Herd instincts?

Jim Thompson snipped-for-privacy@My-Web-Site.com posted to sci.electronics.design:

May i presume you mean the wilfully ill educated children of immigrants? Or did you have some other situation in mind.

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org posted to sci.electronics.design:

You are just conning yourself. The US has had its comeuppance coming for some decades now, and Europe and Japan will follow. Buy yuan now to avoid going bankrupt.

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org posted to sci.electronics.design:

It will take you a few years, but start building your contacts now. Then in a couple of years you can find the work.

No I was referring to what happens when everyone is on the dole.

...Jim Thompson

Slowman is already too well known ;-)

...Jim Thompson

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org posted to sci.electronics.design:

It does not take even one year to get the measure of someone, that gives me many decades of age variance to comfortably absorb.

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org posted to sci.electronics.design:

And you could not be bothered to even try to look them up in the telephone directory?

Jim Thompson snipped-for-privacy@My-Web-Site.com posted to sci.electronics.design:

I was talking about Reuters, UP, AP etc., Toss Al Jazeera into the mix as well.

There would be more without the socialist benefits employers are required to provide which makes hiring older people too expensive.

Sorry, but that's not logical. If he'd done that it would only serve the purpose of qualifying for benefits.

That isn't actually the problem - there are ways of side-stepping the sick leave problem, which is the only one that would actually make an elderly employee more expensive than a younger employee,

The real problem is that Dutch personnel departments have got into the habit of seeing elderly employees as people to be got rid of - when unemployment was really high in the Netherlands, some twenty-odd years ago, early retirement was encouraged to make room for younger employees, and rapidly became the norm, even after the economy had got back into balance. The Dutch governemnt now pays lip service to the idea of keeping people at work and encouraging the elderly to get back to work, but they haven't invested any money or effort into making it happen

ASML is certainly in the telephone directory, but it is spread over several sites, and trying to get hold of the phone number of a specific personnel officer is tedious and time-consuming. It was quicker to find another job to apply for where the ad included a telephone number - as they almost always do

Well, I could have called her up and asked why she'd found it so easy to knock me back, but she would only have replied that I hadn't fitted their profile - and they never say anything specific about the profile.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

False, actually.

There's no way of distinguishing between my genes and my predecessor's genes (give or take the very occasional mutation). If I'd had kids they would only have got half my genes anyway, so there isn't a lot in it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

This may be true in your dialect of English. It's fine in mine. Is English your first language? Antonella Sorace - a professor of linguistics at Edinburgh

has found that bilinguals asked to judge if given sentences are grammatical, reject more sentences in their second language than do native speakers of that second language.

It has been suggested that Texan English should qualify as a separate language, but it is usually held that the fact that Texans don't correctly understand standard English has more to do with the defects of their culture than the defects of their dialect.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

--

So you judge them as idiots, jerks, twits and fools on the basis of their performance at eighty. Try reading up on Alzheimer's disease. They might have been more competent when younger. Ronald Reagan is a case in point

Admittedly, Brian Butterworth did detect early signs of Alzheimer's in Reagan's speech errors when he was running for his second term as president, but nobody took him seriously (Brian Butterworth, that is - lots of people took Reagan seriously when he was president, though many did think that he was no more than a glove puppet).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I think that it is more likely that the Europeans and Canadians come to US because they can buy medical procedures there that look like dangerously premature interventions to medicos outside the U.S.

My medically qualified younger brother tells me that U.S. doctors spend a lot more money on tests than their foreign counterparts, and are much more likely to intervene (at vast expense).

Anxious patients often want their doctors to "do something" when the Cochrane collaboration would advise a wait-and-see approach

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

--- LOL, That's probably the single most lame excuse for not getting off your ass and beating the bushes I've ever heard.

Who are the sorts of people you want to go see and tell about your remarkable "talents"?

Principals of big companies because you think that anyone else is beneath you?

They won't give a shit because you're just another vendor and they have bigger fish to fry, so if you target them you're doomed to failure. Which just may be what you want, since from what I've seen of you so far you're certainly not a go-get-em salesman, you're more like a lazy narcissistic layabout trying to tell successful people how they should run their productive lives/businesses, while you're on the dole.

Kind of like a pilot fish telling a shark what to do.

You obviously aren't interested in work, but if you were, a good entry point would be the purchasing department of a company you'd like to team up with.

IME, Purchasing folks _love_ to talk to vendors and get the best deal they can for their outfits.

After all, if you can demonstrate how to save a penny on a million units and guarantee to do it for $5k, why would you not become a hero and get the job?

OTOH, if you're looking for new design work, it sure wouldn't hurt if someone in purchasing mentioned your name...

-- JF

Is English your first language?

Of course, but I do rather more than than that. In fact I could buy off the obligation to apply for at least one job a week by taking on some kind of volunteer work, but I've got no contacts with anybody involved in that kind of stuff, and I really would like to find myself another job.

I've certainly done it when I can get through to somebody who knows something about the work involved. Personnel departments just tell you that you didn't fit their profile or that your CV didn't include enough coupling points (whatever they are) which is something of a waste of time. The guy at the Dutch Space Research Institute told me that because I'd published papers about my work I wasn't the kind of hands-on engineer he was looking for - which meant that he hadn't read the paper I'd sent him.

It didn't get me out of the house at all, and I certainly didn't get paid for it.

They are, and they still won't give me an interview.

This is one delusion that we happen to share.

Tektronix 465. Though I guess these days I'd have to buy something that I could link to my computer.

When I was working in Venlo we had a Picoscope ADC42, which was nice but slow - 12-bits at up to 7kHz.

And I've bought stuff on E-bay from time to time.

Yes. And it didn't take you anywhere worth visiting.

Rather like Dubbya linking 9/11 to the invasion of Irak. That illusion didn't last, any more than the illusory weapons of mass destruction.

Your ignorance is noted. In fact eight nieces and nephews pass on exactly as much genetic material as four biological kids. Check out the literature on the evolution of altruism.

See above.

Well, I obviously know more about biology than you do, and this is a rather larger subject than the care and feeding of the 555.

You aren't up to doing what I do, so that's not an option.

Or the 555. If your taste in cars matched your taste in integrated circuits and your taste in political systems, you'd get around in a horse and cart.

You may have 20-20 hearing, but your problem comes when you have to process what you hear and read.

And astigmatic, but with my glasses on I've got 20-20 vision, and I can also _understand_ what I'm seeing and hearing.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Of course it does, but if I don't get interviewed I don't know enough about the position to know that, and the personnel department never has clue about the technical demands of engineering jobs.

I've worked for a bunch of hi-tech firms in my time and I've probably got a better idea of what ASML is doing than Jim does (or their personnel department). The jobs that they were advertising did sound very like the kinds of jobs I'd handled competently for other companies.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Wrong. For the first few years in the Netherlands I was working part time at Nijmegen University, and from July 2000 to the end of May 2003 I was working full time for Haffmans BV in Venlo.

They don't. I'd worked for Haffmans for long enough to qualify for the maximum benefit.

You really don't know what you are talking about.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen