OT: James Arthur, the perfect market and the perfect op amp

Yes, the natural tendency of traders is to hold on to their money, which is why gold is around $1700 today. I paid $550, how did you do?

-Bill

James designs and sells electronics and electronic design services. You do nothing useful. Who do you think

The problem with government is that, as a collective entity, it doesn't understand economics. Look at the real estate busts in the US and europe; look at the debt crisies in europe. Did any government economists do anything to prevent these? On the contrary, governments and their financial ministries caused all these messes.

Listen: nobody understands economics. So the best thing to do is let millions of people and companies try all sorts of random things, and let the market decide who is right.

It's evolution, but you don't believe in evolution.

John

On Aug 12, 8:19=A0pm, Bill Sloman wrote: > James Arthur believes that the free market is perfect; perhaps not > absolutely prefect, but better than any market distorted by any kind of > human - government - intervention.

I agree with James because he's right and you're wrong.

If government was right, they wouldn't have to confiscate my money.

G=B2

o n

Who'd be silly enough to buy gold? You can't eat it and the price is determined by the level of anxiety of people stupid enough to buy it, which is to say that it's not subject to rational prediction.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You also design and sell electronics and electronic design services - appreciably more successfully than James Arthur, but have any number of silly ideas about areas outside of electronics.

You've probably got the intellectual capacity do better, if you were prepared to learn a bit more about the subjects you pontificate about, but your implicit claim that current competence in one area is any kind of quide to competence in unrelated areas is silly enough to reveal that you really can't do joined-up logic.

They do, much better than you give them credit. They aren't - sadly - super-human.

We know about the real estate bust in the US. Which real estate bust in Europe did you have in mind?

House prices in the Netherlands are drifting down a bit, and it is a buyer's market, but there's no suggestion of a real estate bust.

The governments and their economic advisors didn't cause the messes - you don't like the remedial actions that the GFC forced them to take, but that's a different claim. James Arthur's beloved US bankers caused the sub-prime mortage crisis by making ninja loans to anybody who asked for them. Preventing the subsequent stock market crash from turning into a re-run of the Great Depression did involve a great deal of deficit-financed spending which has run up a lot of government debt, but nowhere near as much as if they'd followed James Arthur's advice and just let the economy tank - GNP went down by 25% during the Great Dpression and un-employment hit 25%. As Paul Krugman points out, the half-hearted Keynesian pump-priming that has been done has been sufficient to avoid this sort of disaster, but not as much as was needed. The US economy is currently only growing at about 2% a year, rather than the 4% "natural" rate, and US unemploment is a 9.1% rather than the 7.5% you enjoyed before the GFC.

James Arthur does claim that Democrats twisted the arms of his beloved bankers, and forced them to make their ninja loans, but the reality is that nobody imagined that the bankers could be as stupid and greeedy as they turned out to be, and consequently failed to install proper quality controls in the loan guarantee system that was needed to persuade bankers to make home loans to good credit risks who happened to live in low income areas.

Nobody understands economic perfectly, any more than anybody understands the climate perfectly. You know very little about either, and confidently assert that nobody knows more than you do. It's an opinion, but not one that deserves much attention.

If you can live with monopolies - which every big company tries to construct if they aren't watched very carefully - and repeating boom and bust cycles.

You don't seem to have any difficulty accepting the necesity for anti- trust legislation, and you would be able to see the sense in regulating economic cyles to minimise booms and busts if you didn't share James Arthur's bizarre ideas about economics.

Actually, I do, it's just your quasi-creationist variation on the theory that excites my incredulity. You know too little about the subject to realise quite hiw ludicrous your delusions really are.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You agree with James because he is far-right in economic matters, and I'm not.

If the government was that far-right, they'd still confiscate your money, but they'd spend it on invading neighbour countries, or more remote countries with large oil-fields, though they'd probably throw in some spurious claim about weapons of mass-destruction to justify the exercise.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Keynes was a goofy theorist whose prescriptions never worked, and who lived in a world that no longer exists. His popularity rests mostly with politicians and government parasites, who believe his ancient theories because they authorize them to tax and spend and consume without producing. You, of course, are one of the admiring parasites.

John

Why don't you, once in a while, start a thread about electronics? You post thousands of lines of garbage, and you only argue about things that are unprovable, and your intent seems only to prove how much smarter you are than others, which is really stupid if you think about it.

How can you stand to be such a tedious, useless old git?

John

It's all that socialist, mind control up bringing!

