Offer its industry leaders cheap labour, thus tempting them into moving their manufacturing capacity to your country, letting your enemy run up a debt it has no hope of ever repaying, use threats of not giving more credit to force it to devote more and more of its remaining manufacturing capacity to paying you while driving up taxes and weakening social services until the brightest young minds leave it. When it has been bled dry, cut the supply of goods, discard the hollow husk of your enemy, and keep the manufacturing plants they so graciously gave you.
You ignore the fact that China must purchase US dollars to keep its currency pegged and maintain the advantage of cheap labor. Their wealth is therefore built upon the value of the paper the US gives it. Make that paper worthless and the value of those holdings dissolves. Further, many of those shiny manfuacturing plants will be left idle and the value of goods made depreciates since the chief purchaser can no longer afford them. The massive foreign holdings of the dollar has made the United States into the equivalent of a "bank too big to let fail." Just like the corporate fat cats cashing in millions while the economy around crumbled, the US continues to happily give pieces of paper to enjoy cheap goods, finance it's wars, and feed its appetite for oil.
Actually, if you teach a man to fish, his knowledge exceeds the point where the tools are critical to the task.
The knowledge of how to fish doesn't magically give the man sustinance, to get a fish resources must be invested. The question of "fairness" is where those resources must come from. By giving the man a fish, the resource burden is placed entirely on those with nothing to gain. By teaching the man to fish the burden is placed on the same person who will ultimately benefit.
About the only thing that's going to cause him to starve to death is overfishing caused by commercial operations...
As you point out previously, the survival of the man who fishes is critically based on his tools. Without the tool, the knowledge is useless and he will die. This intimate dependency, between the fisherman and the tool-maker gives rise to specialization and trade, which in-turn allows for an overall social improvement through comparative advantage.
Greed has a place in fostering economic expansion to the betterment of everybody. Imagine a "greedy" fishing pole salesman. It is to his advantage to teach everbody he knows fishing techniques, so they can in turn buy more fishing poles from him. He has improved society to gain individual profit.
That's not to say greed is always helpful, like other concepts it can be molded towards good or evil ends. Greed does not corrupt, the corrupt use greed as a means to their goals.
And they tend to waste a lot of the food that would feed starving people too because there's a belief that if you give your product away to anyone, you can't sell it to anyone
Most starvation occurs because of distribution and political issues. Tons of food literally sit on docks rotting away because of government red tape, and in other areas local military/political figures hijack the food to control their populace.
Greed is always bad. It leads to wars, conflict and many other problems.
So do love and freedom. Harmful consequences do not always reflect the inherent morality of motivation.
It would be too easy to say that it drives people to create things. A lot of people are driven by other motivation too. They're usually the ones who bring us the greatest innovations and life-improving technologies.
Those other motivations aren't necessarily noble. War brought us the computer, internet, space travel, cryptography, roads, etc. Social stratification helped establish rights and obligations of government towards the people.
As mentioned before, it's typically the individual who is corrupt and leverages institutions to meet their goals, rather than the institutions themselves being corrupt in nature.
He was contending that perhaps we should be looking to a system that worked for the good of all rather than the short term benefit of some
The two are not mutually exclusive.
We cannot extrapolate the long-term social implications of how we use our resources. Look at the cliche of the man and the fish. Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish he may end up starving if his fishing pole breaks. The unpredictability of the world means that there is no perfect answer on how best to use resources. Best intentions do not necessarily translate into best results.
For decades the greed of industrialization was seen as bad, it put workers out of employment. Later the plenty created by industrial efficiencies created an improved standard of living. Now the pendulum has swung back and the environmental impact of industrialization poses a long-term social threat. Trying to identify how best to allocate resources for the benefit of all requires amazing powers of premonition.
Seriously, if anyone with inside information wanted to cash in on it, how difficult would it be not to get caught? Just make sure not to leave a trail or be obvious about it.
It's not trivial to successfully hide insider trading. When you're talking about executives moving thousands of shares, those moves must be reported and will be placed under a microscope. Regulators have statistical models, that will raise red flags if trading patterns are unusual, not to mention the potential of alienating other traders left out of the loop who will take notice if things seem fishy (eg Enron).
Unfortunately, while there are plenty of tools and regulations to identify inside trader suspects, for prosecutors to actually build a case that can survive legal and political scrutiny is much more difficult.
Most 4-year comp sci programs will require some physical science which doesn't necessarily apply to the core of the subject. Beyond those close connecting subjects, the general electives allow a student to explore. Sometimes solutions to one field exist in another, only the connection hasn't been made because there is a soft wall between them. For example the Black Scholes model of options pricing was made possible by using equations from rocketry to calculate a result dynamically.
Participating in the free exchange of knowledge across subjects improves the chances of breakthrough ideas.
Apple isn't some magical place, most employers want a segment of their workforce to do "inspired" work. While a 4-year degree isn't the only way, it's one of the most common ways for a candidate to separate themselves from the people with a strictly technical focus. If you have a 2-year degree but worked on an interesting hobby like a solar car, you'll grab some attention. If you then can articulate the problems you encountered, how you solved them, and tie it into the position, you differentiate yourself.
As for Apple not considering a 4-year degree as important, a quick look through their Hardware Engineering jobs reveal many postions with a bachelor's or master's degree as minimum requirement. Without industry contacts, or other way to demonstrate skill in the field, they'll pass over your resume like any other big corporation.
But basing a countries foreign policy on 2000+ year old scribblings on goat skins is more than a little nuts.
Why? The US internal policy is a 200+ year old document, based on a 2500+ year old system (Roman Republic), influenced by an 800 year old document (Magna Carta), with a little trendy religion (Deism) mixed in.
Not that I'm a believer, but you can't objectively dismiss the social good from the "Praise Jebus!" brigade. They played a major role in abolition and dissolution of social strata because the guy nailed to a tree said all men were equal. They also influenced the adoption of public education, business reform, and social progressivism during the late 19th & early 20th century. Ironic that those same religious institutions are now fighting against progressive reform.
The scribblings don't guide the foreign policy of the book thumpers. The thumpers make foreign policy and then pick and choose the scribblings that support them.
The same basic things could be proved by technical degrees, two-year degrees, and certifications, which can be obtained more cheaply. I have a four-year degree from a university, and I'm glad I took most of the classes I took for my own benefit. But I don't know why an employer should care about some of them.
Employers care about the breadth of education from 4-year degree because it shows the student has the ability to learn subjects outside of the core competencies. A flexible and diverse workforce is important because you can't predict where the next groundbreaking idea will come from, or how a particular industry will evolve. Steve Jobs mentions the importance of calligraphy to Mac development, and the development of Perl was influenced by linguistics. A hiring manager will care about anything that sets an applicant apart.
Homework has never been a particularly reliable indicator of anything other than the ability to sit at home for some period of time and do it.
Discipline is an important aspect of education. Students learn in different ways. Some people learn from teacher instruction, others from repetition until the light bulb goes off and they "get it." Unfortunately, there are too many lazy teachers who just pick a bunch of problems out of the book with no focus or connection to classroom teaching. As you point out, homework should be tailored to the needs of a particular class to compliment other forms of instruction.
There is no need to engage in philosophical debates. You can simply look at the economic history of the last thirty years, and compare America to Canada, England, France, and Germany.
Those countries were not immune to the most recent recession. They had industry and bank bailouts, and have similar debt to GDP ratios as the US. If you look back 15 years you'd see the economic prosperity of the US. Rather than pick an arbitrary number that supports your doom-and-gloom ideas, look at the long term history. All societies have cycles of prosperity and recession, the successful economies are those that best mute the extremes of both.
A market, properly calibrated by regulation, can do amazing things when it increases competition. Remove the corrective effects of good governance, and it turns into a nightmare.
The key term is "properly calibrated," which is something difficult to assess. Too much regulation and you end up with the inefficiencies of monolithic state run organizations. Not enough and you have a playground for competition many cutting corners and placing society at risk along with boom-bust cycles.
The recent economic woes in the US (and around the world) were the result of Bush era removal of controls and oversight that had functioned for over 60 years
Sure if your really moving onto the next subject. At the level of press button and stuff happens is nearly never enough. People that spend 30 years on a subject are generally not consuming knowledge they are discovering it something that's vastly harder to do.
Yes they are the ones who don't accept black box does X. For the rest of the world it's fine we just accept what black box does and focus on to best use those properties for practical matters.
Actually yes but I find those to be part of a well rounded applied science education, but they rarely need inside a survival scenario. It's also something I know how to do so I will of course pass that onto my son. It can be useful to know how to fix a survival knife.
Just fixing a survival knife is applied learning, not deep understanding. Unless he's going in with a SEM to understand the grain structure and IMC formation of his fix, he doesn't fully understand what is going on. Without developing a theoretical materials/mechanical model of how the changes affect the knife's performance, then at some level he's just accepting how it works.
Cogs is about being a complacent consumer. Teaching somebody about how to be inquisitive is a skill that will server them well in life. How many people do you know that spend there time learning new useful things?
The two are not mutually exclusive. While I'm confident I could spend years understanding organic chemistry, anatomy, genetics, and how the body functions, I choose instead to just eat food and spend the rest of my time studying semiconductor physics and processing.
Black box does X is never enough knowledge. That would assume that you can only fit a certain amount of knowledge. While that may be technically true the limiting factor seems to be time learn not space.
Time is a huge factor and it's difficult to balance breadth vs. depth. There are people who spend 30 years on a particular subject, you can literally spend your entire life peeling back each layer of how something functions. Intelligence allows us to consume knowledge, wisdom teaches us when we've learned enough and move on to the next subject.
I do not expect that the school will teach farming of foraging. I will teach the basics of both as part of wilderness survival, something I learned and then taught as a child/young man.
Do you also teach smelting, forging, and quenching techniques, or take it a step further and study the iron-carbon phase diagram. Isn't it enough to know how to use a survival knife rather than understanding what makes it? There are millions of people who get along fine in the world accepting that food will be at the supermarket. That doesn't make them cogs, they just have a different focus on what they choose to study and learn.
Multiplication is just a shorthand for adding. The child needs to learn how to do arithmetic in there head with reasonably sized numbers and on paper with arbitrary sized numbers. Memorization is the worst way to understand anything it makes good factory worker drone bee's but not much else. Understanding why something works and being made to apply that knowledge should be the goal. Not memorize your 4's multiplication table there will be a quiz tomorrow, and forget about it next week.
Arithmetic is a tool, depending on what a person is interested in just accepting the black box does X may be enough knowledge. An engineer doesn't need to know how a transistor is manufactured to design a circuit or program a computer.
I don't expect the private school teaches in-depth farming and foraging skills so your child can truly be self-sufficient and live off the land. Each individual must decide what they need to understand, and what to accept.
Child A: Doesn't go to school and spends all his time practicing golf.
Child B: Goes to school with 40 other students in a traditional setting
Who do you think is going to be more successful?
The answer is we don't know. Every situation is different, and definitions for "success" can vary greatly
Some people would prefer to be an uneducated millionaire athlete, others a well educated teacher earning $30k.
As a European I can confidently say that one of the worst influences the US has had on Europe in terms of culture is the spread of the "greed is good", "cash is king" and generally egocentric and egoistic ideals. That's not to say that we were all nice and friendly to each other, but the US influence can definitely be seen when comparing my home country today and thirty years ago.
The basis for US financial policy was European principles. Specifically, Hamiltonian economics emulated the British system since at the time they were the most economically successful empire. If you look further than thirty years ago you'd see European countries that had the same focus on greed. Most societies switch back and forth between periods of individual entrepreneurship followed by periods of socially focused reformation.
Which is a pretty good assumption to make, because transmissions at any other frequency (be it IR or some radio frequency) will require a totally different transmission system. An extra system means extra weight, which would increase launch costs on a system that will already be struggling to be economically competitive with ground-based systems.
Using this stuff as a weapon makes a good movie, but poor science.
It seems you're focused on a movie "zomg lazerz pew-pew" weapon. A space power station is going to have radio transmitters, and other communication/monitoring equipment which can be used for military purposes. Strategic use of a high power platform can include precision jamming of ground targets, damaging sensors on spaceborne equipment like spy satellites or missiles, or even powering other equipment making those platforms cheaper to launch. They wouldn't need to have the same level of optimization for relatively low power transmissions.
The military already has projects around all those applications. If the government is putting up such a system, then the cost of additional strategic equipment isn't going to make a difference. It's less about an economically competitive method of power generation, and more about a political trojan horse to put a high power platform in space.
Do you really think the US or China is going to spend tens of billions of dollars without considering the possible use as a weapon?
Your sarcasm is actually true. The antennas involved need to be tweaked to a specific frequency for maximum efficiency. If the military wants to do this, they'll need to build their own stuff, which they'd do anyway if they cared to.
You're assuming the design only has the capability to transmit microwaves. It's first and foremost a powerplant in space. The energy could be sent to other elements to emit infrared, radio signals, etc. Something like localized communication jamming (that DARPA has been working on) is well within the capability of such a platform. A purely military system with such a high amount of power has numerous political pitfalls. Meanwhile a "peaceful" power plant with secret (or even not-so-secret "defensive") military capabilities is an easier sell.
The third point is nothing. The energy in question is not easily absorbed by the human body or anything else that isn't specifically designed to capture microwaves. This no more contributes to space weaponization than any other activity in space.
I'm sure there is no possible way the power transmission system could be changed to emit wavelenths to do something like destroy an ICBM or cause problems with a communication/power infrastructure on earth. Just like a nuclear reactor, such a system creates a strategically significant platform under the veil of a civilian project.
It's a natural result of monopoly rights. In market segments where you have competition there's a reasonable natural limit on the value of marketing; raise your costs and prices too much and your customers will buy the competitors product instead. With monopoly rights there is nobody else to buy an equivalent product from. The price point at which your customers drop off is where they can no longer afford the product at all, which places the marketing ROI equilibrium far, far higher.
The purpose of marketing is product differentiation, which is why it is more important in segments with heavy competition. Common products like Tylenol have hundreds of millions in marketing so that the consumer "trusts" their brand name product over a generic. While it's true pharma companies market patented products to which they have monopoly rights to distribute, it is because there are alternative products which treat the same illness available to consumers. For example all the ED treatments on TV may still be covered by patents, but they are all competing against each other. The other reason for marketing is to promote off-label use of their product to expand their market. This is a grey area of fact and marketing fiction; In some ways it's healthy for the market because doctors receive extended "education", the downside is the information is skewed towards a single product. The majority of marketing budgets consist of doctor education courses and free samples, rather than television and other direct to consumer marketing.
So it's not really marketing that needs extra regulation, it's monopoly rights that need to be scrapped. There are few methods of redistributing funds within the economy that are as wasteful and damaging as the monopoly.
There are very few treatments which a single company dominates. While they may hold a monopoly on a single medication, there are usually alternative chemistries that behave in a similar fashion to treat the same illness. It is because of monopoly rights that multiple treatments are available for the same illness, with the only difference being that they work better or worse for a small portion of the population. There is no one-drug-fits-all, so it is important to create incentives for continued research into similar products. Those incentives just wouldn't be there without the artificial monopoly of IP, companies would all just pump out the same medication that works in 90% of people and ignore the other 10% of patients because the market wouldn't allow them an opportunity to recoup the research dollars.
