This is a horrible, horrible idea. If you make photosynthesis more efficient, plants won't have to spend all their time generating food. A few hours a day, and they'll have all they need. Soon enough, plants will have more free time than they know what to do with. They'll wake up in the morning, spend a couple of hours making sugar, and spend the rest of the day sitting in coffee shops and arguing about the finer points of whatever passes for philosophy among the members of the plant kingdom.
There is a (very tiny) gem of a real issue in your... whatever. 50% more photosynthesis means 50% more sucrose (or whatever) means 50% more water needed to keep osmotic pressure constant. Or growth rate increases 50% meaning you need 50% more protein and cellulose synthesis required means 50% more fertilizer required. But that will screw up the ionic balance of the dirt so you need 50% more root growth and or 50% more inorganic filler (sand?) in the soil. Think of a factory, you make one machine at one station 50% faster, that does not mean the rest of the factory nor the supply chain not the distribution chain will run 50% faster.
Now what it would do, is make it possible to grow greenhouse crops at pretty high latitudes during the winter. You just have to balance the costs of running a greenhouse in the winter, vs the cost of inter-hemispheric aircraft shipping to see which is "worse" along with balancing vitamin deficiencies etc.
I think people are gonna object to being sold "greens" which are entirely black. Aesthetics matter just a teensy bit when it comes to food.
Then it'll mostly go to starving people. Its not like its going to be thrown away. Hey starving person, here's a pitch black head of lettuce... oh you don't like the color? Gimme it back then, I'll give it to someone whom prefers not to die of starvation. bye bye starving person and have a nice day or whatever you have left?
Meanwhile I contemplate my side dish last weekend of diced apples, caramelized diced onions, chopped red bell peppers and some seasoning. Tasted bettter than it sounds. Not much "green" but it all came from the produce aisle...
There have been ex-engineers interviewed about with regard to the meltdown. TEPCO have concealed incidents, installed shoddy protections and go with lowest bidder rather than safest product.
In about 5 seconds of googling "TEPCO incidents" or "TEPCO unethical" you can see a myriad of articles with quotes from engineers and monitoring groups about how TEPCO has deceived the Japanese government.
Just because you don't keep up with the news doesn't mean others don't.
There is also an important difference between TEPCO and, say, BP last year. BP had a pretty shoddy record on average, although it was highly variable and they generally cleaned up each individual site to a reasonable standard. The 3rd party they contracted with to drill their well had a very clean record, winning awards, etc, at least until the well blew... TEPCO on the other hand, has repetitive multiple violations at the very same plant that melted down, but the irony is that this was not an operational failure, but a design specification failure... The meltdown was baked into the cake decades ago when they made the blueprints and tidal wave far higher than design spec arrived. And the reactor was designed by... GE. Yes, America nuked Japan yet again. (Given GEs current hiring trends, much like IBM, very soon they will have no legal American citizen employees other than maybe the CEO or something, although decades ago when they built the reactors, GE was an American company)
Cinematics, story and voice acting in your average videogame cannot come close to the equivalent in feature films. Games are event-driven, so they're choppy by nature. There are games like Metal Gear Solid that have great cut scenes, but many gamers have complained that it seems more like a movie than a game. That seems like it's always going to be an argument, because if people wanted to watch a movie they would do so. They wouldnt be playing games
On the other hand, check out this list:
1) No one makes any money but the distributors due to crooked accounting, and the distributors are being destroyed by "the internet".
2) Mass distributed content is formulaic and repetitive remakes of the same tired old ideas and frankly hasn't had anything new or fresh in many years.
3) 1% of the population is fanatic about it, the other 99% simply do not care.
4) Everyone in the biz thinks the world revolves around them, everyone outside the biz doesn't care at all about them (huge cultural impedance mismatch)
5) It takes a huge investment of time to understand the inside jokes, none of which are funny.
Funny! All these desktops look the same from inside a command prompt.
There was an interval in the 00s (or was it the 90s?) where the only way to get a tabbed console was from KDE's Konsole. Now even the XFCE terminal has it.
The facts are (good or bad) that most businesses of any significant size use Excel spreadsheets that include complex scripting macros and othe "advanced" features.
Come on man, I'm there and its exclusively used as the corporate standard database management system and the most advanced features we use are exclusively typographical (Could you center that title, put it in Times-Roman, blue, and make it bigger?)
