Driver to drive?

[dcaster@krl.org]

On Sunday, August 3, 2014 1:15:21 AM UTC, Bill Sloman wrote:

You certainly seem to be. You missed the point of my first post and continue to ignore it when I reiterated it in my response to your post. This may be another version of James Arthur's ideological blinkers - which mean that he doesn't process anything that doesn't fit his preconceptions - but your history suggests that simple dimwittedness is a sufficient explanation.



--

Bill Sloman, Sydney

I fully understood the point of your post. I just happen to think it never happened. Proving that there was a benefit in raising the wages would be very hard to do. It reeks of being an anecdote that has no statistical proof.

Dan

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, 3 August 2014 12:28:28 UTC+10, dca...@krl.org wrote:

On Sunday, August 3, 2014 1:15:21 AM UTC, Bill Sloman wrote:

You certainly seem to be. You missed the point of my first post and continue to ignore it when I reiterated it in my response to your post. This may be another version of James Arthur's ideological blinkers - which mean that he doesn't process anything that doesn't fit his preconceptions - but your history suggests that simple dimwittedness is a sufficient explanation.

I fully understood the point of your post. I just happen to think it never happened. Proving that there was a benefit in raising the wages would be very hard to do. It reeks of being an anecdote that has no statistical proof.

It did come from a Cambridge academic - a species that does take maths and stats rather seriously. By the time it has been filtered through me, it has been degraded to an anecdote. If I though that you opinion was susceptible to facts I might go to the trouble of trying to track down the original work, but the noise level on the web for that kind of data is rather high.

I'm still in contact with one of the South Cambridge Labour Ward committee with whom I heard the original talk, but there's little chance that I could use them to track down the academic. It's been more than twenty years ...

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, 3 August 2014 12:28:28 UTC+10, dca...@krl.org wrote:

On Sunday, August 3, 2014 1:15:21 AM UTC, Bill Sloman wrote:

You certainly seem to be. You missed the point of my first post and continue to ignore it when I reiterated it in my response to your post. This may be another version of James Arthur's ideological blinkers - which mean that he doesn't process anything that doesn't fit his preconceptions - but your history suggests that simple dimwittedness is a sufficient explanation.

I fully understood the point of your post. I just happen to think it never happened. Proving that there was a benefit in raising the wages would be very hard to do. It reeks of being an anecdote that has no statistical proof.

Those kinds of studies were certainly going on at the time. This example is from slightly later, and is absolutely crawling with statistics.

http://jamesbuttinger.com/FE312buttinger/Paper_Days_files/MinWageKrueger.pdf

The authors don't seem to be into labour quality - they have other fish to fry - but other right-wing nitwit economic assumptions do get mauled.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Saturday, August 2, 2014 10:28:28 PM UTC-4, dca...@krl.org wrote:

> I fully understood the point of your post. I just happen to think it never happened. Proving that there was a benefit in raising the wages would be very hard to do. It reeks of being an anecdote that has no statistical proof.

To your earlier point, FWIW:
http://www.minimum-wage.org/states.asp?state=Texas
"Texas does not have a state-specific minimum wage, and adopts the Federal Minimum Wage by reference."

Here's one scholar's review of the field:
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns010814.php3

"A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that 90 percent of its members agreed that increasing the minimum wage raises unemployment among young and unskilled workers."

Dr. Walter Williams, economist, notes minimum wage laws in the U.S. and South Africa had overtly racist motivations: to prevent blacks from under-bidding unions.

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, 3 August 2014 13:50:36 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Saturday, August 2, 2014 10:28:28 PM UTC-4, dca...@krl.org wrote:

I fully understood the point of your post. I just happen to think it never happened. Proving that there was a benefit in raising the wages would be very hard to do. It reeks of being an anecdote that has no statistical proof

To your earlier point, FWIW:

http://www.minimum-wage.org/states.asp?state=Texas

"Texas does not have a state-specific minimum wage, and adopts the Federal Minimum Wage by reference."

Here's one scholar's review of the field:

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns010814.php3

"A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that 90 percent of its members agreed that increasing the minimum wage raises unemployment among young and unskilled workers."

They may have thought that in 1976. There's a fair bit of evidence that demonstrates that this generalisation can break down in specific situations and for specific industries.

> Dr. Walter Williams, economist, notes minimum wage laws in the U.S. and South Africa had overtly racist motivations: to prevent blacks from under-bidding unions.

That's racist? The minimum wage is colour-blind. A spot of Orwellian Double-Think from Dr. Walter Williams?

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

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, 3 August 2014 20:14:48 UTC+10, Robert Baer wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 01 Aug 2014 09:27:16 -0700, Robert Baer<robertbaer@localnet.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 31 Jul 2014 16:16:17 -0400, Tom Biasi<tombiasi@optonline.net
wrote:
On 7/30/2014 6:32 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 28 Jul 2014 12:52:02 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtU8by1CIAENQZ3.jpg:large

About an hour ago, I hired a new EE. Young girl, right out of a

Mexican college, BSEE, and she has really unusual (ie, really good) electrical instincts.

I've met very few Mexican, or female, circuit designers. Should be interesting.

I bet she has a human brain.

Humans do come in two sorts, male and female. My wife is a speech pathologist, a profession that is literally 99% female. Electronic circuit designers are, I'd guess, 99% male. Don't know why.

Right brain VS left brain?

It no doubt has a cultural component. As in being the only X in a classroom full of Ys. On the other hand, the extra-cirricular parts look good.

One male speech pathologist that we know was originally a chemist with a severe stuttering problem. He got interested in the speech problem and switched careers. There's going to be a speech therapy conference in Truckee, and he was reluctant to be in a cabin with all women, but I'll be there too, so we can go do male things, throw rocks or chop down trees or something..

Mo sees a lot of techie male stutterers. She may get rich on the Googlereferrals alone. Many are (on topic!) immigrants.

I have a theory about stutters.

Those people are so intelligent that their thoughts are always ahead of their mouth, they hear what they are saying, and automatically "rewind the card reader and unpunch the cards" and start over.

That seems to reflect one of the five myths about stuttering listed below

http://www.stutteringhelp.org/five-myths-about-stuttering

"Reality: There is no link whatsoever between stuttering and intelligence."

Don't give up the day job.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Sunday, August 3, 2014 1:13:13 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Sunday, 3 August 2014 13:50:36 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Saturday, August 2, 2014 10:28:28 PM UTC-4, dca...@krl.org wrote:



I fully understood the point of your post. I just happen to think it never happened. Proving that there was a benefit in raising the wages would be very hard to do. It reeks of being an anecdote that has no statistical proof



To your earlier point, FWIW:



http://www.minimum-wage.org/states.asp?state=Texas



"Texas does not have a state-specific minimum wage, and adopts the Federal Minimum Wage by reference."



Here's one scholar's review of the field:



http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns010814.php3



"A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that 90 percent of its members agreed that increasing the minimum wage raises unemployment among young and unskilled workers."

They may have thought that in 1976. There's a fair bit of evidence that demonstrates that this generalisation can break down in specific situations and for specific industries.

Raising the cost of employing an unskilled worker makes them more attractive to hire? And this fundamental truth debuted sometime since 1976? (Or 1990, the other study Williams cites?)

Dr. Walter Williams, economist, notes minimum wage laws in the U.S. and South Africa had overtly racist motivations: to prevent blacks from under-bidding unions.

That's racist? The minimum wage is colour-blind. A spot of Orwellian Double-Think from Dr. Walter Williams?

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

Poorly spotted. Double-think is holding two simultaneous conflicting views, such as believing everyone must do something about carbon dioxide, and that one's own behavior makes no matter.

Here there's no conflict, nor has Dr. Williams made any sort of mistake--Dr. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University:
http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/

He's an accomplished academic, historian, and noted author, particularly on the subject of race and economics.

Davis-Bacon Act was crafted to suppress black employment gains in the south during the Depression, an effect it still has today.

Low-skilled workers' main recourse to the job market is by working for a lower wage until they gain the skills to demand higher wages. Minimum wage and protectionist laws like Davis-Bacon cut off that access then and now, originally by design.

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[dcaster@krl.org]

On Sunday, August 3, 2014 3:21:22 AM UTC, Bill Sloman wrote:

I fully understood the point of your post. I just happen to think it never happened. Proving that there was a benefit in raising the wages would be very hard to do. It reeks of being an anecdote that has no statistical proof.



Those kinds of studies were certainly going on at the time. This example is from slightly later, and is absolutely crawling with statistics.



http://jamesbuttinger.com/FE312buttinger/Paper_Days_files/MinWageKrueger.pdf



The authors don't seem to be into labour quality - they have other fish to fry - but other right-wing nitwit economic assumptions do get mauled.



--

Bill Sloman, Sydney

There's a story that I heard in a lecture from a Cambridge academic - to a small bunch of UK Labour Party members, back around 1990 - about the introduction of a minimum wage in Texas. The fast food shops all agreed that it was going to bankrupt them.

In fact it made them money. They did have to pay their staff more, but the jobs - at the higher rate of pay enforced by the legislation - became more attractive, so the staff stuck around long enough to get good at their jobs, to recognise regular customers, and get their food cooked the way that particular customer liked it, which increased the turnover in the fast food shops.

As often happens with a "free" market, the pressure to push down wages had taken them below the optimal level, and short term advantage had discouraged management from bucking the trend. Wages have to paid every week, and it takes a while for customers to get happier and eat out more often.


I slogged through the study you referenced and found nothing that would suggest that the increase in wages was beneficial to the owners of the restaurants.

Dan

 

[Robert Baer]

John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 01 Aug 2014 09:27:16 -0700, Robert Baer<robertbaer@localnet.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 31 Jul 2014 16:16:17 -0400, Tom Biasi<tombiasi@optonline.net
wrote:

On 7/30/2014 6:32 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 28 Jul 2014 12:52:02 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtU8by1CIAENQZ3.jpg:large

...Jim Thompson

About an hour ago, I hired a new EE. Young girl, right out of a
Mexican college, BSEE, and she has really unusual (ie, really good)
electrical instincts.

I've met very few Mexican, or female, circuit designers. Should be
interesting.


I bet she has a human brain.

Humans do come in two sorts, male and female. My wife is a speech
pathologist, a profession that is literally 99% female. Electronic
circuit designers are, I'd guess, 99% male. Don't know why.


Right brain VS left brain?

It no doubt has a cultural component. As in being the only X in a classroom full
of Ys. On the other hand, the extra-cirricular parts look good.

One male speech pathologist that we know was originally a chemist with a severe
stuttering problem. He got interested in the speech problem and switched
careers. There's going to be a speech therapy conference in Truckee, and he was
reluctant to be in a cabin with all women, but I'll be there too, so we can go
do male things, throw rocks or chop down trees or something.

Mo sees a lot of techie male stutterers. She may get rich on the Google
referrals alone. Many are (on topic!) immigrants.

I have a theory about stutters.
Those people are so intelligent that their thoughts are always ahead
of their mouth, they hear what they are saying, and automatically
"rewind the card reader and unpunch the cards" and start over.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, 3 August 2014 23:34:09 UTC+10, dca...@krl.org wrote:

On Sunday, August 3, 2014 3:21:22 AM UTC, Bill Sloman wrote:

I fully understood the point of your post.

This seems unlikely.

> > > I just happen to think it never happened. Proving that there was a benefit in raising the wages would be very hard to do. It reeks of being an anecdote that has no statistical proof.

You want to think that it never happened. Reality has little respect for what the audience wants to have happened.

Those kinds of studies were certainly going on at the time. This example is from slightly later, and is absolutely crawling with statistics.

http://jamesbuttinger.com/FE312buttinger/Paper_Days_files/MinWageKrueger.pdf

The authors don't seem to be into labour quality - they have other fish to fry - but other right-wing nitwit economic assumptions do get mauled.

Learn to quote

"> There's a story that I heard in a lecture from a Cambridge academic - to a small bunch of UK Labour Party members, back around 1990 - about the introduction of a minimum wage in Texas. The fast food shops all agreed that it was going to bankrupt them.

In fact it made them money. They did have to pay their staff more, but the jobs - at the higher rate of pay enforced by the legislation - became more attractive, so the staff stuck around long enough to get good at their jobs, to recognise regular customers, and get their food cooked the way that particular customer liked it, which increased the turnover in the fast food shops.

As often happens with a "free" market, the pressure to push down wages had taken them below the optimal level, and short term advantage had discouraged management from bucking the trend. Wages have to paid every week, and it takes a while for customers to get happier and eat out more often."

I slogged through the study you referenced and found nothing that would suggest that the increase in wages was beneficial to the owners of the restaurants.

I gave it as an example of the kind of studies that seem to have been being done at the time. It clearly post-dates the one I was told about, and - as I said - is looking at a different effect of the introduction of a minimum wage.

It doesn't exactly "reek of being an anecdote that has no statistical substance".

You've been shown up a twit who can't think straight. Try to do better in future.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, 3 August 2014 23:07:04 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Sunday, August 3, 2014 1:13:13 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, 3 August 2014 13:50:36 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Saturday, August 2, 2014 10:28:28 PM UTC-4, dca...@krl.org wrote:

<snip>

Here's one scholar's review of the field:

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns010814.php3

"A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that 90 percent of its members agreed that increasing the minimum wage raises unemployment among young and unskilled workers."

They may have thought that in 1976. There's a fair bit of evidence that demonstrates that this generalisation can break down in specific situations and for specific industries.

Raising the cost of employing an unskilled worker makes them more attractive to hire? And this fundamental truth debuted sometime since 1976? (Or 1990, the other study Williams cites?)

Paying them better wages makes them stick around longer, so they do their job better, and end up making more money for their employers? It strikes you as counter-intuitive, but that's predictable.

Real markets are a little more complicated that those that let Chicago school economists set up their mathematical models (which don't happen to match real-world economics all that well).

Dr. Walter Williams, economist, notes minimum wage laws in the U.S. and South Africa had overtly racist motivations: to prevent blacks from under-bidding unions.

That's racist? The minimum wage is colour-blind. A spot of Orwellian Double-Think from Dr. Walter Williams?

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

Poorly spotted. Double-think is holding two simultaneous conflicting views, such as believing everyone must do something about carbon dioxide, and that one's own behavior makes no matter.

I don't believe that my behaviour doesn't matter - I just don't believe that it matters very much - I could delay the climate catastrophe by about 5msec by modifying my personal behaviour. No double-think there.

Here there's no conflict, nor has Dr. Williams made any sort of mistake--Dr. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University:

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/

He's an accomplished academic, historian, and noted author, particularly on the subject of race and economics.

Academic economists aren't always in close touch with reality, and the ones that you seem to follow aren't famous for their realism. In fact they seem to be as incompetent as the climate scientists that you get to meet socially, and whose bizarre opinions you quote here.

Being a Tea Party groupie could be having negative effects on the kind of people you get to mix with.

> Davis-Bacon Act was crafted to suppress black employment gains in the south during the Depression, an effect it still has today.

It was actually crafted to stop employers from importing cheap labour from lower-wage areas. It didn't explicitly stop them doing it, but because it forced employers to pay the imported labour the locally accepted pay rate for the work being done, it made importing cheap labour essentially pointless..

The racism was in the labour market itself, rather than in the legislation. In the 1930's, when the act first came into force, US trade unions mostly wouldn't accept coloured men as union members. Somewhat earlier, Australia's rather more powerful trade union movement endorsed the White Australia policy (now long dead) as way of discouraging employers importing cheap labour from overseas - notably Chinese and Indian coolies.

> Low-skilled workers' main recourse to the job market is by working for a lower wage until they gain the skills to demand higher wages. Minimum wage and protectionist laws like Davis-Bacon cut off that access then and now, originally by design.

Working for low wages is one way of getting experience. Explicit training works a good deal better, but somebody has to pay for that, and you don't see that as something in which the tax-payer should be investing. It's a short-sighted delusion, but you've got plenty of others to go with it.

Flipping burgers isn't a good way of training to become a carpenter or a brick-layer, but that's what's implied by your logic.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Monday, 4 August 2014 11:05:02 UTC+10, Bill Bowden wrote:

"Bill Sloman" <bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:fa6662f1-bec6-4589-837d-49d384b0247e@googlegroups.com...
On Sunday, 3 August 2014 23:07:04 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 3, 2014 1:13:13 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, 3 August 2014 13:50:36 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Saturday, August 2, 2014 10:28:28 PM UTC-4, dca...@krl.org wrote:

snip

Here's one scholar's review of the field:

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns010814.php3

"A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that 90 percent of
its members agreed that increasing the minimum wage raises unemployment among young and unskilled workers."

They may have thought that in 1976. There's a fair bit of evidence that demonstrates that this generalisation can break down in specific situations and for specific industries.

Raising the cost of employing an unskilled worker makes them more attractive to hire? And this fundamental truth debuted sometime since 1976? (Or 1990, the other study Williams cites?)

Paying them better wages makes them stick around longer, so they do their job better, and end up making more money for their employers? It strikes you as counter-intuitive, but that's predictable.

Real markets are a little more complicated that those that let Chicago

school economists set up their mathematical models (which don't happen to
match real-world economics all that well).

Dr. Walter Williams, economist, notes minimum wage laws in the U.S. and South Africa had overtly racist motivations: to prevent blacks from under-bidding unions.

That's racist? The minimum wage is colour-blind. A spot of Orwellian Double-Think from Dr. Walter Williams?

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

Poorly spotted. Double-think is holding two simultaneous conflicting views, such as believing everyone must do something about carbon dioxide, and that one's own behavior makes no matter.

I don't believe that my behaviour doesn't matter - I just don't believe that it matters very much - I could delay the climate catastrophe by about 5msec by modifying my personal behaviour. No double-think there.

Here there's no conflict, nor has Dr. Williams made any sort of
mistake--Dr. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University:

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/

He's an accomplished academic, historian, and noted author, particularly on the subject of race and economics.

Academic economists aren't always in close touch with reality, and the ones

that you seem to follow aren't famous for their realism. In fact they seem
to be as incompetent as the climate scientists that you get to meet socially, and whose bizarre opinions you quote here.

Being a Tea Party groupie could be having negative effects on the kind of people you get to mix with.

Davis-Bacon Act was crafted to suppress black employment gains in the south during the Depression, an effect it still has today.

It was actually crafted to stop employers from importing cheap labour from lower-wage areas. It didn't explicitly stop them doing it, but because it

forced employers to pay the imported labour the locally accepted pay rate
for the work being done, it made importing cheap labour essentially pointless.

The racism was in the labour market itself, rather than in the legislation. In the 1930's, when the act first came into force, US trade unions mostly wouldn't accept coloured men as union members. Somewhat earlier, Australia's
rather more powerful trade union movement endorsed the White Australia policy (now long dead) as way of discouraging employers importing cheap labour from overseas - notably Chinese and Indian coolies.

Low-skilled workers' main recourse to the job market is by working for a lower wage until they gain the skills to demand higher wages. Minimum wage and protectionist laws like Davis-Bacon cut off that access then and now, originally by design.

Working for low wages is one way of getting experience. Explicit training works a good deal better, but somebody has to pay for that, and you don't
see that as something in which the tax-payer should be investing. It's a short-sighted delusion, but you've got plenty of others to go with it.

Flipping burgers isn't a good way of training to become a carpenter or a
brick-layer, but that's what's implied by your logic.

Why isn't flipping burgers good training? It teaches you to report to work

on time, learn to take orders and respect the boss for giving you a job,
don't complain, and get the job done on time with least number of
complaints. Isn't that good training?

It's a start. It tends to make you a bit weak on fault-finding, fault-correction and initiative in general, and misses out on most of the other skills needed for better paying jobs. You can learning turning up on time and not dissing the boss at a trade school, along with a bunch of rather better rewarded expertise. If the local burger shop is the only place you can learn the very basic skills, the local community is a little weak on education and training - a fault of the American community as whole if the US nitwits who post here are anything to go by.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Bowden]

"Bill Sloman" <bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:fa6662f1-bec6-4589-837d-49d384b0247e@googlegroups.com...
On Sunday, 3 August 2014 23:07:04 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Sunday, August 3, 2014 1:13:13 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, 3 August 2014 13:50:36 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Saturday, August 2, 2014 10:28:28 PM UTC-4, dca...@krl.org wrote:

<snip>

Here's one scholar's review of the field:

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns010814.php3

"A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that 90 percent of
its members agreed that increasing the minimum wage raises
unemployment among young and unskilled workers."

They may have thought that in 1976. There's a fair bit of evidence that
demonstrates that this generalisation can break down in specific
situations and for specific industries.

Raising the cost of employing an unskilled worker makes them more
attractive to hire? And this fundamental truth debuted sometime since
1976? (Or 1990, the other study Williams cites?)

Paying them better wages makes them stick around longer, so they do their
job better, and end up making more money for their employers? It strikes you
as counter-intuitive, but that's predictable.

Real markets are a little more complicated that those that let Chicago
school economists set up their mathematical models (which don't happen to
match real-world economics all that well).

Dr. Walter Williams, economist, notes minimum wage laws in the U.S.
and South Africa had overtly racist motivations: to prevent blacks
from under-bidding unions.

That's racist? The minimum wage is colour-blind. A spot of Orwellian
Double-Think from Dr. Walter Williams?

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

Poorly spotted. Double-think is holding two simultaneous conflicting
views, such as believing everyone must do something about carbon dioxide,
and that one's own behavior makes no matter.

I don't believe that my behaviour doesn't matter - I just don't believe that
it matters very much - I could delay the climate catastrophe by about 5msec
by modifying my personal behaviour. No double-think there.

Here there's no conflict, nor has Dr. Williams made any sort of
mistake--Dr. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of
Economics at George Mason University:

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/

He's an accomplished academic, historian, and noted author, particularly
on the subject of race and economics.

Academic economists aren't always in close touch with reality, and the ones
that you seem to follow aren't famous for their realism. In fact they seem
to be as incompetent as the climate scientists that you get to meet
socially, and whose bizarre opinions you quote here.

Being a Tea Party groupie could be having negative effects on the kind of
people you get to mix with.

Davis-Bacon Act was crafted to suppress black employment gains in the
south during the Depression, an effect it still has today.

It was actually crafted to stop employers from importing cheap labour from
lower-wage areas. It didn't explicitly stop them doing it, but because it
forced employers to pay the imported labour the locally accepted pay rate
for the work being done, it made importing cheap labour essentially
pointless.

The racism was in the labour market itself, rather than in the legislation.
In the 1930's, when the act first came into force, US trade unions mostly
wouldn't accept coloured men as union members. Somewhat earlier, Australia's
rather more powerful trade union movement endorsed the White Australia
policy (now long dead) as way of discouraging employers importing cheap
labour from overseas - notably Chinese and Indian coolies.

Low-skilled workers' main recourse to the job market is by working for a
lower wage until they gain the skills to demand higher wages. Minimum
wage and protectionist laws like Davis-Bacon cut off that access then and
now, originally by design.

Working for low wages is one way of getting experience. Explicit training
works a good deal better, but somebody has to pay for that, and you don't
see that as something in which the tax-payer should be investing. It's a
short-sighted delusion, but you've got plenty of others to go with it.

Flipping burgers isn't a good way of training to become a carpenter or a
brick-layer, but that's what's implied by your logic.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Why isn't flipping burgers good training? It teaches you to report to work
on time, learn to take orders and respect the boss for giving you a job,
don't complain, and get the job done on time with least number of
complaints. Isn't that good training?

-Bill



--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---

 

[josephkk]

On Sun, 03 Aug 2014 22:52:31 -0700, John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Sun, 03 Aug 2014 18:19:39 -0700, josephkk <joseph_barrett@sbcglobal.net
wrote:

On Thu, 31 Jul 2014 17:53:16 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:


I have an idea that i am working on. It needs that magic CC fet stack
though to get enough power at low voltages for a useful blink rate.

?-/


We've discussed that before. Given the CC stack, we don't need to
blink... a good LED would be plenty bright at 200 uA. But the stack is
big and expensive and dissipates a lot of power, and has its own
hazards.

Well you seem to have forgotten a few points. For a resistor to produce
enough usable power from 100 V it wastes way too much at 5 kV. I have
noticed your blinkers run only over a 5:1 voltage range, but the
requirement is for 50:1 (100:1 as originally stated 5 kV to 48 V) and get
to marginal to unacceptable slow blink rates.

Your own sims that you posted.

?-)


My Schmitt_Blinker_2 works from 38 volts to 2000 with a 3 meg series resistor,
the upper limit set by a reasonable power dissipation limit in the resistor.

At 50 volts, the blink rate is just about 1 Hz. That will work for me.

So what have I forgotten?

That range is not shown in any of the files you have posted.

Show it by posting it with proper voltage ranges.

?-)

 

On Saturday, August 2, 2014 12:32:27 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Saturday, 2 August 2014 12:12:27 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, July 31, 2014 2:53:08 PM UTC-4, Robert Baer wrote:

Yes, the Golden Rule: "He who has the Gold, Rules".

He who rules, gets the gold. (Just look at today's DC.)

It was articulated by some of the more plain-spoken of the founding tax evaders as "the people who own the country should run the country".

And here we have Bill Sloman, America-hating, throwing Molotov cocktails at innocents and honored dead, on invented charges and imaginary grounds. It's useless rebutting; none it ever happened, Bill has no basis for it, has no source--made it all up himself--yet fanatically believes it.

> History suggests that they shouldn't - they don't spend enough on keeping the working classes fed, healthy and educated to maximise their own profit, let alone everybody else's. There have been times when they've been less greedy (and have made money out of it) but since Reagan got elected the US has been stuck with a particularly greedy and short-sighted exploiting class.

America doesn't have static "classes"--that's Marx's terminology (part of his strategy to incite peoples to violence and revolution). Most of the people in our lower income quintile aren't there ten years later, nor do those in the top stay either, generally. America spends among the most on education--and our poor suffer obesity, not famine. Yet Bill's jihad continues unaffected. If anything, intensified.

It's truly bizarre, disturbed. Unbalanced.

Mencken's hobgoblins, the dead, and decent, caring, civil people are the easiest to attack and safest to confront. And if you're attacking imagined injustices you're doing something noble, even if the people you disparage don't deserve it. Maybe that explains it.

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

On Sunday, August 3, 2014 9:05:02 PM UTC-4, Bill Bowden wrote:

"Bill Sloman" wrote:
On Sunday, 3 August 2014 23:07:04 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 3, 2014 1:13:13 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, 3 August 2014 13:50:36 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Saturday, August 2, 2014 10:28:28 PM UTC-4, dca...@krl.org wrote:

snip

Here's one scholar's review of the field:

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns010814.php3

"A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that 90 percent of
its members agreed that increasing the minimum wage raises
unemployment among young and unskilled workers."

They may have thought that in 1976. There's a fair bit of evidence that
demonstrates that this generalisation can break down in specific
situations and for specific industries.

Raising the cost of employing an unskilled worker makes them more
attractive to hire? And this fundamental truth debuted sometime since
1976? (Or 1990, the other study Williams cites?)

Paying them better wages makes them stick around longer, so they do their
job better, and end up making more money for their employers? It strikes you
as counter-intuitive, but that's predictable.

Real markets are a little more complicated that those that let Chicago
school economists set up their mathematical models (which don't happen to
match real-world economics all that well).

Dr. Walter Williams, economist, notes minimum wage laws in the U.S.
and South Africa had overtly racist motivations: to prevent blacks
from under-bidding unions.

That's racist? The minimum wage is colour-blind. A spot of Orwellian
Double-Think from Dr. Walter Williams?

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

Poorly spotted. Double-think is holding two simultaneous conflicting
views, such as believing everyone must do something about carbon dioxide,
and that one's own behavior makes no matter.

I don't believe that my behaviour doesn't matter - I just don't believe that
it matters very much - I could delay the climate catastrophe by about 5msec
by modifying my personal behaviour. No double-think there.

Here there's no conflict, nor has Dr. Williams made any sort of
mistake--Dr. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of
Economics at George Mason University:



http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/

He's an accomplished academic, historian, and noted author, particularly
on the subject of race and economics.

Academic economists aren't always in close touch with reality, and the ones
that you seem to follow aren't famous for their realism. In fact they seem
to be as incompetent as the climate scientists that you get to meet
socially, and whose bizarre opinions you quote here.

Being a Tea Party groupie could be having negative effects on the kind of
people you get to mix with.

Davis-Bacon Act was crafted to suppress black employment gains in the
south during the Depression, an effect it still has today.

It was actually crafted to stop employers from importing cheap labour from
lower-wage areas. It didn't explicitly stop them doing it, but because it
forced employers to pay the imported labour the locally accepted pay rate
for the work being done, it made importing cheap labour essentially
pointless.

The racism was in the labour market itself, rather than in the legislation.
In the 1930's, when the act first came into force, US trade unions mostly
wouldn't accept coloured men as union members. Somewhat earlier, Australia's
rather more powerful trade union movement endorsed the White Australia
policy (now long dead) as way of discouraging employers importing cheap
labour from overseas - notably Chinese and Indian coolies.

Low-skilled workers' main recourse to the job market is by working for a
lower wage until they gain the skills to demand higher wages. Minimum
wage and protectionist laws like Davis-Bacon cut off that access then and
now, originally by design.

Working for low wages is one way of getting experience. Explicit training
works a good deal better, but somebody has to pay for that, and you don't
see that as something in which the tax-payer should be investing. It's a
short-sighted delusion, but you've got plenty of others to go with it.

Flipping burgers isn't a good way of training to become a carpenter or a
brick-layer, but that's what's implied by your logic.
----

Bill Bowden wrote:

Why isn't flipping burgers good training? It teaches you to report to work
on time, learn to take orders and respect the boss for giving you a job,
don't complain, and get the job done on time with least number of
complaints. Isn't that good training?

It's very good training, and nearly always leads to higher pay in short
order. And, in America, the risk of poverty is almost nil for someone
who manages to get any job, even minimum wage. It's a great way to get
started which Bill would eliminate.

Roughly 20% of American families have *no one* that works, explaining most
of our poverty.

Bill simply disparages people, and especially denigrates hard work.

It's the elitist's view.

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Monday, 4 August 2014 22:58:02 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Saturday, August 2, 2014 12:32:27 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, 2 August 2014 12:12:27 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, July 31, 2014 2:53:08 PM UTC-4, Robert Baer wrote:
Yes, the Golden Rule: "He who has the Gold, Rules".

He who rules, gets the gold. (Just look at today's DC.)

It was articulated by some of the more plain-spoken of the founding tax evaders as "the people who own the country should run the country".

And here we have Bill Sloman, America-hating,

A totally unjustified claim. I like America, and would love to see it gets it's act back together. It used to be the best country in world, but the rest of the world has got better, and America has remained to attached to Tennyson's "one good custom which corrupts the world".

> throwing Molotov cocktails at innocents and honored dead, on invented charges and imaginary grounds.

Scarcely Molotov cocktails. The founding tax evaders were not innocents - far from it - got a lot of people killed fighting their revolutionary war, and did very well out of it. George Washington was a land speculator, and did very well out of the war. There's no imagination required there. Land ownership is very well documented. Despite their distinctly mixed motivations, the founding tax evaders did a remarkably good job of putting together a workable system of government, which served the new country remarkably well for quite a while.

The more radical French revolutionaries didn't do as well, throwing out rather too much baby with the bathwater, but subsequent regime changes have mostly done better, and most advanced industrial countries are now better run than the USA, largely because their constitutional machinery avoids the weak points exhibited by the US model.

> It's useless rebutting; none it ever happened, Bill has no basis for it, has no source--made it all up himself--yet fanatically believes it.

Try reading Jonathon Israel's "Democratic Enlightenment".

http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199668090.do

History suggests that they shouldn't - they don't spend enough on keeping the working classes fed, healthy and educated to maximise their own profit, let alone everybody else's. There have been times when they've been less greedy (and have made money out of it) but since Reagan got elected the US has been stuck with a particularly greedy and short-sighted exploiting class.

America doesn't have static "classes"--that's Marx's terminology (part of his strategy to incite peoples to violence and revolution). Most of the people in our lower income quintile aren't there ten years later, nor do those in the top stay either, generally. America spends among the most on education--and our poor suffer obesity, not famine. Yet Bill's jihad continues unaffected. If anything, intensified.

America's classes are more static than those in other advanced industrial countries

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better

In the USA income is now about as heritable as height. Chapter 12 of "The Spirit Level" in figure 12.1 shows the US below even the UK on social mobility - much poorer than Germany - while the Scandinavian countries and Canada all do appreciably better than Germany.

> It's truly bizarre, disturbed. Unbalanced.

What's bizarre and unbalanced is your inability to recognise that the USA has a problem that it really ought to want to solve. Far from solving it, figure 12.2 in "The Spirit Level" shows that the US went from a place where a father's income explained some 15% of a son's income in 1950 to one where it explained only 10% in 1980 to on in which the father's income explained 20% of the son's in 1990 and close to 35% in 2000.

Horatio Alger is long dead.

> Mencken's hobgoblins, the dead, and decent, caring, civil people are the easiest to attack and safest to confront. And if you're attacking imagined injustices you're doing something noble, even if the people you disparage don't deserve it. Maybe that explains it.

You seem to be devoted attacking imagined injustices in my comments, and equally devoted to ignoring the real injustices in your society. Saying unpleasant and inaccurate things about me is cheap. Upsetting your deluded friends in the Tea Party would be much more expensive.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Monday, 4 August 2014 23:12:17 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Sunday, August 3, 2014 9:05:02 PM UTC-4, Bill Bowden wrote:
"Bill Sloman" wrote:
On Sunday, 3 August 2014 23:07:04 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 3, 2014 1:13:13 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, 3 August 2014 13:50:36 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Saturday, August 2, 2014 10:28:28 PM UTC-4, dca...@krl.org wrote:

snip

Here's one scholar's review of the field:

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns010814.php3

"A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that 90 percent of its members agreed that increasing the minimum wage raises unemployment among young and unskilled workers."

They may have thought that in 1976. There's a fair bit of evidence that
demonstrates that this generalisation can break down in specific situations and for specific industries.

Raising the cost of employing an unskilled worker makes them more attractive to hire? And this fundamental truth debuted sometime since 1976? (Or 1990, the other study Williams cites?)

Paying them better wages makes them stick around longer, so they do their job better, and end up making more money for their employers? It strikes you as counter-intuitive, but that's predictable.

Real markets are a little more complicated that those that let Chicago school economists set up their mathematical models (which don't happen to match real-world economics all that well).

Dr. Walter Williams, economist, notes minimum wage laws in the U.S. and South Africa had overtly racist motivations: to prevent blacks from under-bidding unions.

That's racist? The minimum wage is colour-blind. A spot of Orwellian Double-Think from Dr. Walter Williams?

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

Poorly spotted. Double-think is holding two simultaneous conflicting views, such as believing everyone must do something about carbon dioxide, and that one's own behavior makes no matter.

I don't believe that my behaviour doesn't matter - I just don't believe that it matters very much - I could delay the climate catastrophe by about 5msec by modifying my personal behaviour. No double-think there.

Here there's no conflict, nor has Dr. Williams made any sort of mistake--Dr. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University:

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/

He's an accomplished academic, historian, and noted author, particularly on the subject of race and economics.

Academic economists aren't always in close touch with reality, and the ones that you seem to follow aren't famous for their realism. In fact they seem to be as incompetent as the climate scientists that you get to meet socially, and whose bizarre opinions you quote here.

Being a Tea Party groupie could be having negative effects on the kind of people you get to mix with.

Davis-Bacon Act was crafted to suppress black employment gains in the south during the Depression, an effect it still has today.

It was actually crafted to stop employers from importing cheap labour from lower-wage areas. It didn't explicitly stop them doing it, but because it forced employers to pay the imported labour the locally accepted pay rate for the work being done, it made importing cheap labour essentially pointless.

The racism was in the labour market itself, rather than in the legislation.
In the 1930's, when the act first came into force, US trade unions mostly wouldn't accept coloured men as union members. Somewhat earlier, Australia's rather more powerful trade union movement endorsed the White Australia policy (now long dead) as way of discouraging employers importing cheap labour from overseas - notably Chinese and Indian coolies.

Low-skilled workers' main recourse to the job market is by working for a lower wage until they gain the skills to demand higher wages. Minimum wage and protectionist laws like Davis-Bacon cut off that access then and now, originally by design.

Working for low wages is one way of getting experience. Explicit training works a good deal better, but somebody has to pay for that, and you don't see that as something in which the tax-payer should be investing. It's a short-sighted delusion, but you've got plenty of others to go with it.

Flipping burgers isn't a good way of training to become a carpenter or a brick-layer, but that's what's implied by your logic.

Why isn't flipping burgers good training? It teaches you to report to work on time, learn to take orders and respect the boss for giving you a job, don't complain, and get the job done on time with least number of complaints. Isn't that good training?

It's very good training, and nearly always leads to higher pay in short order.

But only as a short-order cook. There are a wide variety of possible jobs, and many of them require explicit training. Traditionally, you became an apprentice, and paid for your training by doing the tedious grunt work for very low wages, but eventually you graduated to journey-man and eventually master-craftsman (if you could master all the skills involved).

It turns out to be quicker. cheaper and more effective to train apprentices at trade schools. Somebody has to pay to keep the schools running, and in well-run countries - like Germany - relatively high taxes cover this particular cost, but generate enough extra productivity in the work force to compensate for the damage done by higher taxes.

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

Germany does export almost as much as the US, despite having only a quarter of the population, and paying it's workers much the same sort of salaries (and giving them more training)

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

The US pays $3,263 per month, Germany $2,720 and China $656, adjusted for purchasing power. These are averages - rather than medians - and the US average is skewed by the very high US levels of inequality (roughly the same as China's). And the US has charged its workforce rather more for it's training than the German workers had to pay for theirs.

> And, in America, the risk of poverty is almost nil for someone
who manages to get any job, even minimum wage. It's a great way to get
started which Bill would eliminate.

The US already has a minimum wage, just like every other advanced industrial country, albeit set rather lower than most. It also has a remarkable enthusiasm for exporting low-wages jobs, and spends less on it's social safety net than most, which makes sense - if you want to export your low wage jobs, you don't want to have to spend too much on your less well-off neighbours whom you might otherwise have hired to do the work.

Germany, in contrast, spends a lot on on training its work force, and more of them end up with some kind of tertiary education (a lot of it vocational) than pretty much anywhere else.

The US approach not a great strategy for the country as a whole, but works tolerably well for the people who own the country, though they do have to live with the consequences of living in a country with a high level of inequality, as spelled out in

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better

> Roughly 20% of American families have *no one* that works, explaining most of our poverty.

Curious that nobody with capital in an advance industrial country doesn't see that as an opportunity. If the US welfare, health and education systems worked as well as those in most advanced industrial countries, these people would be being exploited as a resource, not left to rot.

> Bill simply disparages people, and especially denigrates hard work.

I'm not the one that's writing off 20% of American families as containing nobody who is employable. That's your society, not mine.

I'm not quite sure why I'm supposed to be denigrating hard work. I do happen to think that useful work is what is needed and that worrying about whether work is hard or easy is evidence of sloppy thinking. Working for the sake of working is simply wasting time.

> It's the elitist's view.

I'm an elite member of an elite profession. I was bright enough and self-disciplined enough when young to complete an elite education - admittedly in physical chemistry - and ten years later I was good enough at electronics to be accepted as a member of the IEEE despite not having had any explicit training in electronics.

Few people can soak up education as effectively as I did, but lots of people can absorb a lot more training than they get, and lot more than they'll get if they are sold off cheap to fast food shops at an early age.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 03 Aug 2014 23:45:47 -0700, josephkk <joseph_barrett@sbcglobal.net>
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Aug 2014 22:52:31 -0700, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Sun, 03 Aug 2014 18:19:39 -0700, josephkk <joseph_barrett@sbcglobal.net
wrote:

On Thu, 31 Jul 2014 17:53:16 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:


I have an idea that i am working on. It needs that magic CC fet stack
though to get enough power at low voltages for a useful blink rate.

?-/


We've discussed that before. Given the CC stack, we don't need to
blink... a good LED would be plenty bright at 200 uA. But the stack is
big and expensive and dissipates a lot of power, and has its own
hazards.

Well you seem to have forgotten a few points. For a resistor to produce
enough usable power from 100 V it wastes way too much at 5 kV. I have
noticed your blinkers run only over a 5:1 voltage range, but the
requirement is for 50:1 (100:1 as originally stated 5 kV to 48 V) and get
to marginal to unacceptable slow blink rates.

Your own sims that you posted.

?-)


My Schmitt_Blinker_2 works from 38 volts to 2000 with a 3 meg series resistor,
the upper limit set by a reasonable power dissipation limit in the resistor.

At 50 volts, the blink rate is just about 1 Hz. That will work for me.

So what have I forgotten?

That range is not shown in any of the files you have posted.

Show it by posting it with proper voltage ranges.

?-)

Drop dead.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation

 

[dcaster@krl.org]

On Monday, August 4, 2014 3:42:57 PM UTC, Bill Sloman wrote:

I'm an elite member of an elite profession. I was bright enough and self-disciplined enough when young to complete an elite education - admittedly in physical chemistry - and ten years later I was good enough at electronics to be accepted as a member of the IEEE despite not having had any explicit training in electronics.





Bill Sloman, Sydney

Only in your own mind. You are unemployed. No job, no profession

Dan

Profession - Merriam-Webster Online
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/profession
Merriam-Webster
a type of job that requires special education, training, or skill. : the people who work in a particular profession