I personally beleive in personal, not governmental Merchantilism. That is the idea of when including total cost of a good, including the probabilistic cost that the money spent will never re-enter the local market.
In terms of the game, Monopoly, if I want to create wealth, I have an exchange of money between four players. If each player pays the next player $4000 from turn to turn, they have gained $4000 for their services, for which they want to purchase $4000 of a good.
I just read a viewpoint from an economist of why the U.S. Trade Deficit is not such a bad thing. It disproves some "common sense" knowledge by looking at the Trade deficit as the equation not just involving exports and imports, but the balance of:
Savings - Investment = Exports - Imports
The negative export/import value is balanced by a large inflow of investments. On the balance sheet, the investments have hopefully led to more net capital, but there is an increase in corresponding liabilities.
I just got finished completing a survey for the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota.
I felt that the University of Minnesota, from my first course as a PSEOA (high school) student, tried to make the students jump through many hoops. My experience at private schools is that you focus more on the learning and the rest is simpler, more service-oriented.
It started my first day as a PSEOA student, a Minnesota program that lets high school students take courses at the college or university of their choice. I went to the bursar to straighten out my payment with the State and the staff worker said to me, "No, you had better be prepared to pay this bill. This is not a JOKE." Maybe all service organizaitons could do better service by treating everyone as a B2B customer instead of B2C.
To the U of MN, I would request focus on students' needs. Example: parking was always an issue, placing the Alumni building in place of it does not appear student-oriented.
To the Dean I would say my favorite experiences were with IT group activities. Encourage IT activities that cross disciplines. I tried to take in seminars. Now I am not sure where I can go to find them all in one place (what took the place of the newsletter?).
I remember professors in the Civil Engineering Deparment, Gary Parker in hydrology, Otto Strack in hydrogeology, and Randal Barnes in geostatistics. There was a lot of character in all of the professors and they really liked their work. They motivated me to go on to graduate work.
I found out today that the actor, Tim Choate, that played Zathras on Babylon 5 died September 24, 2004. Zathras is a name of one of 10 brothers who lived over a millenium. They were assistants to the events involving Babylon 4 during the last "great war", and knew the leader of the Minbar religion, Jeffrey Sinclari.
Some of his best lines were:
1. "Zathras used to being beast of burden. Zathras have sad life, probably have sad death, but at least there is symmetry".
2. "Everyone always coming to Zathras with problems. Great responsibilities. But Zathras does not mind. Zathras trained in crisis management."
Sleep well, Zathras, your burden is over.
The VAIO PCG-FRV26 was acting pretty bad this past week. Though no viruses were being detected, I was getting strange errors from ikernel.exe. Probably from installing and removing software over the past few months.
I think the last time that I refreshed the system was in February when Trevor was born and I was staying home. From November to February, I was refreshing my system every 1-2 months just to keep the fragmentation and excess to a minimum.
Here is a link to my current software requirements.