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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (81224)	11/28/1999 12:17:00 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 1575396

Mary. What you say is quite true, esp in the sciences. However the UK is no slouch in sciences. For example in the UK students are generally better educated than in the USA up to the age of about 16 when a very small % go to university.(they have the equivalent of grade 12 by the ages of 14-15...but the subjects taught do not compare directly)The quality of the science graduates is very high, in general on a par with most US graduates, but the numbers are tiny compared with the USA as a %. In addition a school has to adhere to strict standards to grant degrees and so the gradation from good to bad is compressed to the point where the worst UK degree granting bodies in Sciences would be in the upper third of all US science schools(approx). Bad schools are not permitted to grant degrees. I am not sure how each state administers it's permissions to colleges to grant degrees....if at all...they may allow the market to rate them and grads of poor schools get bad degrees and get fewer offers at lower wages? Possibly an American can comment here? I am not sure what % of UK students goes on to a science career but I suspect it is a small fraction of the US %. There are more UK doctors as a % of UK population than the average in UK science because the med school are tenfold oversubscribed and the admission are scaled to the population so the UK ends up with a similar % of doctors per million people to the USA. In all the Sciences the USA has 2-3 times the per capita graduates, even more with law. I have heard that 25-30% of US citizens are college graduates? In the UK it will be under 10% This extra education of the people makes the USA workforce the best trained for high tech stuff as well as business, biology etc....more people=more new ideas. But it does not prevent crooked governments and politicians, an area where the British are far less tolerant then the USA. If the UK prime minister had been caught like Clinton was with Monika...he would be finished in an instant, drummed out of caucus and out of the government. The average UK person is more involved in politics and knows more of current affairs than the average US citizen....In additon the average UK person knos more about the USA than vice versa. The same goes for Canada to a lesser degree. One big advantage the USA has is the break with the royal power as a permission granter. In the UK they evolved from a king based system where you could do nothing...unless you had a permit from the king. In the USA you could do whatever you liked...unless there was a law against it. This unfettered capitalism took the lead in radio and electronics from the UK and brought it to the USA by about 1925-30. In England you still need a TV licence. You still pay by the minute for local calls. Standard radios were licenced until the 70's. A fee each year for a TV, a fee to use the phone and radio. In the UK every call is like a pay phone call at about 5-10 cents per minute. this has a powerful chilling effect on internet access, and most people in the UK work offline as much as then can..then going online to post and retrieve on SI or e-mail etc. The next ten post retrieval function on SI was put there for those poor people in the UK and europe with a per minute fee. So the USA is the place to be, not perfect, but pretty good IMO Bill