A good idea 20 years ago. Today, the farmer has a choice of death vs life due to the fully mature gang culture that has grown up around illegal drugs.

Best to just legalize it - let the gangs convert to legal families with less income.

Mainly the land was worthless because no one could find work there any more. Demand for the land dropped precipitously as thousands of people left the area and moved elsewhere. The world is littered with similar ghost towns.

There is not much value in unmanaged woodlands. Perhaps in 20 to 30 years they could grow trees there that could sell.

You are ignoring consumers giving their money to companies for goods and services.

The most obvious case are companies that pay dividends but earnings growth and resulting stock price growth also represent the same thing.

Compare a CD / Bond to a stock.

The CD pays 1% per year. If you put $10,000 into it, you will get $100 per year in interest.

Say you have a company that pays $200 per year on $10,000 of stock. Is $10,000 a fair price? Or are people likely to bid it up until it is paying about 1% per year? There is some risk, but it's likely the stock will go up until it pays a rate closer to the CD. So the stock might go to $18,000 and pay you $200 per year.

Now say the company is increasing earnings by 10% per year. So it will pay $220 next year, $242 the year after that and so on. So reasonable people will now pay even more for the stock. It might go up to $19,000 this year (and more in the future).

Finally, say bad news -- the companies earnings are not going up to $242 as planned but instead are dropping to $180 because of a new invention, new law, or new competitor. And it's earnings are likely to be $160 the year after that. So now, a reasonable person might only want to pay $14,000 for the stock.

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Just to make things interesting make a lot of this a matter of opinion and not facts. A new law *may* be passed... a new competitor *may* start up. And different people have different opinions on how likely that is to occur.

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And then add oscillation around the "ideal" value. Every time the stock price moves- it slightly overshoots. it takes it time to stabilize on a ideal value and by the time it is going to- some fresh news changes the ideal value. And of course-- occasionally a majority of people will be afraid and unwilling to buy the stock at it's ideal value and other times a majority of people will be irrationally exhuberant and willing to buy the stock above it's ideal value.

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Anyway.. long story short- it's not a pure ripoff. For the most part, you don't "get rich" but you do preserve purchasing power adjusted for inflation. Mainly, you need to save hard. People who try to get rich are gambling- some will win big- many will lose big.

Mostly but not always true. A lot of real estate in the middle of the country became worthless after 2000. Recall that they were bulldozing thousands of houses in some towns and offering to let people swap into a different house closer to town while also cutting services/road repair to those who remained further out.

Changing climate or moving rivers/coastlines also render property worthless at times.

I agree that land does tend to hold value better than other assets but it's not an absolute.

It won't happen again.

Actually, if you look at Monthly R.S.I., it's also doing interesting things.

I think the government trying to stop the ordinary business cycle recessions is making the recessions worse when they finally do occur.

Lol.. Let's try that again...

At the lower executive positions on up, where everyone was old, the gender balance basically flipped. But you are talking about under 300 positions in the entire company of 70,000 employees. Essentially every operating division was lead by a male (200+ of those) and the vp positions were 80% male, the CIO was female but the COO, CEO, etc were male, and the BOD was 80% male and 20% female. That level/group was almost all white as well.

Are colleges at 60/40 as reported in the news article above.

What part of that hard fact do you not buy?

DHI? Dick Heads Incorporated?

Which is one of the challenges (for now) of indian competition.

A degree in india is 7.5 to 20 lahk while a degree from comparable western universities is 20 to 50 lahk.*

Living expenses are even lower so the amount of debt incurred is tiny compared to western students. The net result is a degree cost 25% of a comparable western degree.

The lower level of debt allows a much lower income level. This is likely to continue for another 20 to 40 years at current inflation rates and presumes that indian tuition won't accelerate as western tuition has and that western tuition won't continue to outpace indian tuition inflation.

*http://www.mba.com/india/plan-for-business-school/enroll-in-a-program/financing-your-degree/how-much-will-it-cost.aspx

Bad
Adjective
1) Wasting time posting about video game issues on Slashdot.
2) of poor quality; inferior or defective.
3) not such as to be hoped for or desired; unpleasant or unwelcome.

The documentation was right there in our promotion and hiring practices. We were specifically taught to select the "most diverse" candidate formally whenever two candidates were close. That wasn't illegal even at such hugely distorted numbers.

The illegal part was the female manager going to lunch with the female team then talking business, making business decisions, deciding strategy, and assigning key positions. You can't document that unless you are there any more than women could document men doing it on the golf course or in their private business clubs (elks, kiwanas, rotary club, etc.) And in the pattern of hiring which was well past 50/50 (as I said 70/30 managers and 80/20 team leaders reporting to managers).

It was also women being allowed to work limited hours because "it's too dangerous for them to work at night" but assigning men to work 2nd shift. And allowing women to take the afternoon off to take care of children but telling men they need to let their wives take care of the kids.

It's obvious and right there in your face. just like colleges being grossly imbalanced and yet people keep assisting females but not males.

All I can do is point it out and hope that enough people will start to notice the facts and think, "Hmm. 60f/40m is ACTUALLY pretty unbalanced. Perhaps young females don't need so much college assistance any more and perhaps young men need more."

Um..

Just exactly when are you going to stop helping females and take your foot of the back of young men? The ratio is 60/40 now-- when will it be "enough" to stop having hundreds of groups helping females but few helping males?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07...

Most institutions of higher learning, except engineering schools, now have a female edge, with many small liberal arts colleges and huge public universities alike hovering near the 60-40 ratio. Even Harvard, long a male bastion, has begun to tilt toward women.

"The class we just admitted will be 52 percent female," said William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions.

Women now outnumber men two to one at places like the State University of New York at New Paltz, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Baltimore City Community College.
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seriously--- I'm retired and don't really give a shit- I'm not a "men's" activist-- but I see in my gaming groups and in my in-laws relationships how the males are suffering while the females are still getting assistance and help even tho things are well past 50/50 (i.e. "fair") now.

At the last place I worked before I retired, 70% of managers were females and they openly discriminated in favor of females for team leader positions the ratio was 80% female to 20% male. They did things which would be illegal if a man did it. The law wasn't being equally enforced.

People hire people "like" them unless the government gives them a reality check. Women are equally able to discriminate, behave in a prejudicial fashion, and abuse the power of their positions.

The area where it is imbalanced in favor of males is at the very top. Among 60 year old males- the percentages are m ore like 80% male and 20% female. Where we need affirmative action is at the top- not in the bottom or even in the middle any more.

My coffee is behind my right keyboard on top of my notepads. Mouse is in the middle right now tho I've had a mouse tray in the past when doing this. Graphics tablet is on the back of the table leaning against the wall or in my hands/middle if I'm using it.

I using a mini desk/folding table right now. (Long term a small antique desk is intended for this spot.

The table is 20" by 40". The 28" monitor is 24" from my eyes and on a upside down "infile" box about 9"x12". I think mid term I'll be putting it on a mount or even mounting it on the wall.

The space available is shallow but wide- about 48" deep (including seating room) by 62 inches wide.

If you do that you have to double the used web space, and that can be expensive. I'm already almost at the upper limit for my site and will have to go to the next tier of hosting soon. As it is, only three of the well over a hundred pages on my site need a special mobile version, and I would imagine a lot of other folks are the same way.

Having it first look for m.sitename, falling back to mobile.html if it exists and m.sitename doesn't, then index.html if there are neither m.sitename or mobile.html might be a good idea, though.

Yea, well you were not kept as slaves, killed for learning to read, beaten with inch and a quarter thick poles (often to death). Your families were not sold separately to different owners and broken up. You were not systematically excluded from education, jobs, housing, medical care for generations and eveb lynched for generations (as recently as the 1990s for several of those). The police don't selectively stop you, shoot you, arrest you while letting other races go without an arrest record.

So affirmative not really so much about helping or hurting you or your minority group. It's about trying to correct evils of the past and make things fair enough again that we don't have violent civil unrest, mass rioting and destruction of property.

If you have 2% of the population and 2% representation at harvard, you don't need help from harvard.