laugh of the day

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Not everybody. I'm convinced that Rich Grise is a non-partisan nitwit for all seasons.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Facts are sacred. Spin varies from newspaper to newspaper, and the Telegraph sees the downfall of the EU in anything more threatening than a depressing weather forcast.

Funny that. John cites his "fact" complete with the spin added by a notoriously right-wing newspaper. The spin presumably gave him some emotional satisfaction, because there certainly wasn't any intellectual content in it to enjoy.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Where I come from it is probably similar. Where I went to it does not matter much for a circuit designer what your degree is or whether you have one at all. What matters is whether or not you are good.

No, they don't have to retire. Even if companies won't hire you because of age discrimination or whatever, self-employment is always an option. Or moving to an area where your talent is in demand.

Was the Juncker quote a fabrication?

complete with the spin added by a

I cited no spin. I said that I found the Juncker line to be funny.

The spin presumably gave him some

Not to you, obviously.

John

Nobody is made to retire because of age, to my knowledge, except commercial airline pilots. And they are just prohibited from piloting planes; they can do other stuff if they please. But we can (usually) fire anyone who isn't up to the job, regardless of age.

Where I come from, we judge people by how well they perform, not by what class we assign them to. You'd rate below several college dropouts that I know.

I don't understand that last part. If you actually did something useful, would you be arrested or something?

John

All other things being equal, I'd give the hiring preference to the person with a EE degree, because s/he'd be more likely to understand the math and circuit theory and such. But I'd be happy to make exceptions for serious talent.

John

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I am a little more stringent than you are in this area, but then again, who isn't.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

We are working on it. At the moment my wife's talent is in demand in the Netherlands, but she's ageing at exactly the same rate as I am.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The people who hired me shared that attitude. It did help that I was better at the math and circuit theory than most of the guys who had EE degrees - when things got sticky they would lend me their lecture notes rather than tackle that kind of stuff themselves.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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We don't all specialise in flattering the boss. Some bosses are more worried about how your electronics works than how good you make them feel good about themselves.

Well, I have done some minor useful stuff, and haven't yet been arrested. The trick is to get somebody to pay you for doing usueful stuff, and also pay the rent/interest on the gear you use to do the useful stuff, not to mention paying the support staff who turn it into useful product.

There I've been less successful.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That's age discrimination. It's illegal here to force some one out of the job force due to their age.. where the f*ck do you get your info from? A shoe box?

Yeah, we have to many of you over here now. Proclaimed in a lot of things but still and have been on the program..

Where you come from professionals are shoulder educated and full of shit. I don't know if I would call you a prime example, but you fit part of that description.

You had to be in the job field, contributing to classify yourself as retirement material.. I don't know if you really qualify.

Jamie.

tics is that when it really comes unglued,

Europe - almost disarmed as it is - supplied the German gun for the Abrams battle tank as well the the British "Chobham armour" it relies on. Europe spends about 200 billion euros per year on its defense forces, less than the US 470 billion (which does seem to include a lot of welfare payments for its military industrial complex on top of the investment in defense), but roughly three times as much as China and five times as much as "Imperial Russia".

Imperial Russia has got a lot of oil, but its predecessor bankrupted itself trying to match the US and European armed forces. Today's Russia lacks the economic strenmgth to present a significant military threat to Europe.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It appears that most of Europe is in flames, and Sloman still believes that socialism can work.

The poor guy is apparently brain-damaged.

Thanks, Rich

Nah. Everybody knows what "BS" means. "MS" means "More of the Same" and PHD means "Piled Higher and Deeper."

Cheers! Rich

Impressive. Rich cn see the flames from Califiornia, and I can't see them Nijmegen, which is a whole lot closer to every part of Europe.

In fact Europe isn't "in flames". The bankers who speculate against currencies have decide that it is worth taking a shot at the euro, and the bankers who look after the euro have taken the usual precautions agains this sort of speculative attack. The US media are fascinated - they are wondering what is going to happen when the dollar comes under the same sort of attack - and unsophisticated readers like John Larkin and Rich Grise has misinterpreted the interest.

It seems unlikely - and Rich wouldn't be a useful witness. If he had any brain left to damage he might be a useful witness about his own decline, but someone who hasn't the wits left to see the beam in his own eye isn't going to say anything useful about the motes in the eyes of others.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

last

Jamie seems to be suffering from a lot of comprehension problems these days. I doubt if my drinking - a glass of wine with dinner - would have had any effect on the comprehensibility of the paragraph he is complaining about. Of course, if Jamie were projecting his own problem drinking onto others, we'd have a simple explanation of why he found that paragraph difficult.

But you clearly don't know much at all.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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You may not have noticed, but the debt guarantees from the richer members of the EU to poorer members come with an explicit obligation for the poorer countries to get their budgets back in the black. If the poorer countries don't perform, they lose the guarantees. It's a big stick. The Greek government made itself very unpopular with the electorate by doing it what it had been told do. The Irish government is in for a similarly hard time.

The IMF has been doing the same thing for many years.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

There are also exceptions to such likelihood. I have met people sans degree who possess very serious math skills and use them all the time. Most EEs do not enjoy math much, and that includes me. Yeah, I have the background and use it if I have to, but if there is any kind of way around it, such as SPICE, I take it.

I resort to math when PSpice tweaking leaves me uneasy that I don't really know what is happening. But I've always liked math, though I'm rusty from disuse :-(

See my "Diplexer" post which I did just for fun and to prove I still can see thru those sorts of things :-) ...Jim Thompson