Module 6

                I'm going to start the night off with free trade. Free trade is the ability for countries to trade goods and services without any restriction. As you may know, I am quite the computer nerd. I love technology and I love to watch the progress of it as well. My personal standpoint on free trade is that it is absolutely vital to the progress of technology. Free trade provides competitors with more competition for their products. This new competition forces one another to constantly best each other's product. For example, take the rivalry of nVidia and AMD (formerly ATI). The two companies both produce high end graphics processors and they are constantly pumping out new technology. It's to the point that a new product is released every six months that will double the performance of the previous flagship model. As soon as one company launches a new chip the other has already begun development of a better one. This competition has driven technology advancement at an extreme rate. Now let's look at it on a broader scale. The automotive industry has gone through numerous booms because of the same type of competition. Take a look at Toyota Motors, without free trade they would lose roughly 32% of their sales just from the U.S. alone. The way I see it is that without the global competition, we would never progress. The competition brought on by free trade only benefits us consumers with better products.

                The "New Middler" is the new middle class employee. With all of the outsourcing of middle class jobs, employees had to find a way to secure their position or face unemployment. New middlers have proven their worth to their companies by providing exceptional people skills, something that a computer just can't provide. They're also must be adaptable. With the constant changes and jobs being outsourced, new middlers must be able to prove that they can handle any task and exceed their expectations. New middlers tie in perfectly with the next topic.

                The "CQ+PQ>IQ" equation means that curiosity  and passion for a subject or in this case your job, can be worth much more than intelligence. You see it time and time again, people staying with jobs because they pay well or they know a lot about their job that they do well at it. The thing they're missing is their love for what they do. If you have a passion for your field of work and want to learn more than you will inevitably be successful. I believe this philosophy 100%. I'm studying computer science right now because I absolutely love the field and all my free time and money reflects that. Some of the other students in my classes that I have talked to don't seem to have the same passion for it like I have and they don't seem to be grasping the concepts or really even seem to care. However, once I finish my homework I dig deeper and find myself staying up until the early hours of the morning researching and learning more. I love talking with other people as passionate about computers as I am because you can sense their drive.