conservation of Euros

On May 11, 8:47 am, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a.hdgFGtPjbY

You can't fool Mother Nature. When a few hundred million people choose
to not work much, not breed much, and consume a lot, you just can't
spend your way out of the problem.

This is the leading edge of the European demographic crisis that's
been building for generations now. There's no quick fix.

John

Actually, not to quibble, but there is a quick fix: no one gets what
they were promised, everyone pays more, everyone works more, and has
less.

It's the only solution, because, ultimately, you can't get blood from
a stone, and you can't fool Mother Nature.

Now that's change we can believe in. Yes, oh yes we can.

--
Cheers,
James Arthur

 

On May 19, 4:01 am, Martin Brown wrote:

On 17/05/2010 03:05, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:
On May 14, 2:31 am, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2010 06:16, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

    Of course Marx himself was a n'er-do-well who never earned his keep,
a pseudo-academic parasite sponging off patron Engels.  Engels in turn
coasted off the family business.  Marx made his living guilt-tripping
Engels with econobabble, a fine tradition carried on by Marxists
today.

Engels saw first hand what greedy industrialists were doing to their
workers in the Lancashire cotton industry. Boiler explosions were
commonplace up until the Vulcan insurers made a stand and insisted on
proper boiler safety inspections. And in cases of tampering with safety
relief valves they would not pay out.

It was common practice to overstoke the fire before the first shift and
add weight to the pressure relief valve - this resulted in several large
scale boiler explosions destroying big mills in the early morning and
killing many workers in the Lancashire cotton industry.

Destroying your factory is a bad business model.  That quickly self-
limits.  Besides, nowadays we sue or jail those people.  Too much, in
fact.

In a fast moving business scrapping and re-equipping with the latest
technology at no additional cost could actually be a sound business plan
so long as the insurers were prepared to pay out. Vulcan insurance
formed and insisted on boiler inpections to bring this under control.
Factory managers tended to die in explosions but not the mill owners.

You have so very little faith in men, that one wonders why you so
trust in politicians, who are often the worst of the lot.

I just saw a thing on Mao's Great Leap Forward. He wasn't evil, he
was just being a good little Marxist. Mao was very vexed and
surprised when his new agricultural army--as per Marx--didn't fill
their horn-o-plenty. Instead, it turns out people don't work as hard
for the socialist utopia when there's no gain in it for them.
Production plummeted, and they had famine. Whoops.

http://www.camdenmin.co.uk/technical-steam/historic-steam-boiler-expl....

Articles on the history of boiler insurance show that the US had a worse
record despite having the advantage of seeing the innovations in UK
boilers. Some element of NIH played a part but mostly it was that
industrialists greed was paramount and the workers powerless. eg.

http://www.casact.org/pubs/proceed/proceed15/15407.pdf
first page and page 7 under Normal Loss Hazard

Interestingly and ironically enough, that emphasizes the need to
identify defects and eliminate high risk insureds to minimize
underwriting loss rates.

"Experience has also shown  that  the scientific  examination  and
inspection  of  insured  boilers  produces  a
declining  loss  ratio."

It also showed that US industrialists were a lot more cavalier about
boiler explosions despite having the opportunity to learn from UK
experience.





In the UK there were some decent industrialists mostly of quaker
families who did treat their workforce fairly - examples include some
household names like Pilkingtons, Cadbury, Bournville, Marks&Spencer.

But most of the rest were complete bastards who built large factories
and employed the equivalent of bonded labour stuck very high density
slum housing. It was not surprising that unions were formed in some
cases the manager really did hold the whip hand - literally.

As John pointed out, that was a transient effect, an unusual, historic
dislocation.  Machines meant that few could farm what had previously
required the toil of many.  So there were lots of workers looking for
work.

Short term, that's painful.  Long term, that's creative destruction,
society re-allocating resources from something no longer needed, to
something people do want and need.

And so long as it only affects the peons that is OK?

It affects everyone, to say otherwise is absurd. As far as being OK,
it's the *only* moral thing to do.

Insisting that all those people keep their jobs, stay on the farm
though unneeded, and get the same pay, while working let's say 2 hours
a day--that would wipe out all the benefits of mechanizing, all the
incentive for the farmer to invest in machines, or for inventors to
invent them.

That locks us in the stone ages, to the greatest detriment /most
particularly/ of the lowest-paid workers. That's immoral.

Would it have been better to destroy the farm equipment that made
growing food so easy, or the mills that made clothing cheap for
everyone?  Or go the Obama way--carve up the factory and give it to
the workers?  Divvy up the greedy farmer's land?  That makes factories
disappear and farms go fallow (witness Zimbabwe).

You set a false dichotomy. What I am saying is that the ruthless
exploitation of the poor at below subsistence living rates

It's impossible, by definition, for someone to work for less than
subsistence. Subsistence is the true minimum of wages, for a man
cannot work for less than he needs to live. He can''t. (Adam Smith)

In California and across the USA, social subsidies lower the amount of
money people need to live, and thereby lower the prevailing wages, and
spawning the need for more subsidies (otherwise the non-subsidized
people can't live). Subsidies create the need for more subsidies.

<snip>

The dislocation at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution was
especially traumatic since motive power meant so many human-muscle-
powered occupations were displaced at the same time.  Would it have
been better to keep them all in subsidized green jobs making wagon
wheels with sustainable, carbon-neutral technology, as they were,
after all, before steam?

It wasn't carbon neutral before steam. Small amounts of coal were in use
in the UK from about 1200 onwards. Coal only became really important
after the 1615 Royal Proclamation forbidding the use of wood for glass
making and so spurring on the industrial revolution. The remaining wood
was needed for shipbuilding. Trees were vanishing fast.

But coal really only took off big time after Abraham Darby in
Coalbrookedale patented a means to smelt iron ore by using coke around
1709. That is still a long time before the Victorian era.

Wooden wagon wheels were carbon neutral. Only carbon criminals would
consider wrapping wheels with steel to make them last 10x longer. But
you're right, it's better just to cut two sticks and drag your stuff
around on a skid.

Longer term, profitable business attracts competition.  Outrageous
profits are almost never sustainable for that reason.  Competitors
have to compete for workers, with both wages and conditions.

No they don't. Look at Standard Oil in your own country - it required
government legislation to bring their monopolistic empire under control.

It's a negative (stabilizing) feedback term, not an absolute. I agree
that we need some controls, just as the referee separates two boxers
before one of them gets killed.

They can agree not to outbid each other and keep wages low.



Sharing the wealth?  That comes immediately through cheaper goods,
making it easier and cheaper to live, and through better wages and
working conditions with time, as described above.

Everyone wins.   And yes, the industrialist does very well for a time--
there's a phase delay.  That's his reward.  Take it away, and he won't
do it at all.

You subscribe to a model that says that the rich will only work if you
shower them with loadsamoney because that is what they crave. But the
poorest work best when starving and under constant threat of eviction.

No, I believe the vast majority of people who get rich, who get there
slowly, by working extra hours, won't try as hard if you take all or
part of that away.

The leftist propaganda for the masses is that all rich people in
America get it dumped on them--unearned--in buckets every year. A few
do. But far and away most of the rich people in America get there by
earning a decent wage, living modestly, and saving carefully their
whole life.

Engineers who live carefully, for example, can easily become
millionaires.

It is no coincidence that the worlds most violent societies have the
largest ratio between highest paid executives and minimum wage.

It sure sounds like one.

"Poor" people in America live more opulently than I do. Maybe we need
is a maximum wage, just to keep other people from doing better. How
about a max wage of $80k for movie stars, authors, and sports figures?

That ought to chop violence significantly.

--
Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[JosephKK]

On Wed, 19 May 2010 09:36:08 +0100, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 17/05/2010 00:33, JosephKK wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 17:53:22 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2010 16:06, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:31:49 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

In the UK there were some decent industrialists mostly of quaker
families who did treat their workforce fairly - examples include some
household names like Pilkingtons, Cadbury, Bournville, Marks&Spencer.

A decent industrialist realizes that a partnership with workers is
mutually beneficial, but must still compete with company owners who
don't agree with this philosophy. A company can't arbitrarily give
away high wages without achieving corresponding competitive benefits.

This wasn't about competition though it was about screwing the poor sods
at the bottom of the pile into the ground knowing full well that they
were individually powerless and a consumable item.

Regards,
Martin Brown

You are rather completely bought in to the liberal version of history
based on the content of your post.

:Look again through the records, your

previous instructors have both understated the worst excesses of the
"owners" and underreported the decency of the average to best cases.

Did you read the second sentence? The instructors reference is to your

earliest teachers, often including parents. See if you can find a copy
of Grob and Billias on American history and historians.

See (available at Amazon.com):

Interpretations of American History, 6th ed, vol. 1: To 1877
(Interpretations of American History; Patterns and Perspectives) by
Gerald N. Grob (Paperback - Dec. 9, 1991)

Interpretations of American History, Sixth Edition, Vol. 2: SINCE 1877
(Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspectives) by
Gerald N. Grob and George Athan Billias (Paperback - Dec. 9, 1991)

That course really trashed an abundance of assumptions that i did not
even know i had.

You could not be more wrong. I am working from primary material and
contemporary press reports. I have previously helped National Geographic
in their UK research into relevant local archives. I have access to
private collections of very old photographic material.

You should be aware that the big industrialists were inclined towards
Whig politics (as opposed to Torys who were for the landed gentry). The
modern name for the Whigs is Liberals. A word you cannot bring yourself
to say without the bile and venom dripping from your rabid lips.

If you are actually interested in the history then you could do worse
than read "At the Works" by Lady Bell, wife of one of the Teesside
Ironmasters who founded the British Steel industry.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/At-Works-Study-Manufacturing-Middlesbrough/dp/0860684156

And the founder was actually a Whig (Liberal) politician 1874-1880.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowthian_Bell

They were benign and way ahead of the game in terms of fair treatment of
their own employees in that industry.

BTW old Washington Hall is worth a visit for American tourists who would
like to see something unusual and are in the NE.

I can only comment fully on the ones I have looked at. The large number
of boiler explosions in the Lancashire cotton industry is a matter of
public record and the high density slum grade exploitation of the poor
by many unscrupulous mill owners was a matter of public shame even at
the time. However, the laissez faire view was to leave them to fester.

Regards,
Martin Brown

 

On May 17, 5:40 am, Bill Sloman <bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 17, 4:22 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:



On May 14, 5:07 pm,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 14, 10:42 pm, John Larkin
Productivity is the ultimate benevolence. Technology pushes
productivity.

Perfectly true. But it doesn't do a thing to ensure that the benefits
of increased productivity are equally shared between capital and
labour.

Obviously it's extremely critical how and when those benefits are
shared.  Labor does not deserve all the proceeds of my innovation,
risk, and investment simply because I hire them, guarantee them a
regular check when I get none, and insulate them from the predations
and petty ministration of their rulers.  Showing up for a paycheck at
a factory does not entitle you to the factory.

Freedom means you can start something yourself, if you want those
rewards and are prepared to take those risks; government means you
can't, to a larger and larger extent.

Society as whole provides the environment where you can hire
technically educated employees, communicate with them, and have them
travel around and get looked after when they get sick.

The infrastructure that matters, that I need, represents about 10-15%
of the taxes we pay, and about a like amount on defense; the rest is
squandered uselessly on bread and circuses.

Technically educated employees? That means they know Windows, MS Word
and LabView, political correctness, and how to file a thousand
different lawsuits for imagined slights, but not how to hold a
screwdriver.

Your taxes support that society. Try setting up an innovative business
in a third world country where the tax rates are lower (or easily
evaded by bribing the right people).




Showing up for a paycheck at a factory doesn't entitle you to the
whole factory, but the last hundred years has demonstrated that the
optimum split for rewarding capital versus labour comes out at around
fifty-fifty.

As the brilliant innovator who made whatever it was possible, you
think that you deserve a larger proportion of the gravy, but societies
where people like you have managed to hang onto more of the profits
don't turn out as well as places where labour gets a roughly equal
slice of the pie.

You just have no idea of reality. I take all the risk, put my life
savings on the line, and get far less than everyone else combined. If
I get no return on that, no advantage for all the sleepless nights,
hassles, and years of zero pay I simply won't do it. Why should I?
It's that simple.

You and your demagogues want show-trials to punish the rare people who
leverage other people's money and ideas and walk away with the lion's
share, but in the process you punish EVERYONE ELSE.

I am, by nature, creative. You, and the government want to bury me in
paper, in fees and requirements, and kill all the fun. Hey, I don't
need to create products and jobs. Make it miserable, and I'll do
something else.

James Arthur

 

On May 17, 7:17 am, Bill Sloman <bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 17, 5:57 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 16, 8:53 am,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 15, 11:05 am, Greegor <greego...@gmail.com> wrote:
On May 14, 4:49 am,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
The Bolshevik version of Marxism, with its emphasis on the "leading
role of the party" has damaged a lot of countries, and killed a lot of
people.
The problem isn't with Marxism, but the concentration of power
into the hands of an unrepresentative and irresponsible elite -

Like politicians, whom you'd have save us all with their wisdom.
Socialism inevitably degenerates into tyranny.  (That's what's
happening here, as we lose civil and economic rights.)

Socialism didn't degenerate into tyranny in the UK in 1945-51 period
when Labour ruled the country and nationalised the controlling heights
of the economy, and it hasn't degerated into tyranny in Scandinavia.

The night is still young...

What you've got in the US at the moment certainly isn't socialism -
nor anything like it - and the economic "rights" you seem to be losing
would seem to be the right to be ripped off by a geedy and inefficient
health insurance industry, which has been spending your money on an
expensive campaign to depict Bismark's less-than socialist national
health insurance scheme (which doesn't seem to compromise civil
liberties in Frande or Germany) as some kind of communist plot.

Pabulum.

<snip>

That Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot used Marx's writings to justify
mass murder doesn't say much about Marx,

To say that, you haven't understood the first word of his Manifesto,
which advocates nothing less.

  "The  Communists  are  further  reproached  with  desiring  to
   abolish  countries  and nationality."
(Which, Marx then acknowledges, is his goal.)

  "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest,
    by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize
    all instruments of production in the hands of the state,
    i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and
    to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as
    possible.

  "Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected
   except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of
   property, and on the  conditions  of  bourgeois
   production;  by means  of measures, therefore, which
   appear economically insufficient and untenable, but
   which, in the course of the movement, outstrip
   themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the
   old social order, and are unavoidable as a means
   of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.

  "These measures will, of course, be different in different
   countries."
          --The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto was written in 1848 - when Marx was thirty. It
was the Year of Revolutions distinguished by many revolutionary up-
risings.

Marx was an innovative thinker who had many ground-breaking ideas,
some of them good, useful and productive. His ideas about the politcal
supremacy of the proletariat were not useful or helpfull and have
subsequently been adopted by a number of groups who used them to
justify stupid and evil actions. Marx was a fallible human being, and
the communist manifesto isn't his best work.

Marx speaks of the need of separating children from their families,
husbands from wives, of destroying nations and their cultures,
eliminating all old morality, law, and religion, and seizing and
socializing (spreading) the wealth of nations.

That's the very recipe Pol used in his pot.  Of course it's all just
despotism and tyranny, under color of morality.

Political propaganda, like Dubbya's claim to be introducing democracy
in Irak. It played well at the time, and served its short-term
purpose. Treating it as gospel is rather stupid, but quasi-religious
fanatics do do stupid thinks, as you regularly illustrate.

 Econobabble, rationalizing self-interest.

Like most politcally motivated rhetoric.

Rhetoric? Excuse me, I thought you said it was genius.

 Like Al Gore's ecobabble.

Al Gore doesn't speak of "speaks of the need of separating children
from their families, husbands from wives, of destroying nations and
their cultures, eliminating all old morality, law, and religion, and
seizing and socializing (spreading) the wealth of nations."

He's more into reducing CO2 emissions before the consequences of
global warming have much the same kind of effect. Since you don't have
a clue about the science underpinning his chain of logic, you probably
don't appreciate the distinction.

Marx was an idiot--a dangerous idiot--and a blowhard.

Marx was a genius - a dangerous genius - and an all too effective
blowhard. He huffed and he puffed and Russia fell down.

His political ideas were lunatic, but his economic insights were
supremely important and gave his daft political ideas a credibility
that they didn't deserve, while frightening off the capitalists who
really should have taken them seriously and acted on them at the time.
It's taken a hundred years for his economic ideas to become common
knowledge, and even now stupid Americans will reject perfectly
sensible propostions because they think that they are associated with
Marx.

Your own aversion to Obama's health care bill - which has nothing to
do with Marx, except that Bismark thought it up to take the wind out
of the sails of some of Marx's political associates - is a case in
point.

You don't have the first idea what's in Obama's mandatory insurance
purchase and regulation bill--you're simply regurgitating--and neither
do you know anything about American health care, so there's really no
point in debating you on this.

--
Cheers,
James Arthur

 

On May 18, 4:03 am, Bill Sloman <bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 18, 6:35 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:
On May 17, 10:27 pm, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 17 May 2010 13:48:28 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com
wrote:

To the contrary--anti-trust should apply to labor, too.  E.g.
government unions.

Agreed; all unions.

Sure.  A union is nothing more than an attempt to monopolize labor..

Sad day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Antitrust_Act#Exemptions

The AFL-CIO can only be seen as monopolists.  They'd have taken over
the country, except that they killed all their hosts.

Don't be silly. Unions are alive and tolerably healthy in Europe, and
are quite sensible enough to function as benign symbiotes.

That is, culturally, possible. In Japan unions actually press
management to improve production. In the US they do the opposite.
They create strife strictly to enrich the union bosses, create an
artificially adversarial relationship with management, all so the
union can fleece its members.

That's why unions should be restricted--they can get out of hand, and
that should not be allowed.

James Arthur

 

On May 19, 9:45 am, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:
On May 18, 12:53 pm, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:
On May 17, 8:43 pm, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

I can't speak to their methods or calculations, but I'd sure love it
if you'd read their material and report back on it! ...
This one?
http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer
This document gives figures, but not methods:
 http://www.fairtax.org/site/DocServer/What_the_federal_tax_system_is_...
This is the main info page:
 http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_main
I had looked at both. No meat in there other than assumptions.

You sure give up awfully easily Joerg!  There's a load of academic
papers, cited in the footnotes, with 10 full .PDFs for free download.
Like this one:
http://www.fairtax.org/PDF/Tax%20Notes%20article%20on%20FT%20rate.pdf
(footnote #1 onhttp://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_basics_main
)

Yes, sometimes when you find blatant flaws you need to scrap and
abandon, then if suitable redesign. Like this one in the article from
your above link, quote: "1. Housing. Explicit rental payments are
subject to taxation under the FairTax.

Right. If you pay rent, it's taxed. But, you paid no income tax, so
you're still ahead.

Implicit rents on existing
owneroccupied housing and farms are not. However, the Fair-Tax
implicitly taxes imputed rent on newly constructed housing via a
prepayment approach that levies the FairTax on their initial sale.4
Thus, we remove the value of imputed rent for housing and farm dwellings
from the base. Because purchases of new homes are counted as investment
in new structures in the NIPA accounts, we add those figures to the base"

a. Here they are beginning to make this sort of tax as complicated as
the income tax. Engineers call that feature creep. Expempt this, but not
that, but only on days with a full moon ...

It's dirt simple. Above they're just tallying the taxable flows,
which they have to do to estimate revenues.

b. They punish elderly who have saved and want to move into assisted
living but with some independence. If the buildings are new their cost
jumps 23%. So the building of new retirement communities will come to a
crawl. Some people will move out of the country and buy a retirement
bungalow there to avoid this double-tax whammy. -> More layoffs.

Buildings have a high labor content, and thus a high hidden tax
content. Remove those costs, and the price of building will fall to
compensate. How much will they fall? You could reasonably expect
them to fall by nearly however much the builder's cost is reduced.

Further, you'd be paying with money you got straight from your job,
invested for however many years, all without ever paying any tax.

c. They exempt imputed rent on old buildings yet do not at all consider
removing the de-facto double tax on savings in Roth IRAs or regular
accounts. What that does is simple: The millisecond such a flawed law
would be announced there'd be a stampede. Everybody who is smart pulls
their money out of the banks and buys real estate, any real estate. -
Financial market collapse -> major new recession.

Well, stop naysaying and fix it. That's what engineers do.

We could simply exempt all existing taxed savings and investments, and
create accounts for those, with tax-free debit cards, or whatever.
Anything you buy with that debit card from that account either a)
isn't taxed at sale or b) you keep your statements and file for a
refund. Blah, blah, blah.

It ain't rocket science.

All these considerations only apply for a transition period anyhow,
then they go away. Since you're still working you'll get years of
income-tax-free benefits from the thing, if enacted. Wouldn't that be
great?

The alternative is this: last year Obama spent $1.60 for every $1.00
he took in. Of that $1.00, he got roughly $0.50 from income tax, and
$0.50 from SS tax. To fix that, assuming interest rates stay low
(which they won't), he'd have to raise income taxes by double just to
break even, or every other tax in the book by 50% or so, plus make up
some more.

And then they talk about removing compliance costs which is also flawed.
Who is going to determine how much fictitious rent tax you must
surrender? Right, an assessor. He's going to have to be paid a salary,
and he'll probably get a nice fat pension later.

There is no"fictitious" rent tax, and no assessor. You never need
assessors, since taxes are based on actual sales price--that's the
assessment.

AIUI "imputed rent" is the implied _value_ you're getting from living
in or using a property you own. Economists tally that for their own
calculations. It isn't taxed if you already own the property and are
simply living there on the one hand because there's no sale; however,
if you buy a new property, the "imputed rent" of you living there in
the future is effectively taxed because the sale pays the Fair Tax.
Nothing wrong with that.

<big snip..get to it tomorrow...I'm sleepy!>

--
Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[Martin Brown]

On 20/05/2010 04:48, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 18, 4:03 am, Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 18, 6:35 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

The AFL-CIO can only be seen as monopolists. They'd have taken over
the country, except that they killed all their hosts.

Don't be silly. Unions are alive and tolerably healthy in Europe, and
are quite sensible enough to function as benign symbiotes.

I think US unions are somewhat different to in the ROW. My only
encounter was at Pittcon a long time ago when a rough looking guy came
around saying the equivalent of "mind your stand mister (ie give us some
cash and we will)". One European exhibitor refused and came in the next
morning to find that someone had driven a forklift through their exhibit
mangling it. I presume we had paid up.

That is, culturally, possible. In Japan unions actually press
management to improve production. In the US they do the opposite.

In Japan almost everyone thinks of themselves as middle class. The
unions exist to make sure the average worker is looked after by what is
a *very* patriarchal system. There is more unproductivity lurking in
parts of Japan than you might imagine - but it isn't in their highly
advanced manufacturing plants. You can still see rice being grown by
people using oxen to pull a plough right next to semicon plants! The
"democratic" voting system there means the whole place is held to ransom
by the rice growers who are stuck in a time warp.

And salesmen come in threes. An elderly one who is past it, the one who
knows roughly what he is talking about and a junior learning the ropes.
Depending on who in the organisation decides to talk to them one of them
will take the lead. An inordinate amount of physically visiting
customers goes on - that is what keeps the shinkansen trains busy.

The ratio between the CEOs wages and the floor cleaners is the smallest
in the industrialised world. Senior managers do get some extra perks.

They create strife strictly to enrich the union bosses, create an
artificially adversarial relationship with management, all so the
union can fleece its members.

Wouldn't the union members see through this sort of thing?
UK had its fair share of communist inspired bother in the early 70's
with the likes of Red Robbo. Thatcher put an end to that.

That's why unions should be restricted--they can get out of hand, and
that should not be allowed.

Equally the employer should treat employees fairly and not be entitled
to hire and fire on a whim in the way that seems so common in the USA.

Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 20/05/2010 03:48, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 19, 4:01 am, Martin Brown wrote:
On 17/05/2010 03:05, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:
On May 14, 2:31 am, Martin Brown wrote:

It was common practice to overstoke the fire before the first shift and
add weight to the pressure relief valve - this resulted in several large
scale boiler explosions destroying big mills in the early morning and
killing many workers in the Lancashire cotton industry.

Destroying your factory is a bad business model. That quickly self-
limits. Besides, nowadays we sue or jail those people. Too much, in
fact.

In a fast moving business scrapping and re-equipping with the latest
technology at no additional cost could actually be a sound business plan
so long as the insurers were prepared to pay out. Vulcan insurance
formed and insisted on boiler inpections to bring this under control.
Factory managers tended to die in explosions but not the mill owners.

You have so very little faith in men, that one wonders why you so
trust in politicians, who are often the worst of the lot.

I know the history of the Lancashire cotton mills pretty well. The mill
owners there were downright evil for the most part.

I just saw a thing on Mao's Great Leap Forward. He wasn't evil, he
was just being a good little Marxist. Mao was very vexed and
surprised when his new agricultural army--as per Marx--didn't fill
their horn-o-plenty. Instead, it turns out people don't work as hard
for the socialist utopia when there's no gain in it for them.
Production plummeted, and they had famine. Whoops.

Therein lies the problem. The profit motive is essential, but chasing
profit at the cost of everything else including business ethics is also
dangerous. That is how the financial system was wrecked in 2008.

Short term, that's painful. Long term, that's creative destruction,
society re-allocating resources from something no longer needed, to
something people do want and need.

And so long as it only affects the peons that is OK?

It affects everyone, to say otherwise is absurd. As far as being OK,
it's the *only* moral thing to do.

Insisting that all those people keep their jobs, stay on the farm
though unneeded, and get the same pay, while working let's say 2 hours
a day--that would wipe out all the benefits of mechanizing, all the
incentive for the farmer to invest in machines, or for inventors to
invent them.

No. They clearly have to move to the cities. But the mill owners did not
have to exploit them in the ruthless way that supply and demand
economics allowed them to.

That locks us in the stone ages, to the greatest detriment /most
particularly/ of the lowest-paid workers. That's immoral.

What happened was equally immoral. Except that the wages were paid in
cities and the poor there had no way there to obtain fresh food except
by buying overpriced stuff controlled by the Corn Laws to make the rich
landowners and their merchants even richer. In the cities food was
overpriced and frequently adulterated making it less nutricious and in
some cases downright poisonous like the infamous Bradford sweets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bradford_Sweet_Poisoning

Would it have been better to destroy the farm equipment that made
growing food so easy, or the mills that made clothing cheap for
everyone? Or go the Obama way--carve up the factory and give it to
the workers? Divvy up the greedy farmer's land? That makes factories
disappear and farms go fallow (witness Zimbabwe).

You set a false dichotomy. What I am saying is that the ruthless
exploitation of the poor at below subsistence living rates

It's impossible, by definition, for someone to work for less than
subsistence. Subsistence is the true minimum of wages, for a man
cannot work for less than he needs to live. He can''t. (Adam Smith)

Actually you can and they sometimes did. That is why every child over 6
was working in the mills. The family income was just about enough
provided that everyone in it was able to work.

In California and across the USA, social subsidies lower the amount of
money people need to live, and thereby lower the prevailing wages, and
spawning the need for more subsidies (otherwise the non-subsidized
people can't live). Subsidies create the need for more subsidies.

UK is experimenting with a wider zero tax rate band to avoid having
subsidy traps of that type.

snip

The dislocation at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution was
especially traumatic since motive power meant so many human-muscle-
powered occupations were displaced at the same time. Would it have
been better to keep them all in subsidized green jobs making wagon
wheels with sustainable, carbon-neutral technology, as they were,
after all, before steam?

It wasn't carbon neutral before steam. Small amounts of coal were in use
in the UK from about 1200 onwards. Coal only became really important
after the 1615 Royal Proclamation forbidding the use of wood for glass
making and so spurring on the industrial revolution. The remaining wood
was needed for shipbuilding. Trees were vanishing fast.

But coal really only took off big time after Abraham Darby in
Coalbrookedale patented a means to smelt iron ore by using coke around
1709. That is still a long time before the Victorian era.

Wooden wagon wheels were carbon neutral. Only carbon criminals would
consider wrapping wheels with steel to make them last 10x longer. But

You really love your straw men don't you.

you're right, it's better just to cut two sticks and drag your stuff
around on a skid.

Another false dichotomy. I did not suggest that at all.
I simply pointed out that we stopped being carbon neutral in the UK a
very long time ago - it was once all forests.

Longer term, profitable business attracts competition. Outrageous
profits are almost never sustainable for that reason. Competitors
have to compete for workers, with both wages and conditions.

No they don't. Look at Standard Oil in your own country - it required
government legislation to bring their monopolistic empire under control.

It's a negative (stabilizing) feedback term, not an absolute. I agree
that we need some controls, just as the referee separates two boxers
before one of them gets killed.

Except you seem to think that none would be better.

They can agree not to outbid each other and keep wages low.



Sharing the wealth? That comes immediately through cheaper goods,
making it easier and cheaper to live, and through better wages and
working conditions with time, as described above.

Everyone wins. And yes, the industrialist does very well for a time--
there's a phase delay. That's his reward. Take it away, and he won't
do it at all.

You subscribe to a model that says that the rich will only work if you
shower them with loadsamoney because that is what they crave. But the
poorest work best when starving and under constant threat of eviction.

No, I believe the vast majority of people who get rich, who get there
slowly, by working extra hours, won't try as hard if you take all or
part of that away.

I am inclined to prefer a model that makes sure that the poorest in
society are not so poor that they view me as someone they should rob.
Paying taxes provides useful services for everyone and a safety net for
those who are unable to work through no fault of their own. Whilst I do
resent the idle slobs that take advantage of the system they are a small
proportion of the population. Most people do want to work.

The leftist propaganda for the masses is that all rich people in
America get it dumped on them--unearned--in buckets every year. A few
do. But far and away most of the rich people in America get there by
earning a decent wage, living modestly, and saving carefully their
whole life.

I think you have far too many slimy lawyers, hedge fund managers and
merchant bankers. They are expensive parasites.

Engineers who live carefully, for example, can easily become
millionaires.

Becoming a dollar millionaire isn't all that difficult.

Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Bill Sloman]

On May 20, 5:48 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 18, 4:03 am,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:



On May 18, 6:35 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:
On May 17, 10:27 pm, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 17 May 2010 13:48:28 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com
wrote:

To the contrary--anti-trust should apply to labor, too.  E.g.
government unions.

Agreed; all unions.

Sure.  A union is nothing more than an attempt to monopolize labor.

Sad day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Antitrust_Act#Exemptions

The AFL-CIO can only be seen as monopolists.  They'd have taken over
the country, except that they killed all their hosts.

Don't be silly. Unions are alive and tolerably healthy in Europe, and
are quite sensible enough to function as benign symbiotes.

That is, culturally, possible.  In Japan unions actually press
management to improve production.  In the US they do the opposite.
They create strife strictly to enrich the union bosses, create an
artificially adversarial relationship with management, all so the
union can fleece its members.

It takes two to tango. US management is so anti-union that it can't
conceive of anything but an adversarial relationship, unless it can
bribe the union officials (which management has been known to do,
along with supporting candidates for union posts who are known to be
susceptible to bribery).

Management in the UK is less fanatically anti-union, but my memories
of my short period as a low level union representative are dominated
by incidents in which the personnel department tried to lie to us. I
was actually better placed to detect these lies than the more senior
union representatives, and consititutionally inclined to point out
that the story we were being told was inconsistent with reality, which
did make for a tolerably adversarial environment.

And one wonders how the union gets to fleece its members? Union dues
are fixed, and the only way the union is going to get more money s to
have more members. Corrupt union officials do have other sources of
income, but mainly from management, who presumably don't want the kind
of overtly adversarial relationship that slows down production.

That's why unions should be restricted--they can get out of hand, and
that should not be allowed.

Actually, that's why unions should be protected and encouraged. If
they can stop worrying about protecting their very existence, they
have more time to think about enriching the jobs of their members, and
encouraging management to perform at a level likely to generate more
jobs for potential union members.

It works for the rest of the world, but God's only country hasn't
noticed, and still carries on as if the International Workers of the
World were alive and well and threatening US cultural values, such as
endemic right-wing stupidity.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Bill Sloman]

On May 20, 12:50 am, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Wed, 19 May 2010 14:35:20 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 19, 3:43 pm, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Bill Slomanwrote:
On May 18, 5:19 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Tue, 18 May 2010 01:20:40 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

[...]

The alternative do-nothing approach, as practiced by Hoover in 1929,
leads to vast tracts of industry standing idle with 25% unemployment,
dramatically reducing production and consumption.
The argument isn't about "producing as much as you consume" - it's
about maintaining consumption and production under circumstances where
both would otherwise collapse.
Managing the transition back to balanced budgets without crimping the
level of economic activity too much isn't a trivial job, and the banks
don't help by bleating about financial responsiblity as if their US
colleagues hadn't created the problem in the first place by being
totally irresponsible.
With your understanding of dynamics, it's a good thing you don't
design electronics.

With your understanding of dynamics, it is a miracle that you can.

As you should know, I can use the Ziegler-Nichols step response test
to tune a PID controller. This is tolerably primitive (Ziegler and
Nichols published their test in 1942, the year I was born) but
adequate in a lot of practical situations. I know about more
sophisticated schemes - such as state variable control - but happily
I've yet to run into a situation where I needed to use one. And my
Ph.D. thesis was on the reaction dynamics of the thermal decompostion
of nitrosyl bromide, which involved simulating a non-linear process (a
second order rate law, perturbed by self-cooling). Your own background
is probably less sophisticated.

Here goes the bragging again.

Not exactly. The half-wit claims that because I don't share his
economic opinions, I don't have enough understanding of dynamics to
design electronics. It's very much an apples and pears comparison, but
it's also flat-out wrong, as I've gone to the trouble of pointing out.
If using objective facts to point out that John has made an idot of
himself again is "bragging", then I am stuck with bragging - I did get
the Ph.D. in that area, and I'm not going to lie about it in a effort
tp project a modest persona.

How come that John, probably not that much different in age from you,
makes tons of money designing and building electronics, right now, has
created tons of jobs, and you don't?

He's more interested in making money than I am, and his expertise does
seem to lend itself to lower value systems than I worked on.

Systems that don't sell have no value. Systems that sell thousands of
copies at 4:1 margins have value.

IBM and HP could get away with a 6:1 margin.

Quite a lot of the gear that I worked on did get sold. The electron
beam microfabricator project got canned before we'd started a single
printed circuit layout - and managements relutance to let us send out
the first circuit for layout was a clear indictator that they were
contemplating canning the project.

The electron beam tester prototype was never demonstrated to a
potential customer - the departing boss who should have been chasing
customers hid in his office and worked on his next job, while the
people who took over the task of selling the machine after he finally
resigned decided that there weren't enough potential customers without
going to the trouble of letting one of them see the machine in action,
which was probably a mistake, since the machine collected its data
impressively faster (as it has been designed to do - the whole massive
investment in digitising the data collection was justified on that
basis).

If the machine had been actively sold, it would have been worth a
bundle.

