On Thu, 5 Sep 2013 18:19:51 -0700 (PDT), "
wrote:

On Thursday, September 5, 2013 6:12:32 PM UTC-4, Ed Huntress wrote:


Over 50% of Albania's employment is in agriculture -- small family

farms. Foreign investment and domestic investment are very low.



The dynamics of Albania's economy have virtually no relationship to

that of the United States.



If you read Birnbaum's blog post, which is what I'm referring to, the

false dichotomy that he made was between living in the USA or living

with a GINI coefficient of 0.27 -- Albania's.



But he made no effort to show any causative relationship. So it's a

silly example.



--

Ed Huntress

So I thought the topic was about whether a hgh or low Gini number made a difference.

It is. But you can read what he said either way. Here's what he said:

"Albania has a Gini of 0.27, but a per-capita income only one-eighth
of the USA. Would you be willing to sacrifice 87% of your pay in order
to be more equal to everyone else?"

So, is he suggesting that the consequence of having such a low GINI
coefficient is low absolute incomes?

It's ambiguous.

And yet you seem not to be concerned with the general case, but instead only want to discuss the U.S. economy.

That's what we were talking about -- the rising income disparities in
the US, and the implications of IMF and other research from other
countries for the US economy.

There isn't much to be applied to the US, from the experience of a
relatively poor economy where over 50% of the workers are involved in
farming.


So you are trying to restrict the discussion to a single country instead of discussing the general case. So cherry picking the data.

I'm not tryint to "restrict" anything. I'm talking about the subject
we were discussing.


Now on to discussing metalworking. Today I welded in some sheet metal to stiffen up the stand for the Drill/Mill. The welds looked really bad. Strong enough,but ugly looking. I was welding some material about .040 thick to the legs which are square tubing with a .250 wall thickness. That was not the problem. The problem is that I could not see where I was welding. So I clamped a strip of aluminium along side where I wanted to weld, and that helped. But it was not enough. So the next step would be to rig a halogen light so it illuminates the weld area and connect it to the MIG welder so it turns on when the wire starts feeding. Or maybe I should skip that and just rig a simple track system and advance along the path using a stepper motor and maybe a second stepper to weave the torch back and forth orthogonal to the first stepper. Which of course ties into the automation of labor and doing work that is not being done. Well sure there are welding robots already, but I am
thinking of something in the range of $50. Almost nothing to it except a microcontroler and a couple of stepper motors. It would only do straight welds , although the same parts could rotate a weld positioner for circular welds.

Dan