In my post, I mentioned that the "screen rooms" where I worked had braided ground straps to building ground. The latest I could have seen one was in late 2012, and I never *worked* in one - I just saw them when going by in the hall. I am pretty sure they were grounded somehow, but it may have been a plain old wire.
Flashlight. (Everybody's got a little light under the sun.)
Matt Roberds
And failed horribly when the less competent have worked outs ways of weedin g out the more competent - usually by buying politicians and organising "de pletion allowances" and other tax-payer unfriendly flim-flam.
Everybody understands that medical practitioners have to be trained and lic ensed. Fewer understand that the AMA uses unreasonable training and licensi ng requirements as a form of professional birht control.
If it isn't at the expense of people who already have money
That's a false dichotomy - one of James Arthur's favourite rhetorical trick s.
In fact there is a range of possible government interventions. The version James is being justly rude about is the centrally planned economy, adopted by the USSR and shown to be practicable, if seriously sub-optimal.
All advanced industrial countries go in for some measure of government inte rvention in the free market - even the US has anti-trust legislation.
Germany and Scandinavia go a good deal further, and seem to have rather mor e productive economies than the US does. Germany famously spends more on pr oviding some form of tertiary training for a bigger proportion of their pop ulation than any other country, and - equally famously - out-exports the US A despite having only a quarter of the population.
They also have legally enforced trade-union representation on the "secondar y boards" of their larger companies, which James Arthur will assure you to be a recipe for disaster (despite the fact that it seems to work rather wel l).
Well-informed too, just like James.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Natural monopolies aren't efficient markets. Attempts to privatise them ten d to end in tears.
And even Adam Smith was aware that merchants tend to conspire together to d efraud their customers.
" People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and div ersion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the sa me trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to faci litate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. Chapter X, Part II, p. 152"
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
At IBM Yorktown in the early 80s, people's labs were getting shifted around constantly due to expansion. One guy, an electron microscopist, insisted on a big solid copper sheet screen room to put his SEMs in. The real motive was to make it too expensive to move his lab ever again.
Some years later he got fired for cussing out the president of a major university.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
Chuckle. That should have worked.
Moving was also a big problem at the company with my brass mesh screen room. One of my numerous bad habits is to aggravate a problem in order to draw attention to it. After one move, I attempted to order casters and rollers for all the lab benches and desks in order to make the next inevitable move somewhat easier. I also renamed our group the "Portable Radio Division" where portable referred to the division, not the radio.
As I recall, IBM stood for "I've Been Moved".
Bad move. A necessary survival skill is knowing how to be insulting without resorting to profanity. I think it's called diplomacy. Some people just don't have the necessary talent and self control.
Anecdotal drivel: During the dot com era, I was working inside a hot and messy server closet on a difficult problem at a startup company. My barricade of tools, equipment, boxes, and a "Do Not Disrupt" sign scattered in the hallway attracted the attention of the employees. Most were nice enough not bug me with questions such as "when is the server going to be back up?" At one point, my concentration was broken by a 20 something year old, wearing sandals, torn Levi's, and a Hawaiian shirt. I don't recall exactly what I said, but it probably wasn't very diplomatic. I later learned he was the founder and company president. I finished the work and was promptly paid, but there was no further business from the company.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Monel metal staples are more common than brass. Used for outside work, especially near the sea. Stainless also works, but the tips will rust if the wood is always wet (crevice corrosion being the culprit).
I had not heard of brass staples for such things, and the acmestaple website doesn't list them.
I do have an ancient Bates office stapler that makes staples from a big spool of half-hard brass wire. I got this stapler as a big of parts in
1968 or so with the comment that if I could figure out how to reassemble the stapler, it was mine. Someone had taken it apart for a reason I never learned, and then couldn't undo the deed. Nothing like some motivation - those staplers were quite expensive. It is still my main stapler. I did buy extra spools of wire, sensing that Bates was slowly failing and would soon disappear.I recall seeing it earlier in the posting, but perhaps it was from some other poster.
Is this screen room also used as a vibratory sifter?
Coleman lantern?
Joe Gwinn
Yes, those are all results of bigger and bigger government. Whenever the government regulates something, it creates a huge incentive (and advantage) for monied interested parties to mold the regulations in their favor.
That generally means regulations exclude people and benefit the existing players.
It's odd that more of that is your solution to almost every problem.
True. It's not much different than Barack Obama giving taxpayer billions to G.M., or Solyndra, or building hundreds of millions for left-wing advocacy groups into Obamacare.
Fewer people still understand that the AMA is not a physician's organization founded for the public good, but a self-interested for-profit lobbying group. Only 17% of U.S. doctors belong to it.
It's not a false dichotomy, it was a pointed and practical example of the consequences--utter failure--of current levels of planning and intervention in current real-life policy.
If that modest intellectual leap from abstraction to real life seems like devious rhetorical trick to you, well, we're obviously not communicating. I test theories, circuits, and arguments. Constantly. I distrust them, look for the holes. You apparently don't.
To me it's perfectly natural to set real-life results right next to a theory and compare them in one continuous thought. For you, apparently not. I distrust theories. You distrust people.
Cheers, James Arthur
d,
oss.
at
ding out the more competent - usually by buying politicians and organising "depletion allowances" and other tax-payer unfriendly flim-flam.
e)
So why is the US government much more susceptible than - say - the German a nd Swedish governments to this sort of pressure? Both are "bigger" in the s ense of collecting a bigger proportion of the national income -55% for Swed en, 50% for Germany compared with 30% for the USA, but considerably less pr one than the USA to creating sweatheart deals for particularly industies wi th particularly industrious lobbyists.
Not "more". Merely enough. It's a distinction that you don't want to notice .
licensed. Fewer understand that the AMA uses unreasonable training and lic ensing requirements as a form of professional birth control.
Except that it actually happens, whereas Obama - personally didn't give bil lions to GM. He sat on his hands until GM had declared itself bankrupt, aft er which the government bought the assets and sorted it out. Like the banks , GM was too big to be allowed to fail, and it did cost a lot of money to r econstruct it. Dubbya had also put money into GM, but hadn't had enough sen se to get rid of the people who were mismanaging it at the time.
Similarly, Solyandra didn't get billions from the government. It did get " a $536 million U.S. Energy Department loan guarantee before going bankrupt. "
I imagine the "hundreds of millions for left-wing advocacy groups" built in to Obamacare are equally well documented.
That does fit the US model. The people who own the country (or in this case , the medical profession) run the country for their own benefit.
ly
ricks.
ion James is being justly rude about is the centrally planned economy, adop ted by the USSR and shown to be practicable, if seriously sub-optimal.
Rubbish. The current levels of US planning and intervention aren't remotely compatible with the USSR-style of central economic planning, which didn't work well, and fall considerably short of the - higher, but scarcely Russia n - levels of planning and intervention that work very well in most other a dvanced industrial countries.
It wasn't any kind of modest intellectual leap. It was an inaccurate and mi sleading comparison of two very different systems, which ignored the existe nce of a third - less extreme - variant which works a whole lot better than either of the systems you condescend to compare.
You pick the "real-life results" you compare. You chose them with the fixed and obvious intention of being able to make the argument you want to make. The fact that you ignore the bulk of the real world in selecting the resul ts you chose to compare makes it obvious why I distrust you, and why I ridi cule your demented arguments and your claims to be engaging in a rational d iscussion.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Thanks. I didn't know that and such staples might be useful in future construction projects.
It's a special from Acme. However, brass and brass plated staples are common in the art industry, where they're used to fasten canvas to a wooden frame for oil paintings. Staples that rust might leave a rust stain: Note that all this was before the internet. At the time, I had to rely on catalogs, indexes, other engineers, and manufacturers reps in order to find brass staples. At best, that was a hit and miss proposition. Today, a few minutes searching with Google would do what previously took hours.
Interesting... I've never seen one: Looks like you can still get wire refills: Note that they used (B-50) brass wire staples:
Ummm... No.
Yep. Any source of lighting that didn't require waiting for the facilities people to approve the necessary wiring.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
The cops get them first....
At WCOEQ.PK Tulsa in the early 00s, our cubicles got shifted around a lot, both because of expansion, and because of consolidating people from (expensive) downtown offices to (cheaper) ones in the former Memorex-Telex plant north of town. I started with a roomy cubicle but it got smaller with each move, at intervals of about 6 to 8 months. There was the usual amount of grumbling about this, which was mostly ignored by manglement.
One day, with my move to a really small cubicle bearing down, I got the genius idea to see what Uncle Sam said about it. He doesn't have much to say about cubicles, but he *does* have some rules about keeping animals. If I was a 180 pound monkey, my proposed cubicle would have been too small. I sent off an email full of references to "123 CFR 456 paragraph 5 line 2" and similar. I shortly had my boss, her boss, and HR people all talking to me, trying to make sure I wasn't about to sue the company or quit. I didn't care *that* much about the smaller cube, but the reaction was quite amusing.
I've been to and worked at universities... did the guy deserve the cussing out?
Matt Roberds
Don't think so. The electron microscopist got steadily angrier and angrier as he got older. We all tend to turn into caricatures of ourselves as we age, and his just wasn't a very nice caricature, I'm afraid. I lost touch with him after that.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
Brass plated steel isn't all that rustproof, but probably good enough for a painting. Nor was monel metal available in the 1600s.
Ahh. So that's the reason. Monel would work for this too.
Ain't that the truth. A lot of bookcase space was taken up with massive catalogs.
[snip]Mine is the second from the right, with the black handle. Manufacture date is about right too. Mine was almost unused before it was taken apart.
I did know of this website. While back in the day I bought enough spools to keep me in little staples for a very long time, it's good that there is still a source.
Joe Gwinn
and,
Boss.
that
r,
eeding out the more competent - usually by buying politicians and organisin g "depletion allowances" and other tax-payer unfriendly flim-flam.
he
age)
and Swedish governments to this sort of pressure? Both are "bigger" in the sense of collecting a bigger proportion of the national income -55% for Sw eden, 50% for Germany compared with 30% for the USA, but considerably less prone than the USA to creating sweatheart deals for particularly industies with particularly industrious lobbyists.
Is the more susceptible? I don't follow Europe that much, not with Barack burning down the house here. I recall seeing a PBS (progressive public television in the U.S.) documentary to the effect that Europe's already dominated by a large number of century-old dinosaur megacorps, with essentially no chance for start-ups. So, European cronies may have already successfully prevented spry, effective competition. Mission accomplished.
The German solar initiative looks like a cronyism apocalypse for the ages.
The U.S. is quite different culturally and demographically, not to mention constitutionally.
gce.
But it's never enough, and you never specify how much would be.
nd licensed. Fewer understand that the AMA uses unreasonable training and l icensing requirements as a form of professional birth control.
ns
illions to GM. He sat on his hands until GM had declared itself bankrupt, a fter which the government bought the assets and sorted it out.
Complete misrepresentation of what actually happened.
ot of money to reconstruct it. Dubbya had also put money into GM, but hadn' t had enough sense to get rid of the people who were mismanaging it at the time.
Fiction.
" a $536 million U.S. Energy Department loan guarantee before going bankrup t."
into Obamacare are equally well documented.
se, the medical profession) run the country for their own benefit.
And, what did the AMA support? Obamacare, even though 87% of their (remaining) members oppose it. So of course Barack Obama publicly touts the AMA's support as a way of misleading the public into believing doctors supported Obamacare.
So, you've got the industry involvement / corrosive effect right, but have missed how it's a direct result of the stuff you prescribe, e.g., Obamacarp.
ably
py
tricks.
rsion James is being justly rude about is the centrally planned economy, ad opted by the USSR and shown to be practicable, if seriously sub-optimal.
ly compatible with the USSR-style of central economic planning,
You're ignoring the example right under our noses, and wandering off into abstraction land. They obviously planned and were 100% responsible for the website. They had almost four years. Yet it was a colossal screw-up.
That's just a tiny bit of what these same idiots presume to centrally plan under Obamacare.
scarcely Russian - levels of planning and intervention that work very well in most other advanced industrial countries.
misleading comparison of two very different systems, which ignored the exis tence of a third - less extreme - variant which works a whole lot better th an either of the systems you condescend to compare.
You're still not getting it.
ed and obvious intention of being able to make the argument you want to mak e. The fact that you ignore the bulk of the real world in selecting the res ults you chose to compare makes it obvious why I distrust you, and why I ri dicule your demented arguments and your claims to be engaging in a rational discussion.
Okay, let's use Bill Sloman's results instead: the Obamacare website wasn't centrally planned--the Administration had nothing to do with it(!)--and it wasn't a failure, it was great!
There, now it fits your narrative.
Cheers, James Arthur
I have a friend in France who has a company similar to mine, a copy actually, but he has no formal full-time employees. It's just too difficult and expensive to hire people in France. I guess huge, established companies can have the HR and legal staff necessary to comply with regs, but a small company can't. The US has that problem, but to a lesser extent. Any small company that seriously tried to comply with all the laws and regs would have one worker and seven lawyers.
I don't see a lot of small instrumentation and electronic-exotica companies starting in Europe or Asia or India. The european semiconductor segment is small and not very dynamic compared to the US. It's probably a combination of the legal systems and the cultures.
The UK seems a bit better than mainland Europe, more interesting small and mid-sized electronic companies.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation
I wasn't concerned (much) about rust. It was dissimilar metals conspiring together to produce diodes which would have produced mixing and therefore intermodulation junk. I didn't want that junk in the screen room or near the test equipment.
It used to be that I could tell quite a bit about a person by the books they had read. Just one look at their bookshelf was enough. These days, I have to look at their browser history and bookmarks to see what they're up to. Here's mine: There are several more bookshelves with as many books and junk elsewhere in the house. Time for a purge.
Nice. I've seen a few of those over the years, but never with any brass wire on the spool. They show up at the local thrift shops occasionally. I'll buy one and see if I can use it (more junk). Putting it back together doesn't seem too complicated.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
e:
emand, how come Safeway is always out of Boston Creme Donuts?
ed Boss.
n that people running corporations are competent, loyal,
ter, weeding out the less competent. It has worked amazingly well at optim izing all sorts of things.
weeding out the more competent - usually by buying politicians and organis ing "depletion allowances" and other tax-payer unfriendly flim-flam.
the government regulates something, it creates a huge incentive (and adva ntage) for monied interested parties to mold the regulations in their favor .
an and Swedish governments to this sort of pressure? Both are "bigger" in t he sense of collecting a bigger proportion of the national income -55% for Sweden, 50% for Germany compared with 30% for the USA, but considerably les s prone than the USA to creating sweetheart deals for particularly industri es with particularly industrious lobbyists.
Dear me. Europe does have long-established companies. My first job in the U K was with George Kent Instruments, which was started in 1838, making flow meters.
My next was with EMI Central Research which was established in the 1920's a s the British equivalent of RCA, making the electronics for talking movies.
From there I went to ITT-Creed which got started in 1912, and moved into te leprinters in 1924, with a brief excursion into Chessell Recorders, who wer e part of the Eurotherm Group (which started in 1965, and started spawning smaller subsidiaries, including Chessell, in 1970.
Then on to Cambridge Instruments in Cambridge, which had been started by Ho race Darwin, Charles Darwin's youngest son in 1881, grown hugely, been take n over by George Kent Ltd. in 1968 and gutted by them, leaving the loss-mak ing electron microscope business which they floated off as Cambridge Instru ments in 1979.
Every last one of those companies has either gone bust or been taken over s ince then.
Those dinosaur mega-corps do seem to be busy tearing one another to pieces and merging the fragments.
The US has Dupont which dates back to 1802. Do you expect Europeans to see that as representative of US industry.
In your imagination.
.It did - as it was intended to - multiply the market for photovoltaic cells by a factor of ten, and halved the unit price. The Chinese saw what the Ge rmans had done, and did it again, leaving all the German economies of scale looking depressingly irrelevant - though they'd made a lot of money before the Chinese ate their lunch.
n constitutionally.
The demographic difference - as spelled out by Thomas Piketty - is that the US has grown by immigration. This shaped the way the society and the econo my were organised. Most of the immigrants came from Europe so the intrinsic cultural differences are insubstantial.
ing
tice.
You claim that "it's never enough" but don't bother to produce an example. Scandinavia and Germany do seem to be politically stable, so what they've g ot would seem to be "enough", and I'm happy to give them as an example of " adequate" government intervention.
The US Gini-index keeps on rising, so you've got an unstable situation.
and licensed. Fewer understand that the AMA uses unreasonable training and licensing requirements as a form of professional birth control.
ions to G.M., or Solyndra, or building hundreds of millions for left-wing a dvocacy groups into Obamacare.
billions to GM. He sat on his hands until GM had declared itself bankrupt, after which the government bought the assets and sorted it out.
As opposed to your " Obama giving taxpayer billions" to GM?
He did make sure that the company declared itself bankrupt before the gover nment acted to preserve the jobs and the manufacturing base.
In a very real sense, what came out of the rescue isn't GM, and you've comp lained here that the shareholders got shafted - neglecting the fact that th ey'd left an incompetent management in place for much too long. GM was in d eep trouble before the GFC.
lot of money to reconstruct it. Dubbya had also put money into GM, but had n't had enough sense to get rid of the people who were mismanaging it at th e time.
Sadly true. Not the way you'd present the story, but you do go in for selec tive reporting.
t " a $536 million U.S. Energy Department loan guarantee before going bankr upt."
t into Obamacare are equally well documented.
nization founded for the public good, but a self-interested for-profit lob bying group. Only 17% of U.S. doctors belong to it.
case, the medical profession) run the country for their own benefit.
aining) members oppose it. So of course Barack Obama publicly touts the A MA's support as a way of misleading the public into believing doctors suppo rted Obamacare.
Only 17% of US doctors are members of the AMA, and 87% of that 17% oppose O bamacare, so only 14.8% of US doctors can be guaranteed to oppose Obamacare .
Obama may not be misleading the public at all ...
e missed how it's a direct result of the stuff you prescribe, e.g., Obamac arp.
You seem to have missed a few steps in that chain of argument. Obamacare is essentially a deal negotiated between Congress and the medical insurance b usiness, where they get bribed to offer slightly more equitable medical ins urance. If the US constitution supported political structures that were les s well-adapted to looking after the interests of people with lots of money, Congress might have been able to negotiate a better deal.
More like the sorts of deals that have been negotiated in France, Germany a nd Scandinavia. where health care represents an appreciable smaller drain o n the GDP.
t and untrustworthy, so politicians(*) should run everything. (Preferably through a giant website--"it'll be like Travelocity"--and some snappy false-advertising.)
al tricks.
version James is being justly rude about is the centrally planned economy, adopted by the USSR and shown to be practicable, if seriously sub-optimal.
the consequences--utter failure--of current levels of planning and interv ention in current real-life policy.
tely compatible with the USSR-style of central economic planning,
abstraction land. They obviously planned and were 100% responsible for th e website. They had almost four years. Yet it was a colossal screw-up.
Not the first in that area, and it won't be the last. US free enterprise de mands the right to fail on the largest possible scale (if it isn't a bank) and the Obamacare website was contracted out to just such an enterprise.
n under Obamacare.
The website development was contracted out. That's the very antithesis of c entral planning.
t scarcely Russian - levels of planning and intervention that work very wel l in most other advanced industrial countries.
like devious rhetorical trick to you, well, we're obviously not communicat ing. I test theories, circuits, and arguments. Constantly. I distrust them , look for the holes. You apparently don't.
d misleading comparison of two very different systems, which ignored the ex istence of a third - less extreme - variant which works a whole lot better than either of the systems you condescend to compare.
Obviously not. Quite why you think that the failure of the free-enterprise development of the Obamacare website is evidence that a state-run health ca re system can't work - when any number of them work fine in Europe - really does escape me.
I can see why you'd want to make the argument - there don't seem to be any better ones around - but it is something of a confession fo intellectual de speration that you'd even try.
a theory and compare them in one continuous thought. For you, apparently n ot. I distrust theories. You distrust people.
ixed and obvious intention of being able to make the argument you want to m ake. The fact that you ignore the bulk of the real world in selecting the r esults you chose to compare makes it obvious why I distrust you, and why I ridicule your demented arguments and your claims to be engaging in a ration al discussion.
The Obama-care website wasn't - in fact - centrally planned, but sub-contra cted out to a private developer. Once the Administration had selected the c ontractor they could have tried to micro-manage them, but obviously didn't. They did intervene late in the process, changing the specification, as cus tomers are prone to do (both central planners and pointy-headed bosses).
The development was a failure. One out of three isn't great.
Almost, bar two fatal defects.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
te:
lly, but he has no formal full-time employees. It's just too difficult and expensive to hire people in France. I guess huge, established companies can have the HR and legal staff necessary to comply with regs, but a small company can't. T he US has that problem, but to a lesser extent. Any small company that seriously tried to comply with all the laws and regs would have one worker and seven lawyers.
Probably not. I worked for the Eurotherm Group in the UK for a few months, specifically for Chessell Recorders. Eurotherm - like Racal, another UK gro up, limited the size of individual companies within the group to about 250 employees.
Chessell didn't have any Human Relations staff - hiring was managed by the section bosses and their secretaries. The regulations are complex, but they aren't impossibly complex, and you can presumably sub-contract some of the messier bits, as do when you hire an accountant.
es starting in Europe or Asia or India. The european semiconductor segment is small and not very dynamic compared to the US. It's probably a combination of the legal systems and the cultures.
So you don't do any work for ASML? You've in fact boasted about providing i nstrumentation for funny lasers for their hard-UV lithography sources.
ASML isn't small, and it is a spin-off from Philips, and it is now the majo r player in the international semiconductor lithography market, having knoc ked the Japanese off their perch.
The fact that you don't see a lot of small instrumentation and electronic-e xotica companies starting in the Europe or Asia or India probably means no more than that Fox News doesn't report them in the media that program your brain.
d mid-sized electronic companies.
The fact that they advertise in English in the English language trade magaz ines may have something to do with that.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Wow, then you'll probably make a killing in capital gains. Uncle Brown now wants an extra 3% of those because that's the way he "fixed" the budget.
What will happen to the famous water-driven elevator?
A mile is still easily walkable. Or maybe pick up some yard sale bikes, paint them Highland-Technology blue, with mountain shapes and sun, and use them as company lunch vehicles. Of course, in observance of true Silicon Valley style they have to have your URL on them. Plus that newfangled square 2D bar code thingie.
I've found that since GoToMeeting and services like that it no longer really matters where I am located. Only one of my clients is within driving (or actually even biking) distance, and most are now out of state. For the usual reasons.
Houston is now the place. Miserable climate but that area has a really high concentration of good engineers. It's where things are moving.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
I hope they survived. One German immigrant was craving this stuff so badly after decades of living here that she said "I've got a meat grinder, so let's just get some ..." ... "NO!"
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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