With computer technology, too. Who needs a compiler? Recapitulate the development of micro-scale silicon: Start with an interpreter. Use it to write your first compiler. Use the interpreted compiler to compile itself into a real compiler.

What’s my opinion of the “Citizen Agenda”? I’m hurt, TB, that you don’t recognize large parts of it from my posts over the years. How many times have I tried to tell you that corporations not only have no place in Smith’s scheme, they were anathema to him. As one of those rare people who’ve actually read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, I say Korten is being entirely true to classic free market theory.

I’ve said many times, too, that I’d love to see the United States try free markets sometime. Real free markets, without the gravitational distortion of massive corporate economic entities working day and night to insultate themselves from market forces.

I’d go farther than Korten–I’d abolish limited-liability businesses completelty. No more corporations. Fine with me if you get as rich as you can on your own efforts. But don’t expect me to cheer people who get rich taking money from investors they’re not obligated to repay. And believe me, my heroes are not hired gunslinger MBAs appointed as CEOs to inflate the stock and cash out after a few years. I dare you to show me even one real entrepreneur at the head of a Fortune 500 company.

That’s corporate libertarianism.

One who talks piously all the time about the virtues of small citizen-owned businesses, but promotes policies which mostly favor ruthless multinational corporations.

A “corporate libertarian” is the opposite of a “libertarian socialist”; an individual who has equal distrust and suspicion of both public and private bureacracies.

Look it up.

Meaningless terms get made up around here almost as fast as real terminology with real definitions gets eliminated.

Are you going to be the hat trick for implosion?

You guys don’t even know where the box is. How do you know what’s inside it or outside it?

What’s your opinion on the “Citizen Agenda?”

So far we have a thumbs-up from Bowser and ER.

http://www.nzeldes.com/HOC/ALKU.htm

One can only guess, and the likely reason would be post-war shortages. This slide rule was made around 1947; it is quite likely that the woods used in this industry (carefully selected for long-term dimensional stability) were not readily available in East Germany at that time, and perhaps neither was the machining equipment needed to produce metal slide rule parts. But plate glass is abundant, is flat and dimensionally stable, and can be cut to fairly good precision.
Alfred Kuhmann may have been practicing my favorite definition of Engineering: “The art of making what you want from things you can get”.

And just think…it’s from a Communist country! OMG!

Stonehenge, and a multitude of other standing stones and pyramids and slots and Mayan calendars are examples of computers specialized for time, e.g. seasonal and astronomical calculations.

I could chip an abacus out of flint in a few days, if you’d spot me wood for the shafts. Longer if I had to chip the shafts out of flint too.

It’s possible, though the work of several lifetimes, to chip a Babbage Engine out of flint. Though I think obsidian would probably be better, in terms of taking a polish necessary for precision machining.

Other processor architectures could be implemented in macro-scale silicon. A classic Turing machine “tape” could be implemented as pits on a long stone slab that actuate smooth pebbles constrained in a frame over the “tape”.

Sand in an hourglass, come to think of it, represents macro-scale silicon processing.

This is why I never argue political economics with you, Tom. You just can’t think outside the corporate libertarian box.

Reading that list was like listening to someone convinced he can make a computer by chipping it out of flint. After all, silicon is just another mineral, right?

It seems to me that letting a bank loan out a lot more money than it has on reserve is precisely equivalent to a government printing banknotes with no backing. Of course, I guess its different when free enterprise does it. Somehow, its more legitimate.

Face it Tom, you are just convinced that business people are naturally smarter and more virtuous than anyone else, and we should let them have anything they want.

I don’t. I don’t trust the bastards.

And to paraphrase Sister Sara, that strategy has worked out just fine so far for me.

Tell you what, why not start with the 100 percent fractional reserve requirement for banks. I’ll watch from a distance. Preferably New Zealand.

And of course, we have the absolute totalitarian power over our lives that those proposals would require.

But then today, for a lot of people, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature (another one of those memes).