quote:

---

Originally posted by ogre:
Any thoughts on the Chinese currency manipulation bill that is going through the congress?

In case you didn't know:
http://www.businessinsider.com/senate-takes-up-bill-to-punish-china-for-m anipulating-currency-2011-10

.02,
Jesse

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by jULAG:
Did you even read my post? I'm taking issue with this bill because I do not think that it will have any significant impact on improving our manufacturing base over the long term. I'm also taking issue with the fact that us complaining about "unfair currency manipulation" is pretty silly because our government does the same thing all the time.

Edit: And yes, the net benefit of making goods and services more expensive for poor americans is worse than trying to impose even protectionist nonsense on our economy (which, incidentally, is one of the best way to encourage jobs to move overseas longterm). Out of curiosity, do you refrain from buying cheap goods that are produced overseas?

---

That's like saying drilling for oil in pristine nature reserves lowers the price of gasoline. It hasn't, doesn't, and won't. Poor americans having access to cheap ipods doesn't really help anyone. Poor americans need help buying food, housing, and energy (stuff that Chinese doesn't manufacture). Illegal immigration has lowered prices too, not just Chinese manufacturing. So I don't think the issue is as simple as just one factor.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Shadow88:
I have more opinions about how the Senate is handling the bill than about the bill itself, unfortunately.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by choco man:
That's like saying drilling for oil in pristine nature reserves lowers the price of gasoline. It hasn't, doesn't, and won't.

---

Not really sure what this has to do with this post. Seems like you're trying to suggest that I'm trying to imply that there is one single, simple answer to solving the structural problems of our economy. I'm not.

quote:

---

Poor americans having access to cheap ipods doesn't really help anyone. Poor americans need help buying food, housing, and energy (stuff that Chinese doesn't manufacture).

---

And how does devaluing our currency help poor Americans do this? Seems like eroding the purchasing power of the dollar simply makes assets more expensive for those that hold dollars.

And really, the argument that devaluing our currency = improving our trade defecit and stimulating American manufacturing is incredibly short sighted. In the short term, this might work to increase sales of American goods, at least within our borders, but long term it does not address the problem of American labor being far too expensive relative to labor abroad; the steel and automobile industries suggest that raising tariffs has caused those industries to innovate. Its just made those industries suck more, which has invariably led them to come and ask for more protection.

quote:

---

Illegal immigration has lowered prices too, not just Chinese manufacturing. So I don't think the issue is as simple as just one factor.

Yes, our leaders haven't been effective at leading.

---

If there is one major source of the problem of our economy, its that labor in this country is TOO EXPENSIVE relative to labor in other countries. That's it.

Fixing it is a different story. It probably requires a number of different steps:

1) Restructure/privatize our education system education behaves more like a market and it actually teaches students skills they need in the private sector (IBM is going to outsource 100,000 jobs over the next decade, not because doing so is particularly financially advantageous to them, but because Americans simply do not have the skills needed to perform these jobs). Also we need children to spend much less time in the class room and much more time getting skills in the labor force. The gross amount of money we spend on educating our children in this country, and the amount we force our college grads to take on in debt, have a tremendous effect on the amount that they demand in wages in the private sector.

2) Open up our borders so that we can attract more skilled labor from overseas. Also allow a strong guest worker program so our manufacturing base can pay much lower wages. Legalize all drugs so that we don't have to deal with drug cartels coming over the border and murdering our citizens (or our own citizens murdering each other; this can save state budgets quite a bit both in the forms of tax revenue and because it will allow them to make huge cuts to police spending).

There's no way to avoid buying things made in China. That's beside the point, too. The economy is shedding hundreds of thousands of well-paying manufacturing jobs. All those 40-50+ year old laid off workers are never going to get wages like that ever again because Chinese labour is so cheap. Partly because the Yuen isn't properly valued. Who cares if consumer goods are slightly cheaper when nobody can find jobs?

It's the same reason why Walmart might be an capitalist's orgasm (though in Canada it's really not all that cheap anyway...), but it's anathema to everything else. Sure there's tons of jobs at Walmart. They pay minimum wage, no benefits, job security, or prospects of ever getting better pay, all the while it's sucked the local economy dry running everybody else out of business. All so you can get slightly cheaper consumer goods.

Re: Skilled worker immigration

Opening the floodgates any more than they already are wouldn't be all that great. Foreign credentials are hard to translate over, especially when they aren't from Japan/Europe/Canada/Australia. So you end up with skilled immigrants who have to pay a lot of money out of pocket in order to gamble on the job market to get a job. If you've got way more skilled workers, wages fall, the US becomes even less attractive than it already is.

Fixing the education system would be a good start. It will take two decades for there to be a strong, pronounced effect, (that is, if another pro-wealthy republican government doesn't hack it to pieces at some point), but it would mean huge benefits for the middle. You could start by not forcing teachers to teach to tests, forcing the smart kids to take the same courses as the idiots, gently pushing people with mechanical aptitude towards trades, engineering or the like, stop treating schools as prisons with metal detectors and whatnot, killing grade inflation (the best kid should get an A+, not half the class. It should be hard to fail, but Cs should be given out for C work), providing co-op jobs for high school students, teaching job skills alongside stuff like Shakespeare, and so on. Stop busting teacher's unions - happy teachers are better educators. Stop laying off the best teachers every time there's something bad in the economy (seniority as the exclusive marker of value is bad). Make "trades" high schools. Teach kids how to write a resume, a cover letter and so on, and get them out into the workplace - I'm sure lots of companies wouldn't mind free or virtually free labour. Make classes 9 - 4, stagger vacation time.

Stop forcing kids to take PE. Or at least don't force kids to take PE all together. Zero aptitude children are going to get nothing out of playing football with a kid who played since he was 5. If you want kids to be fit, promote healthy eating and fitness attitudes. Don't throw them all together and hope for the best. Shouting doesn't work that well either.

For post-secondary, bring back 60's-era funding for anybody with a decent average. Subsidize professional programs more, things like English Lit less. Yes, the academics will grumble, but we *need* engineers and scientists. Whereas English Lit majors either have to choose to go onto a Masters/Law degree or will never use anything they learned. Don't subsidize private schools, especially religious ones. If we don't have enough doctors, roll back some of the ludicrous requirements for med school. Same for all professions except law (as it appears the US has way too many law schools now, and they are all mostly terrible). Upscale co-op jobs in universities as well. Nobody should graduate without some decent work experience under their belt.

Stop forcing undergrads to take pointless electives.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Volcanon:

Subsidize professional programs more, things like English Lit less. Yes, the academics will grumble, but we *need* engineers and scientists. Whereas English Lit majors either have to choose to go onto a Masters/Law degree or will never use anything they learned.

---

Just wanted to point out that professional programmes do actually get more in government subsidies than other (non-math/science) programmes do. If you're just asking for more subsidies than these currently have, however, then that's a different issue. Still, it's worth pointing out that the low cost of a non-science/professional degree reflects the low cost of providing those degrees (all that's needed is a decent library, a chalkboard, and chalk, after all), and that it's actually these degrees which end up off-setting most of the costs incurred by more expensive subjects (e.g. engineering, physics, medicine, etc.). Dips in enrolment for these subjects directly affect the available funds for STEM subjects.

The current situation with 1992-universities in Britain is a pretty good case in point; STEM subjects in Britain receive (or did, prior to the current overhaul) about twice as much as non-STEM subjects. This prompted a number of administrators to decide to cut non-STEM subjects from their curricula so that they could attract more STEM students and, accordingly, more funds. What they apparently didn't realize was that the programmes they were cutting were generating surpluses even without government funding, and so they've ultimately precipitated some rather serious financial crises down the road.

quote:

---

If we don't have enough doctors, roll back some of the ludicrous requirements for med school.

---

The problem isn't students not making the cut: enrolment in medicine is actually quite high. It's the cost of the education and the availability of spaces that are problematic, not to mention the overall structure of our respective health care systems.

quote:

---

Stop forcing undergrads to take pointless electives.

---

I'm not sure what you've got in mind, but I suspect the answer here is usually that you want well-balanced students coming out of a university. So, you expect everyone to know just a little science or just a little critical thinking (say, something about evolution or what an argument is and how to construct one). This is why most liberal arts institutions have distribution requirements rather than just funnelling students immediately into a given subject. It's an idea (and an ideal) that I strongly support, although it's obviously not always well executed.

__________________
"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to me." -T.S. Eliot

RIP Ari

quote:

---

Originally posted by Goaswerfraiejen:
The problem isn't students not making the cut: enrolment in medicine is actually quite high. It's the cost of the education and the availability of spaces that are problematic, not to mention the overall structure of our respective health care systems.

I'm not sure what you've got in mind, but I suspect the answer here is usually that you want well-balanced students coming out of a university. So, you expect everyone to know just a little science or just a little critical thinking (say, something about evolution or what an argument is and how to construct one). This is why most liberal arts institutions have distribution requirements rather than just funnelling students immediately into a given subject. It's an idea (and an ideal) that I strongly support, although it's obviously not always well executed.

