The infrastructure that matters, that I need, represents about 10-15% of the taxes we pay, and about a like amount on defense; the rest is squandered uselessly on bread and circuses.
Technically educated employees? That means they know Windows, MS Word and LabView, political correctness, and how to file a thousand different lawsuits for imagined slights, but not how to hold a screwdriver.
You just have no idea of reality. I take all the risk, put my life savings on the line, and get far less than everyone else combined. If I get no return on that, no advantage for all the sleepless nights, hassles, and years of zero pay I simply won't do it. Why should I? It's that simple.
You and your demagogues want show-trials to punish the rare people who leverage other people's money and ideas and walk away with the lion's share, but in the process you punish EVERYONE ELSE.
I am, by nature, creative. You, and the government want to bury me in paper, in fees and requirements, and kill all the fun. Hey, I don't need to create products and jobs. Make it miserable, and I'll do something else.
Rhetoric? Excuse me, I thought you said it was genius.
You don't have the first idea what's in Obama's mandatory insurance purchase and regulation bill--you're simply regurgitating--and neither do you know anything about American health care, so there's really no point in debating you on this.
That is, culturally, possible. In Japan unions actually press management to improve production. In the US they do the opposite. They create strife strictly to enrich the union bosses, create an artificially adversarial relationship with management, all so the union can fleece its members.
That's why unions should be restricted--they can get out of hand, and that should not be allowed.
Did you read the second sentence? The instructors reference is to your earliest teachers, often including parents. See if you can find a copy of Grob and Billias on American history and historians.
See (available at Amazon.com):=20
Interpretations of American History, 6th ed, vol. 1: To 1877 (Interpretations of American History; Patterns and Perspectives) by Gerald N. Grob (Paperback - Dec. 9, 1991)
Interpretations of American History, Sixth Edition, Vol. 2: SINCE 1877 (Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspectives) by Gerald N. Grob and George Athan Billias (Paperback - Dec. 9, 1991)
That course really trashed an abundance of assumptions that i did not even know i had.
I think US unions are somewhat different to in the ROW. My only encounter was at Pittcon a long time ago when a rough looking guy came around saying the equivalent of "mind your stand mister (ie give us some cash and we will)". One European exhibitor refused and came in the next morning to find that someone had driven a forklift through their exhibit mangling it. I presume we had paid up.
In Japan almost everyone thinks of themselves as middle class. The unions exist to make sure the average worker is looked after by what is a *very* patriarchal system. There is more unproductivity lurking in parts of Japan than you might imagine - but it isn't in their highly advanced manufacturing plants. You can still see rice being grown by people using oxen to pull a plough right next to semicon plants! The "democratic" voting system there means the whole place is held to ransom by the rice growers who are stuck in a time warp.
And salesmen come in threes. An elderly one who is past it, the one who knows roughly what he is talking about and a junior learning the ropes. Depending on who in the organisation decides to talk to them one of them will take the lead. An inordinate amount of physically visiting customers goes on - that is what keeps the shinkansen trains busy.
The ratio between the CEOs wages and the floor cleaners is the smallest in the industrialised world. Senior managers do get some extra perks.
Wouldn't the union members see through this sort of thing? UK had its fair share of communist inspired bother in the early 70's with the likes of Red Robbo. Thatcher put an end to that.
Equally the employer should treat employees fairly and not be entitled to hire and fire on a whim in the way that seems so common in the USA.
I know the history of the Lancashire cotton mills pretty well. The mill owners there were downright evil for the most part.
Therein lies the problem. The profit motive is essential, but chasing profit at the cost of everything else including business ethics is also dangerous. That is how the financial system was wrecked in 2008.
No. They clearly have to move to the cities. But the mill owners did not have to exploit them in the ruthless way that supply and demand economics allowed them to.
What happened was equally immoral. Except that the wages were paid in cities and the poor there had no way there to obtain fresh food except by buying overpriced stuff controlled by the Corn Laws to make the rich landowners and their merchants even richer. In the cities food was overpriced and frequently adulterated making it less nutricious and in some cases downright poisonous like the infamous Bradford sweets:
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Actually you can and they sometimes did. That is why every child over 6 was working in the mills. The family income was just about enough provided that everyone in it was able to work.
