I never believed the unemployment numbers lauded by the #Obama administration. After all, the "falling" unemployment rates were always filled with people who maxed out of collecting unemployment since Obama eliminated all extensions. But learning that 94% of millions of jobs Obama created weren't traditional jobs?! That number shocks even me.

Thanks for sharing.

Chris, it was my understanding that Tesla's response to the Consumer Report story was that they acknowledged that there were bugs and that they will be fixing them for free through built-in firmware updates (just like you'd get a free Windows update bug fix on your computer). So there would be no cost at all to consumers.

I don't recall the exact source but it was in a Huffington Post article that was listed in the "Around The Web" sidebar right here on TalkMarkets.

While you are of course right, when it comes to tech companies, they always push products out to market before it's ready and just figure they'll fix all the bugs later. And they get away with this too - users and early adopters have come to expect this. I'd say that Tesla $TSLA is becoming a tech company and is behaving in the same way.

You have eloquently brought attention to a concerning problem which has been troubling me for some time now.

Actually Carol, I must confess that I've never seen an episode of Mad Men. It's been on my to do list for many years, but I never quite found the time. I heard it was a great show though. I just assumed it would be hard to have product placements for a period piece, but I suppose some companies like Coca Cola were certainly around back then.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

They need to make their money from somewhere. It's unlikely they were able to make much from product placements. :-)

I suspect all historical pieces have the same problem

Very interesting and thorough. Seems to me, that if companies like Netflix are the main users of internet bandwidth, they should become an internet provider themselves.

"Many such queries are commercial in nature, and given Amazon's growing advertising business, sponsored recommendations should be part of the roadmap for making Echo an even greater profit driver."

This is very interesting, and something I hadn't though of. I suspect you are right. I could envision two price points for the Echo, just as Amazon sells the Kindle with "special offers" (aka ads) for a lower price.

But it would be very invasive to have ads blurted out to you throughout the day. Or to have your streaming music, which I pay for to avoid commercial interruptions (like on Pandora or regular radio) be interrupted by Amazon ads. So how could Amazon truly integrate such a feature into this device?

Maybe it's a bullish flag.. My rules say stay away. It's choppy