Exactly. Replacing 50 welders with a few $3M robots and then hiring millwrights and engineers to program/maintain them sounds like a great thing. We got rid of the crappy jobs and replaced them with higher paying ones that are less menial. Except not everyone is capable of doing the millwrights/engineers job. Even with free education there just are too many dumb people out there that just won't be able to do it. All these hordes end up fighting over the Walmart greeter jobs because that is all that is left for them.
Well a 4yr old doesn't need to be able to video chat with anyone but with their parents that for whatever reason can't be with them frequently (works on a ship, oil rig, is a soldier whatever) yeah I'd say that is a good reason. There isn't any reason to bring the thing to school though imho. If the kid wants something to play with when at school how about a ball and some friends?
It could be a shaddy kiddie fiddler but I doubt it. Might just be a separated parent dealing with a spiteful ex spouse.
I might have missed where it was the caregivers fault that they couldn't keep in touch. The guy/gal might have a geographical reason why they can't be close, could be a restraining order in effect between the couple too though.
Smartphone that the kid hangs on to: could be, not saying it is but perhaps the poster doesn't want to pay for internet at the house which could be used by the other parent for their own uses more easily. It might just be a spitful thing: I want to give something to my kid but nothing to him/her even though the extra cost is nothing/marginal.
I agree with others though generally a 4 year old is too young, they need to be 6-8 in my opinion before they are coordinated enough and responsible enough to have a reasonable chance of the thing not getting lost/broken in a couple months. A desktop/laptop etc that stays at home is a more practical solution since data on a computer is a few orders of magnitude cheaper, the device likely won't go to school with the kid, no worries of someone deciding it would be a good idea calling China for 100hrs a month on your dime etc.
Take the money you'd use to buy the smartphone to by a cheap netbook/tablet or a used laptop. Then get the internet wherever they happen to be. You can email, Skype for free, in a couple years when the kid needs a computer for classwork s/he will already have experience with one and there is mostly no issues with the kid being distracted at school or the kid's classmates wanting phones too since it would stay at home.
Your grammar was fine as far as a physicist is good at grammar:) Life insurance is just for the case of death so you were right there. Kind of a funny spin on it, you get fire insurance in case of fire, flood insurance in case of flood, but life insurance in case of death weird. I guess floods, fire, theft etc are stuff that happens around you or too your possessions death is something we like to pretend will never happen to us.
I'd suspect if the question is "will global warming end over the next year?" whether it is human created or geological the answer is no. Insurance companies are quick to raise prices and very slow to respond to reduction in risks. How much has your car insurance dropped since the 80's? You are much less likely to die (or more importantly kill someone else) in a car accident because of air bags, antilock breaks, crumple zones, better engineered roads etc. You'll be a long time seeing those savings passed on to you.
Have solar panels on my roof actually, slightly greater than 7kW and I don't drive. However, I also don't try to pretend to have a 0 impact since the stuff I use still gets driven, I use a train to get to work etc. I'm not an econazi maybe just an eco Pol Pot. The amount of gas that a car uses, the weight of it for example can change much more rapidly than governments are going to tear down the new wind firm they built for billions. I'd suggest that if the governments are going to involve themselves in peoples energy choices they should incentivize/force
1) Imbedded the total cost of an energy source in its cost by C02 (or other factors) taxing
2) new buildings must have a solar installation assuming they are south (or north for the southern hemishere) facing.
3) cars are hybrids possibly with rooftop solar installed. As solar panels get more efficient it would be much easier to convince people to drop 1k to get the new model on the car than to convince a power authority to replace 10'000 panels. You could use peoples vanity against them, they'll need the new IPanel 5s before their neighbour gets it.
Oh another thing I thought of which might not necessarily be a deciding factor but definitely requires consideration: switching to electric vehicles implies that you'll rely on the central power generation to be efficient. Say they go out and buy the best of the best and everyone buys an electric car. It isn't just that it needs to be better than the most efficient car possible (after all those electric buyers could have bought a different gas/diesel operated instead). It probably has to be better than the best car available 30-40 years from now. The time scale of major power infrastructure upgrades is 30-50 years but a car typically is replaced (including secondary market use) after about 10-15 or so leaving a few cycles of car upgrades for every opportunity to upgrade the grid.
It doesn't cost too much more to use more green tech so yeah in this case we probably are better off. Though improving when I bought my solar panels a few years ago I seem to recall reading that it takes ~7-10yrs to break even on an energy standpoint (mining, shipping, melting etc silicon is very energy intensive I guess). You literally couldn't switch everything right away over to solar because you'd have need 10 years worth of world energy use to produce enough panels to generate the annual load.
Anyways you aren't always better off being cautious. There are 1B plus people still burning whatever they can get their hands on to heat there homes and cook their food because they can't afford "modern" tech. They definitely will not be able to install solar panels, wind farms,the cost of running the infrastructure to them etc. If we ban burning stuff or tax it like crazy these people will die in droves. If we subsidize it by having the developed countries pay for it it has a huge economic cost on the west, prone to corruption and almost certainly a bunch of people would die in the process before it got sorted out. Also probably disables the middle east and Russia even more because their dictatorships depends on being able to bribe people, or at least the elites, with oil money. That goes away and all of a sudden you have the shit holes of the world blowing each other up at the same time that the west has spent all the economic resources buying solar panels.
This won't be an issue for long (probably another decade or so) since it looks like wind and solar might get to parity with oil in the not so distant future.
I actually personally think global warming is happening just I doubt the insurance companies care one way or another other than the direction and magnitude of expected adverse events.
With climate modelling the problem is a hugely nested group of models all of which can be off by a lot. They have a model of how various greenhouse gases interact with longterm weather patterns (general air currents, typical ocean currents etc) but also the different layers of the atmosphere. So they end up with a model of how the gases work, a model of how they are produced, and a model of how the interrelated weather patterns behave.
I have a bachelors and a few publications in physics doing computer modelling and we were happy if we could get the direction right and within an order of magnitude. I suspect climatologists are the same way especially since it is such a cross domain problem (fluid dynamics, chemistry and when it actually affects people demographics).
Demographics/social side of things will be key IMO and often ignored. I see all sorts of maps showing where the water level will be and where the population centres are. The thing is people can move and generally are much less tolerant of death tolls than the actual economic cost of the death tolls (ex: people in the US panic that a few thousand people died due to terrorism in one year which works out to about 0.0001% of the population and hasn't since been repeated). If things get too bad near the shore they'll move further in land and I'd suspect 90+% of the existing population will be survivors. You still have things like droughts and such but storms are another matter. Deaths due to storms as they are predicted pretty much assume people will continue living where they do and that governments won't invest in better infrastructure to be able to detect early and efficiently evacuate areas before the storm hits. Sure there are little island nations that might get wiped out but the thing is they are little and thus a relatively small percentage of people. The LAs and New Yorks of the world will figure out what they need to do to balance the risk/reward for living there or will become vacate wastelands a la Detroit which they have proven is possible in the time scale we expect global warming to take hold as it has happened before (see Detroit:)).
In terms of storms insurance companies will care because they'll have to pay for the lost infrastructure. It will be an emotional trying time for people dealing with a Katrina every year but the actual species cost I suspect will be pretty low. Of course insurance companies also insure crops and people need to eat and drink... that is what will kill us from global warming. Weather patterns in the sense of 100 year storms not so much.
That is why windows still says "untrusted certificate do you want to continue" or similar all over the place. Just because Verisign didn't get their $100 this year doesn't mean I no longer trust the source. Additionally, do you really thing hackers won't find a way around this? They are already trying to find a way into your system it will just be one more thing they have to get right before they can force their way in. Or they'll go after services, flash whatever.
At best the types of data that insurance companies would collect would be measurements of effects not proof of a cause. All you can say about more storms hitting areas that you insure is that for some reason there is more storms lately. You can't say whether or not it is due to man made reasons, geological cycles, purple space gods that are angry that 30 Rock went off the air etc.
As much as Linux has any brand awareness in my non-geek friends it is Ubuntu. Friends might occasionally ask me if I'm running Ubuntu at home Slackware... not so much. They might be able to rid the obsolescence wave a la Win XP for that reason: even if they aren't the shiny new bobble (or the best representation of what openness can do) they have a reputation for being easy to use which will likely win them new users for years to come.
A bad fingerprint reader would probably be stronger than the average Joe's "strong" password especially one you'd use on a phone (likely 4 digits). As long as there is less than a 1/9999 chance that your fingerprint will open my phone it is better than me handing to to you and letting you take a guess. Two factors is nice for really seriously needed security situations but not very practical for every time you need to use your device especially something like a phone which you might need to interact with for 1 minute at a time several times a day.
Didn't have any problem when I used them ~5 years ago. Not sure how they are now but if you are just running Linux/windows I found them fine and their support was good (in europe at the time anyways). We still had Sun boxes kicking around for special needs but otherwise we were commodity. With a SAN setup and most if not all data living on disk arrays the servers take a back seat somewhat. You might die but you won't lose data which was the biggest thing in internal IT services were I worked and likely everywhere. If corporate email has to do go down for a day that is one thing if it comes back up but loses your 20k message archive you'll get lined up and shot. Having a warm standby for almost everything is good enough for a lot of things. There are exceptions of course, banking systems, webcentric businesses etc but the vast majority of companies are Twitter with nothing to sell but bytes on a wire.
It justifies if ever briefly adding hardware that ends up being useful at some point. Touch on a desktop isn't useful for the most part but touch on a laptop could very well be. Touch on windows was crap now it is part of the core us of the OS forcing (hopefully) vendors to add touch to their screens. Now we just need to force them to add high res screens universally for all laptops: it is sad that there are still laptops sold with fewer pixels than iPhone or equivalent.
Exactly. Not to mention dragging around a tablet for your powerpoint presentation is much handier then dragging a laptop with a bad center of balance with the lid open to a podium etc.
I think RTs legacy is it pushed touch into the PC market. Haswell will make it so these devices are "real" computers. In a few years there probably will be "power user" level tablets (say 8GB ram and equivalent to a present day i7 Quad) the thickness/battery life of a iPad mini. Docking your tablet and bringing your whole computer with you everywhere without having to sacrifice a whole lot of speed would be great.
I did physics. Started with 60. Graduated about 20. Of those that left before graduating it was a mixed bag of people failing out, people that started in physics because their marks weren't good enough to get in engineering so after the first year or two transferred over, and a bunch switched to general science because they wanted more freedom to choose electives (we only had something like 4 non-science electives in a 4 year degree, the other "electives" had to be from a pre-selected list of math, or other sciences). Of those that graduated only myself and one other I know ever did ANY physics related work =. The rest: insurance, programming, teaching english, doing handymen work etc. The one other physics student I know of that used it went to grad school whether she ended up doing anything after grad school I don't know. Even the job I did physics in the physics degree wasn't really required, we needed to be able to handle scientific equipment but really anyone that could figure out an electrometer, and know enough not to stand in the path of radiation would have been fine.
I think the difference is to a large extent whether or not your degree gives you a known and in demand job prospect. Of the arts accountants, law and business degrees stand out, of the techies comp sci, and engineering disciplines. I think the flaw with the emphasis on the STEM degrees is it really should just be TE degrees, a lot (perhaps most) scientists will never do anything with just their Bsc, similarly the maths. Sure you might need it as a tool for the job you get but you won't really be doing organic chem or physics, you'll be testing equipment that is used by people doing stuff in that industry and oh yeah by the way can you program/analyze this data for us? Your degree is a tool for problem solving. Where as you can argue an arts degree is a tool for solving people problems (ability to communicate in different languages, ability to understand cultural differences, add the "feeling" to what us nerds add the "function" too etc).