UK is experimenting with a wider zero tax rate band to avoid having subsidy traps of that type.
You really love your straw men don't you.
Another false dichotomy. I did not suggest that at all. I simply pointed out that we stopped being carbon neutral in the UK a very long time ago - it was once all forests.
Except you seem to think that none would be better.
I am inclined to prefer a model that makes sure that the poorest in society are not so poor that they view me as someone they should rob. Paying taxes provides useful services for everyone and a safety net for those who are unable to work through no fault of their own. Whilst I do resent the idle slobs that take advantage of the system they are a small proportion of the population. Most people do want to work.
I think you have far too many slimy lawyers, hedge fund managers and merchant bankers. They are expensive parasites.
Becoming a dollar millionaire isn't all that difficult.
It takes two to tango. US management is so anti-union that it can't conceive of anything but an adversarial relationship, unless it can bribe the union officials (which management has been known to do, along with supporting candidates for union posts who are known to be susceptible to bribery).
Management in the UK is less fanatically anti-union, but my memories of my short period as a low level union representative are dominated by incidents in which the personnel department tried to lie to us. I was actually better placed to detect these lies than the more senior union representatives, and consititutionally inclined to point out that the story we were being told was inconsistent with reality, which did make for a tolerably adversarial environment.
And one wonders how the union gets to fleece its members? Union dues are fixed, and the only way the union is going to get more money s to have more members. Corrupt union officials do have other sources of income, but mainly from management, who presumably don't want the kind of overtly adversarial relationship that slows down production.
Actually, that's why unions should be protected and encouraged. If they can stop worrying about protecting their very existence, they have more time to think about enriching the jobs of their members, and encouraging management to perform at a level likely to generate more jobs for potential union members.
It works for the rest of the world, but God's only country hasn't noticed, and still carries on as if the International Workers of the World were alive and well and threatening US cultural values, such as endemic right-wing stupidity.
Quite a lot of the gear that I worked on did get sold. The electron beam microfabricator project got canned before we'd started a single printed circuit layout - and managements relutance to let us send out the first circuit for layout was a clear indictator that they were contemplating canning the project.
The electron beam tester prototype was never demonstrated to a potential customer - the departing boss who should have been chasing customers hid in his office and worked on his next job, while the people who took over the task of selling the machine after he finally resigned decided that there weren't enough potential customers without going to the trouble of letting one of them see the machine in action, which was probably a mistake, since the machine collected its data impressively faster (as it has been designed to do - the whole massive investment in digitising the data collection was justified on that basis).
If the machine had been actively sold, it would have been worth a bundle.
Inadequate attention-span. Did you have ADHD as a kid? I happen to be particularly good with complex systems, and that influences what I do and what my employers have wanted me to do.
Which doesn't make you a prophet. There are plenty of "investment opportunities" that are never going to make money, even during a boom.
Since - as I went on to point out - this is a foolish criterion, you are congratulating yourself on being a twit.
Few countries are unlucky enough to have their economy depend on a single product. Australia would have to tighten its belt a lot if the market for iron ore declined signficantly. Carrying on as if the absence of such a single product is a sign of economic malaise is evidence that you don't know enough about economics to make a useful contribution to this kind of discussion.
s,
You've got anecdotes. I found statistics, albeit embedded in messy documents for which it didn't seem appropriate to post links. See if you can find some counter-statistics.
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It shows up in the goverment export statistics. I'm not going to bother digging through company balance sheets to support a point tha ti only raised to point up the fatuousness of your idea that Greece needed to be exporting some world-beating technical innovation before it could be seen to have a viable economy.
Germany was - and still is - insulated by the Wirtschaftswunder.
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German workers are skilled and well-educated, their trade unions are constructive, and their bosses are predominantly engineers (as opposed to book-keepers in the UK and lawyers in the US).
I see US debt rising from the time Regan got to be president, with a short decline under Clinton. National debt isn't the only indicator of national economic health - which is obvious enough if you think about what probably would have happened if national governments had reacted to the sub-prime mortagage crisis by emulating Hoover, rathter than Roosevelt. You'd have 25% unemployment and a much lower national debt.
