I Wanted to put up one last post thanking all of you. It was a pleasure taking this class and in the end it helped me to grow as a person. It was quite nice to be able to talk economics with all of you and if I noticed you on the street I would be happy to say hello. I wish all of you the best of luck for the future.
The major thing I learned from this course was how to better manage myself in an online class. Though I am still not particularly good at it in most of my online ones before this I would have a huge rush to get everything done the day before everything is due, and here I would tend to make incremental progress over time. As well as the important class related thing I learned was how to better set up my arguments. before this class I didn’t keep to one of the most important rules of building one in that I didn’t think of the dissenter as someone with fully thought out opinions. So this class helped me to be less likely to use straw-men in my points.
when it comes to a reflection on the class I would say that the class is rather well designed. My only real problem with the class are those that I find in all online classes in that though I don’t like making blog posts. I generally find that with the lack of constant feedback also caused me suffering, seeing as a majority of what I’d posted about was via replies and comments on the videos linked. Posts like those are not internally treated as posts; hence when I have no method of knowing whether or not they were counted when it comes to point totals. I only bring this up because when I went to check my grade online, it appeared as if I had only been credited for the main posts. however the relaxed deadlines were also quite helpful because the lack of consistent real-world contact with you and the other students would sometimes end up putting them in the back of my mind. overall I would call it quite an enjoyable class though the nature of doing the blog posts allowed me to have discussions with the other students on points we don’t agree on a skill that in economics is fundamental, and at the end of the day it allowed me to be more honest about my opinions through leaving me unafraid of the long-term relationship affects with other students (no offense towards them, it even helped me to respect them more when they didn’t agree). If I were to rate it I would probably give the class as a whole a 3.5 GPA
After doing all of the readings I generally feel nervous towards the future, because most of these problems would be solved if people were to do simple things. for instance we could drastically reduce our carbon emissions by a significant number if we didn’t have a culture that believed in the necessity of owning your own vehicle. but in actuality our biggest problem that affects all of our generations is the amount of excess in our recent ones we drive everywhere we demand low costs of food to the detriment of it’s quality. The greedy nature of life is not only it’s greatest triumph but could very well be it’s inevitable demise. I don’t believe anyone really thinks global warming is a hoax, just that they refuse to accept what that responsibility means for humanity as a whole.
So a Youtube content creator just posted an interesting idea as to why the tech industry generally undersupplies a product at launch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yp5BpT96yo any thoughts on the video as to either the validity of his claims or if this can be applied in new or interesting ways. Also, what he was getting at made me thing of comic books or trading card games when they use identifiers to tell you when the card was printed.
To be honest, I’m glad you put up the ones about Patient costs and doctors moving to Canada because it helps to prove a point I often end up in heated rants over my belief that privatized insurance is one of the least fair things this country does to it’s consumers. Insurance companies have incentive to not provide the service the sell whenever possible, if any other product did that the industry would die.
So the book I plan to report on should be arriving soon after a few minor difficulties I chose
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition. It seems interesting to me, but I have another unrelated thing to post about is there any way to see in general as to how we are doing because at the moment, I am unaware as to whether the replies I have made were of the quality worthy of points.
I just saw a fascinating story on PBS talking about the hyper inflation in Venezuela coming as a result of the drop in the price of oil. I kind of want to talk about this do you guys think it could be blamed on them, or just the circumstances. I would argue it was an inevitability based on the over reliance on one product which has proven before in history to be disastrous whether it be products like oil, or the amount of stock put in the potato by Ireland.
https://admissions.msu.edu/finances/tuition.asp Sam’s recent post about the costs of things got me wondering so I figured out how much it would cost for a semester at state. I started by looking at the cost of tuition which for a single semester of 15 credits is $13,612 and then went to housing and found a cheap 1 bedroom at $600/mo. which for the 5 months I’d have to be there for the semester comes to $3000. If I were to continue by adding 50 too factor in the bus pass I’d need for transportation as well as the 80 I spend in general in a week it would cost me about $18,262 for a semester at MSU that is with discounting the variable for book purchases and course packs which could vary wildly so ill factor it in at $300 putting the total at 18,562 divide that by our minimum wage of $8.50 an hour and it would take 2184 hours to pay this all off. this leads me to think that maybe universities are starting to become more of a pit, because a hole is something you can climb out of.
The Bottom Billion video seemed to offer some ideas that honestly scare me. The increasing involvement from foreign powers is what caused these problems. so would it even be possible to interfere more without just leaving feelings of resentment?