Better Rate of Growth Data

On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 1:09:59 PM UTC-7, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 01/04/20 18:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 18:04:38 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 01/04/20 17:42, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 5:18:03 AM UTC-4, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 01/04/20 02:35, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Companies have to make a profit.
Governments don't have to make a profit.

Ah. Do you /really/ think profit is the most
important thing?

Absolutely.

So, you a company's profit is more important than
your health and freedom, and that of your loved ones?

Really?


My company's profit funds the health and freedom of my employees and
their loved ones.

You can have freedom without profit, and lack of
freedom with profit.

Conclusion: freedom and profit are orthogonal.


If there had been no profit in the past, there would
be no company. No employees. No salaries, vacations, health care,
continued education, bonuses, 401K, ice cream sandwiches. No donuts.

That your employees health care depends on your
company's profits is immoral. Many parts of the
world do much better than that.


It generally takes a violent revolution to kick out an inefficient
government. People get hurt. China will be interesting some day.
Smaller scale, Cuba and Venezuela
Not always, and so what?

Name ONE government that left peacefully.
 
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 12:49:47 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 12:19:00 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 7:33:54 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:


What profit does is separate the efficient organizations from the
inefficient ones.

That's true enough.

It allows economic mutation and selection.

Huh? Those don't interact with economics except in a for-profit organization; other
organizations, and individuals, have other performance metrics to meet.
Health, for instance, is kinda important for individuals this year.

Our social institutions, and ourselves, are motivated by OTHER figures-of-merit.
You won't understand personal virtue or reliable defense establishments if you
consider profit and economics instead of the more appropriate principles..

No society, capitalist or socialist or anything, is going to do very
well if it consumes faster than it invests. All the farms and
factories will deteriorate. Profit is what people use to invest. It's
the measure of producing more than you consume.

Henry Ford didn't need government subsidies to build factories to make
affordable cars. He did it with profits. Once you could buy a model T
at Sears for $295.

My company started with one guy with a few thousand in savings, and
made a small profit, and re-invested that over the years, and employs
25 people now. I did it more for fun than money, but it wouldn't have
survived or grown without profit.

Good intentions are useless if you are out of business and producing
nothing.

Even intelligent Communists have realized they do better if they leave
a big segment of the economy alone to make profits. Not in Venezuela.

The problem is, nobody, especially not economists or revolutionaries,
understand how to run an economy. It's best to let people try all
sorts of things, and let the profitable experiments prosper.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Thanks for that insight, which is grossly lacking among the libtards here. They even think that they can pay for their wet dreams (Green New Ripoff, etc.) by taxing corporations, not realizing that corporations don't pay a cent in taxes - their customers do. They even believe that government can create wealth when, in fact, they just steal from one person to give to another.

Here is another great example of entrepreneurism:

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2017/12/limor-fried-building-electronic-dreams/

Adafruit is making a material contribution towards the technical education of our young. We need more innovation such as this.
 
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 3:00:44 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 3:29:31 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 4:41:27 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 5:50:20 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 8:20:06 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 11:46:27 AM UTC+11, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 28/03/20 20:17, Martin Brown wrote:
These are quite an interesting and worrying set of graphs - scroll down to
"world" to see the comparison of USA with Japan and Italy:

http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/#wn

Thanks for those graphs; I've been waiting for
somebody with the raw data to plot them.

Recommended.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

has been plotting the data for several weeks now. They were the first website I found that did it, and when I got jeered at for taking them seriously I did point out that that they did say where they got their data from, but that my main reason for using them was the fact that they did post graphs.

GIGO. Remember that? If not, it stands for "Garbage In, Garbage Out.." And the fucking Chinese comms are feeding us GARBAGE!

Flyguy doesn't realise that his claims about the reliability of the data the Chineses are sending out are based solely on his moronic misconceptions, which makes him the obvious garbage emitter around here.

Hardly. You are the moron who sucks up to the Chicomms.

The fact that I don't share yoru irrational irrational anxieties about them doesn't mean that "I'm sucking up to them". I don't like their political system at all, and am fully cognizant of their nasty habits and entrenched corruption.

Their system is even worse than one that the US has.

And I know why: Australia's NUMBER ONE trading partner is China.

I couldn't care less about that. We could get by without them, but our standard of living would take a hit if we tried, and there's enough Chinese influence in Australian politics, that we might seem some kind of attempt to turn us into a Chinese-influenced banana republic - the US has made a habit of doing that kind of thing. Iran in 1953 was the last time it worked (at least for a while) and Australia may be be too politically stable to let that happen, but one can't be sure.

I've seen that attitude here: our NBA was also sucking up to the Chicomms because they do a huge business there, and muzzled an owner at the Chicomm's insistence when he criticized them. Now, they are stopping shipments of medical supplies to the US. When you lie down with snakes don't be surprised when you are bitten.

Of course the real snake here is you. You lie more or less non-stop (though you are too dim to realise it) and that poisons the whole discussion.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

So, the NBA story is a lie? REALLY?? Hey Slow Man, you should have checked that out BEFORE embarrassing yourself!
 
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 12:52:47 PM UTC-7, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 31/03/20 19:50, dcaster@krl.org wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 2:05:26 PM UTC-4, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 31/03/20 17:29, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 4:41:27 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 5:50:20 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 8:20:06 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 11:46:27 AM UTC+11, Tom Gardner
wrote:
On 28/03/20 20:17, Martin Brown wrote:
These are quite an interesting and worrying set of graphs -
scroll down to "world" to see the comparison of USA with Japan
and Italy:

http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/#wn

Thanks for those graphs; I've been waiting for somebody with the
raw data to plot them.

Recommended.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

has been plotting the data for several weeks now. They were the
first website I found that did it, and when I got jeered at for
taking them seriously I did point out that that they did say where
they got their data from, but that my main reason for using them
was the fact that they did post graphs.

GIGO. Remember that? If not, it stands for "Garbage In, Garbage Out.."
And the fucking Chinese comms are feeding us GARBAGE!

Flyguy doesn't realise that his claims about the reliability of the
data the Chineses are sending out are based solely on his moronic
misconceptions, which makes him the obvious garbage emitter around
here.

-- Bill Sloman, Sydney

Hardly. You are the moron who sucks up to the Chicomms. And I know why:
Australia's NUMBER ONE trading partner is China. I've seen that attitude
here: our NBA was also sucking up to the Chicomms because they do a huge
business there, and muzzled an owner at the Chicomm's insistence when he
criticized them. Now, they are stopping shipments of medical supplies to
the US. When you lie down with snakes don't be surprised when you are
bitten.


At least the Chinese are dealing with the problem better than the USA is.

Your rants are what I would expect from a neocon that is correctly afraid
that their philosophy is about to become very unpopular. Unless there is a
big smokescreen people will eventually realise that big government will do
a better job of protecting them than market forces.

Why? Because politicians can be removed by individuals, unlike companies.

I do not rant very often as it never seems to make any difference. But I
think that it is good to have some countries with big government and some
with market forces being dominate. _And you are wrong about market forces
not being able to remove companies. Currently the retail companies are
changing or being removed.

Read what I wrote. Your comments have zero relevance to that!
Hint: individuals cannot remove companies (but they can remove
governments)


It sucks to pay a lot more for health care, but it is nice to have
companies working on manufacturing ventilators and developing vaccines.

Except when companies deliberately thwart that.

Here's how market forces are killing Americans from Covid-19, by preventing the
manufacture of low-cost ventilators that would undercut expensive existing
product lines.....

It was 2010 and Newport Medical Instruments, a small medical device company in
Costa Mesa, California, was excited. They had just signed a federal contract to
design and build up to 40,000 mobile ventilators, which would be placed into the
national stockpile in the interest of pandemic preparedness. After SARS and bird
flu and swine flu, the government needed to steel itself should a deadly
infectious disease go viral.

Newport agreed to deliver the devices at a low-cost, not only to maximize
federal purchases but also to build a reputation that could increase sales to
other countries and the private sector. The company sent prototypes within a
year, and was on track for market approval by 2013.

But before that could happen, Covidien, a larger firm, announced a bid to
purchase Newport for $108 million in March 2012. The Federal Trade Commission
didn’t even give it a second look; the deal closed in May. And Covidien sold its
own ventilators. They weren’t interested in developing a new model that could
cut into its existing profits. Covidien immediately asked for more money from
the government, and by 2014 they called off the deal because “it was not
sufficiently profitable for the company.”

https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-covidien-story-corporate-america-ventilators/

Yes, some companies buy other companies just to eliminate the competition. But this vacuum is soon filled by others that recognize an opportunity:

https://www.zoll.com/products/ventilators

It happened to me when Autodesk bought Eagle and eliminated their free version PCB CAD software, switching to a subscription service (at least they didn't eliminate it!). But that vacuum was filled by KiCad, an open-source PCB CAD package that is even better than Eagle.
 
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 6:26:57 PM UTC-4, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 01/04/20 21:34, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 4:09:59 PM UTC-4, Tom Gardner wrote:

That your employees health care depends on your
company's profits is immoral.

That's insensible. Someone who has chosen to be an employee needs
for an employer to exist, first and foremost.

Your imagination and sight are lamentable.

In Europe the employer is rarely directly
involved in healthcare.


IFF the employer exists, and pays the employee, then the employee
is free to use / spend / allocate the proceeds of his labor as he
sees fit, including purchasing food, clothing, shelter, savings,
cable TV, etc.

That theory leads to unpleasant consequences in the US.

No it doesn't, that's silly. We're the most prosperous, most
open, most free country the world has ever known. Our lowest
quintile enjoys a higher standard of living than Europe's
middle-class. I'm not trying to be unpleasant, those are just
facts.

Here people can earn a lot more with their labor than elsewhere,
and if they want to, they can spend it on health care. What's
wrong with that? Or if they don't want to, they can spend it
somewhere else. That makes perfect sense.

If your theory is that a centralized government is indispensable for
providing this supposedly essential health care, why not nationalize
food, farming, shelter, clothing, heating, and water? Those are all
more much more immediate and critical to surviving than health care.

If government monopoly is the most efficient and cost-effective of
providing things, shouldn't the U.K. nationalize grocery stores and
run those? To save expense?

Many parts of the world do much better than that.

No they don't, actually.

They do, actually.

Not really. If you're sick, your results will be better here.

It is expensive, but that's mostly government's 'helping' hand
at work. If we let people shop and reap the benefits of shopping,
we'd cut the cost in half almost overnight.

Cheers,
James Arthur
 
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 7:31:15 PM UTC-4, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
Not really. If you're sick, your results will be better here.

It is expensive, but that's mostly government's 'helping' hand
at work. If we let people shop and reap the benefits of shopping,
we'd cut the cost in half almost overnight.

OK, I get that you are the self appointed cheerleader for the US, but do you have any evidence to support this claim? I've never seen anything to indicate the US healthcare system is significantly better than other first world countries. Well, maybe Italy at the moment. But we are pushing to catch up with them as well.

Actually, that is a very good indicator of problems in our healthcare. While many other countries are coping without massively overflowing their critical care, parts of the US are swamped and people are dying needlessly. Did you factor that into your comparison?

Your shopping idea is fruitless. Comparison shopping is only practical when you have information to compare and something to compare. You will never get information comparing quality of care and in many places it doesn't matter because you have a choice of one. Healthcare is becoming a monopoly in many places. When any industry has a small number of competitors, the actual competition reduces and they all fall in lock step. When there is a single hospital in the entire county, what options do you have? When there are more than one hospital in a county, but they are all run by the same company, what are your options?

The only way to change healthcare in the US in any significant manner is to find a way to have a national system. But there are too many competing interests and anything we come up with will just screw us more. Washington isn't run by the politicians. It's run by special interests controlling the politicians.

We are all fucked.

--

Rick C.

-+++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
 
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 8:52:19 PM UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 3:26:44 PM UTC-7, Rick C wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 6:17:49 PM UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 1:09:59 PM UTC-7, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 01/04/20 18:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

It generally takes a violent revolution to kick out an inefficient
government. People get hurt. China will be interesting some day.
Smaller scale, Cuba and Venezuela
Not always, and so what?

Name ONE government that left peacefully.

Parliamentary systems do it all the time. It's called a vote of no confidence. I wish we had that here. So much simpler than impeachment. The real advantage though is the absence of the two party system. That alone is the biggest log jam in our government. It's always one party against the other. With multiple parties in power compromises are required to form a government and get things done because it's not automatic that one party will dominate. Often the largest party still doesn't have a majority and has to form a coalition.

But being able to dump your bad government is the way to go for sure!

--

Rick C.

-++- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-++- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

The US does it every 4 years, but a change of party leadership is not what I am talking about, which is a wholesale change of government.

That would be amending the Constitution and there's a way of doing that. We have the freedom to change our government to anything we want. What you are talking about is when there is major disagreement over how to do that which results in armed conflict. Yeah, it happens, but governments change without it too.

BTW, I'm tired of cleaning up your posts. I won't be responding to your posts anymore. They really aren't at all insightful or stimulating anyway. I think I just reply from the xkcd effect.

--

Rick C.

-+++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
 
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 6:05:27 PM UTC-7, Rick C wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 8:52:19 PM UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 3:26:44 PM UTC-7, Rick C wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 6:17:49 PM UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 1:09:59 PM UTC-7, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 01/04/20 18:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

It generally takes a violent revolution to kick out an inefficient
government. People get hurt. China will be interesting some day..
Smaller scale, Cuba and Venezuela
Not always, and so what?

Name ONE government that left peacefully.

Parliamentary systems do it all the time. It's called a vote of no confidence. I wish we had that here. So much simpler than impeachment. The real advantage though is the absence of the two party system. That alone is the biggest log jam in our government. It's always one party against the other. With multiple parties in power compromises are required to form a government and get things done because it's not automatic that one party will dominate. Often the largest party still doesn't have a majority and has to form a coalition.

But being able to dump your bad government is the way to go for sure!

--

Rick C.

-++- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-++- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

The US does it every 4 years, but a change of party leadership is not what I am talking about, which is a wholesale change of government.

That would be amending the Constitution and there's a way of doing that. We have the freedom to change our government to anything we want. What you are talking about is when there is major disagreement over how to do that which results in armed conflict. Yeah, it happens, but governments change without it too.

BTW, I'm tired of cleaning up your posts. I won't be responding to your posts anymore. They really aren't at all insightful or stimulating anyway. I think I just reply from the xkcd effect.

--

Rick C.

-+++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

Fine by me - you don't understand the concept of a revolution anyhow.
 
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 3:26:44 PM UTC-7, Rick C wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 6:17:49 PM UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 1:09:59 PM UTC-7, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 01/04/20 18:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

It generally takes a violent revolution to kick out an inefficient
government. People get hurt. China will be interesting some day.
Smaller scale, Cuba and Venezuela
Not always, and so what?

Name ONE government that left peacefully.

Parliamentary systems do it all the time. It's called a vote of no confidence. I wish we had that here. So much simpler than impeachment. The real advantage though is the absence of the two party system. That alone is the biggest log jam in our government. It's always one party against the other. With multiple parties in power compromises are required to form a government and get things done because it's not automatic that one party will dominate. Often the largest party still doesn't have a majority and has to form a coalition.

But being able to dump your bad government is the way to go for sure!

--

Rick C.

-++- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-++- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

The US does it every 4 years, but a change of party leadership is not what I am talking about, which is a wholesale change of government.
 
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 12:49:47 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 12:19:00 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 7:33:54 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:


What profit does is separate the efficient organizations from the
inefficient ones.
It allows economic mutation and selection.

Huh? Those don't interact with economics except in a for-profit organization; other
organizations, and individuals, have other performance metrics to meet.
Health, for instance, is kinda important for individuals this year.

Our social institutions, and ourselves, are motivated by OTHER figures-of-merit.

No society, capitalist or socialist or anything, is going to do very
well if it consumes faster than it invests.

And, no calculator is going to do well if he/she/it spends lots of time on division by zero.
That's not obviously relevant.

Henry Ford didn't need government subsidies to build factories to make
affordable cars.

Oh, but the Ford corporation REALLY took off when highways and freeways were
built. Yes, he DID need government investment, he just wasn't allowed
to DIRECT that investment (as it was supported by other-than-profit values).

