OT: Meanwhile, in the showpiece Socialist paradise of Venezuela...

I wouldn't want to live in the USA of the 1950's. Things are radically better now.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

In some ways. However the moral confusion of our present situation has no parallel that I know of since the death of Nero, and that's going some.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Socialism is doing just fine in Germany and Scandinavia.

Chavez wasn't a socialist, just a showboat (rather lime Trump).

Curistor Doom imagines that this is a credible claim - more evidence of his rapid decline into senility.

No socialist thinks that. Socialism does tax the well-off - not just the ri ch - more heavily than Thatcher wanted to, but it spends the money making t he poor healthier, better educated and better trained so that they find it easier to get work, and are more productive in that work ( which makes more money for the well-off people who employ them).

Germany exhibits it's socialist principle by having a work force with a hig her proportion of tertiary-trained participants than any other country, and it consequently exports about as much as the USA, which has four time the population.

The UK is a basket case in comparison, in part because Thatcher destroyed U K manufacturing industry, largely on the basis that the banking industry ma de more money (by trading hats) than the vulgar process of making things to sell.

Germany doesn't export as much as China (which also purports to be socialis t) but it pays its work force a whole lot better.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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But bad spelling is more a more reliable indicator.

The Germans seem to have worked out how to manage a productive economy. Put ting more of the workers through some kind of tertiary training than anybod y else does seem to be one of the tricks that helps.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

As usual, krw doesn't know what he is talking about. Poles form the biggest single immigrant group, at about 2% of the population, but about 14% of the population doesn't qualify as "ethnic Norwegian", whatever that may mean.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Check out Germany and Scandinavia, where "real" democratic socialism is wor king fine, and a whole lot better than the US idea of rule by well-off elec ted representatives. Of course krw thinks that Norway hasn't got any minori ties, so appealing to his knowledge of the real world is something of a was te of time.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

The Sunnis and the Shiites have been hating and slaughtering one another for 1000 years. The French and Russian and Chinese revolutions were pretty ugly. The US had that slavery thing, and a civil war, and white-only-everything into the 1950's. I remember.

Now the violence is mainly on Twitter. That's an improvement.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

I just find it utterly baffling how anyone could possibly believe that woman would make a good president.

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Three million more people seem to have thought that she would make a better president than Donald Trump (65,844,954 voted for her versus 62,979,879 wh o for him), but the American electoral system made him president anyway.

Cursitor Doom does find a lot of things baffling, but is happy to accept an y number of silly ideas that anybody with a functioning brain would reject out of hand. Apparently the level of explanation handed out by the Daily Ma il and Russia Today is carefully adjusted to appeal to those stupid enough to fall for their twaddle.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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"In the Scandinavian countries, like all other developed nations, the means of production are primarily owned by private individuals, not the communit y or the government, and resources are allocated to their respective uses b y the market, not government or community planning."

Democratic socialists are agnostic about who owns the means of production. Marxist-Leninists emphasise "the leading role of the party", which makes th em undemocratic, and is what got them thrown out of the international socia list movement back in 1870.

The UK Labour Party did nationalise the "commanding heights of the UK econo my" in 1945 but left most UK industry in private hands - it was more a tact ic to deprive their political opponents of financial support than anything all that ideological.

It wasn't a successful exercise, and democratic socialists haven't copied t hem since.

Anarcho-syndicalists prefer to see industry organised as employee-owned coo peratives, and that can work, but it's hard to enroll venture capitalists i nto cooperative start-ups - capitalism allows for a wider variety of roles within an organisation.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

The '50's were pleasant... "Ozzie and Harriet" times. ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142    Skype: skypeanalog |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
     It's what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

But far more importantly from a cultural perspective, the late 50s saw the inception of two of the best-loved cartoon characters of all time, Rocky (the flying squirrel) and Bullwinkle (the moose)!

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And Boris and Natasha ;-) ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

| 1962 | It's what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

Natasha: Vell, Boris, moose and sqvirrel hass defeated us again. Vhat ve do now, buy ticket and go home?

Boris: No, ve *steal* ticket and go home.

I proposed a waveform generator to a customer, and internally we called it The Wayback Machine. I included this as one of the figures in our proposal:

They bought it.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Super !-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142    Skype: skypeanalog |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
     It's what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

Twitter and the UC Berkley campus. The latter is much of an improvement from the '60s.

Best adult cartoon ever. Only approached my the original Muppets (before they went PC).