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.
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Eli Zumberg
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Eli Zumberg
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.
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Eli Zumberg
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
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Eli Zumberg
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.
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Eli Zumberg
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.
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Michael Ruben
After watching it I felt it was a far cry for a marketing director to turn to a CEO and CFO and say something to the effect of “hey, I have an idea! Let’s cut profits by shortening the supply. But instead of feeding the demand we will simply let others in the market pocket what would have been our profit, because after all creating a strong demand of our product will enhance our image and that’s more important than numbers.” And yet, as much as I feel like this is a far cry, I’m pretty sure it would have been the CEO’s idea, not the marketing director’s.
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Eli Zumberg
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.
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Michael Ruben
As soon as hospitals became hospitalized and patients started paying for everyone, not just the doctor they came to see, the costs skyrocketed. How is it that a hospital birth receipt of less than $50 from the 1950s (which would be probably about $500 in today’s currency) is closer to $3,500 at minimum. Add in other costs and it could be as much as $10K! I certainly do feel like the scale is weighed unjustifiably. After all, the last few times I’ve been to the doctor’s I haven’t felt much like a patient but rather a walking ATM.
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Eli Zumberg
this is my second choice
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Eli Zumberg
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.-
Alex Latunski
I am also wondering on what it means to make a “quality” post.
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Michael Ruben
Likewise. I don’t know either. I’ve given some in-depth posts, but no points were given for those under “quality posts.” So I’d like to know also how that is defined.
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Eli Zumberg
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.
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tatef
Thought I had already responded but apparently not. My thinking is that a lot of things take time and money to develop. Oil provides the money and buys a country time to get other things in place. A good school system, health care and the like take a lot of investment but without them its very hard to make progress in any other way. If oil money can provide a way to firm up a solid foundation for economic growth than it would be crazy not to invest in it. I’m not sure where Venezuela was/is at in terms of other industries but it can be very hard to tell people to wait a generation or two for prosperity when you have money you can pump out of the ground now. There is no oil famine that wiped out their supply as in Ireland but there is international machinations that cause the worst of it just like In Ireland. In part its increased technology (shale oil, oil sands extraction) and Saudi Arabia deliberately keeping prices low. But I think its also the sheer craziness of every market since 2008. We may be out of the recession but that doesn’t mean things are back to normal here or elsewhere in the world (like Alex was talking about Greece, or China’s recent stock market hit http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/24/asia/china-stocks-explainer-new/index.html). Stock markets are fluctuating rapidly, commodities are going up and down etc…
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Eli Zumberg
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.
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Michael DeLaGarza
Just for the sake of throwing it out there, sometimes the apartment complexes will give you a free bus pass for the semesters that you have a contract with them.
It isn’t easy to pay for college, which is why some people debate the idea of whether it’s worth the ten years of paying off student loans after graduation. What I like about the course we are taking right now is that the books and readings were all free. This is the first course I’ve taken at a college where you did not have to factor in a cost for books, which at a community college can sometimes equal the cost for the class itself. Bigger universities will usually have courses that are required, and the books and online access fees cost upwards of $300-$500. What’s more interesting is that a lot of the time they will require you to always have the latest edition and it will be written by the professor who instructs the course. In the larger economics courses where they have 300 – 500 people enrolled in a single class, book revenues are generally mind blowing, especially when you take into account that the professors will have multiple times for each class with around the same number of students enrolled each semester. If we go with the lower end and use the figure of 300 students per class, with 3 different class times per week, and a book cost of $250, you are looking at $225,000 in book revenue for just one semester. I don’t know how everyone is paid and how much of a percentage the company will usually get, but even if the professor only ended up with 25% of total revenues, he or she still gets $56,250 as supplemental income.
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Eli Zumberg
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?
Alex Latunski and 
Michael DeLaGarza are discussing. 
Michael Ruben is discussing. 
Eli Zumberg and 
tatef is discussing. 
Michael DeLaGarza 12:26 am on May 9, 2016 Permalink | Log in to Reply
It was my pleasure logging in and reading your responses and your thoughts on the different things we were learning. You’ve been pleasant to take this class with and you’ve posted some interesting responses. Thank you and best of luck to you.
Alex Latunski 12:28 am on May 9, 2016 Permalink | Log in to Reply
The same to you, it was good to hear the opinions of others instead of talking in a vacuum like it feels like with most online courses. Your replies have on some occasions made me question my opinion. I wish you the best of luck moving on.