array9

Businesses temps and unemployment


A divide between permanent employment and unemployment may not be a good idea for society.  Having temporary employment opportunities might be a good buffer and stepping stone.

What would good practice be?

Business should be forced to treat unemployment rather like racism, in the sense that the internal distributions should be similar to the local distributions.  That way knowledge of the issues will be better known and understood.

Outsourcing to another business should not be counted.  That is cheating or hiding it under the carpet.

I would suggest that temporary employment should be at least as high as the local level of unemployment, thus giving the unemployed in some sense a more than half chance of gaining temporary employment.

Now this has some interesting effects.  It is the companies with least temporary employment who have to change most if unemployment rises.  They also cannot use temporaries as disposable buffer at the bottom end.

Obviously there are definitional and deviousness issues here in plenty, and permanent employment will need some protection.  This might include need to ensure rotation of temporaries.

Unemployment is everybodies' problem, and a waste of good resources.  The above ideas in extreme situations rightly is a tax on the 'wealthier' businesses or an encouragement for mobility.

It might be tempting to have higher rates than 1:1, but i think that would have too much instability.

Both business and unions will hate the ideas, and that is probably proof enough.

Martin

Two photons will pass through each other as if nothing has happened.  Supposedly.

Can two neutrinos do the same thing?

Do you have to have stationary mass to collide?  Could you get other forces to work on photons so that they would react to each other?

Of course you have to have some force between two neutrinos in order for them to 'collide', and I guess the question is whether they have that.  If they react with other matter maybe that says that they should in principle be able to react with each other.

While the experiment sounds nice and easy, I somehow doubt if you could do it in a reasonable time.

I would say that if they have mass, then they can clearly can interact and 'collide'.  Indeed a narrow beam of them would presumably oscillate under their own gravity, converging and then diverging.  Presumably rather like photons passing each other would, having mass.

But somehow I feel that these guys are so minimal, that anything else is just plain unlikely.  Indeed they may be able to occupy the same space without any issue.


Life as a neutrino would however be pretty lonely,  with nothing ever happening to it, except the occasional bump into some real matter.  Though their birth must have been quite fun, and presumably a backwards running of the tape would show that they can indeed collide with somethings in a death.

martin

It occurred to me that being more efficient at collecting energy from the sun, must have an evolutionary advantage.  If you have a greater fuel source, you are going to do better.  Now I am not quite sure how this works out across species, rather than within species, whatever species means.

But my thought would lead one to believe that a wild scene would be on average better than a farmed scene at absorbing the suns energy.  Now we might not like what the plants do with the energy that they have managed to gain, this going into some nasty chemical and positional strategies, such as woody stems/ height and herbicides,  But even these strategies could not ultimately make up for being less efficient.

This does not mean that woods are the optimum energy sink, since clearly they are still having to put a large amount of energy in to the warfare of climbing above their competitors, which is not exactly useful per se.  Just short term bullies.

Maybe woods are just a temporary feature, and that eventually they will get bumped off through some use of energy by another species of plant or bug.

Anyway it makes me think that by doing nothing in the garden, I am generating more compostable waste, than my neighbour who is being terribly neat and tidy.

Obviously this is a hope rather than a clear principle.

martin

It must be very difficult to measure the size of a neutrino.  It must be quite difficult to measure the smallest possible length, if it exists.  ie the quantum of length.

It just seemed to me rather obvious that there was a possibility to simplify things a little, by assuming that these two things were actually the same.  That there is a particle with the minimum possible length, and that this is the neutrino.

I get the feeling that this must somehow tells us its mass as well. The time for light to cross the diameter ( whatever that means in a quantum length world) implies an uncertainty in its energy, and hence its mass.  Is something like h (cross) divided by ( c times quantum of distance)

I do wonder also whether space is completely full of pretty well real or virtual stationary neutrinos, therefore bringing back the ether hypothesis and giving the quantum grittiness to everything else.  I suspect that might be a step too far.

martin

You cannot see the forest for the wood


In the more thoughtful meaning of 'forest', there can be woods.  But much else besides.  This is the area outside the daily control of the lordship, which served many functions, including hunting by the toffs.

Woods are useless for hunting.  You need open spaces in which to spot and to chase your prey

Woods provide cover and shelter for the game, and with careful positioning and use of  cunning beaters, provide a convenient supply of animals for easy hunting.

My little extension to the normal conundrum, tries to remind people to look after the wonderful forest habitat, and go for its greater diversity.  Woods will, after all, kill forests if they are given half a chance.

Martin

Multi-tools when resources are scarce

My idea here is that in the past, when using anything other than human labour for work/energy was almost impossible, people would have spent much more thought about making things efficiently and also making them do more than one thing.

This is meant to be very different from the idea that labour was dirt cheap, and so people would feel free to waste it.  There probably was not a market as such.

My particular bugbear is the so-called 'boundary banks'.  These are a ditch and bank construction, often on a large scale.  Yes, it may have marked a boundary.  But surely you would have thought a little more about this, before or while embarking on the endeavour.

Surely it could do other things.

- herding domesticated animals along routes
- funneling wild animals into traps or hunts
- channeling water or drainage
- banks for rabbit burrows and water diversion for warrens
- hides for stalking
- planting areas for fussy herbs
- foundations for temporary structures such as animal pens or shepherd 'huts'.

Maybe you could get storm water to help create the ditch part, and make a large structure with little effort.  Are the ditches more likely to be uphill from the bank.

Anyway you would not catch me making such a labour intensive structure, when there must have been other ways of marking out straight lines on the landscape, and easier ways of keeping animals from wandering ( these banks by themselves won't do it).

martin