It's working great. It's working so well, that you're actually grateful for it. Mission accomplished! The line for castration begins to your left.

I hereby propose a law which prevents you from using the words "your" or "you're" in text since you are apparently incapable of selecting the proper one.

But if you install a proper outlet according to code, you really shouldn't go to the pokey whether you're a licensed electrician or not, if the house should happen to burn down and kill someone. I'm sure glad I'm allowed to make such trivial repairs to the house myself. I imagine you need to call a certified ball-scratcher if your nuts itch in Australia. We can do any electrical work we want, including installing all the wiring in our new house ourselves, but a licensed contractor has to bless the installation. He just certifies that it's up to code and not obviously bad and wrong, then throws the switch. I've replaced two outlets and two switches in this house, not to mention rebuilding the stove after rodent intrusion (with full custom insulation replacement since I couldn't find anyone to sell me the OE pad) and replacing the water heater. I imagine none of that would be legal in the prison colony down under. How does it feel to still be a prisoner today?

Well no, actually, it doesn't. Because in most places in the USA it is literally illegal to show a gun to someone if you're not about to use it. There are no statistics on crimes prevented by displaying a firearm, because this is a crime called brandishing. The system was deliberately designed not just to get people shot (if you threaten me with something that I claim looks like a weapon and I shoot you it's self-defense, but if I feel threatened by your actions and show you that I'm armed it's a crime) but also to prevent accurate reporting of statistics.

Bullshit. The people who have the worst motives are those who wish to subject all "lesser" humans to a condition of slavery. They know what's best for you, and they know how to implement it. And those people use expensive guns with serial numbers stamped on them. They are very clean and go very well with jack boots.

Straw man. Those who own guns as a hedge against tyranny are typically not proponents of anarchism. The crap we put up with from foreigners who want to engage in bullshit prevarication due to their cognitive dissonance over gun laws is ridiculous. You do realize I hope, that every time you make such an idiotic argument, you deprecate your side's views?

We have the second amendment because of the British. They didn't want Australia, which is why they dumped their undesirables there. Those undesirables have learned the lesson of their parent nation well, which is why the Australian government is also a booted foot stomping upon an unprotected neck, forever. We also learned the lesson well, which is why we have the right to keep and bear arms. Well, theoretically, anyway. Many states (including my native home of California) have laws which directly contravene the second amendment.

In spite of my non-anarchist leanings, the answer to your question might well be "better off". If your government is not working in your best interest, clearly you need a new government.

you might be right, but it won't come soon enough to help this generation.

You're both just ranting unless you ask the people she supposedly helped, most of whom are presumably now dead. If they were happy then she did a good job. If they were unhappy then she did a bad job. There is no other metric which is meaningful but happiness per dollar or whatever other number you're measuring effectiveness by. (Man-hour? It pretty much always boils down to dollars or hours, and hours can be converted into dollars.)

If you're going to come over all logical, I have to ask, where is the grain coming from? I mean, you're not proposing that they print bread from PLA, are you? Just because you can theoretically eat it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

I got my first webpage at 15. And there wasn't a lot of content around at the time.

Suffice to say, if I ever entertained notions of running for political office, they were long since dashed.

This is much of why I feel so free to share my feelings here. My attitude is already well-known and a matter of public record. (Although since the internet archive operates based on the current robots.txt, our once-significant site is not available to the public...)

There are two kinds of noise in the car which are insulated for, the road noise and the engine noise. If you run any kind of fancy rubber for performance reasons, road noise will be considerable at high speeds. Of course, most EVs and hybrids run LRR tires which produce less friction and thus less noise... but in a luxury performance vehicle, you want some decent rubber. You really need it if you want to actually use the car.

"a Tesla" will soon include a $30k model and, hopefully, will later include a lower-cost model. If a family can't afford to buy a $30k car on credit, then there are deeper problems afoot in the nation which you simply cannot pin on Tesla, and which are not adequately explained by the Government granting them a loan which has now been paid back.

How amusing. Solyndra is what you're asking for, and Tesla is what you're complaining about, but we've been paid back for Tesla, and not for Solyndra. You really have no clue what you're on about, or even what you're saying, have you?

It wasn't until the auto companies bought up and shut down profitable public transportation systems nationwide (including both local and long-range transport — streetcars, buses, and trains) and shut them down to increase demand for their product. When coupled with the development of the interstate highway system which was allegedly intended to promote national defense but which was actually unnecessary for that purpose (expanding a rail network provides for the same function, but delivers more transportation efficiency) this forced citizens to buy automobiles if they wanted to remain relevant members of society. I grew up in Santa Cruz as the child of a single mother who refused to buy a car. Some of our buses ran every fifteen minutes but that still resulted in adding hours to my day every day because of the dominance of cars and the ineffectuality of the bus system — again, a situation which was deliberately created by auto companies nationwide.

You're looking at history through typically rose-colored glasses. The fact is that it wasn't the price coming down that drove acceptance of the automobile; that was a result of acceptance of the automobile that was forced upon the populace, due to the deliberate removal of the systems which had naturally evolved to fill actual consumer need.

That's a massive change. That's several of the most failure-prone systems removed and replaced with something less failure-prone than anything that's currently on the vehicle. It basically reduces the vehicle to body, suspension, and electrical work, because statistically nobody is actually going to work on the motor or controller (which will be replaced as a unit) and many of these vehicles don't even have a transmission. Vehicles with regenerative braking also reduce the wear on the brake system, extending even such a trivial service. The fact is that EVs built to the same standards will require significantly less maintenance hours than vehicles with ICEs in them. Dealers are already hurting (primarily "big 3" dealers) due to the loss of service revenues which came with American automakers finally electing to compete on quality and not simply based on being made in the USA, which is mostly a lie anyway since so many major parts (including castings!) have been coming from China since the 1980s.

You offered a false dichotomy. It's not a choice between "a new car for $10K and $1K in gas fees every year for 20 years" and whatever, because of the massive externalities from gasoline-powered vehicles. As long as people are driving them, we all suffer and we suffer by loss of environment and due to health impact. Petro-fueled cars have a cost in lives. Those who drive them are murderers, myself included. Hyperbole? Bullshit. We're killers for nothing more than convenience.

EVs have the same problem, but not inherently. Of course, we could run even our gassers on biofuels (i.e. Butanol, a direct 1:1 replacement) if not for legal malfeasance designed to keep us from producing and burning them, thanks to Butamax, a shell company owned by BP and DuPont. They are leveraging patents produced at public universities, partly with our tax money to prevent production of Butanol as a motor fuel, which would make the world a better place.

An open statement, not to be misconstrued as any accusation against the parent poster: If you work for BP or DuPont, fuck you. I hope you die in a fire.

Well, you're just wrong. They don't need to do that. They can be profitable with a $30k car.

Why are you still prevaricating about luxury cars when we're talking about the $30k model?