Even in California where we're paying $0.15 - $0.20 per kWh of electricity, electric vehicles save so much gas that they almost pay for themselves.

Only because you're getting ass-raped on gasoline as well. When I topped off the gas tank here in Vegas before driving down to LA last weekend to visit my nieces, I paid $3.04. I pulled over in Baker for a snack. The gas station next to the jerky place wanted somewhere around $4.50! Granted, Baker's never been the cheapest, but gas in Barstow was still around $3.70. I think it was $4.something around LA, and by the time I was running on fumes Sunday morning (driving down to San Diego to make everything worse), I ended up paying right at $4 per gallon ($3.999, if you want to be pedantic) for a full tank in Carlsbad.

Gasoline is sent to Las Vegas from California by pipeline, so how is it we're paying considerably less for the same fuel after it's been pumped through ~300 miles of pipe?

You are generally safe with Nexus devices, since you have the best chance of upgrading to the latest OS.

A device with an unlocked bootloader is also more likely to be more future-proof. I have a newer version of KitKat running on my Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 (4.4.4) than on my considerably newer Moto X (4.4). The tablet's running Cyanogenmod...have no idea if Samsung ever got around to spinning a KitKat build for it, and don't particularly care at this point as the only thing that doesn't work under Cyanogenmod is the IR blaster. My phone, OTOH? Motorola has pushed newer versions (maybe even Lollipop now), but the bootloader is locked and you can't even root newer firmware versions (rooting 4.4.4 requires an unlocked bootloader first).

That new phone that Asus introduced earlier this week sounds interesting, and there's already an unlock for it. The only downside is the ginormous, almost tablet-sized screen. The Moto X is barely larger than the iPhone 4 it replaced, but it seems hardly anybody wants to build a full-powered phone that'll still fit in your pocket anymore.

I'd love to hold society to the standard that no child should have to risk death due to parental stupidity. That's just not California. If you really want to uphold this ideal, you'll have to crusade for myriad causes, including gun control, obesity-fighting measures, tighter distribution of driver's licenses, promotion of breastfeeding, etc, etc. On the list of annual deaths in California caused by parental stupidity, lack of vaccination is near the bottom of the list.

All of this is true. However, lack of vaccination will rapidly climb the lists if America's current anti-science, anti-education and anti-logic trends are allowed to continue.

I don't think there's a downside to a minimum wage, or at least, not a compelling one.

As to specific implementation details. I really don't know. Not my field. My lay opinion would be that, well, it needs to be tied to the local cost of living and what not, but it would be a bitch to administrate. But no, having the minimum wage in Buttfuck Arkansas and Los Angeles be the same is probably sub-optimal.

I intended more to point out that while a small increase is basically a cost-of-living raise, a large increase will, indeed, likely do more harm than good.

I don't think there's any downside. But there are all sorts of upsides to working towards eliminating preventable, fatal diseases.

No child should have to risk death because their parents are stupid.

It is a clever trick to equivocate "insurance" and "access". It is possible to self-insure - a completely rational, actuarially-sound, choice for many young people.

QFT. There were a couple of time intervals in my 20s when I went without insurance, but that didn't stop me from hitting up the quick-care clinic and the pharmacy on the couple of occasions that a cold (or flu or whatever it was) wouldn't go away in a reasonable amount of time with OTC treatment.

Too bad 404care makes that illegal now. Perhaps some "Irish democracy" is warranted as a response.

Since when does Android run on iOS devices? It doesn't?

At risk of being pedantic, there was a project years ago that got Android kinda-sorta working on the iPhone 3G. It was sluggish and drained your battery at an alarming rate because it didn't have any hardware-acceleration or power-management support, and it didn't let you make calls IIRC, but it was Android on an iPhone. It even set itself up in a dual-boot environment, so you could switch between Android and iOS. AFAIK, it was never developed into something that was actually usable. It also never ran on anything newer than the iPhone 3G.

Since apparently there is no downside to drinking water, some, why not drink a bunch?

If some is good, more is better, and much more is much more better, right?

Why not a minimum water intake of 5 gallons/hour?

I'd support a bill like this if it also included provisions for criminal charges against parents who 'opt out' and their child winds up having long-term effects, or dying, of preventable diseases.

Say, do you also believe that, say, seatbelts are a matter of personal choice?

That being said, if Bernie Sanders ran with Elizabeth Warren, under any party, I would vote for them.

What kind of "libertarian" are you if you'd even entertain the notion of voting for either of those socialist jackwagons? You might as well turn in your guns, your money, and your freedom now, before they take them from you.

And they make the vast majority of the income and should pay the majority source of the income tax.

They already do:

Last week the Congressional Budget Office joined the IRS in releasing tax numbers for 2005, and part of the news is that the richest 1% paid about 39% of all income taxes that year. The richest 5% paid a tad less than 60%, and the richest 10% paid 70%. These tax shares are all up substantially since 1990, and even somewhat since 2000. Meanwhile, Americans with an income below the median -- half of all households -- paid a mere 3% of all income taxes in 2005. The richest 1.3 million tax-filers -- those Americans with adjusted gross incomes of more than $365,000 in 2005 -- paid more income tax than all of the 66 million American tax filers below the median in income. Ten times more.

How much more would you like them to pay?

DHI? Dick Heads Incorporated?