Luddites went around breaking the new weaving machines that they feared were taking their jobs.

Large companies today are worried about inventors that they cannot control and their answer has been to weaken patent laws, so all inventors (engineers) have to work for them and not compete with them.

"new Luddites"...I need to learn of that. Have heard the term but not familiar with its meaning.

I started in the aircraft industry, mostly manufacturing engineering and (my favorite) aircraft structures analysis. I eventually made the switch to A&E - hvac, plumbing, fire suppression and a little seismic. Salaries for engineers, during my career, have really stagnated and even dropped some. I know some very good engineers who get paid $65K/year. They need to have their heads examined. And, I've had plenty of offers to get to work for nothing. When I left the aerospace business I was seeing designs from major companies you've all heard of where it was clear the company didn't value good engineering. They were hiring people with zero experience to do things like design satellite structures and the designs were terrible sometimes. But, that's ok because those engineers are cheap. I've had some good laughs looking at piping drawings that were outsourced to India. Sharp people, with little experience, working for almost nothing. Knock yourselves out...

Look at the story of our new Bay Bridge here in the Bay. I love to look at it and at the Golden Gate nearby. The Golden Gate was done with pencils, paper, slide rules and real grit. The new Bay Bridge, recently done, is a mess - crappy welds, etc. We just can't get it done. I'm thinking the engineers on the Golden Gate probably had a house on the hill or a little coastal real estate...

Sorry for the rant...

What kind of engineering?

In my first non-fiction book I point out a number of changes in the laws from the late 90s that undercut technology startups. These same laws of course undercut the engineering profession. What is amazing is that so many engineers do not understand that their value is tied to the strength of the patent system for instance. Without strong property rights, engineers cannot work independently or start their own businesses. Manufacturers (including google and similar companies) are the new Luddites.

yes. There are places thirsting. it is brain drain, abaco. drain your country of your brain :)

Just this morning, as I was walking to the office in the dark I was thinking about how I'm planning to phase myself out of engineering. - How it is a field that has died a gradual, steady death. That it really is a profession for somebody who is living in a society that wants to build things, as opposed to a society that willingly strangles itself with taxes and regulations. No...five or six more years at the most. They can keep it. My degree and license will remain on the wall, as will some photos of some of the things I helped create. Like a mini-museum...

Mamaemma, human nature retains much of its evolutionary origins of animal behavior: unthinking pursuit of what survival needs and taking what one wants as one finds it. The notion of respecting others' property or even recognizing such a thing as ownership was a much later evolutionary stage. It made possible a system of communal living, with division of labor and productive achievement, voluntary cooperation, the trading of values for equal and mutual benefit, the recognition of individual rights. To get there we went through every variation of slavery, domination, exploitation, pillage and genocide through all the millennia of human expansion. (It is usually overlooked that America was able to have a "brilliant rocket-explosion" in its youth because it had a virtually virgin continent as a resource to appropriate.)

What we are seeing today is a long-coming relapse to wanting to have without the commensurate effort to earn it, a primitive motivation of envy. And because humans have developed the brain capacity for abstract reasoning coupled with unreasoning emotions, they have managed to construct thought systems that rationalize demanding that the productive serve the needy. And rather than gratitude, the productive are paid with the insolence of ever-growing demands, envy and accusations of greed. People can easily be led to believing that thus enslaving the more able is justified "for the greater good".

The evil resides in those who know how envy works and build it into a political philosophy that then enshrines itself into the culture as altruism enforced through socialism. You can see it nakedly exposed in a Bernie Sanders speech to congress that I came across recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsDYA...

There is growing talk of "war", first metaphorically as the war on drugs, the war against women, or against the middle class, or against the rich, or against the poor. But wars become real, and after making illegal wars against any number of foreign nations, we seem to be building towards civil war, what with militarized police and drones and ever-encroaching limits on citizens' rights. And will this civil war be people against people, or people against governmental tyranny? And how can we reverse this snowballing process to restore the enlightened system that built America, without a war, without bloodshed and destruction?

It always galls me when people speak of "the American experiment", as though it were just some transient thing to be tossed away instead of the breakthrough to the best great hope for a lasting civilization, a foundation upon which this strange product of evolution, the human species, could advance to greatness not yet dreamed of.

Morality of sacrifice = environmentalism.
Handouts = solar companies.
Mystic split = climate change.
Worship of need = animal rights...
Mooching = mooching is over because the moocher bought a gun with the $$ we gave.

Environmentalism is to treat other men as an animal. Taxing him disproportionately to punish incentive, imposing restrictions, quotas, and rationing to control his growth, removing his ability to represent his own ideas. Are these not cruel acts with analogous actions? Kill all the buffalo and no fur or meat will remain. Destroy the bee hives and there is no honey for the toast. Beat the horse and don't be surprised if it kicks your chest. But men are not animals, and liberals cannot shape policies which will affect civilization in such a way as they would predict. Institute economic policies and stocks plummet. Institute racial quotas and racism spreads. Institute climate change policies and we shall see what happens... The liberals see themselves as the master, but they are soon to find out exactly what Malcolm said in Jurassic Park. Life finds a way. Despite the doomsday scenarios, when it comes to capitalism, the cat is out of the bag. When it comes to capital, the liberals will say, don't let the door hit you on the way out. The capitalist, though, just moves from the rental to the property. Countries will compete for capital, or they will crumble when cut off from its life-force. Rational men will not be slaves.

I mean saying a country showed the world what greatness is possible for a human sounds like exaggeration. But it's not. It actually happened that way..

What was the intended contrast between "nationalism" and "actually happening"? They are not opposites. The wording sounds like "nationalism" versus "nationalism that happened".

at least that's true here, Jan. -- j
.

like an addict, they gotta have it -- to buy more power! -- j
.

We sold cameras and accessories plus .We couldn't compete with big retailers in price, but we made so little on cameras that we only made profit on accessories. Our mantra was that if you didn't sell an accessory with a camera, you didn't really make a sale.

Shakespeare described it as: "To be or not to be", that was the question of his time; a time of choosing; to live sovereign with a conscious mind and identity or to live and die by the brain and a disconnect to everything created.

It was born in the halls of governance, the antilectual dyslexia of progressiveism or "not to be"
Not the being of order but the plaque of disorder.

Thanks to the consequences of creation, we whom chose to be, still thrive and prosper; otherwise, I fear, existence would have disappeared.

Esceptico is constantly trashing Ayn Rand with his own lack of understanding of what she wrote.

Their lack of understanding of your costs and efforts was only part of it. What difference would it have made if you had higher profits from providing them with value? They resented you for success and expected to you to provide for them.

Me 2, Jan. On point as usual. Nephews and Nieces so clearly conditioned by MSM. We try to set a productive example, but watch as taxes increase every year.. Regards

Better to have a civil war than continuing tyranny because of the lack of ability to wage one.

Isn't it the truth? I get tired of some patients perception that money just falls into my lap with no effort. Thankfully it's only a few patients

I used to be of the same view as yours. I changed my mind after reading more history.

But they can make more deadly wars more frequently. Tribal and city-state societies had more frequent conflicts with higher death rates than current nations do (by orders of magnitude).

I have no problem with the US States having more independence and differentiation (though I pointed out that they did not seem to want to) but we have not had a war within the US in over a century. This cannot be said of the smaller nations of Europe. We do not need to change our current model in order to solve 'how to keep the States of the US from going to war with each other'.

Jan

The smaller the state, the freer the people. Small nations cannot make big wars.

If the States were more independent, then they might be able to serve as varied crucibles where different forms of government were experimented with. But I am not sure that would happen - even within the scope of current variability, most states deviate little.

I am more concerned with the stronger establishment of individual rights than I am in making the US a conglomeration of independent nations.

Jan

I would like to live in a society where hatred of producers was considered destructive.

Jan

Exactly!

Not correct because she identified the unifying principles on which the political structure is constructed. Monroe writing nearly 50 years later made it clear that the principle was that of individual sovereignty and the political experiment was how to achieve it. So political forms changed while we dreamed of keeping the principle alive.