Correct, I was just pointing out that even the best of the competitions offerings still fell well short of price parity, the fact that the fuel for the more efficient vehicle is more expensive just exacerbates the situation. Another factor swaying the per mile cost in favor of the electric is the fact that you're highly unlikely to reach the EPA rating in southern California traffic so real world numbers will be even more skewed.

Nissan Leaf would go from 25K to 18K
Or, much more likely it would be available for $18k with the current range or $25k with double the range. In fact Nissan is seriously talking to existing owners about how much they would be willing to pay for a model with double the range as they see Tesla coming down range at them.

My wife's friend who works for Rigid gets a company truck and a fuel card that covers his gas for work, he's supposed to report personal use but I believe if he doesn't they just use a standard IRS formula and take it out of his annual bonus.

VS what, a car from the 1970's? Everything from the mid 80's on is a complete fender replacement in the case of an accident. It's the price we pay for fuel economy. Heck, many fairly minor accidents result in the vehicle being totaled due to crumple zones, that's the price we pay for safety. In both cases it's a minor percentage of the total cost of the vehicle fleet.

I doubt it, my wife's last van is 11 years old and while it has some rust her sister is still driving it just fine, my 11 year old Vibe has hardly any rust and I live in the middle of road salt hell (NE Ohio), it's not the 70's anymore, cars don't rust out in 8 years.

Right now there are plenty of stations listed on gasbuddy in LA proper, and the greater LA area at $3.47-$3.49, of course there are quite a few listed at $4.99!

According to their terriff sheet summer consumption at 200% of baseline is $0.19564 for delivery and and $0.12396 for generation which actually comes out to $0.3196 per KWhr so I assume the $.35 includes some kind of taxes.

Well, there are some original model Prius out there with over 1M kilometers on their less overengineered batteries so I think any speculation about throwing away a Tesla because of a worn battery pack are just a bit pessimistic.

The tax credit is there to jump start the industry, and there are per manufacturer and total vehicles sold caps on the credit, compared to all the perpetual credits for the oil and gas industry that's actually extremely progressive.Oh, and you can buy a Nissan Leaf and take full advantage of the credit without being anything approaching "Rich".

Thing is, in California electricity costs almost the same as gas

The top tier with southern california edison is $0.32/KWhr so filling the top capacity model S costs $27.20 and gives you a 300 mile range for a cost per mile of $.09. The average price of gas in southern California is currently ~$3.50 so to match the Tesla you'd have to achieve ~38MPG, which is quite a bit better than the 740i achieves, probably the most comparable vehicle to the Model S. Heck, the most fuel efficient large BMW in the US, the 535d, only achieves 30MPG combined. This also neglects the fact that if you have the money for a Model S you can afford to put up solar panels to avoid falling into that top tier of consumption so your real cost per mile could be significantly lower.

I too have a massive library of oldies from GOG.com, a huge Steam library, and a large Steam wishlist just waiting for the right sale to pickup, I can outwait this trend since I literally have more content available than I can possibly consume pre-retirement.

Is it ever okay to "grease" an official's palm?
If the payment is only intended and only results in an official carrying out his or her job duties a bit faster (without breaking any other rules), then it MAY be legal. If the payment speeds up the process by ignoring the local laws or regulatory process, then the payment is still an illegal bribe. So in addition to the FCPA, you must check written laws of the host country. link

You can find many other sources, the case law around it is a bit nuanced, but basically if you're just trying to get stuff off someones desk that should be moving along under local law then you're probably ok. Congress obviously didn't mean to make it impossible for US based companies to do business around the world so the courts have to take that into account. Since most folks aren't lawyers practicing in that area of law corporate training tends to be very black and white on the issue (this also works to absolve the company if their employees tread into areas that are dark shades of grey).

No, this is much more than the tip style bribery, in fact the foreign corrupt practices act specifically excludes payments to officials who are just doing their normal function (your tips to get paperwork moved), this was out and out corruption to get sweetheart deals. Nobody is paying one official $600k to get paperwork moved along, they're doing that to get millions in contracts with little oversight and hence tons of profit margin. Trust me, nobody in DOJ is going to upset powerful multinationals over some greased palms.

You can get a refurb 2013 Nexus 7 for less than $150, it will run 4.4.4 today and is guaranteed to get L. Asus MemoPad 7 is available for $124 new at Walmart.com and runs 4.4, though for a developer the Atom might not work (it depends on if you're using native code, though if you're going there you shoudl probably get a sample of the top x devices you plan to support)

Woohoo, modded troll by an idiot for stating facts. Typical slashdot.