Economic management was erractic in the 1970's - Keynes was still in vogue, but the people who applied what they thought were his prescriptions don't seem to have understood them very well. When Thatcher was elected in the UK in 1980, there was enough dissaatisfaction with the then prevailing economic orhtodoxy that she could get away with acting on advice from monetarists. She'd have been better off consulting astrologers, as Regan did - the British economy grew less under her care than any other advanced industrial economy - but that she could get awya with it speaks volumes about the state of the UK economy when she got to power.
That's roughly the way the software was designed that ran my father's counter-current continuous pulp digester in the mid-1960s. My father had always known how the continuous digestor should be controlled, and was able to get the algorithms programmed into the - ICT - computer than ran the digestor in the paper mill where he was the research manager. The main advantage of the computer is that you could program in long time constants, much longer than were compatible with the attention spans of all but the best of the shift cooks who had previously managed the manual control of the digestor. The son of the best of the guys involved in manually running the digestor is now the Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Melbourne University - we don't know to what extent intelligence is heritable, but we know that the father was also pretty bright, though he didn't grow up at time when he could have contemplated going to university.
My data collection and processing program for the PDP-8 used interrupts to control the TTY i/o, as well as to to keep track of the real-time clock, and the A/D converter. The program that I wrote in MACRO-8 was tolerably complicated.
Ouch. Most of the academic work in that area, at that time, was done in FORTRAN and run on computers that could run FORTRAN comfortably.
One can see how an obsessive 19-year-old could do it, and be amazed. I was 23 when I wrote great chunks of simulation and non-linear least squares minimisation software on the basis of what I could get from books and papers, and I'm still surprised how well it all turned out.
A definite bonus. I just got to hang around the chemistry department a few years longer than I should have done if I'd done what my supervisor expected me to do.
You might be better off turning the company into a cooperative. At least that way the poeple who inherit the company will have some understanding of how it works and why it works that way.
This is an anarcho-syndicalist sort of observation. I don't expect you to take it seriously.
Since you think that universal health care falls under bread and circuses, your estimate of the value you get for what you pay can be written off as right-wing ideosyncratic.
Universities aren't good at teaching people how to hold screwdrivers. They are pretty good at teaching them about phsyics and mathematics, but since your firm doesn't seem to need employees that have acquired that kind of information, you probably don't value it yourself.
If the firm is so bad at what it does that it hasn't built up and goodwill, you shouldn't have started it. If it is doing any kind of useful job, you will be able to sell it - as a going concern - for a lot more than if you closed it down and sold off the bits. That difference is your return for the hassles and sleepness nights. John Larkin talks about the "goodwill" component in his firm as if the goverent had invented it to allow them to charge death duty on it, but it basically covers the practical knowledge about doing their job built up in every employee, which can be seen the gorwth of the prodcutivity of new hires as they settle into a company.
There are entrepreneurs who can put together ideas and capital and create something new and profitable that would not have come into existence without their intervenetion. This is paiseworthy. If they subsequently cheat the people who provided the financial or intellectual capital, they should be tried, convicted and punished for these crimes.
I can't imagine why a demagogue would want to make such a process into a show trial, or how such a process would damage everybody else, or why such a demagogue would be my demagogue.
In reality, I think you are complaining about the prospects of putting the Goldman-Sachs executives on trial. Since their crime seems to have consisted of the rather uninspiring device of concocting a prospectus that claimed that an investment vehicle was sound when they knoew very well that it wasn't, entrepreurship isn't any kind of element in the case. Your Securities and Exchange Commission is duty bound to presecute that kind of fraud, evn if the bankers involved are well known, so the only demagoguery around would be yours
I've noticed. Your arguments aren't constrained by reality=A0- as above.
Sure. You want the freedom to invent the facts that suit you, and ignore everything else.=A0
I'll do
What do you actually do? Apart from trolling right-wing web-sites for impausible arguments and incomplete evidence, that is.
The UK elected a conservative government in 1951, which - granting your somewahat biased perspective - should be seen as having stopped the degeneration into tyranny. The UK is now run by a Conservative- Social Democrat coalition, and while it seems that Cameron leapt into bed with the Social Democrats mainly to muzzle the rabid right wing of his own party, the prospect for a degradation into tyranny don't look good.
Unless you plan on redefining tyranny as "any governemnt that Jame Arthur wouldn't vote for" which does fit your style of argument.
Which happens to give better health care in France and Germany than the US system does in the USA, and at two-thirds of the price per head. You should give it to your children, rather than the inadequate and over-priced crap that you seem to favour.
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Marx was a genius, when it came to economics. As a politician, he was a dud. I do critical commentary, not fanatical support. Since you don't seem to be up to critical commentary, you may not appreciate the difference. And this is reiterating a point I made later in the post to which you are responding - you might go to the trouble of reading the whole post before you respond to particular parts of it, if you don't want to be accused of text-chopping.
You don't seem to know much more about Obama's mandatory insurance purchase and regulation bill than that you don't like it, and your ideas about the current American health care system don't seem to include the information that it is half again as expensive as it ought to be, so this is one more case of the pot calling the kettle black (or Afro-American, if you wnat political correctness).
Only in cloud-cuckoo-land. Nobody's situation is exactly the same as anybody else's, and everybody thinks that they are carrying an unfair share of the cut. As a solution it imposes an unmanageable level of social disruption on an economy that wasn't working very well to begin with. Only a mindless Utopean would propose it.
It's certainly not the only solution that is consistent with the laws of conservation, and suggesting that it is implies that you are either a liar or an idiot. The evidnece does suggest the latter.
Not trusting in reincarnation, I plan to do as many things in life as I can. Doing things includes finsishing them properly and moving on... ideally leaving documentation for production to make copies for a decade or two. That's not called "inadequate attention span", it's called "productivity." Try it some time.
The Brat will probably run it better than I do. She has a head for business and management, and making money, whereas I just like to play with electronics. She started working in assembly during summer breaks; now she's managing engineering (which includes me), laying out all our PC boards, redoing the web site, and going to business school. A kid's got to start somewhere.
There was a fad in the '70s around here, centered in Berkeley of course, for co-op buisnesses; I still have a couple of the books, like "We Own It!" It was an interesting experiment. There seemed to be two available outcomes, sad failures and hilarious failures.
A very few are still around. There's a co-op bakery on 9th avenue, not bad stuff actually. They close down one day a week just to meet and talk. And talk. And talk. I hear that it's painful for the majority.
I wonder to what extent the collapse in shipping prices contributed to the problems there. The cost of shipping a TEU (container) from Asia to North America was approximately zero at the beginning of the year, rather than the usual few thousand dollars. Compare with, say, oil, which has been relatively stable despite the near collapse in the US financial markets.
If you can imagine comfortably making ends meet with a 50% consulting workload then you are better off than most people. I know grown men who are doing min-wage jobs right now just so they don't lose the family home. And they might still lose it.
--
Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
While Bill may think that the Greek shipping companies are a major GDP contributor I am afraid I'll have to burst that bubble. It accounts for a mere 5% of their already paltry GDP:
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Quote: "Shipping is one of the top contributors to Greece's 240 billion euro ($323.7 billion) economy along with tourism and construction. It accounted for about 5 percent of GDP in 2009."
Tourism is a major source of income there. Or to some extent, was. Folks from Europe tell me that Greece has become quite expensive and they prefer other areas such as Turkey. Same type of climate, more bang for the buck or Euro. So now shipping may account for a few more percentage points but not because of growth ...
Then an interesting tidbit from the above link, quote: "Greek shipping companies have to pay a tonnage tax but are exempt from income taxes on profits from operating Greek registered vessels." Ahm, well ...
--
Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
Most of Greece's shipping "industry" is actually only registration, not Greek companies. But what would BS know. "BS", what a descriptive set of initials. I'm always pleased to note that I'm the highest standard for Slowman's disdain, but please don't feed the jerk. Let him die that most unpleasant of deaths... alone ;-)
-- ...Jim Thompson
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