While I agree change needs to occur. there is no easy solution to health care. If it was as easy as saying scrap IP, I would be all for it, unfortunately the world is far more complex.
Chocolate doesn't have government supported monopolies. The monopoly rights are what allow beyond free market extraction of funds, and any state supported method that drives prices beyond their competitive equilibrium is functionally equivalent to a tax (from a transfer point of view).
The FDA and health regulations create a barrier to entry, trademarks give perpetual monopolies which require litigation, and recipies are trade secrets never to be released for the public. Further, monopolies are defined by a market where there are no substitute goods. Music, movies, books, and other media have plenty of substitutes. I can listen to a band that releases it's music free as a substitute for listening to the latest pop song.
A 99 cent competitively produced hula hoop cannot be produced and sold for less than 99 cents. A 99 cent song on the other hand could, but for the government intervention, be produced for, say, 5 cents (if we use 5% efficiency, which seems on par for the music industry).
A 99 cent hula hoop could be produced more cheaply, except the government imposes regulation, not to mention the fees for lawyers and insurance if by some reason it contains some sort of dangerous substance.
That means that the wealth generated as consumer value for the song between 5 cents and 99 vents is lost to the economy with copyright (someone for whom the song is worth 98 cents wont buy it for 99 cents, while if it cost 5 cents, the added value to the economy would be 98-5 cents for that purchase, and the same effect for every purchase that would be made at valuepoints between 5 to 98 cents).
No that means that the value a consumer places on the music is equivalent to 94 cents. As mentioned before the people have the option to consume a substitute good, whether it's a free song or a 99 cent toy. There is no compulsion to purchase copyrighted material since there are plenty of equal (or better) options to spend money on.
Imagine any other government run scheme wasting 95% of the earmarked funding before the money gets to the intended recipients. It's rare with economic areas that make government programs look efficient, but the various IP types actually do.
The media industry profit margins are in line with other industries. From an economic perspective, when you walk into a movie theater it would be more "efficient" to complain about the price of the popcorn which has a far higher markup than the cost of the ticket.
That's clever, but there is a difference: if I have $5 and you decide that it isn't worth anything anymore, I don't have anything. If I have 5 pounds of grain and you decide that it isn't worth anything anymore, I can still eat it
You can always use your $5 to start a fire to keep warm or as a crude water filter. Depending on the conditions, this may be more important to survival than the grain. Intrinsic value is dependent on a person's imagination.
(If you have MacGuyver skills you can turn the cash into a new boat to escape the island.)
Slashdot Mirror
You ignore the fact that China must purchase US dollars to keep its currency pegged and maintain the advantage of cheap labor. Their wealth is therefore built upon the value of the paper the US gives it. Make that paper worthless and the value of those holdings dissolves. Further, many of those shiny manfuacturing plants will be left idle and the value of goods made depreciates since the chief purchaser can no longer afford them.
The massive foreign holdings of the dollar has made the United States into the equivalent of a "bank too big to let fail." Just like the corporate fat cats cashing in millions while the economy around crumbled, the US continues to happily give pieces of paper to enjoy cheap goods, finance it's wars, and feed its appetite for oil.
The knowledge of how to fish doesn't magically give the man sustinance, to get a fish resources must be invested. The question of "fairness" is where those resources must come from.
By giving the man a fish, the resource burden is placed entirely on those with nothing to gain. By teaching the man to fish the burden is placed on the same person who will ultimately benefit.
As you point out previously, the survival of the man who fishes is critically based on his tools. Without the tool, the knowledge is useless and he will die. This intimate dependency, between the fisherman and the tool-maker gives rise to specialization and trade, which in-turn allows for an overall social improvement through comparative advantage.
