If you truly understood the concept of comparative advantage, you'd understand why, when Asian workers make $1-2/hr while American unions demand $20/hr plus benefits for the same work, that jobs flow to Asia, and trade deficits occur.
Ricardo assumed that national currencies would rise or fall to reflect trade status - not at all unusual in a world where currencies were backed by gold. In today's fiat currency world, the US dollar continues to do a levitating act that turns David Copperfield green with envy. By all macroeconomic rights, the US dollar should be in the toilet, which would all by itself turn around the trade deficit. It is the US dollar's status as a "reserve" currency that keeps it up, and prolongs the trade and current account deficits.
I agree with you completely. Liberal arts courses can be enormously pleasurable. I studied engineering, but made sure to take courses in Philosophy as well. Balancing the study of physics with the study of thought was crucial to my development.
Media guru Marshall Macluhan said in the 60's that liberal arts degrees would become even more valuable in the future, as the main skill they taught was critical thinking. Unfortunately, as faculty after faculty has degenerated into the marxist/deconstructionist/feminazi/value-free mush, students are encouraged to parrot rather than think. I shudder for my daughters..
I'm an engineer, and I didn't think Economics was a "bullshit" course; I found it useful and interesting. It sure helps to have some grounding in the subject when discussing taxation, for example. Much of the misery we inflict on ourselves is a result of so many people having no understanding of economics whatsoever.
Twenty years I worked in telecom in Toronto (ROLM, Mitel, Nortel, others), and if I had ever seen a punch down block where the tech had soldered the connections, I would have been astounded to the point where I would have walked out. There's a reason for BIX blocks; they work well, they keep the MDF reasonably uncluttered, and more important, you save thousands in the long run through easier maintenance and upgrades.
Your solution is the perfect example of "penny wise, pound foolish".
When I lived in downtown Toronto, I didn't need a car either. But I live in Richmond Hill now, about 40 km north of the city core, and I work in Scarborough. My choices are drive the 40 km to work (about 45 minutes), or take a combination of 4 buses and a train (about 90 minutes). I'd rather have the convenience of the car and save 90 minutes a day (that's about 6% of my life).
You should visit Toronto. Here, we pay for gas in litres (about 4 litres per US gallon). In my town, a suburb just north of Toronto, there are two gas stations on the main drag. In the morning, when you're heading for work, gas is usually about 85-90 cents/litre (this week, anyway - in the last few months, it's been as high as $1.10/litre). But, after I come home, at about 7:30 pm, these two stations drop their prices to 79, 78, even 77 cents/litre.
Now, a little quick arithmetic will tell you that even a 6 cent/litre drop, is almost 24 cents/gallon. At 10 cents/litre, it's even larger. And that's a huge difference on the cost of 55 litre fill-up.
But one of these stations stays open 24 hours, while the other closes at 11. Guess what happens at 11 pm? Prices roll right back up at the 24 station, until the next evening, when the game starts again. The downside is the lineups take forever after 7:30..
most people who majored in economics say they would kill for the differential equations my school forced econ majors to take
Yes, when I studied "Economics for Engineers" at U of Toronto in the 70's, my economics professor positively luxuriated in being able to use calculus and differential equations to explain the economic concepts. He confessed to us that it was much harder to teach his Arts & Science students, who didn't have the math skills to understand concepts like local maxima/minima, rate of change, etc.
I studied programming at university, and learned various versions of Fortran, Assembly Language, Algol, Lisp, and some strange one-offs like Spitbol and Snobol. Of course, I learned BASIC too.
Today, I work in an office developing applications in Visual Basic to support our sales teams. I know all about structured programming, and most of my apps are streams of CASE statements and sub and function calls. I haven't used a GOTO (or even an EXIT SUB) in years. I know that using GOTO's might make it marginally quicker to develop an app; I also know it makes it infinitely harder to maintain it six months down the line. So I make the extra effort to do things the right way.
