221–230 of 248 posts
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sure we can but instead we're giving a massive tax break to rich people and increasing the military budget by $150B
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
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The conversation was about NASA, an agency that poured billions to Boeing and the United Alliance and was forced to accept SpaceX (way back during the Obama admin, I believe) whilst kicking and screaming.
And? The argument being made was the simplistic "cannot afford" meme, which is trotted out every time the fascists are crushing an agency, yet is conveniently ignored when the fascists spend trillions of dollars for new purposes. If one wants to make a nuanced argument about NASA or fiscal responsibility despite the current political environment, it is perfectly possible to do so! But you need to work much harder to…
The one who lacks nuance is not the one who thinks NASA could stand to shave a couple billions but the one who's making everything a partisan fight.
Wait, so are humans actually going to the moon for the first time in my lifetime in 2027?
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I disagree. Instead of looking at where the tax revenues can come from, which I don't necessarily disagree consider what proportion of the nations economic activity is government spending. I consider govt spending/GDP a much better indicator of economic health. In fact, tertiary_sector/GDP is better still. The US government has too much presence in the economy and can't even provide health care and free tuition.
The issue here is that no one can agree on which portion of government spending is wasteful. It’s almost taken as a tautology that the government is wasteful. After 50 years of cost cutting and wage freezes, I tend to find it fanciful that individuals paid 1/4 of their private sector compensation to work on core civil infrastructure, national research priorities, and policy are somehow a bad deal for the American tax…
Human nature, I guess
"It’s almost taken as a tautology that the government is wasteful. After 50 years of cost cutting and wage freezes," These cuts are not reflected in government spending vs GDP is mostly flat for the last 40 years
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
Note that in the 1970s the US was paying for moonshots and Vietnam (both filthy expensive)
"I tend to find it fanciful that individuals paid 1/4 of their private sector compensation to work on core civil infrastructure, national research priorities, and policy are somehow a bad deal for the American taxpayer at large. "
Ya, that's not a thing. I worked in government, I still work on government projects and no one outside the NSA is getting paid a 1/4 of their private sector compensation. Maybe a 20% hit which they chose to accept since, in my experience, most start as contractors and move to become feds for the job sec + benefits.
Frankly, Id say half of the government employees I worked with are unemployable. And they most of them had at least a STEM masters.
"If anything, I’d imagine that the government could incentivize greater productivity by normalizing the pay scales. At a minimum, maintaining a public capability can often neutralize monopolistic pricing practices."
I don't necessarily disagree.
"Have you considered who the narrative of wasteful spending benefits? Even our narratives of tax increases never discuss tax increases on what is now the bulk of personal monetary gain."
Ive considered it a lot in fact. One of the main beneficiaries appears to be the DC area which was the only region of the country not to have a recession in 2008 and has been outpacing most of the country in growth for thirty years.
The main beneficiaries, thus, are the laptop-class (and their billionaire masters) which is a new way of saying mandarins.
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And? The argument being made was the simplistic "cannot afford" meme, which is trotted out every time the fascists are crushing an agency, yet is conveniently ignored when the fascists spend trillions of dollars for new purposes. If one wants to make a nuanced argument about NASA or fiscal responsibility despite the current political environment, it is perfectly possible to do so! But you need to work much harder to…
THE OP IS AGAINST BBB TOO The one who lacks nuance is not the one who thinks NASA could stand to shave a couple billions but the one who's making everything a partisan fight.
And no, the comment I responded to had absolutely no specific criticism about what from NASA should be "shaved". Notice how I didn't respond to the one about SLS?
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We should bring back surpluses in the good times. If you are the head of a country and you are proclaiming that the economy is "the greatest ever" then you should be running a balanced / surplus budget. If the economy is in the shitter you are perfectly entitled to run a deficit.
Can the down voters help me understand the downvotes? The argument seems cogent. Doing good? Pay down debts. Need a boost? Invest and incur debt. Where is the flaw?
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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…
You might consider checking out the Weinersmiths' book "A City on Mars." It goes into great detail of what still needs to be developed before we can seriously consider colonizing another world. 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 e…
Take a typical doomsday event, an asteroid impact or a supervolcano. Both kill you the same way. It isn't the event itself, but rather the sun ending up getting blotted out for years by mass debris/ash not only causing an extreme freeze across the planet, but also ending photosynthesis rapidly killing all plant life which starts a mass extinction on up the food chain to animals that ate those plants then animals that ate those animals and so on.
