I think you've missed my point. There is not, for obvious reasons, an exact correspondance between the Roman and American empires.
Although the barbarians and, perhaps, the end of democracy may have had something to do with Rome's collapse, it happened more because Roman society had been progressively eaten out from the inside. (Don't forget democracy ended in, what, about 50BC, whereas Rome didn't collapse until about 400AD.) Nearly all of Rome's stuff was produced elsewhere in the empire (outsourcing/offshoring) and there was an increasingly disaffected proletariat (the Rust Belt) who had a corn dole (welfare and the minimum wage), free entertainment (television), and were crammed into overcrowded tenements (Watts) without enough productive work. Rome's army was predominantly mercenaries from the very barbarian tribes who later sacked Rome (all those security companies in Iraq) by the time of its collapse, and the bulk of the empire was composed of client states (so many modern examples - Iraq, Iran, Panama, Cuba pre-Castro,...) with a provincial governor who didn't interfere too much as long as things went the way Rome wanted (Iraq, Vietnam,...).
So yeah, the barbarians are at the gates, and US democracy is looking a bit shaky, but those aren't the things you should be _really_ worried about.
What you are ignoring (and, I suspect, Carter was aware of) is that the oil is running out. The current price per barrel is actually irrelevant when you realise that we either already have, or will soon, hit peak oil production. From that point, it's all downhill, as demand and production costs continue to rise and production quantity decreases.
I amkea point of buying shirts which are made in Australia (which are becoming increasingly hard to find, unfortunately). They cost twice as much as shirts made by slave labour in Burma (or wherever), but they don't fall apart. Also, even though I know they're still made by sweated labour (after all, the garment industry has always been like that), at least it's _Australian_ sweated labour. The other thing that I find interesting is that the locally-made shirts are only twice the price of the imported stuff. Given the disparity in wages between here and (say) a Chinese prison workshop, that means that the Australian companies who make shirts overseas are making an obscene profit on the backs of exploited labour.
Firstly the US economy is the largest in the world (at least for now), so it effectively swamps what other countries do.
Secondly, the US (despite some window dressing) has a highly protectionist economy, particularly for agriculture. Your government provides _massive_ corporate welfare to agribusiness, and dumps subsidised food in other countries in much the same way as the EU, just a bit less obviously.
I won't go into details about the "free" trade agreement that the Australian government just negotiated with the US - it isn't free at all, as it is massively skewed to be in the US's interest, and definitely _not_ in Australia's interest.
You obviously don't know what you are talking about.
Libertarian theory has one big problem. If I understand it correctly, they believe that everything can be managed under the law of contracts (I may be oversimplifying here, but if so, none of the libertarians I've communicated with have managed to clearly explain their position). The problem is, of course, without a system of courts, lawyers, police, etc, paid for at least in part by taxes, the law of contracts breaks down and disputes are settled by who has the most firepower.
You're quite correct about outsourcing being a political tool - the idea is to make people so fearful about losing their jobs thay they won't make _any_ trouble.
And I'm aware that I'm not a unique and beautiful snowflake. I don't want $100K per year (I don't think there are too many people who are worth that much anyway) - I just want a job (first step) which pays me enough to live decently - about $A60K would be enough.
I don't think there's any merit to the notion of a Darwinian marketplace, btw - markets don't evolve in quite the way that living creatures do, as they are an artificial construct. Social Darwinism is just the mis-application of a theory from the life sciences to the social sphere, and is basically used as an excuse to fuck workers over so that shareholder value is increased (never mind either simple economic realities or, more importantly, the moral dimension of life).
The Binomial Theorem itself may be quite old, but I think its application to combinatorial mathematics, probability, etc comes from the 17th and 18th centuries. The same can be said for most of the mathematics of complex numbers (de Moivre's Theorem, Argand diagrams, etc).
So sure, there's not a great deal which has post-Renaissance underpinnings, but you could say that about most of mathematics. However, most mathematics from the 19th and 20th centuries is a bit advanced for high school students (or even most university students), wouldn't you agree?
This is something that always surprises me, each time I hear or read that (some) people in the USA don't do calculus until university. Admittedly, we were only taught how to differentiate and integrate polynomials, but we _were_ taught the concept of a limit, so it was a reasonable grounding.
However, it was interesting when I returned to university about 10 years ago (having failed big-time in the late 60s, for the obvious reasons) - I approached the woman who was teaching differential equations, as I didn't really feel confident that my only-just-pass in Pure Maths II in 1969 had really prepared me for her subject, and she said (roughly) that because I'd studied the stuff about 25 years ago, I probably had a much better understanding of the subject than most of the rest of her students (even though I'd been bone-idle and had hardly absorbed a thing). I suspect that students today don't get as good a grounding as us old fuckers did, which is very sad.
I learnt a _lot_ of maths at high school which is post-renaissance - complex numbers, differential and integral calculus, the uses of logarithms, the Binomial Theorem, cartesian coordinate geometry,... Oh, and we were shown the utility of some of this stuff, at least.
Of course, this was about 40 years ago, and in Australia. I don't know what they teach young people at school these days (although judging from what my kids were taught, it isn't much).
I've observed what my cats do on the rare occasions they manage to catch something. Like predators in the wild, they eat most of it (even though they're extremely well-fed), and _particularly_ they eat all the fat-rich organs (like brains, kidneys, etc), perhaps partly because they usually eat kangaroo meat, which is extremely lean. IIRC, DDT gets stored in the fat cells of the critters (prey or predator) that ingest it. That's why predators are at such high risk of absorbing extremely high doses of it.
You are an idiot. While it's certainly true that a volcanic eruption dumps a shitload of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we aren't having several of these per year. On the other hand, those damn SUVs are driving around spewing out greenhouse gases all the time. I just don't see why the idiots who own them think they have the right to ignore the damage they are doing. And don't get me started on all the other things contributing to the increase in greenhouse gases.
Actually, the fairly clear timeline you're thinking of is the one that goes back to those hominids Leakey found in the Rift Valley from a couple of million years ago, taking in a 10,000 year old Neolithic settlement in Turkey (Catal Huyuk) with the world's very first town plan on its way to the present.
I have done Defence work before as a contractor, and fortunately most of the more interesting stuff happens in Adelaide, where I live (we Australians aren't as fond of moving as Americans seem to be). Working as a government employee is another matter entirely. On the other hand, private sector work is as likely as not to be an exciting insurance application, or something of the sort, so that's not very appealing either.
There are a number of problems with this in Australia, at least, and probably also in the US. Firstly government pays _really_ badly (which doesn't matter when you have no job, but certainly makes you think twice if you're working). Secondly, our governments are furiously outsourcing and offshoring everything in sight (they seem to have a problem with the notion of something being in the national interest) - one of our state mapping agencies had all its digitising done by Chinese convicts a few years ago. Thirdly, you have to write a huge document which "addresses the essential criteria", full of managerialist crap that just about makes you gag and takes a week to construct. I no longer apply for govenment jobs just for that reason.
The banana flavour comes from some ester whose name I can't recall and am too lazy to look up in Papazian - you maybe got it because you fermented it at too high a temperature (Westmalle Tripel doesn't have much of a banana flavour iirc). I, too, need to brew some more extra-strong beer - the stuff from two years ago has almost gone, and it's usually close to a year before it's even drinkable.
Interesting. That's about when I was last there, tidying up some loose ends in my degree (i.e., most of it), but I don't remember seeing her. Was she tutoring Maths I? Because I did that in 1968, so would have missed her for obvious reasons - my tutor for that was Marta Sved (who apparently was at school with Erdos).
The other thing is, in high school you _won't_ be doing large integrals, you'll only be doing simple ones to make sure you understand the concept, and so can then understand how to do the harder ones when (if) you go to university. At least, that's how it was back in the neolithic days at my school.
>... there's virtually no other area to which they have been applied successfully.
Not quite true. Oil industry geoscientists and reservoir engineers use the theory a bit, for estimating reservoir extent, percolation through sands, etc. A person of that persuasion could probably explain in considerably more detail exactly _how_, I'm just quoting a bloke I worked for a few years ago.
Anyway, don't feel you've wasted your time - remember how proud Hardy was of his belief that number theory had absolutely no practical application (I guess the joke's on him).
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I think you've missed my point. There is not, for obvious reasons, an exact correspondance between the Roman and American empires.
...) with a provincial governor who didn't interfere too much as long as things went the way Rome wanted (Iraq, Vietnam, ...).
Although the barbarians and, perhaps, the end of democracy may have had something to do with Rome's collapse, it happened more because Roman society had been progressively eaten out from the inside. (Don't forget democracy ended in, what, about 50BC, whereas Rome didn't collapse until about 400AD.) Nearly all of Rome's stuff was produced elsewhere in the empire (outsourcing/offshoring) and there was an increasingly disaffected proletariat (the Rust Belt) who had a corn dole (welfare and the minimum wage), free entertainment (television), and were crammed into overcrowded tenements (Watts) without enough productive work. Rome's army was predominantly mercenaries from the very barbarian tribes who later sacked Rome (all those security companies in Iraq) by the time of its collapse, and the bulk of the empire was composed of client states (so many modern examples - Iraq, Iran, Panama, Cuba pre-Castro,
So yeah, the barbarians are at the gates, and US democracy is looking a bit shaky, but those aren't the things you should be _really_ worried about.
I have one word to say to you - Rome.
What you are ignoring (and, I suspect, Carter was aware of) is that the oil is running out. The current price per barrel is actually irrelevant when you realise that we either already have, or will soon, hit peak oil production. From that point, it's all downhill, as demand and production costs continue to rise and production quantity decreases.
I amkea point of buying shirts which are made in Australia (which are becoming increasingly hard to find, unfortunately). They cost twice as much as shirts made by slave labour in Burma (or wherever), but they don't fall apart. Also, even though I know they're still made by sweated labour (after all, the garment industry has always been like that), at least it's _Australian_ sweated labour. The other thing that I find interesting is that the locally-made shirts are only twice the price of the imported stuff. Given the disparity in wages between here and (say) a Chinese prison workshop, that means that the Australian companies who make shirts overseas are making an obscene profit on the backs of exploited labour.
You're quite wrong, for two reasons.
Firstly the US economy is the largest in the world (at least for now), so it effectively swamps what other countries do.
Secondly, the US (despite some window dressing) has a highly protectionist economy, particularly for agriculture. Your government provides _massive_ corporate welfare to agribusiness, and dumps subsidised food in other countries in much the same way as the EU, just a bit less obviously.
I won't go into details about the "free" trade agreement that the Australian government just negotiated with the US - it isn't free at all, as it is massively skewed to be in the US's interest, and definitely _not_ in Australia's interest.
You obviously don't know what you are talking about.
Libertarian theory has one big problem. If I understand it correctly, they believe that everything can be managed under the law of contracts (I may be oversimplifying here, but if so, none of the libertarians I've communicated with have managed to clearly explain their position). The problem is, of course, without a system of courts, lawyers, police, etc, paid for at least in part by taxes, the law of contracts breaks down and disputes are settled by who has the most firepower.
You're quite correct about outsourcing being a political tool - the idea is to make people so fearful about losing their jobs thay they won't make _any_ trouble.
And I'm aware that I'm not a unique and beautiful snowflake. I don't want $100K per year (I don't think there are too many people who are worth that much anyway) - I just want a job (first step) which pays me enough to live decently - about $A60K would be enough.
I don't think there's any merit to the notion of a Darwinian marketplace, btw - markets don't evolve in quite the way that living creatures do, as they are an artificial construct. Social Darwinism is just the mis-application of a theory from the life sciences to the social sphere, and is basically used as an excuse to fuck workers over so that shareholder value is increased (never mind either simple economic realities or, more importantly, the moral dimension of life).
This is probably because the people at Forbes can't count ...
The Binomial Theorem itself may be quite old, but I think its application to combinatorial mathematics, probability, etc comes from the 17th and 18th centuries. The same can be said for most of the mathematics of complex numbers (de Moivre's Theorem, Argand diagrams, etc).
So sure, there's not a great deal which has post-Renaissance underpinnings, but you could say that about most of mathematics. However, most mathematics from the 19th and 20th centuries is a bit advanced for high school students (or even most university students), wouldn't you agree?
This is something that always surprises me, each time I hear or read that (some) people in the USA don't do calculus until university. Admittedly, we were only taught how to differentiate and integrate polynomials, but we _were_ taught the concept of a limit, so it was a reasonable grounding.
However, it was interesting when I returned to university about 10 years ago (having failed big-time in the late 60s, for the obvious reasons) - I approached the woman who was teaching differential equations, as I didn't really feel confident that my only-just-pass in Pure Maths II in 1969 had really prepared me for her subject, and she said (roughly) that because I'd studied the stuff about 25 years ago, I probably had a much better understanding of the subject than most of the rest of her students (even though I'd been bone-idle and had hardly absorbed a thing). I suspect that students today don't get as good a grounding as us old fuckers did, which is very sad.
I learnt a _lot_ of maths at high school which is post-renaissance - complex numbers, differential and integral calculus, the uses of logarithms, the Binomial Theorem, cartesian coordinate geometry, ... Oh, and we were shown the utility of some of this stuff, at least.
Of course, this was about 40 years ago, and in Australia. I don't know what they teach young people at school these days (although judging from what my kids were taught, it isn't much).
I've observed what my cats do on the rare occasions they manage to catch something. Like predators in the wild, they eat most of it (even though they're extremely well-fed), and _particularly_ they eat all the fat-rich organs (like brains, kidneys, etc), perhaps partly because they usually eat kangaroo meat, which is extremely lean. IIRC, DDT gets stored in the fat cells of the critters (prey or predator) that ingest it. That's why predators are at such high risk of absorbing extremely high doses of it.
You are an idiot. While it's certainly true that a volcanic eruption dumps a shitload of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we aren't having several of these per year. On the other hand, those damn SUVs are driving around spewing out greenhouse gases all the time. I just don't see why the idiots who own them think they have the right to ignore the damage they are doing. And don't get me started on all the other things contributing to the increase in greenhouse gases.
Troll? Shit, that's really funny (where are those damn mod points when you need them?)
Actually, the fairly clear timeline you're thinking of is the one that goes back to those hominids Leakey found in the Rift Valley from a couple of million years ago, taking in a 10,000 year old Neolithic settlement in Turkey (Catal Huyuk) with the world's very first town plan on its way to the present.
The Bible is a bunch of charming fairy-tales.
I have done Defence work before as a contractor, and fortunately most of the more interesting stuff happens in Adelaide, where I live (we Australians aren't as fond of moving as Americans seem to be). Working as a government employee is another matter entirely. On the other hand, private sector work is as likely as not to be an exciting insurance application, or something of the sort, so that's not very appealing either.
It's a pity that Australia's state and federal governments don't follow Oregon's lead.
There are a number of problems with this in Australia, at least, and probably also in the US. Firstly government pays _really_ badly (which doesn't matter when you have no job, but certainly makes you think twice if you're working). Secondly, our governments are furiously outsourcing and offshoring everything in sight (they seem to have a problem with the notion of something being in the national interest) - one of our state mapping agencies had all its digitising done by Chinese convicts a few years ago. Thirdly, you have to write a huge document which "addresses the essential criteria", full of managerialist crap that just about makes you gag and takes a week to construct. I no longer apply for govenment jobs just for that reason.
The banana flavour comes from some ester whose name I can't recall and am too lazy to look up in Papazian - you maybe got it because you fermented it at too high a temperature (Westmalle Tripel doesn't have much of a banana flavour iirc). I, too, need to brew some more extra-strong beer - the stuff from two years ago has almost gone, and it's usually close to a year before it's even drinkable.
There are two problems here:
1. It won't be a well-ordered set; and
2. Even if it was well-ordered, that might be in terms of someone else's preferences.
Interesting. That's about when I was last there, tidying up some loose ends in my degree (i.e., most of it), but I don't remember seeing her. Was she tutoring Maths I? Because I did that in 1968, so would have missed her for obvious reasons - my tutor for that was Marta Sved (who apparently was at school with Erdos).
Damn, that's funny (but not very kind).
The other thing is, in high school you _won't_ be doing large integrals, you'll only be doing simple ones to make sure you understand the concept, and so can then understand how to do the harder ones when (if) you go to university. At least, that's how it was back in the neolithic days at my school.
> ... there's virtually no other area to which they have been applied successfully.
Not quite true. Oil industry geoscientists and reservoir engineers use the theory a bit, for estimating reservoir extent, percolation through sands, etc. A person of that persuasion could probably explain in considerably more detail exactly _how_, I'm just quoting a bloke I worked for a few years ago.
Anyway, don't feel you've wasted your time - remember how proud Hardy was of his belief that number theory had absolutely no practical application (I guess the joke's on him).
I paid about $A70 for my copy of Kreyszig in 1994 - I still have it, and would refer to it if I got a job that required it. It's _very_ comprehensive.