On Dec 31, 2003, at 10:51 AM, Tim May wrote:

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Add to that the fact that Mr May seems to lead a fairly bucolic life (from his accounts)...working in his gardens, installing tripwires and landmines and so forth, apparently without worrying about cash or physical needs. So this system has served him pretty well, insofar as there was a place for him to apply his skills in order to make his $$$. That system was payed for by somebody else's taxes, and now it's asking (well, demanding from) him for some $$$ that he apparently can easily afford.

Nonsense. The chip companies were NOT "payed for by somebody else's taxes." (Nor was the invention of the IC or the microprocessor paid for by DARPA or anyone else in government, despite factually incorrect lore to the contrary. I was there, at least for the onset of the micro, and I can say precisely what role government contracts played: none.)

Engineers and scientists who work an estimated 8 months out of each year to pay their taxes (Federal plus state plus local plus payroll plus property plus sales plus.....) see the minority layabouts working not one _day_ for their "entitlements" and "benefits" and "social services."

I'm going to elaborate on this point, as there seems to be a growing meme in the tech culture (especially amongst the anti-free trade, twentysomething, self-described "geeks") that somehow government built or paid for technology, business, high tech, etc. What built our "system" was essentially a _compact_, an agreement codified in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and even centuries of common law that a bunch of things would happen: -- that interference in the business choices of a business would be minimal -- that failing businesses would not be bailed out (and, indeed, none of the leading companies in 1850 last much beyond 1900, few in business in 1900 are still dominant, etc.) -- that owners, employers, etc. and their employees, customers, etc. would themselves negotiate wages, prices, benefits, etc., without a top-down order about who might be employed, at what rates, etc. (This of course began to change when the socialists assumed power in the 1930s, and then dramatically changed when the Great Society socialists assumed power in 1961. It then came to be seen as the role of government to set wages, to force businesses to deal with those they wished not to, to let debtors off without repaying debts or even having their kneecaps smashed, etc. This was the start of the Era of Entitlements, when some ethnic groups decided that reading be for whitey and that they would coast on freebies paid for by the "suckas" still working.) This compact, based essentially on voluntary interaction in trade, employment, and investment, worked quite well for many decades. This compact, this way of doing things which is usually called "liberty" or "laissez faire," was not "built" by government...until relatively recent times the size of government was small and tax rates for most workers and investors were low. What made the system work was that the system largely worked on the "non-initiation of force" principle, which is what begets voluntary transactions. If a person thought he was not being paid enough, it was his option to go elsewhere, to start his own business, etc. If a business wanted to raise or lower prices, their option. Customers were free to purchase or not. The meme which Tyler Durden and John Young--not surprising to me that both are Manhattanites, representing the East Coast view of capitalism--are popularizing is the one that says that what made companies successful was *government spending*, not this compact which needed little or no government role, and that this makes government intervention in business justifiable. Even more mendacious is the claim that those who worked hard and risked their capital by investing in companies are profiting at the expense of the "less privileged." "You are successful because of the taxes paid by the less-privileged, so now it is right that you be taxed at high rates so that welfare benefits can be maintained." is the essential message here. This is hokum. Very few U.S. or even European and Asian businesses were built with public funds. Neither Sony nor Honda, two examples of post-war successes, were built by MITI (MITI, in fact, frequently criticized Sony and Honda for the courses they pursued...meanwhile MITI was funding the now-defunct TRON microprocessor and the Fifth Generation Computer, utterly missing out on workstations, PCs, modern microprocessors, CAD, routers, and the Internet). None of Intel's achievements, whether the first dynamic RAM (the 1101), the first EPROM, the first microprocessor, the first single board computer, the first...., etc., was paid for by any kind of DARPA or DOD or government grant. In fact, the military was pissed off at us for not developing their kind of "mil-spec" components, for not bidding on military contracts. We made our products by selling to those who wanted to buy them. Period. And we risked our savings by buying stock in the company and others of its kind. Make a list of companies of the past 50 years, in the U.S., Japan, and Europe, and virtually none of them had significant U.S. funding. Sure, some of them had a lot of government purchases...aircraft companies, for example, will almost always end up selling heavily to national governments. But Boeing beat out Convair (on the 707 vs. 880 race) for very basic reasons. Likewise, Boeing again "bet the company" on the 747, between 1965 and 1970. It succeeded, and only partly because of government purchases. Mostly it was just competency. And so on. The best examples are in Silicon Valley, now being taxed at cumulative rates exceeding 75%. For what? To pay mostly for things they will not, and cannot, ever benefit from. This is one of the reasons Intel and other companies are expanding so rapidly in other countries, places where the work force is not made up of increasingly illiterate high school kids, mall rats, and whiggers. In China and India and Malaysia they have no translation of "reading be for whitey." In 30 years America and Europe are going to be in a precarious position. --Tim May "The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of." -- Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society, October 7, 1789

On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Eric Cordian wrote:

In the real world, a society can not consist 100% of chip designers. It also requires cooks, toilet and floor scrubbers, and people who lug concrete in wheelbarrows up stairs.

Sure, those are still needed. Though I wouldn't be so sure that toilet and floor scrubbers will be needed anymore 20 years from now.

Some countries, like the US and Japan, have as a part of their political doctrine that everyone has the opportunity to be wealthy and successful, so they can't openly have a class system. Of course, they still need one to determine who gets the shit-hauling jobs, and the usual method of doing this is to hide the class system in the education system. Now you don't get the shit-hauling job because you are an untouchable. You get it because you "didn't do well" in school, or you "dropped out, and "you could have been successful if you had just tried harder."

This is just bull shit. You don't have to do well in school to do well in the job market. You just need to have the right kind of skills to do well in the job market; and if the companies not hiring you are stupid and only looking at your (school) credentials and not what you know, you can always put up your own company and succeed that way. Truly that mentality of school worship, which you talk about, makes me sick. It's a myth that you need to do well in school in order to make it out there.

Of course, it's a zero sum game. The bottom X% will always be shit-haulers, and the school is just making the proles fight with each other over who those shit-haulers will be. The fact is that the society can't make everyone successful, and the success of the few is at the expense of the failure of the many, determined by the uncompensated rat race and endless toil on the wheel of public education.

Oh, but it is not a zero sum game. Of course the bottom X% will always be shit-haulers, sure. But here's the catch. If the bottom X% are people who could do some complicated work that would earn them $100 000 a year, then the shit haulers will have to be paid more than that amount a year. Or no one will apply for those shitty jobs. The basics of economics: If there's a shortage of something, markets tend to rise up the value until the demand and supply meet. Exactly same does go for unregulated job market.

The US is an excellent example of this. The AFT and NEA together are the biggest labor organization in the country. THe school system functions not to educate, but as a tool of inculcation in collectivist thinking, and a awarder of certificates which give one the right to work.

Hell yeah. Public school system should be abolished right now. Hmm, I'm not quite as fanatical on these things as Tim is (who probably would want to shoot all those teachers and administrators), but I do find public schools to be something quite horrible.

Schools don't educate, but merely serve as a filter for employers to locate those individuals who aren't going to make trouble at the factory.

No, no, no. Public schools don't educate. Their purpose is to teach obedience and understanding that a single person cannot do without the government. Thus the nooks in Washington can get to keep their power.

Now in a world where most jobs are not skilled people individually producing something in demand, but are the very lowest form of commoditized labor, the opportunity to screw such dissenters probably exceeds their ability to avoid being sent made to the back of the line.

You really think there is this big conspiracy that covers all the companies working in the US, which keeps these black lists and exists just to screw those who don't like the system? How about just saying that if one is lazy and does not do his work well, he might be screwed - and that is frankly a problem of his own making. You take up on a contract, you keep it.

Nonetheless, I think we do such people a disservice when we attribute their dislike of the education business to some sort of culturally ingrained sloth, and characterize them as looking to live on handouts of other peoples tax money.

Nonetheless, I think we do such people a great disservice if we do not show that their culture has a very bad bias against learning and understanding. Such a bias, if it exists, should not be hidden, or shunted upon; it should be brought to broad day light and shown in all its stupidity. -- Mikko Sdreld Emperor Bonaparte: "Where does God fit into your system?" Pihrre Simon Laplace: "Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis."