601–610 of 774 posts
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I didn’t say anything about virtue. You’re probably right that they didn’t fully anticipate changes. But what bothers me is that hypocrisy accusation avoids making a claim about what would actually be a good or bad policy. Do you want federal cut backs or not?
>Do you want federal cut backs or not? The right-leaning people caught up in this would probably say "Yes, but not in my obviously highly efficient division."
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I read this recently, and it doesn't sound good https://idlewords.com/2024/05/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
Any argument that is filled with this much ragebait should be dismissed out of hand.
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>> in the space industry in Europe I bet they are not willing to take a huge paycut. Also the language barrier may be an issue.
It's quite easy to learn proper English if you're American. I have friends who successfully accomplished the feat
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> Meanwhile the USDA, FWS, and DOE do those pesky regulatory things True and that’s awesome. However to put up some of a counter those agencies also over-regulate. Bureaucracy tends to over-expand. Musks example of SpaceX having to calculate the likelihood of a rocket hitting a shark in the pacific. Musk is certainly exaggerating a bit, but is speaking to a real issue for many businesses struggling to keep up with ab…
“ However to put up some of a counter those agencies also over-regulate.” Musk and DOGE had a wonderful opportunity to analyze these issues and address them and improve government efficiency. Instead they opted to cut whatever they didn’t like or couldn’t understand within five minutes. Musk should be deeply ashamed.
NASA has been downsizing a lot. Friend of mine is a contractor for NASA who has been trained as a parts engineer for sourcing and testing electronic components that go into satellites and spacecrafts will be out of a job in a few months as her entire branch is eliminating all contractor positions. Now she has a specialized skillset that isn't very readily transferable to other local companies and industries. Sucks. C…
And Russell Vought is holding the weapon.
The article doesn't really do this justice, it's not really "opting to leave" it's that entire divisions inside the Science side of NASA have had their projects defunded and so all the work the people in those labs were doing is now gone. They're being asked to leave voluntarily so they don't have to be "fired" but all their work and resources are gone and they couldn't stay if they wanted to. A friend of mine had he…
Pardon my ignorance. But isn't it better to be laid off or fired than to resign, since the former entitles you to a few months of severance pay? Or is it different somehow under these circumstances?
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> The truth is that science builds the foundation for that other stuff. It is the very ground you stand on. Engineering without science is like trying to run without ground. That doesn't mean that government investment in science is necessarily a good idea. > I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product,…
In the interest of historical accuracy, Newton's work was directly and indirectly subsidized by his government as was the university he attended (that later gave him partial scholarship). He invented Calculus while isolated due to the plague, but had already graduated by then with those scholarship bucks from a university chartered by the British government. A lot of his work occurred while he was what we'd now call…
(Leibniz had a more complex web of patrons over the course of the decades, including parts of German and French governments and even briefly being a Royal Society fellow. Some of Leibniz's patrons did include private [rich] donors, but it is said that Leibniz was the last scientist/mathematician to find patronage in that way/the last time in history that private donors had shown much interest in direct science/math patronage.)
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jacobolus wrote: > The cuts to NASA as well as NOAA, NIH, USGS, USDA, FWS, DOE, etc. are not really saving that much money, but are destroying literally trillions of dollars of future economic value You, in reply, wrote: > The real issue is essentially: which would you rather have, $1 now or $10 tomorrow?[1] I'm saying you're wrong. There is not a choice to be made. We want the $10 tomorrow. No rational person can di…
That wasn't my argument? I think you should look at my last paragraph. It starts with "I'm pointing this out because". > We want the $10 tomorrow. Previously I didn't state my position. You * assumed* my position. So allow me to tell you what it is: I agree, $10 tomorrow is better > No rational person can disagree with this You really should read [1] Actually, you really should read my whole comment and be careful to…
I understand now that you are just making a semi-wanky abstract point about the nature of rhetoric and descisionmaking for its own sake, and I apologize for misunderstanding this.
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True this is bullshit. The government has a direct policy of wealth transfer from the population to itself and banks, who have "foreign" (except of course not really, for the worst example look at the board of the "gift to Ireland" national wealth fund and how the very young board members have no qualifications or experience and DO have family in government ...) ownership. Which, conveniently, isn't counted in the Gi…
Again, the statistics and numbers completely contradict this narrative. We have a statistic - income redistribution - which effectively measures government policy in this regard. For example, Ireland's redistribution of income from rich to poor does more to reduce inequality than any other country in the OECD. The numbers are here: https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality-before-and-afte... or look at Figure 1 on…
I don't know why the rich in Ireland are somehow not on that graph, but when you walk around in Dublin for 10 minutes you see that this just isn't the real situation. It absolutely isn't the case that there aren't very rich people in Ireland and obviously they're not getting their wealth redistributed ...