User talk:Lbeaumont

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Greetings

Hi Lee,

Did we know each other at Bell Labs?

I lived in Lincroft and worked at Bell Labs in Holmdel until 1987.

Barry Kort

Moulton 14:11, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Probably, your name sounds familiar and I worked at Holmdel from 1973-1983 (when I transferred to the Lincroft then Middletown buildings) and again from 1999-2001. I maintain the site at: PreservingHolmdel.com and have a photo credit for the image at Bell Labs Holmdel Complex. Good to connect!

• I was in Network Planning. Were you active in the Holmdel Folk Music Club? Your name sounds familiar, but we almost surely met socially rather than on any work projects. —Moulton 20:59, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

A Request

Lee, you have a background in EE and Telephony, so maybe I can recruit you to independently review some work of mine.

Elsewhere on this site, there is a chap named Abd who is a diehard believer in Cold fusion. I took the time to analyze the material he was presenting, and construct some models to explain the anomalous "excess heat" that the "fusioneers" insist must be coming from nuclear fusion. My analysis shows that they are ignoring the ohmic dissipation of AC noise signals in the electrolytic cells.

I need someone who has at least a knowledge of sophomore level AC Circuit Analysis to independently confirm (or revise) my model of the AC noise from a fluctuating resistance, such as is found in Edison's carbon button microphone or in the original liquid transmitter of Elisha Gray, AG Bell, and Thomas Watson.

Interested?

Moulton 16:24, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Sure, as long as V still = IR I can probably take a look at it. Where is the material? --Lbeaumont 17:21, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

The material is a bit scattered and buried within a blizzard of words that makes it hard to pick out the signal from the noise, so I'll reprise it here.

Start with a simple model in which a constant voltage works into sinusoidally varying resistance:

Assume a perfect constant DC voltage source, V, working into a sinusoidally varying resistor, R + r sin ωt, where r << R.

Let α = r/R. Can you integrate the power over one cycle of the sinusoid to get PAC = ½α²PDC, where PDC = V²/R, independent of the frequency, ω, of the sinusoid?

Moulton 18:37, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

• Lee, have you had a chance to independently derive the above result? —Moulton 21:28, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Here is my analysis so far and question. Power(t) = V² / (R+r(sin(ωt)) so we need to integrate this over one cycle. Using WolframAlpha I gave it: integrate V^2 / (R + r* sin x) dx from x=0 to 2*pi and it timed out. I am out of town without my calculus book. Can we simplify (and show the steps) of that integral?

• My method, Lee, was to algebraically divide 1/(1+ε) and keep the first three terms of the resulting series. For small ε, 1/(1+ε) = 1 – ε + ε². The linear middle term integrates to zero. The first term integrates to the DC power and the quadratic term integrates to the AC power. Do you agree? —Moulton 14:14, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

OK, keeping with the 1/(1+x) theme, look at wolfram alpha 1/(1+x) = 1 - x + x² . . . as you point out. So your expansion is algebraically correct. But x = αsin(ωt) and needs to be integrarted over a cycle. Going back to Wolfram Alpha integrate sin(x)^2 from 0 to 2*pi we get pi for the definite integral or α pi for the AC term. I still want to see this in context to understand how this is used and if any second order effects, such as thermal non-linearities etc. may be important.

Unrelated comments from Abd

Moulton has proposed a more complex problem than the experimental situation under consideration. He's proposed a constant voltage source. The experimental situation is a constant current source. He first approached this by realizing that the particular constant current Kepco power supply used by McKubre has a slew rate (like all such supplies). That was the wrong specification, it took some time to realize that, it refers to how rapidly the set current slews when the programming is changed. There are other specifications that cover the response to the supply to changes in load. Obviously, there must be some change in current. However, the issue is how large it is, given relatively slow resistance changes. Moulton has consistently avoided this, raising hosts of irrelevant situations, such as "constant DC voltage source."

He also raises the issue of "electrolytic interruptors," which totally interrupt the current flow, and which would, in a situation like the cold fusion cells, result in current going to zero or voltage going to infinity, i.e., there would be dielectric breakdown. Completely irrelevant.

The real situation is simple: resistance noise, which could be modeled as he states, and a constant current supply with response capability probably on the order of 100 kHz, for the kinds of resistance shifts involved. The bubble noise probably has no rapid changes. You can watch a bubble rise, and it would accelerate slowly at first. I doubt that there is significant noise above 10 KHz. Researchers report seeing no current noise, looking at scope displays of current. Voltage noise is quite visible. Barry, trying to confirm his theory, mistook what may have been a display of "SuperWave" current, where electrolytic current is varied according to a complex programmed pattern, for bubble noise in the current. Far from it. I've confirmed with McKubre that this was a SuperWave experiment. It should have been obvious: there was periodicity to the SuperWave pattern. The display was probably about one hour/division, all of which was clear to me before I talked with McKubre. Barry, quite simply, doesn't know what he's looking at. And never admits it.

But one step at a time. You can answer his question if you like, of course, but .... it's not the issue, at all. To save time, you can answer the same question with constant current. The ultimate question is whether or not measuring the voltage with many samples and averaging them, over a sampling period, and multiplying by the set current, will give you a sufficiently accurate measure of true average power for the period. The noise is not a sinusoid, it's random, so the fixed sampling frequency can't trip us up. --Abd 21:00, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Hey, that would be great. Moulton, I'm busy this morning. Do you want to point him to your best shot at this? Here, your blog, or on Knol? Or, Moulton, you could restate it. Quickly, I come up with Cold_fusion/Skeptical arguments/Were the excess heat results ever shown to be artifact?, which links to subpages, and the one relevant to what Moulton is asking you about is Cold fusion/Skeptical arguments/Were the excess heat results ever shown to be artifact?/Input Electrical Power Model. The Talk page attached has a train wreck of a discussion, not yet refactored. Perhaps you'd like to summarize the question there, Barry, for Lbeaumont.

However, my summary: The relevant equation is not Ohm's law but Power = Voltage * Current. In this case, the resistance has some considerable random noise caused by bubbling, so the relevant equation becomes Power = (Current)^2 * Resistance. A "constant current power supply" is used. McKubre (and others) state that, under this condition, current becomes a scalar and input power over a period may be estimated by averaging voltage for the period and multiplying by the set current. Obviously, current is not exactly constant, and Moulton depends on this fact to assert error, whereas the researchers have depended on (1) observation of actual current noise (very low), (2) confirmation of the calculations with a high-bandwidth wattmeter, (3) verification with high-speed data acquisition of voltage and current with a digital storage oscilloscope, and (4) calorimetry with control cells and control conditions, where the same bubble noise would be present, but no anomalous heat appears, i.e., any error from the noise problem would be below calorimetry accuracy, and since it is calorimetric results that count in these experiments, that ices it. --Abd 18:11, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

By the way, "diehard believer" is deceptive. --Abd 18:11, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

I was a skeptic until some time into 2009, when I discovered an abusive blacklisting of the web site http://lenr-canr.org, and confronted it on process grounds. I looked at the article and saw some POV problems, and found that ArbComm had been all over this, banning two editors for a time, one on "one side" and one on "the other." However, the one on the skeptical side was only short-term banned from all fringe science topics, the positive side was an SPA who was banned for a year, based on what I saw as deceptive presentation of evidence. By the same admin who had done the blacklisting, and who, ArbCommm later found when I went to arbitration over it, had been using tools while involved. None of this meant, to me, that cold fusion was real, but I started trying to move the article toward neutrality, which required that I read the sources. Now, I had noticed the Pons and Fleischmann claims in 1989, and recognized immediately the significance. However, I trusted the normal scientific process, rather naively, it turns out. I believed that it had been conclusively refuted. As I started to look at recent sources, and I looked at the 2004 review by the U.S. Department of Energy, I saw that something was seriously awry. I read Undead Science, by Bart Science, and became convinced that there had been some very nasty business, violations of scientific protocol, and that while P and F had made mistakes, for sure, what was on the other side amounted to w:Pseudoskepticism, with, in some cases, a self-interested agenda behind it. Then I started to read and study in earnest. By the time that I became familiar with the material, the faction of editors behind that abusive admin and the other short-banned editor had identified me as a major problem, and I was being continually harassed. I was topic banned by a prominent admin, part of that faction, and I eventually took this to ArbComm and he was desysopped. But ArbComm tends to shoot the messenger, and they are chary of non-administrators who take down an admin. So I was awarded some bans, myself. I'm an editor in good standing, but there are also standing restrictions, and it became such a nuisance to edit Wikipedia that I abandoned it. Here on Wikiversity, I can assist in the study of cold fusion, and can set up process to find consensus, to the extent that others are willing to participate. Moulton has been useful, but he also got awfully stuck on his own idiosyncratic theories, which happens to match some knee-jerk opinions of one or two "experts," who have not published them under peer review. Richard Garwin, for example, said to CBS News that McKubre must be making some mistake in measuring input power, but never specified what mistake. Moulton, then, thinks that he's simply confirming Garwin. Cold fusion has been massively studied by many, including many who were quite skeptical. The alleged errors Moulton states are trivial, easy to replicate, if they were the source of anomalous heat. It would have been over within the first year. Moulton thinks that the situation is that the "non-believers" simply used "correct models," whereas the "believers" all made the same stupid mistakes. Hundreds of them. Expert electrochemists who work with calorimetry and constant-current power supplies all the time. An exact replication is an exact replication. It would include using the same models and assumptions. (When one attempts an exact replication, and finds different results than originally reported, a true investigator will look at what possible differences there were, and will rectify all those differences. "Misting" and "input power model" errors would have been trivial to find. Nobody reported that. To this day. Except Moulton, who is ignorant of the literature, the actual body of experimental report, has looked at a couple of reports and finds what he thinks must be the error, does not attempt to falsify his own hypotheses, but asserts that everyone else is failing to follow the scientific method.) --Abd 18:11, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

I have read through the main article and sampled the seminars but I don't see the formula in question in context in the text. Can you point me to the subsection where it appears. I would like to read it in context so I can better appreciate what is being claimed. Thanks.--Lbeaumont 21:55, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

• I have no idea how to find anything in that mountain of verbiage, but I can tell you this: McKubre claims that telephony doesn't work and I claim it does. —Moulton 02:48, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

McKubre certainly makes no such "doesn't work" claim. I make no such claim. Nobody makes such a claim. Moulton applies an analogy to the situation using telephony with carbon microphones (a carbon microphone is kind of like electrolytic bubble noise), then conflates that into some sort of proof for an entirely different situation, with a constant current supply. Sad, really.

Lbeaumont, above, I pointed to what was, indeed, a long discussion, that led to the development of Moulton's theory, and exploration of the implications. It's on Talk:Cold fusion/Skeptical arguments/Were the excess heat results ever shown to be artifact?/Input Electrical Power Model. It's been summarized above, but Moulton's evasive and irrelevant answer has been typical. Sorry.

Eventually, I went to the researchers with questions about two issues that Moulton had raised: misting and current noise/input power error. I got partially satisfactory answers, and I was told that future work would report the actual noise figures. Workers in this field were quite confident that constant current supplies work as expected, and that there is no significant error in this area, and that's been verified experimentally in at least three different ways. The verification through calorimetry is shown in the paper Moulton was studying, he simply ignored it, and when it was pointed out, he continued to ignore it.

We've been over the math, to no avail. It's visible in that full discussion. I made some mistakes along the way, and corrected them.

Barry has presented the issue in slightly distorted form above. An electrolytic cell is powered by a constant-current power supply. I think the actual supply used is given on the page cited, it's a Kepco supply. Cell voltage may be on the order of 10 volts, and current on the order of 1 amp. When the cathode is saturated with deuterium, deuterium gas is evolved from the cathode and bubbles up. This, it's well-known and acknowledged, causes the resistance to be noisy. The noise isn't periodic, there are many bubbles, detaching randomly. If the supply were not able to keep current constant, there would indeed be the kind of error that Moulton asserts; however, the researchers in the field claim -- and my experience and understanding claims -- that the supply would be able to regulate current quite well, in connection with the relatively low-frequency resistance noise created by bubbling. I've been unable to get actual figures for the resistance noise or for the voltage noise, but indications are that it might be on the order of 1% or so, I doubt it is 10%. Researchers don't routinely watch the current with an oscilloscope, because they have been doing this work for twenty years, and .... a flat line is quite boring! They do watch the voltage, but usually it's captured and averaged over some period. (These experiments take days, typically, or weeks or longer.)

Above, Barry gave you different conditions: a constant-voltage supply. I have no idea why he confused it in this way. In the particular experiment, a deuterium cell and a hydrogen cell were in series. The same current, then, which evolves the same number of moles of gas, flows through both cells, so they can see the difference in behavior of the two isotopes. The voltages recorded, then, were the individual cell voltages.

Barry seems to have the idea that if there is DC power and AC power, and that the total power is the sum of the DC power and the AC power. He has asserted again and again that the researchers have neglected "AC power." They haven't. Rather, if current is constant, with a random AC signal (voltage) riding on top of an average DC level, the AC power -- which you could tap with a capacitor -- averages out and does not add to the DC power. They measure total power by multiplying average voltage by set (and measured) current. I think that's it in a nutshell.

They have also used high-bandwidth wattmeters and DSOs with the same results.

There is significant "AC power," but it has no current component, so, as McKubre wrote, current acts as a scalar. It does not act as a quadratic term, which is what Moulton asserts.

Anyway, if you'd prefer to have Moulton present the question his way, I'll step aside for now. --Abd 03:38, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your changes to Cold fusion

Very helpful. --Abd 22:24, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Dieter Britz evaluation of Moulton power model theory

[1]. Britz examined Kort's claims and conclusively rejected them. I tried to tell Kort, many times, he was, shall we say, a "resistant learner." In any case, you are cordially invited to help develop the Cold fusion resource. Make corrections and comments, pick any topic and expand it, or create new topics, new seminars, linked from above. Thanks for your interest. --Abd 18:50, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

• Lee, you might want to wait until Dieter fixes the errors in his initial draft before taking a look. He's in Denmark, where it's now about 9:30 PM, probably too late for him to review my last round of comments. I'll let you know when Dieter and I come to a point where it makes sense for another set of eyes to take a look. —Moulton 20:32, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

• Update: This morning I found a rather serious error in Dieter's paper. When he took the time derivative of I(t) = E(t)/R(t), he left out a term in the formula for taking the derivatives of products or quotients. It's now evening in Denmark, so Dieter might not get around to looking at that until tomorrow. And then he will probably have to go back to his Fortran program to make sure he has the right formulas. —Moulton 19:14, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Grand challenges

Hello Lb, I love the courses you are developing; especially this one. –SJ+> 23:31, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your encouragement, have I missed any grand challenges you would like to see added?--Lbeaumont 17:54, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

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Comments

Obviously, I think this is worth trying. It's about creating a deliberative process that could connect all interested in Wikiversity into networks of trust. --Abd 18:13, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

C Programming Contributions

I'm a newbie here and I wish to make changes and add additional content to the C Programming Course. see http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Topic:C/Before_you_start

Who is the person(s) who can approve/disapprove of my suggested text ? Do I post to a Sandbox ? BR Srfpala (discuss • contribs) 22:50, 6 March 2013 (UTC) = srfpala 16:50, 06 March 2013 (CST) You should sign your contributions by typing three or four tildes (Srfpala (discuss • contribs) = Username) (Srfpala (discuss • contribs) 22:50, 6 March 2013 (UTC) = Username 19:36, 10 January 2006 (UTC)).

Hi!

Hello, nice to meet you! --The Gir’s and Sing 20:22, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Curator

You've been involved at Wikiversity for some time now, and create high-quality learning materials. Would you be interested in Wikiversity:Curator status? I would be willing to sponsor and mentor you if you are. Curators have more content management tools, such as importing and deleting. Let me know if you are interested. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:13, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks so much for this encouragement. Can you please answer two questions: 1) How much time (e.g.hours per week) does a Curator typically need to spend to perform well?, and 2) It there a dedicated queue of work that I have to complete, or is the work pooled and I extract work from that pool to work on it when I can? (I may travel out of town for a few weeks at a time and be unable to curate, so I don't want work queued up for me to stall during that time.) Thanks! --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 12:22, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

An hour a week would be more than sufficient to perform well. I currently spend 5-10 minutes a day in what I would consider to be typical curator duties (reviewing recent contributions, responding to requests to import or delete pages, checking the abuse log to see if something needs to be cleaned up). The more of us there are who do that, the less time it takes for each of us.

Each of us tends to have our own focus on what work we believe is important, but yes, it's a pool of work, and we work on it when we can and when it is something we believe important enough to dedicate our time to.

The more challenging aspect tends to be the decision-making process, engaging in discussions and adding a vote when called for. For example, there's a lengthy discussion in the Colloquium right now on how to approach fair use images that have missing rationale. It's one of my personal frustrations that we have 10 currently active curators/custodians/bureaucrats, but only two have commented and voted on this issue. It's hard to make progress without engagement.

But that example shows that each of us has our own interests. If being able to import and delete content would help you improve Wikiversity, and you could use those tools occasionally for the good of the community at large, it's a win-win opportunity. The rest is just how far you're willing and able to go toward the "perform well" measurement that you will want to define for yourself. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 13:24, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Sounds good! Let's do it. Thanks! --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 13:46, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Posted at Wikiversity:Candidates for Custodianship/Lbeaumont. The page title is a bit misleading, as you are a candidate for curatorship, but it's what we have right now. I don't expect any objections, but we'll give the community a few days to consider the nomination. Thanks! -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:23, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

You are now a curator. Congratulations! You should now see more tools, both on the menu at the top of each page and on Special:SpecialPages. Review these new options and let me know if you have any questions. Also see Wikiversity:Custodian Mentorship. We ultimately need to create a page specifically for curators, but for now the list at the bottom of the page is what we have. I think there are only five items on that list that don't apply. You won't be able to undelete items, merge history, hide revisions, edit MediaWiki pages, or block users. Everything else is relevant. Enjoy, and thank you for serving in this capacity. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 13:28, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Did you have any questions on curator tools? I noticed you haven't tried using them yet. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 19:02, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your followup. Are there places I can go to see "work queues" or do I simply use these tools as I need them as I work on Wikiversity? (I apologize for my inactivity as a curator, I have been quit busy elsewhere in Wikiverisity and Wikisource. I will turn attention to this.) --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 19:29, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

There are several different resources that should be monitored. The following pages should be included in your watch list:

• Wikiversity:Colloquium
• Wikiversity:Notices for custodians
• Wikiversity:Request custodian action
• Wikiversity:Candidates for Custodianship
• Wikiversity:Requests for deletion

Most of the work queues are listed under:

• Category:Wikiversity maintenance

Whatever you can do to assist would be appreciated! -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:05, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, I browsed Category:Wikiversity maintenance and took a look at: Category:Files_with_no_machine-readable_source in particular the file File:19721207-Earth.jpg This file looks OK to me. What particular information is missing that causes this to appear in the no-source page? Thanks!

Machine-readable depends on specific tags in the information. See meta:File metadata cleanup drive/How to fix metadata. All files need to have an {{Information}} tag applied to supply the information in a machine-readable format. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 13:23, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

ISBN

ISBN magic links have been deprecated. Use {{ISBN|number}} instead. Thanks! -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 01:32, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Dave, thanks for this note. When I create a new book reference, I use the "cite book" template at: Template:Cite_book I notice this still uses the "ISBN magic links" feature. Should that template be updated? Thanks, and happy Thanksgiving. --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 02:05, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, Cite Book does not use magic links. They don't appear in Category:Pages using ISBN magic links and they don't appear to have the same link format. With a magic link, the ISBN key word is also highlighted as part of the link. Cite Book does not include the word ISBN in the link. Happy Thanksgiving! -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 03:23, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Template:Reasoning

{{Reasoning}} is no longer valid. It comes up as a high priority lint error at Special:LintErrors/pwrap-bug-workaround. If you want to use it, please replace the navbox with a different type of navigation that doesn't generate errors. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 23:36, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

Wisdom Research

Hi Lbeaumont!

Your resource Wisdom Research appears well-developed and ready for learners! Would you like to have it announced on our Main Page News? --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 20:36, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Yes, please. Thanks! --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 21:57, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

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COVID-19 Support

I appreciate very much your support for COVID-19 Learning Resource. --Bert Niehaus (discuss • contribs) 06:59, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Using the Metric System

Hi Lbeaumont,

A courtesy note to let you know that I have extened the article "Using the metric system". I believe that my additions are in line with those that you originally posted in the article - please contact me if you feel that they contrast too much with your original text. Martinvl (discuss • contribs) 20:21, 27 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks these additions look good. I made a few light edits. --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 11:22, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

We sent you an e-mail

Hello Lbeaumont,

Really sorry for the inconvenience. This is a gentle note to request that you check your email. We sent you a message titled "The Community Insights survey is coming!". If you have questions, email [email protected].

You can see my explanation here.

MediaWiki message delivery (discuss • contribs) 18:48, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Universal Basic Income or Job Guarantee?

@Lbeaumont: I feel a need to ask about w:Universal basic income (UBI) vs. w:Job guarantee: At either the last "w:Post-Keynesian economics" or the first "w:Modern Monetary Theory" (MMT) conference, one of the presenters noted that Saudi Arabia had a UBI but were heading for some serious difficulties, because (1) they were scheduled to become net oil IMPORTERS in a few years, and (2) they had no Saudi plumbers, etc.: Plumbing was beneath the dignity of a Saudi on a UBI. They import plumbers from places like Pakistan and Indonesia.

Moreover, I've heard MMT leaders say that people who are unemployed are "damaged goods" -- they lose work habits like getting up at a regular hour and actually getting to work on time. And even if they do NOT lose work habits, they are perceived as having lost work habits and therefore have a harder time finding another job.

AND regarding Saudi Arabia, they are rumored to have Pakistani nuclear weapons in silos. And maybe they don't have them yet, but ... . In any event, Saudi Arabia could easily descend into civil war. US government documents declassified in 2016 establish that the Saudi ambassador to the US and employees of the Saudi embassy and consulates in the US were involved in the preparations for the suicide mass murders of September 11, 2001; see Winning the War on Terror. If Saudi Arabia descends into civil war, they could also destabilize Pakistan, which could start a nuclear war with India or the US. See my Time to nuclear Armageddon and Forecasting nuclear proliferation for some further discussion on those themes.

Comments? Thanks for your interesting work. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 15:32, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@DavidMCEddy Thanks for this thoughtful inquiry. I make my basic argument at: Find work or starve. A jobs guarantee has a few problems: 1) It does nothing to address wages sinking so low that a dedicated worker cannot support himself and maintain his dignity. 2) As productivity increases, fewer workers are required to produce the goods and services we need. This makes it difficult to guarantee a (meaningful) job. Regarding the lack of plumbers (and other essential workers) a UBI will stimulate a reevaluation (perhaps only in the longer term) of how we consider important work, and how we pay those doing important work. If we need more plumbers we can pay them more, treat them better, and provide improved training paths and career paths. I hope this adequately describes the highlights of my viewpoint, I can discuss this in more depth if you would like. (Can we create a useful UBI dialogue or Socratic dialogue somewhere?) Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 16:17, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Lbeaumont: There are different w:job guarantee proposals, including some that would pay a w:living wage for up to 35 hours per week unless you are a full time student. Paying an honest "living wage" would prevent "wages sinking so low that a dedicated worker cannot support himself and maintain his dignity." (Otherwise, it would not be a "living wage".)

Regarding the claim that the economy would require fewer workers "to produce the goods and services we need", I have the following responses:

• Many of the jobs in today's economy did not exist 300 years ago, and nearly all jobs related to the Internet did not exist 30 years ago.
• The limits I see on job creation stem from (a) government grants of monopoly rights and (b) governments with sovereign currencies refusing to authorize enough money to achieve full employment while controlling inflation through taxation, trust busting, etc. (The weakest link I perceive in the MMT literature I've seen is the lack of an empirically validated approach to monitoring and controlling inflation. However, I regard that as a detail that can be solved with a serious commitment -- including a media system whose funding does not depend on the beneficiaries of political corruption.)
• If job creation actually lagged as you suggest, the number of hours required for a job guarantee could be reduced, e.g., to 30 or 20 hours per week rather than the current 35 mentioned in some of the job guarantee literature. However, I'm not familiar with any serious empirical analyses that suggest that there really could be a serious limit on the creation of new jobs. There will always be opportunities for more research, to name only one thing.

Do you know of any empirical surveys comparing UBI and a job guarantee?

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs)

@DavidMCEddy I would like to continue this conversation on a more suitable platform. I prefer dialogue over debate, a forum more inclusive and focused than my talk page, and a topic more conducive to dialogue than debate. I propose that I create Wikidialogue as an addition to the existing Wikidebate forum. The first topic I would appreciate your participation in is "How can we better sustain human dignity?" What do you think? Thanks! Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 13:26, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

@Lbeaumont:I'm happy if you create "Wikidialogue" for this, but I won't promise to devote a lot of time to it. I've proposed "Broad political discourse", which sounds like what you are suggesting, except that your suggestion may be much better, more functional, better developed, etc., than my "Broad political discourse" proposal. I'm interested, but I also have other demands on my time. Thanks, DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 15:27, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

@DavidMCEddy Thanks! please take a look at Wikidialogue, and let me know your comments. Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 16:44, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

@DavidMCEddy Thanks! please take a look at Wikidialogue, and let me know your comments. Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 14:14, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

@Lbeaumont: Please excuse. I looked briefly at Wikidebate. It looks like something I might use in the future. However, I'm too narrowly focused on other priorities at the moment to want to take time for this right now. Thanks again, DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 14:37, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

References

Do you want more essays contributed to Living Wisely?

You seem to be the dominant contributer to Living Wisely. Would you like it for me to make it easier for readers to contribute their own essays in the subspace of that page? I would do it by adding Template:Callforcontributions to either the top or bottom of that resource (your choice where). Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 19:44, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

I moved your page to draftspace, but not for reasons you might think

See Draft:Book Reviews/Writing a review, which apparently you wrote. I didn't move it into draftspace because I considered it substandard. It's a long story: A movie review was nominated for deletion, and to protect it, I decided to move it to a subpage of another article. I found Book Reviews, and that inspired me to create Movie Reviews, on the grounds that all student efforts that are not embarrassing should be allowed to remain somewhere on Wikiversity. The movie review (proposed for deletion) is now a subpage at Movie_Reviews/Paris,_Texas, where I believe it will be safe from efforts to delete. But I couldn't put it as a subpage to Movie Reviews without creating Movie Reviews, and I did that by copying Atcovi's "Book Reviews". In that process, I noticed a flaw with "Book Reviews" and contacted Atcovi with an offer to fix the flaw. I repaired "Book Reviews" by moving your "Writing a review" to draftspace (see Draft_talk:Book_Reviews/Writing_a_review for details.) When I moved "Writing a review", I thought Atcovi wrote it and that "sort of" gave me permission to move what I now know as your essay into draftspace.

So here is my question to you is: Do you want me to move your essay/lesson out of draftspace? Or is it OK to leave it where it is. If you want my opinion, ask for it.Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 06:35, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Please move it back. Thanks! Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 10:57, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I will put it back. But I could also put it in mainspace as Writing a review. That way people won't think it's a book review (Book Reviews is now configured to show all its subpages as if they were book reviews. Personally, I prefer Writing a review, but Book Reviews/Writing a reveiw is also acceptable.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 16:16, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Please put it back, and then move it, leaving a redirect, to Writing a Book Review. Thanks Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 22:47, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Will do. The page (with subpage) will be at Book Reviews/Writing a review and it will have a redirect at Writing a Book Review.