Possibilities:
(a) Full employment would be bad for capital because it would give workers too much power.
(b) In our highly leveraged financial system, much current wealth exists only insofar as people generally expect a certain rate of future growth. Nobody knows how to maintain economic growth with a shrinking population (maybe it can be done, but it'd be something new). So a shrinking population would destroy a lot of current wealth.
(c) Racism/ fear of cultural change from immigration.
It all comes down to energy, right? We need people to do things for people who can pay them, which ultimately requires cheap energy at the end of the chain. Most retirees aren't going to have the money to pay for all this new help themselves, and even if they did, where would the money come from after they died?
Disappointingly, the internet is not immediately forthcoming on the birth rate in the Douthat-Tucker household.
If you don't have a steady supply of hungry people, breaking unions and suppressing wages becomes harder.
Sucks for an exploiter, man.
What's with all these comments? All of you! Go make babies!
I actually think you all should go make babies because it's fun and makes life happier.
THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING.
That's the best Opinionated Grandma I've seen in a while.
Anyhoo, for the economy to work, we need people to go get cheap energy, and then we need other people to make use of it in ways that make everyone comfortable and entertained. I don't know whether it's the best system but it works alright when the energy is actually cheap and the tax code is actually progressive. It does require young people though.
OPINIONATED GRANDMA is always excellent, except when she gave me the most unkindest cut of all.
I believe I'm on firm ground when stating that the world does not need more Douhat-ish NYT columnists.
What we need is enormous magic drinking birds, appropriate cups for them, and a way to harness all that energy.
If only Mittens had won and laid off Big Bird as planned. America is doomed.
It's comments like 14 that keep me going when I'm feeling blue.
Should the massive per-worker productivity growth of recent decades cancel out the not-enough-workers-to-feed-the-old-people problem?
If we can tax the people who have been pocketing all the gains from that growth sufficiently, sure.
17: it would but for the twin running-out-of-hydrocarbons and ecological-collapse problems.
We should look for a whole bunch more hydrocarbons. No downside to that.
We need cheap energy in order to maintain a lifestyle that is at all close to what any of us here live. The economic system we have depends on cheap energy. If the cheap energy is hydrocarbons, then we're going to fuck up the climate even more than we already have done. We're in a bad spot, so everyone lies about it one way or another. IMO it's imperative to develop new sources of energy. But others are doing that while I'm trying to entertain them. This is stuff that, on this blog, I assume we all sort of agree on.
A couple of notes:
1. As always, the place to look to see what the possibilities are for a wealthy country with an aging, shrinking population is Japan, which is already there and has been for a while. Japan is famously a macroeconomic basketcase, of course, and has various other problems as well, but living standards do seem to be remaining high there.
2. text is making a lot of sense here with his focus on energy, which is ultimately the limiting factor for economic growth.
All else being equal, wouldn't you expect immigration to make up for declining birth rates? The US is _much_ friendlier to immigration than Japan or, say, Germany.
Why do people write "all else being equal"? All else is never equal, of course, but hopefully the relevant things are actually being discussed in the sentence that follows. If they aren't, then starting the sentence with "all else being equal" is a signal that what you are about to say is rendered meaningless by factors that you have chosen not to discuss. And if they are, then the opening clause is itself surplusage.
All else being equal, wouldn't you expect immigration to make up for declining birth rates?
Yes, you would, which is why complaints like Douthat's are generally pretty silly.
Nick, while the US is friendlier to immigration, there's a lot of counterproductive restrictions (like restrictions on skilled workers) that we could get rid of. Loosen those, and you can solve aging-population problems pretty quickly.
... What, in short, is the problem here?
A potential problem is that old people and young people tend to have different political priorities. As is the case between people with and without children. So if the composition of the voting population shifts so that there is greater fraction of old and/or childless people public policy is likely to shift in favor of their interests. Whether you feel this is an actual problem depends of course on whether you think such changes will be for the better or for the worse. I suspect they will be for the worse on balance but as an old person without children I don't really care all that much.
Why do people write "all else being equal"?
And it has the potentiality in question when the passive object is present and is in a certain state; if not it will not be able to act. To add the qualification "if nothing external prevents it" is not further necessary; for it has the potentiality in so far as this is a potentiality of acting, and it is this not in all circumstances but on certain conditions, among which will be the exclusion of external hindrances; for these are barred by some of the positive qualifications.
while the US is friendlier to immigration, there's a lot of counterproductive restrictions (like restrictions on skilled workers)
Pray tell, where are these industries where we're short of actual people rather than people who want to do the job for a fraction of what it's worth? Likewise, "immigration" as an answer to these questions also makes me want to kick people in the nuts. An endlessly growing global population is not a good answer.
Spain recently adopted a policy where if you buy a house worth more than 200K you get permanent residency. I think we should do the same thing for houses in Detroit. If you're willing to move to Detroit, buy a house, and live in it for 10 years, then you and your children get to be US citizens.
Some Rust Belt cities (not Detroit specifically that I know of) are in fact starting to put in place policies designed to attract immigrants to shore up their declining populations. Obviously offering citizenship is something that would have to be done at the federal level, which makes it a more complicated matter.
Very loosely-related, but speaking of population and politics, a very interesting graph of prez vote vs. population density of counties. Its general shape is what one would expect, but still pretty striking.
And speaking of votes, this week we should finally get more finals from some of the big blue states. Ohio's climbed from 100k to 160K, ~3% which is closer to the polling averages. overall up to 4.63M, I still think 5M is possible.
The plains provinces in Canada have had some success attracting immigrants to places that are losing people to internal migration, which could also serve as a good model for the Detroits of the US.
As always, the place to look to see what the possibilities are for a wealthy country with an aging, shrinking population is Japan, which is already there and has been for a while. Japan is famously a macroeconomic basketcase, of course
Well, it is and it isn't. It is true that Japanese GDP hasn't grown much - about 1% a year for the last 20 years. But GDP per worker is a different story. Japan's been stagnating mainly because the number of workers has been falling.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/japan-reconsidered-2/
Borrowing money to hire people to do completely useless work is useful economic stimulus when people are unemployed
Even worse-than-useless work will do (like fighting wars). But there are so many useful things that desperately need doing (repairing or replacing infrastructure in the U.S., building houses in the U.K., replacing the fossil-fuel-based energy infrastructure with one based on renewables, improving the energy efficiency of the existing stock of buildings) that it is crazy to leave tens of millions unemployed while these tasks remain undone.
32: I do wish that I could just get a job in Canada without doing complicated paperwork and that my boyfriend could do the same in the U.S. I can marry him and get him a greencard that way, but I think that truly open immigration would work better.
33
... If you're willing to move to Detroit, buy a house, and live in it for 10 years, then you and your children get to be US citizens.
Like we're going to kick them out if they move after a month. And any children they have (in the US) get to be US citizens anyway.
This long Kunkel piece at n+1 is a great overview of the economics and politics of full employment. It's been a while since I read it, so I don't have a pull quote or a précis, nut you may enjoy it.
Japan is famously a macroeconomic basketcase, of course...
...but living standards do seem to be remaining high there.
So much the worse for macroeconomics, I guess.
I can marry him and get him a greencard that way, but I think that truly open immigration would work better.
Amen, sister.
43: If you enter into a sham marriage with BG's boyfriend to get a green card, I look forward to some interesting ATMs!
And while I'm posting everywhere, reminder to LB or someone that Lee and I would love a meetup on the 14th, a week from Friday. We'll need to get back to Brooklyn Heights after but I don't think we have any place or time restrictions beyond the day itself.
can marry him and get him a greencard that way, but I think that truly open immigration would work better.
Maybe better for your dating life but economically it doesn't seem very compelling given the current unemployment rate.
46
Maybe better for your dating life but economically it doesn't seem very compelling given the current unemployment rate.
Well just between here and Canada wouldn't be so bad.
45: Yes, I'm on it, and delighted by the prospect.
Dean Baker explains all. He also has a chart and numbers (pdf), which is more than Ross "don't" Douthat has.
50: Ah, that's a comfort. So the demographic problem is as nonsensical as I thought.
The mirror reduction in the "problem" due to the change in children per worker is one I generally forget.
I read the Douthat piece a day or two ago and didn't even get to the level of questions LB has about his argument, because I couldn't get past the contradiction of "have more babies" and his his general stance of "don't expect any help from the government (you should get that from your church anyway)." He mentions family-friendly government policies and France and Sweden, but it's right back to condemnation the immorality and narcissism of our present day.
That last sentence should have a couple more words:
but then it's right back to condemnation of the immorality and narcissism of our present day.
I thought immigration into Canada was pretty easy to qualify for? I only looked at it briefly, so I certainly could have missed something important.
