It's precisely because it's a contract that it needs laws around it. You can't just put anything you want in a contract, have all parties sign it, and expect everyone to go along with it. If you think you can, you have an extremely childish viewpoint on how these things work and you're probably a libertarian.

Jet engine technology isn't secret or mysterious. Plenty of civilian aircraft have jet engines of similar specs. It's just that jet engines are really, really expensive to buy and even more insanely expensive to maintain. And in an aircraft, if your engine fails you can coast to a stop; in this contraption if your engine fails (and it _will_ fail at some point) you die.

You're completely ignoring the evidence and choosing to hold to your ideology-driven viewpoint. It's worthless continuing this argument.

You can find similar information in every year's report, the 2006 report is by no means special. $45 million is a drop in the bucket, and a large part of that would not be needed today since smart meters are widely deployed.

Also, stop changing your argument. Your initial argument was that price doesn't influence demand. You asked for evidence and I provided solid, verifiable evidence of that.

Google "demand response". Too lazy? Ok, google in particular the FERC's "Assessment of Demand Response & Advanced Metering staff report", it's a yearly report on demand response and how it affects consumer demand. Too lazy to do that? Ok, here's the 2006 report: http://www.ferc.gov/legal/staf... Too lazy to read the table of contents? Ok, the stuff you're looking for is in pages 114-117.

> The economy is goods changing hands, and services being performed, for considerations, usually with money as an intermediary.

"money as an intermediary"... so... basically exactly what I said.

Yeah sure, not all transactions in the economy involve money (gee whiz, I never knew that!) but it's kind of cute what you economic nincompoops say and think it makes you sound smart.

Here, let me help you by giving you the dictionary definition: "the management of the resources of a community, country, etc., especially with a view to its productivity. "
"Ohhh, right, I'm sorry, I was wrong!"

Except in practice it turns out that these measures _do_ influence power consumption. And the largest power consumers aren't homes anyway. They're large industries, which go through an entirely different system (the wholesale electricity market).

You hear the fossil fuel crowd say this a lot... except in practice it turns out that wind power is actually pretty suited to the long-timescale needs of the grid (more power in winter, etc.) and solar, pumped hydro, and batteries can pretty much cover short-term fluctuations. Yes, you do usually need to install a lot of spare capacity with wind but even so it winds up being cheaper than a lot of other forms of power.

Oh don't give me your logic and facts, everyone knows wind turbines have a huge impact on the atmosphere but billions of tons of carbon dioxide doesn't affect the atmosphere at all

It is blatantly obvious yet a lot of people don't seem to get it...

The economy is nothing but money trading hands. A wage increase is _by definition_ a boost to the economy, as long as doesn't severely affect the other cash flows of the company and the company can remain alive (which in this case virtually all of them can; not so much if you increase it to $500/hr).

> We're trying to optimize something in a very complex system

Yes! You're starting out well.

> If I'm running a business, and my payroll increases 30% while sales remain flat, I have two options: 1) slow or stop hiring, cut staff, or even go out of business;

Aaaaand... you crashed into the water. Raising wages increases productivity, demonstrably so: http://www.raisetheminimumwage...

Of course, as said, this only 'works' if the wage was abysmally low to begin with (which is true in this case). If you're already paying your workers $100/hr, paying them $200/hr is likely not to do much, but going from $5/hr to $10/hr is going to do a lot.

There are many reasons for this. Low-paid workers often lose productivity due to working multiple jobs or making non-optimal life decisions to save money. Employee theft and misbehavior goes down. Job satisfaction (and the resulting increase in productivity) goes up. There are a lot of other positive effects.

> I think it will largely end up being a feel-good measure that well-off, well-meaning people can use to congratulate themselves about

I actually agree with you a little bit here. But that's life.

No they are most definitely not meaningless. Humans are just as good at programming as pigeons are good at flying into space, and this comparison holds true even if there were no spacecraft to compare pigeons to.

People who have never written a C compiler generally tend to think it's "one step above assembler."

Being 'the best that there currently is' does not equate to 'being amazing at it.'