This is already the law with respect to H1B. The problem is that it's not enforced well, and there are many legal tricks to artificially lower the target wage level.

What you and a lot of other people don't understand is that for many of us, H1B visas are the only viable path to a green card. US immigration policy is rather ridiculous in that respect in that it doesn't have a properly designed, dedicated skilled immigration track, the way e.g. Canada, Australia or New Zealand do. So in practice that role is subsumed by the "dual-intent" H1B, where you come into the country on that as a "temp worker", and then get your employer to sponsor you for a green card.

Thus, H1B has two kinds of people lumped together into it: the true temp workers, usually paid low wages, and kicked out as soon as their visa expires; and people who are trying to actually immigrate and using it as a stepping stone. In most other countries, the two pools are separated much earlier on.

As an H1-B from Russia, let me give you the answer:

Because I get paid waaaay more in US (even accounting for cost of living and cost of property). Because this is a more stable and prospering society with crime levels several times less. Because I can actually get into politics here on any level from local to national without risking my neck.

Basically, because the grass is greener on this side of the fence.

It doesn't. It assumes that there is a sufficient number of great programmers who don't want to live where they currently live, and for whom a country like US that is easy for them to move into and that would offer great career opportunities would be very attractive. That is certainly true for pretty much anyone from a third world shithole somewhere in Africa or Asia, and even for many from relatively well off middle class families in Eastern Europe or Latin America.

Now it's true that US is not the only one offering this deal. The main players in the market today are US, Canada and Australia. Of these, US is the hardest to immigrate to and has the most associated red tape and the least clarity; Canada is arguably the easiest. OTOH, US generally offers the best career prospects, and the highest quality of life in terms of how much to earn vs cost of living, so it's still the #1 destination for skilled immigration.

Why don't you let them decide where they want to stay and what they want to improve? They're not slaves, you know.

They can, and do. But when that happens, people start complaining about how those programmers working in India (and hence being paid proportionally to the cost of living there) undercut them. And they also pay their taxes in India, and spend that money there, thereby subsidizing Indian economy. So from your perspective, it's better that those same people are employed in US - where they have to contend with the cost of living here (and demand the appropriate wage), pay income and property taxes here, and spend their earned money here.

Unless, that is, you're one of the people who are complaining about the "curry stench".

Maybe they're gamers.

Lotus also retooled the production line that Tesla was using, which is another thing that killed the Roadster. Lotus didn't have a problem with Tesla continuing their relationship (well, sort of), but that would have also required some additional engineering effort to retool the customized components that Tesla was using.

In short, like you said... it would require a whole new redesign from basically a clean sheet of paper that only superficially looks like the original Roadster. The battery technology would still be largely the same, but even that has evolved over the years.

Well, you're not going to get that big an improvement, but you can often chip for efficiency and gain a few MPG at the expense of a few HP. Often it's actually a very good trade. Until recently when the mileage targets surged few automakers have truly pursued maximum mileage. Typically, they're too afraid of customer response to truly go all in.

What? What is it good for, then? It's a shiny lure.

Widom-Larsen requires an implausible mix of scales. The effective mass of heavy electrons in the solid state is a collective phenomenon happening over distances and time-scales that are large relative to the nucleus and nuclear time-scales and affect the dynamics of the electron's interaction with the lattice, on those scales. To impute to these large-scale effects efficacy at the nuclear scale is very unlikely to be correct.

Consider a car analogy: a car moving along a freeway in dense traffic interacts with all the cars around it. If the driver accelerates, they will pull up close to the care behind and that driver may speed up a bit too, sending a diminishing wave of acceleration through the traffic, so compared to the same car alone on the road the car in dense traffic appears to have a much higher effective mass. Alone, you hit the gas and speed up a lot. In traffic, you hit the gas and speed up a little bit. That's what the electron in the surface looks like: a car in traffic.

But on the scale of car-car interactions, the "bare" mass of the car is what matters. If two cars collide you get an energy of 0.5*m*v^2, not 0.5*Meff*v^2.

Yeah, there are multi-car pileups that muddy the analogy, but they add up to nothing like the effective mass of the whole traffic block, so there. And the difference in scales between "cars and traffic" is tiny compared to the difference in scales between "nuclei and the lattice", so the effect that analogy hopefully makes obvious will be that much larger in the latter case.

While I don't disagree on the smell, Gates is richer than God, and the first thing I thought on seeing this was that if I had that kind of money I might spend a bit of it on wigged-out ideas, just in case. It's like me throwing a panhandler a buck just 'cause I can.