Setting
up your own company to make electron microscope or phased array
ultrasound machines probably takes more capital than even John could
have got his hands on, and was never one of my ambitions.

I started with essentially no capital. I've never believed in raising
a lot of money and then developing a complex product; that path has
about a 90% failure rate. I developed modest products, sold them, and
worked my way up. But designing megabuck instruments doesn't appeal to
me; each one will take years of development and support, and I don't
have that sort of attention span. Six or eight designs a year is more
fun.

Inadequate attention-span. Did you have ADHD as a kid? I happen to be
particularly good with complex systems, and that influences what I do
and what my employers have wanted me to do.

<snip>

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Bill Sloman]

On May 20, 1:22 am, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Bill Slomanwrote:
On May 19, 3:13 am, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Bill Slomanwrote:
On May 18, 5:21 pm, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Bill Slomanwrote:
On May 17, 4:01 pm, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Bill Slomanwrote:
On May 16, 1:11 am, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Bill Slomanwrote:
On May 13, 5:59 pm, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Bill Slomanwrote:
On May 13, 3:46 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Thu, 13 May 2010 02:34:35 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman
bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 12, 7:57 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 12 May 2010 10:13:56 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman
bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

<snip>

Which is the sort of claim that is easy to make after the fact. Have
you got any kind of record of what you actually said at the time? When
I've been able to check out my own prophecies, I've always found that
what I remember writing was always distinctly more explicit than what
I actually wrote at the time.

Of course I did not put a tape recorder on the table. At banks that is
generally frowned upon

I do vividly remember that discussion. It was about a real estate
investment fund opportunity which, after that discussion, was shelved.
And boy was I glad we did.

Which doesn't make you a prophet. There are plenty of "investment
opportunities" that are never going to make money, even during a boom.

<snip>

These are are the problems that the Greek governemnt has now faced up
to, whence the aggressive political theatre in the streets of Athens.
The difference in GDP between Greece and its neighbours isn't
dramatic. It is stiil an advanced industrial country. ...
Care to point out any high-tech products they make and sell in
significant volumes?

No. ...

Thought so.

Since - as I went on to point out - this is a foolish criterion, you
are congratulating yourself on being a twit.

 ... You can be an advanced industrial country without manufacturing
and exporting high-tech products. The Greeks may have found a niche
they can dominate, but if they have I don't know about it, and more
than you knew about them having the the largest shipping fleet. In any
event there are other products they can produce and export in
sufficient volume to fund the goods that they have to import.

The shipping fleet is obviously not able to keep this country afloat,
else they wouldn't have gone begging at the IMF, would they?

Few countries are unlucky enough to have their economy depend on a
single product. Australia would have to tighten its belt a lot if the
market for iron ore declined signficantly. Carrying on as if the
absence of such a single product is a sign of economic malaise is
evidence that you don't know enough about economics to make a useful
contribution to this kind of discussion.

<snip>

Greece is a small
country - about 11 million people - and it's industry, such as it is,
isn't widely publicised. It is a developed country, and the GPD per
head is about the same as that of France, Italy and Germany.
It is not, the GDP is lower.
Not dramatically.
30% less and retirement around 5 years earlier than other EU countries
is "not dramatically"?

Compare them with the ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe, where
the GDP is closer to a third of the European average.

The retirement age - 58 or 61 or whatever it is - is roughly the same
as the average age of exiting work in Australia - 59 - and the
Netherlands and France. In fact the Greeks tend to continue to work
after their official retirement age, so the Greeks avtually work
longer than the Dutch or the French, making a nonsense of half of your
claim. Presumably the mediterranean diet keeps them healthy for longer
than their Dutch adn French equivalents.

Greeks have told me the exact opposite of what you claim. And the state
of their economy proves it beyond a doubt. So does the per-capita GDP.

You've got anecdotes. I found statistics, albeit embedded in messy
documents for which it didn't seem appropriate to post links. See if
you can find some counter-statistics.

Open your PC or
whatever else electronic and see how many components in there are from
Greek companies. Open the hood of your car and do same. In fact, open
just about anything.
So what? There's nothing there from Australia either, or Switzerland.
Australia largely lives off of its minerals and other goodies, as long
as they have some. Switzerland, well, we all know what they do besides
making watch movements and precision machinery
Australia exports around a billion dollars worth of scientifc
instruments and services every year. ...
I have yet to see one such instrument. Would be a first for me, and I
deal with tons of instruments in my job (but admittedly, mostly EE
stuff). However, I do have an Astor BPJ radio

The only ones I knew about were flame ionisation spectrometers, which
are handy for elemental analysis, and gas chromatography detectors.
You might find them in a clinical laboratory.

So what company/companies? You claimed a billion bucks. That's a lotta
bucks and it should show on some balance sheets.

It shows up in the goverment export statistics. I'm not going to
bother digging through company balance sheets to support a point tha
ti only raised to point up the fatuousness of your idea that Greece
needed to be exporting some world-beating technical innovation before
it could be seen to have a viable economy.

<snip>

Dream on. I was in the UK during the three day week, and the
subsequent period when Wilson and Callaghan had to reign in domestic
spending to get the economy back on the rails. The came to power in
1974,"when a period of economic crisis was beginning to hit most
Western countries".

I lived in Germany and other than the energy crisis I don't remember
anything remotely close to what they and the neighbor countries are
experiencing today.

Germany was - and still is - insulated by the Wirtschaftswunder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder

German workers are skilled and well-educated, their trade unions are
constructive, and their bosses are predominantly engineers (as opposed
to book-keepers in the UK and lawyers in the US).

And unfortunately that goes for the US as well
although we do have some nice upsides in the area of high-tech that can
(hopefully) pull us out. Medical devices, aerospace and so on.

That has dramatically changed during the last few years, and the US is
unfortunately no exception.

Your memory doesn't seem to be all that reliable.

I can read statistics. And I assume you can read as well? Take a look:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USDebt.png

Now read my statement about the 70's again and look at the graphs. Do
you see it now? If not get your glasses and try again

I see US debt rising from the time Regan got to be president, with a
short decline under Clinton. National debt isn't the only indicator of
national economic health - which is obvious enough if you think about
what probably would have happened if national governments had reacted
to the sub-prime mortagage crisis by emulating Hoover, rathter than
Roosevelt. You'd have 25% unemployment and a much lower national debt.

Economic management was erractic in the 1970's - Keynes was still in
vogue, but the people who applied what they thought were his
prescriptions don't seem to have understood them very well. When
Thatcher was elected in the UK in 1980, there was enough
dissaatisfaction with the then prevailing economic orhtodoxy that she
could get away with acting on advice from monetarists. She'd have been
better off consulting astrologers, as Regan did - the British economy
grew less under her care than any other advanced industrial economy -
but that she could get awya with it speaks volumes about the state of
the UK economy when she got to power.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Bill Sloman]

On May 20, 1:24 am, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Wed, 19 May 2010 14:54:44 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman



bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 19, 8:44 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Tue, 18 May 2010 15:54:36 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 18, 5:19 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Tue, 18 May 2010 01:20:40 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 17, 5:18 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Mon, 17 May 2010 07:01:48 -0700, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid
wrote:

Bill Slomanwrote:
On May 16, 1:11 am, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Bill Slomanwrote:
On May 13, 5:59 pm, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Bill Slomanwrote:
On May 13, 3:46 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Thu, 13 May 2010 02:34:35 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman
bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 12, 7:57 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 12 May 2010 10:13:56 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman
bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

snip

Managing the transition back to balanced budgets without crimping the
level of economic activity too much isn't a trivial job, and the banks
don't help by bleating about financial responsiblity as if their US
colleagues hadn't created the problem in the first place by being
totally irresponsible.

With your understanding of dynamics, it's a good thing you don't
design electronics.

With your understanding of dynamics, it is a miracle that you can.

As you should know, I can use the Ziegler-Nichols step response test
to tune a PID controller. This is tolerably primitive (Ziegler and
Nichols published their test in 1942, the year I was born) but
adequate in a lot of practical situations. I know about more
sophisticated schemes - such as state variable control - but happily
I've yet to run into a situation where I needed to use one. And my
Ph.D. thesis was on the reaction dynamics of the thermal decompostion
of nitrosyl bromide, which involved simulating a non-linear process (a
second order rate law, perturbed by self-cooling). Your own background
is probably less sophisticated.

The first control system I ever designed, at about the age of 19, was
for a 32,000 horsepower steamship propulsion system. The system
nonlinearities, propeller/hull bahavior, and the boiler dynamics had
to be considered. I simulated it in FOCAL on a PDP-8. A sub-loop drove
a dc servo motor/pot that positioned the steam valve, which was in
turn moved by a hydraulic servo. It all worked first try.

I'll bet the FOCAL simulation didn't work first try, or the various
control schemes that you tested on the simulation.

Does any complex software work first try? The initial algorithm
(nonlinear function generator feedforward with constrained PID around
that) worked as planned. The sim allowed me to tweak the loop for
turbine inertia, gearing, steam valve curve, prop coupling, hull mass,
water resistance on the hull.

I plotted a simulated run from dead stop to 100 RPM, valve position,
RPMs, and hull speed versus time, on a Teletype machine, just one of
those

      *
       *
       *
      *
      *
       *
       *
      *

sorts of things, then went over the characters with colored pens to
make nice graphs. We took it to the ship owners and showed it to them
(remember, I was 19 and looked about 16.) We'd never done any control
system before. They had an old crusty ex-Chief Engineer at the
meeting. He said "that's exactly the way an experienced engineer would
work the valve by hand" so we got the job.

That's roughly the way the software was designed that ran my father's
counter-current continuous pulp digester in the mid-1960s. My father
had always known how the continuous digestor should be controlled, and
was able to get the algorithms programmed into the - ICT - computer
than ran the digestor in the paper mill where he was the research
manager. The main advantage of the computer is that you could program
in long time constants, much longer than were compatible with the
attention spans of all but the best of the shift cooks who had
previously managed the manual control of the digestor. The son of the
best of the guys involved in manually running the digestor is now the
Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Melbourne University - we don't
know to what extent intelligence is heritable, but we know that the
father was also pretty bright, though he didn't grow up at time when
he could have contemplated going to university.

The really impreesive part of that story is that you were able to set
up a tolerably realistic simulation. The PDP-8 wasn't a large
computer. To quote the Wikipedia article on FOCAL

"FOCAL ran on very low-end PDP-8 systems, even systems with only 4K
words of memory and lacking mass storage. The FOCAL interpreter was
written in very tight assembly language and typically used only 3K 12-
bit words, leaving a somewhat limiting 1K words to hold the user
program, and variables.

Yup. Rick Merrill did a stunning job on FOCAL, especially considering
what a barbaric machine the PDP-8 was. His internal constructs changed
DECs design of the PDP-11, which pissed off Edson DeCastro so much he
left and started Data General. The NOVA was basically the klunky
page-oriented PDP-11 initial design... which so influenced Wozniak.

The low-end PICs are essentially PDP-8s. Horrible machines. The
6800/6803 and later the 68K were heavily influenced by the PDP-11. The
PDP-11 was a truly beautiful machine. The instruction set was so
regular that I can still assemble programs in my head, in octal.

LandMine instruction:

MOV -(PC), -(PC)    014747

If the system was upgraded by adding one or more extra 4K banks of
memory, FOCAL could use that extra memory, either for a single user,
or split the extra memory across several time-sharing users. FOCAL
made extensive use of interrupt-driven terminal I/O, so it could keep
four teletypes busily whirring with nary a pause."

I don't recall Focal-8 using interrupts for TTY i/o. I certainly
didn't have four TTY interfaces. I did have 4kx12 core memory.

My data collection and processing program for the PDP-8 used
interrupts to control the TTY i/o, as well as to to keep track of the
real-time clock, and the A/D converter. The program that I wrote in
MACRO-8 was tolerably complicated.

Somehow I suspect that you had access to somebody else's mathematical
model of the steamship propulsion system.

Absolutely not. I coded it myself, based on physics and what data I
could get from DeLaval about the turbine and steam valve.

Ouch. Most of the academic work in that area, at that time, was done
in FORTRAN and run on computers that could run FORTRAN comfortably.

One can see how an obsessive 19-year-old could do it, and be amazed. I
was 23 when I wrote great chunks of simulation and non-linear least
squares minimisation software on the basis of what I could get from
books and papers, and I'm still surprised how well it all turned out.

And I got to ride on the ships, too.

A definite bonus. I just got to hang around the chemistry department a
few years longer than I should have done if I'd done what my
supervisor expected me to do.

--
Bill sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Bill Sloman]

On May 20, 1:26 am, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Wed, 19 May 2010 20:19:10 +0100, Martin Brown







|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:
On 19/05/2010 19:55, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 19 May 2010 08:46:45 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk>  wrote:

On 18/05/2010 16:35, John Larkin wrote:

When I die, the government will make an absurd valuation of the heap,
including "goodwill", and levy enough death taxes to wipe it out,
roughly 6 times over. I suppose if they want to wipe out the
businesses that create jobs and pay taxes, it's their choice.

You should campaign to get the law changed then.

I'd rather design electronics than try to change the world.

Obviously that is your choice.

The UK protects family businesses and farms from being wiped out by
inheritance tax liability. Tax planning using the potentially exempt
rules would work for transfer of any asset at all provided you did it at
least 7 years in advance of your expiry. (2 years in the case of handing
a business to a close relative)

Granted it is no use at all if you fall under a bus tomorrow.

For a quick guide on how the UK system works try
http://www.estatesortrusts.co.uk/estates-inheritance-business-success....

It seems "Land of the Free" rips you off again!

In that I have to do a lot of expensive and boring estate planning to
avoid blunt injury from the idiotic laws, yes.

This is pretty much basic boilerplate stuff. You can spot the cut and
paste in the first draft documents from the less skilled places.

But don't you appreciate the skill that clever lawyers demonstrate in
their word craft? It isn't really all that different to the creative
processes of new software and hardware design. There are a set of rules
but they can be constructively tweaked. I have to say that my encounters
using solicitors have been about 50:50 good *and* bad.

The key to using solicitors effectively is asking the right question(s).

Zero inheritance taxation would remove all that silly overhead.

Taxing liquid assets (including house and saleable effects) of the
estate on death seems reasonable to me. You can't take it with you.

I can give it to my kids. Everything I have has been taxed already.

But would they use it as well?

You might be better off turning the company into a cooperative. At
least that way the poeple who inherit the company will have some
understanding of how it works and why it works that way.

This is an anarcho-syndicalist sort of observation. I don't expect you
to take it seriously.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[JosephKK]

On Wed, 19 May 2010 16:30:12 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
On Wed, 19 May 2010 15:27:01 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
On Wed, 19 May 2010 09:42:44 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On May 18, 2:46 pm, Charlie E. <edmond...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Mon, 17 May 2010 14:31:43 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com
wrote:
major snippage and attributions...

$1 only buys $0.77 worth of _stuff_ today, say the Fair Tax people
(AIUI). The rest goes to taxes hidden in the item's price.
If I tax-deferred the
$1.40, I could buy $1.00 worth of stuff. Any after-tax savings (that
is socked away before the change) gets hammered *twice*.
If you had tax-deferred the $1.40, you'd escape the indignities of the
old system. That's a windfall (assuming Congress allows it).
Going forward though, with income-taxed money, the $1 we have left
still buys the same with or without the Fair Tax. $1 with embedded
tax burden hidden inside it, or ($0.77 actual price + $0.23 Fair Tax)
both cost you $1 at the register. No loss of purchasing power.
That's the contention, AIUI.
The other false assumption is that the price would drop
instantaneously to $.77 as soon as the tax was passed.
I don't assume that. There are all sorts of 2nd and 3rd-order
effects.

In reality,
the price stays at $1.00, and the retailer uses this 'profit' to pay
off his loans. Now, as time goes by, prices 'might' drop, but I
wouldn't bet on it. I actually expect prices to rise.
I expect prices to fall, quickly. Like with gasoline there's a delay
for goods-in-transit, then market forces handle the rest.

Why would a Japanese car or Chinese-made flatscreen TV fall in price
quickly?
Because there is more than one manufacturer.

With consumer electronics the number of manufacturers inside the US is
often zero.

I don't see the relevance.


The relevance is this:

When a group of "experts" claims the price of goods will fall because
the income tax burden of the labor in a product will drop by 23 percent
that assumption is flawed for two reasons:

a. Most consumer products are from China and, consequently, not one iota
will change in the tax on labor. The only cost that changes is the labor
associated with the sales and distribution process but that's miniscule.

I don't think so. The final retail distribution is rather expensive and
labor cost driven. Take a look at the volume pricing at Digikey for
example.

b. The percentage of labor in the COGS even for products made in the US
is much smaller than they anticipate.


If the
government stops taking out SS and IRS taxes from my paycheck, I have
more to spend. I can then afford these now 'higher' prices of that
$1, plus $.23 fair tax, plus the sales tax of $.09, so it is now
$1.33.

As for savings, I don't sweat it as much. Yes, it makes my post-taxes
savings less valuable, but it also removes a lot of taxes on my
earnings and interest!
I'm interested in saving the time and energy I waste avoiding tax land-
mines. That's worth a lot--at least a couple weeks a year. More like
three, methinks.

There'll be new tax land-mines, like who gets to pay ficticious rent
tax, how much, and who doesn't. Et cetera.
That part still seems iffy, yes.

IMHO the whole idea is iffy. Fair means it has to be fair to just about
everyone and not just part of the population. And that's not the case.

The only hole I see in it is savings, that we both object to. I may not agree
(or understand completely) the economics of taxing large items (homes and
cars) heavily.

Much of that will depend on how property tax on homes and use tax on
vehicles gets changed. 40 years of property tax adds up.

There would be some major stampedes if it ever were to happen (or even
seriously discussed, after the recent retroactive stuff). And as people
not only in the Wild West know stampedes are usually dangerous.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On May 20, 5:15 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 17, 5:40 am,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 17, 4:22 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 14, 5:07 pm,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 14, 10:42 pm, John Larkin
Productivity is the ultimate benevolence. Technology pushes
productivity.

Perfectly true. But it doesn't do a thing to ensure that the benefits
of increased productivity are equally shared between capital and
labour.

Obviously it's extremely critical how and when those benefits are
shared.  Labor does not deserve all the proceeds of my innovation,
risk, and investment simply because I hire them, guarantee them a
regular check when I get none, and insulate them from the predations
and petty ministration of their rulers.  Showing up for a paycheck at
a factory does not entitle you to the factory.

Freedom means you can start something yourself, if you want those
rewards and are prepared to take those risks; government means you
can't, to a larger and larger extent.

Society as whole provides the environment where you can hire
technically educated employees, communicate with them, and have them
travel around and get looked after when they get sick.

The infrastructure that matters, that I need, represents about 10-15%
of the taxes we pay, and about a like amount on defense; the rest is
squandered uselessly on bread and circuses.

Since you think that universal health care falls under bread and
circuses, your estimate of the value you get for what you pay can be
written off as right-wing ideosyncratic.

Technically educated employees?  That means they know Windows, MS Word
and LabView, political correctness, and how to file a thousand
different lawsuits for imagined slights, but not how to hold a
screwdriver.

Universities aren't good at teaching people how to hold screwdrivers.
They are pretty good at teaching them about phsyics and mathematics,
but since your firm doesn't seem to need employees that have acquired
that kind of information, you probably don't value it yourself.

Your taxes support that society. Try setting up an innovative business
in a third world country where the tax rates are lower (or easily
evaded by bribing the right people).

Showing up for a paycheck at a factory doesn't entitle you to the
whole factory, but the last hundred years has demonstrated that the
optimum split for rewarding capital versus labour comes out at around
fifty-fifty.

As the brilliant innovator who made whatever it was possible, you
think that you deserve a larger proportion of the gravy, but societies
where people like you have managed to hang onto more of the profits
don't turn out as well as places where labour gets a roughly equal
slice of the pie.

You just have no idea of reality.  I take all the risk, put my life
savings on the line, and get far less than everyone else combined.  If
I get no return on that, no advantage for all the sleepless nights,
hassles, and years of zero pay I simply won't do it.  Why should I?
It's that simple.

If the firm is so bad at what it does that it hasn't built up and
goodwill, you shouldn't have started it. If it is doing any kind of
useful job, you will be able to sell it - as a going concern - for a
lot more than if you closed it down and sold off the bits. That
difference is your return for the hassles and sleepness nights. John
Larkin talks about the "goodwill" component in his firm as if the
goverent had invented it to allow them to charge death duty on it, but
it basically covers the practical knowledge about doing their job
built up in every employee, which can be seen the gorwth of the
prodcutivity of new hires as they settle into a company.

You and your demagogues want show-trials to punish the rare people who
leverage other people's money and ideas and walk away with the lion's
share, but in the process you punish EVERYONE ELSE.

There are entrepreneurs who can put together ideas and capital and
create something new and profitable that would not have come into
existence without their intervenetion. This is paiseworthy. If they
subsequently cheat the people who provided the financial or
intellectual capital, they should be tried, convicted and punished for
these crimes.

I can't imagine why a demagogue would want to make such a process into
a show trial, or how such a process would damage everybody else, or
why such a demagogue would be my demagogue.

In reality, I think you are complaining about the prospects of putting
the Goldman-Sachs executives on trial. Since their crime seems to have
consisted of the rather uninspiring device of concocting a prospectus
that claimed that an investment vehicle was sound when they knoew very
well that it wasn't, entrepreurship isn't any kind of element in the
case. Your Securities and Exchange Commission is duty bound to
presecute that kind of fraud, evn if the bankers involved are well
known, so the only demagoguery around would be yours

I am, by nature, creative.

I've noticed. Your arguments aren't constrained by reality - as above.

You, and the government want to bury me in
paper, in fees and requirements, and kill all the fun.

Sure. You want the freedom to invent the facts that suit you, and
ignore everything else. 

Hey, I don't need to create products and jobs.  Make it miserable, and I'll do
something else.

What do you actually do? Apart from trolling right-wing web-sites for
impausible arguments and incomplete evidence, that is.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Bill Sloman]

On May 20, 5:43 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 17, 7:17 am,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 17, 5:57 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 16, 8:53 am,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 15, 11:05 am, Greegor <greego...@gmail.com> wrote:
On May 14, 4:49 am,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
The Bolshevik version of Marxism, with its emphasis on the "leading
role of the party" has damaged a lot of countries, and killed a lot of
people.
The problem isn't with Marxism, but the concentration of power
into the hands of an unrepresentative and irresponsible elite -

Like politicians, whom you'd have save us all with their wisdom.
Socialism inevitably degenerates into tyranny.  (That's what's
happening here, as we lose civil and economic rights.)

Socialism didn't degenerate into tyranny in the UK in 1945-51 period
when Labour ruled the country and nationalised the controlling heights
of the economy, and it hasn't degenerated into tyranny in Scandinavia.

The night is still young...

The UK elected a conservative government in 1951, which - granting
your somewahat biased perspective - should be seen as having stopped
the degeneration into tyranny. The UK is now run by a Conservative-
Social Democrat coalition, and while it seems that Cameron leapt into
bed with the Social Democrats mainly to muzzle the rabid right wing of
his own party, the prospect for a degradation into tyranny don't look
good.

Unless you plan on redefining tyranny as "any governemnt that Jame
Arthur wouldn't vote for" which does fit your style of argument.

What you've got in the US at the moment certainly isn't socialism -
nor anything like it - and the economic "rights" you seem to be losing
would seem to be the right to be ripped off by a geedy and inefficient
health insurance industry, which has been spending your money on an
expensive campaign to depict Bismark's less-than socialist national
health insurance scheme (which doesn't seem to compromise civil
liberties in Frande or Germany) as some kind of communist plot.

Pabulum.

Which happens to give better health care in France and Germany than
the US system does in the USA, and at two-thirds of the price per
head. You should give it to your children, rather than the inadequate
and over-priced crap that you seem to favour.

That Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot used Marx's writings to justify
mass murder doesn't say much about Marx,

To say that, you haven't understood the first word of his Manifesto,
which advocates nothing less.

  "The  Communists  are  further  reproached  with  desiring  to
   abolish  countries  and nationality."
(Which, Marx then acknowledges, is his goal.)

  "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest,
    by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize
    all instruments of production in the hands of the state,
    i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and
    to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as
    possible.

  "Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected
   except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of
   property, and on the  conditions  of  bourgeois
   production;  by means  of measures, therefore, which
   appear economically insufficient and untenable, but
   which, in the course of the movement, outstrip
   themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the
   old social order, and are unavoidable as a means
   of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.

  "These measures will, of course, be different in different
   countries."
          --The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto was written in 1848 - when Marx was thirty. It
was the Year of Revolutions distinguished by many revolutionary up-
risings.

Marx was an innovative thinker who had many ground-breaking ideas,
some of them good, useful and productive. His ideas about the politcal
supremacy of the proletariat were not useful or helpfull and have
subsequently been adopted by a number of groups who used them to
justify stupid and evil actions. Marx was a fallible human being, and
the communist manifesto isn't his best work.

Marx speaks of the need of separating children from their families,
husbands from wives, of destroying nations and their cultures,
eliminating all old morality, law, and religion, and seizing and
socializing (spreading) the wealth of nations.

That's the very recipe Pol used in his pot.  Of course it's all just
despotism and tyranny, under color of morality.

Political propaganda, like Dubbya's claim to be introducing democracy
in Irak. It played well at the time, and served its short-term
purpose. Treating it as gospel is rather stupid, but quasi-religious
fanatics do do stupid thinks, as you regularly illustrate.

 Econobabble, rationalizing self-interest.

Like most politcally motivated rhetoric.

Rhetoric?  Excuse me, I thought you said it was genius.

Marx was a genius, when it came to economics. As a politician, he was
a dud. I do critical commentary, not fanatical support. Since you
don't seem to be up to critical commentary, you may not appreciate the
difference. And this is reiterating a point I made later in the post
to which you are responding - you might go to the trouble of reading
the whole post before you respond to particular parts of it, if you
don't want to be accused of text-chopping.

 Like Al Gore's ecobabble.

Al Gore doesn't speak of "the need of separating children
from their families, husbands from wives, of destroying nations and
their cultures, eliminating all old morality, law, and religion, and
seizing and socializing (spreading) the wealth of nations."

He's more into reducing CO2 emissions before the consequences of
global warming have much the same kind of effect. Since you don't have
a clue about the science underpinning his chain of logic, you probably
don't appreciate the distinction.

Marx was an idiot--a dangerous idiot--and a blowhard.

Marx was a genius - a dangerous genius - and an all too effective
blowhard. He huffed and he puffed and Russia fell down.

His political ideas were lunatic, but his economic insights were
supremely important and gave his daft political ideas a credibility
that they didn't deserve, while frightening off the capitalists who
really should have taken them seriously and acted on them at the time.
It's taken a hundred years for his economic ideas to become common
knowledge, and even now stupid Americans will reject perfectly
sensible propostions because they think that they are associated with
Marx.

Your own aversion to Obama's health care bill - which has nothing to
do with Marx, except that Bismark thought it up to take the wind out
of the sails of some of Marx's political associates - is a case in
point.

You don't have the first idea what's in Obama's mandatory insurance
purchase and regulation bill--you're simply regurgitating--and neither
do you know anything about American health care, so there's really no
point in debating you on this.

You don't seem to know much more about Obama's mandatory insurance
purchase and regulation bill than that you don't like it, and your
ideas about the current American health care system don't seem to
include the information that it is half again as expensive as it ought
to be, so this is one more case of the pot calling the kettle black
(or Afro-American, if you wnat political correctness).

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Bill Sloman]

On May 20, 3:59 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 11, 8:47 am, John Larkin

jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a.hdgFGtPjbY

You can't fool Mother Nature. When a few hundred million people choose
to not work much, not breed much, and consume a lot, you just can't
spend your way out of the problem.

This is the leading edge of the European demographic crisis that's
been building for generations now. There's no quick fix.

John

Actually, not to quibble, but there is a quick fix: no one gets what
they were promised, everyone pays more, everyone works more, and has
less.

Only in cloud-cuckoo-land. Nobody's situation is exactly the same as
anybody else's, and everybody thinks that they are carrying an unfair
share of the cut. As a solution it imposes an unmanageable level of
social disruption on an economy that wasn't working very well to begin
with. Only a mindless Utopean would propose it.

It's the only solution, because, ultimately, you can't get blood from
a stone, and you can't fool Mother Nature.

It's certainly not the only solution that is consistent with the laws
of conservation, and suggesting that it is implies that you are either
a liar or an idiot. The evidnece does suggest the latter.

Now that's change we can believe in.  Yes, oh yes we can.

Definitely an idiot.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 20 May 2010 02:01:52 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 20, 12:50 am, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 19 May 2010 14:35:20 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 19, 3:43 pm, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Bill Slomanwrote:
On May 18, 5:19 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Tue, 18 May 2010 01:20:40 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

[...]

The alternative do-nothing approach, as practiced by Hoover in 1929,
leads to vast tracts of industry standing idle with 25% unemployment,
dramatically reducing production and consumption.
The argument isn't about "producing as much as you consume" - it's
about maintaining consumption and production under circumstances where
both would otherwise collapse.
Managing the transition back to balanced budgets without crimping the
level of economic activity too much isn't a trivial job, and the banks
don't help by bleating about financial responsiblity as if their US
colleagues hadn't created the problem in the first place by being
totally irresponsible.
With your understanding of dynamics, it's a good thing you don't
design electronics.

With your understanding of dynamics, it is a miracle that you can.

As you should know, I can use the Ziegler-Nichols step response test
to tune a PID controller. This is tolerably primitive (Ziegler and
Nichols published their test in 1942, the year I was born) but
adequate in a lot of practical situations. I know about more
sophisticated schemes - such as state variable control - but happily
I've yet to run into a situation where I needed to use one. And my
Ph.D. thesis was on the reaction dynamics of the thermal decompostion
of nitrosyl bromide, which involved simulating a non-linear process (a
second order rate law, perturbed by self-cooling). Your own background
is probably less sophisticated.

Here goes the bragging again.

Not exactly. The half-wit claims that because I don't share his
economic opinions, I don't have enough understanding of dynamics to
design electronics. It's very much an apples and pears comparison, but
it's also flat-out wrong, as I've gone to the trouble of pointing out.
If using objective facts to point out that John has made an idot of
himself again is "bragging", then I am stuck with bragging - I did get
the Ph.D. in that area, and I'm not going to lie about it in a effort
tp project a modest persona.

How come that John, probably not that much different in age from you,
makes tons of money designing and building electronics, right now, has
created tons of jobs, and you don't?

He's more interested in making money than I am, and his expertise does
seem to lend itself to lower value systems than I worked on.

Systems that don't sell have no value. Systems that sell thousands of
copies at 4:1 margins have value.

IBM and HP could get away with a 6:1 margin.

Quite a lot of the gear that I worked on did get sold. The electron
beam microfabricator project got canned before we'd started a single
printed circuit layout - and managements relutance to let us send out
the first circuit for layout was a clear indictator that they were
contemplating canning the project.

The electron beam tester prototype was never demonstrated to a
potential customer - the departing boss who should have been chasing
customers hid in his office and worked on his next job, while the
people who took over the task of selling the machine after he finally
resigned decided that there weren't enough potential customers without
going to the trouble of letting one of them see the machine in action,
which was probably a mistake, since the machine collected its data
impressively faster (as it has been designed to do - the whole massive
investment in digitising the data collection was justified on that
basis).

If the machine had been actively sold, it would have been worth a
bundle.

Setting
up your own company to make electron microscope or phased array
ultrasound machines probably takes more capital than even John could
have got his hands on, and was never one of my ambitions.

I started with essentially no capital. I've never believed in raising
a lot of money and then developing a complex product; that path has
about a 90% failure rate. I developed modest products, sold them, and
worked my way up. But designing megabuck instruments doesn't appeal to
me; each one will take years of development and support, and I don't
have that sort of attention span. Six or eight designs a year is more
fun.

Inadequate attention-span. Did you have ADHD as a kid? I happen to be
particularly good with complex systems, and that influences what I do
and what my employers have wanted me to do.

snip

Not trusting in reincarnation, I plan to do as many things in life as
I can. Doing things includes finsishing them properly and moving on...
ideally leaving documentation for production to make copies for a
decade or two. That's not called "inadequate attention span", it's
called "productivity." Try it some time.

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 20 May 2010 03:09:31 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 20, 1:26 am, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 19 May 2010 20:19:10 +0100, Martin Brown







|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:
On 19/05/2010 19:55, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 19 May 2010 08:46:45 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk>  wrote:

On 18/05/2010 16:35, John Larkin wrote:

When I die, the government will make an absurd valuation of the heap,
including "goodwill", and levy enough death taxes to wipe it out,
roughly 6 times over. I suppose if they want to wipe out the
businesses that create jobs and pay taxes, it's their choice.

You should campaign to get the law changed then.

I'd rather design electronics than try to change the world.

Obviously that is your choice.

The UK protects family businesses and farms from being wiped out by
inheritance tax liability. Tax planning using the potentially exempt
rules would work for transfer of any asset at all provided you did it at
least 7 years in advance of your expiry. (2 years in the case of handing
a business to a close relative)

Granted it is no use at all if you fall under a bus tomorrow.

For a quick guide on how the UK system works try
http://www.estatesortrusts.co.uk/estates-inheritance-business-success...

It seems "Land of the Free" rips you off again!

In that I have to do a lot of expensive and boring estate planning to
avoid blunt injury from the idiotic laws, yes.

This is pretty much basic boilerplate stuff. You can spot the cut and
paste in the first draft documents from the less skilled places.

But don't you appreciate the skill that clever lawyers demonstrate in
their word craft? It isn't really all that different to the creative
processes of new software and hardware design. There are a set of rules
but they can be constructively tweaked. I have to say that my encounters
using solicitors have been about 50:50 good *and* bad.

The key to using solicitors effectively is asking the right question(s).

Zero inheritance taxation would remove all that silly overhead.

Taxing liquid assets (including house and saleable effects) of the
estate on death seems reasonable to me. You can't take it with you.

I can give it to my kids. Everything I have has been taxed already.

But would they use it as well?

The Brat will probably run it better than I do. She has a head for
business and management, and making money, whereas I just like to play
with electronics. She started working in assembly during summer
breaks; now she's managing engineering (which includes me), laying out
all our PC boards, redoing the web site, and going to business school.
A kid's got to start somewhere.

You might be better off turning the company into a cooperative. At
least that way the poeple who inherit the company will have some
understanding of how it works and why it works that way.

There was a fad in the '70s around here, centered in Berkeley of
course, for co-op buisnesses; I still have a couple of the books, like
"We Own It!" It was an interesting experiment. There seemed to be two
available outcomes, sad failures and hilarious failures.

A very few are still around. There's a co-op bakery on 9th avenue, not
bad stuff actually. They close down one day a week just to meet and
talk. And talk. And talk. I hear that it's painful for the majority.

This is an anarcho-syndicalist sort of observation. I don't expect you
to take it seriously.

Obviously not.

John