It's more probable that your bill is high because you haven't done a careful energy audit of your home and all of the devices in it, and one or more of them is malfunctioning or using more energy than you'd expect.
I took the time to do this, and found that my electric water heater consumes nearly half of the electricity in my home.
> I took the time to do this, and found that my electric water heater consumes nearly half of the electricity in my home.
Oh man, do I know this feeling. My old duplex I moved out of last year had an electric water heater from 1991, it easily ate up 1/3 of our electric usage every month. New house has a gas water heater, during the summer months our gas water heater results in a $20 gas bill (roughly $10 of that is the connection and other assorted fees).
Old water heaters, especially electric ones can really suck energy like nothing else. My summer electric bill at the new house is still roughly $30/mo cheaper and I'm running like 500W of gear 24/7 in my office/lab that wasn't at the old place.
Same here. We switched over from an electric water heater to a gas one, and it was such a difference on our power bill that it paid for itself in less than a year. Even with running folding@home, BOINC, etc on all of my home machines, our bill is still less. Electric water heaters are expensive!
As an added bonus the heat coming out of the hot water heater might be inside the home where it has to be removed via AC meaning that not only is that heat being wasted instead of providing hot water, it's also increasing your AC usage and wasting even more power.
Did it myself. I'm sure it wasn't precisely accurate, but, good enough: just go down to the breaker panel, switch off each circuit there, then turn on each circuit individually with its usual devices connected. In the case of appliances like the fridge, stove/oven, clothes dryer, run the device with a normal load. With the water heater, I just ran hot water until it kicked on.
Then observe change at meter, write it down, and do some math.
As an added benefit, I got to verify and one case relabel the circuits.
No mention on the website that I can see, but my guess be they won't explicitly require French language exams for the visa, but not speaking French in France is going to be difficult, particularly in the North (including Paris).
It may well be that the right firm, in the right part of France (the South is normally a little friendlier), you're going to be fine. In Paris though? It seems like it is almost a national sport to be a little rude to non-native speakers, and a lot more rude to people who just try and get by in English.
But if you're planning to move to France, to start a French start-up business, and employ French employees, it is probably a good idea to learn some French.
As an English speaker, the michelthomas.com courses point out that you already know a lot more French than you think. :-)
I was looking into this for Canada and English or French proficiency is necessary. It would be odd to take a proficiency test for English but that is the rule.
Don't a lot of people in France look at you badly if you only speak English? I read that this is especially true in more "proud French areas" like Paris etc.
Yes and no. It was still there in the late 90's and early aughts. That said Parisians just don't like anyone not from Paris. They look down on other French people not from Paris. When you're from Paris, then you'll be judged on your arrondissement. Basically, Paris is a really judgy place but the rest of the country isn't. This isn't all that different from other countries' major cities (NYC, London, etc).
That said, you'll get by, meet a lot of nice people from all over, get to vacation regularly in places which are "once in a lifetime travels" for most Americans, etc.
Clearly not in start up environments. What do bother some shopkeepers or restaurants owners for example, is when tourists speak english to them very fast and naturally assuming everybody speaks english. But then if you ask first politely "i'm sorry i don't speak french", then you'll only receive warm welcomes.
You're thinking of the "public" PageRank value previously displayed in Google's browser toolbars. Those are indeed no longer updated. However, there is still some variant of "PageRank" in use internally.
They are probably still using it, but I think they apply spam and duplicate content detection first and also limit PageRank flow to sites of similar topic. Another thing they could do is to nullify the old links for resold websites.
Besides that, time spent on page and social signals such as likes and tweets probably count for more than links. A crappy spam site would be disregarded pretty soon, because people would immediately bounce back to Google and try other sites.
I never hear any specifics about how other cultures consume low amounts of fat. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that western diets are actually the lowest in fat.
