As someone allergic to some chemicals released in the burning of plants (from bonfires to cigars and everything in between)... Smokers are typically my enemy. Especially since smoking fosters special 'circles' where ever they work. I can't even claim my mandatory 15 minute breaks and the smokers get dozens of 'smoke breaks' every day because management tends to also be smokers. Also the cloud hanging around any entryway as the smokers are not allowed to smoke around the buildings is oh so fun for me to walk through...

I'm not militant about it and usually don't make a fuss about it, but willingly harming yourself and others with cigarettes is not rational behavior and should not be encouraged.

The reason it's a problem now, is the fact that the dealership method conflicts with anything new. Normal dealerships don't want anything to do with Tesla. Especially when they basically sell one model of car right now and there is no stratification. If Tesla offered the Roadster, S, and their upcoming E it still would probably not appeal to most dealerships. So for Tesla to sell it's cars it needs it's own method for getting sales.

The last example of this I can think of is Saturn. Saturn was not sold in my state because it did a bit of an end run around conventional dealerships as well. However Saturn is still much closer to a dealership experience then what Tesla wants and that scares the dealerships shitless.

I have long been annoyed by google maps lack of offline mode on my tablet, as my tablet only has wifi and bluetooth for connectivity. Which is good 2G/3G is spotty where I live and 4G does not exist yet, this btw is right next to and within one of the top 300 US cities by population. I don't own a smart phone for the same reason. But get away from internet connectivity and google maps just stops working.

They will milk us dry at higher prices and then simply stop selling to us when they cannot make enough money form us anymore. In the meantime they will try to do as they are now and start selling to countries like China (Though that has had extremely mixed results).

However we are unlikely to ever see deflation as long as the many big businesses cause constant inflation to the prices of goods and services here. It doesn't matter that fewer and fewer americans can pay those increased prices. It's one of my issues with Kansian economics where inflation is good and deflation is bad, regardless of the people that actually make up the bulk of the economy by population.

What I have always found funny about not hiring americans in america is that they don't seem to realize the worse off our personal economy is for the 'have nots' the less americans can afford to buy (even with insane debt). So the 'american market' constantly shrinks and we buy less vehicles, sugar wheatie puffs, and fancy cell phones because of that. Eventually the lack of good paying jobs for americans will gut the 'american market' for products and goods and we will look more like modern south african than the US of A.

Heck if you look at the wealth distribution (by percentile) in the US the lower class, lower middle class, and middle class are all in serious decline and look more like each other than anything else. The upper middle class is stagnating and only the upper class is growing. Eventually all that will be left is that top 20% or ~62 million of ~313 million 'amercians' that can be sold to and everyone else will be starving (Especially with the heavy intent to kill welfare). I'm sure even that 20% will not be enough for those at the very top and they will gut the bottom of that group as well.

The reason it's not trains (or other forms of rail) is for two reasons:
1. Need to buy huge tracks of land in roughly straight lines.
2. Up front cost to actually build a rail system.

America is horribly bad when it comes to modern rail, because it's been effectively dead for decades outside of a handful of Amtrak commercial runs and industrial tracks. So any effort to really make use of rail is going to need to build new rail. Even short runs of light rail track these days costs billions and can take decades to build. You also have some really big players like GE which build most of the locomotive engines in use today and a single locomotive engine costs millions of dollars to build. In comparison one self-driving car only costs hundreds of thousands at most.

Actually with Aereo they make a point of renting you a 'specific' antenna, not some random antenna (unless you cancel your service and then activate it again)...

Having read both majority and dissenting opinions even the other dissenting justices feel this was not anywhere near 'narrow and specific' and that was the primary reason they refused to accept the majority opinion. If 3 of 9 Justices don't even think it's all that narrow or specific why the hell should we?

Social Media advertising when it works well is often the users _wanting_ to partake in the brand they favor. Their was a really good recent documentary on the social media advertising world, both regarding products and people. For products most are already established brands that want to milk their following for potential expansion to the friends of the people who partake. For people it's all basically getting someone known to showcase people who are not yet known. 'Expanding circles' and all that.

The first works especially well for large brands... Movies, soft drinks, shoes, etc. The second works well for things like actors, singers, and others needing or wanting to be a celebrity. The second is also the reason for some of the 'youtube millionaires' and I don't exactly mean money, but some have gotten rather good amounts of money for becoming popular online.

In the 'old days' you had senior employees who mentored new employees when they were hired. They didn't need 'training departments'. Heck I did this plenty when I was working as a network admin and in some sense I had this in turn when I became a network admin, because I had another 'higher placed' person look after me at first (though not an IT person, that mentoring was more about how to ride the political currents of the job).

Even that though regularly gets tossed out the window. To many companies look at 'mentoring time' as an unnecessary waste of time. I still provide tips and advice to new people even though my managers these days don't appreciate the time I take to do that. Or the time I take to show someone how to do something correctly when what they did either didn't work correctly or what they are doing will not go over well for one reason or another.

I'm pretty sure he meant that software should be a copyright issue, not a patent issue because the hardware is patented already and the software requires that to run. Hence someone should realistically not be able to patent software on top of patented hardware since those bits of software already existed in hardware. Instead they can only be copyrighted.

These things are different and cover different areas and serve different purposes.

That very much depends on who is running the union. And a proper union should be run by it's member workers, not some fat cat who is brought in from who knows where to run it. Sadly far to many american unions went capitalist and started to be run by people who didn't care about the workers and instead only cared about the money. Properly run unions are effective counters to abuse by corporations and business owners and are not corrupt rent seeking agencies that make it hard to fire people who do no work.

Well you need to be a bit careful there... 'Delivery' can be a pretty broad word unless you narrow it and that can be kind of hard even.

For instance over the air tv reception is 'delivery', but most of those provide some content of their own (usually 'news') that they don't purchase through an affiliate program. If we went by your wording they would suddenly have to shutter any home brew content and act as dumb pipes to whatever affiliate company they are paired to... It could even kill some tv advertising as I know several local tv stations that provide 'consulting' or 'editing' services in regards to local tv ads. That could be perceived as 'providing content' that they then deliver.

Even if we exclude this to only refer to 'the internet' we could still run into an issue like some smaller broadband ISPs that offer local TV broadcasts, internet, phone, and conventional cable. So an aspect of the same company does provide 'content' which is then relayed over their 'delivery method'. Some of those places have no other source for local 'news' because they can be relatively small communities.

Personally as a sci-fi writer I like Ceres much better then Mars. It has a rocky core, but it's mostly solid water (aka Ice) having more water as mass then the entire Oceans of Earth. It has low gravity so transportation is effectively cheap, while not being actually 'zero-G' and so should help with some of the medical risks of pure zero-G stays. It even has signs of a very limited atmosphere of evaporated water. It's also situated in the 'asteroid belt' just past Mars.

If we do go to Mars we may want to steer some large ice asteroids from the belt down onto it. Though 'Mars Purists' may have some issues with these grand scale forms of terraforming to add more water and other needed materials to the planet. This is something we can only really do because no one lives on mars yet.

For anyone not smart enough to run things like adblock, yes.