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From: Joerg on 21 May 2010 15:45 JosephKK wrote: > On Thu, 20 May 2010 07:47:38 -0700, Joerg <invalid(a)invalid.invalid> > wrote: > >> JosephKK wrote: >>> On Wed, 19 May 2010 16:30:12 -0700, Joerg <invalid(a)invalid.invalid> >>> wrote: >>> >>>> krw(a)att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote: >>>>> On Wed, 19 May 2010 15:27:01 -0700, Joerg <invalid(a)invalid.invalid> wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> krw(a)att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote: >>>>>>> On Wed, 19 May 2010 09:42:44 -0700, Joerg <invalid(a)invalid.invalid> wrote: >>>>>>> >>>>>>>> dagmargoodboat(a)yahoo.com wrote: >>>>>>>>> On May 18, 2:46 pm, Charlie E. <edmond...(a)ieee.org> wrote: >>>>>>>>>> On Mon, 17 May 2010 14:31:43 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodb...(a)yahoo.com >>>>>>>>>> wrote: >>>>>>>>>> <major snippage and attributions...> >>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>> $1 only buys $0.77 worth of _stuff_ today, say the Fair Tax people >>>>>>>>>>> (AIUI). The rest goes to taxes hidden in the item's price. >>>>>>>>>>>> If I tax-deferred the >>>>>>>>>>>> $1.40, I could buy $1.00 worth of stuff. Any after-tax savings (that >>>>>>>>>>>> is socked away before the change) gets hammered *twice*. >>>>>>>>>>> If you had tax-deferred the $1.40, you'd escape the indignities of the >>>>>>>>>>> old system. That's a windfall (assuming Congress allows it). >>>>>>>>>>> Going forward though, with income-taxed money, the $1 we have left >>>>>>>>>>> still buys the same with or without the Fair Tax. $1 with embedded >>>>>>>>>>> tax burden hidden inside it, or ($0.77 actual price + $0.23 Fair Tax) >>>>>>>>>>> both cost you $1 at the register. No loss of purchasing power. >>>>>>>>>>> That's the contention, AIUI. >>>>>>>>>> The other false assumption is that the price would drop >>>>>>>>>> instantaneously to $.77 as soon as the tax was passed. >>>>>>>>> I don't assume that. There are all sorts of 2nd and 3rd-order >>>>>>>>> effects. >>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>> In reality, >>>>>>>>>> the price stays at $1.00, and the retailer uses this 'profit' to pay >>>>>>>>>> off his loans. Now, as time goes by, prices 'might' drop, but I >>>>>>>>>> wouldn't bet on it. I actually expect prices to rise. >>>>>>>>> I expect prices to fall, quickly. Like with gasoline there's a delay >>>>>>>>> for goods-in-transit, then market forces handle the rest. >>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> Why would a Japanese car or Chinese-made flatscreen TV fall in price >>>>>>>> quickly? >>>>>>> Because there is more than one manufacturer. >>>>>>> >>>>>> With consumer electronics the number of manufacturers inside the US is >>>>>> often zero. >>>>> I don't see the relevance. >>>> The relevance is this: >>>> >>>> When a group of "experts" claims the price of goods will fall because >>>> the income tax burden of the labor in a product will drop by 23 percent >>>> that assumption is flawed for two reasons: >>>> >>>> a. Most consumer products are from China and, consequently, not one iota >>>> will change in the tax on labor. The only cost that changes is the labor >>>> associated with the sales and distribution process but that's miniscule. >>> I don't think so. The final retail distribution is rather expensive and >>> labor cost driven. Take a look at the volume pricing at Digikey for >>> example. >> >> I am looking at Walmart and Costco. There's nobody working there that'll >> crack one can of pickles out of a 4-pack. You either buy the 4-pack or >> you don't have pickles for lunch :-) >> > You are confusing unit of issue, intentional recruiting at minimum wage, > and business designed for those conditions with price per unit and delta > price per unit versus volume. What's confusing about this? Whether it's Walmart or Amazon or whatever, competition forces such places to live on rather slim margins. The same is true in the auto business. Yeah, the dealer/middleman might make $1k-$2k but the other $15k go to Japan or Korea. >>>> b. The percentage of labor in the COGS even for products made in the US >>>> is much smaller than they anticipate. >>>> >>>>>>>>>> If the >>>>>>>>>> government stops taking out SS and IRS taxes from my paycheck, I have >>>>>>>>>> more to spend. I can then afford these now 'higher' prices of that >>>>>>>>>> $1, plus $.23 fair tax, plus the sales tax of $.09, so it is now >>>>>>>>>> $1.33. >>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>> As for savings, I don't sweat it as much. Yes, it makes my post-taxes >>>>>>>>>> savings less valuable, but it also removes a lot of taxes on my >>>>>>>>>> earnings and interest! >>>>>>>>> I'm interested in saving the time and energy I waste avoiding tax land- >>>>>>>>> mines. That's worth a lot--at least a couple weeks a year. More like >>>>>>>>> three, methinks. >>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> There'll be new tax land-mines, like who gets to pay ficticious rent >>>>>>>> tax, how much, and who doesn't. Et cetera. >>>>>>> That part still seems iffy, yes. >>>>>> IMHO the whole idea is iffy. Fair means it has to be fair to just about >>>>>> everyone and not just part of the population. And that's not the case. >>>>> The only hole I see in it is savings, that we both object to. I may not agree >>>>> (or understand completely) the economics of taxing large items (homes and >>>>> cars) heavily. >>> Much of that will depend on how property tax on homes and use tax on >>> vehicles gets changed. 