magnetic field

[Lee]

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003 06:37:34 +0000 (UTC), Ian Stirling
<root@mauve.demon.co.uk> wrote:

Lee <no@spam.invalid> wrote:
I have a 60 watt load (120v) that I want to power using a 12v
inverter.

Can someone tell me what Amp-hour battery I would need to power the
load for 2 hours?

60 watts / 12 V = 5A.

I need to keep the batter size/cost down and don't want a lot of extra
capacity.

5A*2h = 10Ah.
*1.5 (inefficiancies) = 15Ah.

The load is a set of powered speakers for PA use.
Thanks.

The load from the speakers is very unlikely to be a constant 60W.
The load (and hence life) will vary significantly depending on
what you'r using them for.

Where are you getting the "60W" from?

Thanks.

I got the "60W" from where the 120v power cord enters the powered
speaker... there is a label that says something like "120v / 60w"

 

[Bill Sloman]

jasligon@msn.com (idlemuse) wrote in message news:<82463628.0307010715.2b61548e@posting.google.com>...

bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote in message news:<7c584d27.0306290900.617c90be@posting.google.com>...
ActualGeek <ActualGeek@no.real.address> wrote in message news:<ActualGeek-4CF873.01551929062003@corp.supernews.com>...
In article <7c584d27.0306281505.24150f8@posting.google.com>,
bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote:

Precious Pup <barking@wrongtree.org> wrote in message
news:<3EFC791A.2B38A0A1@wrongtree.org>...
Bill Sloman wrote:


Go away and
try to learn what honest arguement involves.

Go away and try to learn.

Go away, I wasn't talking to you.

You need to learn how to construct some kind of sequential arguement,
before we can get onto difficult concepts like "honest" and
"dishonest".

Actual Geek can more or less manage that (though his attention span
leaves something to be desired) and in this respect he leaves you
trailing in the dust.

-----
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Getting back on the point.

Bill, you have failed to show how there's an information problem in
capitalism, and you haven't even tried to explain why we need to solve
it.

I've just been reading Paul Krugman's "The Return of Depression
Economics" ISBN 0-14-028685-3 which fairly clearly indicates that
there is an information problem with modern more-or-less free market
capitalism, and that the people in the business of regulating the free
market economies of the world don't have enough information to be able
anticipate and smooth out the instabilities of the currency and
capital markets.

Krugman has been hoping for a return of depression economics for
decades. Any problem faced by the economy at large will be faced by
the regulators of the economy. There is hubris in pretending that you
know what the market is supposed to be doing, and Krugman just can't
shake that control fetish. Let the decentralized decisions of market
participants act on the information they have and regulate to the
least extent possible, and you might avoid a catastrophic unintended
consequence of regulations that affect all market participants.

Go read your Keynes. The decentralised decisions of the market
participants is what makes pure free market economies unstable, and
Krugman identifies the "decentralised decisions" of the currency
speculators and the hedge funds as major contributors to the Asian
crashes of the late 1990's (which is what he was actually writing
about).

The information about the economy that these people are working with
is what is manifest on the stock and currency markets from day-to-day,
and what governements reveal about their current and expected incomes
and expenditures. Everything is denoted in terms of its monetary
value, and the purchase of a single 747 which took nearly a year to
build and is expected to keep flying for twenty to thirty years could
be equated with the sale of ten million Harry Potter books.

As a scheme, it works surprisingly well - better than anything else
that has been tried so far - but it is obviously sub-optimal.

It works surprisingly well because people make continual adjustments
every second of every day. Check the price of ten million Harry Potter
books the day after they are bought and compare it to the price of a
747 the day after it is bought. Interference in the incentives of the
market lead to perverse choices on the part of market participants,
who no longer can trust the information that prices were supposed to
be giving them.

This is arrant "perfect free market" propaganda. Go read Keynes.

Finally, you would then need to explain how a centralized economy would
be able to do a better job than a distributed one... given that
distributed economies are successful because decisions get made at the
place where the people with the most understanding of the situation can
make the decision.

I don't. What I said was that we can now collect a lot more
information than just the cash transfer for every transaction, and if
we could find a way of making this information available outside the
firms who collect the data for their own use, we should be able to
devise a *distributed* control system that ought to be more stable,
and could run a lot closer to full capacity.

The price, at least theoretically, contains all of the information you
might be interested in, doesn't it?

No. Because the price reflects the pressures of the moment. If the
price of 747's goes through the floor, Boeing still has about a year's
production stacked up in the factory in various states of completion.
Harry Potter books can be reprinted and distributed a lot more
quickly.

The metal markets are unstable for the same sort of reason - is the
price of a metal creeps up, the owners of various more or less
marginal mines are persuaded to invest the money to pump out the
mine-shafts again and get the machinery running so they can extract
the relevant mineral, all of which takes time. When they finally start
shipping ore, the market is suddenly over-supplied, and the price
crashes.

Every centrally planned economy in the history of the world has failed,
or been far less successful than less centrally planned economies of
similar conditions.

Since I'm not arguing for a centrally planned economy this is
irrelevant, though a centrally planned economy with modern data
collection and processing ought to be more efficient than the system
that failed in the USSR. In so far as China, Japan and Korea have more
central planning than India, and grew their economies twice as fast
during the catch-up phase, some central planning would seem to be a
good idea.

That is a murky issue. I don't know that I'd hold up India as an
example of notably less government interference than most other
developing countries, it only has less government interference than it
used to have. Its reduction in regulation allowed it to grow at all,
which was not the case before. To compare across countries would be a
much larger task.

Why do you think that it was "the reduction in regulation that allowed
it to grow at all"?

Just look at what's happened in India in the last 20 years since they
gave up central planning and curtailed government interference-- they
have doubled the incomes, on average, of a billion people.

Doubling over 20 years is a growth rate of 3.5% per year - respectable
for a third world economy catching-up, but half the rate achieved by
Japan, Korea and China during their catch-up phases. Neither Japan,
Korea nor China gave up central planning and government interference,
though this has been used more to direct capitalist investment than to
control it.

Japan, for example, flung open the export doors right out of the gate.
A good portion of their growth had to do with the extent to which they
adopted market friendly policies. We will never know exactly, of
course. Krugman would argue one way and P.T. Bauer would argue the
other looking at the same cases.

Japan is almost as good as the U.S.A. at using non-tariff barriers to
trade to protect the domestic market while exporting furiously. I
don't know exactly what you meant to say with "flung open the export
doors right out of the gate" but they certainly protected their
domestic market, and they still do.

They've done more in 20 years to defeat poverty-- using capitalism--
than all the socialist systems ever tried.

That depends what you mean by "socialist".

Frankly, capitalism is the cure for poverty, and it works every time.

If so, why does it work so poorly in the U.S.A., where the poorest 30
or 40 million have been slipping back since Regan started dismantling
welfare?

It doesn't work poorly. It only works poorly if you discount
charitable giving from poverty alleviation, and if you discount that
the amount of goods available for redistribution is greater.

In the U.S.A. the poor are getting poorer. Poverty is not being cured,
but made worse. Capitalism is *not* working as a cure for poverty in
the U.S.A.

The European version of the capitalist economy includes a rather
better welfare system, which pays off in better educated and
eventually more productive workers.

More productive? I would have to see those figures.

Get hold of Will Hutton's book and track down the academic studies
that he references.

You are telling me
that countries with near infinite unemployment benefits,

I've received unemployment benefit in the Netherlands. It wasn't
generous.

mandatory 30 hour work weeks,

Until the end of May I was working a 40-hour week, which is perfectly
normal.
Some unions have negotiated 37 hour weeks. Mandatory thirty hour weeks
sound like the stuff of right-wing propaganda.

mandatory breaks during the day for all laborers,

Half an hour for lunch? And you don't get paid for it.

regulations that prevent anyone from firing incompetent labor,

They don't prevent you from firing incompetents, you just have to go
through a multi-stage procedure, and document each stage, and that
only if you managed to miss the incompetence in the first six months
of employment.

and extremely high debt to GDP ratios have more productive labor forces?

Yep. Some of them do. Read the book. Chase up the references. Wash out
some of that propaganda that seems to fouling up your world-view.

Will Hutton's "The World We're In"
ISBN 0-316-86081-6 reviews a great deal economic research on this and
other subjects, and paints a picture of the U.S.A. that doesn't fit
with what you were taught in civics in primary school (which is now
long out of date).

Lots of books paint pictures about the U.S. Not all pictures are
accurate.

This book has a twelve and a half page list of references cited, and
fourteen and a half pages of specific citations. Will Hutton knows the
published literature.

Europe has been waiting for us to grow up and become
civilized socialists with no respect for individual liberty for a long
time.

Why do you think that European socialist have no respect for
individual liberty? Certain capitalist excesses are illegal, but in
most respects the Europeans are less picky than the U.S. about
behaviour that doesn't create immediate problems for other people. The
Netherlands is famously liberal about soft drugs and same sex
relationships - to name two areas where the U.S. has a number of
fatuous and unenforceable laws which demonstrate a singular lack of
respect for individual liberty.

We just as a culture have different ideas about what
constitutes progress. A state where everyone can wait in line for an
asprin with equal ability has some virtues, but so does a state where
some people can get brain surgery.

If you've got money, you can buy exactly the same level of health care
in (Western) Europe as you can in the U.S. If you haven't got money,
you may have to wait a bit for your brain surgery (for non-emergency
operations), but it will be performed every bit as well. Averaged over
the population as a whole, (Western)European health care performs
better than the U.S. system, which fails the poor quite badly - and in
the sense of not catching up with infectious diseases as well as it
might, it also fails to protect the rich as well as more comprehensive
systems do.

Unsurprisingly, Hutton's book is out of stock a www.amazon.com (but US
dealers will sell you an airmailed copy of the U.K. edition for $25.72).
www.amazon.co.uk have stocks of the paperback at eight U.K.pounds per
copy (about $12).

-------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Bill Sloman]

ActualGeek <ActualGeek@no.real.address> wrote in message news:<ActualGeek-AA7F29.01430729062003@corp.supernews.com>...

In article <7c584d27.0306260958.589069db@posting.google.com>,
bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote:

ActualGeek <ActualGeek@no.real.address> wrote in message
news:<ActualGeek-D67C63.23481325062003@corp.supernews.com>...
In article <3EF8E351.1857@armory.com>,
"R. Steve Walz" <rstevew@armory.com> wrote:

ActualGeek wrote:

snip

But this is typical for americas education system-- they don't teach
the
difference... in fact, I think not knowing the difference is their
educational goal.
------------------
You're a shit and a liar.
-Steve

You and I both know that I am the one who has been honest here

Your claim to "honesty" just means that you have either a poor, or a
very selective memory.

... which
is why I'm calm, while you are tearing your hair out.

Got any evidence for this claim? It is a lot to read into a seven word
declarative sentence.

It doesn't have to be this way.

You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Go away and
try to learn what honest arguement involves.


You are repeating my complaint against you back at me?

Which complaint? The main point that I was making above was that your
claim that Steve was "tearing his hair out" was not supported by any
evidence.

Sorry, that just shows I was right in the first place (And you're not
very creative.)

I'm actually quite creative, but there isn't a lot to be said about
relentlessly superficial fatuities - even Steve doesn't find you worth
serious abuse.

But then, if you had an argument in support of socialism (say, one that
doesn't involve pretending that walmart doesn't exist, or that
capitalism is failing in ways it isn't) you'd present it (we'd hope.)

Free market capitalism is failing to provide a stable business
environment, it doesn't provide full employment, and it doesn't seem
to be compatible with the sustainable exploitation of natural
resources.

Keynesian constrained-market capitalism did seem to keep the
instabilites of of the market under control, and did seem to be able
to get a lot closer to full employment. You probably think that Keynes
was a socialist - he wasn't, and voted with the liberals in the House
of Lords when he was made a lord.

The slightly socialist-tinged economies of western Europe aren't as
Keynesian as they ought to - the introduction of the euro gave the
bankers a lot too much power - but they do reasonably well. The
lip-service to socialism provides a mechanism for getting
sustainability via the market, by charging extra for the depletion of
a finite resoure, but it doesn't actually seem to be happening yet.

My basic arguement was that some - as yet unspecified - system which
had access to all the information we collect about the things we buy
and sell should be able to do better than the current system which is
controlled by just the aggregated cash prices on the days when things
are bought and sold.

I imagine that such a system would have to rely on distributed
control, rather than the central planning which used to be so popular
with socialist administrations, but I'm not doctriniare.

Until you do, you have nothing.

Since I'm not arguing in support of socialism, you don't seem to
understand what the arguement is about. The "nothing" here seems to be
your failure to be able think outside the "capitalist versus
socialist" box.

------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[NightRunner]

Hehehe

It amazes me that a substation could put on such a show, really wild.
I have a whole new respect for high power electrical transmission. And
you know what, when I was a teenager I actually considered breaking
into one of those places to have a close look... Sheeeeesh!

- NR

On Tue, 01 Jul 2003 05:11:57 GMT, Don Bruder <dakidd@sonic.net> was
reportedly seen on the White House lawn holding a large picket sign
and screeching the following:

In article <2c2cf14c.0306261126.1597a8b2@posting.google.com>,
testing_h@yahoo.com (Andre) wrote:

http://205.243.100.155/frames/mpg/XfrmBlast1.mpg



-A

Whoops? WHOOPS??? That'a ALL you can say is "Whoops"????

"The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical
model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a
universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go
to all the bother of existing?"

- Stephen Hawking

---------------------------------------
Our Website:
http://niter417.virtualave.net/

Message Boards Main:
http://niter417.virtualave.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl

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http://niter417.virtualave.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Lasers

Electronics Discussion:
http://niter417.virtualave.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=3

Winemaking Discussion:
http://niter417.virtualave.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=8

Our Webcam:
http://web.infoave.net/~missy1/cam/webcam.html

 

[Tom Biasi]

Well Dave,
You sound like you have a moderate amount of knowledge and I assume that you
tried to locate a schematic.
Draw the circuit from the pc board traces. Look at the holes where the
transistor was and draw a circuit as you follow the traces. Will your
"guessed" transistor fit this circuit?
Good Luck,
Tom

"Dave" <dbeane@genie.idt.net> wrote in message
news:bdrqq0$klc@library1.airnews.net...

I hope this is the right group for the question I have to post. If not,
let
me know, and I will skeedaddle.

I am trying to repair a 20-year-old Uniden handheld CB transceiver, which
I
*think* has the finals blown. My neighbor picks up no signal when I
transmit to him from about 50 feet away, but my shortwave radio picks up
the
transmission from only a few feet away. I can't find my wattmeter as most
of my electronic stuff is still packed and in storage (we recently had to
abandon house for two months.) I do have my oscilloscope and DMM, plus a
few other odds and ends that never got packed. I *think* I have located
the
transistor that acts as the final amplifier and have removed it from the
circuit. It is a TO220 style, and the only markings on it are "2029C/1".
Am I safe in assuming that this is basically a 2SC2029, or some other
compatible? My only clues to the identity of this puppy are its physical
location on the board (near the antenna connection) and the fact that it
is
surrounded by several small (3/16" x 5/16") coils. I do*not* want to just
stick another transistor in there in its place and try to transmit, but I
am
not sure of where to start with my analysis (it's been a long time since
I've done anything quite like this.) Oh, one more thing, this CB has a
seven-inch long alluminum heatsink running the length of the PC board, and
this transistor and one IC (at the other end) are the only things on it
(in
other words, there are no other power transistors in the circuit).

Should I proceed with a 2SC2029 or an equivelant? What do others think?
I
value your opinions, and any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dave
db5151@hotmail.com

 

[Bill Bowden]

FEerguy9 <feerguy9@cs.com> wrote in message

I think he's talking about losses in terms of dollars and cents and damage
to
the environment.

