Mathematical anomalies

I had a thought one day about school. The program I am in lets in a cap of 75 students roughly a year.

Given that population growth is only going up still (albeit apparently slowing down in most industrialised first world countries) and not going down anytime soon, I often wonder about the nature of competition in crowded places.

If you've ever been on a bus that is packed like a can of sardines you get the feeling that civilization is best represented by the calm that people on those packed buses retain.

Eventually, the number 75 will have to be increased to accommodate more students coming and the facilities will have to be expanded somewhat to meet the demands of more students as well.

In our program, we are told, competition is fierce for jobs/careers upon graduation, which leads to another mathematical anomaly; is there potentially a tipping point in the future where the ratio of actual jobs/careers to graduates will see supply not meet demand?

In other words, will some people simply not get jobs/careers because population is to high relative to the amount of jobs/careers available and/or being created?

Death of a Small Bank .....

In the US small banks are not recovering so well as their bigger brothers and sisters who received billions in taxpayer funded bailouts.

Unfortunately, this is a symptom of a larger problem with capitalism; the distribution of wealth.

Yes, capitalism and free markets allow JUST about anyone who has a business idea to make a go of it, but when it comes to issues of inflation and cost of living increases in relation to wealth distribution, its no surprise that the lower and middle classes are paying more to get by then the wealthy.

You need to look only at years of cuts to social programs coupled with shrinking wages, salaries, and disappearing benefits to see how inflation increases hit the lower and middle classes the hardest.

It might be a cliche to say that plain old greed is the culprit, but there are individuals more responsible then others. A large portion of free market zealots believed that absolutism in free markets would manifest itself in a short period of time into a Utopian capitalist paradise in economic experiments around the world from China, to Bolivia, and the former Soviet Union.

What has instead happened is hoarding of wealth by a few percent of the populations with minimal trickle-down to the other social strata's.

And so now, even though the free market zealots core beliefs were shaken to the very foundations during the Credit Crisis of just a few years ago, the heroin addicts that are the large financial institutions that got high on their on supply of liquidity, were given sickly sweet doses of methadone via large bailouts.

Whose to say that someone won't try to pull the same high risk for short term gain economic stunts again?

Twitter to Facebook ....

I was aware of Twitter and Facebook before entering Creative Communications at Red River College, but had no desire or need to use said social media before.

I had to sign up for Twitter in my first semester Public Relations course, and then not to long afterwards, on my own, opened a Facebook account.

So far I use Facebook much more frequently then Twitter. Part of the reason is that you can create photo albums which is a quick way to get pictures out to family and friends without having to develop and physically mail pictures.

Facebook has some other interesting features as well like the birthday function and being able to simply get someones attention by 'poking' them.

To me personally, Twitter is a scaled down version of Facebook, and Facebook is winning the social media battle for myself personally in terms of features and functions that I like.

My wife has had a Facebook account for sometime before me, but she rarely uses it. I have a cousin who refuses to use Facebook because he doesn't want his personal life to mix with his business life in light of privacy issues that Facebook has had to deal with over the past year.

I do have former work colleagues and friends on Facebook which is indispensable as a means of getting a hold of people you don't see on a regular basis, or finding people you might not have seen in years.

On the other hand, I do sometimes feel frustrated when I say I have posted pictures on Facebook and someone wants to see said pictures and they indicate they don't have a Facebook account.

One side of Twitter and Facebook that I haven't really been able to get a sense of fully yet is the business potential for both forms of social media.

On Twitter I've noticed you can follow anyone from a celebrity to a scientist. Short form messages do have the potential to say a lot; potentially just as much as an elaborate Facebook page for a business or PR campaign.

The rapidity of information as well as the complexity or simplicity of information has been transformed by Facebook and Twitter. I can simply assume that whatever career in communications I have in the future, that Twitter or Facebook will be some part of it.

Let it snow ....

Record snowfalls in Washington DC, and lack of snow fall in BC. What do we make of this? Some would say it is the result of El Nino. I say it is the result of climate change! I know I don't have any actual empirical proof but neither does anyone else to the contrary.

Again, we must remember that yes, if the planet warms, overall it will get warmer, but that doesn't mean the whole of the planet will necessarily transform into the Mojave Desert!