Herd instincts?

It makes sense for the FDA to be ultra-cautious - they don't score any brownie points for being quick and they risk huge embarrassment if they approve something they shouldn't have.

Surgeons make money when they operate. It doesn't make a much sense for them to be cautious.

The best of US medical care is as good as - but no better than - the best medical care in Europe and Australia. The public health statistics show that fewer Americans get acess to it than their European and Australian counterparts.

The more extravagant testing is usually explained as driven by anti- malpratice insurance rules. Don't omit any test that a lawyer could claim to have been potentially useful. It is relatively easy to convince a jury that some irrelevant test might have been useful, and defence lawyers don't want to have to try and unconvince them.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Not any more, the FDA has had a "fast track approval process" in place for about 15 years now, but the malady the drug attempts to relieve has to be serious and fairly widespread.

Right- and if the scum neocons had their way, the malpractice liability would be capped at $350K, a pittance. Usually the insurance industry is forced to provide coverage for those treatments that lower the overall cost of treatments they do cover. But a quick death trumps all...

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

I expect that they will blame China. With cause.

Worked on. Sorry about that.

I'd have to lose about thirty years of experience to be reduced to that.

In fact electronics progressed so fast while I was active in the field that every time I changed area while I was working, I was faced with exactly this sort of catching up. I was very good at it, and I've no obvious reaon to beileve that I've lost the capacity to read the latest set of data sheets and application notes and go out and produce a state of the art design.

This isn't the kind of skill you'd understand - anybody who hasn't realised how obsolete the 555 doesn't have much of clue about keeping up.

I'm sure that your advice was well-intentioned, but it was also patronising - which is forgiveable, if irritating - and pretty stupid, which I feel obliged to point out. God forbid that design engineers should try to get design work via the purchasing department - it might work for you if you mainly deal with mom and pop operations where the purchasing department is also the engineering department, but anybody who tried it on company with more than half a dozen employees would at best be wasting their time, and at worst identifying themselves as hayseeds.

Pity about your self-image. You may not see yourself as a Texan hick, but you certainly advise like one.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

For you, yes. You can understand circuits built around the 555, though you do seem to be a little too willing to compromise it's already dubious temperature stability. Anything more demanding does seem to go over your head, and is correspondingly uninteresting, if not downright threatening.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

In practice the genes are identical, so either way creates exactly the same long term result. Females do pass on their mitochondrial DNA, which males don't, so for them it does make a difference, but since mitochondrial DNA is very stable the dfference is insignificant.

Depends how many genes you share.

That is the way you chose to react to the message, It's basically the "shoot the messenger" response, which isn't a useful or productive reaction. Think about the matter a little and see if you can work out how a grown-up should deal with informed criticism.

They aren't as few in number as I'd like. They may not be absysmally ignorant, but their responses tend to be long on emotions and short on objective facts - something rather less than valid critiques. Your judgement of what constitutes a valid critique wouldn't carry much weight - I've yet to see you come up with anything that would qualify.

Is English your first language? "Idiot-bashing" is structurally identical to your "America and American-bashing" (which has vanished in one of your unmarked snips) and means bashing idiots.

You are free to correct any error of fact that you can find. I'm tolerably careful about my facts, though I do slip up from time to time, but at least I'm appropriately grateful when corrected.

That's a claim. You don't adduce any evidence to support it. You can pull more than ten yuears of my postings out of the Google groups archive, so even a twit like you should be able to find an example of this kind of behaviour, if it exists.

When you try, I think you will find that you have been deceiving yourself - and providing a perfect example of the behaviour you are projecting onto me.

That's your injured self-image going into damage-limitation. Grow up.

Which compromise the effectiveness of the system. Mildly sick people stay away because they can't pay, and then are compelled to come in when they are much sicker and need a lot more money spent on them before they can be cured (if they can still be cured).

Good people stuck in bad systems can find it difficult and personally expensive to do the right thing. Niaomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" includes a telling vignette about American medical care - she and her husband were in New Orleans, reporting Hurricane Katrina for some news service, and got injured in a car accident, Because they were fully insured (in Canada), they went straight into a private hospital - the Ochsner Medical Centre - which was fully staffed, with everything working and got superb medical care. Whe she asked the intern who'd looked after her how things were at the Charity Hospital, his response was "They'd better reopen it - we can't treat those people here". She didn't bother asking why.

At that stage Australia relied on private not-for-profit medical insurance schemes. I got a bill from the Hosptial Benefits Association every quarter, and sent them a cheque. If you didn't have the money to pay the premiums - they weren't high - you weren't insured. The hospitals still treated you, but they'd go after you for the cost of the treatment, if there was anything to go after.

You don't like me much - it's called shoot the messenger, as if I needed to remind you.

Sadly, the contribution remains trivial, even if it does make you feel good, as it should.

If I were sick I could get first class medical attention without having to worry about ending up in the poor-house.

It's broken. Bill Clinton tried to get Hillary to fix it, but she couldn't get anywhere against a Republican dominated legislature. President Hillary should be able to do better, if she makes ith through your badly broken electoral system.

It would work for most of you too, although the private medical insurance equivalents of Enron wouldn't like it much.

Mistakes to avoid - my Australian history lessons at secondary school included a fairly detailed description of the way the Australian and Canadian federal constitutions had avoided the defects of the American federal system. Europe has been through another round of electoral and constitional evolution since the Australian constitution came into force in 1901.

We've learned from your constitution in much the same way that Linux learned from DOS - and I'm well aware that Linux grew out of Unix.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Jim does have a rather restricted point of view. It's the U.S. economy that is crashing, and the US administration which spent lots of money they hadn't got on weapons to fight a war they did't need - much as Hitler did - to feed a thoroughly artificial boom. The war propaganda targets Muslims, rather than Jews, and Dubbya has yet to set up gas ovens, but the parallels are depressingly obvious.

I find it difficult to understand how Jim has managed to project US problems onto Europe, but I'm not well placed to understand dyed-in- the-wool ignorance.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You invoked a demographic landslide in November 2006. Check out

and

The right wing web-sites that try to paint this as a serious and immediate threat rarely quote numbers, and those that do cherry pick the highest estimates.

Granting the long-sustained US trade deficit, the run-up of the euro looks rather more like the bursting of the dollar bubble.

The Daily Telegraph is the most right wing of the U.K. quality papers, and the most anti-European. It's columnists shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Since Boeing now subcontracts its manufacturing around the world, the Airbus situation is probably less disasterous than it looks. Boeing won't be able to sell its aircraft at the agreed dollar prices and stay in business either, and the airlines haven't got any interest in bankrupting both of their major suppliers - if they won't renegotiate the now-unrealistc dollar-denominated prices, both companies will have no choice but to declare themselves bankrupt, vitiating the contracts and leaving the airlines stuck with renegotiating the prices with whoever buys the residual assets from the receivers.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That is the usual sleigh of hand.

Will Hutton's "The World We're In" ISBN-10: 0349114714 ISBN-13:

978-0349114712, makes a pretty persuasive case argument for the propositon that the US doesn't invest enough in educating its workers and keeping them fed and housed between jobs to maximise their productivity when they are in work.

The European system frightens the life out of your employer class, but if they had better accountants they'd realise that the higher taxes they'd pay under a more egalitarian system would be more than compensated by the higher productivity of a healthier and better educated work force. Will Hutton's book presents the statistics that prove the point.

Demonising the unemployed doesn't serve any useful purpose - I don't need any extra persuasion that I ought to have a job, and I'd be very grateful for any useful advice that would get me closer to finding one.

The Dutch system does include schemes improving the job-hunting skills of people who've been out of work for more than about six months. I went along with the one I was involved with - irrelevant as it was - when most of the intake gave it up as a waste of time in pretty short order. My case officer was a bit embarrassed about having to sign me up for the course - as far as she could see I interviewed fine. According to her there was no way that a Dutch employer was going to hire anybody over sixty so honing my presentation skills wasn't a useful exercise.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No, just specialised.

It does help if your qualifications are the same as everybody else who presents for the same job.

I've got no formal training in electronics, a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry and a track record that only looks impressive if you know something about the various areas in which I've worked - phased array ultrasound, and electron microscopes are the ones I find it easiest to explain.

You haven't got a clue about the Dutch system, and clearly don't appreciate that it works rather better than the U.S. That doesn't make it fault free, but it does make nonsense of your implict claim to be a respresenting a less bum system.

Visubly alter, She's from Nigeria.

It doesn't worry me at all, and more than seeing other people getting unemplyment benefit paid for out my taxes worried me when I was in work.

That presumably depends on the level of care the garden demands - we didn't design it. The previous occupants were keen gardeners (which I'm not) and although they reworked it into their idea of a low maintenance garden a few years before they sold the place, I've never able to keep up.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Nonsense. I've designed a couple of big and complicated systems and made them work. I've seen enough people make a hash of this sort of job to know that I'm well worth hiring.

Where I probably do go wrong is in putting emphasis on my detailed engineering skills - I'm certainly better than most electronic engineers in getting complicated and demanding systems together, but this isn't a rare skill.

The job interviews that I've had that have gone really well have been those where I got to talk about the interdisciplinary stuff that I've done.

There was a patent at EMI that grew out of the perception that while you need to give the visual system a new image about twenty time a second to avoid problems with flicker, the cognitive system that processes the image is happy to treat an image as real-time even if it is only being refreshed about three times a second.

There was a patent at Cambridge Instruments that deal with the problem that arose when you had to divert a beam of electrons in the time it took for the electrons to travel the length of the diverting electrodes.

While I was there I also fixed a problem in the electron microscope gain control system that arose when the average number of electrons per pixel dropped below one - once you've not got any electrons hitting a significant number of pixels, the standard automatic gain control algorithm jammed the gain at maximum trying to squeeze the desired average brightness out the limited number of pixels that had seen an electron.

You'd think that the problem was obvious, and I'd predicted it long before we had to do anything about it, but I wasn't allowed to do anything about it until it finally upset a customer - and I was the one who first recognised what the customer was complaining about.

The funniest example of this kind of trick was the patent I never got, It started when some Finn published a semi-empirical treatment of the surface tension forces acting on a gallium arsenide single crystal being pulled out of a gallium arsenide melt

When I'd read the paper it struck me that it provided a fairly direct way of monitoring the meniscus angle at the crystal/liquid boundary (which is what you needed to control when pulling a crystal) so I wrote it up as a potential patent and sent it on as memo to my boss, and forgot about it,

I happened to send the memo on my birthday (some nineteen years ago today) so I remembered the date.

Some four months later, the boss called me in to his office to look at at patent he was being offered - essentially the same idea. We knew the guy offering us the patent - we were already paying him royalties on the scheme we used to control the Czochralski gallium arsenide puller that we sold - and he was in the office at the time, so I was happy to play along and point out that I could scarcely claim that the idea wasn't patentable since I'd suggested patenting it some four months earlier,

It turned out that our guy had had a bit of head start - he was one of the editors of the journal where the Finn had published, and had in fact been the action editor for that paper.

That kind of insight does seem to be pretty rare, but Im damned if I can see where I could try and sell it.

Any ideas?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

To exactly the same degree as my genes wouldn't be found in in my kids

- if I'd had any - and their even more hypothetical grand-children.

You need to think about the point that my genes are indistinguishable from my predecessors genes and the sample of those genes that will turn up in my nieces and nephews genomes. The route they take down the family tree doesn't make a shred of difference to the genes. There would be more of them out there if I had had kids of my own, but that is basically statistical noise.

Your assessment of the situation seems to be be based on some mystical idea about blood-lines, which may be useful if you want to write a novel, but has a practical utility of exactly zero.

You may think that I'm a dumbfuck, but at least I know what I'm talking about, whereas you are obviously ignorant about elementary biology and abusing me for failing to share your comical delusions. I know what that says about your intellectual level, but the odds are that it will take some time for you to realise which catagory you've put yourself in.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Only if you take bloodlines seriously. Bloodline theory is to genetics what the four-element theory (earth, air, fire and water) is to chemistry.

Maybe that's how you breed animals in Texas - which might explain why you and Dubbya are as dim as you are - but biology has made quite a lot of progress in the last hundred years, and most educated people now know better.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You are the idiot. The genes would be indistinguishable, Two generations aren't enough to give a signiifcant chance of even a single nuclear polymorphism (SNP) in a single gene.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Your perceptions on this subject do have some value, but since you present as something of a twit yourself, most of that value is in the insight it gives into the (low) reliablity of your perceptions.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I'm pretty sure that I get to see most of the jobs advertised in electronics. From time to time I poke around the local small firms that might be relying on word-of-mouth to ge their recruits - there aren't many of them - but it has never lead to anything, nor looked as if it might.

Any more vigorous approach would have labelled me as some kind of aggressive nut-case, I might well have got their attention, but the effect would have been much the same as sitting myself down on their front step, dousing myself with petrol and setting myself alight - which would also get their attention, but would also leave me in an unemployable condition.

I don't know how thing work in your corner of the US these days, but my job applications almost always get e-mailed, and have done for some years now.

I've been persisting (every year or so) since 1994, and it has done much good so far.

I happen to think I'm qualified to work as an electronic engineer on the basis that that is what I did for some thirty years - 1973 to

2003. You''d be aware of this if you could do pragmatic sentence comprehension

Thats rubbish, and you would be aware that it was rubbish if you weren't completely stupid - which you aren't - so it has to be some kind of pathetic joke.

They'd been removed long before Dubbya tried to use them to persuade the UN to sanctify his invasion plans. Because they'd been removed, the "evidence" that was presented to the UN was not persuasive. At the time the weapons inspectors commented that the tips that they'd got from the US intelligence services on potential locations for WMD's had sent them out of a succession of uniformly unproductive wild goose chases.

You've got to be spectacularly ignorant about biology to ask that question, The human genome alone contains some 20 to 25,000 genes that can synthesis some 100,000 different proteins, The 555 contains 24 transistors and 15 resistors. If you don't find those numbers persuasive I know some psychologists who'd love to meet you - they study weird forms of brain damage ...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Could you ever?

-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)

I believe yes. Reporters were once professional people who appeared to be driven to tell the facts of a situation.

Modern "reporters" largely aren't. They are media story tellers who often bend the facts to sensationalize an event, or to otherwise color it. They are the scum of the earth, as are their employers and the people who watch, listen to, or watch their "entertainment," thus encouraging more of the same.

The modern trend is to employ people who embody the characteristics of the customers, and this is not just the media. Keep at it, one day you might accidentally make a profound observation.