Most consumer electronics will work just fine inside the vehicle cabin. (Engine bay and weather exposed areas is a different story) My company does automotive wiring and consumer electronics wiring and the differences in thermal and vibration and other performance specs are just not all that huge for the most part. Sometimes some increased temperature specs for engine bay stuff and being self-extinguishing can matter but that's not a big cost burden in most cases. I do the quoting and am both the engineer and accountant at our company so I know the numbers well.

No, most of the cost is simply design and volume related. Let me give you an example or two. We make a wire harness that has a grommet on it. We make two versions of it and the only difference is the size of the grommet. Why two versions? Because the engineers and Buick and the engineers and Chevy couldn't be bothered to talk to each other and standardize on a single grommet for both platforms. So we get a worse price because we have to buy two different grommets instead of a single one at a lower price. We also have some connectors on the harness. Instead of picking an off the shelf connector they decided to go with a custom connector despite it providing no performance benefit. So we have to buy 50,000 custom connectors with a 4 month lead time instead of using a standard connector carried by every distributor in North America for less money. Plus the volumes of production are a few hundred thousand. Sounds like a lot but compared to consumer electronics its almost nothing. Apple sells more iphones in a day than the number of harnesses we'll make this year. Volume drives discounts.

Someone just entering the workforce is likely to have minimal credit history and probably wouldn't be able to get a loan of any substantial size without a co-signer. It's not hard to get a junker for a few thousand dollars. I drove several for my early years in the workforce.

If you have to finance then do what you have to do. I did starting out. But do not keep an auto loan for a moment longer than necessary. It's almost always a bad financial decision.

I work in the industry. I can assure you that you are thinking malice where incompetence is MUCH better explanation. I've worked with engineers and executives directly at GM and Ford and several others. There is not a master plan for most of what they do. They are not that competent and certainly not that clever. You have to understand the design cycles and processes. Cars take 2-4 years to get designed and then the majority of the design is effectively frozen for 4-8 years. It takes an act of congress to get them to change a production part once a PPAP is completed and production has started.

They actually could make a lot more money by standardizing components and sub-systems and providing interfaces for third parties to work with. They just culturally do not know how to do this. They are too paranoid, too set in their ways and too slow for the most part. Their internal business culture reacts to changes and industry outsiders like an immune system forcing an allergy attack.

In the meantime another CEO is paying himself a record salary for cutting his stock's value in half...

Hackers have a better chance of deorbiting a satellite and hitting the aircraft while it is in flight than they do taking it over from the in flight wifi.

It's the same for all the hype over car systems. EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE they have to install hardware to get access to the data interface.

So yes Terrorists can take over the airplane from their cellphones if the flight crew let them into the maintenance areas and help them install several specialized devices that give them access.

The terrorists need to make appointments so they can make sure that avionics technicians are on hand to help them

I understand the logic though whether or not it is a sensible decision depends heavily on how much you paid.

That is actually quite sensible. 2% interest is darn close to free money so I think that is a smart decision to finance given that you didn't actually have to. I would have strongly considered doing the same thing.

True but a lot of people buy far more expensive cars than they really can justify if they are being objective about it. A good example is pickup trucks. Ford and GM make the majority of their profits from large trucks with terrible gas mileage. The prices for these vehicles is much higher than their utility to the buyers would justify AND very few of the buyers actually utilize the full capabilities of the vehicle. Yet people buy droves of $30-50K+ F150 pickups. They do it for self image and because they can rather than because it is an objectively sensible decision.

Which is the exception that proves the rule. How many CEOs do you see arguing FOR an increase in minimum wage? They could voluntarily do it but very few actually do. CEO pay has increased FAR more than the average pay of the workers lower down so any argument that CEOs will decide to en-mass increase wages is pretty much delusional.

And most will choose not to of their own free will. That's the problem. If we made taxes optional, how many people do you think would pay? If we eliminated work safety rules do you think best practices would be followed? Real freedom isn't the absence of rules and obligations because society cannot function without them. Real freedom is being able to have a meaningful say in what those rules and obligations are and should be. Real freedom isn't depending on the beneficence of a single CEO deciding one day to be a nice guy.