I worked at a place that used lotus-123 as its desktop publishing system. No other word processor had quite that advanced, flexible, and easy to use system for tabs/columns -n- forms.
and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis.
Or rephrased, roughly 96% of the "users" sign in less than daily. The graph would be interesting to see. My wife checks FB at maximum interval of a couple hours. Everyone knows someone like that, but that doesn't mean they're a statistically relevant population.
National has gone downhill since Robert Pease retired. If you don't know who Pease is, then you probably don't know much about analog electronics. Thats all I'm saying.
Though Gelertner’s patents were upheld by the court, Judge Davis threw out the $625.5 million damage award and closed the case in Apple’s favor.
Isn't this like saying "Apple infringed on your patents, but they won't have to pay anything. Have a nice day."
"You have successfully convinced me you have a nice patent. You have not convinced me it has anything whatsoever to do with Apple, or VLM at/., or chemicaldave at/. or pretty much anything else"
I think you're missing the point - there's no consequence for violence that you commit in games. Take COD, you shoot dozens if not hundreds of human beings in that game and get rewarded for it.
I think you've never played COD or any FPS and certainly never played any RPG. Thats OK; different strokes for different folks. The whole point is no one other than the most terminally stupid, plays video games in kamikaze mode like you suggest. You plot and think and plan and experiment and replan and try again over and over. You pull the trigger for 100 milliseconds after thinking about how to do it for 100 seconds. So how much of an effect is that having on kids... Oh none at all, I see.
If video games are very carefully planned premeditated virtual murder, then "typical boy fights" should become much more premeditated thru habit. But other than media feeding frenzies that are less likely than being struck by lightning, it simply doesn't happen, if anything the violence level seems to be dropping despite the population and poverty levels increasing.. If something that consumes large amounts of time and thought has no effect on behavior at all, then a random impulse taking up relatively less time and thought probably has even less effect on behavior.
Not in any game I've ever played. You take a level 1 trainee mage up against a "boss" dragon, you get turned into ashes. Not fun at all.
I think a better way to study the influence of violent video games would be to study attitudes in boys about sizing up the opposition, and estimating the oppositions abilities, having a plan for running for it, and sharing gossip with their buddies about the best way to beat the other kid.
I'm thinking there is no influence... Stories about my grandfather getting into fights as a little kid sound about like my sons stories, yet my grandfather was too young for video games by about half a century.
Typical boy fight for the last couple centuries or longer: "Well he said some $#%^ so I decided to whack him one to teach him a lesson and one thing led to another and next thing you know we're in the principals office getting disciplined"
Theoretical boy fight, when affected by video games: "Well I heard he drops phat loot and my buddy told me he's vulnerable to bludgeoning weapons and I need a defense against his poisonous spit, and I figured he's about a level 9 boy based on his STR and CON, and I'm about a level 10 boy based on my WIS and INT and CHA, so I figured I can take him pretty easily, and I got a cellphone-rune-of-recall if I need help, and a level 2 flask of bactine and a healers kit of bandaids, so I'm all good, I'm gonna camp his respawn point and get him when he steps off the school bus".
Sure, but it's still just an ICBM. The Shuttle launch is a completely different animal to watch lift off
I think we are well out of the limits of logical discussion about tangible things, but I wish you well anyway. I'd agree with you if it didn't burn chemical fuel, or did horizontal takeoff, or the (manned?) boosters flew themselves back to the launch site for reuse on the next launch, or it used a launch loop or something equally exotic, but... the physics and chemistry are pretty much the same.
What's the point of having a really sweet ride, if you can't afford to fly it anywhere? As I see it, if the US's space program dies, then the Shuttle killed it. As I see it, there's no place for the Shuttle whether the US chooses to have a space program or not.
Maybe rephrased a little: After all the budget cuts, the only purpose remaining for the shuttle was to visit the station, and the only purpose of the station was to have the shuttle visit it. Once one is gone, the other will rapidly follow. And at least superficially we'll never be able to do either again, unless we do both, which makes it quite unlikely. Looks like we're leaving the universe to more advanced countries, like China, Europe...
Sure, but going to the first and last launch of a vessel that will be shuttered for tech that's even more ancient would mean more. I can see ICBM launches all the time at Vandenberg
Soyuz-TMA is much more modern than an ancient space shuttle. And not by a small amount either. The new TMA-M revision is younger than my youngest kid... in comparison the shuttle was designed before my parents first met... And I "waited until later in life" to have kids.
