211–220 of 248 posts
We're counting down the days to August 30 in our house as my spouse is a NASA contractor who works at a program with a current expected budget cut of 40%, IIRC. I sure hope these bills pass and the cuts don't happen, but it's abundantly clear at this point that optimism is pretty foolish.
If the American congress is blocking this, it’s a glimmer of hope for the US and the rest of the planet.
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We could * Not cut taxes on the very wealthy by $4,000,000,000,000 over ten years * Not give $500,000,000,000 to military and police expansion in the immediate future * Not have one person dictating global trade policy with the US that impacts our relationships and competitiveness for the next 30 years NASA is not something we should skimp on.
Who are "we" kemosabe? BBB was proposed by freshly elected president to a freshly elected Congress, and it was passed and signed. I don't like it much, but people (yes, millions of americans) had spoken
I'm not arguing anything about its popularity, I'm arguing its wisdom. My point is that there are other ways to pretend to be fiscally responsible than to cut NASA funding.
The aggressive cutting meant we ran a budget surplus for June. This has to happen or everything gets cut. We're pretty much at the end of the road. The Democrats had control of the white house and legislature at the beginning of Biden's presidency and could have chosen alternatives to cut but did not. As I've said so often: if you don't like what Trump is doing you need to campaign for viable alternatives.
> The aggressive cutting meant we ran a budget surplus for June. My household runs a very nice budget surplus if I don't pay the mortgage, student loans, credit card bills, electricity, gas, insurance, etc. too. Huge balance in the account! It's a few months later that the chickens come home to roost.
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> The aggressive cutting meant we ran a budget surplus for June. My household runs a very nice budget surplus if I don't pay the mortgage, student loans, credit card bills, electricity, gas, insurance, etc. too. Huge balance in the account! It's a few months later that the chickens come home to roost.
The government, as far as I can tell, is paying interest on the debt and as such your example seems flawed. It would be like you decide to stop going to restaurants and now you aren't going into debt.
Cutting for the sake of cutting ignores what you are cutting. Cutting healthcare and education gets very expensive in the long run, for example, if you do enough damage. It is premature to declare victory when the knock-on effects are years or decades down the line. (As with not paying your mortgage; it'll be a little while before the pain hits.)
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NSF funds tons of underpaid grad students who are the source of US research productivity per dollar.
And they are the underpaid workforce that keeps the undergrad industrial complex so profitable.
- Undergrad education breaks even
- Research operates at a loss
- Master's and professional programs makes a modest profit because most students pay full tuition.
- Interest income off the endowment barely covers operating expenses
- The remaining balance comes from donations.
YMMV, but at the end of the day, what keeps many universities afloat is providing good experiences to students in their formative years so that when they get older and make money, they just give a portion of it back to their alma mater due to good vibes and nostalgia. That's the business model, not bilking grad students.
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Where did you read this?
this user has been making this claim repeatedly for months -- and if you look at the source data they used, the titles are fabricated and non-representative. They are either a GenAI disinformation bot, or they're a human who is so dedicated to their dishonesty as to be impossible to distinguish from such a bot.
Just take a minute and read some of them, almost every single one is DEI related. It’s pure racism.
The titles I pasted into my post I copied directly from the published list of grants, it’s not like I made up those weirdly specific names. You can search for them yourself.
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Where did you read this?
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> Had he not, we could very well have a civilization on Mars today Well, that's an interesting take. Fantasial, but interesting.
And how do you think putting a man on the Moon sounded at a time when we'd yet to put a single person into space? Werner von Braun was the head architect of the Apollo Program and viewed the Moon as little more than a step on the way to his vision of colonizing Mars, for which he'd already been working on technical plans with the planned first landings to be in the early 1980s. In fact this is precisely where the Spa…
It's one of the reasons I support manned spaceflight - sending robots is easy but limited, sending people allows for way more flexibility but needs a lot more knowledge and engineering. We'll never develop that knowledge and engineering without actually sending people into space.
> Fewer robots, more humans Exactly the opposite of what they should be funding..
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This is drastically under-appreciating the blowback nationalizing SpaceX would generate. Both from the Republican base, to whom government is anathema and private industry the best. And to corporate interests supporting the Republican Party. Want to see where the real power is? Follow the political money.
Twenty years ago, would you have thought the religious right would accept a serial philanderer former Democrat from NYC whose favorite Bible verse is “Two Corinthians” as their idol? The Republican base doesn’t actually care about the things they claim to.
What’s being said now is more important than what someone historically said, as long as the current messaging is consistent. (And opponents have been eliminated)