On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 21:48:18 +0100, D wrote:

> I'll never trust a democrat when it comes to US history again! What else
> has been hidden from me? In europe, indians are these sweet little
> nature people who can do no wrong, and who were abused by the white man.
> That's the only story around the european mainstream.

There is that Rousseauian noble savage spin in the US too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois

That's a long article but the gist is the expansion of the Iroquois
confederacy was as subtle as any European nation building. They are the
reason the 'Last of the Mohicans' was the last one. Quite a dew of the
tribes the European settles thought of as Plains Indians had formerly
lived in the eastern woodlands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackfeet_Nation

That's an example. Given them guns and horses and the Blackfeet tried to
kill everything in sight. The only Indians killed by the Lewis and Clark
expedition were Blackfeet who were trying to steal their guns and horses.

Thoreau was enthralled by the artifacts he found in his wanderings around
the Concord area. He was also put off by the contemporary versions.

Long story short -- Indians are human. Among other things they managed to
hunt many North American species to extinction so they aren't exactly
ecowarriors.

On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 13:21:09 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

> I’m not sure I’d want a Zulu as a slave.

No, some other populations seem more docile.

On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 21:53:00 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 13:29:17 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> Why would big money need workers when it has robots?
>
> It needs consumers with sufficient income to buy its products.

Jack London was a product of his times and sometimes made simplistic
arguments but one I remember is the question of how it works if the
workers can't afford to buy back what they produce?

Like I said, simplistic, and I'm sure there is a library's worth of books
on the labor theory of value and so forth but the question always haunted
me.

On 11/4/24 5:13 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 13:19:25 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> But one has to ask what in fact a desktop OS is for these days.
>
> The “desktop” OS originated back in the day when people couldn’t afford
> “workstations”. Look at the Unix-based systems of the time (particularly
> the RISC-based ones), and you see machines that did interactive “desktop”
> stuff, with the added advantage of multitasking, but more than that, they
> also offered “server”-style functionality in the same package.
>
> That, in essence, was a “workstation”. Microsoft killed it off in favour
> of a model where the server-style functionality is carefully crippled in
> the “desktop” OS, so if you want that, you have to pay extra bucks (a lot
> of extra bucks) for a “server” OS.
>
> Well, Microsoft killed off the “Unix workstation”. But today we have the
> “Linux workstation” in its place, doing everything its predecessor could
> do back then, and more.

The "desktop OS" went WAY back - originally to Xerox,
there was even a C-128 version (which was better than
Win-1).

I have a VM running Win-1.x - just AWFUL !!! Oddly, found
a BYTE magazine with a review of Win-1 ... I'm saving that.

GUIs are just easier to deal with for a LOT of little
things, esp things non-experts may need. Yea, yea,
the purists think editing endless obscure config files
is all anyone would want and need. NOPE ! Ain't 1960
anymore folks, no warehouse full of clattering iron.

Sorry, but 99.9x percent of computer users are NOT
"experts". They need stuff to be easy, intuitive,
to WORK without trauma. Granny needs her e-mail
without setting up a full mail server on her PC
and writing a POP3 app.

M$ and Apple made VAST fortunes and influence by
replacing the 'unix workstation desktop' with
stuff that's NICE.

It's up to Linux/Unix to CATCH UP in this respect.
Joe and Jane User should kinda NEVER have to think
about the underlying system - just point-n-click
tweaks in an aesthetic, helpful, GUI.

Yes, there will always be some of us who find
an SSH terminal adequate for most tasks - but
we're the VERY few, we're not really a "market"
or "following".

So .. <bitch-slaps> .....

Just sayin'

On Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:47:46 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2024-11-04, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> In the end the European market pretty much kept out US cars and vice
>> versa. The Japanese didn't have such a big home market so they went for
>> it big time. Sound reliable cars loaded with nice toys.
>
> I guess it's time to dig out that one about trade negotiations between
> the U.S. and Japan. The Americans were being quite hard-nosed, and the
> Japanese complained, "Why are you being so hard on us? After all,
> we never destroyed one of your cities." To which one of the Americans
> snapped: "What about Detroit?"

The observation I liked was the Japanese trade delegations would replace
members when they died while the US tended to replace the entire
delegation after every elections. The Japs would spend 4 years running the
newbies through the hoops, sit back, and wait for the next crop of
greenhorns.