Tell you what. Take a trip to Europe sometime. The EU is by many measures the largest economy in the world. The standard of living in most of the EU is quite high compared to much of the rest of the world. Most governments in the EU have what is generally acknowledged to be a somewhat socialist ideology - certainly in comparison to the USA. And yet they have good health care, good GDP per-capita, world class businesses and manufacturing and art and sport, and are among the most successful societies on the globe politically, economically, militarily and socially. All while "socializing" certain aspects of their society and what do you know, it works if you don't take it to the extreme of communism.

Here's the point of all that. We ALL depend on each other. You can argue about how much sharing is a good thing but you cannot argue that all sharing can be optional. It simply will not work. Some folks simply are more willing to acknowledge this fact than others. You can argue about how much sharing is a net benefit to society but the argument Socialism = Bad is just stupid. EVERY society has some amount of socialism to it and it cannot be otherwise.

Every civilized country engages in socialism. The only difference is in the degree to which they do it. A society which does not will rapidly fall apart. If you have a job it is because a lot of other people worked very hard to make it possible - even if you work for yourself. We require people pay taxes and minimum wages and other things because it benefits us all. While you can take it too far, we're certainly in no danger of that here in the US.

Liberals understand that the real world isn't a place where we can afford to pretend we don't depend on each other. Share a little and everyone benefits. It is possible to both share too little and share too much. Personally I think the sharing too little is the worse of the two options.

" I tried Plasma 5, and - gone it was! "

What was gone?

I guess that's fine as long as you know your car is badly under-performing what is possible.

Could not disagree more. I've owned cars from that era and grew up driving cars from the 70s and 80s, both foreign and domestic. They were mostly total crap compared to what is available today. If you got 100,000 miles out of a car from the early 80s you were doing well. American cars in particular from that time were almost universally crap with terrible reliability, terrible fuel economy, poor handling and ridiculously poor construction and build quality. "Knew how to make good cars in 1982"? Don't make me laugh.

That mostly means that people are buying high priced cars that they cannot actually afford and probably don't actually need. There is seldom any reason for most people to actually buy a new car. They depreciate like milk and mostly what you get for a new car is pride of new ownership. 60 months financing? That means you should be buying something else. Personally I haven't financed a car purchase in the last 15 years and baring economic catastrophe I don't plan to start. Financing a car (new or used) should be a last resort. It's a terrible use of money. Anyone who finances a car with 60+ month terms is almost certainly making a dumb financial decision.

The reason car electronics cost so much is that they don't sell very many of them, relatively speaking. Even cars that sell very well will only sell a few hundred thousand units per year and the design cycles are at least for a 4-8 year production run minimum. Electronics advances WAY faster than car companies can keep up with. The GPS in my truck (a 2009 model) is laughably obsolete albeit still useful. My company makes a part for a backup camera for one of the big US auto makers and the volumes simply aren't enough to get huge economies of scale even at a few hundred thousand a year. Plus they often do stupid stuff like design the parts to use custom connectors instead of off the shelf ones that would cost far less.

Frankly the auto makers should let the consumer electronics firms integrate their stuff into cars to handle the GPS, entertainment, telephony, etc. The car should provide the screen and an interface but let people bring their own electronics to the party. The auto makers just aren't good at it and don't do enough of it to ever realize economies of scale AND their design/production cycles are far too long. What should happen is that I should be able to take my phone into any car and have to car and the phone work together seamlessly.

Debt is a bit like nuclear power. It can be a powerful force for good or evil and you don't want to get any on you if you can avoid it. Some debt is fine and potentially very useful but that doesn't mean one should use debt financing just because one can. I could go out and finance a Tesla Model S tomorrow but that doesn't make it a good idea. Debt is a powerful tool and like most powerful tools if you don't know how to handle it then you are likely to get yourself in trouble.

The data isn't backing you up on a macro-economic level. Unemployment right now is around 5-6% in most of the US which is historically a pretty normal amount. While there is some nuance to that number the facts don't bear out your assertion that "jobs are going oversease" any more than they ever have. As for jobs not being created fast enough here, that's a reasonable assertion to a degree but how fast is "fast enough" for you?

You're adding more mass, which requires even more fuel.

Consider it deducted from the amount of payload/second stage you can carry. But if your first stage is engineered to be more than enough for what you need as payload anyway (ie it's already cost effective) you might as well try to recover the cost of it with a soft powered landing and make MORE profit.