Jamie

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Try reading a biography of the man before making yourself even more ridiculous than usual. He really wasn't a "goofy theorist". The Wikipedia article on him

includes the line "Keynes showed considerable talent at applying economic theory to practical problems" when discussing the work he was doing just before WW1 and he remained impressively competent in practical matter for the rest of his life.

You could also try to find a simplified exposition of what his theories actually involved. "Tax and spend without producing" hasn't got much to do with what he was talking about. His most important contribution was the idea of using government interventions in the money markets to damp down the natural tenedency of the market to oscillate between boom and bust.

James Arthur can't understand how this could possibly work, but that because he's got some remarkably silly political prejudices that block any kind of rational appreciation of what Keynes had to say.

You do like to think that. In fact I spent some thirty years in full time work as a senior electronic engineer, and while I'm now retired - somewhat against my will - and living on some of pension I earned (and sharing my wife's rather more extravagant life-style), this doesn't make me any kind of parasite. I've organised my pensions so that most of them won't start paying out until I'm 70, when my wife's income looked likely to drop back a bit (or at least it looked as if it might drop back when I was close to turning 65 and could nominate when the pensions started paying out).

If I'm a parasite, then pretty much everybody else who is retired and living on an earned pension is also a parasite.

You really do post utter nonsense from time to time.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I do post stuff on electronics from time to time. I'm not doing much electronics at the moment, so I rarely feel the need to start a thread on electronics.

I'm not interested in "proving that I'm smarter than others". I did that many years ago, when I got my Ph.D. though "proving I was smart" was not what I had in mind when I started the process of getting the Ph.D.

I spend time here pointing out that I'm better informed than some of the other people who post here - you included - but I'm primarily engaged in correcting false claims, and one can't point out that someone has posted nonsense without implicitly claiming to be better- informed than whoever it was that posted the nonsense

How can you stand being such an illogical and ill-informed old git? Why can't you go to the trouble of checking your claims before dumping them onto the web? Your characterisation of Keynes as a "goofy theorist" is extraordinarily counter-factual - even for you - and thirty seconds reading could have saved you from making an utter fool of yourself.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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John Larkin seems to be a competent electronic engineer - not great, but perfectly adequate - but he's lamentably ill-informed on matter outside of electronics, and lamentably prone to resort to personal abuse when his pretensions are deflated.

On the evidence available here, the capitalist education system didn't manage to control his mind well enough to get him to pay any attention to anything much outside of electronics.

The Tasmanian education system wasn't noticably socialist in the

1950's, but they did require a fair spread of subjects up to age 16, and we all had to sit - and pass - the same Schools Board examinations. I can't say I was all that enthusiastic about doing Commerce - elementary book-keeping - and Social Studies - which was a blend of history and geography, with some basic economic data thrown in - but I studied hard enough to pass the exams.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No, greed and total lack of any moral integrity caused the mess! The problem is that big companies no longer value their customers. Letting (big) companies do what they want leads to mass destruction.

This documentary makes that more than clear:

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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[snip]

What a pile of socialist crap... no customers, no income. And "Letting" is not a description of Democracy. ...Jim Thompson

[On the Road, in New York]

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
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I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

You blame companies for grotesque government benefits and borrowing?

John

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Well , I don't know, but gold seems to be a hedge against the riots going on in London. If they burn down all the stores, what will there be to eat? At least you have a little gold to trade for some bread? That's better than trying to trade stocks or bonds for bread. Maybe oil would be a better bet? How about toilet paper?

Looks like Keynesian economics isn't working any more? Maybe this is the end of all that BS?

-Bill

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Flour would be more negotiable, if a little bulkier.

You can survive without toilet paper. Food and shelter are lot more important.

Why do you think that? The Tories in the UK differentiated themselves from Gordon Brown - who is a Keynesian - by publicly rejecting Keynesian solutions, but this was all political posturing.

Probably not, because Keynes original insights were the very antithesis of BS. Some of the schemes that claimed to implement some of his ideas were BS, but that's political posturing for you.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

They fail to realize that companies can't steal from you, but only sell you their products. If you don't like the company, you can simply not buy their crap. With government, you don't have that option. But they worship the ground that the bureaucrats slither across.

Cheers! Rich

" is

Right-winger do tend to ignore the way that big companies use advertising to manipulate what their customers want, and advertising- derived techniques to blind customers to the dangers of using their products.

The tobacco comapanies started it by misleading their customers about the health hazards of smoking, and the fossil-carbon extraction industry - notably Exxon-Mobil - used the same people to mislead the population about the climate-changing effects of burning lots of fossil-carbon.

After all, the free market is perfect and companies wouldn't be silly enough to wreck their long term prospects by trashing their customers health or the health of the planet they live on ...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen