"Liveblogging" my Studying (nix the timestamps)

I'm going to make some notes on this thing which will, in theory, help me remember what I need to know for my exam tomorrow. The class is "Economics of the European Integration."

Discussing integration theories, one of the slides talking about the Division of Labour theory says: Complexity of cooperation extending to the whole re-production process. Now I take it to mean that the theory says that the labor pool is rather acutely divided across countries and through cooperation the countries relax restrictions on the movement of labor until there is institutionalized cooperation and countries are able to specialize in specific industries instead of producing everything themselves. That's the beauty of comparative advantage. However, there's more than one re-production process.

I have never seen it hail as much as it has here.

It goes from a beautiful, sunny spring day to hail and back to the spring day in less than 15 minutes. And I thought Ohio weather was volatile.

Presumably (hopefully) this won't happen but: There is this "single licence" policy which says that if a financial institution (bank, insurance company, etc) gets a licence to work in one EU member country, then they can operate in any EU member company as long as they "sign in." This is a handy little thing because it strips away almost every barrier to doing financial business across EU countries. But what happens if one country denies this priviledge to a company from a different country? What can the EU do to enforce the priviledge the financial company has within the EU? The U.S. would send in the National Guard or something similar, but does the EU have something like that? I know the funding for EU security comes almost exclusively from the UK, France, Germany, and Italy (with some help from the Netherlands and Spain). If one of those countries denied the "single licence," what would happen? Although I think the probability this happens is very small (p < 0.001), the one thing the class didn't cover is enforcement mechanisms of the EU.

Completely unrelated to the task at hand, but I just remembered that in Russia you can't drink tap water. Or at least in Tomsk you can't. Their pipes are so old that they've rusted a bit so their water contains arsenic. It's a very small percentage of arsenic, but still. It's arsenic.

It's really hard to study when other people are speaking on the phone. Especially if it's Turkish and emphatic. Not conducive to studying at all.

People in the States tend to look at the European education system and say it's better. People in Europe (at least, the people I've talked to) look at the US's education system and say it's better. I think the most important observation is that neither Europeans or Americans know anything about the other education system. The grass is greener on the other side. From what I see, the European primary (in the US, K - 12) is better than the US but the university system in the US is better than the system in Europe. The European system has a 3 years undergrad and a 2 years master (the Bologna system). By the way, Bologna is the location of the oldest university in Europe.