scientists as superstars

I'm certainly persuadable. But hand-waving and ignoring history and data just isn't persuasive. To persuade me, your arguments have to be informed and persuasive.

For example, this notion that we can fix poverty by a. creating some authoritarian power to b. confiscate c. what hard-working people produce, and d. 'give' that confiscated loot to those less industrious.

How does that fix poverty?

No one has ever explained to me how taking what A made and giving it to B, (1) creates more for everyone, (2) encourages A to continue producing, (3) motivates B to add to the national wealth, or (4) fixes whatever problem B had in the first place.

It doesn't make sense.

If B's production (and thus income) is less than what he wishes to consume, how have your subsidies now made B able to produce more and meet his consumption? How has taking other people's stuff fixed B's original problem?

It hasn't. Instead you've made B totally dependent on A, and given A virtually the power of life and death over B.

Those are the sorts of questions I always ask, but none of the proponents of this plan can answer basic questions. Instead, all I get are pronouncements and hand-waving.

The whole theory doesn't make any sense to me, proponents can't defend it, and whenever I consult the many examples of it being tried over and over through the centuries, it doesn't work. It fails miserably for exactly the reasons you should think that it would.

That's why you're not persuasive.

Cheers, James Arthur

Some things that are devastating our lower-income people:

Cheap imported labor

Cheap imported goods

Fragmented families

Drugs

Physical, racial, and language segregation by diffusion

Great Society type disencentives to join the middle and upper income classes, to work, to feel engaged even if the work is not really productive.

What statistics? The one's Ive seen say that wealth is a heritable as heigh t in the USA

No, but having rich parents who live in a school district that spends more per head on primary and secondary education does seem to lead to better pay ing jobs.

If only it were that simple to find work.

Getting forty hours per week is frequently very difficult, and finding empl oyers who actually do pay the minimum wage can be equally difficult.

James Arthur has a huge blind spot here.

If you are too sick to work, you should starve. If you need an operation to get you fit enough to work, and you haven't got the money to pay for it, y ou should starve.

Not in the real world, and certainly not in the Scandinavian social democra cies. James Arthur does like to invent versions of "socialism" that fit his argument.

Only in James Arthur's parallel universe - the one he invents to support hi s rhetoric.

It gives you a place in society, associates and acquaintances and most peop le do understand that you can't freeload.

Because they'd understand that this wasn't what was being offered - mainly because it wouldn't work for society as a whole. Peooplem aren't quite as s tupid as James Arthur likes to pretend.

Because he'd steal from you? Theft isn't what's on offer.

Basic human nature is to be a social animal - to cooperate with your neighb ours to get a better outcome for the community as a whole.

Herbert Spencer invented Social Darwinism - much to Charles Darwin's disgus t - and ever since right-wing half-wits have been ignoring the fact that hu mans are quite as much social animals as bees. ants and naked mole rats. Th at's our basic evolutionary innovation, and things like speech and tool use are secondary aspects of it.

stop working as hard.

Please document your sources. You are probably referring to a bunch of smal l scale Utopian social experiments, which didn't happen to work. Democratic socialism is practiced on quite a large scale and works rather better than US-style capitialism - or least for the lower 99% of the income distributi on.

It clearly doesn't. Places like Germany and the Scandinavian countries aren 't poverty stricken and are considerably more equal that the US, which is a lot more unequal than pretty much any other advanced industrial country. C hina might be as bad, but we can't trust their statistics.

I heard a great economist today explain these discredited Utopian notions' proposers can't imagine their simplistic schemes possibly unfolding imperfectly.

"Most people who talk about this don't even talk in terms of 'If this then that,' they talk about it as 'This is how the world ought to be." (Thomas Sowell)

E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for something they already get free? It doesn't make any sense.

I think hardware design trains some of us to think ahead more carefully, to consider more possibilities beforehand, to test our ideas constantly to see if they're making sense / working as expected, and instills humility.

Hardware doesn't care how lovely your idea sounded.

There's nothing so humbling as a single transistor's behaving not-to-plan...

Cheers, James Arthur

----- "If you want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans." Yiddish saying

True for some people, false for many more.

Many people feel defined by their work, and feel pointless without it. Such people have a tendency to "give up and die" relatively shortly after retiring.

You seem to understand Theory X companies, but have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described by McGregor in the 1950s.

Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the difference instinctively, and created a rather successful Theory Y company. You may have heard of it.

"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better themselves without a direct reward in return. These managers view their employees as one of the most valuable assets to the company, driving the internal workings of the corporation. Employees additionally tend to take full responsibility for their work and do not need close supervision to create a quality product."

Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,

You could have done worse to emulate the hardware designs of Henry Cavendish. He was rich, but a hard worker (at science) regardless.

Human motivations didn't always start with money. They still don't.

I've been having major external work done on my house. It was stopped by the lockdown at just about the worst possible time. I was extremely concerned about water ingress and damage during a storm, but fortunately we had an extremely dry spring.

When the various (blue collar) contractor workers came back after lockdown ended, I asked them whether they were glad to be back at work. The majority (maybe 2/3) were glad to be working again.

That proportion was higher than I expected.

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He's black right-winger.

"Two weeks before the 2016 election, Sowell urged voters to vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Sowell's belief was that Trump would be easier to impeach than the country's first female president. In 2018, when asked on his thoughts of Trump's presidency, Sowell replied "I think he's better than the previous president."

His appeal to James Arthur is obvious. His grasp of reality, less so.

Not to James Arthur.

Doesn't seem to have worked for you or John Larkin.

Some of us have gotten used to it, but then again we can revise our plans t o bring them into closer correspondence with reality.

I also think that hardware design is appealing to, and done by, people who are hard-nosed thinkers by nature. But it does (often but not always) train us to examine actual causalities, and to do simple stuff that works, to check our work, to not make fatal mistakes.

It's sad when someone wants to be an electronic designer, but just doesn't have the mentality to do it. We need to find other uses for such people, if we can.

Sure, but a company doesn't become a Y just with a policy statement. It requires finding and hiring the right workers, treating them right, and firing the ones that don't work out.

HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.

It didn't cross my mind anybody could think mere policy statements could be sufficient.

In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes, wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted things to be done. Apparently when they were setting up new sites the first hires became a little sick and tired of them!

OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy pronouncements, which nobody could understand. That's one of the things that made me decide to leave.

HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.

I have Packard's book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina's book, The Journey. The contrast is hilarious.

I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious. He would have been my boss.

He looked at my resume and said "The first thing you need to do is decide if you are an engineer or a programmer."

What I decided to do was walk out.

Not if you were in HP!

Snap!

I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the HRdroid asked me whether I was "really a hardware of software engineer".

Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful. I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still offered me a job.

But then GEC was an infamous "cost plus" government contractor that was paid for bums on seats rather than deliverables.

I almost went to work at HP Labs on Page Mill Rd in 1987 when I graduated. Fortunately a hiring freeze delayed their offer until I'd already taken a postdoc at IBM.

Since I had a wife and daughter to support, I'd probably have taken HP's, which was for a permanent position, and wound up working on magneto-optical storage and living in a hovel in some desert in the East Bay with a monster commute. (I'm looking at you, Pleasanton.)

The manager was a very nice woman named Barbara Shula, who was an officer of the American Magnetics Society among other honours and accomplishments.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

San Francisco was still affordable about that time. Places like South City and San Bruno and Pacifica, too.

When I moved here from New Orleans, about 1980, I found a flat to rent in 20 minutes, for $315 a month, more space than I had in NOLA for $250.

We lived in San Mateo for about 6 months, in a high-rise at 624 Laurel Avenue iirc. I was making $750 per month and the rent was $450, so it didn't last long. Fortunately that was the year my IBM fellowship came in, so my stipend went up to a princely $1100, and we moved into family housing on campus.

In Vancouver, 1982-83, I paid $225 for a studio in a nice brownstone a block from the beach. Not so much these days.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I avoided taking a job at GEC research in Wembley for the same reason.

I wonder if East Palo Alto, the other side of the railway tracks[1], would have been preferable :)

Most HP people I bumped into were very nice, and wanted to help you in any way they could.

East PA was super sketchy in those days. Mostly it was on the other side of Highway 101, so it was comparatively isolated. Train tracks are a whole lot easier to cross.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I made $32K as a design engineer at a little company in Fremont. I took BART from my flat across the street from Mission Dolores. Simpler times. But AIDS was just starting up.