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The very least they could of done is photoshop in some friggin lasers. Is that really too much to ask?

I am "implying" no such thing. I am explicitly saying that if it's very popular then that is a strong argument in its favour. How odious or not you personally may feel it is, is neither here nor there.

This maze is otherwise known as "politics" and yes it does have lots of twisty little debates in it.

In evaluating the market size I expect number of participants is more important than transaction sizes. Essentially, if a significant percentage of citizens want to engage in the trade then this is a good indicator the trade should be legal. How many percent of citizens have expressed an interest in child porn?

Do note that child pornography laws have drifted a long way away from being about protecting children. Nowadays if you draw a stick figure and write the caption "naked 6yo" under it then that's child pornography and they'll put you in jail if the fancy strikes them. Personally I don't consider drawing stick figures to be particularly evil regardless of the caption, but others may disagree.

Well, the free market is an argument for legalization, but only with qualifications. Essentially, if the free market for a given good or service is or would be big enough then this alone is a very strong argument for legalizing it. The reasoning behind this is that first of all, if a lot of citizens want to trade in it then it is a democratic problem if they are prevented from doing so; secondly, that with such a big market even if you outlaw it the trade is still going to happen at large scale so what are you really achieving; and thirdly, that a lot of money that would otherwise move around the economy in a proper manner is now going to get funneled into a black economy where it will see less circulation (thus having a stagnating effect on the economy overall), will not be properly taxable, and will tend to leak into other more serious criminal enterprises. Also as we have seen with drugs, criminalizing what many see as a necessary good has led to the blatant militarization of police forces and erosion of civil rights for everyone. This is a very high price to pay for feelgood politics.

Of course this would only be one of the arguments in any given debate but it would be a weighty one.

It would need to be reported one way or the other. The easiest way to try to get around it is possibly not to register it but then you won't have a number plate (unless you fake one) and so couldn't use it on public roads. Maybe you could drive it on foreign plates and hope no one notices/cares that you've been doing so for far too long. You'd still be required to list it as wealth but if you choose not to there may not be any obvious ways for the tax man to find out on his own.

What will happen from time to time though is that someone you pissed off at some point reports you and then you may be in trouble again.

If you want to drive the car on public roads it's probably very difficult to avoid registering it. Cheating one's way around this is probably possible but if you ever have an accident or otherwise end up in the spotlight it's game over.

While legally carried handguns may present problems, this isn't one of them. When someone decides to go shoot up a school I have yet to see evidence that this is a spur of the moment decision. Rather, it is a pre-planned event for which the shooter brings weapons from home explicitly for this purpose. He is going to bring them whether carrying guns is legal or not, because he has already decided to break much more serious laws.

If anything, legally carried handguns may help prevent school shootings or at least keep down the body count because they increase the likelihood of an armed citizen being nearby to shoot the shooter.

They won't, but if they later find out they'll nail you to the wall.

As an immediate concern, if you're making lots of bitcoins then there's not really that much to spend them on directly and so you'll want to convert them into national currency. At this point the tax man may notice and start asking questions.

When the time comes that you can easily buy a Ferrari for bitcoins they will also have a chance of noticing, and will ask you how you could afford that Ferrari.

If you go to any length to avoid the tax man noticing any of those two scenarios, you're probably guilty of some shade of money laundering which will get you nailed that much harder if they do discover you.

I think it's much the same thing here. Capital gains is 28% or thereabouts, whereas income tax is progressive from 28% up to 50%, -ish. There may be important nuances I am omitting, being a wage slave rather than a tycoon.

Depending on what sort of radiation we're talking and to what extent you can harden your electronics against it, possibly you could do non-shielded reactors on drones before long.

Not a scary thought at all, nosiree.

They didn't fake it so much as they filmed the scene. Top Gear is a sitcom about cars and like any sitcom they first write the script, then they film the scenes. Then they put those scenes together and there you have the week's episode.

The major disconnect here is all those people who seem to think that Top Gear is some sort of unbiased, or even just serious, product review show. It is not: it is a British scripted comedy show. It is a bit unusual in that cars play parts in the show, but then that is presumably an important factor in its unique appeal. (In the movie Evolution the protagonists use a well known brand of shampoo to give the big bad alien a fatal enema, saving the world; the same people who take Top Gear seriously might also think that saving the world from aliens is an actual feature of that shampoo.)

Cynical as this is, there is certainly a lot of truth to it.

This isn't the case however. There needs to be a certain correlation between the election result and polls etc., or people will realize it's all a sham. The easy way to achieve this correlation is to make a reasonable effort to actually count the votes and use that result as the official election result. (One of the difficult ways is to try and control the press without the people realizing that you do; there are so many pitfalls down this path I don't know that it can be done well for long.)

It is a purely pragmatic viewpoint: we know there's going to be war, whether we like it or not, so banning it is pointless. (Besides, we may want to go to war at some time and we'd like it to be legal to do so when that happens.)

It is also accepted that in a war people are going to get killed. This is a necessary consequence of war. If you couldn't kill enemy soldiers then essentially you couldn't wage war and we have already realized that you can't ban war outright. (People would just wage it anyway, it's too compelling.)

What is not however, or so it is thought, strictly necessary is for war to be overly cruel to the participants. Yes, you can get killed if you're in it, but people shouldn't be going out of their way to be cruel to you beyond this. There is usually a way to wage a war and achieve political objectives without torturing enemy soldiers and so nations can go to war without also at the same time being forced to ignore the rules of war, so long as all you are expecting them to do is not be overly cruel.

So the rules of war are what they are because that's more or less the most you can get away with and still have some hope that they will be adhered to.

There is also more than just a little colonial power bias in there, but that is something of a separate issue.

Putting holes in people is just a very straightforward way of killing them or putting them out of action. Adding a non-clotting agent mostly seems like a purely cruel addition to this since someone who's been hit by a flechette is likely going to be out of action anyway. The non-clotting isn't needed for combat effectiveness.

Additionally, although this is seen from a completely different angle, it seems to me that the anti-clotting is ill advised from a military effectiveness viewpoint. What you want to do, ideally, is wound the enemy soldier so that he becomes an active burden on his side's evac and medical services. If he's dead he can just be left there for now and dealt with when there's available resources to remove bodies, but if he's wounded then manpower will need to be diverted immediately to deal with him which means less manpower to fight the battle that is going on there and then. (Even more ideally you probably want to maim him so that he becomes an immediate burden, and won't be returning to the action even after medical care; but pure maiming weapons are usually found in violation of the rules of war I believe.)

Tesla's advice for fighting a fire in the battery pack is to just pile on huge quantities of water, and to continue piling on water until the battery no longer produces heat. (They suggest using an IR camera if available, or looking for smoke if not.)

Small amounts of water on the other hand have little effect. It might seem to temporarily smother the flames but does nothing to bring down the internal thermal process and so once you stop applying it the thing will flare up again. You need lots and lots of water over some period of time to cool down the battery below thermal runaway temperature.

"Shoppers"? I would take this to mean shoppers in general, 90% of whom would never be able to afford a Tesla anyway.

Absent evidence to the contrary I'll go out on a limb and categorically state that 98% of people who shop for a Tesla do qualify for the full $7,500 tax credit. And the 2% who do not don't because all their income is hidden away in tax havens.

I'd say Tesla is writing for their target audience here, and in this context their calculation is pretty much spot on.

The tax credit is necessary because every single one of the other EV manufacturers out there is completely incapable of building a compelling EV that people actually want to buy, so they need to be bribed into buying it. Tesla gets to have its cake and eat it too by both building a car people actually want and simultaneously cashing in on the incompetence of its competition by partaking of the tax credit.

I can see two immediate reasons why Tesla wouldn't want to involve themselves with existing dealerships.

First, the dealerships are a poison pill. It is common in the various states to have laws that effectively say that if you have ever sold your cars through a dealership, you are condemned to always sell your cars through dealerships in the future. A car manufacturer would be a fool to voluntarily tie his own hands and feet like that. Tesla being a brand new manufacturer without any legacy chains holding them down have great freedom to come up with their own sales model and they are making the very best out of that opportunity.

Second, existing dealerships have no incentive to sell Tesla cars because there isn't any money in it for them: They can't skim a lot off of the sale price because people can easily order the car from California at the factory price, and they can't rely on profitable service and repairs because there's just not that much to service or repair on an EV. Tesla needs to run a very aggressive sales program to generate the cash flow that they need to achieve their short to mid term goals and dealerships would never deliver this cash flow. They'd keep a couple Teslas on the lot as talking points but they'd try their damndest not to actually sell any.