Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
How did you get in to that field? I had never heard of this before reading your post, I read a little bit about it, and I think that work is extremely interesting, especially the data mining and analysis part of it.
if i had to do it all over again I would get an internship while in college just doing something like updating the datasets or mapping (not much on the enterprise side), just to get that experience on your belt. You'll probably do best at a city gov or something. The private sector has opprotunities as well, but I didn't see that many for fresh recruits.
While doing this work on the specialization of your choice. I as mentioned went with the arcgis server route, but you can do a little of everything or alot of one thing. Read up on computer programming then mess around a little with openstreetmap, read up on databases using mysql or oracle database XE (free, then eventually make your way around to oracle spatial). Web mapping is extremely popular as mentioned above, so that's another option. The ideal GIS candidate esp wrt mining and analysis will have experience with python and sql to perform advanced queries. If you want to be able to present your findings then you'll pick up something like SPSS so you can do hardcore quantitative stuff.
JUst don't waste $$$$$ and four years on a degree in History, Psychology, Sociology, a language, etc. These degrees will not prepare you for any job, and all you'll have left is a big debt and 4 years of parties behind you. These are nice fields of study, but you can learn a lot of this on your own by reading books in the Library, or buying them on line. Then you don't waste time on a lot of other courses they make you take to round out your liberal arts education.
I value my college education and the doors it has opened for me in accounting.
However, I think it's pretty obvious that the education system is a bubble just like housing was. I won't go into much detail, but the Fed has royally screwed up and allowed the dollar standard to gut the country in many ways.
Housing, medical, and education all pretty much stem from the same problem of easy credit and bubbles. It's the reason why pretty much everything from medical costs to college costs are all screwed.
They think the answer was the make education easier to get and to have more people go. The reality is that this lowers the value of a degree at the same time the government involvement is making costs rise in double digits. A recipe for disaster and ruined lives.
I remember reading an economics article about the days of average being over. Basically, only the top group of people in a given field, ect will make it like more people used to. Competition is fierce over a pie that can't grow fast enough.
Read this article, and you will understand exactly what we're seeing today. It's the root cause of this entire economic crisis.
If we lose the reserve currency over the next few decades because of it, the "American Dream" as we know it is DONE.
The dollar standard was set up after ww2, when we were the only unwrecked nation on earth.
And what other form of currency do you envision taking the place as the worlds reserve currency? Are things perfect? Of course not. But we are still the best house in the worst neighborhood.
I agree with Andy here we are the best house in the worst neighborhood. And at the end of the day that may be all it takes to come out ahead. We will keep the world's reserve currency as the dollar for a few more decades. Their is nowhere else for the big world banks to hold their reserves in but the dollar. Yes the dollar will be worth much less high unemployment and massive underemployment. And we do have bubbles in housing medical and education. We will have massive shocks to the system and huge layoffs. But here is the key everyone else we be so much worse off then the US. We are going to run at 8% to 12% unemployment in the future. The rest of the world 20 to 25% is what their unemployment rate will be. Look at Spain at 20% this is the new normal. The dollar may be worth less in the future. But everybody else who has currency other then the dollar it will be worth nothing.
I agree with Andy here we are the best house in the worst neighborhood. And at the end of the day that may be all it takes to come out ahead. We will keep the world's reserve currency as the dollar for a few more decades. Their is nowhere else for the big world banks to hold their reserves in but the dollar. Yes the dollar will be worth much less high unemployment and massive underemployment. And we do have bubbles in housing medical and education. We will have massive shocks to the system and huge layoffs. But here is the key everyone else we be so much worse off then the US. We are going to run at 8% to 12% unemployment in the future. The rest of the world 20 to 25% is what their unemployment rate will be. Look at Spain at 20% this is the new normal. The dollar may be worth less in the future. But everybody else who has currency other then the dollar it will be worth nothing.
Many of those European countries are run like pseudo socialist nanny states. In Spain, young workers are having a terrible time finding work, and most attribute that to the extreme difficulty of getting rid of undesirable workers. Safer to hire a seasoned older work with experience. Not all European countries are doing that bad, but the ones that are seem to harbor borderline socialist policies. Good for the worker, until the work goes elsewhere. Some of that work does migrate to the United States. Ikea production work would be a good example of such, where temps in this country can be hired for $8/hr no benefits in the south.
And what other form of currency do you envision taking the place as the worlds reserve currency? Are things perfect? Of course not. But we are still the best house in the worst neighborhood.
Obviously, I don't know the true answer because this is one of the most difficult questions of our time. No one really knows what the best course is, but many have suggested the SDR. Either way, it's going to take decades---and maybe another World War.
It's accepted wisdom that the United States, despite recent problems, is still the strongest growth locomotive for the world economy, the pillar of the global system. What if we were to discover that, instead of being the pillar, that the United States was, in fact, the heart of a dysfunctional economic system, which is spreading instability, unemployment, and depression globally?
I agree with Andy here we are the best house in the worst neighborhood. And at the end of the day that may be all it takes to come out ahead. We will keep the world's reserve currency as the dollar for a few more decades. Their is nowhere else for the big world banks to hold their reserves in but the dollar. Yes the dollar will be worth much less high unemployment and massive underemployment. And we do have bubbles in housing medical and education. We will have massive shocks to the system and huge layoffs. But here is the key everyone else we be so much worse off then the US. We are going to run at 8% to 12% unemployment in the future. The rest of the world 20 to 25% is what their unemployment rate will be. Look at Spain at 20% this is the new normal. The dollar may be worth less in the future. But everybody else who has currency other then the dollar it will be worth nothing.
"So perhaps Bretton Woods does not end because foreign governments are unwilling to bear ever increasing levels of currency and interest rate risk or due to the collapse of private intermediaries in the US, but because it has delivered the threat of deflation to the US, and that provokes a substantial response from the Federal Reserve. A side effect of the next round of quantitative easing is an attack on the strong dollar policy.
Consider the enormity of the situation at hand. The Federal Reserve is poised to crank up the printing press for the sake of satisfying their domestic mandate. One mechanism, perhaps the only mechanism, by which we can expect meaningful, sustained reversal from the current set of imbalances is via a significant depreciation of the dollar. The rest of the world appears prepared to fight the Fed because they know no other path.
Bad things happen when you fight the Fed. You find yourself on the wrong side of a whole bunch of trades. In this case, I suspect it means that Bretton Woods 2 finally collapses in a disorderly mess. There may really be no other way for it to end, because its end yields clear winners and losers. And the losers, in this case largely emerging markets, and not prepared to accept their fate.
Bottom Line: The time may finally be at hand when the imbalances created by Bretton Woods 2 now tear the system asunder. The collapse is coming via an unexpected channel; rather than originating from abroad, the shock that sets it in motion comes from the inside, a blast of stimulus from the US Federal Reserve. And at the moment, the collapse looks likely to turn disorderly quickly. If the Federal Reserve is committed to quantitative easing, there is no way for the rest of the world to stop to flow of dollars that is already emanating from the US. Yet much of the world does not want to accept the inevitable, and there appears to be no agreement on what comes next."
We often hear the phrase, "Saved by WWII" when talking about the Great Depression and the 1930s. Back then, the world was in disarray, based on economic constraints rooted in WWI reparations, the expansion and bursting of the stock market, and worldwide abject poverty.
Saved by a war that cost 60 million lives? What was the option? The starvation of the poorest had begun in Eastern Europe, and revolution was in the air in the United States. No one can contemplate the extent of the disaster that is coming now, since we don't conceptualize WWII as being caused by economics.
Perhaps it's time to promote this explanation, so it would be clearer just what kind of a precipice we are now looking over.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