My ex-girlfriend has a couple PhDs in biology and she still fights with the fact that each lab has 6 post docs but only one faculty position. What exactly do you do with your STEM degree when you are stuck with 2 year post docs after each of which you have to move around the world for the next one?
You can put effort into improving the school system while at the same time sending your kid elsewhere. People manage to volunteer, do social events, and such there is no reason why you couldn't do that for the public school you are so concerned about. That doesn't mean you have to punish your kids with a poor education while things get improved.
I can see two ways where sending your kid to private school could help, both kind of contradicting each other: you still pay your taxes so there is more money to go along for less students in the system. Smaller class sizes, more money for extra curriculars etc. The flip side if your community doesn't send your tax dollars to a school you don't send your kid too then the market can work and the public schools will have to try to improve to get your dollars back or go out of business and more and more kids get private or home schooling vs public.
I'd think if people freely chose public transit it probably would improve. Much higher utilization rates would help make them sustainable rather than needing large subsidies, increased routes/ frequency because of the new load and less road traffic because fewer cars are being used. It is the corrosion and lack of alternatives/competition that made these examples bad not the fact that the solution was public rather than private.
Depends what you call a race. Heck Mexican vs Porto Ricans happens. There is always someone that is too brown, too pale, speaks with a funny accent or roots for the wrong football team.
When the Israelites killed all the *itites" in the old testament they seemed to think that they were different then them (and the itites thought they were different from each other presumably). My experience and again it isn't universal, is most Jewish people look white but most arabs are darker. Not all muslims are arabs though that is why there are a lot of pale Lebanese, Turks etc. I wonder how many really Jewish people I see in Canada though since given hundreds of years of exile I'd imagine most people are mixed somewhat. Most natives I meet aren't pure they always seem to be 1/2, 1/4 etc. I suspect the same is true with Russian Jews etc that immigrated back to Isreal. Anyways racism can get very specific look at african countries that have problems with this issue to me at least as a white guy I can't tell the difference sometimes between the too groups but somehow they seem to know on sight that the other guy is the enemy tribe.
This assumes that people are free to chose where they allocate their education investment. Some fields have way more demand for training than capacity, law and medical come to mind. There is both real and artificially created shortages in medicine for example. Med schools can only effectively train so many people a year but the medical boards purposely limit accreditation so that the salaries of doctors stay high (at least they do in Canada where I am). So even though society demands a certain volume of medical services and tax/insurance payers are willing to pay for it the supply of workers are limited due to middle ages mentality that supports trade group cabals.
R & D projects can also suffer from being an unproven market. If the going rate for engineers is too high the enterpreneur might not be able to acquire sufficient investment and thus technical talent to achieve innovation. It isn't you need X inputs to produce Y outputs sometimes it is you need X inputs to even have a product that someone is willing to pay for. Market clearing rates are all fine and dandy but when you need to create markets generally they aren't affordable by anyone that doesn't already have an alternative revenue stream, new entrants to the market are blocked because the marginal cost of inputs per unit of output is greater than they can float for the period it takes to get to production.
A lot of people finish their degrees and decide it isn't for them. I have a physics degree of the few people I kept in touch with I'm the only one who ever used physics outside of university. One taught english for a while overseas and is now a handy man/artist, another is in the insurance business. I'm now in software development so I didn't even stay in the field. When graduation was a approaching people just took what jobs they could find and lots of employers like the fact you can solve hard problems but not a lot (relatively speaking) have physics problems they need solving. Add to that similar to people that study the humanities people often get degrees because they are generally interested not because they want to commit to a particular area of work.
Lastly, and more importantly: a lot of people that graduate with the degrees you wouldn't want working for you. By definition half the people are below median. Better a passionate quick learner with say a psych degree than someone with a BSc but didn't give a crap by second year.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Replacing 50 welders with a few $3M robots and then hiring millwrights and engineers to program/maintain them sounds like a great thing. We got rid of the crappy jobs and replaced them with higher paying ones that are less menial. Except not everyone is capable of doing the millwrights/engineers job. Even with free education there just are too many dumb people out there that just won't be able to do it. All these hordes end up fighting over the Walmart greeter jobs because that is all that is left for them.
Well a 4yr old doesn't need to be able to video chat with anyone but with their parents that for whatever reason can't be with them frequently (works on a ship, oil rig, is a soldier whatever) yeah I'd say that is a good reason. There isn't any reason to bring the thing to school though imho. If the kid wants something to play with when at school how about a ball and some friends?
It could be a shaddy kiddie fiddler but I doubt it. Might just be a separated parent dealing with a spiteful ex spouse.
I might have missed where it was the caregivers fault that they couldn't keep in touch. The guy/gal might have a geographical reason why they can't be close, could be a restraining order in effect between the couple too though.
Smartphone that the kid hangs on to: could be, not saying it is but perhaps the poster doesn't want to pay for internet at the house which could be used by the other parent for their own uses more easily. It might just be a spitful thing: I want to give something to my kid but nothing to him/her even though the extra cost is nothing/marginal.
I agree with others though generally a 4 year old is too young, they need to be 6-8 in my opinion before they are coordinated enough and responsible enough to have a reasonable chance of the thing not getting lost/broken in a couple months. A desktop/laptop etc that stays at home is a more practical solution since data on a computer is a few orders of magnitude cheaper, the device likely won't go to school with the kid, no worries of someone deciding it would be a good idea calling China for 100hrs a month on your dime etc.
Take the money you'd use to buy the smartphone to by a cheap netbook/tablet or a used laptop. Then get the internet wherever they happen to be. You can email, Skype for free, in a couple years when the kid needs a computer for classwork s/he will already have experience with one and there is mostly no issues with the kid being distracted at school or the kid's classmates wanting phones too since it would stay at home.
Your grammar was fine as far as a physicist is good at grammar :) Life insurance is just for the case of death so you were right there. Kind of a funny spin on it, you get fire insurance in case of fire, flood insurance in case of flood, but life insurance in case of death weird. I guess floods, fire, theft etc are stuff that happens around you or too your possessions death is something we like to pretend will never happen to us.
I'd suspect if the question is "will global warming end over the next year?" whether it is human created or geological the answer is no. Insurance companies are quick to raise prices and very slow to respond to reduction in risks. How much has your car insurance dropped since the 80's? You are much less likely to die (or more importantly kill someone else) in a car accident because of air bags, antilock breaks, crumple zones, better engineered roads etc. You'll be a long time seeing those savings passed on to you.
Have solar panels on my roof actually, slightly greater than 7kW and I don't drive. However, I also don't try to pretend to have a 0 impact since the stuff I use still gets driven, I use a train to get to work etc. I'm not an econazi maybe just an eco Pol Pot. The amount of gas that a car uses, the weight of it for example can change much more rapidly than governments are going to tear down the new wind firm they built for billions. I'd suggest that if the governments are going to involve themselves in peoples energy choices they should incentivize/force
1) Imbedded the total cost of an energy source in its cost by C02 (or other factors) taxing
2) new buildings must have a solar installation assuming they are south (or north for the southern hemishere) facing.
3) cars are hybrids possibly with rooftop solar installed. As solar panels get more efficient it would be much easier to convince people to drop 1k to get the new model on the car than to convince a power authority to replace 10'000 panels. You could use peoples vanity against them, they'll need the new IPanel 5s before their neighbour gets it.
Oh another thing I thought of which might not necessarily be a deciding factor but definitely requires consideration: switching to electric vehicles implies that you'll rely on the central power generation to be efficient. Say they go out and buy the best of the best and everyone buys an electric car. It isn't just that it needs to be better than the most efficient car possible (after all those electric buyers could have bought a different gas/diesel operated instead). It probably has to be better than the best car available 30-40 years from now. The time scale of major power infrastructure upgrades is 30-50 years but a car typically is replaced (including secondary market use) after about 10-15 or so leaving a few cycles of car upgrades for every opportunity to upgrade the grid.
