You can get by working 1/2 time. I know plenty of people that do it. The thing is they live like they did in the 1950s. 1 car, no cable, no cell phone, no internet. They own their property with a 1000 sqft double wide on it and spend their leisure hunting and fishing. Now if you want all of the modern goods you need to work full time. The fact is you can not work at all in the US and live off of societies waste better than someone who worked 100 years ago. That is the beauty of productivity and technology increases. The US waste stream contains for free better quality goods than were available to presidents and royalty 100 years ago.
Read about Deming. The idea is create a good process that is under control. You only have so many resources available. How do you allocate them teaching, improving, or testing? Demoing showed that testing every part is a waste of time and money. You only have to test every once in a while and as long as that testing shows the parts will be within specification statistically you are good. This allows you the time and money to keep improving the process making it better all the time.
Apply that to teaching. Every teacher k own that we test too much but they are forced to do it. The know it wastes time since every decent teacher knows what their students know or don't know. It would be better to spend their time helping the kids learn and improve their lessons than testing and grading. The principles job should be to help the teachers improve their skills and weed out the occasional teacher that refuses to improve. Again the principles know who the problem teachers are.
Reading the article it gives the example of one teacher reviewing her own performance and thinking how she will do better next time. That is what I was trying to convey. You don't HAVE to measure how well the teachers are doing if you have a culture where everyone is expected to improve and given the tools to do it. In the case of the cars the machinists building the parts. They weren't told they had to make parts of a certain tolence or they would be fired. They were given the tools and the education to keep improving the process. These people were then allowed to do their job. Most parts coming off a Japanese line aren't inspected. Why? Because the parts that are inspected are of such high quality they know the process is under control and there is no need to waste money testing every part. In fact you make more money concentrating on making good parts than if you test everyone because you don't have to waste time and material on scrapped parts.
This is the same with teaching. You don't have to keep testing every single kid over and over. If you examine the process, ie teacher, and know they are good.
Back when Mazda joined with Ford to make cars in the US they had a problem. Ford was building all the parts to spec but the transmissions didn't run as nice as the Japanese built ones. Then Ford ripped apart some Japanese engines and found the parts were made to MUCH tighter tolerances than the specs called for. This was because of Deming's Quality program he taught the Japanese. Basically it is never stop improving quality. Even when you are within specs keep getting better because quality will improve and your customers will be happier.
This is what needs to happen in education. It's not setting a standard and making sure teachers meet it. It is setting up a culture of excellence and pursuit of perfection even knowing it is unobtainable.
When you loan someone money there is a risk involved. The interest rate depends on the risk and if there is anything backing up the loan. The problem with student loans is that the interest rate is independent of risk and there is no collateral. The rate doesn't depend on school or degree. This is a serious flaw as it tends to push people towards easy schools and easy degrees. Also a loan is not the proper instrument for education since there is nothing to reposes if the loan is in default.
A proposal was made to establish a stock market for education. People would invest capital in students education. Instead of being a loan the repayment would be based on a percentage of income for a limited term. Say for example per $1000 invested in an electrical engineering student at MIT someone might bid.2% of income for 10 years after graduation. If the investor thinks the graduate will earn an average of $100k per year for 10 years that would be $2k in payments. An MIT education might run about $100k. So to pay for the whole thing the student would owe 20% of their income over 10 years. Now here is the big difference. The risk is borne by the investor not the student. If the student is unemployed or works for minimum wage he still owes only 20% of income. Of course if another student makes it big and earns $1M a year than the investor makes out.
The beauty of this system is that the investors will evaluate not only the students but the schools and degrees to determine what they all are worth. It is entirely possible that a student will find it cheaper in terms of % of income to go to a better school. Also degrees that have more value in the market will see cheaper rates than others and this will help guide students towards degrees that are more valuable.
Here is the problem with your theory. You make the claim they can drop prices to eliminate all competitors. Now they raise prices and make obscene profits. Obscene profits are good because they are a signal to investors there is an opportunity somewhere. So now competitors start drilling and selling their own oil thereby reducing prices.
Germany is doing so well because it's filled with Germans. Having a culture where productive work is honored instead of ridiculed helps. Also Germany (and most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, ect) spends hardly anything on military since WWII since the US pretty much guarantees their safety.
Dumping is what you call it when your competitor is much cheaper than you.
My post stands. Either you side with the consumer and let China sell cheap PV panels or you side with US producers and use protectionist methods to help the producers at the expense of the consumer.
The thing you are missing is all things are relative. Pollution may be bad but compared to what? Dangerous factories may be bad but compared to what?
When an economy is purely agricultural it is very dangerous. There are plenty of things for farmers to die from and the working conditions are outside in all weather. Compared to that a sweatshop is much nicer. You have a roof and a stool. And if you are lucky the product needs to be build in a climate controlled factory and you get to enjoy that too.
Same for pollution. When you living a subsistence life you would trade some pollution for an easier life. This is a necessarily state to pass through because you can't afford both the manufacturing capital and the environmental protection capital costs. It is only when you grow to a certain productive level can you afford safety and pollution controls. You are looking at it from a rich western lifestyle. Try to see it through the eyes of someone that is seriously worried about where their next meal is coming from. Even the poor in the US are fat.
It depends on what you are talking about. I own a straight razor that should last the rest of my life. I am happy using it and I don't see a need to ever want a new one.
But in year my cell phone will be outdated. Why spend the time and money to make one last 10 years?
As for landfills think of them as mines. We are returning materials to the earth. If those materials ever get very expensive to find in nature we can dig up the landfills. Besides in the next 20 years or so we will have advanced waste processing like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_waste_disposal so that we will recycle everything by default because it is economic to do so and not as a jobs program as it currently exists.
We are all producers and consumers. As producers we want our products to be rare and expensive. As consumers we want our products to be plentiful and cheap. You have to decide what type of world you want to live in. One that has plenty of inexpensive things or a few expensive things. I'll take cheap and plentiful.
Let's say the Chinese decided that the US was too dependent on foreign oil and as a buddy they wanted to supply us with free solar panels. As much as they could make. Would this be a good thing or bad thing? For consumers it would be great but for producers of solar panels it would be terrible. To have progress as a society you have to let consumers rule.
Get a NASA internship or Co-op while you are going to school. You will meet a lot of people in the industry including those in private space. Also if you are a co-op and do well you will end up with a NASA job. Then you can apply for a Graduate Fellowship. They will pay you for 1 year of your salary while you go full time for grad school. This way you can get your education cheap. You do owe them a couple of years after that but use that time to build up your skills on great projects before applying to private space.
Here is the beauty. You never get really good at something unless you do it often. You need lots of practice. But currently we are stuck in a catch 22 with rockets. The payloads are very expensive so you want to make sure your rocket doesn't fail. This requires lots of money typically to verify everything.
Fuel delpts turn everything upside down. Now you are launching something cheap, fuel. You can make the rockets as cheap as possible and even with a few failures it's no big deal since you are only out cheap fuel. But even with cheap rockets if you launch them often enough you will get very good at it and reliability will increase as you identify problems.
This is great for NASA too since the majority of beyond earth orbit mass is propellant. It can launch they payloads dry and do that on much smaller and cheaper rockets. Also it can just pay for fuel delivered to the depot. Any failures are on the customers dime.
Their job filter sucks. I know someone that was a government contractor and the people he worked for wanted to hire him as a federal employee. So they set up a listing that was well defined to fit his skills. He submitted his application but couldn't make it through the filter so he couldn't be hired.
I saw an opening for a job and I knew the people that put the request in. I just copied and pasted the entire job requirement and description under other information and I sailed past the filter. When I was interviewed they thought it was a computer errror that caused the ad to print at the end of my application. I told them the truth and they laughed and I got the job.
"it 'confirms that these studies were done carefully.' The study also found that warming in the temperature record was not caused by poor quality weather monitoring stations — thus rejecting a frequent claim of skeptics."
From page 2 of the report. No adjustments or corrections were made for systematic effects such as urban heat island warming or change of instrumentation.
So they did nothing to check the quality of the monitoring stations. They accepted the readings. This does nothing to reject the effect of these claims.
You are wrong. Finding more gold does cause price inflation when gold is used as currency. There have been many cases throughout history when this has happened including when Spain returned gold they captured in the Americas to Europe and also during the Californian gold rush. The reason is simple. When there is more gold in relation to other products the price of those products rises in terms of gold.
The reason precious metals in particular make good money is the following characteristics.
There is inherent worth. (The ladies love it and there are industrial uses) The worth is intrinsic to the material and not form (Smash a coin and if it still has the same mass of metal is is worth the same unlike a diamond) Easily identified and recognized Hard to counterfeit (including governments) Compact Store of Value Easy to divide without losing value (unlike gemstones where 1 ct stone is worth much more than two 1/2 ct stones) Doesn't degrade over time Increase in supply requires effort (You have to at least go out find it in nature and mine it)
I know it's a loaded word but I use it in the context of people owning capital good, things used for production not consumption. The first thing to realize is that growth is a function of what people value. If people are getting things they value more than in the past they are getting wealthier.
We don't use up iron even if we throw it in a dump. In the dump it is probrably at a higher concentration than in a mine. Also carbon seems like it is going to be the element of the next hundred years. Carbon structures will eventually replace metals in structures as the cost of metals increase and the carbon decreases. It looks like other carbon structures may replace some elements used in electronics.
Slashdot Mirror
You can get by working 1/2 time. I know plenty of people that do it. The thing is they live like they did in the 1950s. 1 car, no cable, no cell phone, no internet. They own their property with a 1000 sqft double wide on it and spend their leisure hunting and fishing. Now if you want all of the modern goods you need to work full time. The fact is you can not work at all in the US and live off of societies waste better than someone who worked 100 years ago. That is the beauty of productivity and technology increases. The US waste stream contains for free better quality goods than were available to presidents and royalty 100 years ago.
Read about Deming. The idea is create a good process that is under control. You only have so many resources available. How do you allocate them teaching, improving, or testing? Demoing showed that testing every part is a waste of time and money. You only have to test every once in a while and as long as that testing shows the parts will be within specification statistically you are good. This allows you the time and money to keep improving the process making it better all the time.
Apply that to teaching. Every teacher k own that we test too much but they are forced to do it. The know it wastes time since every decent teacher knows what their students know or don't know. It would be better to spend their time helping the kids learn and improve their lessons than testing and grading. The principles job should be to help the teachers improve their skills and weed out the occasional teacher that refuses to improve. Again the principles know who the problem teachers are.
Reading the article it gives the example of one teacher reviewing her own performance and thinking how she will do better next time. That is what I was trying to convey. You don't HAVE to measure how well the teachers are doing if you have a culture where everyone is expected to improve and given the tools to do it. In the case of the cars the machinists building the parts. They weren't told they had to make parts of a certain tolence or they would be fired. They were given the tools and the education to keep improving the process. These people were then allowed to do their job. Most parts coming off a Japanese line aren't inspected. Why? Because the parts that are inspected are of such high quality they know the process is under control and there is no need to waste money testing every part. In fact you make more money concentrating on making good parts than if you test everyone because you don't have to waste time and material on scrapped parts.
This is the same with teaching. You don't have to keep testing every single kid over and over. If you examine the process, ie teacher, and know they are good.
Back when Mazda joined with Ford to make cars in the US they had a problem. Ford was building all the parts to spec but the transmissions didn't run as nice as the Japanese built ones. Then Ford ripped apart some Japanese engines and found the parts were made to MUCH tighter tolerances than the specs called for. This was because of Deming's Quality program he taught the Japanese. Basically it is never stop improving quality. Even when you are within specs keep getting better because quality will improve and your customers will be happier.
This is what needs to happen in education. It's not setting a standard and making sure teachers meet it. It is setting up a culture of excellence and pursuit of perfection even knowing it is unobtainable.
So prices will continually get lower as they try to maintain market share?
When you loan someone money there is a risk involved. The interest rate depends on the risk and if there is anything backing up the loan. The problem with student loans is that the interest rate is independent of risk and there is no collateral. The rate doesn't depend on school or degree. This is a serious flaw as it tends to push people towards easy schools and easy degrees. Also a loan is not the proper instrument for education since there is nothing to reposes if the loan is in default.
A proposal was made to establish a stock market for education. People would invest capital in students education. Instead of being a loan the repayment would be based on a percentage of income for a limited term. Say for example per $1000 invested in an electrical engineering student at MIT someone might bid .2% of income for 10 years after graduation. If the investor thinks the graduate will earn an average of $100k per year for 10 years that would be $2k in payments. An MIT education might run about $100k. So to pay for the whole thing the student would owe 20% of their income over 10 years. Now here is the big difference. The risk is borne by the investor not the student. If the student is unemployed or works for minimum wage he still owes only 20% of income. Of course if another student makes it big and earns $1M a year than the investor makes out.
The beauty of this system is that the investors will evaluate not only the students but the schools and degrees to determine what they all are worth. It is entirely possible that a student will find it cheaper in terms of % of income to go to a better school. Also degrees that have more value in the market will see cheaper rates than others and this will help guide students towards degrees that are more valuable.
And did the diving and swimming teams pay for this at my school?
http://www.scarletknights.com/facilities/werblin.asp
Here is the problem with your theory. You make the claim they can drop prices to eliminate all competitors. Now they raise prices and make obscene profits. Obscene profits are good because they are a signal to investors there is an opportunity somewhere. So now competitors start drilling and selling their own oil thereby reducing prices.
Germany is doing so well because it's filled with Germans. Having a culture where productive work is honored instead of ridiculed helps. Also Germany (and most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, ect) spends hardly anything on military since WWII since the US pretty much guarantees their safety.
Dumping is what you call it when your competitor is much cheaper than you.
My post stands. Either you side with the consumer and let China sell cheap PV panels or you side with US producers and use protectionist methods to help the producers at the expense of the consumer.
The thing you are missing is all things are relative. Pollution may be bad but compared to what? Dangerous factories may be bad but compared to what?
When an economy is purely agricultural it is very dangerous. There are plenty of things for farmers to die from and the working conditions are outside in all weather. Compared to that a sweatshop is much nicer. You have a roof and a stool. And if you are lucky the product needs to be build in a climate controlled factory and you get to enjoy that too.
Same for pollution. When you living a subsistence life you would trade some pollution for an easier life. This is a necessarily state to pass through because you can't afford both the manufacturing capital and the environmental protection capital costs. It is only when you grow to a certain productive level can you afford safety and pollution controls. You are looking at it from a rich western lifestyle. Try to see it through the eyes of someone that is seriously worried about where their next meal is coming from. Even the poor in the US are fat.
Because the Chinese companies actually MAKE solar panels. Ours are just front companies to enrich CEO's.
It depends on what you are talking about. I own a straight razor that should last the rest of my life. I am happy using it and I don't see a need to ever want a new one.
But in year my cell phone will be outdated. Why spend the time and money to make one last 10 years?
As for landfills think of them as mines. We are returning materials to the earth. If those materials ever get very expensive to find in nature we can dig up the landfills. Besides in the next 20 years or so we will have advanced waste processing like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_waste_disposal so that we will recycle everything by default because it is economic to do so and not as a jobs program as it currently exists.
"Societal Progress has absolutely NOTHING to do with consumption of 'stuff''."
And how did you manage to write this? Did you use your telekinesis powers to flip bits on the server?
"Great idea! Then the workers can be kept in factory dormitories and piss in holes in the floor like they do in Chinese factories!"
Which is pretty much what OWS is doing now.
We are all producers and consumers. As producers we want our products to be rare and expensive. As consumers we want our products to be plentiful and cheap. You have to decide what type of world you want to live in. One that has plenty of inexpensive things or a few expensive things. I'll take cheap and plentiful.
Let's say the Chinese decided that the US was too dependent on foreign oil and as a buddy they wanted to supply us with free solar panels. As much as they could make. Would this be a good thing or bad thing? For consumers it would be great but for producers of solar panels it would be terrible. To have progress as a society you have to let consumers rule.
Get a NASA internship or Co-op while you are going to school. You will meet a lot of people in the industry including those in private space. Also if you are a co-op and do well you will end up with a NASA job. Then you can apply for a Graduate Fellowship. They will pay you for 1 year of your salary while you go full time for grad school. This way you can get your education cheap. You do owe them a couple of years after that but use that time to build up your skills on great projects before applying to private space.
We aren't talking about just astronauts.
http://www.metafilter.com/90280/The-worst-spacerelated-disaster-happened-in-Xichang-China-in-1996
Here is the beauty. You never get really good at something unless you do it often. You need lots of practice. But currently we are stuck in a catch 22 with rockets. The payloads are very expensive so you want to make sure your rocket doesn't fail. This requires lots of money typically to verify everything.
Fuel delpts turn everything upside down. Now you are launching something cheap, fuel. You can make the rockets as cheap as possible and even with a few failures it's no big deal since you are only out cheap fuel. But even with cheap rockets if you launch them often enough you will get very good at it and reliability will increase as you identify problems.
This is great for NASA too since the majority of beyond earth orbit mass is propellant. It can launch they payloads dry and do that on much smaller and cheaper rockets. Also it can just pay for fuel delivered to the depot. Any failures are on the customers dime.
So is it gouging to sell stocks for more than you bought them for?
Their job filter sucks. I know someone that was a government contractor and the people he worked for wanted to hire him as a federal employee. So they set up a listing that was well defined to fit his skills. He submitted his application but couldn't make it through the filter so he couldn't be hired.
I saw an opening for a job and I knew the people that put the request in. I just copied and pasted the entire job requirement and description under other information and I sailed past the filter. When I was interviewed they thought it was a computer errror that caused the ad to print at the end of my application. I told them the truth and they laughed and I got the job.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Switzerland
From the headline above
"it 'confirms that these studies were done carefully.' The study also found that warming in the temperature record was not caused by poor quality weather monitoring stations — thus rejecting a frequent claim of skeptics."
From page 2 of the report.
No adjustments or corrections were made for systematic effects such as urban heat island warming or change of instrumentation.
So they did nothing to check the quality of the monitoring stations. They accepted the readings. This does nothing to reject the effect of these claims.
You are wrong. Finding more gold does cause price inflation when gold is used as currency. There have been many cases throughout history when this has happened including when Spain returned gold they captured in the Americas to Europe and also during the Californian gold rush. The reason is simple. When there is more gold in relation to other products the price of those products rises in terms of gold.
The reason precious metals in particular make good money is the following characteristics.
There is inherent worth. (The ladies love it and there are industrial uses)
The worth is intrinsic to the material and not form (Smash a coin and if it still has the same mass of metal is is worth the same unlike a diamond)
Easily identified and recognized
Hard to counterfeit (including governments)
Compact Store of Value
Easy to divide without losing value (unlike gemstones where 1 ct stone is worth much more than two 1/2 ct stones)
Doesn't degrade over time
Increase in supply requires effort (You have to at least go out find it in nature and mine it)
I know it's a loaded word but I use it in the context of people owning capital good, things used for production not consumption. The first thing to realize is that growth is a function of what people value. If people are getting things they value more than in the past they are getting wealthier.
We don't use up iron even if we throw it in a dump. In the dump it is probrably at a higher concentration than in a mine. Also carbon seems like it is going to be the element of the next hundred years. Carbon structures will eventually replace metals in structures as the cost of metals increase and the carbon decreases. It looks like other carbon structures may replace some elements used in electronics.