In defense of John here... I think you'll find that his widgets are significantly cheaper than buying comparable equipment from some of the big test equipment vendors such as Agilent or SRS. Indeed, I seem to recall a lot of his early sales were VME data acquisition cards where he had both a price and quality advantage over LeCroy.
While the physicists might not be particularly knowledgeable about electronics, it's kinda hard to argue that they're doing anything wrong when they still manage to spec gear does "get the job done," as you say.
There is a well-established formalism for identifying public goods - they must be non-rival and non-excludable. Within a capitalist framework, public goods are perfectly acceptable.
The bad thing is that people still disagree about what makes a public good, even though there's a perfectly workable formalism for it. This usually amounts to "religious" arguments - "it would be obscene *not* to have ".
I think the better approach is to literally figure out what a social security scheme would cost if run privately. In general, when this has been done, government offers are less expensive because government has finance options unavailable to (truly) free market organizations.
They are cheap, though. "Handouts" in America run about 3.3% of GDP.
Unlike in the Jim Crow South, jail isn't used as a housing solution. Our prison problems come from somewhere else.
And "busy exporting unskilled jobs" is mostly false - the jobs would otherwise have mostly disappeared altogether. The thing that replaces cheap Chinese labor is automation.
Like yeoman farming, say, textile labor simply doesn't command enough marginal compensation to be done by humans unless you have the kind of massive subsidy system in emerging economies.
That's an "obscenity" problem. Harmful drugs are rounded up to "obscene" and the thing we do is make them "taboo". This completely resists any hope of economic reasoning - the price of "legal" drugs is set at "infinite".
We as a species can't seem to agree on much about what is stupid and what is not.
That was posted somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The point is that John Larkin is mostly selling into a market that doesn't buy many too many units (though some of his devices do make into small mass markets). This makes the cost of the design the biggest single item in the production budget over the life-time of the machine, and any approach that minimises design cost has got a lot going for it.
I spent most of my career over-designing stuff for small volume products - having it work first time and keep on working trumps parts cost almost every time.
I wasn't suggesting that jail was being used as a housing solution - I meant that they were breaking the law, getting arrested, tried, convicted and incarcerated as felons.
As you say later in your post, from your idiotic drug laws.
Some jobs aren't easy to automate. The Dutch factory- and office- cleaners have a trade union and they just been on strike for 105 days for better wages and working conditions, which they've now got
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There are fewer unskilled jobs than there were, but they still exist.
Looked at from an economic point of view, this is just setting the drug price at a level that makes it worth taking the risk of get hold of the drugs illegally and selling them illegallly. Prohibition - "The Great Experiment" - told the US exactly how this was going to work out.
We don't have to agree. Evolution will sort it out - eventually. There are better ways of making sensible decisions, but James Arthur doesn't seem to have access to any of them.
Like philosophy, 200-level psychology (both nonsense), chemistry (ditto), and most of materials science... why are these guys so compulsive about steel alloys?
Idiot. My biggest customers are analytical instruments, aerospace, and lately semiconductor fab. None of these people will buy junk. My biggest customers lately are Pratt&Whitney and Agilent and Cymer. None of them would let you onto the parking lot.
I sell occasionally to physicists, like the two systems we did for NIF. They were great to work with, and knew exactly what they were doing.
You can't even do insults right.
We were having a nice discussion about magnets, and came across an issue where a physical chemist was specifically needed. Of course, you want to rant about economics and climate and health care, OT stuff that you really know nothing about.
Pitiful.
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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 controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
We consistently average around 22% materials cost as a fraction of total revenue. Labor and benefits is about 50%. The numbers are very much like running a restaurant.
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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 controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
That's actually on the high side. 15% is what I remember.
But it ties in with what I was saying about minimising design costs when serving relatively small markets, by over-designing to improve your chances of getting it right first time.
Not true, but if you don't pay attention you won't get much out of them.
which is really stupid. If we didn't have chemistry we wouldn't have semi-conductors, plastics, pharmaceuticals and a bunch of other useful stuff. They don't teach all that much that's immediately useful in undergraduate courses - no matter how ostensibly applied my undergraduate lectures had been, I always had to go back to the library to nail down the details when I wanted to do anything practical - but if you haven't got the basics, you can't understand what you can read in the library.
John's not into that kind of reading - as he makes clear here from time to time,
Most of the stuff you put together is made of some kind of steel alloy. At Cambridge Instruments we liked to use stainless steel screws in our electron microscopes - they don't rust, and they - mostly - aren't magnetic. The "mostly" came down to the fact that there are quite a few different ways of making steel that doesn't rust, and each of the different stainless steel alloys has a different name, a different composition, and quite often a different annealing scheme.
Getting purchasing to buy the "right" stainless steel wasn't easy, particularly when some of the firms selling us the screws used different alloys from one batch to the next ...
That's not what I said. You wouldn't be in business if you sold junk. The point was that you are in the low volume end of the business, where the cost of designing the product is a big chunk of the total cost of putting together all the specific examples of a particular product that you are ever going to sell before it goes obsolete. You can afford to over-design - in fact you can't afford not to - to minimise design time and keep the development cycle short.
When I worked for Cambridge Instruments, we sold stuff to IBM, Siemens, Texas Instruments and Thompson-CSF. None of them has any reason to talk to me today, but tomorrow may be another story - I've just got a bunch of RM14 cores and formers from Farnell, and today's job was winding a 48-turn test coil onto one of the formers. Tomorrow I'll put a bifilar output winding on top of that, clip on the ferrite core, and post it off to my mate in London - he's worried about harmonic generation in the ferrite and is going to run some tests.
I've plugged an inductor with hysteresis into LTSpice "L1 N001 0 HC=3D20. Bs=3D.49 Br=3D.18 A=3D0.00017 Lm=3D0.07 Lg=3D0.00037 N=3D48" thoug= h it looks more like
LTSpice puts the third harmonic content at about 80dB down. We may ended up going for a core with a bigger air-gap if the simulation is anything like realistic (which is always an open question) but this may give us poorer coupling than we want to live with and end up forcing us to split the tank inductor out of the output transformer. For a "two transistor circuit" it's got interesting subtleties - though still no discrete transistors.
It certainly took the form of an insult, but content was - deliberately - toothless.
Actually I do know quite a bit about it, but you aren't in a position to appreciate that, since you believe everything you read in the right wing press and understand none of background information that the reporters purport to be interpreting.
Save your pity for your own ignorance. It's real. My "ignorance" is a figment of your self-serving imagination.
Knowing more than John Larkin doesn't mean knowing much more than nothing, but it is still more than nothing. I may not publish on the subjects in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, but I read and understand stuff that does get published there from time to time, and sometimes pass it on here (often when John Larkin gets it more wrong than usual).
That's quite a bit more than nothing, if less than expert knowledge. You may not know enough to be able to make this kind of subtle distinction.
I don't see the big deal of federal taxes being too high today. Taxes may increase, if the spenders get their way, just like Jerry Brown trying to stick it to California to cover the state employee's pensions. But, historically, it looks like federal taxes today are lower than in the past. In 1967, taxes were 18.4% of GDP, and only
15.8% in 2012. It does look worse in 2017 at 19.2% when Obama care adds to the cost, but that's only 1% more than in 1967.
Pay attention? I argued with the idiot instructor. The particular psychology fad that she adored has long since been discredited. It was obviously bogus.
NMR is wildly more sensitive to magnetic distortions than an electron microscope. Even pure copper will wreck field homogenity. Magical tricks are required.
I'm still selling some 10-year old designs, with serial numbers over
3000 on some products. Design cost on something like that is a couple of per cent of aggregate revenue. You make up stuff, and you're usually wrong.
You
Why would anyone want to maximize design time? A cell phone or a PC has a product lifetime measured in months. You can't spend years designing something like that, and you can't spin multiple iterations trying to get it right. As usual, you have things backwards.
I design things right the first time because that's what good engineers do. And because I enjoy it.
I'm not, since you say nothing on-topic.
--
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
OK. I get where you are coming from. However, policing is a useful function especially when done honestly; but welfare as constructed is poisonous and destructive to society. Given this i find it beyond reason to find _ANY_ moral equivalence between the two. Job training and workfare i can get behind, but not systems that make it next to = impossible to get yourself off the dependency teat.
Oh, that's certainly not true. The VT politicians were easily 10x, 10x denser than anything, or anyone, in Alabama. Ditto, IL, CA, NY,... Actually, AL isn't a bad place to live at all.
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