It doesn't cost too much more to use more green tech so yeah in this case we probably are better off. Though improving when I bought my solar panels a few years ago I seem to recall reading that it takes ~7-10yrs to break even on an energy standpoint (mining, shipping, melting etc silicon is very energy intensive I guess). You literally couldn't switch everything right away over to solar because you'd have need 10 years worth of world energy use to produce enough panels to generate the annual load.
Anyways you aren't always better off being cautious. There are 1B plus people still burning whatever they can get their hands on to heat there homes and cook their food because they can't afford "modern" tech. They definitely will not be able to install solar panels, wind farms,the cost of running the infrastructure to them etc. If we ban burning stuff or tax it like crazy these people will die in droves. If we subsidize it by having the developed countries pay for it it has a huge economic cost on the west, prone to corruption and almost certainly a bunch of people would die in the process before it got sorted out. Also probably disables the middle east and Russia even more because their dictatorships depends on being able to bribe people, or at least the elites, with oil money. That goes away and all of a sudden you have the shit holes of the world blowing each other up at the same time that the west has spent all the economic resources buying solar panels.
This won't be an issue for long (probably another decade or so) since it looks like wind and solar might get to parity with oil in the not so distant future.
I actually personally think global warming is happening just I doubt the insurance companies care one way or another other than the direction and magnitude of expected adverse events.
With climate modelling the problem is a hugely nested group of models all of which can be off by a lot. They have a model of how various greenhouse gases interact with longterm weather patterns (general air currents, typical ocean currents etc) but also the different layers of the atmosphere. So they end up with a model of how the gases work, a model of how they are produced, and a model of how the interrelated weather patterns behave.
I have a bachelors and a few publications in physics doing computer modelling and we were happy if we could get the direction right and within an order of magnitude. I suspect climatologists are the same way especially since it is such a cross domain problem (fluid dynamics, chemistry and when it actually affects people demographics).
Demographics/social side of things will be key IMO and often ignored. I see all sorts of maps showing where the water level will be and where the population centres are. The thing is people can move and generally are much less tolerant of death tolls than the actual economic cost of the death tolls (ex: people in the US panic that a few thousand people died due to terrorism in one year which works out to about 0.0001% of the population and hasn't since been repeated). If things get too bad near the shore they'll move further in land and I'd suspect 90+% of the existing population will be survivors. You still have things like droughts and such but storms are another matter. Deaths due to storms as they are predicted pretty much assume people will continue living where they do and that governments won't invest in better infrastructure to be able to detect early and efficiently evacuate areas before the storm hits. Sure there are little island nations that might get wiped out but the thing is they are little and thus a relatively small percentage of people. The LAs and New Yorks of the world will figure out what they need to do to balance the risk/reward for living there or will become vacate wastelands a la Detroit which they have proven is possible in the time scale we expect global warming to take hold as it has happened before (see Detroit :)).
In terms of storms insurance companies will care because they'll have to pay for the lost infrastructure. It will be an emotional trying time for people dealing with a Katrina every year but the actual species cost I suspect will be pretty low. Of course insurance companies also insure crops and people need to eat and drink ... that is what will kill us from global warming. Weather patterns in the sense of 100 year storms not so much.
That is why windows still says "untrusted certificate do you want to continue" or similar all over the place. Just because Verisign didn't get their $100 this year doesn't mean I no longer trust the source. Additionally, do you really thing hackers won't find a way around this? They are already trying to find a way into your system it will just be one more thing they have to get right before they can force their way in. Or they'll go after services, flash whatever.
At best the types of data that insurance companies would collect would be measurements of effects not proof of a cause. All you can say about more storms hitting areas that you insure is that for some reason there is more storms lately. You can't say whether or not it is due to man made reasons, geological cycles, purple space gods that are angry that 30 Rock went off the air etc.
