US Election Year!

Perhaps not this time around. It looks as it is going to be a replay of

There's not a lot to say - Trump is even more obviously a crook than he was back then, and if you still haven't registered that there's not a lot of point in talking with you.

Neither candidate is in any condition to govern effectively, and in short order all day-to-day operations will be managed by bureaucratic ideologues, corporate flunkies, or evangelical "Jesus He Knows Me" stooges, depending.

The good news such as it is is that both candidates and their respective parties have the perfect alibi to renege on any campaign promises as required i.e. they don't remember making them.

Neither candidate is in any condition to govern effectively, and in short order all day-to-day operations will be managed by bureaucratic ideologues, corporate flunkies, or evangelical "Jesus He Knows Me" stooges, depending.

The good news such as it is is that both candidates and their respective parties have the perfect alibi to renege on any campaign promises as required i.e. they don't remember making them.

Okay. I've thought about it and I'm none the wiser. What's the reason?

They are tribal and social, so are hostile to new, unauthorized ideas.

Academic training can have the same effect, making people shy away from anything original.

I don't follow. Everything in electronic design has already been done

- and much of it more than 60 years ago. What are these new ideas of which you speak. Can you provide an example or two?

So we have no need of electrical engineers any more?

I know people who think that anything they need can be found in a book or an appnote or on an eval board. No tiresome thinking or inventing required. Nobody needs to design electronics any more.

Fine with me. Less competition.

OK., that's settled then. Anyway, we should not be talking about electronic design in a thread about US politics. It's off-topic!

Simple, but wrong. H.L. Menken got there first.

Being obsessive about circuit design to the exclusion of everything else isn't a recipe for being a good circuit designer.

That has to be a particularly silly argument. The last fifty years of circuit design has seen a flood of new devices. Anybody who fixated on solving all their problems with a 555 wouldn't look like a good circuit designer.

John Larkin didn't get much academic training - or a least not much that was any good. Academics have a habit of latching onto the latest new idea and running with. If you want to produce new an exciting papers that other academics will read, you have to keep up with the leading edge, also know as the current state of the art.

Engineers have a habit of sticking to approaches that work until something shows up that works appreciably better.

Sixty years ago I couldn't even buy a uA709, which became commercially available in 1965 - I bought one for $30 the following year.

He must have a bizarrely limited social circle. I've never met anybody with that particular delusion.

Politics get much less boring when it affect you personally. Your tiny vote can have an effect from time to time.

Frequently not all that well, but some customers are less demanding than others.

You find it boring. Others clearly don't! And I don't vote.

I'm just a hobbyist. Okay, I've had many decades of experience with electronics, but I'm no designer. I don't think that way.

Neither does John Larkin. He can put together circuits that work, but he doesn't seem to be able to design them.

He never talks about the ripping up and starting over process that is an integral part of real design, and he's strangely unwilling to justify the choices he made in the circuits that he does boast about here.

There's an element of design where you work out how something that you have slung together actually works, and that process often lets you change it so that it works better, but it's not easy to talk about - pretty much impossible while you are doing it, and it take an effort when you are writing it up after you have got it sorted out.

Natural language didn't evolve to do that kind of work, and while we can exploit natural language to document unusual activities, it takes ingenuity.