and its potential proliferation channels:

What will be the affordable average-priced new car for the average median-income household will varies depending from the city they are in:

someone else will hire you to build theirs.
~ Farrah Gray

Median Lifetime Earnings for Select Majors (In Millions of Dollars)

~ Major Decisions: What Graduates Earn Over Their Lifetimes by Hamilton Project.

See also: Student Loan Debt: Scale of Problem and its Main Sources

… anti-Semitism didn’t originate with Europe’s Muslims, nor are they its only proponents today. The traditional anti-Semitism of Europe’s far right persists. So, too, does that of the far left, … There’s also an anti-Semitism of the center… in Berlin in July, “Jews to the gas!” …
~ What’s Behind Germany’s New Anti-Semitism by Jochen Bittner, New York Times.

See also: Anti-Semitic riots in Europe ‘took us back to 1938′ by By Terrence McCoy, Washington Post.

Source: “Why Alibaba is Worth More Than Amazon in Three Charts” by By Jason Del Rey

Apple is rarely first to market: The iPod was hardly the first MP3 player; the iPad certainly not the first attempt at a tablet. Apple’s wrist-wearable device, whether or not it’s called the iWatch, will hardly be different. The category has been pioneered on the one hand by Pebble, Sony and Samsung, with “smartwatches” and on the other by Fitbit, with its fitness trackers…
Read more: http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2014/09/09/one-sure-thing-here-comes-the-hate-for-apples-iwatch/

By the same way the IBM & Microsoft built their PC MS DOS market on the skeleton of Digital Research, Inc., …, etc.

STEM – Science Technology Engineering Mathematics – Education is the main factors that will pre-determine American competitiveness in the nearest future.

Source: The Case for STEM Education as a National Priority

See also: Student Loan Debt: Scale of Problem and its Main Sources

‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ thinking are terms often associated with creativity and they reflect the neurological processes associated with different hemispheres of the brain. Research suggests that the right side of the brain is visual and processes information in an intuitive and simultaneous way, looking first at the whole picture then the details (soft thinking). The other hemisphere – the left brain – is verbal and processes information in an analytical and sequential way, looking first at the pieces then putting them together to get the whole (hard thinking) …The distinction between hard and soft thinking can be illustrated in the following way. 

Hard thinking	Soft thinking
certain close down one right answer exact fast looking black and white analysis logic differences and categories rational precise serious familiar	doubtful open up many right answers approximate slow waiting many shades of grey hunches intuition similarities and connections dreamlike diffuse playful new

Roger Von Oech (1990) believes that creative thinking must be recognised as a process that involves both hard and soft thinking and that it is important to know when each is appropriate. He argues that every person has a ‘judge’ and an ‘artist’ within, and both are required in order to be creative. Even those who are very inventive, and thrive on spontaneity and uncertainty, also need to seek order and be analytical if they are to be successful.  It is now believed that the most powerful creative thinking occurs when the left and right hemispheres of the brain combine to apply both generative and evaluative processes.  Read more: http://www.journeytoexcellence.org.uk/resourcesandcpd/research/summaries/rsfosteringcreativity.asp

Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study

GULLIVER’S TRAVELS. CHAPTER V: The Author permitted to see the Grand Academy of Lagado.
By Jonathan Swift, 1726.

Step 1: Decide on ideological argument and proposed policy remedies;
Step 2: Manipulate data as needed to justify;
Step 3: Publish book…
Step 4: Ideological allies receive book rapturously, say it cannot be challenged due to quantitative rigor of underlying data analysis…
Step 5: Data analysis carved up by outside analysts;
Step 6: Response from allies = “Data & analysis don’t matter — we KNOW the truth.”

– The overwhelming initial reception of the book was, “See? Rigorous proof of what we have always believed and said!”
By Marc Andreessen, 2014.

The first professor … said perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations. But the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness, and he flattered himself that a more noble exalted thought never sprang in any other man’s head. JONATHAN SWIFT, 1726

After all, the “logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge” ~Stendhal

AMERICANS are giving more to charity than ever before—but a smaller proportion of this money is going to religious organisations. Though the amount given to religious charities has risen from an inflation-adjusted $89 billion in 1987 to $105.5 billion in 2013, that represents a fall from 53% to 31% of the total, according to research released by Giving USA, a non-profit that researches philanthropy in America, and the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
Read more: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/06/philanthropy-america?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/thesqueezeddevout

There are, … three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I guess, what they call a poet.

~ Joseph Brodsky, Nobel Lecture December 8, 1987.