Untitled
The House Of Murphy
Murphy's home
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K
Kafka's Law:
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Kamin's First Law:
All currencies will decrease in value and purchasing power over the long term, unless they are freely and fully convertable into gold and that gold is traded freely without restrictions of any kind.

Kamin's Second Law:
Threat of capital controls accelerates marginal capital outflows.

Kamin's Third Law:
Combined total taxation from all levels of government will always increase (until the government is replaced by war or revolution).

Kamin's Fourth Law:
Government inflation is always worse than statistics indicate: central bankers are biased toward inflation when the money unit is non-convertible, and without gold or silver backing.

Kamin's Fifth Law:
Purchasing power of currency is always lost far more rapidly than ever regained (Those who expect even fluctuations in both directions play a losing game).

Kamin's Sixth Law:
When attempting to predict and forecast macro-economic moves or economic legislation by a politician, never be misled by what he says; instead watch what he does.

Kamin's Seventh Law:
Politicians will always inflate when given the opportunity.

Kaplan's Law of the Instrument:
Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.

Katz's Law:
Men and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Katz's Maxims:
  1. Where are the calculations that go with the calculated risk?
  2. Inventing is easy for staff outfits. Stating a problem is much harder. Instead of stating problems, people like to pass out half- accurate statements together with half-available solutions which they can't finish and which they want you to finish.
  3. Every organization is self-perpetuating. Don't ever ask an outfit to justify itself, or you'll be covered with facts, figures, and fancy. The criterion should rather be, "What will happen if the outfit stops doing what it's doing?" The value of an organization is more easily determined this way.
  4. Try to find out who's doing the work, not who's writing about it, controlling it, or summarizing it.
  5. Watch out for formal briefings; they often produce an avalanche (a high-level snow job of massive and overwhelming proportions).
  6. The difficulty of the coordination task often blinds one to the fact that a fully coordinated piece of paper is not supposed to be either the major or the final product of the organization, but it often turns out that way.
  7. Most organizations can't hold more than one idea at a time. Thus complementary ideas are always regarded as competetive. Further, like a quantized pendulum, an organization can jump from one extreme to the other, without ever going through the middle.
  8. Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it being done, or is it something to be done? Reports are now written in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel uses of "contractor grammar", defined by the imperfect past, the insufficient present, and the absolutely perfect future.

Kelley's Law:
Last guys don't finish nice.

Kelly's Law:
An executive will always return to work from lunch early if no one takes him.

Kennedy's Law:
Excessive official restraints on information are inevitably self-defeating and productive of headaches for the officials concerned.

Kent's Law:
The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.

Kerr-Martin Law:
  1. In dealing with their *own* problems, faculty members are the most extreme conservatives.
  2. In dealing with *other* people's problems, they are the world's most extreme liberals.

Kettering's Laws:
  1. If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.
  2. If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

Key to Status:
S = D/K. S is the status of a person in an organization, D is the number of doors he must open to perform his job, and K is the number of keys he carries. A higher number denotes higher status. Thus the janitor needs to open 20 doors and has 20 keys (S = 1), a secretary has to open two doors with one key (S = 2), but the president never has to carry any keys since there is always someone around to open doors for him (with K = 0 and a high D, his S reaches infinity).

Kharasch's Institutional Imperative:
Every action or decision of an institution must be intended to keep the institution machinery working.
Corollary: The expert judgment of an institution, when the matter involved concerns continuation of the institution's operations, is totally predictable, and hence the finding is totally worthless.

Kirkland's Law:
The usefulness of any meeting is in inverse proportion to the attendance.

Kitman's Law:
On the TV screen, pure drivel tends to drive off ordinary drivel.

Klipstein's Lament
All warranty and guarantee clauses are voided by payment of the invoice.

Klipstein's Observation:
Any product cut to length will be too short.

Klipstein's Law of Specifications:
In specifications, Murphy's Law supersedes Ohm's.

Klipstein's Laws:
Applied to General Engineering:
  1. A patent application will be preceded by one week by a similar application made by an independent worker.
  2. Firmness of delivery dates is inversely proportional to the tightness of the schedule.
  3. Dimensions will always be expressed in the least usable term. Velocity, for example, will be expressed in furlongs per fortnight.
  4. Any wire cut to length will be too short.
Applied to Prototyping and Production:
  1. Tolerances will accumulate unidirectionally toward maximum difficulty to assemble.
  2. If a project requires n components, there will be n-1 units in stock.
  3. A motor will rotate in the wrong direction.
  4. A failsafe circuit will destroy others.
  5. A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse by blowing first.
  6. A failure will not appear until a unit has passed final inspection.
  7. A purchased component or instrument will meet its specs long enough, and only long enough, to pass incoming inspection.
  8. After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
  9. After an access cover has been secured by 16 hold-down screws, it will be discovered that the gasket has been omitted.
  10. After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found on the bench.

Knight's Law:
Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans.

Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy:
Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for that rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.

Knowles's Law of Legislative Deliberation:
The length of debate varies inversely with the complexity of the issue.
Corollary: When the issue is trivial, and everyone understands it, debate is almost interminable.

Kohn's Second Law:
Any experiment is reproducible until another laboratory tries to repeat it.

Koppett's Law:
Whatever creates the greatest inconvenience for the largest number must happen.

Korman's conclusion
The trouble with resisting temptation is it may never come your way again.

Kristol's Law:
Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want.

Krueger's Observation
A taxpayer is someone who does not have to take a civil service exam in order to work for the government.
Murphy's home
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