slurry

Not bringing this up to argue that RMS is correct or reasonable (here or elsewhere), but I just thought it was interesting. RMS may be an unrealistic utopian, but his unrealistic utopia is some mutant form of liberalism - with property rights and commerce etc. - not communism or even big-s socialism.

I could replace half my data center with a POWER box and manage the other half with it. Amazing machine if you ignore licensing...

How rigorous/sophisticated is the math in research-level econ, really? The econ undergrads I knew went up to basic engineering math (calc 3, linear algebra, diff eq's) at most, and those who did were considered to be really hardcore. Do research economists use higher-level math than that?

I still perceive India as a "shithole". Whereas China's elite has used its newfound wealth to finance widespread infrastructure and especially sanitation projects, India's has not, not on a mass countrywide scale. Fallen prey to coordination problems is the best gloss you can put on it but I still find it scandalous.

Second, South America's recent progress has mostly been under governments of the left, using more or less coercive statist means that neither the Gates Foundation nor the average HNer would endorse. But maybe it's worth considering.

b. Humanities PhD programs also have enormous dropout rates. And many dropouts also end up in bad shape. I'm ignoring them too, so in the context of the breathtakingly unscientific anecdote, it's even.

c. Besides which, survivorship bias is probably not even in the top three things that make my personal anecdote not a valid scientific experiment. It's obviously not good empirical evidence for many other reasons.

Look, the basic point is, fields that people "love" but which are very hard to get jobs in, such as academia, the arts, architecture, nonprofit human services work, journalism, modeling, video game design, etc. do not tend to actually make them happy in my personal observation and experience. Another point is that I think people in high-demand fields tend to have more life satisfaction.

Things I did not address: getting a degree vs. getting a job/career; are the humanities terrible?; which specific high-demand career should one choose?; what happens if one can't hack chem e/nursing school?

I don't know the answers to most of those questions. Failing out of nursing school? I really don't know what to tell you. Would it have been better if you passed as a fine arts major? Possibly. But I'm more concerned about careers than about degrees here. If you graduate with a fine arts degree and go into banking you may be better off than the nursing school dropout, if you try to seriously pursue a career as a sculptor you are probably going to be worse off, unless you have family money.

I really am not offering advice on what career to choose, besides pointing to one big superclass of jobs that are probably a bad idea to pursue and another big superclass that are probably a better idea.

Sorry this got stuck on chem e. I don't know any chiropractors, otherwise I would have used them.

Bureaucrats quoted as praising it seem to be mid-level at best.

Either vaporware, or reskinned Linux/Android, or most likely both.

My argument was that being one of the (high percentage of) chemical engineers with a job is better than being one of the (low percentage of) humanities academics with a job. I'll acknowledge that survivorship bias is a potential problem.

Do you think humanities PhD washouts are generally happier than Chem E washouts?

All the chemical engineers I know (I know a few) are pretty happy. Most find their work interesting.

All the humanities academics I know (I know very many, having been one in a former life) are more or less unhappy. Many find their day to day work uninteresting and unexciting.

Chemical engineering is a high-demand field. Not many people's dream job.

Humanities academia is a low-demand field. Many people's dream job.

I think "work in a high demand field" is better advice for any young person than "do what you love," with or without qualification. Especially if they are the sort of young person who wants to be passionate and interested in their work.

Doing the hyperspecialized Hot Field of the Day may be a bad idea, but perennials like [software] engineering, K-12 education, finance, nursing, medicine etc. are generally going to be the best use of an intelligent student's time.

Low-demand fields mean a lot of down time due to lack of funding or lack of employment. That kills passion. High-demand fields mean there's always something to do and a new problem to solve. I think that's more important for actually loving what you do.

I'd say China in the late Qing Dynasty would be a good data point for it being a bad thing. Or a compare-and-contrast of Spain and the Netherlands in the early modern period.

With respect to Japan, yeah, we think of it as super-hierarchical. Then again, Japan had two major hierarchy-toppling social revolutions pretty recently. First the military-imperial apparatus toppled the feudal nobility during the Meiji Restoration. Then General McArthur toppled the military-imperial apparatus during the American occupation. So, perhaps the slope of the long term trend line is as important as the current value?

Like, off the top of my head, Kant or Hume. Plenty of contemporary people working away thanklessly as well, probably, too; but it's not my field. But even then, it more likely qualifies as "useful" rather than "revealing". Because there are no big easy-to-grasp-and-broadcast flashes of blinding insight. In the field of consciousness or any other.

Appreciate your continuation of the discussion.

2. Full stomach/quenched thirst is trivial if you don't mind tap water and simple starches, but once you add (depending on your taste) a complement of steak, quinoa, fresh fruits, beer and/or wine - then you run into a little money.

3. Warm place to sleep - anywhere near work? public transport? "good" schools (however you define that)? Gets expensive quick.

3bis. Meaningful intimate loving relationships are easier to maintain if you have at least one weekend day off (i.e. don't have to work 2 or more jobs) and have at least a little cash to go out on the town at least once in a while.

4. Sense that I am valuable - to me, this has always been difficult without a modestly good set of clothes, shoes and a haircut. Others don't feel that way (but less than you'd think). But maintaining a personal sense of one's value is at least somewhat correlated with others' sense of ones' value. And others' sense of one's value is never completely monetarily free.

5-6. Freedom to indulge curiosities and spiritual life - on a low income, you'd better be single and childless. And even then, it's a challenge.

I very much doubt the average person could fulfill those goals to any degree of satisfaction on less than 50k as a single person in a major metro area, not a ton less in the boondocks, and not much less than double that with a partner or spouse.

Also, this is only "surrounding the first day when the C.E.O. is on the job". Value and long-term growth investors will not even notice.

But there is something like nationalism at work here. You have the self-appointed champions of "real Canada" (Harper's base in the landlocked provinces) systematically undermining the knowledge and cultural capital of the Alien Other (the "weird" provinces that touch salt water, which for various reasons are all not quite "real Canada).

It's probably not fascism. But it's more than just bad policy. It's bad policy that consistently works out to the detriment of non-favored geographic, linguistic, and yes sometimes ethnic groups.

I might actually be okay with an ID requirement if we also got rid of the previous registration requirement.

I doubt they'd be the same in either nominal or real terms. But that's a side issue.

You could already do what you're talking about with gold. A bank could offer gold savings accounts that pay interest on gold loans. They don't do it. Borrowers are deflation-averse and no one wants to deal with the exchange rate fluctuations.

BTC has some legit uses (like buying unjustly banned consciousness-expanding products over the internets) but the built-in deflationary death spiral in its design pretty much ensures that it will never be a serious full-spectrum parallel currency, much less a replacement for the dollar and euro.

If everyone adopted bitcoin, the velocity of the dollar would approach zero. Which means that inflation would go down, not up.

And yes, I would rather have my [savings] account in a hard, non-inflationary currency. On the other hand, I can only earn interest when someone is willing to take a loan in the currency and pay interest on it. And I am not about to take out a loan in a hard currency when perfectly good inflationary currencies are easily at hand. So, you're going to have a hard time finding a bank that pays interest on bitcoins. This is why "bad money drives out good", aka Gresham's law.

Nevertheless let's try.

We can do better, HN. We can do better than "this wouldn't fly in Belgium" as the top-rated comment.

BTW: Belgium? Not historically a model for even-handed tolerance with respect to black people: https://www.google.com/search?q=king+leopold&safe=off&rlz=1C...

(On the other hand, it seems very plausible tribal colleges have excellent programs to maximize grad rates as much as possible.)