OT: "We're not treating this as a terrorist attack"

also:

Humans are incredibly diverse. You blame and mock (and imagine) people who have different opinions than yours.

I think this intolerant diversity is evolved, naturally selected, as a tribal survival mechanism. Probably your intolerance is genetic, inherited; you can't help yourself.

This tribal tendency for intolerance is why we have wars.

You are emotionally driven to believe that you are always right. That attitude, emotionally selective blindness and hostility to ideas, is toxic to electronic design. I guess that's why so few people are good at it.

It's not about opinions like, what ice cream flavor is best or whether it's better to like golf or basketball. Trump built a political empire peddling fear of marginalized people and I think it's a particular tactic worth mocking, yes. Pretty disingenuous to shift the goalpoasts to some broad fashion of intolerance that's not the real issue, you know what this is about..

Perhaps your tendency to like flattery is inherited, you can't help yourself. Sounds kind of like you're blaming me for the existence of war which could be considered flattering in a certain light but I'll have to demure on that one. I don't think I have such power, my dastardly leftist genes or whatever aren't up to the task.

That's true, I even miss Jim Thompson from time to time. He was better at it than you

You are copying me and cloning Sloman. Neither is difficult nor original.

I dislike flattery; I find it embarassing. My employees know that I don't like a bunch of public praise, as many CEOs get.

I'm blaming tribalism, and intolerance is a big part of tribalism. As is racism. And professional sports. And music.

He was creative but digital-phobic, which is another irrational intolerance. Code is a great way to do advanced signal processing cheap. But Jim and I did different things so it's hard to compare.

People are different.

But you can't know much about what I design, because I don't post the best stuff.

Well, to be fair, unlike Bill Sloman, Bitrex at least *attempts* to put together some form of rational argument - even if it doesn't stand up to scrutiny (very few Leftist arguments stand scrutiny, so that's no reflection on him, he just has crap ideology to work with and you can't make a silk purse out of a pig's ear).

Makes sense. Nazi-ism was a tribal/racial-purity movement that killed maybe 100 million people and is damaging the world still.

Nazi Germany tolerated no dissent, like China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, Iran today.

None do notable electronic design. The Enlightment was good for electronic design, kick started free thinking.

There's no need to invent targets for that kind of attack. You pop up whenever such a target is required.

He blames and mocks people who assert - as facts - opinions that are demonstrably false. Your opinions about climate change come from climate change denial propaganda and are demonstrably false, but you are can't follow the demonstartion.

Science hasn't been around long enough for critical thinking to get engineered into the genome. Diversity means that some people have a talent for it, and others - like you - can understand the concept at all.

No. Wars depend on the insight that if you kill the people who are currently occupying some desirable real estate, you occupy it yourself. Intolerance doesn't come into it.

Most people have that problem. Scientific training involves learning to recognise that you can get stuff wrong, and learning how to change your opinions so that they conform more closely to reality.

Scientific training is aimed at minimising your emotional attachment to old ideas, and mastering the art of integrating good new ideas with good parts of what you already know.

The last fifty years of electronic design we've had a steady stream of new parts and new techniques that exploit them, so there's been a lot of throwing out of good ideas that can be replaced by better ones.

You don't seem to make any fuss about that aspects of electronic design. I talk about tearing up designs and starting over. You don't.

Being rude about your appetite for flattery is entirely unoriginal. John Fields noticed it early on. It's difficult to miss. This isn't an argument for not mentioning it from time to time.

And nobody else make as fuss about it either. It doesn't seem to be all that good - good enough to sell to people who want bespoke electronic design that conforms to their daffy prejudices. When I got stuck with doing that kind of work at Nijmegen University, most of my time was devoted to persuading people that they buy something quite good enough off the shelf. There were some exceptions, but not all that many.

Cursitor Doom imagines that he can do rational argument, or follow it.

He thinks that he has demolished the case for anthropogenic global warming by finding some crummy data published in the 1890s that recorded values that are as high as the much reliable - and reproducible - data we record now in remote places where the atmospheric CO2 level doesn't vary very much through the year.

And the American MAGA movement.

You probably need to read this book

The Radical Enlightenment ran from 1650 to 1750. Electronic design couldn't get started until we'd discovered the electron in 1897.

I rate Alan Dower Blumlein as the first modern electronic designer. He was born in 1903 and died in 1942. His genius didn't owe much to the enlightenment, but he was brilliant at collaborating with his colleagues.

...and he gave them credit where it was due. The HB1 (Holman-Blumlein) microphone was so-named because Blumlein insisted that, as Herbert Holman had done a large part of the design work, he should take the credit, so his name ought to come first.

I was privileged to know Alan Blumlein's son, Simon, who was also a wonderful character* and a very likeable person. Sadly, Simon died last year but the other members of his family are still going strong.

Except that there's absolutely no evidence that this actually happens.

Whatever schemes the American electoral system has for identifying voters do seem to work. "Vote early and often" was a Tamany Hall jibe, but since then they do seem to have worked out how to stop people voting repeatedly.

The Republicans cheat by making it difficult to for legitimate voters to voting even once in areas of the electorate that don't normally have a big Republican turn-out. Jeb Bush won Florida for his brother by purging the electoral rolls in Democrat-leaning districts of anybody who even had the same surname as somebody with a felony conviction.

Mike Johnson: "This election was TOO BIG TO RIG", still implying that anything was "rigged" the last time.

People are different, people change, but that Republicans are non-stop lying SOBs is pretty much a universal constant. And no doubt you block vote the elephant, so what's that make you I wonder.

Speaker Mike Johnson: "This landslide victory election was TOO BIG TO RIG", still implying that anything was "rigged" the last time.

People are different, people change, but that operatives of the Trump Party are non-stop lying SOBs is pretty much a universal constant. Other types of politicians are known to lie as well, but it hardly seems as fully necessary a condition for the job as the former.

The lies being peddled are finally too silly for making out anyone who doesn't take them seriously as a Nazi to be very effective.

They probably do think it was a "landslide victory" and everyone actually loves them, reminiscent of when Obama won by 5 million votes in

Design some electronics. You'll feel better.

Thanks for confirming the accuracy of my statement.

But I've hardly been here for some time, as I've been splitting my time between that, family responsibilities, and getting another degree, which doesn't leave time for much other than sleeping.

I see that nobody posts many circuits anymore and I'm sorry for that. but at the end of the day I learned enough over the years here that people wanted to pay me more and more often for doing it, and I'm not going to turn them down.

I wonder why John Larkin claims this - he doesn't seem to so much design his circuits as evolve them, and that can't be all that satisfying.

Like all tedious tasks, you do get a sense of relief when you have done enough to be able to quit, but it's not all that dramatic.