Slashdot Mirror
India Joins Galileo Consortium
ghoul writes "Yahoo! is reporting that both India and China have joined the Galileo Consortium as part of an effort at building a Multipolar world.
Of note is the fact while China is giving money (200 Million Euros) India is giving 350 million Euros(almost half a billion dollars) in parts and services as Indian satellite makers are considered world class. Makes you think with all the outsourcing and stuff maybe America's century is coming to an end and this century will belong to India or China. After all one of them is 1/6th of the world and the other 1/5th."
Makes you think with all the outsourcing and stuff maybe America's century is coming to an end and this century will belong to India or China.
a .h tml
I don't think so. Both of these countries have political issues that interfere with their reaching their economic potential.
Both countries have severe educational, economic and political problems. India has a deeply entrenched bureaucracy and strong Marxist political elements. India has an illiteracy rate about 70%.
China has similar problems, perhaps even worse including rampant corruption. The literacy rate in China is lower that the US rate of people granted post-graduate degrees.
Here is an article in Forbes describing some of the issues with China:
http://www.forbes.com/2003/11/14/cz_rm_1114chin
As a citizen of the USofA I face facts about the huge wastes of money we endure every day, such as:
- The dead-end Space Shuttle program
- Farm subsidies
- Ethanol subsidies (which intersect somewhat with the above)
- Mandated "special education" to the student's needs regardless of cost, while regular classrooms languish and the gifted are conspicuously neglected
- Million-dollar healthcare for very premature infants (who will be lucky to ever get past "special ed")
That doesn't include other things which could save piles of money, such as making the people who "develop" rural areas pay the full cost of all the roads, sewers, schools and whatnot that they require while abandoning cities where all those things already exist.Getting back to space, it no longer surprises me that the price of several Apollo projects has not taken humans beyond LEO in 3 decades nor given us a real space station, while a few tens of millions in SDIO gave us an SSTO technology demonstrator and one aerospace engineer was able to construct a scenario for a full manned mission to Mars for a fraction of the Shuttle budget. It disgusts me, but it is not surprising... it's all money politics, and the future is sold down the river because it has no constituency while the past chows down at the trough. Kind of like the pandering to old people with "free" drugs while the children whose future is going to be largely determined in classrooms over the next 10 years are ignored beyond mandates on top of mandates which all go unfunded.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Actually in todays service oriented world what matters is more the no of skilled people you have to do the work than the amount of land. For example Japan is much more densely populated than India and is a rival to a United States 50 times larger.
Till now Indias population was that while it had the population the population was not skilled which made it a liability instead of a resource but now the trickle down effect of the nuclear and space programs is being felt in higher levels of education and competency at all levels
**Life is too short to be serious**
- The Shuttle program mainly continues to keep the program's suppliers and contractors in business. The same people could produce far more in the way of truly useful goods and services if they were merely diverted to working on different launch systems, but today's gravy train is guaranteed while any change implies risk to the contractors (the taxpayer would properly see it the other way, but the taxpayers do not have lobbyists working the capitol).
- The USA used to have a program of farm set-asides, where farmers were paid to idle some of their acreage and prevent overproduction. This guaranteed farmers a profit on those acres and kept prices from tanking. This program was replaced with one of pure subsidies 20 or so years ago. The results have been predictable: we have rampant overproduction while prices remain too low for many farmers to remain in business, all at taxpayer expense.
- Ethanol subsidies mostly go into the pockets of wealthy corporate interests like Archer Daniels Midland. Some of the surplus corn (from the excessive subsidies) is consumed by the ethanol program, but the taxpayer pays more for a gallon-equivalent of motor fuel produced by this method than a British driver paying 75 p per liter. Ethanol production requires roughly a gallon-equivalent of fossil inputs to produce 1.2 gallons-equivalent of output, at a subsidy of $1.90/gallon; if I have that right, the taxpayer is paying $9.50/gallon for the energy actually created by this process. The rest of the energy is merely transformed from other forms, such as coal, gas and petroleum used on the farm.
- "Special education" for children who will never be able to function on their own is likely wasted. "Education" for those who are both mentally defective and dying from their conditions is completely wasted.
- Spending a million dollars (or a half, or a quarter million) to save a very premature infant, when the parents cannot support such a child's needs and the child will sustain serious brain damage, is wasted. Once these babies are born there is nothing medical science can do to make up for the damage that results. We would save more lives by letting them die naturally and putting the money into prenatal care, schooling and programs to prevent pregnancies among people who won't take prenatal care seriously.
These programs are not worth it; they destroy value, not create it.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.