While your reasoning is off, from what I've read most vaccines have single digit ineffectiveness rates of up to around 10%, but consider the proportion of the population that's immunocompromised today; the figures I've read about average around 10% still vulnerable even if you jab everybody that isn't medically contra-indicated. The very young, the very old, the sick, immunocompromised(not all of whom know it yet), etc...

"Fully covered" means that if your doctor doesn't administer it that your insurance has to pay for somebody else to do it. None of this 'The pharmacy isn't a primary provider so we won't pay!'.

Have you contacted your insurance to find out where they WILL pay for you to get the shots? Have you told them that your doctor refuses, perhaps against contract?

The stories are fading, but I have a grandfather who has a lifetime disability from polio as a young adult. 'Last rights 3 times' level of sickness from it. Just recently I learned that my grandmother on the opposite side had to relearn how to walk after her bout of polio.

Grandpa took his kids to the doc the moment he learned that a polio vaccine had been released for it. He didn't wait for it to be given out at the schools.

I was of that generation as well. Still, get into the early history of vaccination - before it was even called vaccination. Variolation was deliberately infecting somebody with smallpox. They would do it to a healthy person/child, using a deliberately chosen milder strain(there were 2), on an extremity(took longer for the infection to reach important stuff). It had around a 1% death rate as opposed to a 30%+ rate for 'wild caught' smallpox. Even the royalty variolated their kids before better alternatives were developed.

Those parents were essentially doing the same thing - deliberately causing you to catch the disease when, statistically speaking, it was least likely to screw you up. However, that doesn't make somebody who uses an even safer and cheaper method a 'pussy'. It makes them smart.

8k miles/year required driving still seems a touch much to me. Regular trips into Fairbanks would do it for me, but I'd have looked into a beefier alternator. Maybe install something temporarily so I could get a good idea of the vampire drain on the car. Oh, and measure how fast it's charging the battery. It might be one of those 'tick up the voltage 10%'. I remember reading about BMW having had trouble with insufficient charging.

Probably not, the technology is too new and 'out there' for the Energy Star section of the EPA. The closest section, battery chargers, well, Tesla probably handily beats. We're talking about something where efficiency increases as the power draw increases after all. An efficincy standard for chargers for cell phones, AA cells and such is going to be easily met by a charger intended for a 60-85kwh behemoth. At that size you're using efficient processes just to handle the power demands without setting things on fire.

1. I agree, give me an extra $70k and I'm not buying a model S with it, but if you gave me $200k I might... Right now it's not a good fit for my needs. Maybe that truck he's planning on around 2017 or so....
2. About those batteries they're buying off the shelf... That might change...
3. There's more reasons to buy a Model S than 'faux shit about the environment'. They range from stupid(IMO) gimmies like access to the carpool lanes even with only 1 passenger in California to being able to avoid gas stations(if you have a particular dislike) to being able to drive your car right into your warehouse(not a good idea with gas cars), and it's actually competitive with the other cars in it's price range for luxury.
4. Nearly all car manufacturers got their start building premium vehicles. Especially new tech ones.
5. Back to the battery packs - Tesla produced it's first car using a Lotus Elise body. Really, the core Tesla development at that point was the drivetrain - engine and systems. With the Model S they used their own designed from scratch body. With each model Tesla is taking more of the production 'in house'. Musk may be obscenely wealthy, but he doesn't quite have Scrooge McDuck's money vaults to establish all the production systems from day 1.
6. His buying of massive quantities of cells, as is, allows the companies that DO produce them to invest more in said cell production technology, automating more, increasing efficiency of scale, etc...

I've seen this as well. Boiling it down, my perception is that Elon Musk is honestly concerned about how people receive his product. If you have a genuine problem he'll attempt to make it better. After all, somebody tweeted him*, he then went through the effort(or made somebody else do it) to track down the reviewer's car, complete a more extensive diagnosis on it(failed battery) and send a team out to fix it. We don't honestly know whether or not this was due to the public perception, though the article writer notes that he's not the only one reporting on the forums that they're replacing the batteries. He does mention that the 60kwh version is having more problems reported, which is indeed a head-scratcher, but it could be a perception thing - 60kwh owners could be more concerned with efficiency than those that buy the 85kwh vehicles, after all.

Now he DOES get incredibly pissed if you misrepresent his product - see the lawsuits against Top Gear for implying the vehicle ran out of power and had to be pushed into the warehouse, as well as firing back against the NYT author who drove faster than he said, ran the heater/AC when he said he didn't, deliberately missed charging points, disconnected early and did loops around a parking lot until it died.

So a guy makes an honest assessment and Elon gets his car fixed. Somebody lies and he sues. Sounds like he has pride in his product.

*He has to be aware of the problem before he can fix it, of course.

They also rate the car's mileage in terms of kwh - about 3 miles per kwh. So 1.1 kwh = 3.3miles lost per day.

I have to agree with the others; it shouldn't need this much power. I rate it up to the fact that they're doing something relatively brand new, are a new car company, and getting vampire drain lower was lost on the priority list. Never buy the first year of a new/significantly revised car model....

Going what I'm seeing for vampire drain for other appliances - 1w should be mostly doable, or 24wh per day. Or almost 50 times less than what's being reported.

Truck, not a car, but I've left my lights on a couple times and still been able to start it... Mostly during the day when I started driving it was dark, but light when I got to work/home. Noticed when I went to leave. Still started. Of course, first opportunity after that I slap the charger on...

This makes me wonder - how does that 1.1kwh per day compare to other modern cars in it's class?

As for your boss, I'd think that it'd depend on how many miles he drives when he does start it up. 8k miles translates to an average of 22 miles a day(7 days a week). Given that my work is right at 10 miles away, I'd probably need to top that battery off occasionally if I'm not making a fair number of extra trips. That's either a lot of vampire drain or an underrated charging system.

Citation? I know they've been increasing the size of batteries and chargers in modern cars to keep up with the increase in vampire draw from all the electronic do-dads, I also know that lead acid batteries don't like being fully discharged, but I've never heard the trickle current thing.

As for the secondary batteries, with cars lasting over a decade I'd really rather not have to replace more batteries.

I think that you'll find that devices used in state-sanctioned executions are either dual-purpose with far greater utility in saving lives, on average, even including the drugs used, or actually relatively primitively put together. IE not actually done by engineers.

Actually, music writers have a very good guild and have managed a much better job at maintaining publication rights than the artists that perform the songs.

I'm not going to go so far as to say they need to work 40-50-40(hours/weeks/years), it's more a contract job. There's plenty of non-standards out there - military, police, and fire fighter careers are often 20 years, and the average NFL career is a mere seven years, and it is indeed possible to save enough to retire in that period if you receive median pay. You just can't live like a NFL star... ;)

Still, I view it a bit like writing - should the average writer be 'set for life' after writing only one book? Most of the authors I follow are far more prolific than that. If you only produce 5 books in your life you're not much of a writer, sad to say. Even Tolkien wrote at least a dozen in his life, and he was a notoriously slow writer.

If you're simply a 'one hit wonder' you should probably get enough money to cover production costs the first couple months, then it dwindles to maybe a couple hundred a month. If you're a consistent performer, a serious of hits, even just modest ones, should eventually provide enough residuals to support you in your retirement. If you're a superstar you get to live like a king, of course.