One roll of duct tape

What's the direct cost? Does it include your (someone at your company) time?

Re selling price: We've got some products, priced too high IMO. Selling ~1-2 per year vs. 10+. In a lot of ways our products are in competition with each other. All for the same small pot of money.

Putting prices on stuff is hard. We resell, (package with instruments or just alone.) All sorts of Thor lab mechanical stuff. Rigol sig gens. volteq and other power supplies cables, camera's, video monitors, omega temp controllers.

We buy spendy mirrors, custom order. ~$250 each. we put a pair in a mechanical mount, ~$100, most of that Thor lab parts. Once all the parts are gathered and the blue gloves are put on, the time to put one together is minimal >5 minutes. There is no testing, (though we did have problems with un-matched mirrors in the past.) Say our cost is $700, it's an accessory, so not needed, how much?

George H.

Reply to
George Herold
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I'd prefer '4007s and some Rs and Cs. That gives me CD4007 as well as 1N4007 to play with.

Reply to
whit3rd

You can do far more with transistors than 555s.

You must be one of them digital folk.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

It's an estimate of materials and direct labor cost, including testing time but no overheads. It's not scientific but is used as the basis for a multiplier.

Pricing is the least scientific thing we do.

In Economics 101 there is presented a graph of total profit vs unit selling price. It's an inverted parabola. We have no idea where we are on that graph. We're trying to establish some metrics to give us at least a clue.

Don't ask me!

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

When I worked in contract R&D, 2.65x was the value we used for "cost plus" government work. 5x was the highest normal value.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

With a cost-plus contract, you're guaranteed to get paid. When we develop a technology or a product, we don't know what will happen. Maybe half of the products that we develop are ultimately profitable. So a low multiplier would put us out of business.

A product may involve a ton of engineering, tooling, test sets, software, and manuals. None of that is figured into our direct-cost multiplier.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Look again: the CD4007UB has discrete separate transistors.

Reply to
whit3rd

Accepted.

The positive aversion to developing their own products there was the principal reason I left. I really enjoyed working there; the people were extremely competent, the work interesting, and the atmosphere was zany fun.

Examples of the latter: the monthly photocopied internal newsletter contained things that people /really/ wished they hadn't said - and they were attributed so there was "no escape". The scattergram of salaries vs age was published, with the delightful result that there was no unpleasant thoughts of "am I (or is he/she) being paid enough".

I don't know whether those practices survived into the corporate PC era; I hope they did.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

The "Laffer curve". The left half of this group doesn't believe in such things.

Reply to
krw

Not exactly. The Laffer curve is total tax revenue vs tax rate. The concepts and curves are similar, but the E101 thing includes the number of units sold as a major factor.

I quit subscribing to Scientific American when they did a ludicrous put-down of Laffer's concept. Their reasoning would equally argue against Boyle's law.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

In concept, they're almost exactly the same. Too low (taxes or price) and there is no income - zero times something is nothing. Too high (taxes or price) - something times zero is nothing.

I stopped reading it fifty years ago when there was nothing scientific left between the covers.

Reply to
krw

Oh, I was thinking 7407.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

Everybody believes in the "Laffer Curve". The problem is that there are a great many of them, and the shape changes from day to day, and from situation to situation.

The one constant feature of the graph is that right-wing politicians love using it to justify tax cuts, and the tax cuts never deliver the extra revenue promised, or anything like it.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

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John Larkin's comprehension of their reasoning is likely to have been as de fective as his comprehension of most scientific arguments. I don't think th at even the Scientific American would have bothered putting down the Laffer concept, but they wouldn't have had much trouble putting down it's attempt ed applications - nobody who seems to want to apply it ever goes to trouble of measuring the shape of the curve around the region they are interested in.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Manufactures of CO detectors have actually got the government to __mandate__ the product fails after a period of time.

m
Reply to
makolber

Tax cuts need no justification.

Reply to
makolber

Taxes need justification.

Reply to
krw

On Tuesday, November 14, 2017 at 7:26:25 AM UTC+11, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote :

ve using it to justify tax cuts,

That is a right-wing delusion. Tax cuts are always coupled with spending cu ts, and those do need justification.

Reagan and the Laffer curve are a prefect illustration of the right-wing en thusiasm for spurious justifications of tax cuts. None of Reagan's tax cuts ever generated any significant extra economic activity, and none of them g enerated enough extra tax revenue to cover the revenue lost.

The second-rate rght-wingers who pulled Reagan's strings and wrote his spee ches couldn't have cared less. The persistent effect of Reagan's regime was that pretty much all the growth in the Us economy after his time ended up in the pockets of the top 1% of the income distribution, which made them ha ppy, and kept them financing the right-wing of the Republican Party. This w as ultimately self-defeating, when the Tea Party faction blocked every non- psychopathic candidate for the Republican nomination in 2016, allowing the merely egomania Trump to grab it.

A few Republicans do seem to have finally got the message, but they are mor e interested in getting rid of Trump - a worthy aim, but more fighting the alligator than draining the swamp.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Which technology?

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

That's correct, but not 5 years. Not only will it fail, it will self destruct after 7 or 10 years of operation by emitting obnoxious beeps reminding the owner to rip it off the wall and replace the entire unit.

The existing consumer level technologies for CO (carbon monoxide) sensors does not provide for a lifetime beyond 7 or 10 years, depending on sensor type. 7 or 10 years is also the design life of the non-replaceable lithium battery. Assuming a 10 year life, the detector will cost about $4/year to own which admittedly is more expensive than the $1/year for a new 9V battery each year.

It takes a long time to convince the CO detector to respond to excessive concentrations of CO: At about 50ppm, which OSHA considers to be the maximum safe concentration for an 8 hr exposure period, it takes 8 hrs for the CO detector to respond. In other words, 50ppm could easily trigger an alarm after you've left work and gone home.

One of the symptoms of CO poisoning is memory loss:

100ppm... what was I ranting about and what's that loud beeping noise?
--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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