Sudden Confusion

Look at the US lobbying industry. That's wholesale influence buying. And note the dichotomy in the fact that the US has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the first world, and one of the lowest rates of corporate tax collection. Every little industry group has it's own private tax loop-hole written into legislation at the behest of some well paid lobbyist

Depends what the system was actually designed to do. There's evidence that the US system was designed to allow the people who owned the country to run the country. It all looks democratic, but the details in the small print mean that - in practice - the wealthy have a disproportionate amount of power

Pretty much everybody else does it better. Look at the rules on election expenditure in the UK and election news coverage in France.

Your constitution dates back to the 1780's. My school history lessons talked about the way the Australian and Canadian constitutions had been written to avoid the more obvious defects of the US constitution

- more than a hundred years ago now. The German constitution - written in 1948 - had the benefit of another half century of constitutional experience, and seems to work pretty well.

Your constitution would seem to be ripe for a design review.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Nah. It's a form of self-defense, really. Once the government started meddling in every corner of the economy, it should be obvious that this was inevitable.

A J.P. Morgan didn't do that sort of thing, because it wasn't interesting.

We don't care for corporate taxes much. This is mainly for technical reasons.

but what governments do is supposed to be *universal*. We shouldn't encourage that sort of thing by having such a byzantine system. That makes for a positive feedback loop of complexity.

it was *designed* as roughly minarchist. That didn't last.

That's because when it was founded, there was a real aristocracy, duty bound as leaders. Yeoman farmers didn't have the resources.

Yeah, I just don't see that. The wealthy are drawn into a morass of regulation and such.

We draw on professionals in a relatively meritocratic manner who are lawyers, engineers, doctors... but mainly lawyers. "Professional" these days mainly has to do with governance issues, including government.

Elections are paid for out of the public coffers in the UK ( not sure of france).

I'd call this the narcissism of small differences. We got very little news of Germany; Canada and Aus. both seem simply better administered, but I see bleedover from American style politics into Canada.

We continue to add amendments...

-- Les Cargill

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US government isn't all that meddlesome by international standards, but the US lobbying industry is uniquely large and well-funded. I think that it is actually a mechanism that the well-off use to divert part of the tax load onto the less-well-off.

And the tax load was lighter. J.P.Morgan (1837-1913) died four years after the US finally managed to introduce taxation on personal and corporate incomes. The initial rates were pretty low. Earlier attempts had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Or a corrupt feedback loop of tax avoidance.

But the US elite was more merchantile than aristocratic, and the basic motivation for the war of independence - tax avoidance - isn't one that an aristocrat would want attached to their reputations.

They navigate with advantage in the morass of regulations - both by virtue of their own expertise and the expertise of the people that only they can afford to hire - and come out well ahead of the rest of the population. My suspicion is that the founding tax avoiders had this in mind from the start.

The "we" that draws on this expertise is the group that has enough money to be able to afford it. If you've got a lot of money to start with the extra cost of buying expertise is relatively easy to recover from the profit you make on following their advice. The less well-off can't afford expert advice.

Not true (about the UK).

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In France they have elaborate "equal time" regulations on news coverage for each candidate for the presidential elections - the Dutch press had fun satirising this.

Perhaps because they've got better constitutions to work with?

Cut and link corrections.It's time you tore up the schematic and started over.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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That's better than average. When I was in the business in the UK the expectation was that about 30% of development projects would pay off.

You could also learn from what other people design - it is a cheaper way of getting educated. "Experience is a hard school but fools will learn in no other".

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

.

Josephkk is really depressingly ignorant. He's in no position to judge what other people may know or not know. He might come into contention if there was a prize for party-political bigotry and ignorance, but there's a lot of competition in that area, and James Arthur is further ahead (with added extra nitwit points for misuse of statistics).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The US is large and isolated enough that international standards haven't been that interesting until recently. That natural isolation took considerable effort to overcome.

Diverting that load to the less well off was a statistical inevitability.

Exactly - although most lobbying is actually a perverse information sharing mechanism. Lobbying per se isn't corrupt. It's exactly what our First Amendment was designed to protect.

Assigning tax avoidance as a corrupt thing is a bizarre opinion.

The US was not all one thing. The vast majority of the land area that was populated wasn't all that mercantile. Only the thin crust around the Atlantic was. granted, that was and still is the most densely populated regions and we still break down on those lines...

Industrial production from the US wasn't a factor until a century or so after the revolution. By that time, much of the population was emigre.

Exports were mainly raw materials. That's less than half the Mercantile equation.

Tax avoidance wasn't the real impetus. Look up the "olive branch petitions". Mercantilist empires such as the British Empire aren't stable because they break the invader's government's financial back.

I can say this with some certainty - no. Nobody in the US was "ahead" of anything because we did not have the kind of cash flow needed until after the Civil War. Read of Robert E. Lee's military career prior to the Civil War. The Army was barely a thing at all.

So maybe that's an argument against a Byzantine State ...

I'd say that people (at least in Canada) are generally better informed. I think our media works differently than there and causes this. That's what Micheal Moore could have said in "Bowling for Columbine" before he went off the rails.

You sound like the Tea Party in that sentence....

-- Les Cargill

I have a massive collection of manuals and tech/journal articles and books and actual equipment. I've purchased microwave gear and sampling heads and stuff just to see how it's constructed.

I've probably studied ten, or more likely 100, times as much electronic designs as you have, and I've probably designed 100 times as many things as you have. And you keep thinking that you can lecture me on how to design electronics, or how to live a life.

Moron.

--

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

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I'm sure that you've looked at more electronic designs. I'm not so sure that you've looked at a wider range of electronic designs. I'm even more certain that you've designed more circuits that I have, and equally certain that your circuit designs cover a narrower range than mine.

The fact that you think you can equate quantity with quality speaks volumes about your judgement - or lack of it.

The thought processes that lead you to post this erroneous conclusion are transparent, and won't lead anybody to think more highly of your emotional stability or judgement.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I agree that the private sector -- by virtue of potentially going out of business if they don't do it -- has that incentive. The government -- while not at any real risk of "going out of business" -- absolutely has people within it who try very hard to reduce its overhead as well, though.

If your job were being paid for by taxes, surely you'd try your best to work as efficiently as possible in an effort to hold down taxes and thereby keep more money for yourself?

Nonsense. It's not in their interest to reduce overhead.

Of course not. I'd try to add peons to my empire to increase my power. OTOH, I could remain a peon and let the others build their power. Either way, the taxpayer is screwed.

Well, let's see:

Marine automation (the first control system I designed was 32,000 horsepower) Pipeline automation Modems Language lab Guitar amp Comm gear for NY subway system Flight hardware for S1B and C5A HUD for C130 Computer interfaces, including color graphics generators CAMAC VME VXI ISA, PCI, PCIe boards NMR/MRI FTMS controller Tomographic Atom Probes Picosecond pulse and delay generators Picosecond time interval measurement

2D delay line imaging Power electronics, including servos and microsteppers Magnetic field mapping systems LVDT/synchro stuff Fiber optics links NIF timing system NIF amplitude modulators Laser controllers ICCD camera controllers Semiconductor lithography DUV/EUV light source controllers Electrical metering and submetering Building automation Utility supervisory controls Tons of aerospace test stuff Ground penetrating radar to locate mines (which never works)

and a lot of other stuff.

How about you?

--

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

Well jeez... I guess if that's the sort of government worker you'd be, I can understand why you have so little faith in the government's ability to do good!

I wasn't talking about published standards, I was merely comparing the the US penchant for government intervention with the tendency of other governments to intervene. The US isn't different enough along that axis to explain the uniquely baroque extravangance of your lobbying system.

If you compare income inequality in the US with income inequality in other advanced industrial countries, there seems to be a good deal more inevitability around in the US than elsewhere

Telling your elected representative what the voters want is information sharing. Telling them what their richest voters want - and are prepared to pay for - is corruption. Your lobbying industry seems to cover that spectrum, but more of the money seems to be concnetrated at the corrupt end of the continuum

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Tax evasion is a crime. "Influencing" legislators to insert bogus tax loop-holes into the law makes it tax avoidance, and that's legal. There's nothing bizarre in pointing that that these are two different ways of getting to pay less tax. Getting your own tax loop-hole puts a fig-leaf of respectability over the process, but it's still as aspect of the "golden rule" - people with gold get the rules revised so they get to nang onto more of that gold.

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That was also the area that went to the trouble of declaring itself independent, and provide most of the money and men to persuade the British to take their declaration seriously. The merchantile minority has a lot to answer for.

It is now. It wasn't them.

You'd like to think so, and the founding tax evaders did try to create the impression that they were serious about liberty and and representation, but I'm distinctly sceptical.

What on earth is that supposed to mean? The British Empire lasted as long as British military superiority could sustain it.

We are talking about the wealthy within the US versus the less wealthy within the US. There was less in the way of resources around for the rich to pre-empt before the Civil War, but they weren't any less enthusiastic about hogging was was around to be hogged.

We'd probably have different ideas about what you new constitution might look like. Does the Tea Party show any signs of thinking about what they might put in place of the stuff they propose to rip up? Not that I really care what goes on in whatever it is they use instead of their brains.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Parkinson's Law.

Everybody knows about it now - with the possible exception of krw - and civil service administrations are vigilant about pruning out superfluous administrators.

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Only the taxpayer who is as dumb and ill-informed as krw.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I did work for George Kent in Luton from 1973 to 1976, who were primarily into flow control. They had this vortex shedding flow meter that I worked on - laid out the first printed circuit board realisation, because the original hard-wired board kept failing when I was running tests. The drafting shop was livid, and highly critical of the corners that I'd cut.

Got into them - a bit - when I was working at ITT-Creed on the system of communicating word processors(Teletex) that was supposed to replace TWX/Telex. I ended up lecturing my boss's boss on mobile telephones as one point in that job (in 1981), and talking to Donald Davies about incorporating public key encryption into the Teletex protocol - which would have been easy to do.

Trivial

Trivial

Could have been interesting, but almost certainly so constrained by the regulatory environment that you couldn't do anything interesting

Ditto.

Ditto

Boring.

Process control. Did at bit of that a George Kent, but left before they got heavily into digital process control.

Boring

Boring.

Boring. We all had to do stuff that interfaced with the ubiquitous computer buses.

Ran into the fringes of that when the first commercial system was being developed at EMI Central Research. The whole development got sold on when EMI went bust and the first commercial machines came out under the buyers name.

Not something I've worked on. I spent a couple of months working on a high resolution dual mass spectrometer for Kratos Analytical in 1971, but that was a much more traditional design

Sounds like electron/ion beam microscopy with added extra flim-flam. Not wildly different from some of the stuff I worked on at Cambridge Instruments at Cambridge, UK.

The electron beam tester I designed and we built at Cambridge Instruments from 1988 to 1991 included precisely that kind of hardware. The minimum pulse width was 500psec (we had plans to get that down to 100psec) and the time resolution was 10psec (though the jitter on the 800MHz master clock was closer to 60psec - we would have fixed that when we'd had more time, if we'd had more time).

Boring

That came up from time to time. I did a stepper motor controller with programmed acceleration in TTL at EMI Central Research in 1978-79, which was pretty impressive at the time - I wanted to do it with a micro, but the development system was booked solid for months ahead, and the TTL solution came together in a couple of weeks.

Boring.

First used an LVDT in my Ph.D. work, and again at Cambridge Instruments for their Metals Research subsidiary, where I ended up reworking the electronics for an LVDT-based precision weight sensor that weighed a single crystal of GaAs being pulled from a pool of molten GaAs in a Czochralski crystal puller. That was where I invented my low distortion version of the Baxandall class-D oscillator to generate a clean sine wave to excite the LVDT.

Boring. The mass spectrometer used one, and the nitwit who designed it in hadn't made enough allowance for signal loss in the plastic fibre. Swapping in glass fibre solved the problem. Not all that cheaply, but it was a quarter of million pounds worth of machine and we needed to get it out the door.

Fun stuff.

Can be fun. I did a bit of that - for diode lasers - at Fisons Applied Sensor Technology 1991-93.

Boring

Arc lamps with a college education. Build a couple of arc lamp controllers and starters as a post-doc at Southampton University. Can be hairy.

Boring.

Boring

Boring

Boring

Why am I not surprised?

I don't have any pathological desire to impress. Going through your list reminded me of some of the weirder stuff I'd done, but by no means all of it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That's the whole problem. Lefties believe in the perfectibility of humans, rather than their fallibility. Feedback is needed to keep things going in the right direction. For profit companies have loads of negative feedback (unless they've been granted TBTF status by government). Governments NOR THEIR EMPLOYEES have any sort of negative feedback regulating their actions so the output tends to rail, which is exactly what we're seeing now. As an engineer, I'd expect you to have some grasp of the idea. You clearly don't, though.

They do, but my experience is that many (perhaps even most) businesses get to the point of being in the green and call it good -- even when they're sometimes still quite inefficient. In practice the whole idea that competition makes for efficiency is only partially true: Good marketing and (especially) good customer service can often more than make up for large inefficiencies.

Sure they do -- as with regular businesses, the government has entities whose sole purpose is to improve quality and efficiency. I mean, sure, such an entity itself isn't going to be 100% perfect in its execution, but its absurd to suggest that no one ever stopped to think, "Hey, maybe, just maybe we should actively try to make our government as good and efficient as possible rather than just crossing our fingers and seeing what happens?"

Ultimately We The People are a form of negative feedback insofar as voting out politicians whose policies we don't feel to be worthwhile. If I were an elected official in charge of a large government budget, I think I'd be *much* more anxious insofar as the connection between my performance and my continued electability than I would be at a private company: At a private company you typically only have to keep a handful of people happy; at a government office every single voter has a say in your continued employment.

I'm not going to suggest there isn't plenty of inefficiency in government -- clearly there is. However, there's plenty of inefficiency in private business as well. I see feedback mechanisms in both cases that attempt to improve the situation. Trying to compare how well they work in some sort of quantitative way is rather difficult, IMO, since their "inputs," "outputs," and "controls" are so vastly different. E.g., in many cases with government programs you can't define a return on investment as money in vs. money out, because it's an entitlement program such as the military or social security or public transportation or whatever and there simply isn't any "money in" *by design.*

---Joel

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IBM used to do that as I recall.

Just enough to make the idea unpatentable.

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24% of GDP and rising without limit, to something like the 16% of GDP typical of industrialized countries in Europe.

And not the Tea Party controlled House of Representatives? Obama cannot get any laws passed at all since last January.

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If we were France we wouldn't have to worry about burning fossil fuels to produce electricity -- we'd have plenty of safe cheap nuclear- generated-electricity.