Man in a Shed: Another chance missed

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Another chance missed

There's been a lot of excitement about the RaspberryPi computer - designed to give us Dad's some credibility when we re tell stories to the youth of today about falling off RAM packs, 1k space invaders, and having to transpose Commador Pet computer programmes line by line from Electronics Weekly to work on our own home computers ( in my case a Sharp MZ-80k ). Yes the opportunity has presented itself to make the kids suffer too - which must be why their eyes glaze over every time I mention getting one.

By accident the brave hero's who gave us the Raspberry Pi have stumbled across a new market segment - the plug into TV computer.

Will the UK be leading the world in the commercialisation of this idea ? Or will some other lucky nation be picking up the opportunity. You can guess the answer.

Now if the government did something to encourage this sort of imitative then perhaps we'd get growth. But as we all know government is hopeless a picking winners - just see the green technology disaster for details.

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The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman