What's truly weird is how many europeans say that Americans are fat,
lazy and stupid. Meanwhile, we have a raging economy with low
unemployment. We practically own the semiconductor and instrument and
biotech businesses. We take the great majority of Nobels in the hard
sciences. Our atheletes win a lot of stuff, like the Tour de France.
When's the last time you bought a British oscilloscope, or a French
CPU chip, or a German won a Nobel in physics? Even their cars are
crappy these days.
On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:01:41 -0700, Jim Thompson
[snip]Aren't these Europeons bright enough to question the pabulum they are
fed by their propagandizing media?
Martin Brown, Why are you so gullible? Why are you so ignorant? Poor
Europeon education?
...Jim Thompson
What's truly weird is how many europeans say that Americans are fat,
lazy and stupid. Meanwhile, we have a raging economy with low
unemployment. We practically own the semiconductor and instrument and
biotech businesses. We take the great majority of Nobels in the hard
sciences. Our atheletes win a lot of stuff, like the Tour de France.
When's the last time you bought a British oscilloscope, or a French
CPU chip, or a German won a Nobel in physics? Even their cars are
crappy these days. [1]
John
[1] Anybody want to buy a Rabbit with 5K miles on it?
I should clarify that I'm not at all opposed to some level of subsidy,
I simply note that the cost of university has been increasing for
years at approximately the rate President Bush has increased spending
on it. Twice the rate of inflation--7%--for some years, making it
less affordable, not more.
But that's not what's happening.
You wrongly assume only the rich can go to college. That may be true
in your country, but not here--yet.
You're assuming that the goal of the university is job-training but,
mostly, here, it isn't. The primary goal is to make better, well-
rounded citizens.
As far as useless subjects and expenses, academics love to indulge in
subjects that are, well, academic. It's possible (and ever more
popular) to major in communications, art history, and any number of
non-job-related fields, at taxpayers' expense.
Strange that you've been led to believe such a thing, when, for
reasons you've already stated, it would make no sense, and couldn't
possibly be true.
The problem is by no means confined to black kids--the rate's even
higher for others, but for the same reasons.
Wannbe horrified? Peruse some of this story:http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2667532&page=1
Or this, from the Los Angeles Times:http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-dropout29jan29,0,138315,f...
Your health system only looks after those people who can pay.
Your
public education system is an international laughing stock
with
religious nutters mandating that evolution cannot be taught and 30%
dropout rates...
The big problem today is that there are a limited number of
opportunities for illiterate and innumerate manual labour in the first
world.
Regards,
Martin Brown
But you didn't know what you were actually going to get, and once
you've got it, it can be rather difficult to establish what you've
actually learned, and how valuable it is.
I had some dealings with a fairly charimatic Cambridge Ph.D. whose
education had taught him how to present fairly trivial innovations
as impressive inventions. Unfortunately, he never bothered to think
through his solutions, and I managed to derail his career by asking
him one idle question (in the presence of his boss). My intention
had been merely to make conversation, but his answer essentially
announced that he had been wasting his time, and a few weeks later I
heard that he'd moved from electron microscopes to fuzzy logic
A Cambridge (U.K.) Ph.D. should be a remarkably valuable educational
asset - but this guy had appeared to put in all the work and had
cleared all the hurdles without getting the training that he needed
Governments don't seize universities - they subsidise them. This is
revenue that has been seized from the public at large, but it is
invested in getting more students through universities than would
happen without subsidy. Business enterprises do subsidise some
students, but they tend to subsidise students studying subjects that
are relevant to what the entreprise needs at the time. Nobody
subsidised students to study computer science when I was at
university - it wasn't a separate subject - and for the next ten
years companies were hiring hard scientists who had learned how to
use computers in the course of their post-graduate research.
Self-education isn't expensive of anything except time. Your idea of
private education seems to be formal education from an unsubsidised
institution, which is expensive - and often of very poor quality.
Hayek is talking sense, and the subject is pretty much exactly what
we are discussing. The problem that you are missing is that a market
hasn't got a hope of putting a sensible value on education - you
can't really tell if the money invested in any single individual's
education was well spent until after they've died, and sometimes not
even then. Darwin's theory of evolution didn't really start
explaining things well until genetics got going, long after he'd
died.
We can estimate the costs of education fairly accurately, but the
benefits aren't quantifiable - at least not when the information
would be of any use to us. The only rational strategy is to educate
as many people as we can afford to, and to educate them for as long
as they will put up with being educated.
This is bound to "distort the market", but the market hasn't got the
information to make an informed choice about where to invest, so the
distortion you are complaining about is a distortion from an
inaccessable ideal.
Maybe I should have said "If nobody knows how much an education is
going to be worth, how can you know that the price system is
distorted?"
I got a full, free scholarship to Tulane University. My dad was a
milkman. I had two jobs on the side, to pay for cars and motorcycles
and girls.
Not the ones I know.
I suppose all the electronics and biotech and software stuff happens
accidentally somehow? And the Nobel prizes?
A casual glance at the data may well suggest that the current
northern hemisphere warming trend is still well below the noise
floor - 0.7 degrees Celcius is about a tenth of the day-to-night
variation around here.
More careful examination shows it to be a real - in the sense of
statistically significant - effect. Finding a generally acceptable
way to filter out the predictable variations in temperature to get a
visually persuasive display - the famous "hockey stick" - is rather
more difficult.
I was merely pointing out that the URL in question did represent a
minority view. In science, the majority doesn't have to be right,
but the anti-global warming minority doesn't look much like a group
of
ground-breaking revolutionaries. In fact they look and behave very
much like ideologically motivated reactionaries - they have a lot in
common with the creationists and intelligent designers who don't
believe in evolution.
As Richard Henry points out, the ranking senator on the committee is
a fundamentalist right wing nut case
http://www.impactpress.com/articles/winter06/bestwinter06.html
There are less partisan assessments available on the web, but they
all report much the same facts - Senator James Inhofe is the guy who
gets quoted when reporters want to satirise U.S. opinion.
If you won a scholarship. why did you need a job?
I got a scholarship from ICI (chemical company). I was supposed to
study chemistry but swapped to physics. My university did not allow
undergraduates to have cars (and still doesn't). It is total gridlock
even with student bicycles.
I have known some brilliant rich kids, but they were outnumbered by
the airheaded "beautiful people".
Bad choice. Cambridge University with 82 has the highest number of
Nobel Prizes awarded to any institution on the planet, and the UK
overall punches well above its weight in academic research.
Manufacturing has been screwed though.
http://www.cam.ac.uk/cambuniv/nobelprize.html
US venture capital is much better for hitech companies than the UKs
stuffy risk averse banks. I will give you that.
On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 04:33:02 -0700, Martin Brown
[snip]
Your health system only looks after those people who can pay.
Utter nonsense.
So why do Europeons troop here for an education?
In one or two school districts in the whole USA.
Must be why the Mexicans are flooding our country.
[snip]
Regards,
Martin Brown
The big problem in the world is the utter brain washing foisted by the
media, and believed by the truly ignorant.
Only a minority of any group can be the smartest. I think there may be
a mathematical reason for that.
Look at the dates. Then look at the details, particularly how many
were shared, and with who, and where the winners are now.
[email protected] [email protected] posted to
sci.electronics.design:
Aha. I see that you have met at least one yourself, during my
undergraduate degree studies, i met one that bad and several nearly
so. These creatures dilute to poison education and yet manage to
persist in the university systems. And the data available to me
suggests that they are far more frequent outside such hallowed halls,
i hope that it is true.
In the US it is not about seizure, but about control of research
funding by various zealots. Plus added requirements to achieve
various political goals, do all sorts of ridiculous record keeping,
all the while being stripped of any authority to keep order in the
classroom.
The problem is that bean counters cannot be bothered to _be_ enough to
be able to evaluate self-education. So it, and the abilities that
result, must not be recognized by the bean counters.
And exactly when did Gregor Mendel live?
Unfortunately, way too many seem to lose interest at about age 10 to
12.
The standing statistical data on the value of an education is quite
clear, and should be taught in grade school.
[email protected] [email protected] posted to
sci.electronics.design:
Difficult to the point of being impossible to do honestly?
Like switching to a software package that is known to be prone to making such wild predictions.
What's truly weird is how many europeans say that Americans are fat,
lazy and stupid. Meanwhile, we have a raging economy with low
unemployment. We practically own the semiconductor and instrument and
biotech businesses. We take the great majority of Nobels in the hard
sciences. Our atheletes win a lot of stuff, like the Tour de France.
When's the last time you bought a British oscilloscope, or a French
CPU chip, or a German won a Nobel in physics?
Martin said:Strange that in the US it is dogma that only the
rich deserve to have a decent education or health
service.
I thought you were the typical selfish American that
believes that the state should do nothing and only
those whocan afford to pay privately deserve to get
a quality education or proper healthcare."
We could easily have been without his [Isaac Newton]
brilliant insight into the physical world had "common
sense" and commerce prevailed.
Your health system only looks after those people who can pay.
The big problem today is that there are a limited number
of opportunities for illiterate and innumerate manual
labour in the first world.
On Oct 27, 4:46 pm, [email protected] wrote:
On Oct 26, 7:25 pm, James Arthur wrote:
On Oct 26, 2:29 am, [email protected] wrote:
On Oct 26, 6:06 am, James Arthur wrote:
On Oct 25, 2:52 pm, [email protected] wrote:
On Oct 25, 6:36 pm, James Arthur wrote:
[...]
We've been protecting the world since WWII. That's expensive.
But that's not where most of the money is going.
True, now. Most of our money is presently spent on ineffectual social
programs.
Not true.
http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm
Bill, that link is just plain embarrassing--no wonder you have such
wacky, misbegotten theories.
I rather liked the way they lumped the interest on the national debt
into military expenditure, on the not-unreasonable basis that this was
just paying for previous wars.
That's one of their most glaring errors--wrongly attributing all debt
to warfare.
We've spent a great deal more on welfare, Medicare, Medicaid and
Johnson's war on poverty. Social programs have been roughly 2/3rds the
budget for quite some time; by any fair measure, they deserve an equal
proportion of the debt.
That's not opinion, that's accounting...amortization.It's opinion. Your national debt has been built up over a long time -
much longer than the period that you have been spending 2/3rds of your
budget on what you chose to classify as social programs, and you could
attribute each dollar of debt to the expenditure that incurred it.
That would be a valid system of amortization, Claiming that the debt
should be assigned on the basis of the way you spend money now is not.
Here you have a point--the amount of blame for any annual deficit
should be apportioned year-by-year according to each category's
proportion of that year's budget.
OTOH, it's preposterous to say that all defense spending is spent on
warfare.
Comparing war- and peace-time figures clearly illustrates
that point. So, properly, your link should only attribute *excess*--
not all--defense spending to warfare.
Also, a large part of defense spending comes back as revenue -- taxes
on profits and wages -- offsetting something in the vicinity of 25-40%
of the amount actually spent. When it comes to apportioning deficits
this revenue should properly be deducted.
Anyway, the site's methods and figures being absurd on their face, I
didn't previously bother with the minutiae. Since you insist on
pressing the point, I took several hours and investigated.
I complied the following data with the most generous possible
assumptions in your favor: a) that all defense spending is for war,
and b) that defense spending does not produce any offsetting revenue.
Consider this an engineer's guide to the question; an approximation,
not perfect, but close enough for our purposes.
=======
RESULTS, adjusted to 2004 dollars per the Consumer Price Index data:
=======
(view tables in Courier font)
Historical Budget Data from Congressional Budget Office (1).
Inflation adjustment figures per US Bureau of Labor Statistics'
Consumer Price Index data (2)
TOTAL EXPENDITURE, 1962-2004, (all figures in 2004 dollars)
===========================================================
Social Security 12,541 x 10^9 dollars
Medicare 5,079 "
Medicaid 2,432 "
Income Security 4,301 "
Other Retirement
and disability 4,099 "
Defense 15,699 "
------
TOTAL of above 44,151 "
TOTAL, all outlays,
for all purposes 62,269 "
PUBLIC DEBT 1962-2004, (all figures in 2004 dollars)
==========================================================
Total debt, 1962 $1,552 "
Total increase in debt,
1962-2004: $8,554 "
Total portion of increased debt apportionable
to defense (3): $2,096 "
==========
CONCLUSION
==========
Even if we assume all debt existing in 1962 was war debt, and all
defense spending since 1962 has been for warfare, the two together are
about $3,600 x 10^9, roughly 1/3rd of the current U.S. national debt.
So: attributing 80% of the interest on the nation debt to past
warfare--or even defense spending--is WRONG.
and ...
These are emotional appeals, but they just aren't true. I have lived
in the US my entire life and have never heard _anyone_ say anything
remotely like "only the rich _deserve_ an education."
"what does it mean to 'deserve' an education?"
The rich don't inherently "deserve" an education any more or less than
anyone else. The basic fact of life is that they can afford it absent
funding from anyone else. This is not emotional -- it is merely a
fact of life that no two peoples situations in life are identical.
Life has no notion of "fairness."
We could easily have been without his [Isaac Newton]
brilliant insight into the physical world had "common
sense" and commerce prevailed.
This again is another emotional appeal commonly heard. Perhaps Newton
would not have been the individual to make the discoveries. This is a
In a free society, you may contribute to another's education as much
as you want and are able to. No one would stop you. The main point
is whether you should be able to coerce others to contribute to causes
of your choosing. You have no such right.
To the extent health care is privatized, it is not "a system" in the
socialist/statist way of thinking. Therefore, there is not an "it"
looking after anyone, since there is no "it." To the extent "it" is
private firm, then paying is typically a prerequisite of receiving the
good/service, just like any transaction. This is stating the obvious.
"Health care" is not a right. In a free society, you are free to
contribute to others health. No one would stop you. You have no right
to coerce others to contribute to causes you (individually) deem
worthwhile.
This is because minimum wage laws price them out of the market. So
similarly unskilled labor comes over the border and works undercover,
On Oct 30, 11:58 pm, James Arthur wrote:
No it isn't true here. But it is largely true in America. US friends
talk about insane levels of cost to put their kids through a major
university well beyond what a normal family could reasonably afford.
They keep on whinging about it.
In America a prestigious school like UCLA charges about $7,800 a year
+ books, while an excellent but less-known engineering school like Cal
State Long Beach charges about $3,100 a year + books.
How much is it in the U.K. ?
