This.

At my school CS majors actually take more math than most engineering majors.

Math degrees are great if you want to be a math teacher. If you don't want to be a math teacher, don't get a math degree.

I only know one EE that is satisfied with being an EE. All of the others are trying to get CS jobs and wishing they actually had some CS training. The only EE knowledge I have heard of being widely useful is basic circuit analysis which you can get in just a few classes. Granted, there are going to be some jobs where in depth EE knowledge is actually useful but those jobs are few and far between. What you really want is a CPE degree where you become a competent programmer combined with a basic knowledge of circuits and hardware. EE's go too heavy on the physics, which 99% won't need, and too light on programming, which 99% will need.

Option A: Receive the swift kick in the pants you had coming today.
Option B: Receive two swift kicks in the pants tomorrow.

I don't know much about what the UK is doing but it sounds like the UK chose option A and the US chose option B. The US has serious issues that are getting worse. The longer we wait to face those issues, the worse the pain will be.

You seem to be arguing that you prefer two swift kicks in the pants tomorrow over one swift kick in the pants today. Sounds short sighted to me.

First, during Clinton's entire tenure, the surplus was never more than $400 billion. No where near a "multi trillion dollar" surplus.
Second, deficits under Bush never rose over $500 billion. Again, no where near a "multi trillion dollar deficit."
Third, the US took in $1.03 trillion dollars in 1990 and spent a little over $1.25 trillion, taxes were 17.9% of GDP. In 2011, the federal government took in $2.3 trillion and the federal budget was $3.6 trillion, taxes were 15.3% of GDP. That is a lower % of GDP but in order to reach $3.8 trillion taxes would need to be 25.3% which is over 40% higher (in terms of % of GDP) than taxes were in 1990. You are right in that taxes are lower now than they were in 1990. More importantly, you are wrong in that spending is much higher (adjusted for inflation and relative to GDP) than it was in 1990 so the taxes would need to be 40% higher than they were in 1990 to balance the budget.

So yeah...pretty much nothing you said was even remotely accurate.

Kickstart?

Ummm...it involves Mountain Dew. Sooooo...nerds?

You are confused. Friedman never argued for a completely free and unregulated market. Primarily, he said that government is responsible for enforcing contracts and prosecuting fraud. Those are forms of regulation. Less != none. I don't know why that is so hard for people to understand. I suppose people choose not to try and understand because otherwise they would actually have to listen to other peoples ideas and consider them instead of outright dismissing them. Summarily dismissing someone is the easy, close minded, arrogant way out of having any real discussion.

A compromised position would be to only bail out companies that agree to split. That was my main complaint about the bailouts, they left the companies relatively untouched. If they accepted a bailout they should have been forced to split until they were no longer too big to fail.

There are two problems. The first is to keep companies from getting too large. The second is what to do with companies that get too large and then fail. If we always solve the first problem, there won't be a second problem but that is unlikely to be the case 100% of the time.

Colluding isn't a case of competition "not working." It is a case of there being no competition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZWzf3h50LU

Skip to 1:14. I'm no physicist but those look like lasers to me.

I was actually describing the Reproducibility Project which uses the Open Science Framework. My bad.

http://openscienceframework.org/project/EZcUj/wiki/home

The Open Science Framework focuses on psychology instead of chemistry but I would imagine they could both utilize similar frameworks and methodologies. I'm not a chemist or a psychologist so there may be some major incompatibility I don't know about.

That is correct and is not contradictory to the quote. The point of the quote is that economics can help show leaders how little they really know about the impacts their policies will have.

As for the rest, you have presented a false dichotomy. Hayek didn't say that we shouldn't do anything unless we are 100% sure of all of the consequences of that action. He did say that we don't know nearly enough about economics to justify making grand designs to control the economy. This applies equally to many regulatory schemes. The bulk, but not all, of such things are best left to emergent systems that contain local knowledge that are, currently, inaccessible to central planners.

Shocking. Hayek strikes again, "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

I would have modded you up but I don't currently have any mod points. I decided to post a smug comment that you probably don't agree with instead. :)