All resource extraction was less than 10% of the Canadian economy in 2014, smaller than manufacturing and real estate.
I don't really have a great picture of what parts of the economy drive properity, but while I can see that healthy manufacturing can lead to everyone having more stuff, I do wonder how "real estate" enters into it. Real estate can change hands, and go up (or down) in value, but nobody is making any more of it, so having a healthy real estate "sector" would seem to be more of an indicator of prosperity rather than a creator of it.
In any case, if you have any links you can share explaining that resoure extraction isn't such a big deal to Canada I would be interested in learning.
It does seem like oil is Canada's biggest export (about 27% of the total). Vehicles are #2 at just under 13%. Combined with Precious metals (#4), Plastics (#6), Wood (#7), and Aluminum (#9) that makes up about 39% for "resources", while the Vehicles, Machines, Electronics and Aircrafts add up to about 25%, so it looks like "resources" are significantly larger than "manufacturing" on an export basis at least.
One can see that dropping the price of the biggest export by 70% is a pretty significant event. All other things staying the same one could imagine oil going from number 1 to number 3, droping the overall export total by 80 or 90 billion dollars, or around 20% of the total.
What did the government do? Devalue the Canadian dollar against the US dollar. Bastards, all.
While there may have been some policy factors that have directly influenced the Canadian dollar value, they have been very small in comparison to the impact that resource prices (I'm looking at you, Barrel of Oil) have had. The failure to diversify the economy away from such a heavy resource weighting has been a shortcoming of every government since confederation both provincially and federally.
Even for ideas that were already know to myself, the presentation of them is fun. The framing story of a child who does not enjoy math class but is excited when meeting the titular devil character is not particularly suprising, but the whole thing is quite enjoyable.
But the workaround for that is easy: stop being an American business. It might be as simple as Apple turning one of its offshore subsidiaries into its headquarters, and turning its Cupertino headquarters into a subsidiary.
I think Burger King is now a "Canadian" company due to this type of move: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... when it merged with Tim Horton's the resulting entity was based in Canada.
No, California classifies any light with an Edison socket as low-efficiency, not matter what bulb you put in. They're banned in kitchens completely, and only allowable if you put in a dimmer switch that will damage some high-efficiency lights that would otherwise work in an Edison socket.
You keep saying this, but I cannot find anything to support that idea. This mentions only efficiency requirements, not socket type:
"According to the Title 24 energy standards a high efficacy luminaire contains only high efficacy lamps or high efficacy LED lighting, and must not contain a socket which allows any low efficacy lighting system to be used. For example, any luminaire containing a medium screw base socket is classified as low efficacy, regardless of the type of lamp installed into that socket. Typically, high efficacy luminaires contain pin-based sockets, like compact fluorescent or linear fluorescent lamp sockets, though other socket types such as screw sockets specifically rated only for high intensity discharge lamps (like metal halide lamps) light emitting diode (LED) luminaires (dedicated LED lighting fixtures that cannot use incandescent or any other type of lighting technology) may also qualify as high efficacy."
It does seem like a bit of almost pointless legislation since low efficiency bulbs can be found for various pin-based socket systems.
So a low intensity light at a high color temperature "looks wrong". For example a 6000K LED light dimmed to minimum, where an incandescent light might be down close to 1700K.
I doubt very much this is built into the biology rather than just being the result of experience. As a point of reference, moonlight is about 4100K, and we have been using that for a lot longer than candles, so do candles "look wrong"? The full moon gives off about 0.1 lux, while one foot-candle is about 10 lux, so the full moon is much dimmer than a single candle, but its colour temperature is much higher.
Give us some experience with dim lights with high colour temperatures and we will feel that that sort of thing is "right".
I think the reason so many people want the yellow lights is it is what they are used to.
Personally, I think it's millions of years of evolution, combined with the fact that it's only been the last 130 years or so that we stopped getting all our light from fire. You may want to have your color vision checked, next time you are at the optometrist.
The "daylight" bulbs (at around 6,500 K colour temparture) is close to the light produced by the sun than the "soft white" of most incandescents. Sunlight has been our major source of illumination and while there is evidence for controled use of fire for about half a million years, I doubt very much there has been much evolutionary pressure towards preferring that illumnation over sunlight.
And Ray just is abandoned on Jakku as a child; we don't know who abandoned her, and we don't know why.
In fairness, we didn't know anything worthwhile about Luke's history at the end of IV either except that his father's name was Anakin and that he and Kenobi knew each other.
I would say that we do know enough to provide room for broad brushstrokes - he is living with his relatives who don't want to tell him much about his parents, he feels trapped and wants to get away from the constrained future he sees on Tatoine, he has friends that he hangs out with.
With Rey, we don't know why she's there or why she wants to stay/return. We don't even know if SHE knows - if she does then telling the audience why would be good, and if she doesn't then telling the audience THAT would be good. The mystery of what aspects Rey knows about herself seems a pointless and frustrating one. And there are others.
To be fair, Luke got to use a laser sword regardless of training in A New Hope even though he had ability. Having a non-jedi who is trained as a soldier use a lightsaber for a few minutes doesn't seem to be super unreasonable considering he was fighting another storm trooper who was using a big-assed non-laser sword. One would assume both fighters had similar training.
Well, Luke didn't actually fight with one in ANH, and presumably did some training with Yoda before fithing with Vader in the later films. Rey had no training that the viewer could be expected to know about yet managed to defeat the big bad guy.
The "experiment" in Dauphin, Canada lasted 4 years and seems like it was terminated for political reasons, not because of failure. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
I've seen lots of posts on Slashdot denigrating Common Core so I've been on the lookout for anything that looks questionable in her math homework but I haven't seen anything yet that I wouldn't want her to learn. Certainly I've never seen anything even remotely like the gibberish that you're quoting.
People have been complaining about changes to math instruction and how insane it all is since well before all of us were born. See for instance the "New Math" ideas of the 1960s, and I have little doubt that similar "problems" existed before then, probably back to Plato.
Usually the issue is not much larger than the combination of student and parent confusion, and poor communications between teacher and family. Add a bit of teacher understanding and a healthy dose of math-phobia sprinkled through all parties, and a "crisis" is not hard to find.
What is the political background? How come the resistance has been sitting on their asses while a third death star was getting built? Why is it a random improperly brainwashed stormtrooper that knows all the details, and not them?
I certainly would have appreciated more of the political background too. But moving away from taxation of trade routes as the main item in the start-of-film text crawl was a good move.
Why would the Jesus freaks tout Ayn Rand, a stout atheist. Maybe you shouldn't stereotype.
If you expect anyone to hold self-consistent positions in all areas of their life, you have not been paying attention. Anyone beyond you and me, of course. We alone are the bastions of cool rationality. And I'm not so sure about me.
slasher999 says: Hrm, spellcheck changed "fascists" to "racists" in my reply. Please mentally edit accordingly.
Rockoon says: With the way the left decries any requirement of presenting identification as racist in the case of voting, their push for even more strict gun control laws is surely racist under the same standard. You wouldn't want to deprive black people guns just because the place to get an I.D. is way across town, do you?
That is an interesting observation. Even without the retorical dig at the presumed left/right different mindset in regards to voting rights and restrictions, the underlying idea that voting restrictions/registration/limitations might be viewed similarly to firearm restrictions/registration/limitations might have some usefulness.
I think that Rockoon's assumption is correct that the people who hold strong positions on these two issues largely are divided into two groups: for-strong-gun-restrictions, against-strong-voting-restrictions in contrast to those who are against-strong-gun-restrictions, for-strong-voting-restrictions. Framing the two issues together in this way might have the effect of creating some understanding of the feelings of each group for the other group's position - maybe we could end up with reasonable-gun-restrictions as well as reasonable-voting-restrictions.
Perhaps we could come together more as a nation if we explicitly combined the two spheres - in order to get a gun permit you would need to provide the same type of info and qualifications that are necessary for voter registration, and visa versa. It is not uncommon for gun rights advocates to state that they feel that the second ammendment (right to bear arms) is as foundational to the functioning of the whole political structure as the fifteenth or nineteenth amendments (right to vote not based on race or sex), so perhaps basing restrictions/registration/limitiatins of one "right" on the other "right" could address two challenging issues with a single compormise position.
Certainly it would be interesting for the supreme court to have to make a contitutional ruling on legislation framed in a way that it invoked both issues at the same time: "Anyone who does foo is banned from voting or owning a gun, and in order to vote or own a gun everyone needs to do bar."
Combine the voter registration card with the firearm registration card.
Maybe if it is not an idea that can apeal to a majority of citizens, it might be an idea that is repugnant to the majority of citizens! That would be something - to come together as a nation to create an idea that we can all reject, even if for opposite reasons!
Please stop with the silly "we need more gun laws" argument every time someone farts. You're just embarrassing yourselves now. We have enough gun laws.
If measured by lines of legislation, you may be correct. If measrued by effectively doing what citizens and legislators would like to do we probably don't. We also seem to have a huge morass of restriction on data sharing, funding of enforcement, and consistency across juresdictions. The vast majority of amaricans support required background checks for all firearms purchases, which seems to pass constitutional tests in the states that in fact require them - yet such checks are not required for individual transactions in many states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Our laws should make it difficult for criminals and crazies to buy firearms from sellers obeying the law. Such laws would not solve all firearm problems by a long shot, but at the very least they would allow us to try to address problems with our background checking system rather than wringing our hands and saying "whatever shall we do? once again the crazy criminal was able to legally buy a gun and did bad things!"
If driver-less cars are involved in double the accidents of driven cars, then it is in insurance on driverless cars that will go up.
Not if all of those accidents are deemed the fault of the other driver, and their insurance does all the payouts. I suppose there might be some effect due to uninsured drivers.
Fuel consumption is just a function of gear ratios. 60mph is the best speed for fuel consumption right now because it is a good average of common highway speed limits. If speed limits change (up or down,) car makers will compensate.
Air friction is highly dependant on vehicle speed (going as the fourth power as I recall), so as you start getting faster speeds, a significantly larger fraction of the car's energy is lost to the air friction, regardless of your gear ratios. It just takes more energy to maintain higher speeds.
I'm tired of morons thinking they understand traffic engineering. The speed limit should be set at around the 80th percentile of car speed on the road. If the 80th percentile is 20mph faster than the speed limit, the speed limit is broken; hell if its 10mph slower than average its being set at about the 30th percentile likely; so 70 percent of people are speeding on that road. Time and again studies show that most people drive a safe speed for the road and conditions regardless of the speed limit, whether faster or slower.
I have never seen such studies and would be interested in a reference.
Certainly I know that when I travel on windy mountain roads I can very easily exceed the posted speed limit with no risk of sliding off the curve, and many people driving those roads do exceed the posted limits (I have done so many many times in the past myself). It was a few months ago while reading a slashdot discussion about self-driving cars that I realized for the first time that many of the posted speed limits were there not because of a need to prevent cars from sliding off tight corners but because of limits to visibility and stopping distances. The "sea to sky highway" heading north to Whistler from Vancouver BC is notorious for traffic fatalities, largely I think because of this effect.
People drive at what they THINK is a safe speed for the road and conditions, but often are unaware of what that safe speed actually is. Modern cars are quiet and handle very well at high speeds and contribute to the driver FEELING like they are in complete control. Stopping distance increases proportional to the square of the velocity - so increasing your speed a fairly small amount can increase stopping distance by a much larger amount than most people think. So going around the corner at 50mph might not be safe while travelling at 45mph could give ample space to avoid problems blocked from view by the curve.
After I posted, I was thinking that, instead of a strict yearly renewal, a registrant could register for multiple years in a single shot.
However, I like your idea as well. How does this sound: $20 gets you the first ten years, and each subsequent year doubles. You can buy ahead if you wish. This gives them fifteen years of relatively cheap protection, and it starts making it economically nonviable to retain protections for much beyond 25 years.
I think there is value in having free automatic copyright protection for at least a few years - not only does it simplify all the accounting that a business would need for each and every little thing they might publish, it also protects the average citizen from having their work exploited by others without recompense. Ten years for free automatically, then require registration and payment for anything beyond starting at $10 and doubling each year as proposed. This is fairly close to the price point that the $0.01 for the first year would have realized ($10.24 for year eleven).
I would actually support almost any starting price at almost any year, since the geometric progression puts the vast majority of stuff into PD fairly quickly and eventually gets everything back, with the fees at least partially justifying walling off part of our shared cultural heritage for a limited time.
What would really suck is if they go ahead and pay the $100k+ to H1Bs instead of hire local talent. It just might be doable if they save the costs of benefits. Backfire!
Forcing a company to pay higher wages for workers could have a negative impact on the company, but in general it has benifits for the local economy and the tax basis. The company is supposed to be hiring local talent where available, so the local talent should be happy to see the H1Bs being paid more as it should result in the local talent being more likley to be hired at wages they are willing to work at.
If there is currently local talent going unhired, increasing the wages of H1Bs might make them more attactive to be hired, and if it does not then they are no worse off then they currently are.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link ceoyoyo - it is nice to see all the data in one place.
I don't really have a great picture of what parts of the economy drive properity...
PROSPERITY
must learn to proofread
All resource extraction was less than 10% of the Canadian economy in 2014, smaller than manufacturing and real estate.
I don't really have a great picture of what parts of the economy drive properity, but while I can see that healthy manufacturing can lead to everyone having more stuff, I do wonder how "real estate" enters into it. Real estate can change hands, and go up (or down) in value, but nobody is making any more of it, so having a healthy real estate "sector" would seem to be more of an indicator of prosperity rather than a creator of it.
In any case, if you have any links you can share explaining that resoure extraction isn't such a big deal to Canada I would be interested in learning.
It does seem like oil is Canada's biggest export (about 27% of the total). Vehicles are #2 at just under 13%. Combined with Precious metals (#4), Plastics (#6), Wood (#7), and Aluminum (#9) that makes up about 39% for "resources", while the Vehicles, Machines, Electronics and Aircrafts add up to about 25%, so it looks like "resources" are significantly larger than "manufacturing" on an export basis at least.
One can see that dropping the price of the biggest export by 70% is a pretty significant event. All other things staying the same one could imagine oil going from number 1 to number 3, droping the overall export total by 80 or 90 billion dollars, or around 20% of the total.
These look like 2014 figures:
http://www.worldstopexports.co...
1 Oil: US$128.6 billion (27.2% of total exports)
2 Vehicles: $59.7 billion (12.6%)
3 Machines, engines, pumps: $32.6 billion (6.9%)
4 Gems, precious metals, coins: $20.3 billion (4.3%)
5 Electronic equipment: $13.6 billion (2.9%)
6 Plastics: $13.2 billion (2.8%)
7 Wood: $12.7 billion (2.7%)
8 Aircraft, spacecraft: $12.4 billion (2.6%)
9 Aluminum: $8.9 billion (1.9%)
10 Cereals: $8.7 billion (1.8%)
What did the government do? Devalue the Canadian dollar against the US dollar. Bastards, all.
While there may have been some policy factors that have directly influenced the Canadian dollar value, they have been very small in comparison to the impact that resource prices (I'm looking at you, Barrel of Oil) have had. The failure to diversify the economy away from such a heavy resource weighting has been a shortcoming of every government since confederation both provincially and federally.
"The Number Devil" is a very good kids' book that our family has enjoyed and has been gifted to lots of friends' and relatives' kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Even for ideas that were already know to myself, the presentation of them is fun. The framing story of a child who does not enjoy math class but is excited when meeting the titular devil character is not particularly suprising, but the whole thing is quite enjoyable.
But the workaround for that is easy: stop being an American business. It might be as simple as Apple turning one of its offshore subsidiaries into its headquarters, and turning its Cupertino headquarters into a subsidiary.
I think Burger King is now a "Canadian" company due to this type of move: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... when it merged with Tim Horton's the resulting entity was based in Canada.
Most people can't see colors by moonlight; it's too dark for cones to work well.
Good point - that probably does play into things.
No, California classifies any light with an Edison socket as low-efficiency, not matter what bulb you put in. They're banned in kitchens completely, and only allowable if you put in a dimmer switch that will damage some high-efficiency lights that would otherwise work in an Edison socket.
You keep saying this, but I cannot find anything to support that idea. This mentions only efficiency requirements, not socket type:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
As does this: http://www.ledsmagazine.com/ar...
If in fact you can provide me with a reference to this supposed ban on kitchen edison sockets I would be interested to see it.
Oh I spoke too soon - I found some. This is a reference that seems to support your statement: http://www.title24express.com/...
"According to the Title 24 energy standards a high efficacy luminaire contains only high efficacy lamps or high efficacy LED lighting, and must not contain a socket which allows any low efficacy lighting system to be used. For example, any luminaire containing a medium screw base socket is classified as low efficacy, regardless of the type of lamp installed into that socket. Typically, high efficacy luminaires contain pin-based sockets, like compact fluorescent or linear fluorescent lamp sockets, though other socket types such as screw sockets specifically rated only for high intensity discharge lamps (like metal halide lamps) light emitting diode (LED) luminaires (dedicated LED lighting fixtures that cannot use incandescent or any other type of lighting technology) may also qualify as high efficacy."
It does seem like a bit of almost pointless legislation since low efficiency bulbs can be found for various pin-based socket systems.
So a low intensity light at a high color temperature "looks wrong". For example a 6000K LED light dimmed to minimum, where an incandescent light might be down close to 1700K.
I doubt very much this is built into the biology rather than just being the result of experience. As a point of reference, moonlight is about 4100K, and we have been using that for a lot longer than candles, so do candles "look wrong"? The full moon gives off about 0.1 lux, while one foot-candle is about 10 lux, so the full moon is much dimmer than a single candle, but its colour temperature is much higher.
Give us some experience with dim lights with high colour temperatures and we will feel that that sort of thing is "right".
I think the reason so many people want the yellow lights is it is what they are used to.
Personally, I think it's millions of years of evolution, combined with the fact that it's only been the last 130 years or so that we stopped getting all our light from fire. You may want to have your color vision checked, next time you are at the optometrist.
The "daylight" bulbs (at around 6,500 K colour temparture) is close to the light produced by the sun than the "soft white" of most incandescents. Sunlight has been our major source of illumination and while there is evidence for controled use of fire for about half a million years, I doubt very much there has been much evolutionary pressure towards preferring that illumnation over sunlight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I tend to prefer warmer colours myself, but recognize that this is probably more a case of what I am used to rather than any physical bias.
Soft White (2700K – 3000K), Bright White/Cool White (3500K – 4100K), and Daylight (5000K – 6500K)
And Ray just is abandoned on Jakku as a child; we don't know who abandoned her, and we don't know why.
In fairness, we didn't know anything worthwhile about Luke's history at the end of IV either except that his father's name was Anakin and that he and Kenobi knew each other.
I would say that we do know enough to provide room for broad brushstrokes - he is living with his relatives who don't want to tell him much about his parents, he feels trapped and wants to get away from the constrained future he sees on Tatoine, he has friends that he hangs out with.
With Rey, we don't know why she's there or why she wants to stay/return. We don't even know if SHE knows - if she does then telling the audience why would be good, and if she doesn't then telling the audience THAT would be good. The mystery of what aspects Rey knows about herself seems a pointless and frustrating one. And there are others.
To be fair, Luke got to use a laser sword regardless of training in A New Hope even though he had ability. Having a non-jedi who is trained as a soldier use a lightsaber for a few minutes doesn't seem to be super unreasonable considering he was fighting another storm trooper who was using a big-assed non-laser sword. One would assume both fighters had similar training.
Well, Luke didn't actually fight with one in ANH, and presumably did some training with Yoda before fithing with Vader in the later films. Rey had no training that the viewer could be expected to know about yet managed to defeat the big bad guy.
The "experiment" in Dauphin, Canada lasted 4 years and seems like it was terminated for political reasons, not because of failure. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
This was interesting: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2...
https://motherboard.vice.com/r...
"Forget documented a decline in doctor visits, an 8.5 percent reduction in the hospitalization rate, and more adolescents continuing into grade 12"
I've seen lots of posts on Slashdot denigrating Common Core so I've been on the lookout for anything that looks questionable in her math homework but I haven't seen anything yet that I wouldn't want her to learn. Certainly I've never seen anything even remotely like the gibberish that you're quoting.
People have been complaining about changes to math instruction and how insane it all is since well before all of us were born. See for instance the "New Math" ideas of the 1960s, and I have little doubt that similar "problems" existed before then, probably back to Plato.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Usually the issue is not much larger than the combination of student and parent confusion, and poor communications between teacher and family. Add a bit of teacher understanding and a healthy dose of math-phobia sprinkled through all parties, and a "crisis" is not hard to find.
What is the political background? How come the resistance has been sitting on their asses while a third death star was getting built? Why is it a random improperly brainwashed stormtrooper that knows all the details, and not them?
I certainly would have appreciated more of the political background too. But moving away from taxation of trade routes as the main item in the start-of-film text crawl was a good move.
For what did they send the 12 year old to jail?
What country sends 12 year olds to jail for anything anyways?
Texas is part of the United Sates of America.
Of course linking to an Al-Jazeera article feels a bit illegitimate, but it did come up first in my Google search:
UN expert slams US as only nation to imprison kids for life without parole
http://america.aljazeera.com/a...
Why would the Jesus freaks tout Ayn Rand, a stout atheist. Maybe you shouldn't stereotype.
If you expect anyone to hold self-consistent positions in all areas of their life, you have not been paying attention. Anyone beyond you and me, of course. We alone are the bastions of cool rationality. And I'm not so sure about me.
The gun is only dangerous when it's in your hand. So, we could actually do without gun laws if we eliminated people instead :-)
Or hands!
slasher999 says: Hrm, spellcheck changed "fascists" to "racists" in my reply. Please mentally edit accordingly.
Rockoon says: With the way the left decries any requirement of presenting identification as racist in the case of voting, their push for even more strict gun control laws is surely racist under the same standard. You wouldn't want to deprive black people guns just because the place to get an I.D. is way across town, do you?
That is an interesting observation. Even without the retorical dig at the presumed left/right different mindset in regards to voting rights and restrictions, the underlying idea that voting restrictions/registration/limitations might be viewed similarly to firearm restrictions/registration/limitations might have some usefulness.
I think that Rockoon's assumption is correct that the people who hold strong positions on these two issues largely are divided into two groups: for-strong-gun-restrictions, against-strong-voting-restrictions in contrast to those who are against-strong-gun-restrictions, for-strong-voting-restrictions. Framing the two issues together in this way might have the effect of creating some understanding of the feelings of each group for the other group's position - maybe we could end up with reasonable-gun-restrictions as well as reasonable-voting-restrictions.
Perhaps we could come together more as a nation if we explicitly combined the two spheres - in order to get a gun permit you would need to provide the same type of info and qualifications that are necessary for voter registration, and visa versa. It is not uncommon for gun rights advocates to state that they feel that the second ammendment (right to bear arms) is as foundational to the functioning of the whole political structure as the fifteenth or nineteenth amendments (right to vote not based on race or sex), so perhaps basing restrictions/registration/limitiatins of one "right" on the other "right" could address two challenging issues with a single compormise position.
Certainly it would be interesting for the supreme court to have to make a contitutional ruling on legislation framed in a way that it invoked both issues at the same time: "Anyone who does foo is banned from voting or owning a gun, and in order to vote or own a gun everyone needs to do bar."
Combine the voter registration card with the firearm registration card.
Maybe if it is not an idea that can apeal to a majority of citizens, it might be an idea that is repugnant to the majority of citizens! That would be something - to come together as a nation to create an idea that we can all reject, even if for opposite reasons!
Please stop with the silly "we need more gun laws" argument every time someone farts. You're just embarrassing yourselves now. We have enough gun laws.
If measured by lines of legislation, you may be correct. If measrued by effectively doing what citizens and legislators would like to do we probably don't. We also seem to have a huge morass of restriction on data sharing, funding of enforcement, and consistency across juresdictions. The vast majority of amaricans support required background checks for all firearms purchases, which seems to pass constitutional tests in the states that in fact require them - yet such checks are not required for individual transactions in many states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Our laws should make it difficult for criminals and crazies to buy firearms from sellers obeying the law. Such laws would not solve all firearm problems by a long shot, but at the very least they would allow us to try to address problems with our background checking system rather than wringing our hands and saying "whatever shall we do? once again the crazy criminal was able to legally buy a gun and did bad things!"
If driver-less cars are involved in double the accidents of driven cars, then it is in insurance on driverless cars that will go up.
Not if all of those accidents are deemed the fault of the other driver, and their insurance does all the payouts. I suppose there might be some effect due to uninsured drivers.
Fuel consumption is just a function of gear ratios. 60mph is the best speed for fuel consumption right now because it is a good average of common highway speed limits. If speed limits change (up or down,) car makers will compensate.
Air friction is highly dependant on vehicle speed (going as the fourth power as I recall), so as you start getting faster speeds, a significantly larger fraction of the car's energy is lost to the air friction, regardless of your gear ratios. It just takes more energy to maintain higher speeds.
I'm tired of morons thinking they understand traffic engineering. The speed limit should be set at around the 80th percentile of car speed on the road. If the 80th percentile is 20mph faster than the speed limit, the speed limit is broken; hell if its 10mph slower than average its being set at about the 30th percentile likely; so 70 percent of people are speeding on that road. Time and again studies show that most people drive a safe speed for the road and conditions regardless of the speed limit, whether faster or slower.
I have never seen such studies and would be interested in a reference.
Certainly I know that when I travel on windy mountain roads I can very easily exceed the posted speed limit with no risk of sliding off the curve, and many people driving those roads do exceed the posted limits (I have done so many many times in the past myself). It was a few months ago while reading a slashdot discussion about self-driving cars that I realized for the first time that many of the posted speed limits were there not because of a need to prevent cars from sliding off tight corners but because of limits to visibility and stopping distances. The "sea to sky highway" heading north to Whistler from Vancouver BC is notorious for traffic fatalities, largely I think because of this effect.
People drive at what they THINK is a safe speed for the road and conditions, but often are unaware of what that safe speed actually is. Modern cars are quiet and handle very well at high speeds and contribute to the driver FEELING like they are in complete control. Stopping distance increases proportional to the square of the velocity - so increasing your speed a fairly small amount can increase stopping distance by a much larger amount than most people think. So going around the corner at 50mph might not be safe while travelling at 45mph could give ample space to avoid problems blocked from view by the curve.
After I posted, I was thinking that, instead of a strict yearly renewal, a registrant could register for multiple years in a single shot.
However, I like your idea as well. How does this sound: $20 gets you the first ten years, and each subsequent year doubles. You can buy ahead if you wish. This gives them fifteen years of relatively cheap protection, and it starts making it economically nonviable to retain protections for much beyond 25 years.
I think there is value in having free automatic copyright protection for at least a few years - not only does it simplify all the accounting that a business would need for each and every little thing they might publish, it also protects the average citizen from having their work exploited by others without recompense. Ten years for free automatically, then require registration and payment for anything beyond starting at $10 and doubling each year as proposed. This is fairly close to the price point that the $0.01 for the first year would have realized ($10.24 for year eleven).
I would actually support almost any starting price at almost any year, since the geometric progression puts the vast majority of stuff into PD fairly quickly and eventually gets everything back, with the fees at least partially justifying walling off part of our shared cultural heritage for a limited time.
What would really suck is if they go ahead and pay the $100k+ to H1Bs instead of hire local talent. It just might be doable if they save the costs of benefits. Backfire!
Forcing a company to pay higher wages for workers could have a negative impact on the company, but in general it has benifits for the local economy and the tax basis. The company is supposed to be hiring local talent where available, so the local talent should be happy to see the H1Bs being paid more as it should result in the local talent being more likley to be hired at wages they are willing to work at.
If there is currently local talent going unhired, increasing the wages of H1Bs might make them more attactive to be hired, and if it does not then they are no worse off then they currently are.