As much as Linux has any brand awareness in my non-geek friends it is Ubuntu. Friends might occasionally ask me if I'm running Ubuntu at home Slackware ... not so much. They might be able to rid the obsolescence wave a la Win XP for that reason: even if they aren't the shiny new bobble (or the best representation of what openness can do) they have a reputation for being easy to use which will likely win them new users for years to come.
A bad fingerprint reader would probably be stronger than the average Joe's "strong" password especially one you'd use on a phone (likely 4 digits). As long as there is less than a 1/9999 chance that your fingerprint will open my phone it is better than me handing to to you and letting you take a guess. Two factors is nice for really seriously needed security situations but not very practical for every time you need to use your device especially something like a phone which you might need to interact with for 1 minute at a time several times a day.
Didn't have any problem when I used them ~5 years ago. Not sure how they are now but if you are just running Linux/windows I found them fine and their support was good (in europe at the time anyways). We still had Sun boxes kicking around for special needs but otherwise we were commodity. With a SAN setup and most if not all data living on disk arrays the servers take a back seat somewhat. You might die but you won't lose data which was the biggest thing in internal IT services were I worked and likely everywhere. If corporate email has to do go down for a day that is one thing if it comes back up but loses your 20k message archive you'll get lined up and shot. Having a warm standby for almost everything is good enough for a lot of things. There are exceptions of course, banking systems, webcentric businesses etc but the vast majority of companies are Twitter with nothing to sell but bytes on a wire.
Freedom to other people's thoughts right?
It justifies if ever briefly adding hardware that ends up being useful at some point. Touch on a desktop isn't useful for the most part but touch on a laptop could very well be. Touch on windows was crap now it is part of the core us of the OS forcing (hopefully) vendors to add touch to their screens. Now we just need to force them to add high res screens universally for all laptops: it is sad that there are still laptops sold with fewer pixels than iPhone or equivalent.
Exactly. Not to mention dragging around a tablet for your powerpoint presentation is much handier then dragging a laptop with a bad center of balance with the lid open to a podium etc.
I think RTs legacy is it pushed touch into the PC market. Haswell will make it so these devices are "real" computers. In a few years there probably will be "power user" level tablets (say 8GB ram and equivalent to a present day i7 Quad) the thickness/battery life of a iPad mini. Docking your tablet and bringing your whole computer with you everywhere without having to sacrifice a whole lot of speed would be great.
I did physics. Started with 60. Graduated about 20. Of those that left before graduating it was a mixed bag of people failing out, people that started in physics because their marks weren't good enough to get in engineering so after the first year or two transferred over, and a bunch switched to general science because they wanted more freedom to choose electives (we only had something like 4 non-science electives in a 4 year degree, the other "electives" had to be from a pre-selected list of math, or other sciences). Of those that graduated only myself and one other I know ever did ANY physics related work =. The rest: insurance, programming, teaching english, doing handymen work etc. The one other physics student I know of that used it went to grad school whether she ended up doing anything after grad school I don't know. Even the job I did physics in the physics degree wasn't really required, we needed to be able to handle scientific equipment but really anyone that could figure out an electrometer, and know enough not to stand in the path of radiation would have been fine.
I think the difference is to a large extent whether or not your degree gives you a known and in demand job prospect. Of the arts accountants, law and business degrees stand out, of the techies comp sci, and engineering disciplines. I think the flaw with the emphasis on the STEM degrees is it really should just be TE degrees, a lot (perhaps most) scientists will never do anything with just their Bsc, similarly the maths. Sure you might need it as a tool for the job you get but you won't really be doing organic chem or physics, you'll be testing equipment that is used by people doing stuff in that industry and oh yeah by the way can you program/analyze this data for us? Your degree is a tool for problem solving. Where as you can argue an arts degree is a tool for solving people problems (ability to communicate in different languages, ability to understand cultural differences, add the "feeling" to what us nerds add the "function" too etc).