40 years of property tax adds up. >> >> You can bet on it that a certain kind of politician will only agree to >> all that if it result in a serious net increase in taxes squeezed out of >> the public. > > That is all of them. See, now you know another reason why I am against this change :-) >> [...] -- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
From: Bill Sloman on 21 May 2010 16:57 On May 21, 5:16 pm, Joerg <inva...(a)invalid.invalid> wrote: > Bill Slomanwrote: > > On May 20, 5:25 pm, Joerg <inva...(a)invalid.invalid> wrote: > >> Spehro Pefhany wrote: > >>> On Thu, 20 May 2010 02:37:16 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman > >>> <bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: > >>>> Few countries are unlucky enough to have their economy depend on a > >>>> single product. Australia would have to tighten its belt a lot if the > >>>> market for iron ore declined signficantly. Carrying on as if the > >>>> absence of such a single product is a sign of economic malaise is > >>>> evidence that you don't know enough about economics to make a useful > >>>> contribution to this kind of discussion. > >>> I wonder to what extent the collapse in shipping prices contributed to > >>> the problems there. The cost of shipping a TEU (container) from Asia > >>> to North America was approximately zero at the beginning of the year, > >>> rather than the usual few thousand dollars. Compare with, say, oil, > >>> which has been relatively stable despite the near collapse in the US > >>> financial markets. > >> While Bill may think that the Greek shipping companies are a major GDP > >> contributor I am afraid I'll have to burst that bubble. It accounts for > >> a mere 5% of their already paltry GDP: > > >>http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE60R2P020100401 > > >> Quote: "Shipping is one of the top contributors to Greece's 240 billion > >> euro ($323.7 billion) economy along with tourism and construction. It > >> accounted for about 5 percent of GDP in 2009." > > >> Tourism is a major source of income there. Or to some extent, was. Folks > >> from Europe tell me that Greece has become quite expensive and they > >> prefer other areas such as Turkey. Same type of climate, more bang for > >> the buck or Euro. So now shipping may account for a few more percentage > >> points but not because of growth ... > > > Joerg wants to be able to identify a big single contributor to a > > countries GDP before he can believe that that country is viable, when > > - in fact - countries that depend on a single industry are exceedingly > > vulnerable to changes in the business or technical environment. Most > > countries get their income from a wide range of activities, so a 5% > > contribution to GDP is big, for a single industry . > > > The fact that Jeorg can't be bothered working out how Greece - almost > > - supports itself doesn't make them the hopeless basket case that he > > claims. > > Ah, now Bill has resorted to 3rd-person addressing ... :-) > > >> Then an interesting tidbit from the above link, quote: "Greek shipping > >> companies have to pay a tonnage tax but are exempt from income taxes on > >> profits from operating Greek registered vessels." Ahm, well ... > > > So the owners of the Greek shipping fleet had enough money to bribe a > > few legislators - US residents shouldn't find that surprising. > > Bill, you said the Greek shipping industry is a major source of GDP. What I actually said was "Greece has the world's largest shipping fleet. This may not be an industry, but it is certainly a source of revenue." I certainly didn't claim that it was a major source of GDP - although 4.5% of GDP is quite a lot for an individual industry to contribute, about the same as agriculture. Other - less substantial - contributions come from food processing, tobacco, textiles, chemicals (including refineries), pharmaceuticals, cement, glass, telecommunication and transport equipment. http://www.traveldocs.com/gr/economy.htm Tourism is the biggest single contributor - as you pointed out - at around 15% of GDP, but claiming that this is the whole of the Greek economy is a rather drastic (and unhelpful) over-simplification of the the situation, and that is what I actually found objectionable. > I > have shown beyond reasonable doubt (_with_ links, you didn't provide > any) that that is not the case. Simple, really. Since I never made that particular claim in the first place, you were wasting your time. Attacking what you would have liked me to have said is both simple and easy, but scarcely useful. -- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