And then, on the following day, a drunk college student will pass out and have the formula smeared all over his face by his almost equally drunk 'friends'
Do people already do stuff like this with current solutions like rogain / minidoxal / whatever? One thought I had once was it is odd that people like body mods like surgery and piercing and hair dye and fooling around trimming and painting their nails, not to forget having their skin all permanently inked up, but even on the weirdest darkest corners of the internet I've never heard about people doing "alternative hair growth". You know those guys at the pro football games who take their shirts off so the camera takes their picture and they've got body paint in the theme of their local sports team? How come nobody has ever grown a big fuzzy green bay "G" or something like that? Or those furry people getting.. really furry? Or 12 year old kids growing beards so as not to be carded buying booze and tobacco?
Mice are covered with hair. I envision getting an injection and suddenly sprouting hair... freaking everywhere. Also what happens if my eyebrows and nose hair are out of control already, and now I turbocharge them? And my back hair that already keeps me warm in the winter?
This is reported on a website that also reports the following "NEW" stories: 1) Scare story about web traffic monitoring (around since the 90s) 2) designer babies are coming (since the 40s or so, at least since the 80s, I've seen the discover magazines to prove it) 3) multi-axis CNC milling machines exist and are shiny (uh, since the 60s) 4) automation might lead to economic problems (since the 00s, 1900s I mean) 5) nanotech techniques exist to engrave things (since the 90s)
So I'm just askin', and its a fair question, is this breathless report about that newly invented drug.. Minoxidil / Rogaine? Could the site really be so out of touch to report something that old as new? Or is it kind of a campy humor site, kinda like the onion?
Are there really people out there who upgrade their CPU's so often that this is even an issue?
Since the early 90s my game plan has always been two step upgrades... buy the newest MB with the cheapest slowest CPU available (usually pretty good anyway). Then when the fastest CPU available is cheap (because its pseudo obsolete) I buy that chip and install it on the MB. Over the years I've had plenty of fun... Some boards need to have the BIOS flashed to support the most recent CPUs...
Looks like the price of AM3 CPUs will be collapsing in the next couple months, so I'll be upgrading the CPU.
In a couple years or so, lets say late 2012, I'll buy a fancy new "bulldoze" motherboard and the cheapest CPU available for it...
Serious point: I've always wondered why more people simply don't walk right out of restaurants without paying. Food at a lot of big chain restaurants and trendy, expensive spots are way overpriced -- so why do people pay? It's not like there are doormen or video cameras. Why not just walk out the front the front door?
Almost all the money comes from someone trying to impress someone else with how much they spent... Not being seen paying the bill would kind of defeat that purpose. Much like "why tip if you'll never see that waiter again?" So you can be seen tipping by your date, of course.
Places that actually focus on food filling a stomach, poor quality though it might be, know this, so McDonalds, Taco Bell, etc, require you to pay at the counter.
OK interesting. Looks like Alg2 gets the debris. Back when alg I and alg II were just one class, 2.2 conic was done in trig class, no idea what 2.6 is or when we covered it, 2.7 was definitely pre-algebra... And I think 2.5 may have been mushed into or next to the trigonometric identities section in trig class.
I always kind of thought math education was about as permanent and unchanging as euclid's elements but apparently stuff gets shuffled around a lot.
Although what we REALLY need a class on is "common sense" how to deal with money. Interest, balancing a 'checkbook'/banking account. Hell I'd settle for 'this is how you count back money.'
We had tracks based on ability, and you're describing the "general math" / "consumer math" track.
Lots of bitter feeling toward it... Generally speaking, the kids who were not going to make any money got all the education about money, while the kids who were going to make fat stacks of cash were carefully not educated about money but instead educated on stuff far beyond what they'd ever use on the job.
Logic if it was deductively reasoned, stat if it was based on a correlation coefficient calculation, business-marketing class if it was based on an advertisement.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a horrible, horrible idea. If you make photosynthesis more efficient, plants won't have to spend all their time generating food. A few hours a day, and they'll have all they need. Soon enough, plants will have more free time than they know what to do with. They'll wake up in the morning, spend a couple of hours making sugar, and spend the rest of the day sitting in coffee shops and arguing about the finer points of whatever passes for philosophy among the members of the plant kingdom.
