On Tuesday, December 30, 2014 3:08:14 AM UTC-5, mike wrote:
On 12/29/2014 8:10 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
thread getting too long...snip

The Japanese had no reputation for quality at the end of WWII.

Thanks to W. Edwards Deming, they woke up fast, and set a new quality
standard for the world. The Chinese are still mostly bottom-feeding in
international markets.

And you expect this to remain the same for forty years?

I just can't project that far ahead.

It's not rocket science.

The problem is... it is not anything less, either.

It's simple math.
The first order approximation to ANYTHING is to assume
the current trend continues at the same slope.
If you don't like the trend, saying you can't predict is not
helpful.
The correct course of action is to decide where you want to
be in 40 years and take affirmative action NOW to point the
trend in the direction you want.

New York Times Economist Paul Krugman wrote this in September 2, 2009 about the 2008 economic crisis:

"Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field's problems. More important was the profession's blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable -- indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views.

-- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/ma...anted=all&_r=0

Merry Christmas to all and to all a zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Same to ya, but I had a rotten Christmas. Too much trouble with the gf.
;(