No I am not.

There are no dollars and no cents in the ocean wind.

There is if you stop enough of it. What if you block enough
ocean wind to pervent the clouds from moving over the
land and we don't get any rain? Think of the lost revenue
to the ski resorts with no snow. And we would have to drink
imported bottled water 6 times a day. That's a lot of dollars
and cents.

Labor and materials and maintenanc aren't free you know.
How do you compete with an oil well that delivers 10 times more
power at half the cost?

With a collection device that changes the very meaning of economics.

eer is not a collection device. It's an empty storage device that doesn't

contain much when filled.

-Bill

 

[idlemuse]

bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote in message news:<7c584d27.0307011544.22327540@posting.google.com>...

jasligon@msn.com (idlemuse) wrote in message news:<82463628.0307010715.2b61548e@posting.google.com>...
bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote in message news:<7c584d27.0306290900.617c90be@posting.google.com>...
ActualGeek <ActualGeek@no.real.address> wrote in message news:<ActualGeek-4CF873.01551929062003@corp.supernews.com>...
In article <7c584d27.0306281505.24150f8@posting.google.com>,
bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote:

Precious Pup <barking@wrongtree.org> wrote in message
news:<3EFC791A.2B38A0A1@wrongtree.org>...
Bill Sloman wrote:


Go away and
try to learn what honest arguement involves.

Go away and try to learn.

Go away, I wasn't talking to you.

You need to learn how to construct some kind of sequential arguement,
before we can get onto difficult concepts like "honest" and
"dishonest".

Actual Geek can more or less manage that (though his attention span
leaves something to be desired) and in this respect he leaves you
trailing in the dust.

-----
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Getting back on the point.

Bill, you have failed to show how there's an information problem in
capitalism, and you haven't even tried to explain why we need to solve
it.

I've just been reading Paul Krugman's "The Return of Depression
Economics" ISBN 0-14-028685-3 which fairly clearly indicates that
there is an information problem with modern more-or-less free market
capitalism, and that the people in the business of regulating the free
market economies of the world don't have enough information to be able
anticipate and smooth out the instabilities of the currency and
capital markets.

Krugman has been hoping for a return of depression economics for
decades. Any problem faced by the economy at large will be faced by
the regulators of the economy. There is hubris in pretending that you
know what the market is supposed to be doing, and Krugman just can't
shake that control fetish. Let the decentralized decisions of market
participants act on the information they have and regulate to the
least extent possible, and you might avoid a catastrophic unintended
consequence of regulations that affect all market participants.

Go read your Keynes. The decentralised decisions of the market
participants is what makes pure free market economies unstable, and
Krugman identifies the "decentralised decisions" of the currency
speculators and the hedge funds as major contributors to the Asian
crashes of the late 1990's (which is what he was actually writing
about).

I've read Keynes. While it may come as a shock to many in your neck
of the woods, there are numerous perfectly respectable economists with
Nobel bona fides since Keynes who would tend to disagree. As a matter
of fact, Keynes, Galbraith, and their cheerleader Krugman are the
minority view holders these days.

I wonder what they would have to say about the state of Japan's
economy, which is the most Keynesian in existence. Protectionism leads
to inefficient companies that can't compete. Comparative advantage
works. Public spending projects result most often not in fantastic
growth, but in boondoggles that flush hard earned money down the
toilet.

The information about the economy that these people are working with
is what is manifest on the stock and currency markets from day-to-day,
and what governements reveal about their current and expected incomes
and expenditures. Everything is denoted in terms of its monetary
value, and the purchase of a single 747 which took nearly a year to
build and is expected to keep flying for twenty to thirty years could
be equated with the sale of ten million Harry Potter books.

As a scheme, it works surprisingly well - better than anything else
that has been tried so far - but it is obviously sub-optimal.

It works surprisingly well because people make continual adjustments
every second of every day. Check the price of ten million Harry Potter
books the day after they are bought and compare it to the price of a
747 the day after it is bought. Interference in the incentives of the
market lead to perverse choices on the part of market participants,
who no longer can trust the information that prices were supposed to
be giving them.

This is arrant "perfect free market" propaganda. Go read Keynes.

Keynes was incorrect about the benevolent effects of interference. Go
read any of the monetarists, or any public choice economist, or any of
the Austrians to see why.

Finally, you would then need to explain how a centralized economy would
be able to do a better job than a distributed one... given that
distributed economies are successful because decisions get made at the
place where the people with the most understanding of the situation can
make the decision.

I don't. What I said was that we can now collect a lot more
information than just the cash transfer for every transaction, and if
we could find a way of making this information available outside the
firms who collect the data for their own use, we should be able to
devise a *distributed* control system that ought to be more stable,
and could run a lot closer to full capacity.

The price, at least theoretically, contains all of the information you
might be interested in, doesn't it?

No. Because the price reflects the pressures of the moment. If the
price of 747's goes through the floor, Boeing still has about a year's
production stacked up in the factory in various states of completion.
Harry Potter books can be reprinted and distributed a lot more
quickly.

This is less true than it used to be, as most production facilities
use 'just in time' tactics to minimize the amount of warehousing they
have to do. The question isn't whether the price as it currently
exists isn't distorted by inefficiencies, the question is whether the
price becomes more or less distorted when some self interested
political body tells everyone what the price 'should' be. To address
the problems you raise here, we should be focusing on a reduction of
interference with pricing signals and let technology and the self
interest of companies work to improve each of their contributions to
the price of a good.

The metal markets are unstable for the same sort of reason - is the
price of a metal creeps up, the owners of various more or less
marginal mines are persuaded to invest the money to pump out the
mine-shafts again and get the machinery running so they can extract
the relevant mineral, all of which takes time. When they finally start
shipping ore, the market is suddenly over-supplied, and the price
crashes.

I'm surprised that companies haven't figured this out yet. I would
think that this would only occur when the price of metal shoots up
rather than when it creeps. What you are calling instability is the
market working to meet demand. It just isn't happening as quickly as
you would like for it to. Again I ask, why on earth would you prefer
for a bureaucrat to tell everyone what the price of metal should be?

Every centrally planned economy in the history of the world has failed,
or been far less successful than less centrally planned economies of
similar conditions.

Since I'm not arguing for a centrally planned economy this is
irrelevant, though a centrally planned economy with modern data
collection and processing ought to be more efficient than the system
that failed in the USSR. In so far as China, Japan and Korea have more
central planning than India, and grew their economies twice as fast
during the catch-up phase, some central planning would seem to be a
good idea.

That is a murky issue. I don't know that I'd hold up India as an
example of notably less government interference than most other
developing countries, it only has less government interference than it
used to have. Its reduction in regulation allowed it to grow at all,
which was not the case before. To compare across countries would be a
much larger task.

Why do you think that it was "the reduction in regulation that allowed
it to grow at all"?

The central planning approach produced 0 growth. A few decades ago,
markets were liberalized to some small extent and growth occurred.
Coincidence, maybe?

Just look at what's happened in India in the last 20 years since they
gave up central planning and curtailed government interference-- they
have doubled the incomes, on average, of a billion people.

Doubling over 20 years is a growth rate of 3.5% per year - respectable
for a third world economy catching-up, but half the rate achieved by
Japan, Korea and China during their catch-up phases. Neither Japan,
Korea nor China gave up central planning and government interference,
though this has been used more to direct capitalist investment than to
control it.

Japan, for example, flung open the export doors right out of the gate.
A good portion of their growth had to do with the extent to which they
adopted market friendly policies. We will never know exactly, of
course. Krugman would argue one way and P.T. Bauer would argue the
other looking at the same cases.

Japan is almost as good as the U.S.A. at using non-tariff barriers to
trade to protect the domestic market while exporting furiously.

Japan is much, much better at protecting inefficient domestic
businesses than is the US. Of course, the more people who do this,
the less effective it is, even in the short run. Over the long run,
you have a bunch of crippled, uncompetitive companies.