From: Bill Sloman on 21 May 2010 17:34 On May 21, 3:54 pm, John Larkin <jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > On Fri, 21 May 2010 02:26:11 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman > > > > <bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: > >On May 20, 3:41 pm, John Larkin > ><jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > >> On Thu, 20 May 2010 02:01:52 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman > > >> <bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: > >> >On May 20, 12:50 am, John Larkin > >> ><jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > >> >> On Wed, 19 May 2010 14:35:20 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman > > >> >> <bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: > >> >> >On May 19, 3:43 pm, Joerg <inva...(a)invalid.invalid> wrote: > >> >> >> Bill Slomanwrote: > >> >> >> > On May 18, 5:19 pm, John Larkin > >> >> >> > <jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > >> >> >> >> On Tue, 18 May 2010 01:20:40 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman > > >> >> >> >> <bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: <snip> > >> >> I started with essentially no capital. I've never believed in raising > >> >> a lot of money and then developing a complex product; that path has > >> >> about a 90% failure rate. I developed modest products, sold them, and > >> >> worked my way up. But designing megabuck instruments doesn't appeal to > >> >> me; each one will take years of development and support, and I don't > >> >> have that sort of attention span. Six or eight designs a year is more > >> >> fun. > > >> >Inadequate attention-span. Did you have ADHD as a kid? I happen to be > >> >particularly good with complex systems, and that influences what I do > >> >and what my employers have wanted me to do. > > >> ><snip> > > >> Not trusting in reincarnation, I plan to do as many things in life as > >> I can. Doing things includes finishing them properly and moving on... > >> ideally leaving documentation for production to make copies for a > >> decade or two. That's not called "inadequate attention span", it's > >> called "productivity." Try it some time. > > >Nobody has ever complained about my documentation - except perhaps to > >complain that I've given more detail than was absolutely necessary, > >which I justify by pointing out that keeping documents intelligible > >after ten or twenty years does require making explicit the thinking > >behind some of the choices. I can't say I particularly enjoy writing > >up stuff, but it's part of the job, and I've done more than enough of > >it know that I'm good at it. > > >The sort of "attention span" that you might be seen as lacking isn't > >so much temporal as spatial. You don't seem to have the inclination to > >get your head around all the aspects of a complex system - either > >elaborate scientific instruments or complex social questions. > > You're being an idiot, as usual. When we design electronics, we first > learn the user's technology. Jet engines, eximer lasers, tomographic > atom probes, electrical power systems, NMR/MRI, FTMS, ICCD cameras, > NIF fusion lasers, particle accelerators, gas pipelines, product > weighing machines [1]. It's a load of fun, It's a load of fun, and it impresses the hell > out of a customer when we understand his system at least as well as he > does. In a sense, the electronics is the easy part. We also have to > understand the customer's business and cultural needs to get and keep > the business; that can be a lot of fun too. That's what scientific equipment development is all about. I've done my fair share of digging in university libraries to work out what the customer was doing, and I've done it well enough for occasional customers to try to flatter me by claiming that I understood their system as well as they do, which has to be a load of rubbish, since you have to live with a system for months to really get to grips with what it does and how it does it. > Your experience seems to be very narrow, and pretty much powerless, > and mostly failures, so you make up things as you'd like them to be. That's not the way I remember my own experiences. Granting your enthusiasm for whishful thinking, you may well have been able to edit your memories of what I've posted here to allow yourself to think that this is true, but the reality is that most of the smaller projects I was involved in worked out well, in significant part because I was sufficiently good at what I did to be able to get them done my way. The bigger projects chewed up a lot of money - lots mrore than you seem to spend on individual projects - and several of them got canned because the managers who set them going had managed to delude themselves about the amount of investment that was going to be needed to get the result they were asking for. I certainly felt powerless when the projects were canned, but I wasn't in a position to tell the managers which markets thay should go after, or how ambitious they should be in setting their specifications, though I was in a postion to tell them when they were being over-ambitious, not that they were obliged to believe me. > Sorry, Charlie. There's nothing wrong with that, except you get > pompous about stuff you know esentially nothing about. Since you are the poster who pontificates about stuff that he knows little about - as I've pointed out repeatedly - it is amusing to find you trying to pin the same label on me. It's less amusing to have you cobbling together some lame story about a career that you've imagined for me in order to manouvre yourself into a position where you can recycle my criticism of your habits. The facts of the case are that you don't like developing complete systems, bcause it takes too long and ties up too much capital and engineering effort, and you've found yourself a niche where you can develop useful sub-systems, some of which you can sell to several customers. Your customers would probably be happier if you took on turn-key development contracts, but that kind of big chunk of development takes skills that you don't seem to have - perhaps wisely. Big projects that go wrong regularly destroy the businesses that took them on. -- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
From: Bill Sloman on 21 May 2010 18:02 On May 21, 5:24 pm, John Larkin <jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > On Tue, 11 May 2010 06:47:21 -0700, John Larkin > > <jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > > >http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a.hdgFGtPjbY > > >You can't fool Mother Nature. When a few hundred million people choose > >to not work much, not breed much, and consume a lot, you just can't > >spend your way out of the problem. > > >This is the leading edge of the European demographic crisis that's > >been building for generations now. There's no quick fix. > > >John > > Good one: > > http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeffrandall/7746806/Whatev... The Daily Torygraph is predictable, and predictably wrong. It publishes stuff that appeals to right-wing nitwits, which means that their stories don't have a lot to do with reality. In this case the story recycles a number of right-wing fantasies that they published years ago. They were rubbish then, and they are rubbish now, but the Daily Torygraph knows the kind of fantasies that appeal to their readers. -- Bill Sloman, Nijmenge
From: Bill Sloman on 21 May 2010 18:04
On May 21, 6:01 pm, John Larkin <jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > On Fri, 21 May 2010 11:30:08 -0400, Spehro Pefhany > > > > <speffS...(a)interlogDOTyou.knowwhat> wrote: > >On Fri, 21 May 2010 08:24:16 -0700, John Larkin > ><jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > > >>On Tue, 11 May 2010 06:47:21 -0700, John Larkin > >><jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > > >>>http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a.hdgFGtPjbY > > >>>You can't fool Mother Nature. When a few hundred million people choose > >>>to not work much, not breed much, and consume a lot, you just can't > >>>spend your way out of the problem. > > >>>This is the leading edge of the European demographic crisis that's > >>>been building for generations now. There's no quick fix. > > >>>John > > >>Good one: > > >>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeffrandall/7746806/Whatev.... > > >>John > > >Paging Dr. Schadenfreude.. > > Oh, the US is facing similar problems. But at least we have kids and > immigrants that we can exploit. > > I'm not so much happy that europe is falling apart as I am satisfied > that I have some understanding of how economic systems actually work. > I did predict stuff like this, based on the simple concept that you > can't longterm consume more than you produce, unless you steal it. > This sort of thinking is apparently beyond what learned > macroeconomists and finance ministers can handle. > > The US and Canada have, I think, better longterm prospects than > europe. If you ignore the minor fact that the US has been running a large balance of payments deficit since Regan was president. John's "understanding of how economic systems actually work" doesn't seem able to integrate the consequences of this interesting fact. So he believes right-wing pundits who tell him that Europe is falling apart. and doesn't notice that if what they said were true, the US would be falling apart faster, with California replacing Greece as the horrible example of fiscal irresponsibility. -- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen |