Given the market for even most science PhD's (don't know much about the physics market, but I was a chemistry undergrad and do occasionally read the chemistry blogs), they would be better off economically if they became carpenters - the peak career income will be about equal, or higher, for all but the very highest-paid PhD's, and they won't have spent north of twelve years just above the poverty line.
And that's if you're talking about the people who just hold down jobs, as opposed to being entrepreneurs. I know a number of small businessmen. They're doing better than carpenters, better than PhD's, and they could easily do the work they do with a solid elementary education and apprenticeship. They didn't learn their businesses in a classroom; they learned salesmanship from going out and doing it, and they learned the business by working as an employee for five or six years.
They also have a legal monopoly on the delivery of non-urgent mail and the use of mailboxes. It's hard to tell whether they're actually more efficient than FedEx or UPS because of that - the postal system in the US is financed largely by the delivery of junk mail.
The interesting thing was that the rate of price decrease before the deregulation date was greater than after deregulation.
I would suggest, though of course I can't prove, that the deregulation allowed all sorts of inefficiencies to be wrung out of the system at once. Once all the low-hanging fruit are gone, though, it's a lot harder to keep increasing efficiency at the same rate forever.
Sounds like your phone, electricity, and rail service were being subsidized heavily by tax money when they were privatized. In that situation, costs can go down while end-user charges go up. (Without more detail, it's impossible to know whether that's precisely the case here, but it's often nearly impossible to tell - after all, the IRS collects most of the federal taxes in the US, and so agencies within the government have much smaller billing offices than private enterprises of the same size. The money is still being spent, of course, it's just not accounted for in each agency.)
Government jobs are also subject to featherbedding in a fashion that corporate jobs are not - companies may (and should) go out of business if they run out of money, while governments have a strong preference just to raise taxes to cover the shortfall.
Total household spending on Internet service in 1980 was zero. Total household spending on telegrams in 1980 was not much more. Total cost is rarely the best measure.
And nationalization is even worse. Why does it appeal so much to you? Is there some special expertise in government that makes running a phone company a good idea? It's not like the post office, which at least has the noble concept of providing all citizens access to certain basic communication at a low price via a mechanism that the government cannot cast official doubt upon.
Given the prices we paid in the fully-regulated days before the Ma Bell breakup, I'm not sure that regulation would do much to lower prices. Making all companies operate on the same spectrum would help, though.
A significant portion of the American population is not capable of doing anything more complex than running a cash register. The travesty is that we insist on imprisoning them in schools until they're 18 whether or not they can actually benefit from them.
why would employers be demanding a college education if they didn't see that it actually makes a significant difference in employee performance?
Requiring a college degree rejects some perfectly capable candidates, but it rejects a lot more dullards. Because Duke Power was racist, we can't find the diamonds in the rough by giving them general tests of intelligence.
Interestingly enough, people who control the levers of government and tax money are always going to be wealthy. You can let the wealthy govern you directly (aristocracy has benefits that are not often considered by Americans, though I don't think it's worth it overall - see e.g. Freedom Wears a Crown, as well as passages in Shute's Slide Rule), or you can accept that people who control the flow of vast sums of money will be able to order their affairs in such a way as to profit from it (even legally).
That's an interesting argument. I'd like to see some real defense of it. We already provide free public education through the twelfth grade to everyone in the US, and there are a lot of scholarships out there if you're smart enough to get one.
Put another way: are you actually smarter today than you were at, say, age 12? Or just more knowledgeable? Yes, some people can benefit from higher education. Not everyone can. In the current system, the marginal case is pushed to go to college at enormous personal expense, when they would very likely have been better off economically if they just went out and got a job.
There are two big problems with airships, though. The first is that the wind can play total havoc with you in trying to get to your destination, and the second is that the airship has to have people attending to it 24/7 if it's not in a hangar. The latter is much more of a problem, because it makes them hideously expensive to operate.
The airships of the 1930's happened because there was a market for transatlantic travel that was faster than ship crossing, and aircraft weren't up to the task yet.
You can, however, run the Kindle app on a Mac, a PC, a iOS device, an Android device, or the web, so the only people who are left out are those who want to buy Amazon ebooks to read them on a non-Kindle eInk reader and yet don't have the technical skill to strip the DRM.
1992.75 has 4MB chips for $105, 1993.75 has the same chips for $144. Nearly 50%. I'm not OP but it was enough to feel like "almost doubled overnight" when you factor in that it was 20 years ago. (Those also seem like better prices than I remember - the 16 MB of RAM I paid for in August of 1993 cost me about $700.)
Under that scheme, there would be adequate supply for a few weeks and then a complete shutdown as supply went to zero. Don't like the prices? Don't buy.
"Gouging" is applicable when supplies are artificially restrained (like movie theaters charging $5 for a drink by refusing to allow you to bring one in from the outside). This is an open worldwide marketplace, and anyone who can undercut the elevated prices can make a lot of money doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
Fat diabetics lose toes. Skinny emphysematous chain-smokers lose legs. Missing arms are almost always congenital or traumatic.
Don't forget the rise in cases of oral cancers caused by HPV due to the normalization of oral sex.
You think every dollar of NIH spending is on drug candidates?
Given the market for even most science PhD's (don't know much about the physics market, but I was a chemistry undergrad and do occasionally read the chemistry blogs), they would be better off economically if they became carpenters - the peak career income will be about equal, or higher, for all but the very highest-paid PhD's, and they won't have spent north of twelve years just above the poverty line.
And that's if you're talking about the people who just hold down jobs, as opposed to being entrepreneurs. I know a number of small businessmen. They're doing better than carpenters, better than PhD's, and they could easily do the work they do with a solid elementary education and apprenticeship. They didn't learn their businesses in a classroom; they learned salesmanship from going out and doing it, and they learned the business by working as an employee for five or six years.
They also have a legal monopoly on the delivery of non-urgent mail and the use of mailboxes. It's hard to tell whether they're actually more efficient than FedEx or UPS because of that - the postal system in the US is financed largely by the delivery of junk mail.
The interesting thing was that the rate of price decrease before the deregulation date was greater than after deregulation.
I would suggest, though of course I can't prove, that the deregulation allowed all sorts of inefficiencies to be wrung out of the system at once. Once all the low-hanging fruit are gone, though, it's a lot harder to keep increasing efficiency at the same rate forever.
Sounds like your phone, electricity, and rail service were being subsidized heavily by tax money when they were privatized. In that situation, costs can go down while end-user charges go up. (Without more detail, it's impossible to know whether that's precisely the case here, but it's often nearly impossible to tell - after all, the IRS collects most of the federal taxes in the US, and so agencies within the government have much smaller billing offices than private enterprises of the same size. The money is still being spent, of course, it's just not accounted for in each agency.)
Government jobs are also subject to featherbedding in a fashion that corporate jobs are not - companies may (and should) go out of business if they run out of money, while governments have a strong preference just to raise taxes to cover the shortfall.
Total household spending on Internet service in 1980 was zero. Total household spending on telegrams in 1980 was not much more. Total cost is rarely the best measure.
And nationalization is even worse. Why does it appeal so much to you? Is there some special expertise in government that makes running a phone company a good idea? It's not like the post office, which at least has the noble concept of providing all citizens access to certain basic communication at a low price via a mechanism that the government cannot cast official doubt upon.
Given the prices we paid in the fully-regulated days before the Ma Bell breakup, I'm not sure that regulation would do much to lower prices. Making all companies operate on the same spectrum would help, though.
Private colleges 30 years ago were cheaper than public ones are today. So that's not the whole story.
Allowed to be paid with pre-tax income
It worked so well in the housing market...
A significant portion of the American population is not capable of doing anything more complex than running a cash register. The travesty is that we insist on imprisoning them in schools until they're 18 whether or not they can actually benefit from them.
Every one of those things is done by my city's government, not the feds. A limited federal government is not synonymous with anarchy.
why would employers be demanding a college education if they didn't see that it actually makes a significant difference in employee performance?
Requiring a college degree rejects some perfectly capable candidates, but it rejects a lot more dullards. Because Duke Power was racist, we can't find the diamonds in the rough by giving them general tests of intelligence.
Interestingly enough, people who control the levers of government and tax money are always going to be wealthy. You can let the wealthy govern you directly (aristocracy has benefits that are not often considered by Americans, though I don't think it's worth it overall - see e.g. Freedom Wears a Crown, as well as passages in Shute's Slide Rule), or you can accept that people who control the flow of vast sums of money will be able to order their affairs in such a way as to profit from it (even legally).
The average annual income for an individual with a high school diploma is $35k. For an individual with a bachelors degree, it is $50k.
And do you think that a piece of paper is the only difference between the two?
the poor are poor because they're uneducated
That's an interesting argument. I'd like to see some real defense of it. We already provide free public education through the twelfth grade to everyone in the US, and there are a lot of scholarships out there if you're smart enough to get one.
Put another way: are you actually smarter today than you were at, say, age 12? Or just more knowledgeable? Yes, some people can benefit from higher education. Not everyone can. In the current system, the marginal case is pushed to go to college at enormous personal expense, when they would very likely have been better off economically if they just went out and got a job.
The self-check machines at the Kroger near me use a male voice if you choose Spanish, female if you choose English.
It's a perfectly grammatical sentence, akin to "I can better serve the cause by doing X rather than Y."
It's grammar school, aka elementary.
There are two big problems with airships, though. The first is that the wind can play total havoc with you in trying to get to your destination, and the second is that the airship has to have people attending to it 24/7 if it's not in a hangar. The latter is much more of a problem, because it makes them hideously expensive to operate.
The airships of the 1930's happened because there was a market for transatlantic travel that was faster than ship crossing, and aircraft weren't up to the task yet.
You can, however, run the Kindle app on a Mac, a PC, a iOS device, an Android device, or the web, so the only people who are left out are those who want to buy Amazon ebooks to read them on a non-Kindle eInk reader and yet don't have the technical skill to strip the DRM.
1992.75 has 4MB chips for $105, 1993.75 has the same chips for $144. Nearly 50%. I'm not OP but it was enough to feel like "almost doubled overnight" when you factor in that it was 20 years ago. (Those also seem like better prices than I remember - the 16 MB of RAM I paid for in August of 1993 cost me about $700.)
Under that scheme, there would be adequate supply for a few weeks and then a complete shutdown as supply went to zero. Don't like the prices? Don't buy.
"Gouging" is applicable when supplies are artificially restrained (like movie theaters charging $5 for a drink by refusing to allow you to bring one in from the outside). This is an open worldwide marketplace, and anyone who can undercut the elevated prices can make a lot of money doing so.
No, this was in '93.