OT: So goes Californica, so goes the nation...

He was certainly one of the grand conspiracy of tax evaders who took the US colonies out of the British Empire. The group also included people like Be njamin Franklin and Thomas Paine who didn't own large estates and pay out l ots in taxes, and who were genuinely interested in political liberty, and w rote fine rabble-rousing tracts.

After the war of Independence had been won, Franklin and Paine were sent of f to France, and the people that owned the large estates set about consolid ating their gains, and making sure that they could hang onto them.

Nobody would deny that Jefferson was brilliant, but few would be silly enough to argue that he was perfect. He was happy to argue for freedom and religious toleration, but equally happy that they came in a package with lower taxes.

Jefferson might have been an awesome thinker, but he wasn't all that original. He was more influenced by moderate - rather than - radical enlightenment thinkers, which did tend to happen with people who owned estates.

Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin were just as clever, but less well-off, and espoused the radical enlightenment (which is the version that happens to make sense).

They didn't actually bounce cheques but they did hit the customer for going overdrawn without an arranged facility and punitive interest.

Banks here run ancient Cobol code for core operations and it is very limited in what it will allow them to do. My own bank does a linked deposit to current account but they are unusual (and pointless now that the interest rate on both is 0.1%). More common are high interest current accounts with a high interest rate on minimum balance,

Obviously but mistakes do happen and the costs can be ridiculous.

Not my habits. I know people who are inpecunious though. In the UK we don't segregate the haves and have nots with gated communuties.

It is another symptom of the banks ripping off their customers. This one the chickens came home to roost when they were found liable.

Bankers enjoy a very priviledged position. They gamble with other people's money on a "heads I win, tails you lose" basis.

Regards, Martin Brown

These Nobel-prize economist morons keep confusing the stock market with productive reality. And they keep wrecking that productive economy.

The big central banks are slaves to the stock market and the hedge funds and to governments who want to borrow multiples of GDP at zero interest. Expect another round of trauma, another giant crisis that happens with almost no warning.

They rarely rise to even the skill level of scratching their heads.

The Dismal Science indeed.

Oh, good grief. You *ARE* illiterate!

Bar-B-Q (charcoal) fumes are pretty civilised - and an increasingly popular method since those who share BS's interfering mentality mandated cutting Helium balloon gas with Oxygen.

The checks *did* bounce. The bank was nice enough to not return them unpaid. That saved them a bundle right there.

This is relevant because?

OK, no problem. If the "haves" bounce checks, I assume they pay the consequences too.

Maybe but that doesn't make it relevant to the discussion.

So become a banker.

But, on the positive side, I hear that mattress sales are way up. Right up there with gun sales.

Lets see, how's that go now?

My doctor said I can have my gun back, just waiting for the ok for the bullets!

Jamie

SLow-Man is unemployable!

On Fri, 09 Sep 2016 20:00:18 -0400 krw wrote in Message id: :

Sales Might be down a bit here, though.

In Jamie's ever-so-authoritative opinion. Jamie also thinks that it is a bad idea to have your milk pasteurised, or to get your kids immunised.

Which is nothing, this millennium.

He's the 'Whyle Coyote' of the electronics newsgroups. A self proclaimed genius who can't do anything right.

There was no Union we "willingly joined" when we had our first referendum on membership back in 1975. The EU as we know it today didn't exist back then. What we were voting on in '75 was whether we wished to remain members of the so-called Common Market, which was at that time little more than a bunch of countries who cut each other favourable trade deals. Or to be strictly accurate, THAT was what we were TOLD the Common Market was. Of course, 40 years later and with the benefit of hindsight we can see the then Common Market was a nascent super-state in the making which would one day come to interfere in every aspect of our lives, impoverishing its citizens whilst making the corrupt few who ran it stratospherically wealthy. BS will deny this of course, but then he would, wouldn't he?

e.

Not strictly accurate. The fake beer-bottle that measured the temperature a nd the conductivity of the various beer-bottle washing liquids got designed after May 2000. I didn't post the design here because it belongs to Haffma n's BV who were my employers at the time, and hired me because their regula r electronic sub-contractors couldn't come up with anything that even looke d as if it might work - there's a 1000:1 difference between the conductivit y of 2% NaOH at 85C and regular tap-water at room temperature, which made t he job somewhat tricky.

I was in the UK then and there was no secret about the fact that the Common Market was expected to evolve into a political union.

Cursitor Doom might not have known, but he doesn't know much at the best of times.

The idea that the European Union might create American levels of income ine quality didn't enter anybody's heads at the time - mainly because even the Americans weren't all that unequal at the time, and nobody expected income inequality to start rising, when it had been falling for decades .

US income inequality didn't start rising until Reagan was elected in 1980. The Gini index there is now 0.45. The average over Europe as a whole is 0.3

If there's a conspiracy going on, Cursitor Doom has placed it in quite the wrong super-state, which means that he's being just as dramatically idiotic as ever.

Far from impoverishing it's citizens, the European Union has made most them better off. The main advantage is the larger mass market - a ten-fold incr ease in manufacturing volume usually allows you to halve the unit price - a nd that means the customers in that larger market get their goodies at half

-price.

With his super-sized ego, Slowman fancies himself a member of the elite, when in fact the elite keep him under their control with his little welfare check, just like millions of other leeches.

I don't get any welfare check. I do get a UK old age pension, but it's out of the National Insurance Scheme, which isn't welfare, and I do get an occu pational pension. These are unconditional entitlements, so nobody could use them to control me, even if they wanted to, and I am in position to tell t hem to go to hell if they made a totally illegal attempt to do so. I've als o got the kind of contacts that would make it a very silly idea for anybody even to try. This doesn't make me a member of any elite, but I do know peo ple who are closer to the centre of things. Australia is a small country.

The only louse around here is krw, who lies his head off about stuff he kno ws nothing about. He's even silly enough to think that Cursitor Doom knows what he's talking about. I don't have to "deny" what Cursitor Doom is sayin g - I only need to point out that it is totally incoherent nonsense from st art to finish.