This is the sort of event that could easily completely kill off humanity, but it's not because it'd make Earth a worse place than Mars. Even at the climax of mass extinction, Earth would still be dramatically more hospitable than Mars. The reason it will be so deadly is the same reason that more people die in the desert of drowning than of thirst. It's something you simply don't prepare for. An offworld colony in this case would help ensure humanity is perpetuated, Earth is recolonized, rescue survivors, ensure global order, and so on. In fact this is the case for most of all conceivable disasters.
If there's any argument you found particularly compelling from the book, please do share. I have a copy if you simply want to reference the page number or whatever.
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You might consider checking out the Weinersmiths' book "A City on Mars." It goes into great detail of what still needs to be developed before we can seriously consider colonizing another world. 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 e…
That book seemingly exclusively leans on misleading arguments. For instance, literally their very first effort is to try to 'debunk' the idea of having Mars as a sort of 'backup' to Earth by claiming that even in the case of a doomsday event Earth would still be far more hospitable than Mars. That statement is completely true but also completely irrelevant. Take a typical doomsday event, an asteroid impact or a super…
Your scenario would indeed be a "backup" for the species, but only in the very, very long term. It only works if we have a self-sustaining off-planet presence large enough to survive a complete separation from Earth. Most of the book goes into detail about what we still need to develop even to have a permanent presence in space (as in, you don't rotate people out every few months), much less a self-sustaining one.
We haven't done large-scale agriculture in space. We haven't developed methods of processing extra-terrestrial resources. We haven't seen what different gravity conditions does to children or pregnant women. We don't have solutions for the conditions people develop in zero-g, and we don't know if 1/3g or 1/6g causes those same conditions. We can't completely recycle our waste into food, water, and air without a steady supply of consumables from Earth. We don't know how to effectively deal with lunar regolith and we haven't done the engineering to keep the poisons in Martian soil out of the habitat. We haven't even developed the habitat!
The book speaks to me because I work for an engineering company and I know how much time and money it takes for even simple projects when there are lives on the line. The book doesn't say we can't colonize space, only that we have a lot of work ahead of us before we can successfully pull it off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That book seemingly exclusively leans on misleading arguments. For instance, literally their very first effort is to try to 'debunk' the idea of having Mars as a sort of 'backup' to Earth by claiming that even in the case of a doomsday event Earth would still be far more hospitable than Mars. That statement is completely true but also completely irrelevant. Take a typical doomsday event, an asteroid impact or a super…
Just FYI, my copy's 1500 miles away from me at the moment, so I can't give you page numbers and can only rely on my recollection of the book. Your scenario would indeed be a "backup" for the species, but only in the very, very long term. It only works if we have a self-sustaining off-planet presence large enough to survive a complete separation from Earth. Most of the book goes into detail about what we still need to…
I think an important thing to consider is that in contemporary times most institutions are 100% risk averse outside of war. With Mars that will always be an impossible initial threshold. Because not only are there known unknowns, but also a practically infinite number of unknown unknowns. When we landed on the Moon internal estimates at NASA gave us about a 50% chance of success, which is why the public obituary for the astronauts was written before they'd even left Earth. Early on in the Apollo program NASA even ended up scrapping mathematical risk modeling because the numbers were always coming back so grim that they found it impossible to move forward with them.
Of course that doesn't been they were just suicidally YOLOing it. There was (and will be) extensive planning and preparation, but you have to strike a balance between achieving things and working to create an acceptable perceived risk factor. So for a practical example - the long-term effects of low g, as opposed to 0 g, can be relatively safely ignored. There's every reason to think that low g will be much closer to 'normal' gravity than 0g in terms of effects, and predictable bone/muscle deterioration can be mitigated with exercise or even weight suits much more easily than on the ISS.
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An even more general issue is that the best place to test things with relation to Mars is Mars itself, because Mars is far closer to the Earth in just about every way than it is to the Moon, let alone the ISS. So we have things like the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, or AMADEE-18 that was carried out in Oman. But at the end of the day it's Earth - we know the conclusion of these simulations, and there's limitations on what we can simulate.