I think the Visual Basic IDE is a good development environment. It gives me tons of easy to use trace and watch features, it automatically checks syntax errors (when I get on a roll, my typing is not so good), etc. I wish its error messages were a little less cryptic, but I had the same problems in Lisp and Pascal.
Granted, I'm not developing high graphics games, or interactive web sites, and I'm not conversant with Perl, Python, or php. So if someone wants to say they are better, I'm not going to argue. But to say that Visual Basic can't produce readable, structured code is just wrong.
Sorry my friend; my course was called "Engineering Science", and it combined theoretical physics and chemistry with practical engineering tools like statics and dynamics, and drafting. Oh, yeah - and math. Lots and lots of math. We needed the math to understand the equations in physics. And I don't mean just calculus and linear algebra. Let's add partial differential equations, matrix algebra, vector calculus.. our top students (not that I was one) were considered some of the brightest at the university.
And engineers aren't creative types? What planet do you live on? From James Watt to Shockley to Moore, engineers have contributed mightily to man's progress by creating new technologies. As a software engineer, I like to think I'm creative - and not just in the code I write, but in looking at the business problems my colleagues face, and finding ways to help them solve those problems.
While a student at the University of Toronto in the late 1970's, my fraternity (mostly engineers) invited a professor for a dinner. We retired to the library afterwards with a case of beer, and I ventured the comment "Won't it be great when you can get a desktop computer with 1 Mb of RAM, and a 10 Mb hard drive?".
The prof thought this was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He listed the following "fundamental physics" reasons why these devices would be impossible:
1. You could never make the magnetic domains small enough to get that density
2. Even if you could, you could never make stepper motors precise enough to read the data.
3. Even if you could, you could never make read/write heads sensitive enough to read such
small domains.
4. Even if you could, you could never make a disk which rotated stably enough to prevent head crashes.
5. As for the RAM, he said we could never make chip densities high enough to get 1 MB on a desktop.
6. Even if you could, the heat generated by those RAM chips would require a small refrigerator.
7. And finally, even if you could make the transistors small enough, you would get so many tunneling errors that the RAM would be completely unreliable.
But I don't think society has adequately discussed this belief that the purpose of education is to churn out cogs for the corporate machine.
Well, Marshall Macluhan did over 40 years ago. He wrote that the primary purpose of grammar schools in England was to produce a class of people suited for work in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution. These students had to be able to read a little, and perhaps do a little arithmetic, but the major thing the children learned was regimentation - how to sit in one place for long periods, how to wait for a bell before being allowed to eat, how to take instruction from a superior. Perhaps that's why so many of us were bored to tears at school.
I won't flame you, but I will say that on the Parent Council at my daughters' school, I was appalled at the way money was wasted. For example, the school had one LCD projector with a dedicated PC which all the faculty loved. Now I think that they are great tools to help teach (sure beat the film strips and slide shows I had to watch as a kid). But with one machine, even in a small school, demand for the unit exceeded its supply. So, the council was asked to cough up to buy a second unit with attached PC. The costs for the units? $1,700 for the projector, and $3,000 for the PC. The rationale? They needed "state of the art" equipment to ensure that it would all run properly.
You can imagine how incensed I was. I pointed out that LCD's were available for $899, and that the PC to run it could easily be purchased for $600, and that for the money they wanted, we could have purchased three sets of machines, not one. But "the cheaper LCD's aren't as bright as the $1,700 one" - so draw the blinds - and "the board has standards for new PC's to ensure that every PC can run every program" - except go down into the computer area in the library, notice the 10 year old hardware, and be told that "no, we can't run a lot of programs on these".
So I don't think schools use the money they get wisely. They want gold-plated items that they end up locking in a small room "because it's so valuable".
You can stop them from learning, by keeping them so hungry or abused that higher brain functions shut down.
Or, more importantly and much more frequently, by boring them to tears for 7 hours a day. I would suggest the one reason that homeschooled kids seem to do better is they aren't forced to sit and wait while the teacher explains to the slowest kid in the class why 2 x 2 = 4 for the seventeenth time. My own two girls are in an accelerated program, and while they both say it's better than the standard classes, in that the other kids they're with are also bright, they still complain about boredom more than anything else.
I remember my own days in public school. Bored as above, I was quietly reading a textbook on another subject when my teacher came up behind and smacked me in the back of my head. Apparently, her program was that I was to learn what she wanted me to learn when she wanted me to learn it, and any independent curiousity or initiative was bad and warranted physical abuse.
Sounds like there may be some carryover since making a good company is all about maintaining smart, happy employees.
M$ is full of happy employees? Try reading MiniMicrosoft's blog. Until recently, M$'s review procedure forced managers to rank everyone on their team on a scale of 1 to 5. Problem was, they were restricted in the number of high rankings they could award. So even if you had a team of 5 guys who all worked hard and well, you had to assign someone a 2.5 or less - meaning less than satisfactory - which automatically limited that person's raise, bonus, and stock options. Plus, that little stain stays on their permanent record, making it harder to get promotions and/or transfers later.
So if that's the type of grading system you want to use for your kid, well, go for it. I'd rather have something more objective - like, say test results - than how my kid is doing compared to your kid.
You can get a perfectally acceptable bicycle at Canadian Tire for about $150 Cdn. I'm sure Wal-Mart has them for less. And these are bikes with 27 speeds, decent suspensions, and so on. Sure, you can pay $500 or $2000 for a bike if you want, but then you have to load it up with 20 lbs of locks if you want to keep riding it. I have a beater that I bought new for less than $150 three years ago, and I ride it around in Canada, even in the winter. No one ever looks twice at it, but I've still got it!
Well, in Canada and Great Britain - not sure about Oz - you can formally "decline" your ballot if you feel no candidate is worth your vote. Declined ballots are counted separately, and are not considered spoiled. I've done it!
"It's why I take the "dirty" bus rather than driving a "clean" hybrid "
You should come to Toronto, and visit the intersection of Finch Avenue and Leslie Street during any rush hour. You will watch 6 to 7 buses - huge 40 foot long buses, mind you - with a driver and at most 3 or 4 passengers rush by you. While at the next arterial road south, the intersection was important enough to build a $100 million subway station, at this intersection, only the local bus stops to pick up you, while all the "express" buses, virtually empty, fly by. The best bus in the TTC fleet, the Orion VII, weighs 15 tons. (Most of their many older buses weigh at least 50% more.) There's no conceivable way a 15 ton bus moving 1,000 pounds of payload (assuming you've got 4 fat passengers) is as efficient as my 3300 lb Chrysler Concorde is moving 400 lbs of passengers when my friend and I drive in to work together. 30:1 weight/payload ratio compared to less than 9:1? Do yourself a favour - find a friend to carpool with. You'll save time, money, and aggravation, and have a better experience.
Don't the geeks here know any basic math? 110 million bulbs divided by 1.3 million cars = 84.6 bulbs per car. The OP specified 60 watt bulbs. So, if there was 100% energy savings, it would save 5,076 watts per car. At 746 watts = 1 horsepower, that's 6.8 hp saved.
Now, I don't know too many cars with a 7 hp engine. Even the tiny Smart car has a 40 hp engine. Given that you wouldn't save 100% (IIRC, they use about 1/4 of the energy of incandescents), it's more like 20 bulbs replaced in every home.
Still, even one per home would save close to 500 MW, which is one good sized power plant. It's not a bad idea to use them, but the pollyanna-ish dreams of the OP are ridiculous.
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Ricardo assumed that national currencies would rise or fall to reflect trade status - not at all unusual in a world where currencies were backed by gold. In today's fiat currency world, the US dollar continues to do a levitating act that turns David Copperfield green with envy. By all macroeconomic rights, the US dollar should be in the toilet, which would all by itself turn around the trade deficit. It is the US dollar's status as a "reserve" currency that keeps it up, and prolongs the trade and current account deficits.
OMFG! My daughters are drinking fish sex water? Won't someone please think of the children!
In Korea, only old people use stingrays as guards.
Media guru Marshall Macluhan said in the 60's that liberal arts degrees would become even more valuable in the future, as the main skill they taught was critical thinking. Unfortunately, as faculty after faculty has degenerated into the marxist/deconstructionist/feminazi/value-free mush, students are encouraged to parrot rather than think. I shudder for my daughters..
I'm an engineer, and I didn't think Economics was a "bullshit" course; I found it useful and interesting. It sure helps to have some grounding in the subject when discussing taxation, for example. Much of the misery we inflict on ourselves is a result of so many people having no understanding of economics whatsoever.
I'm not sure which is more revolting - the split cheeks or the split infinitive.
Your solution is the perfect example of "penny wise, pound foolish".
In Korea, only old people use Internet Exploder.
When I lived in downtown Toronto, I didn't need a car either. But I live in Richmond Hill now, about 40 km north of the city core, and I work in Scarborough. My choices are drive the 40 km to work (about 45 minutes), or take a combination of 4 buses and a train (about 90 minutes). I'd rather have the convenience of the car and save 90 minutes a day (that's about 6% of my life).
Now, a little quick arithmetic will tell you that even a 6 cent/litre drop, is almost 24 cents/gallon. At 10 cents/litre, it's even larger. And that's a huge difference on the cost of 55 litre fill-up.
But one of these stations stays open 24 hours, while the other closes at 11. Guess what happens at 11 pm? Prices roll right back up at the 24 station, until the next evening, when the game starts again. The downside is the lineups take forever after 7:30..
Yes, when I studied "Economics for Engineers" at U of Toronto in the 70's, my economics professor positively luxuriated in being able to use calculus and differential equations to explain the economic concepts. He confessed to us that it was much harder to teach his Arts & Science students, who didn't have the math skills to understand concepts like local maxima/minima, rate of change, etc.
Today, I work in an office developing applications in Visual Basic to support our sales teams. I know all about structured programming, and most of my apps are streams of CASE statements and sub and function calls. I haven't used a GOTO (or even an EXIT SUB) in years. I know that using GOTO's might make it marginally quicker to develop an app; I also know it makes it infinitely harder to maintain it six months down the line. So I make the extra effort to do things the right way.
I think the Visual Basic IDE is a good development environment. It gives me tons of easy to use trace and watch features, it automatically checks syntax errors (when I get on a roll, my typing is not so good), etc. I wish its error messages were a little less cryptic, but I had the same problems in Lisp and Pascal.
Granted, I'm not developing high graphics games, or interactive web sites, and I'm not conversant with Perl, Python, or php. So if someone wants to say they are better, I'm not going to argue. But to say that Visual Basic can't produce readable, structured code is just wrong.
And engineers aren't creative types? What planet do you live on? From James Watt to Shockley to Moore, engineers have contributed mightily to man's progress by creating new technologies. As a software engineer, I like to think I'm creative - and not just in the code I write, but in looking at the business problems my colleagues face, and finding ways to help them solve those problems.
The prof thought this was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He listed the following "fundamental physics" reasons why these devices would be impossible:
1. You could never make the magnetic domains small enough to get that density
2. Even if you could, you could never make stepper motors precise enough to read the data.
3. Even if you could, you could never make read/write heads sensitive enough to read such small domains.
4. Even if you could, you could never make a disk which rotated stably enough to prevent head crashes.
5. As for the RAM, he said we could never make chip densities high enough to get 1 MB on a desktop.
6. Even if you could, the heat generated by those RAM chips would require a small refrigerator.
7. And finally, even if you could make the transistors small enough, you would get so many tunneling errors that the RAM would be completely unreliable.
I wonder if he's seen an Ipod Nano yet...
Well, Marshall Macluhan did over 40 years ago. He wrote that the primary purpose of grammar schools in England was to produce a class of people suited for work in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution. These students had to be able to read a little, and perhaps do a little arithmetic, but the major thing the children learned was regimentation - how to sit in one place for long periods, how to wait for a bell before being allowed to eat, how to take instruction from a superior. Perhaps that's why so many of us were bored to tears at school.
Three years.
How many shows a night do you do?
You can imagine how incensed I was. I pointed out that LCD's were available for $899, and that the PC to run it could easily be purchased for $600, and that for the money they wanted, we could have purchased three sets of machines, not one. But "the cheaper LCD's aren't as bright as the $1,700 one" - so draw the blinds - and "the board has standards for new PC's to ensure that every PC can run every program" - except go down into the computer area in the library, notice the 10 year old hardware, and be told that "no, we can't run a lot of programs on these".
So I don't think schools use the money they get wisely. They want gold-plated items that they end up locking in a small room "because it's so valuable".
Or, more importantly and much more frequently, by boring them to tears for 7 hours a day. I would suggest the one reason that homeschooled kids seem to do better is they aren't forced to sit and wait while the teacher explains to the slowest kid in the class why 2 x 2 = 4 for the seventeenth time. My own two girls are in an accelerated program, and while they both say it's better than the standard classes, in that the other kids they're with are also bright, they still complain about boredom more than anything else.
I remember my own days in public school. Bored as above, I was quietly reading a textbook on another subject when my teacher came up behind and smacked me in the back of my head. Apparently, her program was that I was to learn what she wanted me to learn when she wanted me to learn it, and any independent curiousity or initiative was bad and warranted physical abuse.
M$ is full of happy employees? Try reading MiniMicrosoft's blog. Until recently, M$'s review procedure forced managers to rank everyone on their team on a scale of 1 to 5. Problem was, they were restricted in the number of high rankings they could award. So even if you had a team of 5 guys who all worked hard and well, you had to assign someone a 2.5 or less - meaning less than satisfactory - which automatically limited that person's raise, bonus, and stock options. Plus, that little stain stays on their permanent record, making it harder to get promotions and/or transfers later.
So if that's the type of grading system you want to use for your kid, well, go for it. I'd rather have something more objective - like, say test results - than how my kid is doing compared to your kid.
Microsoft to apply for patent on "associating words with objects".
You can get a perfectally acceptable bicycle at Canadian Tire for about $150 Cdn. I'm sure Wal-Mart has them for less. And these are bikes with 27 speeds, decent suspensions, and so on. Sure, you can pay $500 or $2000 for a bike if you want, but then you have to load it up with 20 lbs of locks if you want to keep riding it. I have a beater that I bought new for less than $150 three years ago, and I ride it around in Canada, even in the winter. No one ever looks twice at it, but I've still got it!
Well, in Canada and Great Britain - not sure about Oz - you can formally "decline" your ballot if you feel no candidate is worth your vote. Declined ballots are counted separately, and are not considered spoiled. I've done it!
In Soviet Russia, passwords change you!
You should come to Toronto, and visit the intersection of Finch Avenue and Leslie Street during any rush hour. You will watch 6 to 7 buses - huge 40 foot long buses, mind you - with a driver and at most 3 or 4 passengers rush by you. While at the next arterial road south, the intersection was important enough to build a $100 million subway station, at this intersection, only the local bus stops to pick up you, while all the "express" buses, virtually empty, fly by. The best bus in the TTC fleet, the Orion VII, weighs 15 tons. (Most of their many older buses weigh at least 50% more.) There's no conceivable way a 15 ton bus moving 1,000 pounds of payload (assuming you've got 4 fat passengers) is as efficient as my 3300 lb Chrysler Concorde is moving 400 lbs of passengers when my friend and I drive in to work together. 30:1 weight/payload ratio compared to less than 9:1? Do yourself a favour - find a friend to carpool with. You'll save time, money, and aggravation, and have a better experience.
Now, I don't know too many cars with a 7 hp engine. Even the tiny Smart car has a 40 hp engine. Given that you wouldn't save 100% (IIRC, they use about 1/4 of the energy of incandescents), it's more like 20 bulbs replaced in every home.
Still, even one per home would save close to 500 MW, which is one good sized power plant. It's not a bad idea to use them, but the pollyanna-ish dreams of the OP are ridiculous.