Sudden Confusion

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Twenty years ago I was developing some of the kinds of circuits that John seems to work on now. We got our machine to work, if not well enough to persuade marketing that they could sell enough of them at a time when the semiconductor business was in recession (and my guess is that if the machine had worked perfectly - it already did everything that we'd been asked to make it do - they would have come to the same conclusion).

John's obviously in a position to choose the problems he tackles, and his commercial success makes it clear that he usually chooses the right problems and tackles them adequately. I was never in a position to choose the problems and my ability in that area was never tested. My capacity to solve the problems I ended up with was pretty good.

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Why? There's no customer hanging on the result and no customer to pay the costs of renting or leasing test gear - which normally cost about a tenth of the purchase price per month. I've spent a couple of hundred dollars on RM14 cores, formers, clips and transformer wire and tape in the last week or so. I'm going to spend more than a thousand dollars on parts as soon as my friend in London and I have satisfied ourselves that what I'm planning on putting together will actually work, and work well enough to justify making the effort.

There's little prospect that anybody will want to buy my low distortion 16kHz sine wave generator when I've built it, so this is strictly a hobby project. We may be able to publish the circuit once I've built it and Ian has tested it, but it's still a hobby project - if at a relatively high level.

I've had an LTSpice simulation running since Saturday, and it looks as if it will start telling me useful stuff around midnight tonight, and may take another day or two to run to completion. In the meantime Ian has delved into the relevant manufacturer's Spice model in the and commented out a few of the features that slow it down in our application, so round two may be quicker.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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What's magical about US gas tax (except that it's way too low - the US balance of payments deficit is essentially what you pay to import oil, and any rational government would have long since taxed you into smaller cars and vans with better fuel economy, as has happened in Europe and - to a lesser extent - in Australia)?

He's probably not.The privatised economy has it's own defects, since the free market doesn't discipline natural monopolies in any useful way, and privatising services has had a way of making them more expensive while degrading the quality.Margaret Thatcher's privatision of the UK railway system is a case in point - it didn't get any cheaper, and the quality got quite a bit worse.

Lefties don't believe the rubbish that right-wing nitwits take as gospel.

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So what. Private enterprise has got anything that it doesn't collect from it's customers, and it has to make a profit. The disciplines of the free market don't work on natural monopolies - compare Microsoft and Linux - and civil-service-based system happen to be a better way managing natural monopolies. They aren't perfect, but voter pressure keeps them effective, if perhaps not as efficient as we'd like.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

There is useful work done in economics, but right-wing nitwits sabotage the science by subsidising academics who produce the kind of nonsense that appeals to right-wing nitwits - the Chicago School being a case in point.

Quite how we separate the serious scientists from the flatterers isn't obvious.

It should be easy - serious science produces insights that can be used to predict events that are going to happen in the real world, and Will Hutton wrote a column in the Guardian in the 1980's where he regularly took the monetarist-based predictions of the UK Treasury and pointed out that any Kenysian could see that they were going to be wrong, and six months later would publish a short "I told you so" piece.

This should have lead to the monetarists being laughed at by the population as a whole and fired by their political masters, who ought to have been embarrassed about being mislead. Didn't happen. The right wing UK press kept on publishing the monetarist predictions as if they had some connection to reality, and Thatcher government went on to leave the UK economy in a mess - albeit a different kind of mess than one it had inherited.

People with lots of money have power, and their influence can mess up academic appointments, amongst may other things ...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Nothing that I've ever read suggests that government-run social security programs pay out a lot of money to benefit frauds. They do pay out some, but they spend money on finding them and prosecuting them. 10% lost to fraudulent claims would be a fairly high figure. 99% would justify a rather larger expenditure on fraud hunting than anybody seems to find necessary.

Your willingness to post implausible and unsupported delusions as if they had some factual basis is not unknown amongst right-wing nitwits, but it does make it difficult to take your demented claims seriously.

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why.

Fruit picking is one of those jobs that cries out to be automated. It's painful, awkward work and can't pay enough that nobody with any kind of choice is going to sign up for it. You can call people who won't take it one whiners, but you'd be one of them in the same situation.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The right-wing nitwit can't say why, because fundamentally "profit" and "commission" are both identical, in that they are what it costs to get the job done. They are regulated differently - the level of profit is regulated by competition, while the level of commission is regulated by the legislature, and competition does work better, but there's not an enormous difference as long as the legislature isn't corrupt.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Not really. A profit in the classical sense is a measure of "consumer surplus" - you wouldn't buy something unless it's worth more to you than what you pay for it.

