conservation of Euros

Charlie, Where is it you live?

My daughter-in-law (Duane's widow) needs to move to somewhere around Palm Desert to run her father's car parts business (he is in failing health). ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
      The only thing bipartisan in this country is hypocrisy

Yes, it is an issue that my wife and I deal with all the time. We do have some significant savings, but they are in CDs, which she considers 'safe.' Our big problem is that savings interest rates keep going down and down, but inflation hasn't stopped, and the rates on borrowed money keep going up! We are presently looking around for a new bank to move what little money we have to. A bank seems to offer decent rates for about a year, and then back off. Just to get 1% on a

12 month CD is almost impossible to find. We are presently looking at AMEX...

Charlie

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Good engineers almost always have unique skills and experience. If we can find an employer who needs us, they rarely have the option of hiring somebody else with a comparable mix of talents.

We don't need a trade union, and trade unions can't usually do anything much for us.

People with more stereotyped skills are less fortunate. Employers can send out a form letter to employment agencies and take their pick of a bunch of more or less interchangeable candidates. There will be a standard rate for the job, so there isn't a lot of financial advantage in looking for a better job - you might end up with more congenial colleagues and a more competent boss, but unless you have an acquaintance already working for your target employer, you won't be able to find this out in advance.

The down-side of unique skills and experience is that it can take a while to find an employer who needs someone like you; employers get less picky when the economy is running flat out,but one does gget to hear the word "over-qualified" more often than one would like.

I don't think unions can be blamed for this; employers do like to pidgeon-hole their employees, and trade qualifications play to this. Multiple-skills trademen transcend this sort of thinking, but I've only heard about them.

Because they depend on innovation, which - in turn - depends on people who don't need trade unions.

Less innovative US buinesses have been relatively unsuccessful because they tend to out-source work which can be done by interchangeable trademen to countries where these trademen are paid less. This makes it difficult to practice management by walking about.

The Germans haven't made this mistake, which may be why they are second only to China in export volume, despite having only 6.2% of the population, and a strong and legally entrenched trade union movement.

Unlike US trade unions, which tend to be regularly corrupted by employers (who then turn around and complain that the malleable officials that they helped to get elected are prone to other kinds of criminal behaviour), German trade unions seems to be both honest and sensible, and may well have contributed to Germany's industrial success.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Jim, I am in Desert Hot Springs. From my house, I can get to central Palm Desert in half an hour. The house next door is four bedrooms (or five, if they converted the single car garage to another room...) and probably originally went for $390K. I suspect that if you could get hold of the bank that holds the foreclosure, it would be available for less than $200K...

My real address is on my web siite.

Charlie

Aha! I'll pass along the info. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
      The only thing bipartisan in this country is hypocrisy

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If you weren't going to make money out of the equipment you wouldn't have bought it. It's a depreciating asset, but until it is fully depreciated its an asset to the firm and adds to its value.

Based on your comment above, you are the one who is clueless.

Of course not. That's part of your running expenses, and has to be funded from money you collect the gear that you sell every year.

So what. That how most businesses work. An old friend of mine in Australia started up a company that eventually got most of its cash flow from royalties on my friends patents, but that is exceptional, and my old friend wasn't too pleased with the policy decisions that lead to that state of affairs, and is now separated from the company that he set up.

Your business advisors haven't suggested ways of restructuring the company to avoid this particular scenario? When I did Commerce 1 at secondary school in Tasmania, surrounded by farmers sons, the teacher was obliged to detail some of the schemes that worked in Tasmania at the time ...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Since John Larkin's comments are surprisingly unsophisticated for someone in his position, his characterisation of me as "clueless" does seem to represent one of his outbursts of wishful thinking.

Since you are a totally trivial little jerk, this point probably isn't quite as obvious to you as it is to more sophisticated adults, but you should note that you have - once again - made an ass of yourself.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Your "expert" opinion of the Greek economy seems to have missed the point that they own and run more ships than any other country. This isn't a form of productivity that either you or Joerg seem to know much about, and it does make the point that Greece is a real country with real means of making money. Their goverment has been making a mess of running the economy for quite some time now - the Greek military junta that ran the country from 1967 to 1974 didn't leave the economy in a well-organised state, and political passion has stood in the way of rational government - but the current crisis does seem to have finally been sufficiently dramatic to command concentrated atention.

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

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

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

CDs at 1.5% are pretty easy to find, though CDs in general are a poor place to put money. I have a chunk in plain savings, which is even worse, but it's there as an extended emergency fund (pay the mortgage for a couple of years). One's life's savings in such a place is nuts.

You mean Spain and Portugal. The Spanish economy is now growing again, if only by 0.1% in the last quarter. Portugal has more of problem, in that it was selling itself as a low wage economy and more recent additions to the EU offer even lower wages, but at least it has already dealt with the problems that brought the Greeks down, and is correspondingly better placed to reduce its budget deficit to acceptable levels.

As a prophet, you are about as reliable as the right wing commentators you are parroting, which is to say, not very.

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These are are the problems that the Greek governemnt has now faced up to, whence the aggressive political theatre in the streets of Athens.

The difference in GDP between Greece and its neighbours isn't dramatic. It is stiil an advanced industrial country. It doesn't enjoy the economies of scale of the larger European countries, but it's inhabitants don't have to spend a bundle on heating their houses, and its commercial sector can't claim to be making money by selling the oil and gas that heats Northern European homes and contributes to the Northern European GDP.

Not dramatically.

Australia exports around a billion dollars worth of scientifc instruments and services every year. When I was a student - until 1970

- Australia had always had a positive balance of trade in scientific instruments. It's small beer compared with the minerals and primary produce - even wine exports bring in several billion dollars a year - but its the kind of thing (like the Greek shipping fleet) that you won't know about if you aren't - in some way - involved.

Stall recovery is famously conter-intuitive. When I was a kid and interested in aircraft, I got to read the account of the first guy who worked out how to get out of a stall, and proceeded to get into an aircraft, take off and test his hypothesis - putting his neck on the line in the process.

The non-linear mechanisms involved don't have obvious analogies with the Greek situation - all the control mechanisms were available and working as expected, but the Greek government seems to have ingored the fact that they were steadily losing height.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

In the mid-90's my financial adviser in Europe and I both predicted that the financial system in Greece would one day teeter and go kablouie. That's before there even was a Euro. The only thing we didn't see was that the implosion would be this massive and loud but that's because they joined the Euro zone and thus couldn't devalue their currency anymore.

Care to point out any high-tech products they make and sell in significant volumes?

30% less and retirement around 5 years earlier than other EU countries is "not dramatically"?

I have yet to see one such instrument. Would be a first for me, and I deal with tons of instruments in my job (but admittedly, mostly EE stuff). However, I do have an Astor BPJ radio :-)

In the 70's most countries were reasonable with financial management. That has dramatically changed during the last few years, and the US is unfortunately no exception.

I think they are really close to a flat spin. Maybe they can recover if they ditch all that socialist money squandering. If they don't then they will not recover.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Oh, like us (US), you mean?

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Take a look at Vanguard's GNMA fund (VFIIX) that pays 3.44%. It's government insured, and principal went up today (0.09%) as the market fell 1%. But the downside could be -10% if market conditions change. Another idea is junk bonds that pay 9% or better, but the risk is higher at 25%. Look at HYG or VWEHX for high yield junk bonds (Yahoo finance). They have a good record the past year, (about 32%) but took a bath in 2008. But all the losses were recovered the next year, plus more.

-Bill

You should campaign to get the law changed then.

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

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

For a quick guide on how the UK system works try

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

Regards, Martin Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regards, Martin Brown

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

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

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

You set a false dichotomy. What I am saying is that the ruthless exploitation of the poor at below subsistence living rates was something that they had to fight against and as such the formation of unions or militias was inevitable. In France it led to a wholesale revolution with mass slaughter of the gentry and ruling classes.

The Chartists looked at one point like they might do the same thing in the UK - that was at least the fear of the establishment.

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

But coal really only took off big time after Abraham Darby in Coalbrookedale patented a means to smelt iron ore by using coke around

1709. That is still a long time before the Victorian era.

No they don't. Look at Standard Oil in your own country - it required government legislation to bring their monopolistic empire under control. They can agree not to outbid each other and keep wages low.

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

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

Regards, Martin Brown

[...]

Most recently we aren't much better. And in some states like California the left has has really doomed any future budget by outright stupid decisions. However, in contrast to other regions of the world we do have a well-oiled high-tech machinery out here, tons of sales, new inventions every day. That is sorely lacking elsewhere. One can't live high on the hog with tourism being just about the only sizeable source on revenue.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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[...]

Here goes the bragging again.

How come that John, probably not that much different in age from you, makes tons of money designing and building electronics, right now, has created tons of jobs, and you don't? To me, whether someone has a Ph.D. is rather irrelevant. What he or she does, that's relevant.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Use another domain or send PM.