There is a (very tiny) gem of a real issue in your ... whatever. 50% more photosynthesis means 50% more sucrose (or whatever) means 50% more water needed to keep osmotic pressure constant. Or growth rate increases 50% meaning you need 50% more protein and cellulose synthesis required means 50% more fertilizer required. But that will screw up the ionic balance of the dirt so you need 50% more root growth and or 50% more inorganic filler (sand?) in the soil. Think of a factory, you make one machine at one station 50% faster, that does not mean the rest of the factory nor the supply chain not the distribution chain will run 50% faster.
Now what it would do, is make it possible to grow greenhouse crops at pretty high latitudes during the winter. You just have to balance the costs of running a greenhouse in the winter, vs the cost of inter-hemispheric aircraft shipping to see which is "worse" along with balancing vitamin deficiencies etc.
My point is, humans are not even remotely smart enough to be messing with ... without making some really big mistakes first.
What do you think of fire, or the wheel?
I think people are gonna object to being sold "greens" which are entirely black. Aesthetics matter just a teensy bit when it comes to food.
Then it'll mostly go to starving people. Its not like its going to be thrown away. Hey starving person, here's a pitch black head of lettuce... oh you don't like the color? Gimme it back then, I'll give it to someone whom prefers not to die of starvation. bye bye starving person and have a nice day or whatever you have left?
Meanwhile I contemplate my side dish last weekend of diced apples, caramelized diced onions, chopped red bell peppers and some seasoning. Tasted bettter than it sounds. Not much "green" but it all came from the produce aisle...
There have been ex-engineers interviewed about with regard to the meltdown. TEPCO have concealed incidents, installed shoddy protections and go with lowest bidder rather than safest product.
In about 5 seconds of googling "TEPCO incidents" or "TEPCO unethical" you can see a myriad of articles with quotes from engineers and monitoring groups about how TEPCO has deceived the Japanese government.
Just because you don't keep up with the news doesn't mean others don't.
There is also an important difference between TEPCO and, say, BP last year. BP had a pretty shoddy record on average, although it was highly variable and they generally cleaned up each individual site to a reasonable standard. The 3rd party they contracted with to drill their well had a very clean record, winning awards, etc, at least until the well blew... TEPCO on the other hand, has repetitive multiple violations at the very same plant that melted down, but the irony is that this was not an operational failure, but a design specification failure... The meltdown was baked into the cake decades ago when they made the blueprints and tidal wave far higher than design spec arrived. And the reactor was designed by ... GE. Yes, America nuked Japan yet again. (Given GEs current hiring trends, much like IBM, very soon they will have no legal American citizen employees other than maybe the CEO or something, although decades ago when they built the reactors, GE was an American company)
Cinematics, story and voice acting in your average videogame cannot come close to the equivalent in feature films. Games are event-driven, so they're choppy by nature. There are games like Metal Gear Solid that have great cut scenes, but many gamers have complained that it seems more like a movie than a game. That seems like it's always going to be an argument, because if people wanted to watch a movie they would do so. They wouldnt be playing games
On the other hand, check out this list:
1) No one makes any money but the distributors due to crooked accounting, and the distributors are being destroyed by "the internet".
2) Mass distributed content is formulaic and repetitive remakes of the same tired old ideas and frankly hasn't had anything new or fresh in many years.
3) 1% of the population is fanatic about it, the other 99% simply do not care.
4) Everyone in the biz thinks the world revolves around them, everyone outside the biz doesn't care at all about them (huge cultural impedance mismatch)
5) It takes a huge investment of time to understand the inside jokes, none of which are funny.
Sounds like a pretty good match!
Wow, we're catching up with what Symbian could do in 1998
Palm in 1996?
http://www.hotpaw.com/rhn/files/CBASPAD.TXT
If there's one truth of IT / CS / gadgets its that everything old, is eventually new again.
Funny! All these desktops look the same from inside a command prompt.
There was an interval in the 00s (or was it the 90s?) where the only way to get a tabbed console was from KDE's Konsole. Now even the XFCE terminal has it.
The facts are (good or bad) that most businesses of any significant size use Excel spreadsheets that include complex scripting macros and othe "advanced" features.
Come on man, I'm there and its exclusively used as the corporate standard database management system and the most advanced features we use are exclusively typographical (Could you center that title, put it in Times-Roman, blue, and make it bigger?)
