Yeah, the down payment on leases has always just been a pet peeve for me. The closest thing to it is a deposit on an apartment, but that’s refundable; even for a much more expensive asset (a home), the other fees you pay for other stuff (e.g. application fees) are a lot lower.

A lot of people even voluntarily take pharmaceuticals to try to achieve just that.

Replacement coverage is a must for homeowner’s insurance (and in my case, it would cover something lost away from home, including on a plane), since a lot of items can’t be readily replaced for their actual cash value.

Well, as the OP pointed out, given the $3300 down, that raises the monthly cost of your lease, plus, the $299 payment is only available if you own or lease one of a few specific luxury makes, which qualifes you for a $2750 discount. Starting a new lease in 2 years, you wouldn’t qualify for that.

One, as said elswhere, I think your math is wrong.

Combine this with 5th gear, where Tesla’s Model X was late, is the most sedan-looking SUV I’ve seen, and the Model 3 is being released only as a sedan at this point in time.

Or big city life: If I exclude road trips, I’d find it hard to put 100 miles on my car in a month. I take transit to work, the grocery store’s half a mile, and a 5 mile circuit lets me hit pretty much all the errands I could possibly want to run.

Absolutely anyone who uses the car as a fun, good-weather vehicle. Does that car look like it’s made to slog your kids to and from soccer practice? No, it does not.

In a perfect world, dealerships would have to show you this math whenever you signed a lease.

Yeah, except then you have to change labels on the oil cap for EVERY market, since now it’s using languages instead of images.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that NBC was owned by a company that really wanted people to keep their cable subscriptions and also wanted to make more money via Internet streaming.

Except those are broadcast games. These are cable games, and in this case, NBC holds literally all the cards; they could just decide to make all the games available for ‘free’ (advertising), or they could decide to put all the games behind a Sunday Ticket-like paywall.

I’m really not sure what you’re basing this on, but there’s plenty of bars that open for EPL games. If I were to swing by at 9AM this Saturday, they’d be vacant, but come the start of the season, they’ll be full again. “EPL brunch” is a very real thing.

Your explanation makes sense only if they were offering all of EPL for $50 (or $80, or $100, or whatever number they thought made sense), instead of splitting up EPL matches into broadcast (cable) and Internet-only. It discourages people with cable, and it doesn’t do enough for people without cable.

The real issue is that NBC essentially bet that it could build up a Premier League viewership on weekends that was somewhat like that for college sports (particularly American football) or the NFL, where it became a “tradition” to have the TV on and watch games even when you might not care about the team.

The biggest issue with the Royal Navy isn’t the carriers, it’s that they don’t have enough support ships around the carriers to have both operating at the same time. In particular, the RN stopped building its Type 45 destroyers, which are the key asset for protecting a carrier, after 6 were completed, so if the Navy…

They won’t be, though. The Royal Navy is purchasing F-35B jets; that’s the same model the US Marines use from their amphibious assault ships. F-35Bs are optimized for shorter takeoffs and can land vertically.

Exactly. Vegas’s ticket sales will be less dependent on the home team’s quality than any other team in the league (other than maybe Toronto, where they could field an ECHL team for 6 months and still sell out every game).

They didn’t, though. It’s debatable whether a group of players who’ve never played on the same team can gel quickly enough to be an “we’re an OK team with no standout stars and we’ll be on the playoff bubble” team, and the team was never going to be better than playoff bubble unless something crazy happened, like…

Not to mention supporting jobs in small towns which have often lost a fair amount of employment in recent decades.