I

don't know exactly what you meant to say with "flung open the export
doors right out of the gate" but they certainly protected their
domestic market, and they still do.

I mean that the Japanese dedication to exporting their way to growth
worked, but their dedication to domestic protectionism didn't.

They've done more in 20 years to defeat poverty-- using capitalism--
than all the socialist systems ever tried.

That depends what you mean by "socialist".

Frankly, capitalism is the cure for poverty, and it works every time.

If so, why does it work so poorly in the U.S.A., where the poorest 30
or 40 million have been slipping back since Regan started dismantling
welfare?

It doesn't work poorly. It only works poorly if you discount
charitable giving from poverty alleviation, and if you discount that
the amount of goods available for redistribution is greater.

In the U.S.A. the poor are getting poorer. Poverty is not being cured,
but made worse. Capitalism is *not* working as a cure for poverty in
the U.S.A.

On what basis are you arguing that the poor are getting poorer?

The European version of the capitalist economy includes a rather
better welfare system, which pays off in better educated and
eventually more productive workers.

More productive? I would have to see those figures.

Get hold of Will Hutton's book and track down the academic studies
that he references.

You are telling me
that countries with near infinite unemployment benefits,

I've received unemployment benefit in the Netherlands. It wasn't
generous.

Interesting. I met a guy in Canada from where I thought was the
Netherlands, though it might have been a Scandanavian country based on
your comments, whose friend was an engineer. He had decided to stop
working and fish. All he had to do was show up at an office every so
often, and he got benefits in proportion to what he had formerly
earned.

He hadn't held a job in 5 years and had no intention of doing so in
the future.

mandatory 30 hour work weeks,

Until the end of May I was working a 40-hour week, which is perfectly
normal.
Some unions have negotiated 37 hour weeks. Mandatory thirty hour weeks
sound like the stuff of right-wing propaganda.

Talk to your pals in Italy.

mandatory breaks during the day for all laborers,

Half an hour for lunch? And you don't get paid for it.

Talk you your pals in Germany, France, and Italy.

regulations that prevent anyone from firing incompetent labor,

They don't prevent you from firing incompetents, you just have to go
through a multi-stage procedure, and document each stage, and that
only if you managed to miss the incompetence in the first six months
of employment.

News from Italy and France is that they had labor riots when companies
wanted to fire unproductive employees and the laws were going to be
changed to allow them to do so.

and extremely high debt to GDP ratios have more productive labor forces?

Yep. Some of them do. Read the book. Chase up the references. Wash out
some of that propaganda that seems to fouling up your world-view.

Propaganda comes in all flavors. The left flavor is no more accurate.

Will Hutton's "The World We're In"
ISBN 0-316-86081-6 reviews a great deal economic research on this and
other subjects, and paints a picture of the U.S.A. that doesn't fit
with what you were taught in civics in primary school (which is now
long out of date).

Lots of books paint pictures about the U.S. Not all pictures are
accurate.

This book has a twelve and a half page list of references cited, and
fourteen and a half pages of specific citations. Will Hutton knows the
published literature.

Europe has been waiting for us to grow up and become
civilized socialists with no respect for individual liberty for a long
time.

Why do you think that European socialist have no respect for
individual liberty? Certain capitalist excesses are illegal, but in
most respects the Europeans are less picky than the U.S. about
behaviour that doesn't create immediate problems for other people. The
Netherlands is famously liberal about soft drugs and same sex
relationships - to name two areas where the U.S. has a number of
fatuous and unenforceable laws which demonstrate a singular lack of
respect for individual liberty.

No disagreement about the drugs and sex, but those are not artifacts
of socialism or capitalism. A system which claims half of one's
productive life for 'the public good' has no respect for individual
liberty. It has no respect for who earned the money, it has no
respect for the decisions which might otherwise be made. Confiscation
of earned wealth is confiscation of the portion of one's life it took
to earn that wealth.

We just as a culture have different ideas about what
constitutes progress. A state where everyone can wait in line for an
asprin with equal ability has some virtues, but so does a state where
some people can get brain surgery.

If you've got money, you can buy exactly the same level of health care
in (Western) Europe as you can in the U.S. If you haven't got money,
you may have to wait a bit for your brain surgery (for non-emergency
operations), but it will be performed every bit as well. Averaged over
the population as a whole, (Western)European health care performs
better than the U.S. system, which fails the poor quite badly - and in
the sense of not catching up with infectious diseases as well as it
might, it also fails to protect the rich as well as more comprehensive
systems do.

Odd. We didn't really have a SARS outbreak here, yet Canada did. How
many poor people can't go to the hospital here in the US? I'd just
like to be sure how badly the US system fails. Don't confuse
uninsured with not treated.

Unsurprisingly, Hutton's book is out of stock a www.amazon.com (but US
dealers will sell you an airmailed copy of the U.K. edition for $25.72).
www.amazon.co.uk have stocks of the paperback at eight U.K.pounds per
copy (about $12).

-------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[A E]

Bob Myers wrote:

And yet you persist. You know, one of the more common
simple definitions of "insanity" is repeating the same action over
and over again, and hoping for a different outcome....

Yet you keep trying to educate him!

 

[Dbowey]

<< Up to around 1984 or so the ABC (USA) television network was
delivered by such cables to the TV station where I work. There was
also a local run from the station to a local university basketball
court so we could telecast games from there.

I'm not sure if the impedance was the same, but IBM was fond of using
a similar cable to connect terminals to their computers. It is still
available - look for "twinax"

--

Tony Newman <tonyn@efn.org>
Springfield, OR >>
------------------------------------
small world..... I managed the Eugene outside Toll/video, mobile, etc. group
when that feed to KEZI was put in. I left in 1969 for bigger, but not better,
things. As I recall, we used video cable to Autzen Stadium also.

Don

Don

 

[Larry Hatch]

Harry Conover wrote:

Larry Hatch <lhatch@flite.net> wrote in message news:<vg0u84jik8ab01@corp.supernews.com>...


I bought a TV6 from Ramsey, it is basically, this circuit with 39pf cap
in please of the 22pf.

http://www.web-ee.com/Schematics/TV_XMIT/TVTransmitb.pdf

It bleeds over channels, but the range is not very far.



Given that this thing has no bandwidth filtering on its output, this
is not too surprising. Improper levels of modulaton could be another
cause. Since it also lacks vestigial sideband filtering, you're also
likely to be hearing a video blanking buzz in the received sound as
well because one of the video sidebands will fall on top of the sound
carrier spectrum.


Well, it is very good and making buzz sounds.. The video is not

terrible, but the sound is almost nothing there.

Any ideas on kill the buzzing, maybe then tunning the sound will be easier.

Any ideas how
to make it transmit further.



I am reluctant to say this becuase I don't understand your purpose,
but...


I thought maybe more power would help. I added another NPN for drive.

Made no difference, so I
will remove it as it does seem to go the distance I need.

The transmitter consists of a tunable frequency, free running
oscilator driving an amplifier stage with a conventional pi network
output. In transmitters of similar design, peaking the output level
requires that the amplifier stage be tuned to the same frequency as
that of the oscillator. Most typically this is accomplished by having
variable capacitors in place of the fixed capacitors on each side of
the output tank coil. Generally speaking, the variable capacitor on
the amplifier side of the coil is used to resonate the circuit, while
the capacitor closest to the antenna side of the coil is used to
adjust the loading and match to the antenna. At TV channel
frequencies, these adjustment can be very critical and make the
difference between the transmitter putting out signals of 5% of its
theoretical capacity, or 90%. The problem here being that if you lack
any capacity to measure the relative power being supplied to the
antenna (such as a crude field-strength meter), you'll be hard pressed
to tune the pi network to its optimal performance (although a ma meter
connected between the power source and the feed to the final amplifier
would give you some indication if you are familiar enough with basic
electronics to interpret changes in the ma meter readings.)

One request though, never try to connect this thing to an outside
antenna, for if you do you'll likely become the scourge of you
neighborhood and maybe even invite a visit from the FCC at 3:00 am!

It would drive that big thing? Would not do it. It is going on a boat
actually.

Harry C.

 

[Bob Myers]

"A E" <aeisenhut@videotron.ca> wrote in message
news:3F02E3C0.27DC168C@videotron.ca...

Bob Myers wrote:


And yet you persist. You know, one of the more common
simple definitions of "insanity" is repeating the same action over
and over again, and hoping for a different outcome....

Yet you keep trying to educate him!

Yeah, but at this point I'm doing it solely for the
entertainment value.

Besides, I've never CLAIMED to be sane....


Bob M.

 

[Harry Conover]

"Pat Mueller" <valbuz@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<bdrl8n$vq4mu$1@ID-78905.news.dfncis.de>...

"Ian Stirling" <root@mauve.demon.co.uk> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:bdrbgg$i38$1$8300dec7@news.demon.co.uk...
Pat Mueller <valbuz@hotmail.com> wrote:
hi

is there anybody who can tell me some url's with circuit diagrams of a
raining water tank measuring?

Circuit diagram is the trivial bit, the sensor is the interesting part.
Ultrasound, neutron absorbtion, pressure difference, float, dielectric
constant, conductivity, refractive index, thermal conductivity, fish
detector, ...

What's the size of the tank?


hi

the tank is approximate 4 meter's depth an 2 meter's width (6000L water)

thanks
pat

If you want it to work, I'd follow the 'KISS' principle and keep it
very simple. Something as simple and inexpensive as a float attached
to a push-rod that drives a pivot arm attached to a potentiometer
should work quite nicely for this purpose. In fact, on a much smaller
scale, this is more of less how the gas gauge on an automoibile
functions.

Another approach would be to attach a cord to the float and fun the
cord around a pulley on a 10-turn potentiometer (available quite
cheaply from surplus dealers). Attach a lead counterweight to the
other then of the cord (after wrapping it around the pulley for a
couple of turns). With a linear potentiometer, this should provide a
more linear output than will the pivot arm method.

Ultrasonic depth sensors (such as those manufactures by Scully Signal)
are generally used only very very specialized industrial applications
since they are both costly to consturct, and sometimes produce
'strange' readings. Your easies way to inexpensively implement
something like this would be to purchase an inexpensive marine depth
sounder (circa $129) and mount the transducer on a board that floats
on the surface of the water. Still, most of these cannot relaibly
measure depths less tha abut 2-3 feet -- worse sill with the
reflections that would be present from the walls of the tank.

The float/potentiometer method is your best bet.

Harry C.

 

[Bob Myers]

"Mark Fergerson" <mfergerson1@cox.net> wrote in message
news:3F03497A.5050103@cox.net...

I was wondering why you advised me to quit, but kept on
yourself. I kept going to help _me_ understand the
counterarguments, and get reality checks from the group.

Yeah, I've never claimed to be consistent, either. I recommended
that you quit during one of those periods when I'd basically
written Frank off as no longer having even entertainment value.
Then he later came back with Yet Another Round of the Same Old
Nonsense, and I found myself drawn back into it. Pretty soon
I'll get tired of him again, and round and round and round it goes...

The thing is, Frank himself never seems to tire of it, or learn
anything new, no matter how many times we go through this.
I guess it's sort of like going to the zoo; you can only spend
so much time watching the monkeys do the same thing over and
over on any given day, but you'll still come back to the monkey
house on your NEXT visit.

Bob M.

 

[Neil]

You certainly lasted a lot longer than most. The beginning of the end
started about 5 years ago, when I noticed that parts stocks where no longer
being replenished. The Manager confided to me that the electronics
department was to be phased out as quickly as possible, as it had become a
money loosing part of the business.
So long RS....but I still have the 65 in one kit that I received when I was
10, that started it all with me.
-Kim


"Tweetldee" <dgmason99@att99.net> wrote in message
news:lLIMa.33222$3o3.2422419@bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...

Well, I guess the death knell has sounded for the Shack as a source for
experimenter and hobbyist parts. I went into a relatively new store (open
less than a year) today to get a few resistors that I need in a hurry.
What
did I find? Not a resistor, capacitor, transistor, IC, switch, fuse, or
anything that would be considered an electronic component was to be found.
They had all kinds of TV coax, TV connectors, cell phones, home phones,
phone accessories, satellite TV equipment, expensive toys, and a few
stereo
"systems", but but not an electronic component in sight. They had wire,
solder, soldering irons, and such, but nothing to solder the wires to.
They
don't even carry the small project boxes any more.
They're looking more like the electronics section in WalMart every day.
Ooops, I take that back... the Shack's prices are 40-100% above what
you'll
pay for the same item at WalMart.

Adios Radio Shack !! RIP

--
Tweetldee
Tweetldee at att dot net (Just subsitute the appropriate characters in
the
address)

Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.

 

[Bill Sloman]

jasligon@msn.com (idlemuse) wrote in message news:<82463628.0307020539.5e93798f@posting.google.com>...

bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote in message news:<7c584d27.0307011544.22327540@posting.google.com>...
jasligon@msn.com (idlemuse) wrote in message news:<82463628.0307010715.2b61548e@posting.google.com>...
bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote in message news:<7c584d27.0306290900.617c90be@posting.google.com>...
ActualGeek <ActualGeek@no.real.address> wrote in message news:<ActualGeek-4CF873.01551929062003@corp.supernews.com>...
In article <7c584d27.0306281505.24150f8@posting.google.com>,
bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote:

Precious Pup <barking@wrongtree.org> wrote in message
news:<3EFC791A.2B38A0A1@wrongtree.org>...
Bill Sloman wrote:


Go away and
try to learn what honest arguement involves.

Go away and try to learn.

Go away, I wasn't talking to you.

You need to learn how to construct some kind of sequential
arguement, before we can get onto difficult concepts like "honest" > > > > > > and "dishonest".

Actual Geek can more or less manage that (though his attention span
leaves something to be desired) and in this respect he leaves you
trailing in the dust.

-----
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Getting back on the point.

Bill, you have failed to show how there's an information problem in
capitalism, and you haven't even tried to explain why we need to
solve it.

I've just been reading Paul Krugman's "The Return of Depression
Economics" ISBN 0-14-028685-3 which fairly clearly indicates that
there is an information problem with modern more-or-less free market
capitalism, and that the people in the business of regulating the free
market economies of the world don't have enough information to be able
anticipate and smooth out the instabilities of the currency and
capital markets.

Krugman has been hoping for a return of depression economics for
decades. Any problem faced by the economy at large will be faced by
the regulators of the economy. There is hubris in pretending that you
know what the market is supposed to be doing, and Krugman just can't
shake that control fetish. Let the decentralized decisions of market
participants act on the information they have and regulate to the
least extent possible, and you might avoid a catastrophic unintended
consequence of regulations that affect all market participants.

Go read your Keynes. The decentralised decisions of the market
participants is what makes pure free market economies unstable, and
Krugman identifies the "decentralised decisions" of the currency
speculators and the hedge funds as major contributors to the Asian
crashes of the late 1990's (which is what he was actually writing
about).


I've read Keynes. While it may come as a shock to many in your neck
of the woods, there are numerous perfectly respectable economists with
Nobel bona fides since Keynes who would tend to disagree.

That Nobel prize was a scandal. The economists involved aren't
respectable. They work with an unrealistic theory which doesn't
predict worth a damn, but has the singular advantageof producing the
sort of predictions and advice that the short-sighted rich want to
hear. The Republican party loves them, and they gets loads of support.
They aren't economists, merely flatterers.

As a matter of fact, Keynes, Galbraith, and their cheerleader Krugman are the
minority view holders these days.

Hutton is another of these voices in the wilderness. I first started
reading his stuff when he had a weekly column in the Guardian
newspaper in the U.K. in the later 1980's. One of his habits was
second-guessing U.K. treasury decisions - when they did anything he'd
explain why, what they intended to achieve, and predict what they
would actually achieve. Six months later he'd write an "I told you so"
paragraph.

Because the U.K. Treasury was full of "respectable" economists at that
time, hand-picked for ideological purity by Margaret Thatcher herself,
this was to some extent shooting sitting ducks, but it made the point
about the predictive power of monetarist economics.

I wonder what they would have to say about the state of Japan's
economy, which is the most Keynesian in existence.

So why aren't they printing money to spend their way out of the
deflationary spiral? Because the central bank isn't anythihg like
Keynesian enough ...

Protectionism leads to inefficient companies that can't compete.

So why is Dubbya protecting your inefficient steel producers?

Comparative advantage works. Public spending projects result most often not > in fantastic growth, but in boondoggles that flush hard earned money down the
toilet.

So why is Dubbya spending so disporportionately much on defence?

The information about the economy that these people are working with
is what is manifest on the stock and currency markets from day-to-day,
and what governements reveal about their current and expected incomes
and expenditures. Everything is denoted in terms of its monetary
value, and the purchase of a single 747 which took nearly a year to
build and is expected to keep flying for twenty to thirty years could
be equated with the sale of ten million Harry Potter books.

As a scheme, it works surprisingly well - better than anything else
that has been tried so far - but it is obviously sub-optimal.

It works surprisingly well because people make continual adjustments
every second of every day. Check the price of ten million Harry Potter
books the day after they are bought and compare it to the price of a
747 the day after it is bought. Interference in the incentives of the
market lead to perverse choices on the part of market participants,
who no longer can trust the information that prices were supposed to
be giving them.

This is arrant "perfect free market" propaganda. Go read Keynes.

Keynes was incorrect about the benevolent effects of interference. Go
read any of the monetarists, or any public choice economist, or any of
the Austrians to see why.

The monetarists tell the story that the rich want to hear. Put them in
charge of an economy - as Thatcher did in the U.K. and watch your GDP
per head fall behind that of comparable economies with less
ideologically blinkered policies.

Finally, you would then need to explain how a centralized economy
would be able to do a better job than a distributed one... given
that distributed economies are successful because decisions get made
at the place where the people with the most understanding of the
situation can make the decision.

I don't. What I said was that we can now collect a lot more
information than just the cash transfer for every transaction, and if
we could find a way of making this information available outside the
firms who collect the data for their own use, we should be able to
devise a *distributed* control system that ought to be more stable,
and could run a lot closer to full capacity.

The price, at least theoretically, contains all of the information you
might be interested in, doesn't it?

No. Because the price reflects the pressures of the moment. If the
price of 747's goes through the floor, Boeing still has about a year's
production stacked up in the factory in various states of completion.
Harry Potter books can be reprinted and distributed a lot more
quickly.

This is less true than it used to be, as most production facilities
use 'just in time' tactics to minimize the amount of warehousing they
have to do.

747's are built "just in time" and it still takes about a year. Big,
complicated systems rpodcued in relatively small volumes are always
going to be difficult.

The question isn't whether the price as it currently
exists isn't distorted by inefficiencies, the question is whether the
price becomes more or less distorted when some self interested
political body tells everyone what the price 'should' be. To address
the problems you raise here, we should be focusing on a reduction of
interference with pricing signals and let technology and the self
interest of companies work to improve each of their contributions to
the price of a good.

The problem with manufacturing goods is not just price, but also
volume. The rule of thumb is that if you can increse the volume by a
factor of ten, you can halve the price. Tooling up to do this takes
time and demands investment.

Keynes wasn't in the least interested in telling the market what the
price ought to be. He was interested in manipulating the expectations
of the people who were in the process of making their minds up about
making this sort of investment, and his preferred method involved
using the central banks to manipulate the money supply.

Monetarists postulate a perfect market, so they don't believe in
investor expectations, and find this sort of manipulation heretical.
This suites the central bankers down to the ground - they can keep on
behaving as if they were running a bank,rather than an economy. Both
groups effectively stick their heads in the sand.

The metal markets are unstable for the same sort of reason - is the
price of a metal creeps up, the owners of various more or less
marginal mines are persuaded to invest the money to pump out the
mine-shafts again and get the machinery running so they can extract
the relevant mineral, all of which takes time. When they finally start
shipping ore, the market is suddenly over-supplied, and the price
crashes.

I'm surprised that companies haven't figured this out yet.

They have, but eventually the potential profits get too tempting, and
away we go again. Commoditiy markets are horribly cyclic.

I would think that this would only occur when the price of metal shoots up
rather than when it creeps. What you are calling instability is the
market working to meet demand. It just isn't happening as quickly as
you would like for it to. Again I ask, why on earth would you prefer
for a bureaucrat to tell everyone what the price of metal should be?

No. With better information, it should be possible for the producers
to make realistic predictions of demand, and negotiate where the extra
capacity should come from and when it should come on line. This is -
in principle - agreement in restrain of trade, and not permissible in
the current free market environment, which clearly needs to be made
more flexible.

Every centrally planned economy in the history of the world has
failed, or been far less successful than less centrally planned
economies of similar conditions.

Since I'm not arguing for a centrally planned economy this is
irrelevant, though a centrally planned economy with modern data
collection and processing ought to be more efficient than the system
that failed in the USSR. In so far as China, Japan and Korea have more
central planning than India, and grew their economies twice as fast
during the catch-up phase, some central planning would seem to be a
good idea.

That is a murky issue. I don't know that I'd hold up India as an
example of notably less government interference than most other
developing countries, it only has less government interference than it
used to have. Its reduction in regulation allowed it to grow at all,
which was not the case before. To compare across countries would be a
much larger task.

Why do you think that it was "the reduction in regulation that allowed
it to grow at all"?

The central planning approach produced 0 growth. A few decades ago,
markets were liberalized to some small extent and growth occurred.
Coincidence, maybe?

Quite possibly. Technology has changed a lot over the past few
decades.

Just look at what's happened in India in the last 20 years since
they gave up central planning and curtailed government interference--> > > > > they have doubled the incomes, on average, of a billion people.

Doubling over 20 years is a growth rate of 3.5% per year - respectable
for a third world economy catching-up, but half the rate achieved by
Japan, Korea and China during their catch-up phases. Neither Japan,
Korea nor China gave up central planning and government interference,
though this has been used more to direct capitalist investment than to
control it.

Japan, for example, flung open the export doors right out of the gate.
A good portion of their growth had to do with the extent to which they
adopted market friendly policies. We will never know exactly, of
course. Krugman would argue one way and P.T. Bauer would argue the
other looking at the same cases.

Japan is almost as good as the U.S.A. at using non-tariff barriers to
trade to protect the domestic market while exporting furiously.

Japan is much, much better at protecting inefficient domestic
businesses than is the US.

It may look like that to you, but sitting in the U.K. and exporting to
both in the 1980's there wasn't a lot to choose between the two.

Of course, the more people who do this, the less effective it is, even in
the short run. Over the long run, you have a bunch of crippled,
uncompetitive companies.

Not necessarily. Within-country competition ought to weed out the
cripples.
The volumes aren't as high as you'd get selling successfully into the
world market, but large domestic markets, as in the U.S. and Japan,
mean that the extra volume of exports doesn't give you any dramatic
economies of scale.

Since this sort of protectionism was exactly what was used by the
U.S.A. to protect and develop its own industries in the nineteenth
century, you would seem to be argueing that the U.S. is afflicted with
a bunch of crippled, uncompetitive companies - over and above the
steel mills that Dubbya protected from the predatory Europeans earlier
in his administration.

don't know exactly what you meant to say with "flung open the export
doors right out of the gate" but they certainly protected their
domestic market, and they still do.

I mean that the Japanese dedication to exporting their way to growth
worked, but their dedication to domestic protectionism didn't.

In what way?

They've done more in 20 years to defeat poverty-- using capitalism--
than all the socialist systems ever tried.

That depends what you mean by "socialist".

Frankly, capitalism is the cure for poverty, and it works every time.

If so, why does it work so poorly in the U.S.A., where the poorest 30
or 40 million have been slipping back since Regan started dismantling
welfare?

It doesn't work poorly. It only works poorly if you discount
charitable giving from poverty alleviation, and if you discount that
the amount of goods available for redistribution is greater.

In the U.S.A. the poor are getting poorer. Poverty is not being cured,
but made worse. Capitalism is *not* working as a cure for poverty in
the U.S.A.

On what basis are you arguing that the poor are getting poorer?

It is a fairly well known fact. The specific line "the poorest 30
or 40 million have been slipping back" was lifted directly from Paul
Krugman's "The Return of Depression Economics". Scientific American
has published similar results in recent years. Will Hutton quotes Paul
Krugmans 1994 book "Peddling Prosperity" when he mentions a similar
figure.

The European version of the capitalist economy includes a rather
better welfare system, which pays off in better educated and
eventually more productive workers.

More productive? I would have to see those figures.

Get hold of Will Hutton's book and track down the academic studies
that he references.

You are telling me
that countries with near infinite unemployment benefits,

I've received unemployment benefit in the Netherlands. It wasn't
generous.

Interesting. I met a guy in Canada from where I thought was the
Netherlands, though it might have been a Scandanavian country based on
your comments, whose friend was an engineer. He had decided to stop
working and fish. All he had to do was show up at an office every so
often, and he got benefits in proportion to what he had formerly
earned.

In the Netherlands, if you are less than 57 you have to apply for a
least one job per week to maintain your unemployment benefit.

He hadn't held a job in 5 years and had no intention of doing so in
the future.

Then he wouldn't be on unemployment benefit in the Netherlands, where
it only runs for a limited time, but social security, which isn't
generous and not related to your previous income. If he cycled to his
fishing spots, and ate the fish he caught, he might get by, but he
wouldn't have any drinking money.

mandatory 30 hour work weeks,

Until the end of May I was working a 40-hour week, which is perfectly
normal.
Some unions have negotiated 37 hour weeks. Mandatory thirty hour weeks
sound like the stuff of right-wing propaganda.

Talk to your pals in Italy.

Belesconi is probably the most right-wing of the European goverment
heads, and owns most of the TV stations. He churns out as much
anti-union propaganda as any American media magnate.

mandatory breaks during the day for all laborers,

Half an hour for lunch? And you don't get paid for it.

Talk you your pals in Germany, France, and Italy.

The French unions are certainly good at making outrageous demands at
the start of their annual negotiations, but thirty hour working weeks
are fantasy. The German rules are very like the Dutch - if they were
different we'd have a flood of German firms starting in the
Netherlands (I live within 8km of the border, and Nijmegen fills up
with German shoppers every Saturday afternoon, because the German
shops close at midday.)

regulations that prevent anyone from firing incompetent labor,

They don't prevent you from firing incompetents, you just have to go
through a multi-stage procedure, and document each stage, and that
only if you managed to miss the incompetence in the first six months
of employment.

News from Italy and France is that they had labour riots when companies
wanted to fire unproductive employees and the laws were going to be
changed to allow them to do so.

My guess is that more scrupulous reporters would have talked about the
law being changed to make it easier to fire unproductive employees -
which doesn't usually mean incompetents, but rather what the English
call "redundant workers", which is to say competent peple that the
company doesn't think it can make money on at the moment. I got made
redundant by Cambridge Instruments in the U.K. in November 1991 and
collected $15,000 from the company in redundancy money.

You can understand why a company would want the law changed to make
this easiier and cheaper, and why the employees would not.

and extremely high debt to GDP ratios have more productive labor forces?

Yep. Some of them do. Read the book. Chase up the references. Wash out
some of that propaganda that seems to fouling up your world-view.

Propaganda comes in all flavors. The left flavor is no more accurate.

Well, the "leftist propaganda" I'm giving you does seem to be pretty
accurate, if not particularly leftist.

Will Hutton's "The World We're In"
ISBN 0-316-86081-6 reviews a great deal economic research on this and
other subjects, and paints a picture of the U.S.A. that doesn't fit
with what you were taught in civics in primary school (which is now
long out of date).

Lots of books paint pictures about the U.S. Not all pictures are
accurate.

This book has a twelve and a half page list of references cited, and
fourteen and a half pages of specific citations. Will Hutton knows the
published literature.

Europe has been waiting for us to grow up and become
civilized socialists with no respect for individual liberty for a long
time.

Why do you think that European socialist have no respect for
individual liberty? Certain capitalist excesses are illegal, but in
most respects the Europeans are less picky than the U.S. about
behaviour that doesn't create immediate problems for other people. The
Netherlands is famously liberal about soft drugs and same sex
relationships - to name two areas where the U.S. has a number of
fatuous and unenforceable laws which demonstrate a singular lack of
respect for individual liberty.

No disagreement about the drugs and sex, but those are not artifacts
of socialism or capitalism. A system which claims half of one's
productive life for 'the public good' has no respect for individual
liberty.

This doesn't follow. Tax levels represent choices about services to
the citizen being publicly funded through tax, or privately funded
through the usual market mechanisms. The choice of the U.K.
conservative administration to "privatise" the railways may look like
"respect for individual liberty" to you, but gave the travellers no
more choice than they had had before, and in fact degraded the service
actually offered by the railways down to U.S. levels of incompetence
and inefficiency.

Claiming that a particular level of taxation represents "respect for
individual liberty" and that another, slightly higher level doesn't,
is ideological clap-trap.

It has no respect for who earned the money, it has no
respect for the decisions which might otherwise be made.

More ideolological clap-trap. You are confusing technical issues of
funding with ideological principles. Even you aren't going to
privatise defense, which leaves you just slightly pregnant when it
comes to the question of hiw you are going to fund it.

Confiscation of earned wealth is confiscation of the portion of one's life
it took to earn that wealth.

You didn't earn that wealth on a desert island. You relied on the
roads that are maintained by the state (from your taxes), and the
legal system paid for by the state (from your taxes), and the
education system maintained by the state (from your taxes).

You want to keep all that you earn? Fine. Go off an earn it someplace
where you don't rely on community supplied goods and services. And buy
your own army to keep the local protection racket from ripping you off
in exactly the same way as the government "rips you off" at home.

We just as a culture have different ideas about what
constitutes progress. A state where everyone can wait in line for an
asprin with equal ability has some virtues, but so does a state where
some people can get brain surgery.

If you've got money, you can buy exactly the same level of health care
in (Western) Europe as you can in the U.S. If you haven't got money,
you may have to wait a bit for your brain surgery (for non-emergency
operations), but it will be performed every bit as well. Averaged over
the population as a whole, (Western)European health care performs
better than the U.S. system, which fails the poor quite badly - and in
the sense of not catching up with infectious diseases as well as it
might, it also fails to protect the rich as well as more comprehensive
systems do.

Odd. We didn't really have a SARS outbreak here, yet Canada did. How
many poor people can't go to the hospital here in the US? I'd just
like to be sure how badly the US system fails. Don't confuse
uninsured with not treated.

To get SARS in the first place you had to fly to China or Hong Kong.
How often do poverty-stricken Americans and Canadians choose this as
their vacation destination?

If you want to know how badly the U.S. health system fails, do a
google search on "drug-resistant TB".

http://w3.whosea.org/hivaids/faqchapter5.htm

puts New York city (30.1%)third , behind Nepal (48%)and just just
behind Gujarat state in India (33.8%) and well ahead of Bolivia
(15.3%) for levels of drug-resistance in TB patients. The "best
medical system in the world" performing at third world levels because
it treats the poor as badly as third world systems do. A false
economy.

Unsurprisingly, Hutton's book is out of stock a www.amazon.com (but US
dealers will sell you an airmailed copy of the U.K. edition for
$25.72).www.amazon.co.uk have stocks of the paperback at eight
U.K.pounds per copy (about $12).

-------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Larry Hatch]

Neil wrote:

You certainly lasted a lot longer than most. The beginning of the end
started about 5 years ago, when I noticed that parts stocks where no longer
being replenished. The Manager confided to me that the electronics
department was to be phased out as quickly as possible, as it had become a
money loosing part of the business.
So long RS....but I still have the 65 in one kit that I received when I was
10, that started it all with me.
-Kim


"Tweetldee" <dgmason99@att99.net> wrote in message
news:lLIMa.33222$3o3.2422419@bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...

Well, I guess the death knell has sounded for the Shack as a source for
experimenter and hobbyist parts. I went into a relatively new store (open
less than a year) today to get a few resistors that I need in a hurry.

What

did I find? Not a resistor, capacitor, transistor, IC, switch, fuse, or
anything that would be considered an electronic component was to be found.
They had all kinds of TV coax, TV connectors, cell phones, home phones,
phone accessories, satellite TV equipment, expensive toys, and a few

stereo

"systems", but but not an electronic component in sight. They had wire,
solder, soldering irons, and such, but nothing to solder the wires to.

They

don't even carry the small project boxes any more.
They're looking more like the electronics section in WalMart every day.
Ooops, I take that back... the Shack's prices are 40-100% above what

you'll

pay for the same item at WalMart.

Adios Radio Shack !! RIP

--
Tweetldee
Tweetldee at att dot net (Just subsitute the appropriate characters in

the

address)

Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.





Guess I will never be in a Radio Shack again. And I did spuratic (dumb)

buying when in there of the stuff they want to sell.

I went for something a month ago, they have a flat file drawer with some
LEDs, and caps, it was slim, and they did not have what I wanted.

 

[Dennis Clark]

We electronics hobbyists are a dying breed. Today's kids hang out in the
video game shops now. Note that every single electronics hobbyist rag
in the country has folded now but Nuts and Volts. Popular electronics,
Radio Electronics and others are only in our dreams now. Remember P-Box
kits and the 100 in 1 electronics kits? Today's youth are growing up to
be parasites, not contributors, what a loss.

Where did all the wonder go? I will not fail with my kids! I keep telling
myself that... When I was a kid, when we got a Atari video game, I took
it apart to see how it worked, I never bought a single game past the one
that the unit came with (combat).

sigh,
DLC
--
============================================================================
* Dennis Clark dlc@frii.com www.techtoystoday.com *
* "Building Robot Drive Trains" published by McGraw-Hill 2002 *
============================================================================

 

[ActualGeek]

In article <7c584d27.0306290900.617c90be@posting.google.com>,
bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote:

ActualGeek <ActualGeek@no.real.address> wrote in message
news:<ActualGeek-4CF873.01551929062003@corp.supernews.com>...
In article <7c584d27.0306281505.24150f8@posting.google.com>,
bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote:

Precious Pup <barking@wrongtree.org> wrote in message
news:<3EFC791A.2B38A0A1@wrongtree.org>...
Bill Sloman wrote:


Go away and
try to learn what honest arguement involves.

Go away and try to learn.

Go away, I wasn't talking to you.

You need to learn how to construct some kind of sequential arguement,
before we can get onto difficult concepts like "honest" and
"dishonest".

Actual Geek can more or less manage that (though his attention span
leaves something to be desired) and in this respect he leaves you
trailing in the dust.

-----
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Getting back on the point.

Bill, you have failed to show how there's an information problem in
capitalism, and you haven't even tried to explain why we need to solve
it.

I've just been reading Paul Krugman's "The Return of Depression
Economics" ISBN 0-14-028685-3 which fairly clearly indicates that
there is an information problem with modern more-or-less free market
capitalism, and that the people in the business of regulating the free
market economies of the world don't have enough information to be able
anticipate and smooth out the instabilities of the currency and
capital markets.

Well, if that's true then Paul Krugman is not an economist. The
instabilities in currency are due to these very same people who try to
"control" the market inflating the currency beyond all reason.

AS to the instabilities in the market, they are due also to these peopel
trying to control the economy.

There is no reason to believe that the free market needs to be smoothed
out-- in fact the boom / bust cycle came from exactly this kind of
central planning... before it, the economy was much smoother.

Once again, Government is a disease masquarading as its own cure.

But whats' amasing is the slave mentality you have-- you just assume
that other people have the right to control your life. Why?

The information about the economy that these people are working with

Even if these people had perfect information about the state of things
at any given point, they would still fail because to do the job they are
trying to do they'd have to have perfect vision of the future and the
effects of the things they are considering.

History tells us that the only rational thing they can do is take ah
ands off approach.

But that's not popular with fascists like yourself, is it?

As a scheme, it works surprisingly well - better than anything else
that has been tried so far - but it is obviously sub-optimal.

Socialism, which is what you're advocating, works worse than everything
else that's been tried. Monarchies are more efficient!

I don't. What I said was that we can now collect a lot more
information than just the cash transfer for every transaction, and if
we could find a way of making this information available outside the
firms who collect the data for their own use, we should be able to
devise a *distributed* control system that ought to be more stable,
and could run a lot closer to full capacity.

Impossible, because what you desire requires omniscience and the ability
to see the future.

Is just the ludicrouse excuse of those who want to enslave everyone.
Don't fall for such a patently obvious lie.

Every centrally planned economy in the history of the world has failed,
or been far less successful than less centrally planned economies of
similar conditions.

Since I'm not arguing for a centrally planned economy

Yes, you are. That is exactly what you're arguing for. You just claim
it isn't. Any economy which is controled by the government or any
entity outside the owners of the companies in the economy is a centrally
planned economy.

that failed in the USSR. In so far as China, Japan and Korea have more
central planning than India, and grew their economies twice as fast
during the catch-up phase, some central planning would seem to be a
good idea.

You have been reading a bunch of lies, and now you are repeating the m
to me! Hell, you act as if korea were one country.

Just look at what's happened in India in the last 20 years since they
gave up central planning and curtailed government interference-- they
have doubled the incomes, on average, of a billion people.

Doubling over 20 years is a growth rate of 3.5% per year - respectable
for a third world economy catching-up, but half the rate achieved by
Japan, Korea and China during their catch-up phases.

Now you're just flat out lying. I didn't say the economy doubled, I
said the INCOME of the average person doubled.

Frankly, capitalism is the cure for poverty, and it works every time.

If so, why does it work so poorly in the U.S.A., where the poorest 30
or 40 million have been slipping back since Regan started dismantling
welfare?

A lie based on a lie. The poor have been doing better since Reagan.
And it has generally done well in America, with the exception of the
fact that the government takes half of everyone's income and essentially
destroys it.

Hard to have the benefits of capitalism when the govenrment destroys
half the value.

Or, put another way, since 1913 this countryh as been increasingly a
socialists country.

The European version of the capitalist economy includes a rather
better welfare system, which pays off in better educated and
eventually more productive workers. Will Hutton's "The World We're In"

And yet their economies are growing much slower.

other subjects, and paints a picture of the U.S.A. that doesn't fit
with what you were taught in civics in primary school (which is now
long out of date).

Again, by definition you tell a lie-- you don't know what I was taught
in primary school or how long ago it was.


If you line up companies in a row based on the standard of living of the
poorest 10% of the country, you'll find that the more socialist they
are, the lower the poors standard of living, and the more capitalist,
the higher.

Tha'ts the fact, jack.

 

[A E]

Neil wrote:

You certainly lasted a lot longer than most. The beginning of the end
started about 5 years ago, when I noticed that parts stocks where no longer
being replenished. The Manager confided to me that the electronics
department was to be phased out as quickly as possible, as it had become a
money loosing part of the business.
So long RS....but I still have the 65 in one kit that I received when I was
10, that started it all with me.

It's not really RS's fault, the days of electronics as a hobby for the average
guy are over.

 

[ActualGeek]

In article <7c584d27.0307011544.22327540@posting.google.com>,
bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote:

Go read your Keynes.

Keynes, like Marx, was a man with a lot of theories, and I believe even
Keynes realized he was wrong before he died.

To cite him as an authority here-- you might as well be citing Stalin.