PV is something that still needs a lot of work, but it's not the only way to exploit the sun, nor currently the most effective one. Although your parents might not be located in an optimal place for solar heating, I can attest that where I am, few days passed this winter where I couldn't get the house up to 75 degrees during the day on sunshine alone - I only had to pay for heat at night and only exceptionally cold rainy days. I've seriously considered getting solar water heating because it would actually be hotter than the law allows for electrically-heated tanks.
I once worked at a place where lunchtime microwave oven access was at a premium. Put frozen dinners on the auto dashboard and by noon, they were well over the safe temperature of 160 degrees. Supposedly 240 isn't hard to achieve in a closed vehicle in Florida, even in January.
I looked into solar-powered (adiabatic cycle) refrigeration after a hurricane caused a multi-day power outage and determined that about 3 square meters would be sufficient surface to produce 10 lbs of ice on an average day, and that's all I needed to keep the ice chest cold.
PV definitely works well with LED lighting, and I have a vision of future homes being lit more creatively than present-day ones simply because you can get a lot more lighting in a lot more flexible configurations with a lot less energy using LEDs.
The big problem with PV is the one that nay-sayers cannot seem to move beyond. Like many alternative energy sources, it's subject to major and minor fluctations. Rather than being whiney little kids about it and proclaiming the helplessness and futility of it all, they should be acting like the fabled hero-industrialists of old and taking it as a challenge. Better salts for capturing daytime heat and saving it for the night. Better batteries for smoothing out electrical demands. Better use of heat-transfer technologies. It's ludicrous that a propane refrigerator costs insanely more more than its electrically-powered equivalent even though they're both ultimately doing the same thing the same basic way. New ways to make an 'effin PROFIT!!!!
In any event, it's foolish to keep all your energy eggs in one basket. The most advanced nuclear power plant in the world won't keep you from freezing to death when a blizzard takes out the power transmission lines and all you have is electric heat.
We should have some compassion for everybody. But call centers and data centers are 2 things that don't actually have to be based in major metro areas. The late Sen. Byrd did, in fact, deliver some pork that direction by establishing a remote mail-sorting facility somewhere in WVa.
If we can shred the tax base by sending jobs to Bangalore, we can certainly send jobs just as easily to odd corners of the USA.
In the mean time, a lot of manufacturing has become automated, which made it cheaper to return it to the USA.
And cheaper again to automate it where it already is. Once you sell the farm and the price goes up what do you use to buy it back? Getting things back will be hard and may not happen at all so the hope is some new industry will appear and make everything all right. That's not my personal opinion, I'm a bit more pessimistic, but that's what they teach MBAs that think enough to consider such things.
Considering what the MBAs have been doing with the economy over the last several decades, I'm not going to be putting a whole lot of credence in what they're being taught.
Despair not. Some manufacturing has, in fact, returned to the US and one of the reasons for it was that they got better quality control for less money than cheap offshore manual labor and did so in many cases courtesy of smarter manufacturing equipment.
Don't expect everything to come rushing back. But the bottom has been scraped on offshore manufacturing, and the last few years have seen a backwash.
I am well aware. I have spent time in coal towns in Virginia and West Virginia. Coal mining is a dirty and dangerous business for the miners and it is a dirty business for everyone. I am not saying this should all be preverved just to keep people in obsolete jobs. I just want you all - whom I suspect are about 1,000,000 miles away from any connection to coal mining for the most part - to realize ending coal mining will be utter economic devastation for people and towns and many of them will NEVER recover from it.
The problem isn't "pity the poor coal miners", it's "why is the only major industry in these regions coal mining"? There are many modern-day industries that could be operating in places like that, but so far no one has attempted to do anything about it.
I don't really disagree with your points, but this is an extremely naive statement. Many of these people are too old to make a radical career shift that will keep them in the middle class. When ever there is a radical shift in a large employment industry, there is economic devistation for a lot fo families. The steel industry is a good example of this. Yes most of them found new jobs, but the shift in economic buying power was dramatic and lasted for generations.
So? We have spent the last 30 years destroying domestic employment opportunities in many industries. We were told we didn't need them because we were becoming an "information society", then come Y2K, shipped them out of the country as fast as we could. I feel for coal miners, but it's only one profession being impacted, and considering the dangers involved, one that a lot of them would probably be happy to exchange for something less hazardous if they only had the option.
You mean like nuclear weapons? Perhaps you are not old enough to remember the Cold War. We've had the capability to destroy the entire planet for roughly 60 years and on a few occasions have come disturbingly close to doing it. Fossil fuel pollution is a serious threat but it's not the first technology in a position to wipe us out entirely. Fossil fuel pollution has only become an acute threat in the last few decades though that should not be interpreted to minimize the seriousness of the problem.
The problem is that a nuclear threat is easily visualized. Boom and the planet is (in most people's eyes) a great big glowing cinder (reality isn't quite as dramatic, but the net effect would be similar). It tends to hold us in check.
The deterioration due to emission of catalytic chemicals isn't as visible. People can spend decades arguing over whether the shifts in climate are normal or human-generated, when in fact, both can happen at the same time or even (temporarily) in opposition. By the time the change is irreversable, it's going to be too late for the easy, cheap fixes. In the mean time, the talking heads scream about how jobs will be lost (the same ones who have no problem with sending them overseas) and ignoring the fact that when you attempt to clean up industrial processes, it generates a whole new set of jobs. As we have seen since the acid rain days of the 1960s.
Exactly what do you think is going to replace fossil fuels that is not going to be available in the US? Seriously, I'm all for replacing fossil fuels with cleaner sources of energy but there is NOTHING out there presently or in the reasonably likely future that is likely to do more than dent the use of fossil fuels for at least the next 30-40 years.
Well, the point is, people with entrenched interests in oil are in charge in the US and doing their best to suppress replacements for fossil fuels. In the mean time the rest of the world is more or less free to explore and develop alternatives.
I have little doubt that the Koch Brothers would, should they live that long, expect to buy up those alternatives once they'd milked what they already had to the end using the money they've made off oil, but people who do that are often disappointed. Other people with closer ties to the new industry are going to be just as resistant to sharing their pie with the old-line interlopers as they are now.
Unless the U.S. starts, pretty damned soon, to find an alternative to fossil fuels, it's economy is in for a beating, the likes of which few have scarcely imagined.
Since our economy is far less dependent on heavy manufacturing than it used to be, we're not in nearly as much trouble as other nations. Seen any satellite views of China recently?
Our economy became more dependent on more portable information-based industries. We then sent X-ray reading to the Phillipines, architectural drafting to China, software development to India, [i]etc. etc. etc.[/i]
We're already in trouble.
In the mean time, a lot of manufacturing has become automated, which made it cheaper to return it to the USA.
Solar power people are as deluded as the religious zealots they hate so much. Ever looked up what it takes to produce a solar cell? The amount of silver? The mining of the silver is so destructive that solar power is one of the worst forms of energy for the environment. Coals worst of course. Nuclear is almost totally nurtral. The few accidents we've had with it have been on 40yr old 1st generation reactors, all of them. Modern reactors can't fail. We, unfortunately, don't build any of them however. Because people like you drag your misinformed hippy mother earth religion into the frey. I'm sick of it, if solar worked my roof would be covered with solar cells and I'd be getting rich of selling it to all my neighbors. What do I get instead? A $30,000, very ugly roof so I can save $30 a month on my electric bill. It's THAT GOD DAMNED OBVIOUS.
I want some of the drugs you're taking. Even if we built a "perfect" nuclear plant - and we don't bother to build "perfect" anything elses, the PHB's would staff them with Homer Simpsons, just like we outsource critical technology projects to whatever not-entirely-friendly country happens to provide the cheapest labor.
And what's silver mining got to do with solar? Silver is not only one of the more expensive electrical materials, it oxidizes. Safer/cheaper conductors can be employed and generally are.
As for your expensive, ugly house, well I too would never buy an automobile. Nasty foul things that have to be manually cranked and steered by an awkward tiller. Give me a good old fashioned horse-drawn buggy any day! (you, circa 1890).
I'm visualizing a car with sparkling clean paint and an opaque coating of dirt on all the windows...
Actually, when they said "self-cleaning", I had envisioned some way that it got rid of all the old McD's french-fry bags and other trash all over the backseat flooor.
I was about to say it's more anonymous because you can get a phone without a name attached, but then I remembered how many places have free wifi.
You may not have a name attached, but the EIN is hardwired into it. Which is, I believe, the way that the carrier matches the phone number to the phone.
Reagan had his pluses and minuses. While he's the one I consider most responsible for the destruction of the Presumption of Innocence as well as for the horrible failure that is Trickle-Down Economics, he did revive the country's faith in itself, even though a lot of that came from riding rough-shod over the rest of the world.
I'd grade him above average, depending on what you want to count score by. No Abraham Lincoln, but he did bring optimism to a nation demoralized by the corruption of Johnson, the scandal of Nixon and the general ineffectiveness of Carter.
Unfortunately, he was then used as an excuse by his fellow partisans to promote every questionable fiscal, economic and political misfeasance that they could hallucinate.
It took the train wreck of the GWB administration to strip the luster off those policies and by association to tarnish Reagan's image.
So far, Obama's main claim to fame is in demonstrating that the other side isn't exactly brimming with solutions, though.
>Just to play devil's advocate, how is this more invasive than DUI checkpoints?
It's less invasive. DUI checkpoints are dragnets. In the case listed above, a guy called in to 9-11 to report that another driver had driven him off the road, and was driving recklessly around the freeway. This was considered adequate justification to conduct a traffic stop, at which point they found drugs in the car.
I actually don't see what the big deal is (Scali, I'm looking at you). People report things to the police all the time - if they can't follow up on them, then it sort of makes a mockery of citizens participating in keeping our streets safe.
It's not really an "anonymous" tip. As it was a 9-11 call, they presumably have the cell phone number for the person who called in, and could reasonably call them back and ask them to testify in court against the defendant if they needed to.
As it was a 9-1-1 call, they can determine to within 1000 meters where the telephone was when the call was made.
But that doesn't mean that the person you get when you call back will always be the same person who used the phone to call.
While it may have worked out ok in this situation it is a very bad president.
It might be better than last few presidents we've had.
Well, the last couple of presidents have been guiding us on a downward course where surveillance is everything and you are guilty until proven innocent. All the way back to "get-the-government-off-the-backs-of-the-people-Reagan", who thoughtfully provided us with the "you're a drug-addled illegal alien and you can't be hired until you demonstrate otherwise" model for business.
At the rate we're going, a rock would make a better president.
I don't know how or where this "grow or die" idea began, but it's just plain wrong.
It's not grow or die. It's grow or lose investors. If I own a company (I'm a shareholder) and want a return on my investment the only way for that to occur is for the company to grow.
That's not true. The original idea was that investments would return dividends. It isn't necessary to grow to do that, just operate profitably. In the days when only the wealthy owned stocks, dividends and interest were primary income sources and only a few were speculators looking for share price growth.
Within the last century, we've lost track of that, becoming obsessed with get-rich-quick share price increases which are often completely unrelated to the profitability of an operation, and in fact, often owe more to a continuing dance of mergers acquisitions and divestitures than to actual product.
The human population of the Earth is expected to stabilize around 2050. The natural resources of the planet are finite. The Universe is not only a non-profit operation, it's running at a (entropy) loss. Only things like ideas are unlimited, and no matter how many ideas produce new products, there's only so many products any one person can purchase. So it might be worth considering how to succeed in a non-growth environment.
Yep, that's my typical work day. If Google were a billable service, I'd be in debt for a thousand years. I have to be an expert on a hundred subjects every week thanks the both the complexity and the rate of change of modern IT.
There are a very few open-source projects that are actually responsive to bug-fix and change requests. And not just open-source ones Commodore's Amiga team was pretty responsive as well. Most groups, as you have observed, will either ignore you or outright flame you.
It's not about the Americans being not "qualified" but that a E/CE/CS degree is irrelevant to IT. IT is, in the most general sense, best served by a logic and philosophy/psychology degree. Every problem is solved by a binary decision tree.
No it isn't, and that fallacy is behind a lof of modern-day disfunctionality - the idea that There Can Be Only One True Answer.
If you actually study formal logic, you'll discover that binary/boolean/Aristotelian logic is only one form of logic. There's another whole branch of symbolic logic dedicated to dealing with All/Some/None situtations.
As the Perl people like to say, "there's more than one way to do it". The real test of critical thinking isn't merely to come up with "the" answer, it's to consider multiple answers and determine which one is mostly likely to produce good results.
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Every Pascal compiler had to have some non-standard add-ons to handle modularity.
Actually, if I've got my Pascal-family languages straight, every compiler had to have non-standard add-ons just to handle basic I/O.
Competition is a sin!
John D. Rockefeller, 1883 (allegedly)
PV is something that still needs a lot of work, but it's not the only way to exploit the sun, nor currently the most effective one. Although your parents might not be located in an optimal place for solar heating, I can attest that where I am, few days passed this winter where I couldn't get the house up to 75 degrees during the day on sunshine alone - I only had to pay for heat at night and only exceptionally cold rainy days. I've seriously considered getting solar water heating because it would actually be hotter than the law allows for electrically-heated tanks.
I once worked at a place where lunchtime microwave oven access was at a premium. Put frozen dinners on the auto dashboard and by noon, they were well over the safe temperature of 160 degrees. Supposedly 240 isn't hard to achieve in a closed vehicle in Florida, even in January.
I looked into solar-powered (adiabatic cycle) refrigeration after a hurricane caused a multi-day power outage and determined that about 3 square meters would be sufficient surface to produce 10 lbs of ice on an average day, and that's all I needed to keep the ice chest cold.
PV definitely works well with LED lighting, and I have a vision of future homes being lit more creatively than present-day ones simply because you can get a lot more lighting in a lot more flexible configurations with a lot less energy using LEDs.
The big problem with PV is the one that nay-sayers cannot seem to move beyond. Like many alternative energy sources, it's subject to major and minor fluctations. Rather than being whiney little kids about it and proclaiming the helplessness and futility of it all, they should be acting like the fabled hero-industrialists of old and taking it as a challenge. Better salts for capturing daytime heat and saving it for the night. Better batteries for smoothing out electrical demands. Better use of heat-transfer technologies. It's ludicrous that a propane refrigerator costs insanely more more than its electrically-powered equivalent even though they're both ultimately doing the same thing the same basic way. New ways to make an 'effin PROFIT!!!!
In any event, it's foolish to keep all your energy eggs in one basket. The most advanced nuclear power plant in the world won't keep you from freezing to death when a blizzard takes out the power transmission lines and all you have is electric heat.
We should have some compassion for everybody. But call centers and data centers are 2 things that don't actually have to be based in major metro areas. The late Sen. Byrd did, in fact, deliver some pork that direction by establishing a remote mail-sorting facility somewhere in WVa.
If we can shred the tax base by sending jobs to Bangalore, we can certainly send jobs just as easily to odd corners of the USA.
And cheaper again to automate it where it already is. Once you sell the farm and the price goes up what do you use to buy it back? Getting things back will be hard and may not happen at all so the hope is some new industry will appear and make everything all right. That's not my personal opinion, I'm a bit more pessimistic, but that's what they teach MBAs that think enough to consider such things.
Considering what the MBAs have been doing with the economy over the last several decades, I'm not going to be putting a whole lot of credence in what they're being taught.
Despair not. Some manufacturing has, in fact, returned to the US and one of the reasons for it was that they got better quality control for less money than cheap offshore manual labor and did so in many cases courtesy of smarter manufacturing equipment.
Don't expect everything to come rushing back. But the bottom has been scraped on offshore manufacturing, and the last few years have seen a backwash.
I am well aware. I have spent time in coal towns in Virginia and West Virginia. Coal mining is a dirty and dangerous business for the miners and it is a dirty business for everyone. I am not saying this should all be preverved just to keep people in obsolete jobs. I just want you all - whom I suspect are about 1,000,000 miles away from any connection to coal mining for the most part - to realize ending coal mining will be utter economic devastation for people and towns and many of them will NEVER recover from it.
The problem isn't "pity the poor coal miners", it's "why is the only major industry in these regions coal mining"? There are many modern-day industries that could be operating in places like that, but so far no one has attempted to do anything about it.
They will just have to find another job.
I don't really disagree with your points, but this is an extremely naive statement. Many of these people are too old to make a radical career shift that will keep them in the middle class. When ever there is a radical shift in a large employment industry, there is economic devistation for a lot fo families. The steel industry is a good example of this. Yes most of them found new jobs, but the shift in economic buying power was dramatic and lasted for generations.
So? We have spent the last 30 years destroying domestic employment opportunities in many industries. We were told we didn't need them because we were becoming an "information society", then come Y2K, shipped them out of the country as fast as we could. I feel for coal miners, but it's only one profession being impacted, and considering the dangers involved, one that a lot of them would probably be happy to exchange for something less hazardous if they only had the option.
You mean like nuclear weapons? Perhaps you are not old enough to remember the Cold War. We've had the capability to destroy the entire planet for roughly 60 years and on a few occasions have come disturbingly close to doing it. Fossil fuel pollution is a serious threat but it's not the first technology in a position to wipe us out entirely. Fossil fuel pollution has only become an acute threat in the last few decades though that should not be interpreted to minimize the seriousness of the problem.
The problem is that a nuclear threat is easily visualized. Boom and the planet is (in most people's eyes) a great big glowing cinder (reality isn't quite as dramatic, but the net effect would be similar). It tends to hold us in check.
The deterioration due to emission of catalytic chemicals isn't as visible. People can spend decades arguing over whether the shifts in climate are normal or human-generated, when in fact, both can happen at the same time or even (temporarily) in opposition. By the time the change is irreversable, it's going to be too late for the easy, cheap fixes. In the mean time, the talking heads scream about how jobs will be lost (the same ones who have no problem with sending them overseas) and ignoring the fact that when you attempt to clean up industrial processes, it generates a whole new set of jobs. As we have seen since the acid rain days of the 1960s.
Exactly what do you think is going to replace fossil fuels that is not going to be available in the US? Seriously, I'm all for replacing fossil fuels with cleaner sources of energy but there is NOTHING out there presently or in the reasonably likely future that is likely to do more than dent the use of fossil fuels for at least the next 30-40 years.
Well, the point is, people with entrenched interests in oil are in charge in the US and doing their best to suppress replacements for fossil fuels. In the mean time the rest of the world is more or less free to explore and develop alternatives.
I have little doubt that the Koch Brothers would, should they live that long, expect to buy up those alternatives once they'd milked what they already had to the end using the money they've made off oil, but people who do that are often disappointed. Other people with closer ties to the new industry are going to be just as resistant to sharing their pie with the old-line interlopers as they are now.
Unless the U.S. starts, pretty damned soon, to find an alternative to fossil fuels, it's economy is in for a beating, the likes of which few have scarcely imagined.
Since our economy is far less dependent on heavy manufacturing than it used to be, we're not in nearly as much trouble as other nations. Seen any satellite views of China recently?
Our economy became more dependent on more portable information-based industries. We then sent X-ray reading to the Phillipines, architectural drafting to China, software development to India, [i]etc. etc. etc.[/i]
We're already in trouble.
In the mean time, a lot of manufacturing has become automated, which made it cheaper to return it to the USA.
Solar power people are as deluded as the religious zealots they hate so much. Ever looked up what it takes to produce a solar cell? The amount of silver? The mining of the silver is so destructive that solar power is one of the worst forms of energy for the environment. Coals worst of course. Nuclear is almost totally nurtral. The few accidents we've had with it have been on 40yr old 1st generation reactors, all of them. Modern reactors can't fail. We, unfortunately, don't build any of them however. Because people like you drag your misinformed hippy mother earth religion into the frey. I'm sick of it, if solar worked my roof would be covered with solar cells and I'd be getting rich of selling it to all my neighbors. What do I get instead? A $30,000, very ugly roof so I can save $30 a month on my electric bill. It's THAT GOD DAMNED OBVIOUS.
I want some of the drugs you're taking. Even if we built a "perfect" nuclear plant - and we don't bother to build "perfect" anything elses, the PHB's would staff them with Homer Simpsons, just like we outsource critical technology projects to whatever not-entirely-friendly country happens to provide the cheapest labor.
And what's silver mining got to do with solar? Silver is not only one of the more expensive electrical materials, it oxidizes. Safer/cheaper conductors can be employed and generally are.
As for your expensive, ugly house, well I too would never buy an automobile. Nasty foul things that have to be manually cranked and steered by an awkward tiller. Give me a good old fashioned horse-drawn buggy any day! (you, circa 1890).
I'm visualizing a car with sparkling clean paint and an opaque coating of dirt on all the windows...
Actually, when they said "self-cleaning", I had envisioned some way that it got rid of all the old McD's french-fry bags and other trash all over the backseat flooor.
I'd so wish to see the tank of my car filled up after leaving it parked all day in the field.
I'd settle for being able to shoot it and eat it if it gave me trouble.
I was about to say it's more anonymous because you can get a phone without a name attached, but then I remembered how many places have free wifi.
You may not have a name attached, but the EIN is hardwired into it. Which is, I believe, the way that the carrier matches the phone number to the phone.
Reagan had his pluses and minuses. While he's the one I consider most responsible for the destruction of the Presumption of Innocence as well as for the horrible failure that is Trickle-Down Economics, he did revive the country's faith in itself, even though a lot of that came from riding rough-shod over the rest of the world.
I'd grade him above average, depending on what you want to count score by. No Abraham Lincoln, but he did bring optimism to a nation demoralized by the corruption of Johnson, the scandal of Nixon and the general ineffectiveness of Carter.
Unfortunately, he was then used as an excuse by his fellow partisans to promote every questionable fiscal, economic and political misfeasance that they could hallucinate.
It took the train wreck of the GWB administration to strip the luster off those policies and by association to tarnish Reagan's image.
So far, Obama's main claim to fame is in demonstrating that the other side isn't exactly brimming with solutions, though.
>Just to play devil's advocate, how is this more invasive than DUI checkpoints?
It's less invasive. DUI checkpoints are dragnets. In the case listed above, a guy called in to 9-11 to report that another driver had driven him off the road, and was driving recklessly around the freeway. This was considered adequate justification to conduct a traffic stop, at which point they found drugs in the car.
I actually don't see what the big deal is (Scali, I'm looking at you). People report things to the police all the time - if they can't follow up on them, then it sort of makes a mockery of citizens participating in keeping our streets safe.
It's not really an "anonymous" tip. As it was a 9-11 call, they presumably have the cell phone number for the person who called in, and could reasonably call them back and ask them to testify in court against the defendant if they needed to.
As it was a 9-1-1 call, they can determine to within 1000 meters where the telephone was when the call was made.
But that doesn't mean that the person you get when you call back will always be the same person who used the phone to call.
It's about as anonymous as an IP address.
And we've already had verdicts rendered on how useful they are for proving who did what.
While it may have worked out ok in this situation it is a very bad president.
It might be better than last few presidents we've had.
Well, the last couple of presidents have been guiding us on a downward course where surveillance is everything and you are guilty until proven innocent. All the way back to "get-the-government-off-the-backs-of-the-people-Reagan", who thoughtfully provided us with the "you're a drug-addled illegal alien and you can't be hired until you demonstrate otherwise" model for business.
At the rate we're going, a rock would make a better president.
Every problem is solved by a binary decision tree.
Q.E.D.
I don't know how or where this "grow or die" idea began, but it's just plain wrong.
It's not grow or die. It's grow or lose investors. If I own a company (I'm a shareholder) and want a return on my investment the only way for that to occur is for the company to grow.
That's not true. The original idea was that investments would return dividends. It isn't necessary to grow to do that, just operate profitably. In the days when only the wealthy owned stocks, dividends and interest were primary income sources and only a few were speculators looking for share price growth.
Within the last century, we've lost track of that, becoming obsessed with get-rich-quick share price increases which are often completely unrelated to the profitability of an operation, and in fact, often owe more to a continuing dance of mergers acquisitions and divestitures than to actual product.
The human population of the Earth is expected to stabilize around 2050. The natural resources of the planet are finite. The Universe is not only a non-profit operation, it's running at a (entropy) loss. Only things like ideas are unlimited, and no matter how many ideas produce new products, there's only so many products any one person can purchase. So it might be worth considering how to succeed in a non-growth environment.
Yep, that's my typical work day. If Google were a billable service, I'd be in debt for a thousand years. I have to be an expert on a hundred subjects every week thanks the both the complexity and the rate of change of modern IT.
There are a very few open-source projects that are actually responsive to bug-fix and change requests. And not just open-source ones Commodore's Amiga team was pretty responsive as well. Most groups, as you have observed, will either ignore you or outright flame you.
>I know what you mean. It drives me nut's. It's defiantly not that hard too spell.
Fixed that for ya.
Hey, we didn't give you free reign to go all spelling-nazi. Did you loose your mind? Tow the line!
Well, I guess those courses they made me take in high school on critical thinking and logical fallacies were just a complete waste then.
I can't take what I was taught on the Evils of Communism to Wal-Mart, either.
It's not about the Americans being not "qualified" but that a E/CE/CS degree is irrelevant to IT. IT is, in the most general sense, best served by a logic and philosophy/psychology degree. Every problem is solved by a binary decision tree.
No it isn't, and that fallacy is behind a lof of modern-day disfunctionality - the idea that There Can Be Only One True Answer.
If you actually study formal logic, you'll discover that binary/boolean/Aristotelian logic is only one form of logic. There's another whole branch of symbolic logic dedicated to dealing with All/Some/None situtations.
As the Perl people like to say, "there's more than one way to do it". The real test of critical thinking isn't merely to come up with "the" answer, it's to consider multiple answers and determine which one is mostly likely to produce good results.
I can't speak for all certifications, but ones I've done (CCNA and CCNP in particular) put a heavy emphasis on troubleshooting.
That's why the Cisco certs are among the few rags that actually carry credibility. The vast majority of certs are memorize-and-regurgitate.