291–300 of 410 posts
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Gov. Christie's office ordered the most heavily trafficked bridge in the country (if not the world) closed for political revenge. He is desperately trying to throw his staff under the bus to avoid accountability for this. It's a very delicate subject for him right now, and Musk bringing it up is cruel and yet at the same time (imho) totally fair play.
To be fair, 2/3 toll lanes were closed, not the whole bridge.
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It's the same in Oregon. You're not allowed to pump your own gas even if you want to.
Unless you're on a motorcycle. Then none of the attendants want to deal with you -- they hand you the gas pump nozzle and you do the filling. I don't know what the party line is to justify the gas attendant rules. If it's "consumer safety" then it's bullshit.
Blatant employment protectionism. Every time it comes up on a ballot the "statement in favor" is always primarily employment protectionism. The arguments are generally of the form "if we allowed self service, nobody would pay for full service, and those jobs would go away".
As with many similarly obnoxious laws: Portland votes for it, the rest of Oregon votes against it, and Portland wins.
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The last time I was in NJ, the full-service gas there was the same price as the self-serve in suburban NY. Maybe that's changed, but given the hug number of commuters in NJ, I conclude it likely that holy hell would have been raised of full-serve was significantly more expensive.
Those low prices are largely because NJ has some of the lowest gas taxes in the country (48th) whereas NY has the highest.
The truth is, car dealerships, which are mostly locally owned, are a way for a state to boost revenue capture and generate jobs. In New Jersey, not being able to pump your own gas is the same deal. Look at the economics of a Tesla dealership, for every car sold in New Jersey, how much of that money stays in New Jersey? And let's be honest, being a car salesman is not the most lucrative or respectable of trades. The j…
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More to the point, the things he mentions are not very expensive service items--to say nothing of the fact that there's no particularly compelling reason to have them done at the dealer if you don't want to. (And talking about "tune-ups" is pretty close to an anachronism at this point.) Tesla, on the other hand, does have all its new electric car components which are all very impressive technically but about which re…
I buy luxury brands and have for a long time. The dealer experience is pretty darn good. I took delivery on a new Porsche. The transmission had a problem. So they flew a new one in from Germany by Fedex at a cost of perhaps $8,000 (after all it's pretty heavy) in air freight I was told. Loaner cars? Last time they gave me a brand new Cayman (I own a 911) with 300 miles on it. Other times Cayene Hybrids with 3k miles.…
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I seriously don't understand people that get mad when someone makes a profit. Like are those people expecting to work and earn nothing? When you risk your capital, should you not get a return? And when you risk it on something crazy like electric cars, shouldn't the profits be even that much larger, to compensate you for the out of proportion risk?
No one's getting mad about profit making, the point being made is that when profit-making is the motive, it is disingenuous to position your argument as being about something else (such as pretending to be advocating for good government).
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There are all sorts of laws on the books that we've agreed are idiotic and are no longer enforced. It's up to the executive to determine which those ones are, and, as time progresses, some laws become so outdated that no rational minded person would ever think of enforcing them. What if the law had suggested that Office and Automotive equipment could not be sold directly (perhaps harkening back to a time when the Lar…
There are all sorts of laws on the books that we've agreed are idiotic and are no longer enforced. It's up to the executive to determine which those ones are, and, as time progresses, some laws become so outdated that no rational minded person would ever think of enforcing them. Europeans (mostly Germans) I've talked to about how we do this in the US shake their heads. These shenanigans along with the "speed limit+9m…
Anybody traveling slower than this needs to be in the slower right lanes to avoid getting tailgated or inspiring road rage.
I've often wondered if anybody traveling at (or just over) the speed limit on the freeway has ever been pulled over by the police for obstructing the flow of traffic.
Paternalistic meddling with free consumer choices is always fraught with peril. Sometimes it is necessary to protect important principles in society. You can't discriminate based on race - that limits choice but who would support the contrary? You can't defraud people in selling products - ditto. You can't buy land to build a smokestack plant in a quiet residential neighborhood - ditto. Many other examples might be c…
Actually I'd say that governments typically get away with paternalistic medding with free consumer choices.
Elon Musk has the right of this argument, and it's heartening to see a CEO take aim at the politicians that are doing that paternalistic meddling.
But I don't see Tesla's CEO fighting back against paternalistic governmental meddling that artificially raises the price of gas cars while producing artificial revenue for Tesla:
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/03/04/cant-afford-a-new-car-wa... By the government’s own account, the stringent new CAFE standards will increase the average cost of a new car by $3,000 in 2025. The Energy Information Administration warned that new cars priced under $15,000 may no longer be available by 2025.
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/sustainability/teslas-secr... If a company comes up short, it has to pay a penalty of up to $5,000 per credit. Or it can buy credits from a company like Tesla, which happens to earn a lot of credits on every car it makes. Tesla has sold enough credits to post its first profit.
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> The public no longer believes politicians, but they all believe Zuckerberg, Page and Musk People are given a lot of information from a lot of sources nowadays, which means they're better at analysing it and weeding out the bullshit(typically). Your point assumes we're blindly following what they have to say without analysing it. I can imagine a lot of people aren't. A lot of people may be annoyed with their rights…
>People are given a lot of information from a lot of sources nowadays, which means they're better at analysing it and weeding out the bullshit(typically). Or people find the version of the "truth" they most agree with and just go with that. Given the huge industry of politically-charged "news" organizations, I think there's a significant amount of people that are doing this instead (sadly).
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There are all sorts of laws on the books that we've agreed are idiotic and are no longer enforced. It's up to the executive to determine which those ones are, and, as time progresses, some laws become so outdated that no rational minded person would ever think of enforcing them. Europeans (mostly Germans) I've talked to about how we do this in the US shake their heads. These shenanigans along with the "speed limit+9m…
Just to clarify for any europeans who might have read this, ""speed limit+9mph" informal rule " - is a rule (at least in California) for what your minimum speed on the freeway/highway should politely be. Anybody traveling slower than this needs to be in the slower right lanes to avoid getting tailgated or inspiring road rage. I've often wondered if anybody traveling at (or just over) the speed limit on the freeway ha…