Design challenge

That shows a similar way to control the TV I did play with some Philips remote control transmitter circuit connected to a PC long ago. IR diode and photo diode, decoding and replay of remote commands... Also there were ultrasonic remotes.

Texas and Florida don't have much of a track record for keeping the jobs once they get exported there. Florida is going to get even more deeply submerged when sea-level rise kicks in - ice sheets melting and slipping off into the sea in Greenland and West Antarctica aren't of immediate concern in Florida, but they will get more interested as it speeds up.

Texas has to worry about political corruption, which does seem to be a side effect of industry-friendly politics. Once they've go the industry established they will get into the business of ripping it off.

Paying your workers properly is part of the democratic socialist package. Autocratic socialists, as in China, North Korea and Russia are less enthusiastic and it doesn't do anything good for the long term viability of their industries, though China is beginning to wake up to this.

Still you do vote and votes have some consequences. Often moronic, I cannot understand how the orange clown was elected, this says a lot more about those who followed him (such a caricature) than about the system.

In Soviet times you were required to go and vote (if you did not there would be questions/consequences, even though officially you had that right); and you had 1 (one) option to pick from. Pretty much the same in today's Russia, North Korea, Iran (not sure the latter two even bother to mimic elections).

So while the mess in the civilized parts of the world looks to be on the way up and one could see reasons for rebelling one might still want to make sure he is not cutting too eagerly the branch he is sitting on.

Yes, Florida will be in trouble in about 30,000 years. Drowned or frozen.

One good thing about the structure of the USA is that states compete for people and businesses. California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, the union-heavy former industrial and tech powerhouses, are making themselves less competitive and driving out business and talent. The energy is moving south.

I don't know if any european countries have a similar internal competition structure. Germany just drives industry out of the country. Russia exports talent.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

James Hansen has anxieties about problems that might show up earlier than that.

Money may be moving south. Business energy is a less well-defined concept. Plausible hucksters talk about it a lot. Objective measures tend to be thinner on the ground. We've all heard of Route 128 around Boston

Germany isn't exactly famous for driving industry out of the country. If it had I would have expected to have heard where it had turned up. America is famous for off-shoring stuff. American-owned companies were famously pathologically nervous about trade union activity, and weren't great places to wok in consequence. Most of the trade union activity I got involved in (and it wasn't much) was about protecting people from petty tyrants and idiots in the personnel department (who were ubiquitous).

Right-wing economists aren't famous for putting accurate values on the benefits of living in countries with universal health care, where the schools are paid for by the nation as whole, rather rather than a very large number of very small local schools districts, most of whom aren't all that rich.

My wife's graduate students were about half German and while most of them were interested in working in the US for a year or two (mainly to polish their English skills, which were already remarkably good) they didn't fancy it as a place to raise a family.

And doesn't seem to have happened yet.

Up until 2018 I did a lot of work for Chinese companies. At that time their software engineers were paid more than their UK equivalents, and they were starting to outsource lots of software creation to outside of China.

To be an engineer in China is a highly regarded occupation (unlike Europe) and every school has engineering clubs. All CAD tools from Synopsys/Cadence/Mentor are freely shared between kids and by early secondary school many kids are capable enough to design analogue circuits through to layout. The state has a hand in all of this. In the last few years the Chinese have been developing their own EDA tools, and are progressing faster than I would have considered possible. They have their own useable Virtuoso "clone" and SPICE simulators which seem to be on a par with the US tools.

In the Netherlands Geert Wilders has a lot in common with Donald Trump. He's not quite as pig ignorant and the hair style isn't quite a absurd, but the personality is just as defective. The Dutch coalition government scheme meant that he didn't get to be prime minister even when his party won more votes than any other single party - simple self-preservation meant that nobody was going to put him in charge.

Indeed, it was very irritating that the first presentation had the speaker as very weasel-like and paranoid in tone and demeanor, and that the "disgusting" comment was an attack, that the second presentation was stern and berating and the "digusting" comment was distancing: that's for neither entertainment nor journalistic purposes.

Would be pretty easy to learn how to use a FREE tool had vendors adopted such a policy, here! :> (though that, in part, is the basis for subsidized donations to various universities)

To a first order, you "pay" for what you value (until supply vastly outstrips demand). Look at average pays for different occupations in various markets and you'll see where society has chosen to make its "investments".

The trick is to find a place to LIVE that is affordable and do "remote work" in places where their market is accustomed to paying high for a particular skillset. E.g., San Francisco has some of the highest "compensation" packages for software engineers. But, adjusted for cost of living, considerably underperforms Seattle.

The relative values of (engineering) skillsets also varies based on location, likely a consequence of the types of "work" done in those regions.

This ignores that advantages of interacting with other engineers doing the same work.

"Remote work" sorts of works, but the data transfer bandwidth is definitely lower than you get with face-to-face collaboration.

And you can get a lot more out of transient facial expressions if you really are face-to-face.

I remember remotely helping an engineer in Spain and not picking up on his actual problem until he sent me a screen shot of an oscilloscope waveform. He was working at much too high a fan-out. A couple of buffers and his problem went away.

PS I just found I already put this on my website:

It's easy!

As for the Orange One, basically the Democrats handed the election to the Republicans by allowing whole industries to be destroyed, with the jobs exported to China. Eventually the working class revolted. There were also problems with candidate quality.

Just after Orange won his first term, Obama pointed out that the election of Orange was an effect, not a cause.

Orange won his second term when Joe Biden went blank during the Debate

- everybody has seen that look and knows what it means.

Overall, it's quite the change. In the days of WW2, the working class (all colors of collar) was Democrat, and the Capitalists (top-hats only) were Republican.

Now it's reversed, and the working class (all colors of collar) are Republicans, and Democrats not so much.

The European parallel is BREXIT in the UK.

Joe

I think UK's Starmer wants to sort of join the EU again

Did you mean World War Eleven?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Just turn it off.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

To some extent, it's due to better advertising skills. Republicans have got more money to spend on advertising for their candidates, and modern technology makes them more effective in selling them to unsophisticated voters.

Trump did get a big advantage from his time playing the boss on "The Apprentice". He was reduced to that clowning around because he was a commercial failure, but the show presented him as if he was a successful businessman, and lots of people watched it.

Thatcher wrecked the UK economy by running down UK manufacturing. The whole EEC idea is for individual countries to specialise on specific industries and import everything else from the rest of the EEC, but the UK doesn't seem to have had enough specialisations to keep enough of the population profitably employed (or wasn't good enough in it's specialities to make enough money out of them). BREXIT was the wrong reaction to that situation.

The US trick of outsourcing everything to cheaper labour in South-east Asia is even sillier, but they started of with a bigger economy and it has taken longer to wreck it.

Their gross income inequalities don't help.

It is a mess indeed, both orange and brexit look like clumsy peasant mutinies of the middle ages where some fraud of irrelevant personality has filled in the "leader" position.

Yeah. But no matter the form of government, claimed or actual, if the population is starving, the government and its ruler will be overthrown, and be replaced by somebody different. As always, some will be capable, most will be mediocre, and some will be far worse than what they replaced.

Joe

(freely?) Elected governments reward people who can run races and not necessarily govern.