Douthat has a fucking sick worldview. His complaint is basically people get to be too happy now, so they need to suck it up and have more babies.
Speaking of employment, what does it mean that somebody has endorsed me for expertise on LinkedIn? Am I supposed to go endorse them back or something like when somebody says something nice about your reunion picture on Facebook?
Looking in more detail, immigrating to Canada is harder than I remembered.
It's a bit unclear to me where the opposition to freer migration between the US and Canada would come from, or is it just inertia?
So in one corner we have all of the old people, sitting on 1% CDs and needing to pay for the next 20 years of medical and other expenses. In the other corner, a smaller cohort of workers inheriting an economy that is one or two sizes too big. That suggests that there will be a large shift from investment to consumption, as the smaller workforce won't bear more investment. This also assumes that, for various reasons, investment in India and Africa (ie where the young people live) is probably not feasible. Considering that savings and investment is already very low, it might go negative in the next couple of decades as retirees start to sell their homes and 401ks to pay for expenses. If that's the case, returns on investment might actually improve, and we're already seeing that: profit margins and return on capital are as high as they've ever been.
then it's right back to condemnation of the immorality and narcissism of our present day.
Things are pretty awful nowadays. My wife's co-worker and would-be mentor hit a bicyclist while driving home drunk from a bar. She threw money at him and ran away, while a crowd jeered her. Then she complained about the incident to coworkers. Imagine, can you?
That suggests that there will be a large shift from investment to consumption, as the smaller workforce won't bear more investment.
Again, doesn't it look to you as if we have an awful lot of slack in our workforce right now, such that it could shrink by 10% or so without reducing output?
58.2: It's like you want the wildlings to pillage our realm.
60: Did she get arrested at least?
His complaint is basically people get to be too happy now
From what I can tell, this is the central tenet of conservative Christianity.
If the cyclist was hurt, you should call the cops on her.
I suppose it's in my discretion to do that, Moby. As it's a story I heard third hand, I'm not sure if they would do anything about it, but maybe they would.
Further to 57: Now he's explicitly asking me to endorse his expertise but I'm not exactly sure what his expertise is.
I suppose it means that someone on LinkedIn doesn't actually know you very well.
67: In that case, it may be a bit too far removed. This summer we had a spate of hit and run crashes here where cyclists were killed. A couple of them remain unsolved.
It's facts like that which lend me to support McManus' commenting rights here.
I initially thought the story in 60 was a fabrication being told as a joke, but, since apparently not: what does "threw money at him" mean? What does the "complained" in "complained about the incident to coworkers" mean? Did no one in the jeering "crowd" write down her license plate number?
sorry, urple, I don't know the answer to those questions, beyond the obvious.
I think the real problem is that the economy is changing. Empty houses and factories in Detroit, unfilled jobs for physical therapists in Phoenix. But where is the productivity going to come from? There really are no economies of scale in physical therapy, and other than some exercise equipment, not much capital investment. It really should be a job for a high school graduate, but it requires a 2-year masters. Maybe the best thing would be reducing licensing requirements for semi-skilled jobs like PT, who can easily earn six figures.
basically people get to be too happy now, so they need to suck it up and have more babies.
-- Uh, is it "What is contemporary Catholic social doctrine?"
-- Correct!
(applause)
There maybe ways to train PTs faster than the current system, but that work is in no way 'semi-skilled'.
PT, who can easily earn six figures.
Really? Wow!
Does anyone know how many kids Douthat has? (Semi-serious question.)
The diagnosis takes about 10 minutes and requires high skill. The manipulating and the personal training aspects, that doesn't require a MA. Maybe the job could be split in two, PT Sensei and PT Apprentice.
re: 76
Quite. I'd be willing to be that the average PT has had MUCH more job-specific training, and has a much deeper set of job-specific skills than most of us white-collar workers.
79: Have you seen what a PT does, especially with someone who is seriously disabled?
I've spent tons of dough on highly trained PTs, after my many car accidents. I'm familiar with their work. 95% of the time was manipulation of my muscles, which does not require an MA.
I don't know if it requires an MA or not, but that is still a specialized skill.
I'd push back against an MA as any kind of hallmark of vocational difficulty or skill, too.
Seriously, though, post-graduate degrees are all well and good. But I'd be surprised if even a tiny percentage of them involved the same sort of job-specific skills training that a lot of non-academic vocational training and credentialing does.
What would you consider "actually skilled"? The MS is obviously necessary. What may not be necessary is the BS you have to get first.
57: I'd ignore it. LinkedIn sometimes pesters users when they log on to recommend their coworkers' skills. That might not be so bad, but 1) if you haven't defined any skills yourself, it auto-generates skills based on your other data, and 2) there's a "recommend all" button which quickly gets rid of the annoying request. I suspect that's why I've had multiple intelligent coworkers that I work closely with recommend me for skills that have nothing to do with my job.
87: I didn't actually have very much job-specific training that has been specific to my actually job and certainly have no relevant credential.
89: He's a coauthor, so maybe I'll just look for a "recommend all" button.
You'd think behavior like that would make people pretty skeptical about the value or even sincerity of LinkIn recommendations, and that LinkedIn would realize this and so would discourage, rather than encourage that sort of behavior. You'd think.
Are you saying he really isn't capable of self-levitation?
Regarding the Douthat op-ed, Roy Edroso catalogs the second-string commentary.
Earning six figures as a PT is actually pretty hard, as their work is consistently undervalued and underpaid. I've heard that said several times, but it certainly isn't true in California, at any rate. (Then again, that could be because it's CA.)
95: A massage therapist told me that she now told you g people who were interested in therapeutic massage to become physical therapists, because massage has become a retail chain business and less of a profession. She said it's much harder to make a living.
I also know that if you want to be a sports trainer or whatever it's called you need a masters even after you've gotten a bachelor's in the same field. British doctors don't, I presume, have to get a masters degree after studying medicine as undergraduates. Do they?
I tried to tell people that the massage profession wasn't going to have a happy ending.
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I have to write a letter of recommendation for someone who is currently a lawyer and wants to go back to grad school to become a social worker. I'm not super worried about them not getting it, based on their impeccable resume and everything, but is there anything I should not say? This is someone whom I supervised some time ago, so I'm mainly speaking to past achievements and general character I guess.
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Graduate schools like to have students who are accepting of people different from themselves. Be sure to stress, repeatedly, that your former colleague has nothing at all to do with the Nazi party.
OT: Is this actually even remotely realistically likely?
Why Paid Leave Could Pass in Obama's Second Term: Americans Want It
It's sort of odd that such a basic thing seems almost like a hopelessly utopian pipe dream to me. But maybe I'm too cynical!
But... has Obama indicated he'll push anything like this? Have any Democrats?
re: 97
British doctors have all sorts of complicated options.* It's not uncommon to do an 'intercalated' degree, and some sort of postgraduate training, along with the normal medical degree. It takes five or six years to get a normal medical degree, plus, I think, one or two years as a junior who can't practice completely unsupervised. So, 6 - 8 years.
* I had two medical student flatmates, both of whom did intercalated degrees and some sort of postgrad study.
58
It's a bit unclear to me where the opposition to freer migration between the US and Canada would come from, or is it just inertia?
Well, there's the people that would whine that this is racist if it was limited to Canada. And there's the people who would worry about a slippery slope.
James, I'm sure it gets icy during the winter at the border but is Canada really uphill from the US?
102: Oh yeah, I wasn't familiar with the specifics, I just knew that it was something you could start at 18 instead of 22 and that you could have one longer course instead of doing a less intense training first.
And of course you'd have to have a formal training postgraduate program.
In the U.S. you're looking at
B.A./B.S.
M.D.
Residency -- with a formal didactic component
Fellowship --extra training for specifical specialties like hematology/oncology.
And then there are people who get Ph.Ds too.
If you went straight to med school at 22, you could be out as an internist at 29 but would probably pursue further training. A psychiatry residency is 4 years (including the internal medicine year), so you'd be done at 30. I'm guessing that in the British system you could qualify by 28. Yes?
And there's the people who would worry about a slippery slope.
The Canadian curling team?
104 108
"Slippery slope" is shorthand for arguments of the form "if people aren't allowed to own automatic weapons the next thing you know we will all be trying to cut our steak with plastic knives".
It's also fertile ground for terrible jokes about the Great White North.
"Standpipe's blog" is shorthand for a blog which happens to stand upon a pipe.
Are there any examples slippery slopes? I can imagine some cases where one group cedes political or military power (by, say, granting the vote or not contesting the Rhineland) and ends up having to concede more, but I'm wondering about the type of slope as this argument is usually used: "If we agree to this today, who knows what we will be convinced of tomorrow."
104: Look at a map. It's clearly above us.
114: The gay rights movement's progress has been slippery slope all the way from mere acknowledgment to marriage. Back when simple tolerance was being fought for the religious right was raving about how it would lead to gay marriage and they were right, despite the protestations of the very people arguing for tolerance.
Medical marijuana has slippery sloped into outright legalization in CO and WA.
117: You can use the fibers to make bitchin' rope. Historically it's been Big Rope keeping the herb illegal. Fact.
But for the slippery slope argument to work, doesn't the end result have to have dire consequences?
From the standpoint of the religious right gay marriage is an epic disaster, liable to cause god to get all smitey and shit.
In scuba training they talk about the Incident Pit. If something small goes wrong, you've gone over the lip of the pit, and it's now more likely that something bigger will go wrong, which will send you further down, which makes it more likely that something even bigger will go wrong and so on. (I remember the slide they used to illustrate this, a sort of trumpet-bell shaped curve with DEATH at the bottom.)
120: One could say the same about civil rights and interracial marriage. I suppose I should've asked for remotely convincing examples.
In scuba training they talk about the Incident Pit.
LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU.
Scuba diving so perfectly hits my phobias about water, I can't even think about it for very long.
My coworker had a family member who died while scuba diving. I didn't press for details, but I got the idea that they never did figure out what happened. It wasn't danger-diving or anything. Just a reef off some sunny island.
122: the growth of the British Empire in India would come into that category as well. First you sign a trade treaty with them, then you agree to a Resident, then you're forced to cede power over your foreign affairs, then they disinherit your adopted son and take over your emirate and by that time there's nothing you can do about it.
124. I had a coworker who nearly died while scuba diving. Some valve malfunctioned and cut off his air supply. Fortunately he managed to surface because he's a strong swimmer, but they were quite open about the fact that if he hadn't they wouldn't have been certain as to what had happened. A few minutes before he'd been in an underwater cave, and if it had happened then, that would have been that.
In scuba training they talk about the Incident Pit. If something small goes wrong, you've gone over the lip of the pit, and it's now more likely that something bigger will go wrong the Incident Sarlacc will grab you with its feeding tentacles.
126: Scuba diving scares me for that reason, but I might be persuaded to try it as long as I didn't have to go near a cave.
But maybe not regardless. I get a creepy feeling when I swim in deep water even though I'm aware that swimming in 10' foot of water is exactly the same as swimming in 100' foot of water.
But maybe not regardless. I get a creepy feeling when I swim in deep water even though I'm aware that swimming in 10' foot of water is exactly the same as swimming in 100' foot of water.
Apart from the extra 90' of water in which sharks could be.
And the possibility of them never finding your body.
It's kind of thrilling while swimming any distance off the coast to think about how much room there is below you for large creatures to hide, and how visible you are to all of them there at the surface.
I really do like swimming pools best.
125: Yeah, I think there are examples where power is given to groups that eventually are able to take more power. I'm not convinced there are any in more typical policy debates (and I would include gun control in this latter category).
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I would vote for Ben Masters in this. But it's a damn close run thing*.
*Yes, I know that's a misquotation.
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investment in India and Africa (ie where the young people live) is probably not feasible
Don't we sort of want this to happen, in ruat-coelum acceptance that wealth will be spread into a thin layer of what "looks like prosperity to a Pakistani bricklayer", hello Odesk.com?
135: It's hard not to reward a writer capable of using "wubbering" in a sentence.
I haven't had time in the last two days to really think about the OP, but I've been wanting to. So here are a couple thoughts and hopefully somebody who is actually an economist can correct me.
In no particular order:
1) There is no fixed pool of jobs; reducing the populations will reduce demand which will also reduce jobs available. This is the flipside of D2's, "every mouth comes with two hands." Every pair of hands comes with a mouth as well.
2) From a US-specific perspective, in this recession I've seen a lot of people talking about "employment to population ratio" rather than the unemployement rate, and that seems helpful. If you think that there is a persistent (rather than cyclical) problem with lack of jobs, then the question becomes what sort of a culture shift would allow for a lower employment/population ration with immiserating people? The last big shift was in the opposite direction, with women entering the workforce, I would wonder if, rather than trying to reduce the population it's possible to expand the portions of the population for which it's normal to not have a job (just typing that, it sounds like massive disruptions, but that's what it would mean to have a permanently lower employment/population ratio). Do we try to lower the retirement age, keep people in school longer, etc . . .
3) Obviously "full employment" is all about politics -- what are the incentives at the margin for people who are considering entering/leaving the workforce. If there's a generous social safety net which would make it easier for people to not work for an extended period of time, there's be less competition for jobs and labor would have more leverage; obviously business likes a situation where there's a lot of competition for job openings.
4) Kevin Drum has pointed out that there's something odd about the situation in which business has the sort of labor market that you would think they would want (with lots of competition for jobs) but still aren't competitive. I'm not sure what to say about that, but it seems like an important point to keep in mind for this discussion.
5) From a global perspective, even if total world population started to fall you would still expect to see a continuing increase in the population living relatively affluent lives (by global standards), which is part of what I was thinking of when I made my comment about immigration at the top of the thread. However we define "good" jobs, there are going to be more people competing for those jobs, globally, even if the population declines.
I had a coworker who nearly died while scuba diving. Some valve malfunctioned and cut off his air supply. Fortunately he managed to surface because he's a strong swimmer, but they were quite open about the fact that if he hadn't they wouldn't have been certain as to what had happened. A few minutes before he'd been in an underwater cave, and if it had happened then, that would have been that.
(Apologies to Blume in advance; best you skip this comment)
If he was scuba diving, in a cave, on his own, then that's pretty much "too stupid to live" territory. If he wasn't on his own, the DS solution is "breathe off your buddy's spare regulator while you both ascend under control". Going bingo for the surface as fast as you can from depth is also a good way to die in a variety of interesting and exceptionally painful ways (haemothorax, pneumothorax, DCS, embolism).
the Incident Sarlacc will grab you with its feeding tentacles.
That's pretty much what the slide looked like, actually.
Personal anecdote: I had an O-ring fail once, when I was about 90-100 feet down (32m anyway) and lost my air supply in a big cloud of bubbles and, of course, all my buoyancy too. Buddy and I just went to the surface under control (me holding on to his BC with a vice-like grip). If I'd been on my own, I'd have had no option but to drop all my kit and weight and try for a free ascent, and I have no idea whether I would have been OK or not.
116: not entirely true; am sure there have been some gay rights activists pushing for marriage as long as there has been such a thing as a gay rights activist.
I'm not convinced there are any in more typical policy debates (and I would include gun control in this latter category).
Foreign wars, surely. Once you've got some troops in the country, if things don't go well you have the options of leaving (and admitting defeat) or putting more troops in. Which makes leaving still more unacceptable. Etc.
Subsidies are one that a certain kind of public choice econ always goes on about.
I can see that once you put a subsidy in place it's hard to remove, but would it make it more likely that further subsidies would follow? In other words, isn't it more of a ratchet than a slippery slope?
139. He wasn't in the cave on his own; I think his buddy surfaced after they came out to do something.
The claim is that the subsidised group will then have more resources to push for further subsidies.
145: still a bit daft to be down there on his own. You have a buddy for a reason. If he has to surface, you surface with him - not only because you could get into trouble on your own underwater, but because he could get into trouble during the ascent or on the surface.
142: Throwing good money after bad. That's a good example. Also, the Drug War.
146: I'm skeptical, but maybe?
138.4 is really good point. The counterexamples of developed countries that manage manufacturing (Germany, Korea, Taiwan) are none of them innovative economies. The conventional answer is that there's a tradeoff between security and innovation, and Google and Genentech are both US companies.
I don't know whether the claimed tradeoff stands up to scrutiny.
Scuba diving sounds like something I'd like to try (with a buddy, apparently), but I'm not sure I could ever get comfortable relying on Air Supply.
Aren't you too young to know that?
I've only been scuba diving once, and wasn't particularly frightened by it at the time. Now, I'm retroactively terrified.
153: sorry! That's the trouble with learning through BSAC, actually learning to dive is really quick and then they give you weeks and weeks of hardcore rescue & recovery training and dive medicine lectures and slides of the Incident Kraken.
It's really not that dangerous, though I wouldn't care to try it with urple, just because he'd probably discover a completely novel underwater hazard.
Don't worry about it -- it's not like I'm cancelling tickets for next month's dive vacation. The last and only time I went was very very very long ago.
Lots of fun, though.
Even so, next time the topic comes up I will limit myself to fun skydiving anecdotes.
Sounds good -- those I can be uncomplicatedly terrified by.
Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.
156 No ajay, don't give in to LB's squeamishness, not unless you have some bizarre "let me tell you about the time my skydiving buddy was almost molested by a golden eagle in free fall" anecdotes up your sleeve.