There is a valid point or two here.
Spice can lie about real life; you've got to be careful to get useful
sims.
When all you know is Ohm's Law, everything looks like a resistor.
Incidentally, that flasher circuit can work with the open-base
transistor installed in either direction.
The negative resistance region in the OP's emitter-up flasher circuit
is interesting. It's like transistor action, but the e-b carriers are
coming from zener action, not the normal carrier injection thing.
Something like that. Nobody answered his question, namely whether this
mode degrades the transistor.
The emitter-down version is avalanche transistor mode, at higher
voltages. Tek used avalanche transistors in lots of sampling scopes,
and they often still work, so it must be good for trillions of shots.
John
