121–130 of 337 posts
Here's a more detailed account of the collapse [1]. Looks like they called it, and it just happened quicker than expected.
[0]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/famed-arecibo-telesc...
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observat...
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Why did it fail? Was it a lack of ongoing maintenance?
Ultimately, it was old. It wasn’t designed to handle the stresses it experienced, and important things failed. It is possible but far from certain that inspections could have found and fixed cable problems before ultimate failure.
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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 think it's high time for Puerto Rico to become a US state. Puerto Rico has twice the population of the two Dakotas combined and the only way they'll receive more-equitable treatment is if they become a state. I think the will is there locally but there has been resistance from established political factions in the US who fear a place that might tip the balance of power one way or the other.
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I was asked to do a bit of robotics consulting for Solyndra. I figured that it wasn't going to work out when the guy we talked to took us to a conference room that looked too nice, and admitted that he hadn't been on the production floor in the next building before me and my buddy asked to go check that out. We took the job anyway because it looked interesting, started doing the preliminaries, and when we went to get…
Seriously? Solyndra was being hailed as the pinnacle of American technology, during Obama’s era. When it closed up shop, people were blaming China, again, for stealing American technology, and putting another good American company out of business. But from your description, it sounds like Solyndra was a scam to part investors and the American government, with their money.
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I was asked to do a bit of robotics consulting for Solyndra. I figured that it wasn't going to work out when the guy we talked to took us to a conference room that looked too nice, and admitted that he hadn't been on the production floor in the next building before me and my buddy asked to go check that out. We took the job anyway because it looked interesting, started doing the preliminaries, and when we went to get…
Seriously? Solyndra was being hailed as the pinnacle of American technology, during Obama’s era. When it closed up shop, people were blaming China, again, for stealing American technology, and putting another good American company out of business. But from your description, it sounds like Solyndra was a scam to part investors and the American government, with their money.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/solyndr...
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> 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.
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They recently voted for statehood in a plebescite. I believe the official GOP platform does actually support statehood, but I'm of the view that GOP politicians and voters don't actually know what their platform is beyond revanchism
Obviously, they will official support it for cosmetic purposes of promoting “democracy”. In practice, however, they know it will cause them to lose power, so they won’t vote for it. Same reason Washington DC residents don’t have representation in the Senate. Or why the popular vote does not matter for the president.
If they want to give DC residents voting rights they should make it impossible to be a DC resident and instead anyone who lives within DC should vote as part of the state the land was taken from for federal elections.
That solves everyone's problems (well aside from the democrats who are trying to get another 2 seats in the senate).
Local issues should still be decided at the federal level because that's the whole reason it exists, so a state can't take the seat of fed gov hostage as happened in 1783 in philly.
If you don't want DC to be controlled by the fed then it should be swallowed by maryland or virginia. Making a single city a state unto itself doesn't make any sense unless you're specifically trying to make political hay.
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> 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…
Wait, what?
There have been hundreds of armed conflicts going on around the world since the end of WW2, many of which were either directly instigated by the USA or at least involved the USA. There are dozens going on right now [1] some resulting in massive casualties. I don't think we will ever see world peace.
You don't mass-produce already-obsolete fighter jets in order to promote peace or as an innocent act of military preparedness and industry knowledge-building. You build them to fight war.
1;: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...
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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…
The FTE employee-count alone underestimates the impact of national-scale science infrastructure. naic.edu is down right now (I suspect they're busy at the moment), but their data is used by tens to hundreds of institutions, each partially employing faculty, postdocs, and students. For agencies like NSF, the science is sometimes almost secondary. What matters perhaps the most is that qualified and capable students con…
China's is not really a copy. It does not have transmit capability. What is really missing now in US, and international science is asteroid radar imaging and ranging.
Earlier 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 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've begun imagining that for Defense spending, government money that's spent in a State must have come from that State's federal income taxes. I'm exhausted seeing data that indicates that states like mine put in more money than they get from the Federal government, and watching people from states that receive more than they put in talk about welfare state, wealth redistribution, etc.
The Rockefeller Institute data (https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...) shows that it's not so much "blue states" as frequently claimed, but taxpayers of four very wealthy Northeast states (the Tri-State area plus Massachusetts) that account for the vast bulk of citizens paying more than they receive from the federal government. After them come CO, NE, UT, and MN, of which half voted for Hillary/Biden and half for Trump. All other states, including CA, are net beneficiaries of the taxpayers in the top eight (and, again, really, it's the top four).
The 10 states at the bottom of the Rockefeller report's per capita list—that is, the states that benefit from the most federal spending per person compared to how much each person pays in federal taxes—are
Hillary/Biden-voting states: VA, NM, MD, HI, 1/2 of ME
Trump-voting states: KY, AK, AL, WV, MS, 1/2 of ME