Hi, I'm going through SICP (loving it so far), and I'm using the webcasts of Brian and doing the homework. However, I noticed that there are only 44 lectures, counting 3 missing ones from a break. So, why is there so few? Did CS61A only last for half a semester, or did Brian not lecture every day, or what? (Sorry if this is out of the scope of the forum. There isn't anywhere else I could think of to post this.)
I'm glad you're enjoying it!
We have a 15-week semester, with three lectures per week MWF. The in-between days are filled with labs (Tu) and discussion sections (Th).
If you want the gory details, see page 18 of this.
P.S. At MIT they somehow squeezed it into a 13-week semester! Including chapter 5!
Page 17:
If you chose Berkeley for the sake of a prestigious diploma, maybe you should consider majoring in Business Administration.
What's wrong with Business students? (I quit FBLA this year, as I founded a programming club)
I didn't know that SICP covers logical programming! Sweet!
[Disclaimer: This is just me talking, not the rest of the Snap! team.]
The two things you're quoting are actually about two different points.
The first one is about business students. In retrospect it was wrong of me to say that in an official course document, and I wouldn't do it (and wouldn't be allowed to do it) today. But among undergraduates, especially in technical fields, there's a persistent (I think even now) general opinion that people who can't do physics major in math, people who can't do math major in engineering, people who can't do engineering major in humanities (at MIT, where I was an undergrad, that's actually the name of a major) -- and people who can't do humanities major in business.
It's not just students who have these illicit ideas; when they recruit ace football players who really aren't interested in college and don't need college, but are in college just because it's how you get into the NFL, and they have to study something to be eligible to play, the athletic administrators put them in business classes.
This is undergrad business majors we're talking about. MBA students actually have a curriculum, although I don't like it, see below. But one semester the class before me in the lecture hall was the first undergrad business course, and, I swear I'm not exaggerating, they spent the entire semester learning that if you subtract a negative number the result gets bigger. And the rest of the business curriculum is "it's okay to be greedy, and here's how to get away with it."
The second thing you quoted is about adult businesspeople. I stand by what I said: they're parasites. Once upon a time, maybe, the ideal of running a business was meeting a public need, and making money while you're at it. Think Henry Ford. (Never mind that he was a Nazi.) Then it became figuring out some public need you can monopolize, so as to make money. Think whoever said "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." By now, it's become meta-businesshood: figuring out how you can make money by pushing money around. Think arbitrage, derivatives (not calculus derivatives, investments that gamble in other investments), and the whole "disruption" ethos among computer people, for which the poster boy is Uber killing the taxi industry by monopolizing a marketplace for drivers they insist aren't employees. They don't meet the need any better; they just suck the blood of working people.
If you want more
The First Law of Economics: You can't eat money.
What this means is that economics, the real economics that affects people's lives, is about stuff: food, housing, medical care. The wealth of society is the amount of stuff available to its population.
So when you read in the news that the value of, let's say, Tesla has increased by 50% in a day's trading, does that mean Tesla has 50% more cars ready to be sold? Or 50% more factory capacity to build more cars? No, its actual wealth in stuff hasn't changed at all. What's happened is that some wealth -- ultimately, some stuff wealth -- has been shifted from one set of rich people to another set of rich people (economically neutral), or that some wealth has been shifted from working people to rich people (economically harmful). Or both at once; the actual details of any particular economic event are complicated. Similarly, when you learn that in the 2008 housing crisis "the economy" lost billions of dollars, how you have to think about it is that the amount of stuff in the economy didn't change; if the amount of money changed, that's a reflection of real wealth moving from one group to another -- in this case, moving to bankers, from poor people who were encouraged to buy houses they couldn't afford, and from middle class idiots such as me who let their financial advisors convince them to invest in a "guaranteed can't fail" bank-sponsored derivative fund.
When Silicon Valley started cranking out billionaires, what that meant quite immediately was that working people couldn't afford to live in San Francisco any more, and more generally, that things cost more at the grocery not because the actual cost of farming has gone up (that happens too, but it's not what I'm talking about here), but because rich people bid up the cost of actual food, leaving processed sorta-food for working people.
In other words, the money economy isn't about wealth generation; it's about wealth transfer, both among the rich and from the poor to the rich.
Actual wealth comes from two sources: nature (things in the ground, such as broccoli and lithium) and human labor. What makes capitalism possible is that a worker can produce more stuff than they and their family consume. The extra stuff is profit for the boss. You get to be the boss because you monopolize the means of production, which means both machinery and specialized knowledge.
Of course there are many details I'm leaving out. Here's one: Exactly what counts as "stuff"? When they make a movie, thousands of workers put millions of hours of labor into something that becomes a source of great money wealth. But is it real-economy (stuff) wealth? Of course there's a little bit of physical stuff involved in the film or disk or whatever that holds copies of the movie, but that's negligible. The real money is in the "intellectual property": a government-enforced monopoly, supposedly limited term, on distributing the movie. Is that wealth? I want to say no; you can't eat movies (or live in them, or wear them, etc.). Probably most economists, even socialist ones, would say yes. But the bulk of the (money) profits from the movie don't go to the director, let alone the camera operators and CGI artists and makeup artists and so on. The profits go to one of a handful of movie companies, WB and Netflix and so on, because they had the accumulated wealth to enable funding the production of the movie.
Okay, that's enough for now. You want more, go read "Wages, Price, and Profit" (or "Value, Price, and Profit," depending on whose translation you find) by Marx.
P.S. Yeah, this is way off topic. Sorry. In a perfect world I'd just send a private message to @bluebaritone21. But it's the 21st century and I have to be careful about sending private messages to kids.
I see. That makes sense. Wonder why my upper-class Economics class said 'You can't eat money' on the first day, then focused exclusively on money from then on. :/
Did you intend "upper-class" as a pun?
No. I ment it to be less descriptive than saying my gra... oh! I didn't realize!