If the dealer requirement is removed so direct sells are allowed, expect an influx of inexpensive vehicles from SE Asia with no means of warranty repair or service. Yes, buyer be ware, but really, is it a good idea for the masses to be purchasing vehicles from Amazon?

Strangely, this anarchic sale of cars direct to the public by manufacturers that provide no after sales support has not happened in California. California would provide the best market for this activity, being on the west coast, with a large market.

As soon as Tesla set up shop in Iowa (the site they're doing the test drives from), it ceased to be interstate commerce.

So that's why the drugs the people buy from their local pharmacy are regulated by state laws and not federal laws .... oh wait.

The Supreme Court decided that just about anything can be interstate commerce. Growing weed in your own garden can be regulated as interstate commerce. Yeah, it's ridiculous, but that's the way things are.

If they would have thrown such a pitch at me, I would have happily told Dodge how much even their new cars suck hairy ass and balls compared to something Toyota made 15 years earlier.

Dodge don't care what you think because you are (probably) never going to buy a new car. Buying used cars is a much better financial proposition in most (but not all) cases and it's only the cachet of having a new car that keeps people going into the showrooms.

In some states, all parties must be explicitly aware of the recording and consent to it.

California has sections of law that target recordings (audio and video) in vehicles specifically. So what you may know of laws about audio recording may not apply in vehicles.

Because you need credit for those.

What about a pre-paid credit card? Get one of those and you can start building up some credit. Unless, of course you have some catastrophic credit event in your recent past.

Because a dashboard is a transient thing, which is a snapshot in time and which you can't look back for historical records.

This is absolutely true, but there is another factor (as noted by other posters) -- the effort required to read them.

It's the same as mailing lists vs. forums. The mailing list is fully integrated into my daily activities -- I am already reading my mail. I don't have to log into a forum, perhaps type a password, select the appropriate search (or use multiple dialogs to select the information that I want). The email (assuming it is properly formatted) presents all the information that I want with a minimum of effort on my part.

Let's face it -- forums are popular because it gives the forum owner more control and better possibilities to monetize the traffic.

Hedge fund takes company that has too much debt across to many creditors private. Strikes a deal with the creditors that sees them take a huge haircut to get anything at all. Then they take a massive super sharp machete to the business carving every piece of non-today-essential flesh off. What you are left with is an extremely lean, profitable business which they then list again.

While that may happen some times, there are plenty of examples where the loading up of debt has happened either as a part of going private or after going private, to provide the new owners with a huge dividend.

Also, often that "non-essential flesh" is only non-essential in the short term -- what happens is a lack of investment means that the product pipeline eventually stalls.

IPOs are where the money is.

Stupid investors? I just don't understand why people invest in companies that have been taken private by a hedge fund, loaded up with debt and then IPOed. The story is all too common -- the company takes on massive debt, pays a huge dividend to its hedge-fund owners then sells itself on the stock markets. But why buy? It's not going to be a viable company with all that debt.

Alternative explanation:

Dell was driving down profits in order to make it easier (cheaper) to take the company private.

Now it is private, the drive for profits (perhaps long-term profits, not short term) is in top gear.

The problem with the current graduated system isn't that people in the middle or people in, say, the 60-80 percentile don't pay enough -- I'm fairly sure they do -- it's that it ceases to scale at the top.

The simple fact is that the tax code provides ridiculous breaks for those people who don't actually earn their income. Look at Mitt Romney -- his overall tax rate is ridiculously low because he uses the carried interest exception.

4. Primary Residence - have to apply for refund, demonstrating it is primary residence, this one will get complicated

Those things take care of the truly poor.

The landlord who buys a property and rents is out to the truly poor will pay sales taxes on that property. Those sales taxes will be passed onto the renters in the form of increased rent. So, no. You didn't solve the problem.

Fundamentally, sales taxes are regressive. The 0.01% will pay only a tiny proportion of their income in sales taxes, while the poor will pay a significant percentage -- greater than the income taxes they pay today (0%).

Yes, rich people when they get money stick it under mattresses in order to deny the money from the economy,

Or, they could invest that money abroad, China perhaps, where it is effectively denied from the US economy.

Although it could take the best part of a week to run a full emerge pass if certain really big packages were all updated at once.

That's nothing. On one of my systems, it took 10 days to build one package: OpenOffice.