Greed has a place in fostering economic expansion to the betterment of everybody.
Imagine a "greedy" fishing pole salesman. It is to his advantage to teach everbody he knows fishing techniques, so they can in turn buy more fishing poles from him. He has improved society to gain individual profit.
That's not to say greed is always helpful, like other concepts it can be molded towards good or evil ends. Greed does not corrupt, the corrupt use greed as a means to their goals.
Most starvation occurs because of distribution and political issues. Tons of food literally sit on docks rotting away because of government red tape, and in other areas local military/political figures hijack the food to control their populace.
So do love and freedom. Harmful consequences do not always reflect the inherent morality of motivation.
Those other motivations aren't necessarily noble. War brought us the computer, internet, space travel, cryptography, roads, etc. Social stratification helped establish rights and obligations of government towards the people.
As mentioned before, it's typically the individual who is corrupt and leverages institutions to meet their goals, rather than the institutions themselves being corrupt in nature.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
We cannot extrapolate the long-term social implications of how we use our resources.
Look at the cliche of the man and the fish. Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish he may end up starving if his fishing pole breaks.
The unpredictability of the world means that there is no perfect answer on how best to use resources. Best intentions do not necessarily translate into best results.
For decades the greed of industrialization was seen as bad, it put workers out of employment. Later the plenty created by industrial efficiencies created an improved standard of living. Now the pendulum has swung back and the environmental impact of industrialization poses a long-term social threat.
Trying to identify how best to allocate resources for the benefit of all requires amazing powers of premonition.
It's not trivial to successfully hide insider trading. When you're talking about executives moving thousands of shares, those moves must be reported and will be placed under a microscope. Regulators have statistical models, that will raise red flags if trading patterns are unusual, not to mention the potential of alienating other traders left out of the loop who will take notice if things seem fishy (eg Enron).
Unfortunately, while there are plenty of tools and regulations to identify inside trader suspects, for prosecutors to actually build a case that can survive legal and political scrutiny is much more difficult.
Most 4-year comp sci programs will require some physical science which doesn't necessarily apply to the core of the subject. Beyond those close connecting subjects, the general electives allow a student to explore.
Sometimes solutions to one field exist in another, only the connection hasn't been made because there is a soft wall between them. For example the Black Scholes model of options pricing was made possible by using equations from rocketry to calculate a result dynamically.
Participating in the free exchange of knowledge across subjects improves the chances of breakthrough ideas.
Apple isn't some magical place, most employers want a segment of their workforce to do "inspired" work. While a 4-year degree isn't the only way, it's one of the most common ways for a candidate to separate themselves from the people with a strictly technical focus. If you have a 2-year degree but worked on an interesting hobby like a solar car, you'll grab some attention. If you then can articulate the problems you encountered, how you solved them, and tie it into the position, you differentiate yourself.
As for Apple not considering a 4-year degree as important, a quick look through their Hardware Engineering jobs reveal many postions with a bachelor's or master's degree as minimum requirement. Without industry contacts, or other way to demonstrate skill in the field, they'll pass over your resume like any other big corporation.
Why? The US internal policy is a 200+ year old document, based on a 2500+ year old system (Roman Republic), influenced by an 800 year old document (Magna Carta), with a little trendy religion (Deism) mixed in.
Not that I'm a believer, but you can't objectively dismiss the social good from the "Praise Jebus!" brigade. They played a major role in abolition and dissolution of social strata because the guy nailed to a tree said all men were equal. They also influenced the adoption of public education, business reform, and social progressivism during the late 19th & early 20th century. Ironic that those same religious institutions are now fighting against progressive reform.
The scribblings don't guide the foreign policy of the book thumpers. The thumpers make foreign policy and then pick and choose the scribblings that support them.
Employers care about the breadth of education from 4-year degree because it shows the student has the ability to learn subjects outside of the core competencies. A flexible and diverse workforce is important because you can't predict where the next groundbreaking idea will come from, or how a particular industry will evolve. Steve Jobs mentions the importance of calligraphy to Mac development, and the development of Perl was influenced by linguistics.
A hiring manager will care about anything that sets an applicant apart.
Discipline is an important aspect of education.
Students learn in different ways. Some people learn from teacher instruction, others from repetition until the light bulb goes off and they "get it."
Unfortunately, there are too many lazy teachers who just pick a bunch of problems out of the book with no focus or connection to classroom teaching.
As you point out, homework should be tailored to the needs of a particular class to compliment other forms of instruction.
I was a pack a day player, I think that's why I never started smoking.
Those countries were not immune to the most recent recession. They had industry and bank bailouts, and have similar debt to GDP ratios as the US.
If you look back 15 years you'd see the economic prosperity of the US. Rather than pick an arbitrary number that supports your doom-and-gloom ideas, look at the long term history. All societies have cycles of prosperity and recession, the successful economies are those that best mute the extremes of both.
The key term is "properly calibrated," which is something difficult to assess. Too much regulation and you end up with the inefficiencies of monolithic state run organizations. Not enough and you have a playground for competition many cutting corners and placing society at risk along with boom-bust cycles.
The recent economic woes in the US (and around the world) were the result of Bush era removal of controls and oversight that had functioned for over 60 years
Yes they are the ones who don't accept black box does X. For the rest of the world it's fine we just accept what black box does and focus on to best use those properties for practical matters.
Just fixing a survival knife is applied learning, not deep understanding. Unless he's going in with a SEM to understand the grain structure and IMC formation of his fix, he doesn't fully understand what is going on. Without developing a theoretical materials/mechanical model of how the changes affect the knife's performance, then at some level he's just accepting how it works.
The two are not mutually exclusive. While I'm confident I could spend years understanding organic chemistry, anatomy, genetics, and how the body functions, I choose instead to just eat food and spend the rest of my time studying semiconductor physics and processing.
Time is a huge factor and it's difficult to balance breadth vs. depth. There are people who spend 30 years on a particular subject, you can literally spend your entire life peeling back each layer of how something functions.
Intelligence allows us to consume knowledge, wisdom teaches us when we've learned enough and move on to the next subject.
Do you also teach smelting, forging, and quenching techniques, or take it a step further and study the iron-carbon phase diagram. Isn't it enough to know how to use a survival knife rather than understanding what makes it?
There are millions of people who get along fine in the world accepting that food will be at the supermarket. That doesn't make them cogs, they just have a different focus on what they choose to study and learn.
Arithmetic is a tool, depending on what a person is interested in just accepting the black box does X may be enough knowledge. An engineer doesn't need to know how a transistor is manufactured to design a circuit or program a computer.
I don't expect the private school teaches in-depth farming and foraging skills so your child can truly be self-sufficient and live off the land.
Each individual must decide what they need to understand, and what to accept.
What about the following scenario:
Child A: Doesn't go to school and spends all his time practicing golf.
Child B: Goes to school with 40 other students in a traditional setting
Who do you think is going to be more successful?
The answer is we don't know. Every situation is different, and definitions for "success" can vary greatly
Some people would prefer to be an uneducated millionaire athlete, others a well educated teacher earning $30k.
Definately Arizona State Material
The basis for US financial policy was European principles. Specifically, Hamiltonian economics emulated the British system since at the time they were the most economically successful empire.
If you look further than thirty years ago you'd see European countries that had the same focus on greed. Most societies switch back and forth between periods of individual entrepreneurship followed by periods of socially focused reformation.
It seems you're focused on a movie "zomg lazerz pew-pew" weapon. A space power station is going to have radio transmitters, and other communication/monitoring equipment which can be used for military purposes. Strategic use of a high power platform can include precision jamming of ground targets, damaging sensors on spaceborne equipment like spy satellites or missiles, or even powering other equipment making those platforms cheaper to launch. They wouldn't need to have the same level of optimization for relatively low power transmissions.
The military already has projects around all those applications. If the government is putting up such a system, then the cost of additional strategic equipment isn't going to make a difference. It's less about an economically competitive method of power generation, and more about a political trojan horse to put a high power platform in space.
Do you really think the US or China is going to spend tens of billions of dollars without considering the possible use as a weapon?
You're assuming the design only has the capability to transmit microwaves. It's first and foremost a powerplant in space. The energy could be sent to other elements to emit infrared, radio signals, etc. Something like localized communication jamming (that DARPA has been working on) is well within the capability of such a platform.
A purely military system with such a high amount of power has numerous political pitfalls. Meanwhile a "peaceful" power plant with secret (or even not-so-secret "defensive") military capabilities is an easier sell.
I'm sure there is no possible way the power transmission system could be changed to emit wavelenths to do something like destroy an ICBM or cause problems with a communication/power infrastructure on earth. Just like a nuclear reactor, such a system creates a strategically significant platform under the veil of a civilian project.
The purpose of marketing is product differentiation, which is why it is more important in segments with heavy competition. Common products like Tylenol have hundreds of millions in marketing so that the consumer "trusts" their brand name product over a generic. While it's true pharma companies market patented products to which they have monopoly rights to distribute, it is because there are alternative products which treat the same illness available to consumers. For example all the ED treatments on TV may still be covered by patents, but they are all competing against each other.
The other reason for marketing is to promote off-label use of their product to expand their market. This is a grey area of fact and marketing fiction; In some ways it's healthy for the market because doctors receive extended "education", the downside is the information is skewed towards a single product. The majority of marketing budgets consist of doctor education courses and free samples, rather than television and other direct to consumer marketing.
There are very few treatments which a single company dominates. While they may hold a monopoly on a single medication, there are usually alternative chemistries that behave in a similar fashion to treat the same illness. It is because of monopoly rights that multiple treatments are available for the same illness, with the only difference being that they work better or worse for a small portion of the population. There is no one-drug-fits-all, so it is important to create incentives for continued research into similar products. Those incentives just wouldn't be there without the artificial monopoly of IP, companies would all just pump out the same medication that works in 90% of people and ignore the other 10% of patients because the market wouldn't allow them an opportunity to recoup the research dollars.
While I agree change needs to occur. there is no easy solution to health care. If it was as easy as saying scrap IP, I would be all for it, unfortunately the world is far more complex.
The FDA and health regulations create a barrier to entry, trademarks give perpetual monopolies which require litigation, and recipies are trade secrets never to be released for the public.
Further, monopolies are defined by a market where there are no substitute goods. Music, movies, books, and other media have plenty of substitutes. I can listen to a band that releases it's music free as a substitute for listening to the latest pop song.
A 99 cent hula hoop could be produced more cheaply, except the government imposes regulation, not to mention the fees for lawyers and insurance if by some reason it contains some sort of dangerous substance.
No that means that the value a consumer places on the music is equivalent to 94 cents. As mentioned before the people have the option to consume a substitute good, whether it's a free song or a 99 cent toy. There is no compulsion to purchase copyrighted material since there are plenty of equal (or better) options to spend money on.
The media industry profit margins are in line with other industries. From an economic perspective, when you walk into a movie theater it would be more "efficient" to complain about the price of the popcorn which has a far higher markup than the cost of the ticket.
You can always use your $5 to start a fire to keep warm or as a crude water filter. Depending on the conditions, this may be more important to survival than the grain.
Intrinsic value is dependent on a person's imagination.
(If you have MacGuyver skills you can turn the cash into a new boat to escape the island.)
Maybe the blacked out portions refer to a time machine.
Intrinsic value is an individual delusion. Value varies from person to person, food is more valuable than shiny gems to somebody who is starving.