Sudden Confusion

Trade secrets give you - at best - a shop right to a patentable idea if somebody else discovers it independently and patents it out from under your feet.

It can make sense to publish a patentable idea if the potential return doesn't look likely to cover the cost of the patenting process.

You don't have to publish enough detail to make the idea easy to copy.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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How exactly is 0bama getting the US economy back to running? Other than spurring gun sales, that is (up 66%). By blaming everyone else for everything? Attacking employers? Industries? Spending America underwater handing out candy? Cutting off energy sources? Heaping on extra costs, like Obombacare?

The US GDP is 12% below trend, 12% below where we should be, if we'd bounced back to normal growth, and as we normally would. Obama's the reason for that. 0bama's the biggest impediment to recovery.

Oh--coolfact(tm). I heard: Big 0's economic advisors? French. So, we're France.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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That's not the way it works. The entire process - collection and distribution - is under democratic control, via the legislature, so everybody involved has an equal say. The way our economy works - and this is reflected in the tax system - means that a lot of the money collected comes from a relatively small proportion of the population, but we live in a democracy - not a plutocracy - and it turns out that the rich still do better - in the long term - under democracy than they do under a plutocracy, despite Bastiat's anxieties.

But you are redefining tax collection as robbery, which is misleading and deceitful. Bastiat may have done it first, but an error with a long history isn't any less of an error because some right-wing nitwit endorsed it 150-odd years ago.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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That blather about the wars is tiresome. 0bama took Bush's overspending, cut nothing, and lavished a bunch on top, called it "stimulus," and has made it a permanent part of the spending.

THAT is the reason for today's problem. 3/4 Obama, 1/4 Bush.

And, Obama signed up for the current tax rates, so he owns that too.

Oh,

That's old agiprop, gained by counting wages only, and not counting benefits. When you include all compensation, including medical coverage increasing at 7% a year, and retirement, everyone's getting more, except under 0bama. Real wages have fallen under 0.

It's handy to quote 2005 figures from the government-made banking bubble, and stop before the 2009 correction, isn't it?

Since then the 1% have fallen drastically. That's been nice, hasn't it? Let's recede some more, progressively more!

-- Cheers, James Arthur

It's easier and far more efficient, and less tedious, to just invent tons of stuff and sell it. Let the market deside how valuable each product is. In the unlikely event it infringes some unknown patent, and someone actually notices, then pay a royalty or quit making it. That hasn't happened to me so far.

Getting patents would seriously slow me down.

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I've often wondered how the accounting system works. The FED apparently creates money from nothing, and credit other banks with the deposit. Giving other banks money increases the fractional reserve, thus making more money available for loans. But how does that end up on the books? Where are the credit/debit entries on the balance sheets? Do you understand the mechanics?

-Bill

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Yes. They decide how much currency there will be.

AIUI (dimly), Goldman and other big banks are middlemen who buy the Treasuries, which the Fed buys from them. For some reason the Fed can't buy directly. That's why a number of people have complained-- when Big-0 borrows, Goldman's getting a cut. (Wall Street likes that.)

I don't understand fully--the Fed ain't my thing--but the credit entries would be on the Fed's "book," and the debits on Treasury's balance sheet. The Fed (or banks) count Treasuries as assets; the Treasury counts them as liabilities.

-- Cheers, James

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It is not so much that temporarily helping already contributing members = of society, nor even those that have contributed for a lifetime already; the resentment comes from being commanded (at the point of a gun) to support the third generation of never contributors in perpetuity. Do you understand the significance of the difference?

?-)

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The fundamental problem is the TAKING BY FORCE. I cannot support your ignoring the concept.

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Supporting "entitlements" is the fundamental problem here. Making so = many entitled to the unearned amplifies it immensely.

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Don't know about you but my tax rate is well over 1/3 of my income, some others here are over 1/2 of income. That is NOT a little.

Perhaps just a fool. 1/2 less is not a little. Then giving that to 10 times as many after taking 2/3 of it in processing costs leaves so little that the benefit to the recipients is nearly trivial. Worst of all it is given to insure non-productivity.

all.

Like Greece? Like Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain?

Because he is a arrogant pseudo academic twit and sees all others as the same. Why do you waste half a dozen posts when you should know that already? Why do you even answer him at all?

?-/

It is not so much that humanity needs that or really wants that (other than the "protestant" work ethic types), but that the neer' do well's had damn well better quit throwing brickbats a those few productive persons. We the John Galts can quit for a spell and they won't survive.

