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Comment Re:Medallions (Score 1) 218

Talking to a Chicago cab driver of 28 years, what happened was a Russian bought 80% of all cabs in the city. He talked to the mayor and a year later there was a medallion law in Chicago costing $800k to operate a new cab.

I believe you have been misinformed. Chicago licenses cabs for a normal fee, not hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they have limited the number available (on some theory/excuse like that can drivers can't make a living if there are too many of them). Anyway, Many years ago, when Yellow Cab / Checker Cab had almost all the medallions, Chicago decided to expand the number of medallions, and held a lottery to give them out. Licensed cab drivers with so many years of experience had first shot in the lottery - not sure if the odds were weighted or not (for things like years of cab driving experience or military service). Anyway, my wife's step-father won one and sold it for $20,000. Medallions are bought and sold on the open market, and those prices have risen a lot lately. They are now around $300,000 each. The city of Chicago records the sales but does not make that money.

Comment Re:If dimples have this big an effect (Score 1) 138

Aircraft are not blunt objects, so they don't need as much help in keeping the airflow attached. Wings often have little angled vanes, (which do a better, more precise job of mixing high speed air into the boundary layer than dimples do) in order to keep the flow from detaching, and to keep the air moving across the wing rather than along it.

Comment Re:11% fuel efficiency improvement (Score 1) 138

Aircraft designers already pay attention to separation of the airflow from the vehicle body (which is what the dimples reduce, by mixing higher velocity flows into the boundary layer). The long, streamlined, tapers at the tail do a better job than blunt objects with dimples. And many wings have small, angled fins along their length to ensure that the flow stays attached to the top of the wing and flows across the wing camber rather than following along the length of the swept-back wing.

Comment Re:Has this ever happened to you? (Score 1) 216

Typical AC will chill the air until it's colder than the desired temperature to dehumidify it and then warm it back up.

Typical AC will chill the air below the dewpoint, but will not reheat that air (except for the couple of degrees that the heat of the fan adds). In fact, most energy codes prohibit using energy to cool and then using more energy to reheat (except in certain circumstances where it may be vital, such as humidity-controlled labs, pharmaceutical plants, etc.). Only the more sophisticated, expensive AC systems reheat - those typically have some sort of heat exchanger to reheat supply using warm outdoor air or exhaust.

Comment Re:That's totally how it works (Score 1) 343

you can see that actual employment has been steadily falling since the 1960's in the USA, typically taking a dive after each recession, then regaining some but not all of the previous employment

Bull. In the sixties, most married women were not "employed", yet were not counted as "unemployed". The workforce per capita has increased greatly since then (yet real income has not risen commensurately).

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