Photo of the wreckage from above: https://twitter.com/ruperto1023/status/1333791522269978626/p...
Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
101–110 of 337 posts
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that the impact of Arecibo and these kinds of installations is actually very outsized relative to the number of FTE employees who directly work on it. The larger scientific community are the ones who booked time on the telescope after all. My point is that politically none of that matters. No one is getting elected because people got to book telescope time for their research. The incentives are not correctly…
> So the F-35 makes jobs... I wonder about that. It's been a while since I studied, but the phrase "deadweight loss" looms large in what I remember of the one economics class I took in college. So I wouldn't be surprised if the program is actually a net negative for job creation. Only that doesn't matter, either, because the point is not to create more jobs; the point is to influence job creation in a way that benefi…
I haven't really looked into it all beyond a superficial level, but I certainly think that things like the F-35 program are a net negative to society when viewed at a distance.
As another example, I wonder if Wisconsin's sweetheart deal with Foxconn actually had a negative impact on employment. Clearly Foxconn's promised jobs never materialized, but the threat of them coming to town to spend big money may have had a chilling effect on existing or prospective new employers in the area.
Back to the F-35 program, the jobs it creates may be deadweight, deadend careers that don't produce real value. And then you can't just have these people unemployed and starving, so I guess we'll need an F-35+1 program for them and their descendents. And so on forever, until we break this cycle.
Versus something else that you could buy with the same money that has a future and does create real value (like say, solar panels?). But you're right, its just about the perception of jobs and that photo op.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#103Sad news. Perfect symbol of the collapse of modernity into postmodernity.
All that's left of massive public science and exploration projects, abandoned, deteriorating artifacts of the past.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need to adopt similar strategies for getting e.g. green energy production off the ground. Thinking of things like solar panel production.
There was a brief push by the government to encourage funding of things like Solyndra under Obama, but obviously that didn't all pan out. I think that putting substantial funding into making the US the world leader in climate change related technology is such an obvious slam dunk that it defies belief for me that there seems to be no political will to do it. Argue about the reality of climate change if you must, but…
> There was a brief push by the government to encourage funding of things like Solyndra under Obama, but obviously that didn't all pan out.
Obama-era subsidies of clean energy definitely panned out (though solyndra was a failure). Drive from California to Texas some time, and count the windmills. Those were subsidized at about the same time as solyndra.
From what I could tell from reading placards on the sides of the (many) convoys that deliver more on a daily basis, they’re mostly made by GE.
Similarly, rooftop solar was bootstrapped on top of those subsidies (though the Chinese won the panel manufacturing part of that industry, the US did well on battery technology).
Also, this hasn’t been so much a brief push as a sporadic push. The three blade giant windmill design was invented during California’s big wind power push in the early eighties.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockhead and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. I agree with this. I've been saying for years that our military programs are giant socialist jobs programs in disguise (tha…
One important piece of military preparedness is having a population of experienced engineers, manufacturing infrastructure, leadership, R&D, etc. Institutional knowledge is very real. Weapons programs also simply take decades. You might be able to churn out web apps in a few months, but cutting edge aircraft, not so much. What do we have? Unprecedented world peace. Why do we have it? American foreign policy. You have…
I worry about what happens when Pax Americana inevitably ends, as all things do, and if it will come in our lifetimes. I don't think that we have built a geopolitical system that will survive its absence.
Spending our money on a giant military behemoth makes sense in a mutually assured destruction / deterrence sense, but I think that approach only gets you so far. It also creates a gigantic war machine that exists only to find conflicts. The nuclear arsenal strongly deters conflicts from rising above a certain level (as long as rational people are on both sides...), but the rest of the machine gets put to use distressingly often.
You can't just stop funding it tomorrow, and you can't even really reduce its funding without considerable pain and risk, but we must find a way to transition more and more of our military power to economic and cultural diplomacy (which we also have always done, but which has been diminished in recent years).
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#106"Too big to fail" apparently doesn't apply for science projects. To put this in perspective, at the cost of a single F-35A, Arecibo could be running for ~7y with funding at 2011 levels.
The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. That a fighter plane may or may not come out the other end is only nominally important, the key is to spend the money. The mo…
I wish we could just simply hand the money over and skip the part where we create the demand for eternal wars and the killing and maiming of millions of people.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#107"I look forward to the day when the schools automatically receive the funds they need and the Pentagon holds bake sales to buy tanks."
- Terry Herndon
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a brief push by the government to encourage funding of things like Solyndra under Obama, but obviously that didn't all pan out. I think that putting substantial funding into making the US the world leader in climate change related technology is such an obvious slam dunk that it defies belief for me that there seems to be no political will to do it. Argue about the reality of climate change if you must, but…
> There was a brief push by the government to encourage funding of things like Solyndra under Obama, but obviously that didn't all pan out. Obama-era subsidies of clean energy definitely panned out (though solyndra was a failure). Drive from California to Texas some time, and count the windmills. Those were subsidized at about the same time as solyndra. From what I could tell from reading placards on the sides of the…
I realize that I could have phrased it better. You're totally right that there were successes, I just meant that not all of the investments panned out. But also, that's what investing is: taking a risk.
I find it comical that it's often presented as a giant boondoggle when, as you say, the world is already greener as a result.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So the F-35 makes jobs... I wonder about that. It's been a while since I studied, but the phrase "deadweight loss" looms large in what I remember of the one economics class I took in college. So I wouldn't be surprised if the program is actually a net negative for job creation. Only that doesn't matter, either, because the point is not to create more jobs; the point is to influence job creation in a way that benefi…
I haven't really looked into it all beyond a superficial level, but I certainly think that things like the F-35 program are a net negative to society when viewed at a distance. As another example, I wonder if Wisconsin's sweetheart deal with Foxconn actually had a negative impact on employment. Clearly Foxconn's promised jobs never materialized, but the threat of them coming to town to spend big money may have had a…
I have family that lives in the area where the Foxconn plant was set up. The rumor, which I'm sure will never be publicly substantiated, was that there have been businesses that decided to steer clear of or pull out of Wisconsin over concerns about the economic blowback from state policies including (but not limited to) the Foxconn boondoggle. Including some that offered higher quality (if not as news-worthy, since they didn't count as "tech") jobs than the ones Foxconn would have created under even the rosiest of projections.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#110Would it be possible in the future to build such a telescope in an impact crater like Meteor Crater, Arizona (1)?
Or is the shape or geology of an impact crater unsuitable for such an instrument?