Romney on green cards

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Evidently, yes. We don't see many people going the other direction, not even miso.

(Not even people who left those places, speak the language, and could easily go back, for that matter. They stay.)

James

Many are going back these days because the opportunities in, say, China and Vietnam are better despite low living costs and taxes in the US. When ther e is double-digit growth all you have to worry about is maintain market sha re, not trying to grab it off someone else. Russia too. There's sure plenty of opportunity in the US still, course, and many other advantages such as a reasonably good legal system, predictable politics, okay infrastructure, and excellent education and medical care at the very top end, but things ar e definitely flattening out over time.

When people say it would cost 10% more for US assembly, I don't think they mean that it would cost (say) $5.50 rather than $5.00 to assemble an iPad, rather they mean that it would cost $60.00 instead of $5.00 and that might add "only" 10% to the retail price. And even that is likely a lie. For one thing, all the parts are from Korea, Japan, Taiwan and would have to shippe d much further with many more tons of packaging handled by higher paid work ers.

--sp

It might be on mainland Europe (France particularly so) but in the UK it is marginally higher but still less than 40% for income tax on average. Japan was somewhere in between the two probably still is.

ISTR in Luxemburg it is close to zero which is why many tax dodgers are domiciled and ordinarily resident there. They would say tax avoidance. They can only spend a fixed number of days in the UK as a result.

Curiously the British Conservative government has followed the sort of very tough austerity budget that US fiscal conservatives would like. The results have not been good - it now turns out that the model they used is *completely* wrong in the middle of a recession.

They assumed that for every £1 taken out of the budget only 50p would be lost from the real economy. They now realise that the true answer is ~£1.1 lost and it could be higher. The IMF has also published similar analysis last week that shows Austerity doesn't work at all as economists expected - not only that but it acts to make things worse.

We are stuck with a clueless rank amateur for chancellor worse luck.

Economics is not called the dismal science for nothing. I am very glad the 2012 Nobel Economics Prize was awarded to something useful this year and not to the charlatans that have given us boom bust forever.

You need the state to provide certain structures everything falls flat on its face. I know that would suit the Looneytarians and TeaPot Party.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

I really don't get the vibe that labor cost is the determining factor here. It's something more like logistical cost ( which you say ). it might be "interface simplicity" - all of China is an "enterprise zone" where people are more specialized into setting up and tearing down ... enterprises.

The marginal product of USA labor is quite high and actually rising.

--
Les Cargill

Who is John Galt?

t)

This article is may give some ideas

1. There was an IMO excellent Special Report on the World Economy in their latest issue.

"AMERICANS ARE ENGAGED in a furious argument about redistribution. In now infamous comments at a fund-raiser in May, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, wrote off the 47% of Americans who pay no income tax as people who consider themselves ?victims?, entitled to government handouts. Conservatives like to point out that 40% of all income taxes come from 1% of taxpayers. America?s government, they argue, redistributes far too much from a shrinking pool of ?makers? to a vast number of loafers. Those on the left peddle the opposite view: that the government redistributes far too little because the tax system is skewed to benefit the rich and America?s welfare state is the skimpiest in the developed world.

Both sides are wrong. "

Regards, Mikko

urt)

21564407.

Oh, and the comments by "mike from Virginia", too (from him on the quality goes down IMO). The big picture seems to be well hidden behind all sorts of twists and convolutions. I'm sure some well- informed liberal minded person might be able to still add some left-out pieces of the story, after "mike" - fairly enough - bent it a bit to the conservative direction.

Regards, Mikko

majority of them are hired into relatively mundane administrative positions at pay way less than engineering. It's no loss to discourage candidate students who would choose engineering solely because of the prospects of a high paying job. Those kinds are not going to be very good and probably don't make a career out of it.

applicants. The average admission rate is very low, something like 3% last time I looked. Medical school resources in this country are too slim to waste on gold diggers.

You can assume that all you want. Like I said, most applicants are interested in the money and prestige. I don't know how the admission boards can sort out motivation. Sincerity is one of the easiest things to fake. I'm totally sincere about that!

what everyone knows, and that is quite a large number of graduates aren't fit for any kind of engineering work. By definition, in that census, an engineer is someone with a degree in engineering. There's that friggin meritocracy again, because that is certainly not the reality. They should re-title the survey to American Community Survey of Career Outcomes by Degree. There are a lot of people in those numbers who are good for nothing.

Yes, out of work engineers are all incompetent. That's why many of us have to start our own companies and produce or die. But there isn't enough market share to go around. I was the local head of an IEEE Consultants Network for a couple of years. The best attended lectures we had were were from the "Art of Consulting" series. Many engineers want to get into consulting to make a living. They don't know how to do consulting, but everyone I spoke to seemed to be a pretty good engineer. Mostly they wanted to know how to find customers, the engineering they had figured out.

Rick

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Neither catagory is necessarily going to want to work in the US. The US isn't necessarily where it's happening to day - if you want to work on the cutting edge of semiconductor lithography today, you work for ASML in the Neterhlands.

And the US isn't a place where you've got much cance of changing the world. Bothe the Democrats nd the Republicans are much too attentive to the interests of people who have already got money, and that group doesn't want to change the world - which is their oyster just the way it is. Innovation has a way of destroying existing industries and creating new ones, and that rarely suits the people who own the exisitng industries.

The really good ones rarely have much trouble finding work - at least not when they are young and perceived as flexible.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Nobody moves country without serious motivation - I've done it a couple of times, and it sucks, big-time. The previous moves paid off more than well enough to compensate for the pain. The current move was in part motivated by my wife's desire to keep working after she turned

68 (which she's doing, in spades) and in part by my desire to return to the work force.

I started browsing the local web-sites yesterday, and the main impression I got was that we needed to hurry up and get a fast internet connection to the flat ....

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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ges

Maybe the house prices have gone down recently. When my wife and I contemplated moving to Los Angles in the early 1980s, the price of houses in good neighbopurhoods - with good schools - was prohibitively high. UCLA fialed to hire a number of people at that time, and subsequently introduced subsidised staff mortagages to cope with the problem.

At the same time Silicon Valley - up around San Francisco - apparently became equally unattrractive for exacly the same reason, and the start- ups moved to Oregon and Salt Lake City.

The bursting of the house price bubble may have reduced that particular problem.

Until they found out where they could afford to live.

By the people behind the Romney-Ryan initiative. If they weren't zero- sum thinkers, they'd be putting money into the primary and secondary sectors of the US education system, in the hope of detecting and training a larger proportion of the bright kids of low income families. But that's a long term investment.

Much cheaper to exploit the pool of bright kids that other countries have detected and trained.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Then why are the green cards and work visas so much in demand?

The

ASML just bought Cymer, so you can now work for ASML in San Diego. I think ASML just became my biggest customer.

Of course, you could work for Intel or TI or AMD or LTC a zillion other US companies, and do lithography development.

Total nonsense.

Innovation has a way of destroying existing industries and

The best science, engineering, and chip development are still being done in the USA. Europe and Japan seem to be fading in chip development. The US, especially my neighborhood, is the software center of the world.

We have a few garage operations still doing a little stuff. Apple. Microsoft. Oracle. HP. Amazon. Dell. Google.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

ing

le to

I can pay the same compliment to James Arthur. Given an unsympathetic set of facts, he's a master of exacting the message that he wants you to take away. His claim that the Democrats are wrecking the country, when the GDP and employment have both been rising steadily, if slowly, requires a very selective approach to the facts.

But working out whether he's right or I'm right requires critical thinking, which James clearly can't manage.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Not around here; people are making offers over asking price, and a million dollars buys a nice but plain 3-bedroom house. What has gone

*way* up in the last couple of years is rent. All those $15K-per-month script kiddies want to live in San Francisco and they are bidding up rents. Like $5K per month for a 2-bedroom apartment. In my neighborhood, there are huge unmarked private busses prowling our small streets, picking up the Google and Yahoo kids in the morning and dropping them off at night. Twitter just moved in three blocks away, and Dolby is setting up a facility across the street from them.