As to the "commission", it's really hard to disentangle government's "service" component from its role as currency-establisher, and from the central bank*. If there was no income tax, people wouldn't even see the cost of government. There's an income tax because Wayne Wheeler and his (evil?) minions got the 16th Amendment passed to create one, to eliminate the need for rum taxes to prepare for the passage of Prohibition.

*are these the same thing? I tend to think they are, for historical, path-dependent reasons. YMMV.

The problem ( to me at least ) is that people think that there's a natural government v. industry balance of power. That's mostly a story we've been told. This tends to express people's feelings about collective vs. individualist values.

-- Les Cargill

Not so much. The basic signaling mechanisms in government are vastly different than in private industry. Government is much more risk averse.

-- Les Cargill1

There are very nearly no natural monopolies. Of the available monopolies that are not public utilities, I can think of two - deBeers and Alcoa. Both are centered around high barriers to entry or the fact that diamonds are not evenly distributed.

SFAIK, railways systems are always cash flow disasters. It was true in the American West and it's been true in India.

Civil service is a fairly terrible way to manage anything. It fosters risk aversion. It's analogous to a tradeoff between bandwidth and error rate. If the bandwidth is high enough, just retransmit and use process to polish the error rate in subsequent releases.

-- Les Cargill

Economics is in early days, best I can tell.

As I read Monetarism, people with money wouldn't like it very much. IOW, there's been work done on it since then. And the general perception is that Britain has been better off since Thatcher, that thatcher laid the stage for it.

The basis for money having power is that people say one thing and spend another. We wouldn't need the phrase "put your money where your mouth is" if people were internally consistent in that way.

-- Les Cargill

I'm right about half the time, in that half the things I design are ever profitable. I make up for it by designing lots of stuff.

I do learn from everything I design, so that's another payoff.

--

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

You forgot - or didn't think of - Microsoft. The advantage of everybody standardising on a single operating system - even one as crappy as Windows - makes it a classic natural monopoly.

We want more people to use the railways than would do so if they were run on a pure profit and loss basis, so society subsidises the system to provide more frequent services than the market would support, and services between centres that don't generate enough traffic to justify any trains, let alone the cost of laying and maintaining the rails.

Roads are are a more extreme example of society's desire to enable people and goods to move around freely - you very rarely get charged for using them, so they are total cash flow disaster, but they are nevertheless ubiquitous..

Risk aversion should be fostered. After Thatcher privatised the British rail system, the people looking after the rail network proved to less risk averse than they should have been, and their slap-dash approach to maintaining the signalling system caused a few dozen deaths

"Retransmission" doesn't work if you've been killed in a train wreck.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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But they do.It generates the kinds of advice that they like to hear.

But it's still rubbish, with no more predictive power than astrology.

"Taming the trade unions" got a good press, in large part because the Murdoch press took on the print unions, who'd built up some very nasty and counter-productive restrictive practices, and have been congratulating themselves for their courage ever since, and lauding Thatcher for helping. Quite a lot of baby got thrown out with that particular bath-water.

The destruction she wrought in British manufacturing industry doesn't get as much attention. It did help her to tame the trade unions - the people who still had jobs in what was left of British manufacturing industry were a lot less militant than they had been earlier - but it didn't help the British economy.

The basis for money having power is that you can buy influence in a variety of ways. Straightforward bribery is the simplest, but making generous contributions to election campaign costs seems to be equally effective and more legal.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I can hardly blame you for not being interested in things like this. Few people are.

--

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

Wrong again. The private sector has an incentive to *reduce* overhead. The only incentives for the government sector are to *increase* overhead. It's absolutely a different game.

Absolutely. Any money the government sector has, has first been stolen from the private sector. Without the private sector, there's nothing; something Obama and Slowman constantly forget.

I can think of 10,000,000 reasons.

I didn't. Microsoft was never a monopoly.

No, actually, it does not. It is, however, an excellent example of how confused people are on the subject.

Hope this helps.

Subsidies are *DEFACTO* inefficient. "We want them to" is not enough of a justification. It's muddle-headed thinking.

Leland Stanford did not make money on railroads, he made money on government incentives to build railroads ( and then other things ).

"Monorail!" - The Simpsons.

Roads that are universally available and require no agent to provide access are a public good, give or take.

Railroads can be a public good, but for path dependent historical reasons, aren't. They are a monopoly created by government intervention.

We can't say anything *like* that. Risks are things to be managed, not avoided outright.

That is incompetence. It's not limited to private nor public administration.

You are trying to say "the signalling system for railroads was underfunded and that killed people." And in the same breath, you want to subsidize the railroads.

Those are understandable but contradictory impulses. When the managers of railroads are *required to seek rents*, it's probable that the signalling system will get shorter shrift than it would if they simply had to respond to market forces or buy insurance.

it's not *essentially* nor *universally* true, but think about the incentives.

I'm pretty sure that railroad signalling isn't some esoteric science. It's not even difficult.

So trains are still good, then? When systems become inefficient enough, people get killed...

-- Les Cargill

Not from what I have read it doesn't. I can't say conclusively, but

*my understanding* is that it would simply do what central banks are supposed to do - regulate the money supply by a certain class of principles.

Part of the problem is "people with money" isn't a coherent thing. They vary.

I know that people who profit most in deflations would not like a more inflationary regime. I have not gone through the math for the opposite case.

it's the only thing I have seen that ever predicted *anything*.

Remember, the reason Keynsianism ran aground was stagflation. I haven't seen a keynesian who admits that this was because of Keynesianism - and the Monetarists claim that NGDP targets would have fixed that.

But it deemphasizes fiscal stimulus in favor of monetary stimulus, so there's less for political types to spread around. This is not some snide comment; it's a real problem.

Scott Sumner supports NGDP targeting through NGDP futures contracts. I've yet to see a good critique of it, and various others ( like Krugman and even Taylor ) seem to at least partially endorse it.

Like I say, there's no one grand unified theory in econ, so it's always tricky. And I don't know what it really says about inflation.

there's little doubt that the Thatcher thing was controversial.

I think Schumpeter is better to explain that. My understanding is that Britain was highly managed from a central authority post-War ( and likely needfully so ) and that it was simply wrenching to turn away from that.

Then again, I don't fully understand why Tony Blair gathered so much ire.

I think politicians aren't paid enough. It works out exactly to the the ticket scalping problem ( tickets are only scalped when the original price isn't high enough - more subsidies).

So do you know personally any people who need to buy influence? Why do they need to do that? Can't they just make a living and live their lives?

What does it mean when we make it more attractive for people to "buy elections" than to simply do their jobs? Wasn't that an artifact of a poorly designed system?

Maybe we are bad at that kind of design... so maybe we should not do it.

-- Les Cargill

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Until you think about the influence of voting tax-payers. The incentives are not as immediate and direct, but they are real and influential.

A different game, but the basic rules are the same - do as much as possible while spending as little as possible.

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Not stolen - extracted, perfectly legally, as taxes. Society wouldn't work without the services taxes pay for, though nitwits like krw seem to forget this.

I certainly haven't forgotten it, and I doubt if President Obama has either. Unlike krw, neither of us are right-wing nitwits in the habit of forgetting elementary facts, such as that society runs on taxes and that without taxes there wouldn't be any society for the private sector to make money in.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It's close enough for all practical purposes.

And why do you think that?

The confusion is all yours.

Twaddle. Big cities don't work work without mass transit. You can't fit enough cars into the centre of city like London or New York to make them work without a railway network plus local rapid transit. Los Angeles famously tried to make an all-road system work, and equally famously failed.

And mass transit and rail don't work without subsidies - the subsidies do no more than match the investment in the road system, which rarely gets recovered in tolls.

So what.

They weren't created as monopolies, but turned out to be a service that was best provided as a government monopoly.

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Government services don't go in for outright risk aversion. They tend to be more cautious that private sector entrepreneurs - they've got more to lose if an initiative goes belly-up, and less to gain - but it's a difference in degree, not in kind.

It is a form of incompetence that shows up rather too frequently in newly privatised ex-government services. The entrepreneur who has taken over the service looks for way to cut expenses, and over-does it.

The privatised authority responsible for maintaining the signalling system didn't send out maintenance engineers as frequently as they should have - less frequently than the nationalised British Rail organisation had been doing. Some of the uncorrected defect caused accidents that killed people. If it takes subsidies to pay for enough maintenance to keep the system safe, you pay the subsidies or close the system down (which doesn't happen to be a practical option in the UK).

Why?

If someone gets killed because of something you failed to do you've got a big black mark on your work history, not matter where you are working.

It's not all that simple. The Dutch are trying to upgrade their signalling a the moment - in part to support high speed rail links into the French and German systems, but the peculiar complexities of the Dutch rail system are making it difficult.

Many fewer than get killed on the roads, per person-mile. The ratio is about fourteen to one.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen