rules of life

Bill Gates recently (about a month back) gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1 : Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Free markets ... NOT

 

http://dummyspots.com/2007/09/jon-stewart-and-alan-greenspan-best-interview-ever/

 

Alan Greenspan made an appearance on The Daily Show to plug his new book, but instead of the shallow, softball exchange he may have been expecting, Jon Stewart knocked him back on his heels with one of the most insightful interviews I've ever heard. They covered the myth of the Free Market, the Gold Standard, the Fed's role in controlling the quantity of fiat money, inflation, irrational exuberance… all in the span of about 5 minutes and all in a comedic context. The coup de gras is when Greenspan admits that even with all the complex mathematical models, neither he nor anyone else is any better at forecasting now than they were 50 years ago!

 

<…>

 

Stewart: When you say "Open Market," I always wonder… Why do we have a Fed? Wouldn't the market take care of interest rates and all that? Why do we have someone adjusting rates if we are a free market society?
Greenspan: We didn't need a central bank when we were on the Gold Standard…[Conspiracy theorists note- the Fed was created 20 years BEFORE we decoupled from the Gold Std -Ed.] …people would buy and sell gold and the markets would do what the Fed does now… but by the 1930s most everybody in the world decided that the Gold Standard was strangling the economy and universally the Gold Standard was abandoned…  …you need somebody out there or some mechanism to determine how much money is out there because the amount of money in an economy relates to the amount of inflation…

 

Stewart: So we're not a free market then- there is an invisible, there is a "benevolent" hand that touches us…

Greenspan: Absolutely, you are quite correct. To the extent that there is a central bank governing the amount of money in the system, that is not a Free Market, and most people call it regulation [ this statement should forever be enshrined as a quote- Ed].

 

Stewart: When you lower interest rates, it drives money to stocks and lowers the return people get on savings.

Greenspan: Yes, indeed.

Stewart: So they've made a choice - "We would like to favor those who invest in the stock market and not those who [save] "…

Greenspan:That's the way it comes out, but that's not the way we think about it.

Stewart: Explain that to me. It seems to me that we favor investment, but we don't favor work. The vast majority of people work, they pay payroll taxes, and they use banks. And then there's this whole other world of hedge funds and short betting… y'know, it seems like craps. And they keep saying, "No no no, don't worry about it, it's Free Market, that's why we live in much bigger houses." But it really is, it's the Fed, or some other thing, no?

Greenspan: I think you'd better re-read my book. [trying to work the plug into the surprising line of questioning- Ed.]