It won't last, of course.

When my wife and I

It's not unattractive because housing costs are high. Housing costs are high because it's so attractive. Detroit has low housing costs, but that's not attracting engineers there.

There's a feedback cycle of people bidding up housing cost. It's just another free market at equilibrium. Envision lots of roommates.

The push is from them. One of the reasons I moved to California, Silicon Valley, was to see how good I was in the big leagues.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

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Well, as a brief example, you're wrong on Barack's personal financial management [1], and you're wrong on your Tea Party talking points.

The Tea Party contention is that spending (1.57x revenue in FY2011) is too much. That's not radical, it's common sense. We've jacked up spending, robbing Peter, etc. a) It doesn't work. b) If it worked, it would have. c) It doesn't, didn't, and it's not working. d) And, we're spending all this borrowed money badly, foolishly. It puts people out of work, leaves debts to our children and the poor, reduces our productivity, and ability to provide for the people who need it.

[1] "[...][Obama] has never suffered any consequences from the excessive spending and borrowing in his private life." (which are then detailed)

"Mad Hatters" are the ones who think you can spend infinite amounts of other people's money without ill effects. They think you can chop someone's pay and have them work just as hard, and they think they can spend money more productively than the people who earned it.

Those aren't Democrats, either. JFK never thought that. Plenty of Democrats are fiscally sane. What we have today is something else, something radical. Obama's not a Democrat. He's a radical from an admitted den of radicals, he's ultra-left, and he's an economic disaster.

We're not employing the people displaced by the recession, and we're not creating jobs fast enough to keep up with population growth. There are fewer jobs today than when Barack took office, and we're not making more. The few jobs that are offsetting normal losses are disproportionately part-time, temporary, and low-wage. And, the people most affected are the very ones Obama claims he's helping.

Real household income is plummeting under Obama. Meanwhile, food and energy and medical costs are soaring. And, GDP growth is stalling, as yet another sugar-rush wears off.

All of this is unnecessary, it's easily fixed, but that's where Obama has us--stuck in that less-than-zero-sum box.

--
Cheers, 
James Arthur

Determining that taxation and deficit spending actually reduces productivity is blindingly complicated. My general understanding is that the last time this was actually true was around 1960.

Spending no more than revenue may be common sense, but it's not necessarily *correct*. It depends on a lot. The gummint has to "lead" the economy with the money supply ( like the door gunner on a Huey in 'Nam hadda "lead" the target ). *That* is mainly where the Bad Things happen.

The reasons for keeping government minimal isn't government's run rate; they are that government is a noisy instrument and should be constrained. But that is certainly something reasonable people can disagree on. The problem is that people think that government is the force to oppose "big business", when the opposite is very frequently the case ( and assuming "big business" isn't pretty what we asked for in the first place ).

For productive people, this is a golden age. It's never been easier to get financed and move stuff out. Yeah, there's a huge regulatory overhang for some things, but we're doing pretty well managing even *that*. Meanwhile, there's a massive R&D deficit built up over the last ten years - in some industries, it's as much as underfinanced by 60%. Chances are that'll snap back.

It's the same as always - the jobs lost weren't the good jobs, anyway. They were un-fun paper shuffling gigs. We're all getting more and more of the responsibility and control pushed out to the end worker, and that's a good thing.

it's possible for redistribution to produce an increase in monetary velocity. That should "make everybody better off." Social Security does this in spades.

Again, initial conditions are all but impossible to calculate.

The other side is "what to you mean by 'earned'"? It's certainly possible to have income that you didn't actually earn. But measuring that is not something we're very good at, in general.

It's hard to say what JFK really thought. Ike had most likely been overly austere, so there was plenty of spring built up for JFK to play with.

he's a Centrist, Midwestern city-politician who talks more like Nixon than anybody since nixon. There are too many of us, and we're too dumb for one guy* to counterbalance it, no matter what his job.

*modulo a handful of people, mainly industrialists who built up incredible industries when-the-world-was-new-and-all - and they mainly amalgamated.