---

Shrug, I was forced to take classes that never helped me and never will. Come to think of it I'm forced to take classes that won't help me and aren't interesting in postgrad too.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Volcanon:
Shrug, I was forced to take classes that never helped me and never will. Come to think of it I'm forced to take classes that won't help me and aren't interesting in postgrad too.

Medicine has assinine requirements like thousands of hours of volunteer time and whatnot. As if that has any bearing on how good of a doctor you'll be. Now there's going to be interviews with the intention of weeding out "bad apples", but as we all know, it's not the "bad apples" that don't get through interviews, it's the socially awkward people.

---

I understand what you're getting at. I have a finance degree. I took upper level math courses and explored history while pursuing my degree. But there were many times where I knew for certain that many of my classmates were majoring in business because:

A. They don't want to or can't do science/math.
B. They don't want to or can't write papers in English or read for comprehension.
C. Business = money

You shouldn't be so short-sighted about classes that you need/want/use daily. I'm not an apple fan-boy, but I do appreciate Steve Jobs's commencement speech at Stanford. He dropped out of college and took calligraphy classes. I mean, how in the heck does that help you make better computers. Well, in his words it did. We would certainly be at a loss if school was just math and science.

Volunteering is not asinine. A lot of people view volunteering as an open-ended experience. It's just another classroom and opportunity. Anyways, helping people should be the only reason why medical school exists.

And don't be a hypocrite about the interview process. If you had to choose between 2 equally competent doctors that you don't know, do you choose the weird one? If you had to choose between 2 equally good potential girlfriends that you don't know, do you choose the attractive one?

Why should the A+ student get rejected in favour of a weaker student who volunteered?

My undergrad is 100% things I was interested in, save for some of the more idiotic electives I had to take, and 0% things that our wonderfully myopic employers wanted. You know, because the ability to grind yourself to fluency in a hard language in three years is not a marketable skill at all.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Volcanon:
Volunteering is asinine when they are basically treating you as "free labour".

---

If you're volunteering as a means to some end rather than out of passion, then I agree. But then, so are internships; presumably, the idea behind both (when not done out of some kind of passion for x) is that the experience will serve you well in some respect, usually on the job market.

quote:

---

Why should the A+ student get rejected in favour of a weaker student who volunteered?

---

I've never served on an adcomm, although one of my parents has (for medicine). My understanding (and this is certainly reflected in my own discipline) is that an A+ student should not be rejected in favour of a much weaker applicant with some extracurricular credential; on the other hand, we're talking about a VERY competitive admissions process: the weak applicants are all weeded out very early on. What's left are all strong applicants with diverse backgrounds, and the decision must be made somehow. In some cases, the kind of extracurricular activities chosen may be taken to reflect some sort of attribute that the adcomm wants to have reflected in their student body, and so they choose the student with that experience over the inexperienced student. It's tough, but perfectly fair; that's why applicants must apply widely.

In my own field (philosophy), each department has room for an average of 1.4% of all applicants. To get that 1.4%, they admit 3% of applicants. It's rough, but fair given the ridiculous level of competition. Plus, it's not exactly as important a profession as medicine: our job market is even worse because of recent (well, last 20 years) trends towards hiring administrators and cutting full-time faculty. Administration in the US alone has increased 45% since the late eighties, while faculty size has shifted downward a few percentage points--but part-time [adjunct] faculty has increased massively, to the detriment of full-time [tenured or tenure-track] faculty. Canada's in the same boat there; there's something wrong when mid-level management in a public institution is making between $400 000 - $1 000 000, and the number of those administrators grows every year. I'll come out of here with the same level of degree and overall qualifications as they have, but have a yearly salary of $15 000 to look forward to as a perpetual adjunct. An so will everyone else that graduates for the next decade or two.

quote:

---

My undergrad is 100% things I was interested in, save for some of the more idiotic electives I had to take, and 0% things that our wonderfully myopic employers wanted. You know, because the ability to grind yourself to fluency in a hard language in three years is not a marketable skill at all.

---

I hear you: same boat. Unfortunately, my understanding is that what (non-academic) employers want is for me to hide my education and pretend I'm a semi-literate, innumerate, and utterly vacuous hulk. I refuse.

I would gladly gain more basic work experience doing really horrendous jobs if employers didn't assume I felt too good for them. Yes, I have a solid educational background, I'm proud of it, worked hard for it, and won't hide it--especially when it's a prerequisite for most jobs anyway. No, I will not be scrubbing toilets for the rest of my life: I will definitely leave as soon as I get a better job. But guess what? So would anybody else, irrespective of level of education. If I didn't want a crappy job, I wouldn't be applying for it.

__________________
"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to me." -T.S. Eliot

RIP Ari

quote:

---

Originally posted by Volcanon:
Volunteering is asinine when they are basically treating you as "free labour".

Why should the A+ student get rejected in favour of a weaker student who volunteered?

---

I agree that slave labor is wrong. If that is how you are being treated, it is wrong. But that isn't reflective of all internships/volunteer work.

quote:

---

Originally posted by super324:
Random thought:
Poor folks work hard. Very hard. Anyone who tries to tell me that a hedge-fund manager works harder than a migrant strawberry picker is full of it.

---

I think that you'd find it very difficult to persuade some people otherwise. Some people equate working harder to earning more money. It's a fallacy that gets entrenched early on in life and reinforced through adolescence and early adulthood.

About the second part of your thought, people who have power rarely cede it willingly. When you oppress people, there will come a time when the oppressed no longer view a life without freedom worth living.

When I see the protests around the world and the ones popping up within the US, it makes me strongly consider what I'm doing to help things improve or make things worse; and what I should do to help? I think every citizen should take a cold hard look. We have dysfunctional leadership, sure. But we can't blame leaders for everything.

The ideology and values of the parents who raised our current generation of leaders, we are seeing their children in action. Are we seeing good fruit from our labors or reaping the bad seeds that we sowed? We get the government made up of the Americans we raise and educate and then elect. We get the government we deserve.

quote:

---

Originally posted by choco man:
I agree that slave labor is wrong. If that is how you are being treated, it is wrong. But that isn't reflective of all internships/volunteer work.

If someone doesn't hire you because you didn't volunteer enough, why should someone hire you because you answered some questions on a test better? It's not as simple as grades and extracurricular activities.

---

Grades are a measurable level of intelligence/achievement. Volunteering is not. Thank god I'm in a (non-medical) profession where employers actually care about grades.

As for poor people; farming doesn't pay enough to warrant the hard labour. Apparently in the 80s picking berries in eastern BC paid $300 a day if you worked hard. Ditto for Australia in the 2000s. But now when I look up wages it works out to below minimum wage (as in X pounds = X pay, where it's not humanly possible to pick X pounds at the same rate as the minimum wage).

quote:

---

Originally posted by Volcanon:
Grades are a measurable level of intelligence/achievement.

---

Do you truly believe that?

Grades alone are not a good objective measure for how someone will fit in, execute, and succeed within an organization. It's like judging the value of a baseball player solely on the basis of his batting average.

In practice, she's an idiot who had to be physically stopped from doing shots while on antibiotics. And her personality is such that more or less everyone on the floor can't stand her. So she'd be an absurdly unreliable, incapable of taking orders, and inducing a negative workplace environment employee.

As the levels of certification get higher (Associates degree, Bachelors degree, Masters and PhD for academics) you see a much higher minimum capability. Again, it doesn't mean that the high school graduate is less capable than the PhD. But it does mean, on average, that the PhD will perform at a much higher level within his or her specialty. And since the odds are extremely in favor of the PhD's performance, the PhD will be compensated better. There are other measures of enhanced "minimum capability" including professional certifications (like a CPA in Accounting) and trade classifications (a Master tradesman vs. a Journeyman vs. an Apprentice). Doesn't make an individual necessarily better, but does say that the individual with the higher "rating" will do a lot better on their worst day than the uncertified alternative.

This is the dilemma of the current US economy. There are still a large number of jobs available for those who have special training or unique skills. As an example, the unemployment rate for College Graduates is ~ 5%, and for those with advanced degrees (or those in science, math, and engineering) the rate is ~ 2%. If you have a skill that requires a lot of specialized training, experience, or schooling, you can still do pretty well.

But if your skills are simply the ability to do manual labor, even heavy labor, or your job security is the length of time you have worked in a non-skilled job (like tenure in many union positions), then there are tons of others with equivalent skills and capabilities in other countries who will work for less.

So what America needs is to either see wages drop to world norms (a catastrophe if it occurs) or find ways to help Americans work smarter (which, in reality, requires continuous training).

And the great failing of our Capitalistic System is our requirement that our companies maximize profit (return to shareholders, as the primary stakeholders) by whatever means so long as it is legal. There is nothing in that corporate fiduciary requirement that states "and do good for your country". Nationalism is considered quaint, some sort of third or fourth tier stakeholder consideration.

So business leaders have no qualms about nation-damaging actions ranging from outsourcing jobs to off-shoring the entire organization. These are quick hits that boost corporate profits and avoid the heavy lifting required to help continuously upgrade the skills of American workers. And sadly, the other incentive against the heavy lifting is that American executives often get a big chunk of the short-term paper profits they generate. So their motivation is often against the actions that make our country stronger.

PS As a techie, I am completely in favor of a diverse curriculum. Being skilled in Math or Science is often useless unless you can communicate effectively. Being a great writer is worthless if you are clueless about the differing subjects you might need to write about (like most current journalists today).

quote:

---

Originally posted by Volcanon:
Grades are a measurable level of intelligence/achievement.

---

As someone who gives out grades for a living, I can assure you that's false. Grades are a measure of a student's ability to complete an assignment to our satisfaction, and are strongly correlated with the amount of work that goes in. Writing ability makes a huge difference, but not all intelligent people are good writers. Similarly, your ability to complete complex proofs in logic and metalogic has nothing to do with your intelligence, and a whole lot more to do with familiarity, confidence, and pattern recognition. Case in point: all my peers are extremely intelligent: they made it into a fantastic PhD programme against all odds, after all (about 500-600 applicants, 4 spots). We all have to pass a logic requirement to advance; I'm the only one who was up to the task (they passed, but it was not pretty). That's not because I'm smarter than they are. Rather, it's because I had a more extensive background in logic than they did (some had none), which in turn ensured that I was more familiar with the requisite proof procedures than they were (not with the actual material--FOL and the like are pretty much irrelevant to mathematical logic), and got the patterns far more easily.

Grades measure many things, but intelligence isn't among them.

__________________
"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to me." -T.S. Eliot

RIP Ari

quote:

---

Originally posted by hammr7:

PS As a techie, I am completely in favor of a diverse curriculum. Being skilled in Math or Science is often useless unless you can communicate effectively. Being a great writer is worthless if you are clueless about the differing subjects you might need to write about (like most current journalists today).

---

I agree with this.

From my perspective, once you get out of college, it can only help you to have a bigger skill set. It just gives you more options. Everyone gets out of school with an ideal job in mind, but that job isn't always readily available at the time. I feel like a lot of people who are unemployed are sort of pigeon-holing themselves into that ideal job. They don't think about any other avenues.

I know a few people who aren't able to "get a job in their field". Try something similar, or try something else. Screw it, your goal is to get paid. Having a more broad set of skills makes you better suited for that. If nothing else you have some money flowing in, then keep looking for that ideal job in the meantime.

__________________
There's no need to fear, UNDERDOG is here!

All your Gruul Nodorogs are belong to me. Trade them to me, please!

Report rules violations.

quote:

---

Originally posted by andrew777:
Warren Buffett is such a scumbag. The govt really should just confiscate all his assets and ship him to North Korea. Same with Soros.

---

Why the hate? Or are you not allowed to be liberal, or compassionate towards those less fortunate, when you are rich?

Look at those Koch Brothers. Stole Oil from the US (under-reported the amount harvested to pay less royalties). Bribed foreign governments to get contracts, in direct violation of Federal Law. Did business with Iran, and played a shell game to try and mask it. And these are the things they seem to have admitted to. "Contributing" millions and duping thousands to keep their taxes low, but completely unwilling to publicly state how much they give (and to which causes).

Or that bastion of morality, Rupert Murdoch. Has his media network rip anyone who challenges him. Anyone who thinks he was clueless to what went on in Britain just doesn't know the man (or his son). He's only had the Wall Street Journal for a few years and has already trashed its reputation (see the emerging problems with the European edition).

quote:

---

Originally posted by andrew777:
Warren Buffett is such a scumbag. The govt really should just confiscate all his assets and ship him to North Korea. Same with Soros.

---

I wonder how you would feel if the government went Communist on you?

quote:

---

Originally posted by andrew777:
Warren Buffett is such a scumbag. The govt really should just confiscate all his assets and ship him to North Korea. Same with Soros.

---

"the constitution applies to every citizen, except the ones I dont like".

If you're truly that hateful, just get the **** out of my country. I don't want to be paying for your social security, you hate-filled little gremlin.

Edit - to be clear, this wasn't composed in a fit of anger. More pity and disgust than anything.

If you can't accept that people who disagree with you can do so and be just as valid as you are as a human being, I really don't know what to say.