Whether a person deserves what they get is never so clear-cut. You picked an extreme example, and many people would agree that we shouldnt have to pay for an obese two-pack-a-day smoker's health bills from a common pool... but who is going to decide whether he lives or dies? That sounds like a a death panel to me... one that is much, much worse than the so-called death panels that were recently proposed. So, stop thinking through your arguments half-way. Complete personal freedom doesnt work. You dont have the freedom to kill, cheat, abuse, or pollute. Accept that, and lets try to make the best of it from there.

"stop ruining things for those of who manage to eat right, but still enjoy the occasional culinary sin." The problem is that things are already ruined. Medicare and Medicaid pay billions of dollars of your money to pay for the externalities of culinary sins. The proposal to tax the culinary sins directly, instead of paying for it through income tax, simply puts more of the tax burden on the sinners instead of spreading it equally across all tax payers. The added bonus is that the increased cost of sinning will deter a handful of people, so our GDP can be spent on something other than healthcare. Of course, you could argue that the real problem is medicare and medicaid... and that's a valid argument if that's the kind of world that you want to live in, but I certainly don't want to live there.

Shai Agassi's business model is to lease the battery, so the cost of the battery is distributed over the life of the vehicle. This also means you can drive for a few hours, swap out the battery for an equivalent one, and keep driving (45 seconds later)

This will require some skill on your part, but MATLAB can be an amazing teaching tool. A university Professor of mine used it to create animations and other visualizations.

Imagine being able to demonstrate trigonometric identities with animated sin waves, or geometry with 3d surfaces. As a programming language, it will give you incredible flexibility to demonstrate difficult concepts without putting emphasis on how pretty it looks.