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Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling

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Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling

#171

Post by vithlani »

abhididdigi wrote: post #59
vithlani wrote: post #54

I wish someone would write a headline like: "Why 750 million Indian citizens cannot enjoy basic sanitation facilities after 60 years of gaining so called independence of their nation" Seriously....

Seriously? I gather that you are not an Indian, and if you really are an Indian then either you are an illiterate about what's happening in country, or you are an NRI earning in dollars in US who really don't care about India, except in writing these snarky comments. If you are not an Indian citizen, you still should know the truth before you talk. 750 million Indian citizens aren't enjoying basic sanitation faciliti…

I cannot be "illiterate" about what happens in the country, merely "ill-informed".

FYI, there is a category of Indians who are not NRI and it might surprise you to know there are countries other than the US and....surprise.... currencies other then dollars!! Oh wow!!

What has being an Indian citizen got to do with the truth?

I write what I write so that the rah-rah-yay-yay idiots like you could draw their attention to the real problem in your country -- a civilization more than 10,000 years old that still cannot fix basic sanitation issues, where women are raped on a regular no-comment basis, where corruption is prevalent from birth-certificate to death-certificates, where swathes of your population are being driven to Naxal violence by the state as a means of defending their homes, culture and patrimony from greedy corporations. In the face of the staggering problems you face as a nation, shouldn't you turn your and your peer's attention to them rather than trying to rejoice at "look white man, me too MARS"?

You may also be surprised to know, "Technological Advances" have been advanced enough for a couple of hundred years now to the point that sanitation, roads, etc are a non-issue -- you don't need to go to Mars for that! Or perhaps Slumdog tourism generates enough income for you to want to keep it that way? http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/slumming-it

Down-vote me all you want, happy to give you my points if you make an honest effort to understand the point I make.

You will also note that I post under my real name as I do not feel ashamed about having an honest discussion under my identity -- how about you?

Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling

#172

Post by kamaal »

anupshinde wrote: post #163
kamaal wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was downvoted very badly yesterday for just saying ISRO engineers were paid less. Actually comparatively even compared to many Indian IT professionals salaries of these folks is actually low. Most people don't realize how low it is until you start comparing yourself with people of your same age some 10-15 years in to your career who are working with other software companies. Any decent IIT grad joining something li…

Aren't you discounting the perks? I agree some IT guys like me earn in multiples of that - but most don't. And what about the amazing work-life balance (more life less work), job security and "serving-the-country" feeling. Compare that to a heavily stressful job, waking up at 3AM because some server in SF stopped executing some code that was written in SF. And absolutely no job security (I don't really care about job…

>>Aren't you discounting the perks?

Most Indian private companies today offer free lunch, free transport and health insurance. The days when only government firms offered these are long behind us. If not free, most companies at the least subsidize lunch, food and insurance.

>>I agree some IT guys like me earn in multiples of that - but most don't.

Eventually they will. Changing a job will easily get a you a minimum of 30% raise in any company in India. Even a services company. If you change jobs every 3 years you will still be way ahead of any guy working there. And also note their hikes are largely based on a concept of 'pay revision' which are generally once in 10-15 year activity. In that time even your average guy would drawing at least thrice more than than any government employee.

>>And what about the amazing work-life balance (more life less work), job security and "serving-the-country" feeling.

What you call work life balance, will look like stagnation 10 years into your career. Job security will feel more like institutionalization and you increasingly feel like you are stuck in a place from where there is no way out. The difference in salary between yours and your peers will be huge and they would have a lot more touch on any technology than you will.

And not to mention most private companies think of government firms as wastelands where people just push time doing nothing.

>>Compare that to a heavily stressful job, waking up at 3AM because....

Frankly speaking to my ears this sounds similar to what many of my class mates in school used to say about students who study late night working on physics and math problems. Because they thought people were taking too much stress to work on things they didn't have when they could simply have a garment or a shoe shop and earn the same. We all know where they are today.

Money comes at a price. Like it or not my friend money matters. We live in a society where we have to spend money buying things, send our kids to schools, pay their tuition fees, we need to buy a home, car etc.

>>I'd exchange so-called-high paying job to get a job like ISRO now (Somebody misguided me in my early days with the same logic you mentioned)

You seriously should. And there is nothing really stopping you. And you can easily get through the exams they have. But the fact that most of us don't shows us where our true priorities are.

ISRO is just one small island in the massive government bureaucracy there is. In all likeliness you won't be writing any great application but rather clocking 9-5 with your friends sipping tea in the canteen, cribbing about rising prices, a senior colleagues daughter's marriage for which he hasn't any savings ,pay revision which is 7 years away, and discussing lifestyle of a friend who just bought a honda city while you are here saving money commuting in a bus because petrol prices increased by 4 rupees last week.

Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling

#173

Post by logicchains »

stillsut wrote: post #94
pravda wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A large proportion of the expense of this mission goes to paying the wages of domestic scientists and engineers in India. >This money will in turn get taxed and spent by the recipients and pumped back into the local economy. Your fallacy is... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Breakthrough space-tech is in no way is comparable to the broken window fallacy. In the latter, a window is replaced with a window, while in this case something un-precedented has been created. Most of the wealth of developed nations comes from the belief that holding an asset will be worth more later - for example a house in your neighborhood will be increasingly valuable because people will continue to want buy it…

Wealth doesn't come from the belief that holding an asset will be worth more later; it comes from assets being invested in some way that makes them actually worth more later. E.g. I dig up some resource, and rather than consuming it I invest it in building some device that increases my ability to dig up resources in future. Wealth comes from productivity improvements.

Developed countries are wealthier because it takes a tiny fraction of human effort to produce e.g. a car or a loaf of bread compared to in a developed country, because through investing in technology/capital we're much more productive at making cars and bread.

Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling

#174

Post by logicchains »

mturmon wrote: post #75
bmmayer1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there's no zero sum here Government spending via redistribution is absolutely zero sum. Every dollar spent by the government into the economy is one dollar taxed out of the economy. Money that is given to some has to necessarily come from others. Just because the benefits are concentrated and the harm is spread out doesn't change the fact that you've only taken money from A and given to B. No additional wealth…

"It is highly unlikely that a government bureaucracy will distribute money such that it is spent more efficiently and productively than an individual taxpayer would if he still had the money to spend himself." This talking point does not hold up to scrutiny. There are plenty of examples where individuals fail to build infrastructure that, if built, would help everyone much more than the cumulative cost to build the i…

It doesn't assume that individuals are 'rational'; it assumes productivity/efficiency of spending is determined by the spending's ability to fulfill individuals' preferences at the time of spending. In that sense, in the case where they don't give the money voluntarily to the government, however it spends it is by definition not the way they most wanted to spend it at that moment, hence is necessarily an outcome producing lesser utility to them at that movement then if they had spent it the way they most preferred to spend it.

Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling

#175

Post by logicchains »

kaonashi wrote: post #110
bmmayer1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there's no zero sum here Government spending via redistribution is absolutely zero sum. Every dollar spent by the government into the economy is one dollar taxed out of the economy. Money that is given to some has to necessarily come from others. Just because the benefits are concentrated and the harm is spread out doesn't change the fact that you've only taken money from A and given to B. No additional wealth…

> Government spending via redistribution is absolutely zero sum. Well, at the level of the currency issuer (of which India is one), Government spending is money creation, and not redistribution.

Money creation is still redistribution: redistribution to whoever first gets to spend the created money.

Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling

#176

Post by kaonashi »

logicchains wrote: post #175
kaonashi wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Government spending via redistribution is absolutely zero sum. Well, at the level of the currency issuer (of which India is one), Government spending is money creation, and not redistribution.

Money creation is still redistribution: redistribution to whoever first gets to spend the created money.

No, it's distribution.

Sounds like you want an effective political system to oversee that distribution. Me too.

Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling

#177

Post by innguest »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #157
innguest wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having to compete with anyone does not make a product cheaper, it makes it more expensive. Competition drives prices down. So the government having a monopoly over a service makes that service more expensive. Advertising is not a waste of resources, it is investment of resources - literally, money spent buying leads in order to try and convert them into customers. > Look, capitalistic economy is a greedy optimiza…

In general, I think you might consider [0] a beneficial read; it pretty much answers all your questions and debunks your points. For me, your comments sound a lot like libertarianism turned into religion. A lot of dogmas that sound nice, but are trivially easy to be shown false. To respond to a particular point, > Not having to compete with anyone does not make a product cheaper, it makes it more expensive. Competiti…

The counterpoints in [0] are outdated. It shows the author has not read any of the anarchist literature. If you are interested in debating this, let me know. I'm working on a YouTube channel to bring these points to light, and having someone that is curious about it and knows these counterpoints as well as you do would be great help.

> Things like basic research, things like exploiting a limited pool of shared resources, things like schools and prisons - they all go to hell when you try to run them on free-market rules.

Research is done with money from profits; if companies weren't taxed so much they'd have more profits left to invest in R&D.

Public schools are a vehicle for government propaganda and the brainwashing of children. There, they are conditioned to obey, not to question, and not to trust their own thinking. Public education as it is is as much child abuse as growing up religious is; it teaches kids the truth is in others, and that they couldn't have arrived at true conclusions by themselves.

There are better ways to deal with crime than prisons. It's a strawman to counter anarchist views with "but what of the roads? and prisons?" as if those are the only ways to travel and to curb crime. Go back in history, there are several alternatives to these that do not necessitate the government. Of particular interest is Iceland in the 10th century, but that's really just one example. I wonder how much research you've done to conclude with so much certainty that those things "all go to hell when you try to run them on free-market rules".

Advertising is not money spent trying to one-up competitors (though it can be). It is broadcasting the existence of a service or product. It's not about converting others to drop their favorite brands (though it can be), but about letting others know you exist. How do you get people to know you exist without advertisement?

I'd also like to point out that although I usually enjoy your comments here, you're being extremely condescending to me in your tone. Examples: "pretty much [...] debunks your points", "a lot of dogmas that sound nice", "trivially easy to be shown false", etc. The reason I point this out is because I'm routinely downvoted for defending my side of the argument, when in fact we should be using downvotes for people like you that address others with contempt and trivialize their points.

Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling

#178

Post by innguest »

eric_cc wrote: post #151
nickik wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont agree, this is economly false. Im not particularly against investing in space stuff. > Let's just forget for a moment that valuable skills and infrastructure are being created for India This does not take into account what the money would have done otherwise. Since we can not know what the money otherwise would have been spent on its hard or impossilble to say it it is better for india. > A large proportion of…

While I can see what you're saying on an economic level, I can think of very few things more important than space on an objective level. On a personal level, I can think of nothing more important than space.

How does your here-unjustified opinion help move the discussion?

I don't mean to be rude, but so what that you think this or that is more important? The discussion should be based on the merits of each investment, not eric_cc's list of most important things on an objective level.

Get off your high horse.

Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling

#179

Post by dragonwriter »

eric_cc wrote: post #151
nickik wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont agree, this is economly false. Im not particularly against investing in space stuff. > Let's just forget for a moment that valuable skills and infrastructure are being created for India This does not take into account what the money would have done otherwise. Since we can not know what the money otherwise would have been spent on its hard or impossilble to say it it is better for india. > A large proportion of…

While I can see what you're saying on an economic level, I can think of very few things more important than space on an objective level. On a personal level, I can think of nothing more important than space.

> I can think of very few things more important than space on an objective level.

"Important", unqualified by a specific concrete, objectively measurable goal that thing are judged by importance to, is inherently subjective.

Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling

#180

Post by bipin-nag »

akfanta wrote: post #134
bipin-nag wrote: post #109

There are many point-of-views that one could(should) factor in to explain the circumstances: 1. Mindset due to poverty: There are many people below the poverty line so it makes sense for the scientific programs to aim for the cost-effective solutions not cutting-edge. 2. Experimental: If it was your first space mission, you wouldn't exactly load it with gadgets. Missions have a chance to succeed or to end in failure.…

> orders of magnitude I am not sure if you understand what that means.

You should google it before asking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude).
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