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.

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.

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?

The basic issue here is we are all raised in a social environment where it is assumed that law and morality are the same thing.

That wasn't a bad assumption when laws were almost entirely against acts widely regarded as malum in se. Now that we have a shit-ton of laws (and a googol of shit-tons of regulations) against acts that are merely malum prohibitum, that assumption is of more questionable validity.

At our house, electricity usage goes UP in the winter -- We heat with a geothermal heat pump with resistance heat as the back-up for very cold days.

I had a heat pump once...was a bit of a shock to find my electric bills in the winter were about the same as in the summer, having moved from a condo with gas heat where the combined bills were lower in the winter than in the summer. I'll never have electric heat (whether heat pump or otherwise) again if I can avoid it. The difference in cost between it and gas heat is ridiculous.

Even if Iran had ICBMs and nukes on a scale of the US or Russia they would not attack anyone with them. That is the whole concept of M.A.D. If Iran nuked Israel the nukes from the US, UK, France and the distributed nukes of Israel would completely destroy Iran within days.

MAD only works when dealing with rational actors. The Russians were rational enough. Iran? Not so much.

I'm a Java developer. I have a decade of experience doing that. Why are all these companies hiring .Net developers not even giving me a chance at an interview? It's all computer programming. They're discriminating against me!

That's more a function of IT outsourcing hiring to HR. HR asked for requirements. IT replied with what it's currently using. HR doesn't have the domain-specific knowledge that would indicate that most anyone worth a damn can pick up a new language fairly easily, so if your resume says C++ when they're looking for C#, it gets circular-filed by HR.

(I got lucky with my current job...was referred to the director of IT by one of his acquaintances, so HR only got involved after the decision had already been made to hire me. I went from doing streaming video/audio with C++, DirectX, and our own compression algorithms to doing business-specific web apps with C#, ASP.NET, and SQL Server...rather a different skill set, but that's the kind of adaptability that the HR droids never take into account.)

If you think that's bad, sugar causes a WingDing font.

Better that than Comic Sans MS.

Frankly I was shocked he didn't roll out "synergy" but I think they wised onto it thanks to Dilbert ragging on it so many times.

Too many people would've completed their Marketing Bullshit Bingo cards on that.

Cinavia HAS been cracked.

[citation needed]

(Not that it really matters to me, as none of my playback hardware pays any attention to it: not my TVs, not my OpenELEC boxes, not my surround-sound receiver. Maybe the Blu-ray players care about it, but they mostly gather dust while the OpenELEC boxes stream from a media server.)