?-)

There's nothing pseudo about my academic credentials. They are strictly at the spear-carrier level, but no less real for that. I'm tolerably arrogant vis-a-vis twits like you because I happen to know more than you do - not a whole lot more, but I fit the minimal definition of an expert as someone who knows the limitations of their knowledge.

The same as what? John Larkin's obviously isn't any kind of pseudo- academic, and he doesn't - perfectly correctly - pretend to academic knowledge. He doesn't actually appreciate what this would entail, and spouts opinion which look downright silly when set against what academics - and interested amateurs - really do know.

You seem to be a card-carrying know-nothing who gets upset about the idea that anybody might know more than you do - which probably leaves you upset for a lot of the time, though not as upset as you ought to be, since you clearly haven't got a clue about the extent of your ignorance.

Because he's a raving ego-maniac who loves the sound of his own voice. You should have noticed this by now - he's posted more items on to the user group (28,000 plus) than anybody else.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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If you don't know the literature, most of your "inventions" are going to be re-inventions. Re-inventing the wheel isn't efficient, particularly as you tend to invent the constant diameter roller rather than the wheel.

You are sufficiently over-confident and ill-informed that you won't have had your nose rubbed in this fact all too often, and sufficiently vain that you'll have rapidly suppressed the memory when it did happen.

You are a small volume manufacturer, and don't have enough to be worth suing. It takes a lot of lawyers quite a while to prosecute a patent infringement, and the victim has to have enough money to pay their costs, with some left over to pay off the patent owner, before it's worth the effort. If you ever find and popularise an innovation with mass-market appeal and you could be in more trouble.

Getting an education was something that you set aside because you felt that it was seriously slowing you down. You may well be right about patents, but you do have an opportunist's enthusiasm for the quick and dirty.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Since you don't understand - and wouldn't want to understand, if you could - the Keynesian principle of stimulating the economy by deficit- financed stimulus, it's pointless to even try to expalin it to you.

Normally? As in "without the idiot bankers engineering and bursting a housing price bubble"? The economy reacted perfectly normally to this particular stimulus at the end of 2008, by shrinking 1.6% in three months. Without Keynesian intervention there's every reason to expect that it would have continued to decline at theat rate for several years, as it did from 1929 to 1933, when GDP shrank by 25% - declining at much the same rate for a rather longer period under the influence of nitwit economic ideas like yours.

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Ask any Republican propagandist. They'll give you exactly the same implausible story. John McCain and Sarah Palin would have done ever so much better - at least according to the sort of partisan nitwit who peddles that sort of partisan twaddle.

You should be so lucky.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The borrowing rates have been flirting with being "critical" for about a year now. Whenever they get high, the EU engineers some kind of investor-calming mechanism, and the market settles down again. It provides great cherry-picking for US commentators, who seem happy to ignore the beam in their own eye - and enormous and long established US balance of payments deficit - in favour of the mote in the European eye, which is the persisting consequences of the bursting of the US house price bubble.

Like getting the economy into the happy state it occupied in 1933.

Not to mention stupid.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Says the guy who has been about to build a 2-transistor oscillator for years now. I do stull like that in hours.

And wound up with a catalog of about a hundred products that keep selling.

As far as repressing memories goes, it's astonishing how things that looked dumb, or seemed to be failures, turn out to be useful and profitable years later. everything you do makes you better, one way or another. It helps to keep good notes.

I'm not interested in mass-market products. The most of anything that we've sold is pushing 4000 pieces, an NMR temperature controller. But whatever happens, we'll deal with it.

I kept my scholarship, got As in the courses that mattered, and got a BSEE.

You may well be right about

Idiot. My products are beautiful. You accomplish nothing. Are you lazy, or afraid?

They are useless... that's what matters.

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Two-transistor oscillators perhaps. Getting the third harmonic content of the output more than 80dB below the fundamental might take even you more than a few hours, and doing it in a way that gives you direct and linear control of the amplitude and frequency (if only over a tweaking range of a few percent) might take even longer.

But you are happy that you know all you need to know, even when what you know doesn't have much to do with reality.

Mostly copied (with improvements) from the competition.

Which does suggest that you lack imagination.

Did just enough to gett the ticket, skipped the education.

As you repeatedly tell us. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I'm not accomplishing much at the moment.

Neither, merely retired, much against my will.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

They certainly aren't doing me any good at the moment. Dutch employers look at my date of birth, and don't look any further.

I'll get to find out whether Australian employers are equally blinkered in October. Academic credentials don't make much difference in an engineering environment - the attention is on whether you've been able to turn what you know into product that works. There is stuff out there that I can point to, and the fact that some of the stuff I've done has got into academic publications makes that stuff easier to point to.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen