While there is no theoretical limit on the amount of power they can produce(well, there is, but it is more than enough energy for the foreseeable future.) there are practical problems of moving that power around. Take a look at today’s article “US Electrical Grid On the Edge of Failure” on Slashdot. I believe Europe’s grid is in better shape the US, but I know Germany has issues with moving wind generated energy from where it is produced to where it is needed.
Winds are variable and cause spikes. The sun does not shine in the night and shines little during the German winter. What then? I have seen a lot of neat ideas and theory, but in practice they don’t live up.
With top notch grids and the right circumstances we can do 20% today. From a practical standpoint we won’t be able to crack the 25% until the storage question is solved.
Comparing nuclear power vs. solar power is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. You yourself kind of hit it on the head about nighttime battery power.
Under the current grid you can get 10% to 20% of your power from wind & solar. After that things break down. Economic storage is a nut that is yet to be cracked (and in my mind one of the key factors holding back the industry). That is why you need base power from nuclear, coal or hydro.
I would also question you on why you are paying 14% more for cow power. Is it to reduce greenhouse gasses? The debate is still going if cow power helps or not. For most people adding another 6 inches of insulation in the attic would be cheaper and has a higher impact.
Not for the next 20 years, which is the current life of the reactor.
If we lived in a rational world and nuclear power was the rational answer (I don’t want to get into a debate about current nuclear reactors verse future solar panels right now) the answer would still be to tear down the reactor today and replace it with a more modern one.
A local person buys a franchise, and invests 20 years into building up the brand. After 20 years the manufactory opens a store next door. Or, better yet, sells a new franchise down the block.
The economic sense that made the partnership a “partnership” (in the sense of mutual gain) will probably shift in 10 years and be completely different after 50.
In short, it’s not illegal – probably (Tessla is trying to do this but are having a few issues).
The short answer is that you can either sell your products directly or use a franchise system but you can’t compete against your own franchise system. It is to stop big business from abusing around small, locally owned business who are highly active in local politics. (I can point to abuses on both sides)
Just expanding. There are 3 main types of organizations For Profit - Engaged in business for their shareholders. Pays taxes. Not for Profit - Engaged in business for their members / customers. Think Co-Ops, Mutual, Credit Union, etc. Does not pay taxes exactly but there are a lot of quirk bits. Non Profit – Engaged in charity or what not. Business activity is incidental.
I will point out that a lot of Non-Profits have wholly owned For Profit sub-divisions. The commercial side acts and pays taxes like a business, but pays its dividend to the non-profit side. (Example, Girl Scouts selling cookies is incidental to being a Girl Scout. It’s basically a fundraiser. If they every opened up a retail store that store would have to be a For Profit business.)
Well, the invoice part is not that odd – non-profits do it all of the time. When they buy something they get a invoice. When they sell something they generate a invoice. And it is not odd for non-profits to sell stuff. For example my local botanical garden, which is non-profit, will send invoice you if you hold a wedding on the grounds.
When you make a donation you should get a receipt – proof for the IRS.
When you donate you might be able to specify a very specific project. Real life example – “Richard Johnson Memorial Urinal. “ (I hope he had a sense of humor)
You might be able to demand a review of the accounting for a project. This is generally done for people who have made large donations and will likely make more donations if they know they money is well spent. Heck, sometimes they hire outside auditors.
However, I have never heard of a donator asking for a specific invoice. In my example, the plumber’s bill.
Generally yes - Which is what makes the retroactive thing from management so weird.
As the specific issue you bring up there are certain exceptions. If the company gets something specific back from the “donation” that part does not count. i.e. If you donated $5,000 and they gave you a tote bag (retail value $5) or custom reports for your firm (retail value $5,000) you would need to reduce the amount tax purposes. (And yes, lots of subjective loophole stuff here.)
Why was it important to management that the money be earmark for a specific invoice”able” item?
If you wanted to street the project to something specific, then maybe. But retroactively ? I can’t think of any specific trigger in the tax code that would require that of a donation.
