Market Discussions

I graduated with a B.S. degree in Economics. In my opinion the only thing you learn is how to BS.

Also, straight out of my Economics professor's mouth (who went to Harvard), he said to a classroom of 100+ people that the main reason why we go to college is to learn how to bullshit.

So unless if you want to be an Economist and work in academic related field, most of the stuff you learn are just theoretical, useless, and don't apply to real life.

In Economics, you would often solve silly problems using silly mathematics where they use the symbol "Pi" for Profit........ by the way Pi does not mean profit, Pi means 3.14159 and that's real math.

I suggest studying something more practical and useful in everyday life: i.e. programming / engineering / medicine / law / accounting.

I regret wasting my time getting an Economics degree, and the only reason I did so was because my mother (who only has a high school degree), thought it would be a useful major, and would not pay for my tuition unless I major in something that she agrees on.

And if you are interested in investing and the stock market, an Accounting degree, or Law degree focused on Securities Law, is much more helpful. Economics is useless here.

The degree (and masters) are meant to get me into law school after I'm done with them, so no worries there. I enjoy the field and the way you characterize it is extremely wrong, economics does have an established understanding about how economies work. But regardless thanks for the warning but I'm happy where I'm at.

π is also a greek letter. In that regard it can be used to represent a wide variety of things, just as 'x' is often used to represent a wide variety of things in algebra and calculus. Further, economists use π because profits are usually represented as,

p*y - c(y),

where p is price, y is the output, and c(y) are costs. So, p is already taken, so they use the Greek version of 'p' for profits.

The capital version is also used in mathematics similar like the capital version sigma, Σ. Capital sigma is used for summation, the capital version of pi is used for sequential multiplication.

So much for your understanding of "real math".

As for the usefulness of an economics degree it depends on where you end up working. My last job and my current job it is very helpful. My last job was for the government working in a research division on price index numbers, and currently for a regulated utility. Concepts like marginal costs are discussed routinely. I wouldn't recommend it though if you were just going to get a bachelors degree and stop there. However, if you are going to get a bachelors, take the mathematical and statistical based courses. They'll give you good problem solving skills and really help your ability to reason.

Oh, and generally speaking, going to college isn't really about learning something useful, but as a signal that you can get **** done. That you are reasonably responsible and capable of doing work while not being constantly baby sat (like in high school).

Of course some degrees are percieved as hard and others less hard. A guy with a degree in mathematics or chemistry will send a different signal than a guy with a degree in Chicano studies.

True that... though it's still pretty ******** imo. Wasting **** loads of money "learning" stuff you already know... just to get that stupid meaningless degree. Extremely demotivating. Because you dont actually have to be good at what you do, or have skills, or insight or intellect in order to pass. You just have to memorize what they tell you to memorize and copy paste that on your exam form. In most cases anyway...

Even worse, a teacher once gave me a 0 on my oral exam because I didn't atttend his classes... never mind that I could answer all his questions correctly, nope, just a zero.

Oh well, kind of just venting now lol - all I ever got out of college are bad memories.

My course was around $7,000 in 1992 (May), ending in 1992 (October) + 2 weeks after.

I got a student loan and grant after which all grants in the province were cancelled for over 10 years.

There are other BS related like, the grant was never issued properly , and bureaucrat pocketed the funds and hid the contract details of amounts.

That is only about 5% of the total BS going on.


I further had a $10,000 scholarship 2 years before in 1990, for which I opted to get a $5,000 worth part-time course in computer programming without systems analysis (full-time only).


2nd:
I will list the business equations that are in my computer fundamentals book, but most are more simple than the Microsoft Excel ones.

Of course, there are other business calculations from the system books, which are more intricate.

One of those was the ROI or Return On Investment, which is a calculation of profit over-time , including the depreciation of money.
It is in relation to the investment cost, set in a yearly frame, most of the time, and compared to the potential actual profit derived in fact from the project.
This in turn can be compared to the current system, without upgrade, which may provide more short term profit, but at the cost of long-term short falling (or shortcoming).

Be a Physicist

I had no economy nor market knowledge at ALL before playing EvE. Even less papers.

Nowadays I live in the financial industry thanks to what I have learned here. EvE will always sit in a warm spot in my heart!

My first experience in EVE that made me engaged was opening the market window.. Having buy AND sell orders was, and still is so novel in games.

It inspirered me to go into banking and financial management, but I found the real life "climate" a bit too boiler room, and not enough "academics", so I shifted after 3-4 years. It did make me appreciate EVE even more, and also make me a bit frustrated at a few missing features and "design flaws".. :)

All values or equations (except 15.) have explanations as well as the algebraic notation for the arithmetical procedure.

I am still working on updating it.