My ex-girlfriend has a couple PhDs in biology and she still fights with the fact that each lab has 6 post docs but only one faculty position. What exactly do you do with your STEM degree when you are stuck with 2 year post docs after each of which you have to move around the world for the next one?
You can put effort into improving the school system while at the same time sending your kid elsewhere. People manage to volunteer, do social events, and such there is no reason why you couldn't do that for the public school you are so concerned about. That doesn't mean you have to punish your kids with a poor education while things get improved.
I can see two ways where sending your kid to private school could help, both kind of contradicting each other: you still pay your taxes so there is more money to go along for less students in the system. Smaller class sizes, more money for extra curriculars etc. The flip side if your community doesn't send your tax dollars to a school you don't send your kid too then the market can work and the public schools will have to try to improve to get your dollars back or go out of business and more and more kids get private or home schooling vs public.
I'd think if people freely chose public transit it probably would improve. Much higher utilization rates would help make them sustainable rather than needing large subsidies, increased routes/ frequency because of the new load and less road traffic because fewer cars are being used. It is the corrosion and lack of alternatives/competition that made these examples bad not the fact that the solution was public rather than private.
Depends what you call a race. Heck Mexican vs Porto Ricans happens. There is always someone that is too brown, too pale, speaks with a funny accent or roots for the wrong football team.
When the Israelites killed all the *itites" in the old testament they seemed to think that they were different then them (and the itites thought they were different from each other presumably). My experience and again it isn't universal, is most Jewish people look white but most arabs are darker. Not all muslims are arabs though that is why there are a lot of pale Lebanese, Turks etc. I wonder how many really Jewish people I see in Canada though since given hundreds of years of exile I'd imagine most people are mixed somewhat. Most natives I meet aren't pure they always seem to be 1/2, 1/4 etc. I suspect the same is true with Russian Jews etc that immigrated back to Isreal. Anyways racism can get very specific look at african countries that have problems with this issue to me at least as a white guy I can't tell the difference sometimes between the too groups but somehow they seem to know on sight that the other guy is the enemy tribe.
This assumes that people are free to chose where they allocate their education investment. Some fields have way more demand for training than capacity, law and medical come to mind. There is both real and artificially created shortages in medicine for example. Med schools can only effectively train so many people a year but the medical boards purposely limit accreditation so that the salaries of doctors stay high (at least they do in Canada where I am). So even though society demands a certain volume of medical services and tax/insurance payers are willing to pay for it the supply of workers are limited due to middle ages mentality that supports trade group cabals.
R & D projects can also suffer from being an unproven market. If the going rate for engineers is too high the enterpreneur might not be able to acquire sufficient investment and thus technical talent to achieve innovation. It isn't you need X inputs to produce Y outputs sometimes it is you need X inputs to even have a product that someone is willing to pay for. Market clearing rates are all fine and dandy but when you need to create markets generally they aren't affordable by anyone that doesn't already have an alternative revenue stream, new entrants to the market are blocked because the marginal cost of inputs per unit of output is greater than they can float for the period it takes to get to production.
This has nothing to do with two wars ending and the government pissing away a couple trillion bailing out banks and car companies of course.
A lot of people finish their degrees and decide it isn't for them. I have a physics degree of the few people I kept in touch with I'm the only one who ever used physics outside of university. One taught english for a while overseas and is now a handy man/artist, another is in the insurance business. I'm now in software development so I didn't even stay in the field. When graduation was a approaching people just took what jobs they could find and lots of employers like the fact you can solve hard problems but not a lot (relatively speaking) have physics problems they need solving. Add to that similar to people that study the humanities people often get degrees because they are generally interested not because they want to commit to a particular area of work.
Lastly, and more importantly: a lot of people that graduate with the degrees you wouldn't want working for you. By definition half the people are below median. Better a passionate quick learner with say a psych degree than someone with a BSc but didn't give a crap by second year.