Honestly, interconnections that matter are supporting most of what you deem
to be important, and ought not to be denied or defunded by your clumsy attempts
at spin. Profit, and money, are NOT 'core' economic principles, they're
recent additions. Economics deals with lands, resources, goods, and labor.
Economic principles pre-existed money, and if money were to vanish, would
still apply.
m
 
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 3:43:10 AM UTC+11, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 5:18:03 AM UTC-4, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 01/04/20 02:35, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Companies have to make a profit.
Governments don't have to make a profit.

Ah. Do you /really/ think profit is the most
important thing?

Absolutely. Do you think the alternative -- enterprises whose
product is worth less than the effort and materials they needed
to produce it (i.e. a net destruction of value and resources) --
are laudable? Or sustainable?

Profits are a vital feedback, critical to ensuring constructive
efforts are directed to productive enterprise (and away from
destructive enterprises).

Government lacks that feedback. They can easily promote destructive
policy without suffering the normal consequences -- their salaries
don't change, they don't lose their jobs, or their pensions.

But the political parties that let this happen get booted out - eventually - and the politicians that replace them have to make changes to justify their existence.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
 
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 3:06:12 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 16:45:11 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 01/04/20 15:33, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 10:17:57 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 01/04/20 02:35, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 00:25:06 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 31/03/20 22:36, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 2:50:19 PM UTC-4, dca...@krl.org wrote:
On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 2:05:26 PM UTC-4, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 31/03/20 17:29, Flyguy wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 4:41:27 AM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 5:50:20 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 8:20:06 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 11:46:27 AM UTC+11, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 28/03/20 20:17, Martin Brown wrote:

<snip>

Oh, I see amazing dysfunction in big businesses, and sometimes profit
from same. But long term, I see the creative and efficient ones pull
ahead of the greedy and dull ones.

IBM, Kodak, HP, DEC, Xerox, Motorola, RCA, the Bell system, Nokia
dominated their industries.

For a while. Tom Peters, "In Search of Excellence" published in 1982, said pretty much that.

Even then IBM had stopped being "excellent" and was concentrating on hanging on to its market share by any means possible. Hewlett-Packard isn't excellent any more, DEC and Kodak are history, the Bell system got dismantled.

Being excellent isn't something that keeps on happening without a lot of effort,and a lot of people have other interests that they take more seriously.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
 
On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 21:05:33 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 12:49:47 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 12:19:00 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 7:33:54 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:


What profit does is separate the efficient organizations from the
inefficient ones.
It allows economic mutation and selection.

Huh? Those don't interact with economics except in a for-profit organization; other
organizations, and individuals, have other performance metrics to meet.
Health, for instance, is kinda important for individuals this year.

Our social institutions, and ourselves, are motivated by OTHER figures-of-merit.

No society, capitalist or socialist or anything, is going to do very
well if it consumes faster than it invests.

And, no calculator is going to do well if he/she/it spends lots of time on division by zero.
That's not obviously relevant.

Henry Ford didn't need government subsidies to build factories to make
affordable cars.

Oh, but the Ford corporation REALLY took off when highways and freeways were
built. Yes, he DID need government investment, he just wasn't allowed
to DIRECT that investment (as it was supported by other-than-profit values).

Honestly, interconnections that matter are supporting most of what you deem
to be important, and ought not to be denied or defunded by your clumsy attempts
at spin. Profit, and money, are NOT 'core' economic principles, they're
recent additions. Economics deals with lands, resources, goods, and labor.
Economic principles pre-existed money, and if money were to vanish, would
still apply.
m

OK, let's go back to barter. But some people will still profit; it
will just be measured in eggs.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard
 
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 4:32:50 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 18:04:38 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 01/04/20 17:42, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 5:18:03 AM UTC-4, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 01/04/20 02:35, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

<snip>

I've seen companies (both small and large) promote destructive
paths and practices.

But, with a little luck, the market kills them off.

It generally takes a violent revolution to kick out an inefficient
government.

Democracy offers a non-violent alternative.

The US is a plutocracy, but the election system does offer the theoretical possibility of electing somebody like Bernie Sanders who wants to make real changes in the system, or like Elizabeth Warren who has the subtlety to make it happen without givng the plutocrats too much advnce warning.

> People get hurt. China will be interesting some day.

It might get interesting by inventing a new form of multiparty government. They do seem to be flexible enough to incorporate other peoples ideas of how things might work better.

> Smaller scale, Cuba and Venezuela.

Cuba more or less works. Venezuela doesn't - it's a failed state in terminal decline.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
 
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 7:35:01 AM UTC+11, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 4:09:59 PM UTC-4, Tom Gardner wrote:

That your employees health care depends on your
company's profits is immoral.

That's insensible. Someone who has chosen to be an employee needs
for an employer to exist, first and foremost.

That's got it backwards. If no employers exist, nobody can chose to be an employee.

IF the employer exists, and pays the employee, then the employee
is free to use / spend / allocate the proceeds of his labor as he
sees fit, including purchasing food, clothing, shelter, savings,
cable TV, etc.

The employee can be. In most places, they have an obligation to spend part of what they earns on saving for a pension for their old age, and another part on paying for their health care by supporting a system that looks after everybody else's health care as well.

James Arthur sees this as an unreasonable liberty. He's happy to see them obliged to pay for national defence and domestic policing and law enforcement, but anything that wasn't foreseen by the founding tax evaders isn't acceptable.

Many parts of the world do much better than that.

No they don't, actually.

Not from James Arthur's deeply bizarre and decidedly irrational point of view.

At present residents of china are a lot less worried about their risk of catching Covid-19 before somebody invents a vaccine than are residents of the US. What you worry about changes form time to time and from place to place, if you are anywhere near sane.

James Arthur isn't.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
 
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 6:49:47 AM UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 12:19:00 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 7:33:54 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

What profit does is separate the efficient organizations from the
inefficient ones.

That's true enough.

It allows economic mutation and selection.

Huh? Those don't interact with economics except in a for-profit organization; other organizations, and individuals, have other performance metrics to meet.
Health, for instance, is kinda important for individuals this year.

Our social institutions, and ourselves, are motivated by OTHER figures-of-merit.You won't understand personal virtue or reliable defense establishments if you consider profit and economics instead of the more appropriate principles.

No society, capitalist or socialist or anything, is going to do very
well if it consumes faster than it invests.

Consumption is obligatory. Investment is optional. If you don't invest at all you will eventually go under, but if you invested everything you had and consumed nothing you go under a lot faster.

> All the farms and factories will deteriorate.

Not necessarily. Maintenance is a necessary part of consumption, rather than any kind of investment.

Profit is what people use to invest. It's
the measure of producing more than you consume.

It a measure of getting paid more than you spend, which isn't quite the same thing. We all consume air, and don't produce any of the oxygen we use up, or do anything with the CO2 we emit - which plants transform back into oxygen for us, free of charge.

Henry Ford didn't need government subsidies to build factories to make
affordable cars. He did it with profits. Once you could buy a model T
at Sears for $295.

My company started with one guy with a few thousand in savings, and
made a small profit, and re-invested that over the years, and employs
25 people now. I did it more for fun than money, but it wouldn't have
survived or grown without profit.

Good intentions are useless if you are out of business and producing
nothing.

Even intelligent Communists have realized they do better if they leave
a big segment of the economy alone to make profits. Not in Venezuela.

The most intelligent Communist don't let industry operate entirely independently - the leading role of the part lets them step in whenever they feel they need to.

Democratic Socialists make the welfare of society as a whole the fundamental aim, and regulate their free markets to get there.

Venezuela is failed state more or less controlled by a bunch of incompetent criminal conspirators. It's not a useful example of anything except the consequences of making a lot of bad choices

The problem is, nobody, especially not economists or revolutionaries,
understand how to run an economy. It's best to let people try all
sorts of things, and let the profitable experiments prosper.

John Larkin doesn't understand much, and likes to imagine that nobody else understands anything better than he does. Egomaniacs are like that. It's not a useful point of view.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
 
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 9:35:15 PM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

> OK, let's go back to barter.

No one suggested that, except you. I could reply, if any
profit or other consideration made it useful to do so.
 
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 10:31:15 AM UTC+11, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 6:26:57 PM UTC-4, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 01/04/20 21:34, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 4:09:59 PM UTC-4, Tom Gardner wrote:

That your employees health care depends on your
company's profits is immoral.

That's insensible. Someone who has chosen to be an employee needs
for an employer to exist, first and foremost.

Your imagination and sight are lamentable.

In Europe the employer is rarely directly
involved in healthcare.


IFF the employer exists, and pays the employee, then the employee
is free to use / spend / allocate the proceeds of his labor as he
sees fit, including purchasing food, clothing, shelter, savings,
cable TV, etc.

That theory leads to unpleasant consequences in the US.

No it doesn't, that's silly. We're the most prosperous, most
open, most free country the world has ever known.

If your income is in the top 1% of the US income distribution - and James Arthur acts as if his is - this might seem plausible to you.

The long tail on the high end of the income distribution does push u the US average wage so that it is appreciably higher than the median wave, but even so the US is fourth on the "most prosperous" league table

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage

Most open is total nonsense. By any measure of social mobility US society is less open than pretty much any other advance industrial country. The UK isn't great, but it still quite a bit better than the US, mainly because it is easier for bright kids from low income families to get educated up to their full potential - not as easy as it should be, but still easier than the US.

Our lowest
quintile enjoys a higher standard of living than Europe's
middle-class. I'm not trying to be unpleasant, those are just
facts.

Extracted from one of your right-wing propaganda sheets. You don't provide a link to your source - you've noticed that the Cato Institute is regarded as a reliable source of right-wing spin s opposed to factual information.

Here people can earn a lot more with their labor than elsewhere,
and if they want to, they can spend it on health care.

Which cost half as much again per head as it does in places like Germany, France and the Netherlands who run adequately resourced systems, and twice as much as in the UK, where health care is a bit spartan.

And you have to cope with the fact that the less well off don't get good health care, which means that you are at a higher risk from infectious diseases.

What's wrong with that? Or if they don't want to, they can spend it
somewhere else. That makes perfect sense.

It does to James Arthur, who relates everything back to the level of tax he has to pay.
If your theory is that a centralized government is indispensable for
providing this supposedly essential health care, why not nationalize
food, farming, shelter, clothing, heating, and water?

But the need for them doesn't come on suddenly and unexpectedly.

> Those are all more much more immediate and critical to surviving than health care.

Until you urgently need the health care.

If government monopoly is the most efficient and cost-effective of
providing things, shouldn't the U.K. nationalize grocery stores and
run those? To save expense?

The USSR tried that. It didn't work very well. The UK did nationalise the railways, and they kept on working pretty well until Thatcher privatised them, after which they didn't work quite as well.
Many parts of the world do much better than that.

No they don't, actually.

They do, actually.

Not really. If you're sick, your results will be better here.

If you pay attention to the lying propaganda that James Arthur churned out when Obamacare was being debated.

According to him, you did better if you had diabetes in the US than in the UK.

The catch was that if you had diabetes in the US it was mostly type 2 diabetes, which is a side effect of being overweight, and fairly easy to treat.

The UK isn't as obese, and has a much higher proportion of their cases are type 1 diabetes, which is harder to look after.

Separating the examples into type 1 and type 2 diabetes produced a rather different result.

It is expensive, but that's mostly government's 'helping' hand
at work. If we let people shop and reap the benefits of shopping,
we'd cut the cost in half almost overnight.

This is an opinion, and not a particularly plausible one.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
 
On 01/04/20 20:49, John Larkin wrote:
Henry Ford didn't need government subsidies to build factories to make
affordable cars. He did it with profits.

Their are indirect subsidies, of course.

A classic is the inflated prices paid by the government for
military aircraft in the 50s. The profits from those were
used for civilian aircraft.
 
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 4:56:54 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
It says a lot about American "society" that price gouging is not a crime
under normal circumstances. An outsider looking in would consider the
entire US privatised health system to be a price gouging operation.

You really are a piece of work. What is price gouging "under normal circumstances"??? By definition it is charging more under unusual circumstances than under "normal" circumstances.

I agree about our healthcare. Multiple price sheets for different customers. It should be criminal.

--

Rick C.

+--- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
 

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