Yep.

medical yes. You can't tell anything from the other. Oil markets are the craziest markets there are, subject to biases from Arab Spring uncertainties.

The *overall* energy markets, including natural gas, are on complete bloom. LNG is a seriously coming technology; if I were running a fleet, I'd be doing it. Heck, *propane* is down line 25% from a year ago.

--
Les Cargill

Well, as a brief example, you're wrong on Barack's personal financial management [1], and you're wrong on your Tea Party talking points.

The Tea Party contention is that spending (1.57x revenue in FY2011) is too much. That's not radical, it's common sense. We've jacked up spending, robbing Peter, etc. a) It doesn't work. b) If it worked, it would have. c) It doesn't, didn't, and it's not working. d) And, we're spending all this borrowed money badly, foolishly. It puts people out of work, leaves debts to our children and the poor, reduces our productivity, and ability to provide for the people who need it.

[1] "[...][Obama] has never suffered any consequences from the excessive spending and borrowing in his private life." (which are then detailed)

"Mad Hatters" are the ones who think you can spend infinite amounts of other people's money without ill effects. They think you can chop someone's pay and have them work just as hard, and they think they can spend money more productively than the people who earned it.

Those aren't Democrats, either. JFK never thought that. Plenty of Democrats are fiscally sane. What we have today is something else, something radical. Obama's not a Democrat. He's a radical from an admitted den of radicals, he's ultra-left, and he's an economic disaster.

We're not employing the people displaced by the recession, and we're not creating jobs fast enough to keep up with population growth. There are fewer jobs today than when Barack took office, and we're not making more. The few jobs that are offsetting normal losses are disproportionately part-time, temporary, and low-wage. And, the people most affected are the very ones Obama claims he's helping.

Real household income is plummeting under Obama. Meanwhile, food and energy and medical costs are soaring. And, GDP growth is stalling, as yet another sugar-rush wears off.

All of this is unnecessary, it's easily fixed, but that's where Obama has us--stuck in that less-than-zero-sum box.

--
Cheers, 
James Arthur 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++= 
The complete list of faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies 
  Oboma wants higher taxes, right? 

  The complete list of faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies: 



    1.. Evergreen Solar ($24 million)* 
    2.. SpectraWatt ($500,000)* 
    3.. Solyndra ($535 million)* 
    4.. Beacon Power ($69 million)* 
    5.. AES's subsidiary Eastern Energy ($17.1 million) 
    6.. Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million) 
    7.. SunPower ($1.5 billion) 
    8.. First Solar ($1.46 billion) 
    9.. Babcock and Brown ($178 million) 
    10.. EnerDel's subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)* 
    11.. Amonix ($5.9 million) 
    12.. National Renewable Energy Lab ($200 million) 
    13.. Fisker Automotive ($528 million) 
    14.. Abound Solar ($374 million)* 
    15.. A123 Systems ($279 million)* 
    16.. Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($6 million) 
    17.. Johnson Controls ($299 million) 
    18.. Schneider Electric ($86 million) 
    19.. Brightsource ($1.6 billion) 
    20.. ECOtality ($126.2 million) 
    21.. Raser Technologies ($33 million)* 
    22.. Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)* 
    23.. Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)* 
    24.. Olsen's Crop Service and Olsen's Mills Acquisition Company ($10  
million)* 
    25.. Range Fuels ($80 million)* 
    26.. Thompson River Power ($6.4 million)* 
    27.. Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)* 
    28.. LSP Energy ($2.1 billion)* 
    29.. UniSolar ($100 million)* 
    30.. Azure Dynamics ($120 million)* 
    31.. GreenVolts ($500,000) 
    32.. Vestas ($50 million) 
    33.. LG Chem's subsidiary Compact Power ($150 million) 
    34.. Nordic Windpower ($16 million)* 
    35.. Navistar ($10 million) 
    36.. Satcon ($3 million)* 


  *Denotes companies that have filed for bankruptcy.

You maybe prefer a world where nobody works? Cool, we could all live on government support.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators