My point is, unless we have rules, regulation and the damned government interference, private sector would not deliver prosperity. My point is, it is not a coincidence, the rise of prosperity for the middle class coincided with increasing regulation starting with trust busting, disclosure in stock market, truth in advertising, truth in labeling, product liability laws.

We have known this since the days of Adam Smith, but till about 1960s, the private sector preferred to invest in the developed world, and the third world figured only as a source of raw materials, not competition. Then Japan modernized, then Korea and Taiwan, then came other countries in the Pacific rim. By 1980s the interests of private sector and interests of the general population started diverging. We are still trying deal with the multinational private sector corporations using the lessons learned between 1780 and 1960, without giving due credit for the role of government regulation played in it.

Efficiency in private sector is defined to be maximizing the return on investment. Private sector efficiency is NOT delivering goods and services at the least cost to most people. If that is the *only* way to maximize the return on investment, they will do it. It happens on simple products like cereal, bread, milk etc. For private sector to deliver most at least cost, many conditions have to be met. There must be competition, product should be simple enough to be understood by the consumer to do value over price evaluation and there should unambiguous price feedback signal.

But private sector efficiency of maximizing return on investment would also include, undermining competition by buying them out, collusion, cartel formation, lobbying the legislators, media misinformation campaigns, bribing the media personalities, intimidating critics and many other tactics. Some of it legal, some questionable, and some outright illegal.

If we confuse the private sectors definition of "maximize return on investment", even after they have openly admitted "it is the fiduciary responsibility of the directors of corporations to maximize profit", with lofty goals like job creation, low prices, wide choices, improvement in living conditions, we are the fools, shame on us, not them.

My supreme skill is calculating the intersections of triangles with tetrahedrons with highest possible accuracy at the lowest computational cost. I am sure there is a job for me in the post apocalyptic world. But, in the odd chance there isn't, I certainly will be useful, may be as food.

I mean this is a free market economy pal. The markets have spoken. They have declared the professor to be worth about 140K a year. On the other hand the market is blessing Becks and Limbaughs with millions of dollars a year. Clearly they must be 10 or 100 times smarter than the professors, right? So you should just accept the pearls of wisdom hurled your way by the Rileys, Hannitys, Huckabees etc. If you could not trust someone who roasted squirrels in a pop-corn maker in the dorm, who could you trust?

All these so called scientists, spend 4 years in bachelors degree, 2 more for masters and four or five years to get a PhD. Work for about 80K a year median wage. They create these scare mongering stories to gin up grant money, totally untrustworthy.

On the other hand the media consultants employed by the billionaire owners of coal, oil, petroleum companies and investments in forestry products have absolutely no conflict of interest and they speak the original unvarnished truth.

I mean, who would you trust? Some one who is smart enough to make millions of dollars working for billionaires? Or the fools who spend so much of time studying and ending up working for a pittance? If these so called scientists are so smart why aren't they billionaires and millionaires? Shows who is smart and who you should listen to.

Yup. I can tell.

Or find a 65 year old ex mayor and teach him coal mining.

Everyone knows real programmers code in C, and in C you count from zero. Counting from one? that is so FORTRAN. Retire already, old chap.

Enough said. As more and more people become familiar with it, people would realize how easy it is to code. The standard canard has been women don't code, or they don't code well. We have hired women coders and they do as good a job as men.

Touche'. Sorry for the careless editing. I was about to say 40% but mistyped it.

Math proofs are based on a set of axioms or starting assumptions. All the mathematical proofs are simply inevitable consequences of the axioms, that is all. Every mathematical proofs say, "this is consistent with your original assumptions". That is all, nothing more, nothing less.

I remember reading about an European mathematician who set out to prove that Euclidean geometry was the only possible geometry. He came up with lemma after lemma, conjecture after conjecture, but no matter how hard he tried he could not prove non-Euclidean geometry could not exist. All those proofs, lemmas and work on conjectures formed the mainstay of the branch of non-Eucledian Geometry.

So all the math proof tells you is, if you make a set of assumptions, cosmos could be created spontaneously.

It is a good programming practice not to hard wire such "known" values even if they are constant, in the current builds. In future it might change. Some times it makes sense to make it something like a #define macro. But to maintain backward compatibility, and code reuse etc, we tend to write the low level functions with arguments and make sure callers use the the correct pre defined constants based on current and past implementations to maintain backward compatibility.

I call on the Harvard professors to fight grade inflation. The most common grade given in Harvard is A minus. A and A minus for 50% of the students, B and B plus for another 50%. Less than 10% get C plus, C, C minus, D plus, D minus and F.

Seriously, Harvard is getting to be overrated. Their admission policies claim to be shooting for all kinds of diversity, racial, ethnic, geographical, socio-economic etc etc. But in reality, American applicants disclose everything, salary, bonus, assets, even unrealized stock options. International applicants produce fake certificates claiming to paupers, and game the system. The Asian Americans, mostly IndianAmericans and ChineseAmericans are such a disadvantage, they need to score 100 to 200 points above other applicants. And after getting in everyone gets As.

And these professors are media celebrities, flying to various international conferences, on their book promotion tours, they hardly have time to talk to students or teach. The professors are unapproachable, intimidating and have a condescending attitude towards the students. I am an Indian American and I know plenty of parents who have sent their children to all the top colleges. In my immediate circle are students in all the top 10 colleges. University of Chicago seems to be the only school left that still strives for academic rigor. Princeton, Yale and Harvard have become jokes when it comes to rigor. Columbia kids complain about the academic load, but still seems to be somewhere in between. Initially students are self motivated and continue to study with the same vigor they displayed in high school. In two semesters it dawns on them, "you don't have to work that hard. Everyone gets A minus or A", so they start going lax, and by the time they are in the final year, they all have jobs, planning on spending the lucrative pay packages, slack off almost completely.

I used to think very highly of these institutions when our kids were in elementary school. Now that they are grown and they are in or have been through these univs, having had a closer look, I am very disappointed. The current set of faculty in Harvard, Yale and Princeton have set the institutes for a big fall. The lack of quality of their grads will become too obvious to conceal in the coming decades.

Casual observation suggests, Republicans would find it very hard to believe and the Democrats would find it totally within the realm of possibilities. My brother is consultant for PeopleSoft benefits management module. According to him, about 10% of the employees enroll as soon as the period opens. After that spike there is a lull, and about 50% of the employees enroll in the last week (of a typical 4 week open period), and about 25% enroll on the last day. About 1 in 1000 miss the deadline and send despo emails and come up with sob stories why they missed it and beg to change their options. About 1 in 10000 realize they have missed the enrollment period only when they show up at a doctors offices and the friendly receptionist tells them, "Sorry Mrs McGillacady, the card is not going through". Based on that, I would say the profile of surging enrollment in the last few days/weeks seems to be consistent.

The PHB would use the fact against barlevg during performance review about the number of times (s)he has been told something no action was taken, and number of time the hard working PHB had to remind barlevg to get anything done.