And I can’t think of any good reasons from a management viewpoint. If you want to make sure the money is spent wisely then you need to review the quality of management (or whomever decides to spend the money) not on a particular purchase. (example, the management may have done a very good job in choosing which 3D printer to purchase, but if it is a software project and does need a 3D printer it is a waste )
This just seems weird. If I were working at a charity and received this I am not sure how I would respond.
If they lend money then they are banks. They may not be traditional banks but they are still banks. (or maybe we could find a fancy word for them like finance company.) Heck, I would even classify peer to peer lenders as banks because they provided substantially the same services.
I think you are trying to be funny. In reality you would get it from the bank.
Banks are turning to Facebook / web analytics, etc. when the credit history from TransUnion etc. is thin to non-existent. Think of the unbanked, young people, 3rd world – or just climbing out of 3rd world status.
Everything that I have read about this (as of today) is coming from big banks or internet start ups.
Minor implementation differences and fairness. Hmmm.
What you see as a minor implementing difference is the key difference between QD and OD.
I should point out that OD markets can be abused. The obvious one is if you can figure out the orders in the orderbook / database. If you can figure this out you will have the edge on your completion. (This is particularly true when you are trying to sell a large block of stock that can’t be cleared on a single trade.)
As for fairness, do you want to be theoretically fair or practically fair. Would you be happier if you had to pay more for a system that was “fair”. Look up Shortfall Implementation – I think wiki has a very short article on it. It is the gold standard on determining order cost and quality. For the past 50 years QD systems offer better costs then OD systems. It has narrower margins, deeper liquidity, and more robust during dynamic swings.
The issue that I have is that the two systems have been tried out side by side and QD offers the better value which, I would argue, is more fair.
How is DS9 not optimistic? Was the war end with genocide of the Founders or with a just treaty that implied ongoing peace? In DS9, the rouge Section 31 – doing extreme things that the Federation can’t do – is portrayed as the villain, not the hero.
Being optimistic is not the same as being naïve. One can be in dark places and dream of a better tomorrow.
I guess I don’t see a conflict between optimism and weighty, darker issues. I am not sure which episodes you are thinking about but I am thinking about DS9 where there was a conflict on what to do and how to react to the Dominion’s shapshifters, which has echoes in today’s “war on terror”.
But I felt that the show always tugged the viewer towards the higher moral ground of hope and optimism over fear and xenophobia.
As for a weak Federation – in my mind the way the Federation binds dozen of races and hundreds of worlds together is that everybody is highly committed to a set of core values of openness, equality, justice, etc. Something that would not erode in 10 years.
A weakened but proud Federation yes – but not a weak Federation.
I am not saying it is going to be a bad show. I am o.k. with dark and gritty. I am o.k. with ST maturing over the years. This just seems to be a unnatural mutation. Launch the show as something else.
Star Trek for me always had a certain ethos. Peaceful exploration, conflict could be solved with enlightened rational diplomacy. There were a few phaser blasts, but it always ended on a positive optimistic note about the future. Yes, Kirk was a big Boy Scout.
“This necessitates more drastic measures, some of which are outside the Federation’s jurisdiction.”
This is not Star Trek. This is not optimism in human (and alien) nature. I could be a fine show – it just not going to be good Star Trek. It would be like the Doctor running around with a Sonic Blaster instead of a Sonic Screwdriver. Just the wrong vibe.
Of the 80% reduction in costs, 20% is attributed to compressed bid/ask spread and 60% For both of those figures, most of the gain in both of figures can be attributed to high speed algorithmic trading systems.
Who uses speed algorithmic trading systems? Pension funds, trading desks, mutual funds, hedge funds, market markets, etc. Which of these are HFT? That’s a subjective judgment – kind of boils down to the person’s intent.
Do you know anything about “order driven market”(OD)?–Because your method sounds like that type of system (If I am wrong, let me know). NASDAQ, and most of the world, uses quote driven (QD) system.
OD systems do work. The German Bourse and Paris Bourse were 2 good examples. However, most OD stock exchanges have moved to (QD) in the past 20 years because they are more efficient. The same stock could be trading both on the London and Paris exchange and the London exchange would offer the lower cost.
Now let me be specific about cost – I am talking about total cost, both explicit, implicate, and opportunity costs. You may refer to it as quality but the industry calls it a cost. QD systems are more certain. Your order is more likely to be executed at the price you have specified. With OD systems your order tends to go through a couple of “ticks” and the price wanders from your decision point so the price is different. A lot of trades are canceled.
There are decades worth of data to back this up and I am approaching this form a purely pragmatic viewpoint, I am not claiming that QD systems are inherently or theoretically better than OD systems – and I am sure we can find a few cases where OD systems are better.
I was responding specifically to the OP ½ cent mark. In the 90s, under fully electronic trading, the bid/ask spread was between 12.5 to 25 cents . Today it is under a penny. Why the compression? Computers are not like fairy dust – sprinkling them around does not automaticity solve problems. It is the fact that we have gone from 4 market markers to dozens of HFT acting as de facto market makers.
(Which then brings up a tricky question of what a HFT is. The big boring index funds trade like a HFT in an electronic exchange even though their intentions are radically different.)
As for the tick system – The problem is that you are assuming that at any given second at a given price that supply and demand are equal. When there is an imbalance how do you pick which trades gets execute and which ones are delayed. There are markets that work on “order book” where a exchange agent manages the flows. In practice, these markets have higher trading costs once you factor in indirect costs.
(And I am not so sure about stock exchanges not being in more than one place. NASDAQ is heavily decentralized. Speculating, I would guess the outage was due to a software not hardward.)
I think what you want to say is “only a billion” – as in it is small and falling number in historical terms.
Then let’s view trading costs as analogous to waste friction in a mechanical system – the lower the better. How should we measure this waste? Read up on “Implementation shortfall”. It’s the gold standard in the industry. (Rarely implemented because it’s complex, but still, the best theoretical method of measuring waste.) Now, anybody claiming much about how much made what when or the effect of which market maker or HFT needs to be treated with a large grain of salt. Those numbers are highly propitiatory. However, we can, and have, measured the cost of trading at mutual funds – which have to publish a lot of public information.
Rewind the clock to the 90s and you can see that the costs have fallen by 80%. Why is that? In the old days, the 30 odd market makers on the NYSE would make billions each year – mostly risk fee. We can probably trace about ½ the gain to HFT.
In the old days (80s, 90s), when it was seconds, the middle men grabbed 12.5 to 25 cents per share. Before then, when it was minutes, they would grab 50 cents. Costs for the average small investor have fallen by over 90%. If you invest in index funds your costs have fallen by over 95%. (But wait you say – I don’t trade my index funds. Look at your funds expense ratio, pull out the supplementary prospectus information on what portion of that is trading costs for the past 20 years, and gap.)
Or, to put it another way, would you rather have dozens of HFT fighting for your business or an oligopoly of clique, cozy partnerships. Not saying it is perfect but that it is an improvement.
There are a lot of steps between fertilized egg to a adult that we are still unraveling. We know that some genes are expressed differently deepening on the conditions within the womb – nutrition, diet, etc.
And if you want an argument that cloning would not work, look at his son Julian Lennon. He looks, sings, and plays like him. If the Beatles were ever to reunite – more likely prior to George Harrison passing, Julian should have taken the place of his father. Yet Julian albums were never his fathers. Kind of a blessing and a curse.
The least develop countries are growing really fast and they are on the cusp of a breakout. Sadly, they have been in this position 2, 3 times during the 20th century and have failed, but maybe this time is different. On top of that a lot of their population is immigrating to the first world, repatriating money back. If these people join, the sticky network effect comes into play.
And for all the cynicism out there, corporations just don’t look to next quarter’s results. Most have long term plans where the report progress on a quarterly basis.
So is this effort really charitable, or a cynical attempt to break into new markets?
Why can’t it be both? If the past 50 years have taught us anything, it is that Adam Smith’s invisible hand of bottom up price signals are far better than a altruistic top down approach. (And if somebody accuse me of being a evil Liberation I will point out that is a different argument – different level and types of regulations will affect the market and price signals and the society you get. As the OP said, if the internet provided is free and unrestricted why does it matter? And yes, I am with a small l. I am too pragmatic to be an ideology.)
... There is a limited set of slots.... proper high-school courses
Rationing, by definition, is when you allocate goods on something other than demand. Are there limited slots? Check. So, if there are 100 slots for electrical engineers and 150 apply what happens? What if next year 250 apply – and they all have higher high school grades then the year before? And if education is truly free, why are there a limited number of slots? Who decides how many slots there should be? Does everybody who wants an elite education get one?
My mind boggles not because you have a fair and just society, it because you have a hard time understanding what rationing is. Sweden, by your own words rations its education. And education is not free – somebody has to pay.
So I think you kind of missed my point. How much money should we spend on education? Rationing can be a fair system if done transparently and with broad support from society. (Well, kind of. I would still have some nits to pick, but that would go to the question of what is fair and equal and kind of out of scope.) Free and subsidized goods tend to be over purchased – which may be a good thing. Education has a lot of positive externalizes. Children from poor families may not by enough because risks and costs are too high. Or it may be a bad thing. I know a lot of people who have master in business, arts (chamber music, creative writing, etc.), counseling, etc. who don’t use them.
So, how do we pick? Maybe your method is better. Or maybe you are a special case. It is hard to pick apart cause and effect in the social sciences. Is Sweeden’s homogenous values at the root – or does the homogeneity cause the values?
So let me end with a story – it is about a friend of mine. She was a late bloomer whose family disapproved of egg head, intellectuals, and thus education. She did the classic American thing - worked as an linemen, played professional woman’s basketball in Italy, completed community college then college. She wanted to be a Veterinarian and was qualified to go but there were too few slots so she was rejected. Instead she went to Ross, a Caribbean University who will accept anybody who has the money. (Their graduates are as good as anybody’s but they funk out 50% of their students.). Now she is a Vet.
Would that have worked in Sweden? Could a 30 year old person who is capable but has an irregular resume get a slot? Or would that go to a 22 year old recent grad – somebody who more looks the part? In France I suspect she would not get that slot.
Slashdot Mirror
While there is no theoretical limit on the amount of power they can produce(well, there is, but it is more than enough energy for the foreseeable future.) there are practical problems of moving that power around. Take a look at today’s article “US Electrical Grid On the Edge of Failure” on Slashdot. I believe Europe’s grid is in better shape the US, but I know Germany has issues with moving wind generated energy from where it is produced to where it is needed.
Winds are variable and cause spikes. The sun does not shine in the night and shines little during the German winter. What then? I have seen a lot of neat ideas and theory, but in practice they don’t live up.
With top notch grids and the right circumstances we can do 20% today. From a practical standpoint we won’t be able to crack the 25% until the storage question is solved.
Comparing nuclear power vs. solar power is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. You yourself kind of hit it on the head about nighttime battery power.
Under the current grid you can get 10% to 20% of your power from wind & solar. After that things break down. Economic storage is a nut that is yet to be cracked (and in my mind one of the key factors holding back the industry). That is why you need base power from nuclear, coal or hydro.
I would also question you on why you are paying 14% more for cow power. Is it to reduce greenhouse gasses? The debate is still going if cow power helps or not. For most people adding another 6 inches of insulation in the attic would be cheaper and has a higher impact.
Not for the next 20 years, which is the current life of the reactor.
If we lived in a rational world and nuclear power was the rational answer (I don’t want to get into a debate about current nuclear reactors verse future solar panels right now) the answer would still be to tear down the reactor today and replace it with a more modern one.
Here is the reason.
A local person buys a franchise, and invests 20 years into building up the brand. After 20 years the manufactory opens a store next door. Or, better yet, sells a new franchise down the block.
The economic sense that made the partnership a “partnership” (in the sense of mutual gain) will probably shift in 10 years and be completely different after 50.
Here is another good article
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/19/172402376/why-buying-a-car-never-changes
In short, it’s not illegal – probably (Tessla is trying to do this but are having a few issues).
The short answer is that you can either sell your products directly or use a franchise system but you can’t compete against your own franchise system. It is to stop big business from abusing around small, locally owned business who are highly active in local politics. (I can point to abuses on both sides)
Just expanding. There are 3 main types of organizations
For Profit - Engaged in business for their shareholders. Pays taxes.
Not for Profit - Engaged in business for their members / customers. Think Co-Ops, Mutual, Credit Union, etc. Does not pay taxes exactly but there are a lot of quirk bits.
Non Profit – Engaged in charity or what not. Business activity is incidental.
I will point out that a lot of Non-Profits have wholly owned For Profit sub-divisions. The commercial side acts and pays taxes like a business, but pays its dividend to the non-profit side. (Example, Girl Scouts selling cookies is incidental to being a Girl Scout. It’s basically a fundraiser. If they every opened up a retail store that store would have to be a For Profit business.)
Well, the invoice part is not that odd – non-profits do it all of the time. When they buy something they get a invoice. When they sell something they generate a invoice. And it is not odd for non-profits to sell stuff. For example my local botanical garden, which is non-profit, will send invoice you if you hold a wedding on the grounds.
When you make a donation you should get a receipt – proof for the IRS.
When you donate you might be able to specify a very specific project. Real life example – “Richard Johnson Memorial Urinal. “ (I hope he had a sense of humor)
You might be able to demand a review of the accounting for a project. This is generally done for people who have made large donations and will likely make more donations if they know they money is well spent. Heck, sometimes they hire outside auditors.
However, I have never heard of a donator asking for a specific invoice. In my example, the plumber’s bill.
Generally yes - Which is what makes the retroactive thing from management so weird.
As the specific issue you bring up there are certain exceptions. If the company gets something specific back from the “donation” that part does not count. i.e. If you donated $5,000 and they gave you a tote bag (retail value $5) or custom reports for your firm (retail value $5,000) you would need to reduce the amount tax purposes. (And yes, lots of subjective loophole stuff here.)
Why was it important to management that the money be earmark for a specific invoice”able” item?
If you wanted to street the project to something specific, then maybe. But retroactively ? I can’t think of any specific trigger in the tax code that would require that of a donation.
And I can’t think of any good reasons from a management viewpoint. If you want to make sure the money is spent wisely then you need to review the quality of management (or whomever decides to spend the money) not on a particular purchase. (example, the management may have done a very good job in choosing which 3D printer to purchase, but if it is a software project and does need a 3D printer it is a waste )
This just seems weird. If I were working at a charity and received this I am not sure how I would respond.
If they lend money then they are banks. They may not be traditional banks but they are still banks. (or maybe we could find a fancy word for them like finance company.) Heck, I would even classify peer to peer lenders as banks because they provided substantially the same services.
I think you are trying to be funny. In reality you would get it from the bank.
Banks are turning to Facebook / web analytics, etc. when the credit history from TransUnion etc. is thin to non-existent. Think of the unbanked, young people, 3rd world – or just climbing out of 3rd world status.
Everything that I have read about this (as of today) is coming from big banks or internet start ups.
Minor implementation differences and fairness. Hmmm.
What you see as a minor implementing difference is the key difference between QD and OD.
I should point out that OD markets can be abused. The obvious one is if you can figure out the orders in the orderbook / database. If you can figure this out you will have the edge on your completion. (This is particularly true when you are trying to sell a large block of stock that can’t be cleared on a single trade.)
As for fairness, do you want to be theoretically fair or practically fair. Would you be happier if you had to pay more for a system that was “fair”. Look up Shortfall Implementation – I think wiki has a very short article on it. It is the gold standard on determining order cost and quality. For the past 50 years QD systems offer better costs then OD systems. It has narrower margins, deeper liquidity, and more robust during dynamic swings.
The issue that I have is that the two systems have been tried out side by side and QD offers the better value which, I would argue, is more fair.
How is DS9 not optimistic? Was the war end with genocide of the Founders or with a just treaty that implied ongoing peace? In DS9, the rouge Section 31 – doing extreme things that the Federation can’t do – is portrayed as the villain, not the hero.
Being optimistic is not the same as being naïve. One can be in dark places and dream of a better tomorrow.
I guess I don’t see a conflict between optimism and weighty, darker issues. I am not sure which episodes you are thinking about but I am thinking about DS9 where there was a conflict on what to do and how to react to the Dominion’s shapshifters, which has echoes in today’s “war on terror”.
But I felt that the show always tugged the viewer towards the higher moral ground of hope and optimism over fear and xenophobia.
As for a weak Federation – in my mind the way the Federation binds dozen of races and hundreds of worlds together is that everybody is highly committed to a set of core values of openness, equality, justice, etc. Something that would not erode in 10 years.
A weakened but proud Federation yes – but not a weak Federation.
I am not saying it is going to be a bad show. I am o.k. with dark and gritty. I am o.k. with ST maturing over the years. This just seems to be a unnatural mutation. Launch the show as something else.
Don’t sign me up.
Star Trek for me always had a certain ethos. Peaceful exploration, conflict could be solved with enlightened rational diplomacy. There were a few phaser blasts, but it always ended on a positive optimistic note about the future. Yes, Kirk was a big Boy Scout.
“This necessitates more drastic measures, some of which are outside the Federation’s jurisdiction.”
This is not Star Trek. This is not optimism in human (and alien) nature. I could be a fine show – it just not going to be good Star Trek. It would be like the Doctor running around with a Sonic Blaster instead of a Sonic Screwdriver. Just the wrong vibe.
And another reply - I just remember some OD markets – “Dark Pools”, like Instinet are OD, not QD.
(And I dislike Dark Pools, not because they are OD but because they are dark.)
Less causation then you think.
Of the 80% reduction in costs, 20% is attributed to compressed bid/ask spread and 60% For both of those figures, most of the gain in both of figures can be attributed to high speed algorithmic trading systems.
Who uses speed algorithmic trading systems? Pension funds, trading desks, mutual funds, hedge funds, market markets, etc. Which of these are HFT? That’s a subjective judgment – kind of boils down to the person’s intent.
Do you know anything about “order driven market”(OD)?–Because your method sounds like that type of system (If I am wrong, let me know). NASDAQ, and most of the world, uses quote driven (QD) system.
OD systems do work. The German Bourse and Paris Bourse were 2 good examples. However, most OD stock exchanges have moved to (QD) in the past 20 years because they are more efficient. The same stock could be trading both on the London and Paris exchange and the London exchange would offer the lower cost.
Now let me be specific about cost – I am talking about total cost, both explicit, implicate, and opportunity costs. You may refer to it as quality but the industry calls it a cost. QD systems are more certain. Your order is more likely to be executed at the price you have specified. With OD systems your order tends to go through a couple of “ticks” and the price wanders from your decision point so the price is different. A lot of trades are canceled.
There are decades worth of data to back this up and I am approaching this form a purely pragmatic viewpoint, I am not claiming that QD systems are inherently or theoretically better than OD systems – and I am sure we can find a few cases where OD systems are better.
I was responding specifically to the OP ½ cent mark. In the 90s, under fully electronic trading, the bid/ask spread was between 12.5 to 25 cents . Today it is under a penny. Why the compression? Computers are not like fairy dust – sprinkling them around does not automaticity solve problems. It is the fact that we have gone from 4 market markers to dozens of HFT acting as de facto market makers.
(Which then brings up a tricky question of what a HFT is. The big boring index funds trade like a HFT in an electronic exchange even though their intentions are radically different.)
As for the tick system – The problem is that you are assuming that at any given second at a given price that supply and demand are equal. When there is an imbalance how do you pick which trades gets execute and which ones are delayed. There are markets that work on “order book” where a exchange agent manages the flows. In practice, these markets have higher trading costs once you factor in indirect costs.
(And I am not so sure about stock exchanges not being in more than one place. NASDAQ is heavily decentralized. Speculating, I would guess the outage was due to a software not hardward.)
I think what you want to say is “only a billion” – as in it is small and falling number in historical terms.
Then let’s view trading costs as analogous to waste friction in a mechanical system – the lower the better. How should we measure this waste? Read up on “Implementation shortfall”. It’s the gold standard in the industry. (Rarely implemented because it’s complex, but still, the best theoretical method of measuring waste.)
Now, anybody claiming much about how much made what when or the effect of which market maker or HFT needs to be treated with a large grain of salt. Those numbers are highly propitiatory. However, we can, and have, measured the cost of trading at mutual funds – which have to publish a lot of public information.
Rewind the clock to the 90s and you can see that the costs have fallen by 80%. Why is that? In the old days, the 30 odd market makers on the NYSE would make billions each year – mostly risk fee. We can probably trace about ½ the gain to HFT.
Sure.
In the old days (80s, 90s), when it was seconds, the middle men grabbed 12.5 to 25 cents per share. Before then, when it was minutes, they would grab 50 cents. Costs for the average small investor have fallen by over 90%. If you invest in index funds your costs have fallen by over 95%. (But wait you say – I don’t trade my index funds. Look at your funds expense ratio, pull out the supplementary prospectus information on what portion of that is trading costs for the past 20 years, and gap.)
Or, to put it another way, would you rather have dozens of HFT fighting for your business or an oligopoly of clique, cozy partnerships. Not saying it is perfect but that it is an improvement.
And we are not even sure of that.
There are a lot of steps between fertilized egg to a adult that we are still unraveling. We know that some genes are expressed differently deepening on the conditions within the womb – nutrition, diet, etc.
And if you want an argument that cloning would not work, look at his son Julian Lennon. He looks, sings, and plays like him. If the Beatles were ever to reunite – more likely prior to George Harrison passing, Julian should have taken the place of his father. Yet Julian albums were never his fathers. Kind of a blessing and a curse.
Because they will be worth more than you think.
The least develop countries are growing really fast and they are on the cusp of a breakout. Sadly, they have been in this position 2, 3 times during the 20th century and have failed, but maybe this time is different. On top of that a lot of their population is immigrating to the first world, repatriating money back. If these people join, the sticky network effect comes into play.
And for all the cynicism out there, corporations just don’t look to next quarter’s results. Most have long term plans where the report progress on a quarterly basis.
Mod parent up, and to quote the summary:
So is this effort really charitable, or a cynical attempt to break into new markets?
Why can’t it be both? If the past 50 years have taught us anything, it is that Adam Smith’s invisible hand of bottom up price signals are far better than a altruistic top down approach. (And if somebody accuse me of being a evil Liberation I will point out that is a different argument – different level and types of regulations will affect the market and price signals and the society you get. As the OP said, if the internet provided is free and unrestricted why does it matter? And yes, I am with a small l. I am too pragmatic to be an ideology.)
... there is no bureaucracy or rationing.
and then
Rationing, by definition, is when you allocate goods on something other than demand. Are there limited slots? Check. So, if there are 100 slots for electrical engineers and 150 apply what happens? What if next year 250 apply – and they all have higher high school grades then the year before?
And if education is truly free, why are there a limited number of slots? Who decides how many slots there should be? Does everybody who wants an elite education get one?
My mind boggles not because you have a fair and just society, it because you have a hard time understanding what rationing is. Sweden, by your own words rations its education. And education is not free – somebody has to pay.
So I think you kind of missed my point. How much money should we spend on education? Rationing can be a fair system if done transparently and with broad support from society. (Well, kind of. I would still have some nits to pick, but that would go to the question of what is fair and equal and kind of out of scope.) Free and subsidized goods tend to be over purchased – which may be a good thing. Education has a lot of positive externalizes. Children from poor families may not by enough because risks and costs are too high. Or it may be a bad thing. I know a lot of people who have master in business, arts (chamber music, creative writing, etc.), counseling, etc. who don’t use them.
So, how do we pick? Maybe your method is better. Or maybe you are a special case. It is hard to pick apart cause and effect in the social sciences. Is Sweeden’s homogenous values at the root – or does the homogeneity cause the values?
So let me end with a story – it is about a friend of mine. She was a late bloomer whose family disapproved of egg head, intellectuals, and thus education. She did the classic American thing - worked as an linemen, played professional woman’s basketball in Italy, completed community college then college. She wanted to be a Veterinarian and was qualified to go but there were too few slots so she was rejected. Instead she went to Ross, a Caribbean University who will accept anybody who has the money. (Their graduates are as good as anybody’s but they funk out 50% of their students.). Now she is a Vet.
Would that have worked in Sweden? Could a 30 year old person who is capable but has an irregular resume get a slot? Or would that go to a 22 year old recent grad – somebody who more looks the part? In France I suspect she would not get that slot.