On Mon, 04 Nov 2024 19:57:22 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> And it's so simple - no computers needed, just clever physics.

My mind doesn't work well spatially but I've been fascinated by the
seemingly complex operations that can be accomplished with springs, gears,
cams, levers, and some sort of motive power. Even a hay baler is a
wonderment let alone a Friden SRW.

https://www.hpmuseum.org/srw.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqNvABmpgZs

Unfortunately my spoken German skills have really deteriorated from lack
of use.

On 5 Nov 2024 03:32:50 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> ... the question of how it works if the
> workers can't afford to buy back what they produce?

Let’s see, the Industrial Revolution hit us a bit over 2 centuries ago. At
20 years per generation, that’s about 11 generations -- long enough to say
“long-term sustainability”? The world economy has grown so much that,
before that point, most of the world’s GDP came from India and China,
whereas it doesn’t now.

On 5 Nov 2024 02:46:47 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> When I see some of the mound building projects in the southeast I have
> to wonder if all the people hauling dirt in baskets were free.

They did it in their free time. Yes, farmers in agrarian societies had
free time.

On 11/4/24 5:09 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Nov 2024 20:36:29 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>
>> On 11/3/24 6:30 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>> On Sat, 2 Nov 2024 21:48:47 -0400, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>
>>>> MV = Multi-Valued = Data fields that can hold long lists of that KIND
>>>> of information. If you have a fleet-tracking DB then there'd be ONE
>>>> field saying "mileage" and likely another for "fuel-added" and they'd
>>>> just be added-to over time.
>>
>>>> The record for that vehicle is read all-at-once, rather than there
>>>> being dozens, hundreds, of records for said vehicle every time it was
>>>> fueled-up.
>>>
>>> This is why you have joins: so that you can retrieve multiple related
>>> records with a single query. This is the proper relational way of doing
>>> it.
>>
>> Why join when the MV approach keeps yer data in an already-joined
>> state ???
>
> Because the MV approach makes that hard to maintain.

Never noticed that ...

Everything always in nice structure/order and
all-together. Nirvana.

>> Python, and to some extent FORTRAN, have very good string
>> list-manipulation/reading/writing/insertion/deletion capabilities ...
>> it'd be fairly easy to set up a MV DB in those languages.
>
> Python is quite good at SQL database manipulations. This include
> setting up complicated joins.

But why would you want to use SQL ? Insane :-)

> I have some basic tutorials here
> <https://gitlab.com/ldo/python_topics_notebooks/-/blob/master/Databases,%20Iterators%20&%20Looping.ipynb?ref_type=heads>
>
>> The old PICK-ish DB I spent a decade with used pure ASCII-delimited
>> fields (this was pre-unicode, you could bring 'em up in a text editor
>> and see all the old IBM-BIOS high-ascii symbols).
>
> I know, it was crap. Probably scarred you for life, which is why you
> think the way you do.

LOVED those little IBM chars. That they buried them SO
deep in the unicode codex suggests deliberate bias.

Anyway, clearly, our religions are never gonna be
in-sync here.

You CAN download OpenQM if you want, see how the MV
approach can be useful. Having used both, and seeing
flat-file forced down everyone's throats, I'm gonna
stick with my belief MV has a slight edge and is
more sane and 'organic'.

On Mon, 4 Nov 2024, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2024-11-04, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On 4 Nov 2024 18:27:56 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>>
>>> Except for the baby mommas that see kids as a source of income...
>>
>> The Government should be paying women to have children.
>
> Some do.

This is the truth, and it does not seem to be working. The next logical
step is to punish them! ;)

>> Where else are the children going to come from?
>
> Let's take care of the ones already here before we
> worry about making more.

Let's not forget the future of artificial wombs and mandatory semen banks!

On Tue, 5 Nov 2024, rbowman wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 21:44:52 +0100, D wrote:
>
>> Inherently, I think most people are able to live meaningful lives if
>> they are only taught how and the tools to do it. Socialism, on the other
>> hand,
>> thrives on making people passive and dependent. Socialism doesn't even
>> need automation and robots to collapse, it collapses just fine with
>> regular humans. =)
>
> The eternal optimist. I don't know if George Floyd or Michael Brown would

Guilty as charged!

> ever had lived meaningful lives.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Servile_State
>
> Belloc wasn't far off. He also warned in 'The Great Heresies' that Islam,
> a Christian heresy was only slumbering and shouldn't be written off as a
> threat.
>

On Tue, 5 Nov 2024, rbowman wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 21:41:30 +0100, D wrote:
>
>> Today... many are not capable today. But give it a 100 years or two, and
>> with the progress of psychology and the school system, I'm sure that
>> focus will be to equip people to live meaningful lives, instead of just
>> being compliant cogs.
>
> I had a very brief career as a math and science teacher. The school system
> used homogeneous grouping meaning the classes were broken up according to
> the perceived potential of the students. A was the college bound, B
> possibly would make it to college or a skilled trade, C most likely would
> be unskilled labor, and D was for dummies.
>
> Being the new hire I saw a lot of the D section. They were ineducable. To
> put it plainly they didn't give a shit and their parents didn't give a
> shit. They were marking time until they turned 16 and could get working
> papers. To further clarify, there was one black kid. The rest were run of
> the mill white trash. I did have to relieve the black kid of his straight
> razor. The white kids knew better than to play with their toys in class.
>
> The tranches were roughly equal, so that was 25% of the student body. The
> C kids might have fared better but this was a mill town and the mills were
> leaving.
>

But surely things have gotten much better since the early 1900s? ;) Jokes
aside, yes, todays educational system is a complete mess, and can be very
depressing for teachers.

I teach at the vocational level, and I try to give them a rough start to
filter out the unmotivated ones. Out of the ones who remain, when I was
allowed to educate as I wanted, 100% got jobs, and 100% got salaries above
their industry average.

The school was very excited, yet, angry that 40% quit. They never saw
the connection between the two things.

But fear not! The government is always there to make a good thing worse.
;) This year the government has changed the rules, so schools will be
measured on how many students quit a program and will be punished for it.
I think that new system has great potential to ruin a lot of programs for
the students, since the schools won't accept teachers failing students
since that means lost income for the schools and punishments from the
state.

On Tue, 5 Nov 2024, rbowman wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 21:52:21 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On 4 Nov 2024 18:27:56 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>>
>>> Except for the baby mommas that see kids as a source of income...
>>
>> The Government should be paying women to have children.
>>
>> Where else are the children going to come from?
>
> Essentially the US government does pay women to have children.
> Unfortunately they are the women you wish were sterile. They do have a
> disproportionate number of abortions so that might be a plus. Margaret
> Sanger focused on contraception until later in her life but she had a
> particular interest in that group.
>

I think this would be a good time to recommend the eternal classic
Idiocracy! ;)

On Tue, 5 Nov 2024, rbowman wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 21:48:18 +0100, D wrote:
>
>> I'll never trust a democrat when it comes to US history again! What else
>> has been hidden from me? In europe, indians are these sweet little
>> nature people who can do no wrong, and who were abused by the white man.
>> That's the only story around the european mainstream.
>
> There is that Rousseauian noble savage spin in the US too.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois
>
> That's a long article but the gist is the expansion of the Iroquois
> confederacy was as subtle as any European nation building. They are the
> reason the 'Last of the Mohicans' was the last one. Quite a dew of the
> tribes the European settles thought of as Plains Indians had formerly
> lived in the eastern woodlands.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackfeet_Nation
>
> That's an example. Given them guns and horses and the Blackfeet tried to
> kill everything in sight. The only Indians killed by the Lewis and Clark
> expedition were Blackfeet who were trying to steal their guns and horses.
>
> Thoreau was enthralled by the artifacts he found in his wanderings around
> the Concord area. He was also put off by the contemporary versions.
>
> Long story short -- Indians are human. Among other things they managed to
> hunt many North American species to extinction so they aren't exactly
> ecowarriors.
>

Very interesting. Thank you very much for sharing. Just wait until my
socialist friend hears about this! He will deny it!

On Tue, 5 Nov 2024, rbowman wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 13:21:09 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
>
>> I’m not sure I’d want a Zulu as a slave.
>
> No, some other populations seem more docile.
>

Perhaps I could recommend a swede or norwegian? Very docile! ;)

On Tue, 5 Nov 2024, rbowman wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 21:53:00 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 13:29:17 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> Why would big money need workers when it has robots?
>>
>> It needs consumers with sufficient income to buy its products.
>
> Jack London was a product of his times and sometimes made simplistic
> arguments but one I remember is the question of how it works if the
> workers can't afford to buy back what they produce?
>
> Like I said, simplistic, and I'm sure there is a library's worth of books
> on the labor theory of value and so forth but the question always haunted
> me.
>
>

I wouldn't worry. Here's a longer post on the topic.

While automation poses challenges regarding wage levels and worker
purchasing power, Austrian economics suggests that market mechanisms will
eventually adjust through entrepreneurial innovation and resource
reallocation. The economy’s resilience relies on its ability to adapt to
changes brought about by technology while ensuring that workers can
participate meaningfully in the economy.

Thus, the answer lies not solely in fearing automation but rather
embracing it as part of an evolving economic landscape where proactive
measures can help balance productivity gains with sustainable wage levels.

The solution lies in fostering entrepreneurial innovation and adapting
education systems to ensure workers maintain purchasing power despite
automation’s impact on wages.

An example:

Consider a world in which a full half of working men are employed mining
for coal, which provides most of the world’s electricity. One day, a
nuclear power plant goes online, more than doubling the nation’s energy
production and selling its power at an order of magnitude below the
previous price. The plant only employs a couple dozen engineers. Over the
course of a year, a supermajority of coal plants and mines shut down, and
a mere fraction of the coal miners shift over to mining and transporting
uranium, which has over 150,000 times the energy density. Just as it is
obvious to any observer that society has plainly been made better off
through the proliferation of affordable, emissions-free electricity, it
should also be intuitively clear to all but the most stubborn of
antifuturists that the loss in jobs amounts to little more than a speed
bump in the economic lives of the newly unemployed coal miners. This is
because electricity is a factor input in nearly all lines of production in
any modern economy. Cheap electricity creates jobs, because it makes
previously outlandishly expensive projects suddenly potentially
profitable.

Importantly, the productive opportunities created will always exceed the
amount destroyed, because technology is only ever adopted, in market
economies, when it is profitable to do so. More wealth is created than is
consumed, and so there are more resources to be combined in potentially
productive ways by any entrepreneur who detects the opportunity.
Unprofitable technologies, for readers wondering, are usually adopted when
countries are attempting to pursue a policy of import substitution. For
example, Nazi Germany’s prewar attempts to wean firms off their dependence
on imported oil by forcing companies to use an ersatz oil made of
liquified coal. Another example would be American subsidization of
“renewable” energy sources like wind and solar.

But what about automating the production of the lowest-order goods, a.k.a.
consumer goods? Surely jobs automated out of the yo-yo factory are
essentially gone forever, since no businesses, aside toy stores, will see
their expenses fall thanks to a reduction in the price of children’s toys.
This is correct. However, it is important to remember that consumer goods
are a factor input in the production of labor, and labor is a factor input
in the production of everything that hasn’t been automated. People are, in
terms of opportunity cost, now cheaper than new machines, which produces
yet more firms willing to hire them. The automation in the production of
pure consumer goods, to the extent that there are such things, represents
real wage increases, or an increase in the standard of living, for
everybody else in the society.

In other words, automating the production of yo-yos makes all human
workers marginally more price competitive relative to machines in other
industries, by decreasing the cost of living. Here it is also important to
remember that consumption does not create jobs; savings do. If consumers
spend less on toys and stow the rest at the bank, this is not in any way a
waste. That money enters the loanable funds market. Toys are cheaper,
parents have more disposable income, which is more money to put in the
bank. More savings lower the natural interest rate, making that money
available to spend on other goods and services, in either case raising the
demand for labor. Where the decreasing cost of living improves the
relative standing of humans in comparison to machines, increased
investment raises the total demand for labor, whether in human or robot
form.

Source:
https://mises.org/mises-wire/robots-wont-destroy-us-how-automation-creates-jobs

And finally... even though past performance does not guarantee future
returns, we've had _massive_ automation historically, and we've increased
our population massively as well, and we still are better off today,
globally, than we've ever been. This indicates, that the trend will
continue for a long time.

On 04/11/2024 22:26, John Ames wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 13:19:25 +0000
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> But one has to ask what in fact a desktop OS is for these days.
>
> Any damn thing you please, no walled gardens needed, thankyouverymuch.
>
>> The 'home PC' is now a fondleslab, TV or smartphone.
>
> People have been nattering about "the death of the PC" for upwards of
> twelve years now - and they're still here.
>
Yes, but they are no longer the goto for an IT illiterate consumer.

A desktop workstation is in use by people in business, by designers, and
by hard core realtime 3D gamers.

Everything else has gone touchy-feely-crappy.

That's changed the dynamic of 'what in fact a desktop OS is for these days'

I didn't mean there wasn't a need for one: Just that as desktops move
into more professional areas, they way they work doesn't need to be so
'chrome and tailfin'

Microsoft is keeping the PC market alive by introducing new code that
wont run on old hardware. Apple is the same.

So the second hand market is flooded with dirt cheap PCS that wont run
win11 or whatever.

I think this will in the end drive some applications to run on Linux as
well as windows and OSX

Or windows will as someone else pointed out, be simply a certified WINE
interface.

The only thing that windows can do, but its a very important thing, is
to runs specialist 3rd party programs.

--
“when things get difficult you just have to lie”

― Jean Claud Jüncker

On 05/11/2024 01:05, rbowman wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 21:44:52 +0100, D wrote:
>
>> Inherently, I think most people are able to live meaningful lives if
>> they are only taught how and the tools to do it. Socialism, on the other
>> hand,
>> thrives on making people passive and dependent. Socialism doesn't even
>> need automation and robots to collapse, it collapses just fine with
>> regular humans. =)
>
> The eternal optimist. I don't know if George Floyd or Michael Brown would
> ever had lived meaningful lives.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Servile_State
>
Very interesting indeed.

> Belloc wasn't far off. He also warned in 'The Great Heresies' that Islam,
> a Christian heresy was only slumbering and shouldn't be written off as a
> threat.

Islam is not a Christian heresy. Though to a devout Catholic it might
have seemed so.

In its proclaimed form Muhammed and Jesus were simply equivalent
prophets in a long line of them.

But of course Mohammed, coming later, was deemed 'more correct'

And his divine revelations ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H schizophrenic
hallucinations...were deemed as authority enough.

--
Truth welcomes investigation because truth knows investigation will lead
to converts. It is deception that uses all the other techniques.

On 05/11/2024 01:18, rbowman wrote:
> Being the new hire I saw a lot of the D section. They were ineducable. To
> put it plainly they didn't give a shit and their parents didn't give a
> shit. They were marking time until they turned 16 and could get working
> papers. To further clarify, there was one black kid. The rest were run of
> the mill white trash. I did have to relieve the black kid of his straight
> razor. The white kids knew better than to play with their toys in class.

I have seen similar.
In the context of their lives and their parents lives education is
completely meaningless.
I had one such schoolmate in my class at primary school. His dad was a
pig farmer. All he wanted to be was a pig farmer. But he was in his own
way a nice gentle well behaved kid. He just didn't see the point of
learning Latin...

The headmaster, an ex WWII tank commander, took a drill sergeant
approach, whacking him over the head until he had memorised 'amo, amas,
amat' correctly.

To an extent it worked.

The problem is that this class of boy responds best to the sort of
physical punishment we are no longer allowed to indulge in.

Your class Ds belong in the Army. There they will learn whether they
like it or not, and some may in time learn self respect.

I have long thought that long term unemployed should be made to join a
sort of army, where they are separated from their backgrounds, taught
self discipline and how to strive, and anything else they are capable of
learning - and would in time become extremely valuable as a civil rapid
reaction force to deal with the aftermath of floods and hurricanes etc.

--
"I am inclined to tell the truth and dislike people who lie consistently.
This makes me unfit for the company of people of a Left persuasion, and
all women"

On 05/11/2024 09:34, D wrote:
> But fear not! The government is always there to make a good thing worse

In the UK Blair rationalised turning all the vocational colleges into
'universities' on the grounds that people with degrees all had well
above average salaries.

The net result is we have people with degrees in gender studies serving
up fries, but you cant get a good plumber for love nor money.

--
"Nature does not give up the winter because people dislike the cold."

― Confucius

On 05/11/2024 01:23, rbowman wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 21:52:21 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On 4 Nov 2024 18:27:56 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>>
>>> Except for the baby mommas that see kids as a source of income...
>>
>> The Government should be paying women to have children.
>>
>> Where else are the children going to come from?
>
> Essentially the US government does pay women to have children.
> Unfortunately they are the women you wish were sterile.

Mmm. I knew a girl who was basically a part time whore, who had a kid so
she could get free housing.

She (married?) a graduate communist, but became totally disillusioned
with his greed and materialism, so struck out on her own.

I asked her why he had taken up with him in the first place 'well that
was all there was wa'n't it?'

He wanted an authentic 'working class' girl.

> They do have a
> disproportionate number of abortions so that might be a plus. Margaret
> Sanger focused on contraception until later in her life but she had a
> particular interest in that group.

--
Those who want slavery should have the grace to name it by its proper
name. They must face the full meaning of that which they are advocating
or condoning; the full, exact, specific meaning of collectivism, of its
logical implications, of the principles upon which it is based, and of
the ultimate consequences to which these principles will lead. They must
face it, then decide whether this is what they want or not.

Ayn Rand.

On 05/11/2024 01:30, rbowman wrote:
Lawence wrote
>> Other countries look at
>> the “revolving door” in the US where the same people are working for a
>> regulatory authority one moment, and as a lobbyist on behalf of the very
>> companies being regulated another moment, and wonder why you let them
>> get away with it.
> Yes, in your eyes everything about the US is wrong.
>
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292120300933
>
> Get over it.

The laugh is that Lawrence's beloved EU is even worse.
Siemens were 100% responsible for the 'renewable obligation' that
ensures windmill sales but does nothing for CO2 reduction whatsoever.

--
Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the
gospel of envy.

Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Winston Churchill

On 05/11/2024 02:25, rbowman wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 13:21:16 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
>
>> Cotton gin Mass prod of rifes with interchangeable parts Sewing machine
>> Telegraph Telephone Transistor Banjo
>
> That last one won't fly.
>
> https://bittersoutherner.com/history-of-the-banjo
>

Nor will the telegraph, clearly a European invention

I'll give him mass production of everything - that was the USAs greatest
contribution.

Sewing machine?

Thomas Saint: An English inventor who patented a design for a sewing
machine with a hand crank in 1790.

Telephones were in existence in Europe before Bell.

Transistors were described by a Canadian first, but he never built one.
They weren't invented in the USA, they were developed there into
something that worked

> I play a banjo but I sort of subvert it further. Among other things, I
> play the Irish flute / tin whistle, mostly Irish rebel tunes which tend to
> be recycled traditional songs.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVpEu4fOMB4
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaS3vaNUYgs
>
> There was a perfectly good melody just laying around...
>
> Anyway most of the material is in D or G. The Irish dlute has both C and
> C# so it works. The standard banjo tuning is G, so it's a natural.
>
> The Micks do their own thing with banjos.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk_hLTzppIU
>
It is fascinating how music spreads. There are strong connections in the
scales used in - say - Irish country music, and Indian ragas and the like.
Also Blues scales.

US country music is absolutely an offspring of English folk music from
North country, scotland and Ireland.

Jazz is the negro's sarcastic take on the white man's classical music.
The notes are *basically* the same, though often bent a little, but the
rhythms are no longer pompous and solemn , they are complete 'fuck you
asshole' pisstakes.

I grin when people take jazz seriously.

--
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the
urge to rule it.”
– H. L. Mencken

On 05/11/2024 03:17, rbowman wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 13:21:09 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
>
>> I’m not sure I’d want a Zulu as a slave.
>
> No, some other populations seem more docile.

Yup. Xhosa and Tswana . Xhosa are jolly and happy and don't have an
excess of ego. Mandela was essentially Xhosa.

Southern Sotho? Trouble. burning resentment against everyone. Think Welsh.

There is as much variety in culture and sophistication in African people
as there are in European and ex European palefaces....

--
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's
too dark to read.

Groucho Marx

On 05/11/2024 03:32, rbowman wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 21:53:00 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 13:29:17 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> Why would big money need workers when it has robots?
>>
>> It needs consumers with sufficient income to buy its products.
>
> Jack London was a product of his times and sometimes made simplistic
> arguments but one I remember is the question of how it works if the
> workers can't afford to buy back what they produce?
>
> Like I said, simplistic, and I'm sure there is a library's worth of books
> on the labor theory of value and so forth but the question always haunted
> me.
>
Very very good point too.
What you end up with is Russia. A very small cadre own the capital and
run such economic activity as there is, export it to the West (gas oil
and grain) and they simply buy in Western luxury goods - or live
elsewhere than Russia.

The Russians get drunk and live and die in squalor.

There is no need for consumer products to keep the masses happy when you
own all the Kalashnikovs.

--
The lifetime of any political organisation is about three years before
its been subverted by the people it tried to warn you about.

Anon.