I worked at a place that used lotus-123 as its desktop publishing system. No other word processor had quite that advanced, flexible, and easy to use system for tabs/columns -n- forms.
and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis.
Or rephrased, roughly 96% of the "users" sign in less than daily. The graph would be interesting to see. My wife checks FB at maximum interval of a couple hours. Everyone knows someone like that, but that doesn't mean they're a statistically relevant population.
My print newspaper never used to put "some guy down the pub thought ..." in the middle of its stories.
They just didn't attribute it. The stereotype of the hard drinking reporter didn't come out of thin air.
National has gone downhill since Robert Pease retired. If you don't know who Pease is, then you probably don't know much about analog electronics. Thats all I'm saying.
Though Gelertner’s patents were upheld by the court, Judge Davis threw out the $625.5 million damage award and closed the case in Apple’s favor.
Isn't this like saying "Apple infringed on your patents, but they won't have to pay anything. Have a nice day."
"You have successfully convinced me you have a nice patent. You have not convinced me it has anything whatsoever to do with Apple, or VLM at /., or chemicaldave at /. or pretty much anything else"
I think you're missing the point - there's no consequence for violence that you commit in games. Take COD, you shoot dozens if not hundreds of human beings in that game and get rewarded for it.
I think you've never played COD or any FPS and certainly never played any RPG. Thats OK; different strokes for different folks. The whole point is no one other than the most terminally stupid, plays video games in kamikaze mode like you suggest. You plot and think and plan and experiment and replan and try again over and over. You pull the trigger for 100 milliseconds after thinking about how to do it for 100 seconds. So how much of an effect is that having on kids... Oh none at all, I see.
If video games are very carefully planned premeditated virtual murder, then "typical boy fights" should become much more premeditated thru habit. But other than media feeding frenzies that are less likely than being struck by lightning, it simply doesn't happen, if anything the violence level seems to be dropping despite the population and poverty levels increasing.. If something that consumes large amounts of time and thought has no effect on behavior at all, then a random impulse taking up relatively less time and thought probably has even less effect on behavior.
"no consequences for violence"
Not in any game I've ever played. You take a level 1 trainee mage up against a "boss" dragon, you get turned into ashes. Not fun at all.
I think a better way to study the influence of violent video games would be to study attitudes in boys about sizing up the opposition, and estimating the oppositions abilities, having a plan for running for it, and sharing gossip with their buddies about the best way to beat the other kid.
I'm thinking there is no influence... Stories about my grandfather getting into fights as a little kid sound about like my sons stories, yet my grandfather was too young for video games by about half a century.
Typical boy fight for the last couple centuries or longer: "Well he said some $#%^ so I decided to whack him one to teach him a lesson and one thing led to another and next thing you know we're in the principals office getting disciplined"
Theoretical boy fight, when affected by video games: "Well I heard he drops phat loot and my buddy told me he's vulnerable to bludgeoning weapons and I need a defense against his poisonous spit, and I figured he's about a level 9 boy based on his STR and CON, and I'm about a level 10 boy based on my WIS and INT and CHA, so I figured I can take him pretty easily, and I got a cellphone-rune-of-recall if I need help, and a level 2 flask of bactine and a healers kit of bandaids, so I'm all good, I'm gonna camp his respawn point and get him when he steps off the school bus".
Pretty obvious which is more realistic.
Sure, but it's still just an ICBM. The Shuttle launch is a completely different animal to watch lift off
I think we are well out of the limits of logical discussion about tangible things, but I wish you well anyway. I'd agree with you if it didn't burn chemical fuel, or did horizontal takeoff, or the (manned?) boosters flew themselves back to the launch site for reuse on the next launch, or it used a launch loop or something equally exotic, but ... the physics and chemistry are pretty much the same.
What's the point of having a really sweet ride, if you can't afford to fly it anywhere? As I see it, if the US's space program dies, then the Shuttle killed it. As I see it, there's no place for the Shuttle whether the US chooses to have a space program or not.
Maybe rephrased a little: After all the budget cuts, the only purpose remaining for the shuttle was to visit the station, and the only purpose of the station was to have the shuttle visit it. Once one is gone, the other will rapidly follow. And at least superficially we'll never be able to do either again, unless we do both, which makes it quite unlikely. Looks like we're leaving the universe to more advanced countries, like China, Europe...
Sure, but going to the first and last launch of a vessel that will be shuttered for tech that's even more ancient would mean more. I can see ICBM launches all the time at Vandenberg
Soyuz-TMA is much more modern than an ancient space shuttle. And not by a small amount either. The new TMA-M revision is younger than my youngest kid... in comparison the shuttle was designed before my parents first met... And I "waited until later in life" to have kids.
And then, on the following day, a drunk college student will pass out and have the formula smeared all over his face by his almost equally drunk 'friends'
Do people already do stuff like this with current solutions like rogain / minidoxal / whatever? One thought I had once was it is odd that people like body mods like surgery and piercing and hair dye and fooling around trimming and painting their nails, not to forget having their skin all permanently inked up, but even on the weirdest darkest corners of the internet I've never heard about people doing "alternative hair growth". You know those guys at the pro football games who take their shirts off so the camera takes their picture and they've got body paint in the theme of their local sports team? How come nobody has ever grown a big fuzzy green bay "G" or something like that? Or those furry people getting .. really furry? Or 12 year old kids growing beards so as not to be carded buying booze and tobacco?
There are some problems:
Mice are covered with hair. I envision getting an injection and suddenly sprouting hair ... freaking everywhere. Also what happens if my eyebrows and nose hair are out of control already, and now I turbocharge them? And my back hair that already keeps me warm in the winter?
This is reported on a website that also reports the following "NEW" stories:
1) Scare story about web traffic monitoring (around since the 90s)
2) designer babies are coming (since the 40s or so, at least since the 80s, I've seen the discover magazines to prove it)
3) multi-axis CNC milling machines exist and are shiny (uh, since the 60s)
4) automation might lead to economic problems (since the 00s, 1900s I mean)
5) nanotech techniques exist to engrave things (since the 90s)
So I'm just askin', and its a fair question, is this breathless report about that newly invented drug .. Minoxidil / Rogaine? Could the site really be so out of touch to report something that old as new? Or is it kind of a campy humor site, kinda like the onion?
Are there really people out there who upgrade their CPU's so often that this is even an issue?
Since the early 90s my game plan has always been two step upgrades... buy the newest MB with the cheapest slowest CPU available (usually pretty good anyway). Then when the fastest CPU available is cheap (because its pseudo obsolete) I buy that chip and install it on the MB. Over the years I've had plenty of fun... Some boards need to have the BIOS flashed to support the most recent CPUs...
Looks like the price of AM3 CPUs will be collapsing in the next couple months, so I'll be upgrading the CPU.
In a couple years or so, lets say late 2012, I'll buy a fancy new "bulldoze" motherboard and the cheapest CPU available for it...
Serious point: I've always wondered why more people simply don't walk right out of restaurants without paying. Food at a lot of big chain restaurants and trendy, expensive spots are way overpriced -- so why do people pay? It's not like there are doormen or video cameras. Why not just walk out the front the front door?
Almost all the money comes from someone trying to impress someone else with how much they spent... Not being seen paying the bill would kind of defeat that purpose. Much like "why tip if you'll never see that waiter again?" So you can be seen tipping by your date, of course.
Places that actually focus on food filling a stomach, poor quality though it might be, know this, so McDonalds, Taco Bell, etc, require you to pay at the counter.
And in that case, why are you wasting my time, when you could have just emailed it to me in the first place?
An accurate summary of 99% of the time I've spent in meetings over the past decades.
OK interesting. Looks like Alg2 gets the debris. Back when alg I and alg II were just one class, 2.2 conic was done in trig class, no idea what 2.6 is or when we covered it, 2.7 was definitely pre-algebra... And I think 2.5 may have been mushed into or next to the trigonometric identities section in trig class.
I always kind of thought math education was about as permanent and unchanging as euclid's elements but apparently stuff gets shuffled around a lot.
Although what we REALLY need a class on is "common sense" how to deal with money. Interest, balancing a 'checkbook'/banking account. Hell I'd settle for 'this is how you count back money.'
We had tracks based on ability, and you're describing the "general math" / "consumer math" track.
Lots of bitter feeling toward it... Generally speaking, the kids who were not going to make any money got all the education about money, while the kids who were going to make fat stacks of cash were carefully not educated about money but instead educated on stuff far beyond what they'd ever use on the job.
Set up for failure, by careful design.
Logic if it was deductively reasoned, stat if it was based on a correlation coefficient calculation, business-marketing class if it was based on an advertisement.