problems were due to acceleration or traction control, more just from the fact that the tires had no grip and given that fact the car still did fairly well. Driving up to the summit to try and beat the snow was fun though. That car doesn't seem to care if it's a steep grade or not :)

Much of the cost was the cost to replace the main panel which is something I have wanted to do for some time anyway since the old one was almost 50 years old. Additionally, the previous owners did a lot of less-than-legal electrical work on the house and I wanted it done right. I corrected a lot of mistakes but I wanted a licensed electrician to go over it as well (he found a few issues I had missed). I could have continued to use the 30A dryer outlet in my garage indefinitely or installed a 50A outlet for considerably less money but I chose to do it right. I might have been able to use my existing breaker box and just run the 6 gauge wire needed for a 50A outlet for a few hundred dollars but I chose instead to do something that is more flexible in the future. Besides, my existing breaker box was almost full. The upgrade allowed me to add some additional circuits for other things.

Afterwards I ended up rewiring most of the outlets in my garage and adding some new ones using a couple of 20A circuits since the previous owners had tied everything into a 15A circuit that the doorbell transformer was on. It's also nice now that my air compressor doesn't cause the lights to dim and I don't have to risk tripping a breaker all the time when using power tools. I also feel better running 10 gauge wiring on the long run between the main panel and my garage for those outlets. 50 years ago the power requirements for houses were a bit different than they are today and this allows me to continue to upgrade things as I see fit. The car charger uses 1 gauge aluminum wire for much of the run with 2 gauge copper in the conduit. I had a neutral line run as well so that the wiring could be used for other purposes in the future if needed such as putting in a sub-panel in the garage. I have a few more circuits I plan to add now that I have more room available in my main panel.

When I got the house I found boxes hidden under the sheetrock and splices made with just electrical tape without any boxes plus putting 20A breakers on circuits that can't handle more than 15A, light switches put on the neutral line, etc. Some people shouldn't be allowed electrical wiring.

Besides, my house is paid off in full. If it wasn't for that there's no way I would have bought that car, let alone run the charging circuit for it. Most owners just go for a 50A outlet, which is all the Tesla will handle without an optional charger upgrade.

I rarely use the brakes and typically only at very slow speeds. Even with my previous car, a Prius, people typically got at least 100K miles without needing to change the brake pads and Tesla's regenerative braking is a fair amount stronger than what my Prius was capable of.

The pre-paid service plan covers everything but the tires, so for at least the next eight years even if I do somehow wear down my brake pads they are covered. The service plan covers everything but the tires. The service also includes applying various fixes and changes that have been discovered since the car was manufactured, including minor things that affect things like rattles and noises. It includes a wheel alignment and check and replacement of all expendables. Combined with the warranty basically the only things I have to pay for are tires and some tire rotations.

So for at least the next four years I will pay $0 for brake pads.

http://www.teslamotors.com/ser...

It works out to around $475 per 12K miles, which for a car of its class is quite reasonable, especially given the level of service I get.

It's not first-world government and economic standards. It's simply educating and empowering women and giving them access to birth control. Turns out that most women don't want to be pregnant and chained to the kitchen stove but would rather have a life.
The obvious example was the USSR (along with most of the communist states), by definition a second-world government, which educated their women and had a falling population growth rate. Currently Russia really has a falling population.

I replaced my 2006 Prius with a Tesla model S. I ended up selling my Prius because I just wasn't driving it. For those times when I need a car like that, it's cheaper to just rent a car than to pay the registration on my Prius, plus I no longer have it taking up space in my driveway. Surprisingly a lot of owners moved from non-luxury cars to the Tesla model S.

Brakes are different in the Tesla than in BMW. In the case of Tesla there is a lot of regenerative braking so the brakes should last a lot longer. Tires on the other hand... I have the performance version of the Tesla model S with the 21" rims. When I got my car there was no price difference between the 19 and 21" rims. Anyway, I managed to get a bit over 15K miles on the original tires. The negative camber Tesla uses tends to be a bit hard on the rear tires, plus I tend to accelerate rather hard.

The battery should also last a very long time. I have read the post from one owner who has already racked up over 100,000 miles and still has over 95% of his original battery capacity. Tesla has a battery replacement policy where you can pay up-front to get a new battery after 8 years and get a $1000 rebate each year you wait beyond that.

Instead I decided to take some of that money and buy some stock when it was at $38. I'm kicking myself that I didn't buy more.

The electric motor in my Tesla won't need a lube job for another 10 1/2 years according to the person I spoke with when I had service done. While there is still coolant, many of the issues with ICE vehicles don't apply. The brakes will last much longer since most braking is regenerative. I still need tire rotations and the cabin air filter and the windshield wipers replaced periodically though. I suspect that even the coolant will last a lot longer since a gasoline engine generates far more heat.

A lot of other components should last much longer. There's no transmission, only around a dozen moving parts in the entire drivetrain and few friction points. The AC compressor is electric and completely sealed and there's no flexible hoses. Power steering is electric, not hydraulic which should last a lot longer as well.

Also, it is far easier to reach stuff than in an ICE car. Most things are easily accessible by removing the plastic frunk liner or removing a panel under the front of the car. The entire drivetrain is also easily removable as a unit. Similarly the battery can be easily removed. The car is far simpler to work on.