Yes, friends of mine and I have watched the spiral. Personally I think it started with John Young, one of the consummate "numbers men." There's a story from a friend of mine who quotes him as at least once forecasting 'next quarter's profits' to TWO decimal places...

Danger, Will Robinson!!! When you start measuring managers to that kind of precision, they will do ALL kinds of stupid things to 'make their numbers'!

And Carly was much worse.

'been in Raleigh for almost ten years. Love the genteel Southern charm blended with the sophistication of large companies, lots of entertainment and wide range of restaurants. Warmer than the northeast in winter, cooler than the Deep South in summer. But getting crowded, as NC hasn't learned to grow the highway and byway infrastructure fast enough to service the tons of folks retiring to here or moving here for jobs or plain old 'quality of life.' No 20-year plans visible where they really need 'em.

FWIW, HP is still spiraling down. Good choice to leave, imo. I still use their products, but the quality frequently isn't what it used to be. Jack of many trades may be a highly valued ability in the Gulch.

Have spent lots of time in coastal NC, no much in R-D. Been there long?

Skills? Getting into philosophical and logical blog debates and consistently losing? :)
I can turn wood into pretty household utilitarian items, but electric-powered, not foot or hand...
And judging from the amount of sales I've had (maybe $400 over the past five years, with most of those sales the first year... ) , I'm not sure I've got a marketable skillset for Atlantis OR the Gulch.
I tend to do well with analysis and poorly with implementation. As a friend of mine (ex-Army and also ex-HP) once put it... "We'd be a great team... You'd decide which hill to take and _I_'d take the hill. But it would be terrible to reverse those uses of us!"
HP couldn't let us operate that way so both of us fairly happily left.

I've got LOTS of science left in my mind and a bunch of common-use math and experience. I jokingly used to call myself a Renaissance Man when, compared to many others, I knew LOTS of useful (and useless) information across a WIDE range of subjects. I got many 'best answer' votes on Yahoo Questions across a broad range of subjects, but the remunerative market for that 'skill' has been minimal.

I'm quite good at identifying problem in processes and user interfaces, but most Creators of those things (including problem-creators) fall in love with their own ideas and don't tend to be open to suggestions. Witness: my comments and their responses on things like the AS potential TV series... Them that got the gold make the rules, and "Thank you for sharing your ideas with us, but... we're not changing our minds."
I had enough of that at HP.
I think I'll go to my shop and mutilate some wood on the lathe...

Thanks for listening... :)

Nice collection, plusaf.
Have you posted your skills here yet?
http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/2b...
Need lots of help ;^)

Note Snezzy's post, just above... :)

Thank you, FFA... just added those two quotes at http://www.plusaf.com/home-page-quotes.h... , bottom center of the page.

Remarkable parallel between Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress and California's water "crisis"

Anyone remember the reason for the war for liberty in Heinlein's "Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"?
Scarce resources being wasted, of course, specifically water. California is doing exactly what the moon was doing.
California uses 5.3 million acre feet of water growing Alfalfa- its the biggest single use of water in the state. Alfalfa is a supplementary food for beef production.

"Unfortunately, it’s a plant that’s not generally cultivated for humans: alfalfa. Grown on over a million acres in California, alfalfa sucks up more water than any other crop in the state. And it has one primary destination: cattle. Increasingly popular grass-fed beef operations typically rely on alfalfa as a supplement to pasture grass. Alfalfa hay is also an integral feed source for factory-farmed cows, especially those involved in dairy production.

If Californians were eating all the beef they produced, one might write off alfalfa’s water footprint as the cost of nurturing local food systems. But that’s not what’s happening. Californians are sending their alfalfa, and thus their water, to Asia. The reason is simple. It’s more profitable to ship alfalfa hay from California to China than from the Imperial Valley to the Central Valley. Alfalfa growers are now exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year from this drought-ridden region to the other side of the world in the form of alfalfa."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinio......

If there was a free market on water the cost of growing alfalfa would rise so far as to make it uneconomic to grow in California, but as in Heinlein's "Moon...Mistress", government has interfered and caused a severe problem that it now wants to "solve" with more government.

Heinlein is one of the greats! Worth reading all of his works. To me there is much in common with AR. He valued the individual and personal liberty above all. He believed in the barest minimum of government for the maintenance of society. This is a great example of his philosophy of valuing what he did and expecting no less of others...

Pretty sure this was Heinlein:

“The only difference between stealing an hour of a man’s time and killing him outright, is matter of degree.”

I had a '74 Jensen Healy and my roommate a Triumph Spitfire in the 70s. I learned rather quickly that one of us should own a non British vehicle. The Jensen with its oil leaky Lotus engine had to go in spite of the joy of driving it gave when it was running.
thanks for the insight on warm beer ;^)

"Lifeline" also included another observation that is quite appropriate today:
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

The first Foundation book was written 1942-1950. Lifeline was in 1939 (per wiki.) (Don't have copies on hand to look for the specific idea though.)

Mine was red with a white roof. The hood opened backwards, making any engine work (of which there was a lot) more difficult. And of course, Lucas Electric systems. Know why the British drink warm beer? Because Lucas builds refrigerators, too.

holy crap! . mine was an english ford anglia, baby
boy blue, 36 hp L-head 4 cylinder engine -- would do
just a tad over 60 downhill with a tailwind. . drove it
to daytona for spring break in '67. . turn the key, then
pull the starter button and pray. . battery lasted
seven years, though. . amazing. -- j

p.s. this is a green one::: https://images.search.yahoo.com/images/v...

I love all these old stories! It is pretty heart wrenching to think of how greedy some people must be that the same things are so much more expensive. We do our best to survive on my husband's wages, a measley $50k a yr. When I was a kid that would have been a blessing. Fortunately, I know how to stretch a dollar and am learning new methods of living off the land everyday. I am doing my best to make our home self sustaining. Hope to see it completed in the next few years.

I thought Asimov said it first in the Foundation trilogy.

Good exercise. We were a hearty breed. And we only had last summer's tennis shoes (with holes in them) to walk in.

Exactly. Plus, I'd get the windshield washed, the oil checked and the tires pressure ok'd. Dems wuz da good ol' days.

If the "good old days" were really that good, why did all the kids have to walk 10 miles through the snow to get to school, uphill both ways?

:-)

My first car...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peugeot_404...

My first car was a Ford Anglia. For those who've never seen one, the Weasley's flying car from Harry Potter is an Anglia.

At any rate, during the gas wars (remember those?) I could fill my tank for two bucks. The downside? Most of the time i didn't have two bucks left over for gas!

Herb, remember when gas was 25 cents a gallon? When you could drive up and tell the attendant (gasp!) to give you a dollar's worth?

Memory Lane: At age 16, I could drive my dad's car all day for a dollar.

'69 VW beetle bought new by my folks and me for
$1900; I paid them back. . new '71 Harley FX::: $2544.18
I remember when gasoline was 15.9 and I drained the
hoses at the Esso station to fill my go-cart for an
afternoon of illegal driving in the subdivision. -- j

Of course, we didn't realize how good we had it then.