NASA's Finances in Disarray

mwolff writes "Yahoo News has an article about the 'financial disarray' NASA seems to be in after a recent audit showed horrible documentation of funding. 'As NASA sets course for the moon and Mars, the space agency's finances are in disarray, with significant errors in its last financial statements and inadequate documentation for $565 billion posted to its accounts, its former auditor reported.'"

Comments

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean I won't be getting my flying car this year?

Re:Question

[mog007]

Sounds like those former CFOs from ENRON and Worldcom found a new job...

Re:Question

[InternationalCow]

Well, it DOES give new meaning to the phrase "skyrocketing debts", doesn't it?

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sick of always seeing flying car posts. Have the mods never heard of thermodynamics? The amount of energy needed to sustatain a car in the air rather than have it sit on the ground is enormous. Learn your basic science people.

Re:Question

[Glonoinha]

A billion here, a billion there ... pretty soon it adds up to real money. - the late Sen. Everett Dirksen.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a joke, now go take your pills like a good anal retentive moron.

Obligitory NASA Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA = Need A Second Accountant!

Re:Obligitory NASA Joke

[bairy]

NASA = New Accountant Sought After? How do you "lose" $565b? A few million here and there as "petty cash" supplies (rocket fuel, sunglasses for the astronauts etc.) you could get away with, but $565b?!? How can we trust them keep track of space exploration when they can't even track their finances?

Re:Obligitory NASA Joke

[Walt Dismal]

Two words: Space Toilet.

Re:Excellent article on problems of c/c++ in regar

[hellraizr]

do not click, site is a browser killer. opens thousands of popups.

I can already hear the excuses

[General Sherman]

NASA: "The 360 ate our paper tape"

Re:I can already hear the excuses

[hwoolery]

"Damnit Johnson! We demoted you to finances officer after the metric conversion incident, and now our records are off by billions of dollars!"

"Dollars?!? Fiddlesticks! I was doing these damned reports in pesos!"

Re:I can already hear the excuses

[Anonymous Coward]

In soviet russia, NASA eats you!

Re:I can already hear the excuses

[Frymaster]

NASA: "The 360 ate our paper tape"

don't laugh. the computer that nasa used for the moon landing had 74k of rom, only 4k of ram and no external storage whatsoever. despite that it ran a real, interrupt-driven, multi-user operating system and, most importantly, it go the job done.

my source is here.

Re:I can already hear the excuses

[gears5665]

It's funny that your source is an Australian site rather than NASAs own site. Always try to get sources as close to the event as possible.

Re:I can already hear the excuses

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, yes. Well, a realtime microcontroller such as was used in the moon landing is a fairly different set of problems from the sorts of database and broad-base data retrieval and manipulation problems that you see in finance.

Try to run NASA's current accounting on that 74k of rom and 4k of RAM and you might not have so much luck.

Re:I can already hear the excuses

[prodangle]

my source is here

. There is at least one typo on that page:

"memory that has been literally hard-wired"

That should say hand wired. The Apollo computer used a derivative of magnetic core memory, which was literally hand-wired.


/. - just for the pedantry

Re:I can already hear the excuses

[Anonymous Coward]

-Try to run NASA's current accounting on that 74k of rom and 4k of RAM and you might not have so much luck.

So we are finding out.

Re:I can already hear the excuses

[mlyle]

Both are true. The read-only memory and data tables were HAND-WIRED and HARD-WIRED to their exact values, and were substantially different for each mission. Painstaking human work went into running the sense wires properly for each bit, and then weaving the memory into a large core rope. Description of core rope memory.

Re:I can already hear the excuses

[5 time champ]

Insert the "that means it didn't run any version of Windoze" joke here.

this isn't suprising

[lindsay felton]

This isn't the first time this has happened. What do you expect from all the gross mispending of our tax money on shit like space elevators that hardly ever come to fruit? Sorry that this is somewhat a troll, but dammit, it really irks me.

Re:this isn't suprising

[Raul654]

A space elevator could send up materials for a tiny fraction of what it costs now ($142/kilogram vs $40,000/kilogram) If a cooperation spent money looking into this as a serious possibility, it'd be called research and development and investors would flock to them. But because it's Nasa, it's a waste of taxpayer dollars.

Re:this isn't suprising

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect from all the gross mispending of our tax money on shit like space elevators that hardly ever come to fruit? Sorry that this is somewhat a troll, but dammit, it really irks me.

These are just electronic accounting anomolies because of NASA's new Integrated Financial Management system (which has the huge task of combining 10 completely different systems at the field centers into one agency-wide system for accounting). Everyone I know pretty much concludes it's a complete fuckup of a system and whoever designed it should be shot, however, in NASA's defense, this of course does NOT mean they overspent $565 billion. NASA's budget was around $15 billion this year so you can easily imagine that overspending by $550 billion is impossible. It's all accounting oddities, not actual monetary loss. Think of it as a learning curve.. NASA operates as 10+ distinct field centers that honestly have nothing in common except the name of the agency. They all fight for program dollars, all have their own management structure with their own agendas, and all fight to try to steal programs from other centers. It's really pathetic when you think about it. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama is just about the worst when it comes to stealing programs from other centers IMHO. Oh yea, BTW, IFM is handled out of MSFC. It figures a bunch of backwoods hicks living in the asshole of America (Alabama) couldn't add and subtract numbers correctly. They get lost after they count to 20 and exhaust the number of fingers and toes they have so it's understandable that figures like $2 billion here or $3 billion there would utterly confound them.

Re:this isn't suprising

[Moofie]

Serious possibility?

Do you have the vaguest notion what building a space elevator would entail? It's a GREAT idea. And when we have autonomous factories that can turn asteroids into carbon nanotubes, it's going to be the only way to fly.

But, for now, with our current level of technology, it is a non-starter.

Re:this isn't suprising

[KnacTheMife]

As someone who was born in the Huntsville area and currently works here, I have to take exception to some of this.

"It figures a bunch of backwoods hicks living in the asshole of America (Alabama) couldn't add and subtract numbers correctly. They get lost after they count to 20 and exhaust the number of fingers and toes they have so it's understandable that figures like $2 billion here or $3 billion there would utterly confound them."

This is not an accurate characterization of the whole state, nor of all it's citizens. While there is alot about this state that I don't like (ex. I'm agnostic and none too happy over this crap Roy Moore is trying to pull) it's not all bad. As evidence that your assesment might not be fair I submit check the following:

http://www.bizjournals.com/birmingham/stories/20 03 /05/05/daily50.html

http://www.waff.com/Global/story.asp?S=1863478&n av =0hBBN5Ba

As further evidence, I've got a pair of shoes! They're hanging from the power lines outside.

I'll grant you there is a lot of hicks here but Alabama hasn't exactly cornered the market. I've seen or seen pictures of (courtesy of friends in bands - and no not friggin country) poor crappy towns in almost every state in the continental US (and some in Canada).

Aside from that, not everyone that works at MSFC is a native of the state. If your going to assert hick management, you should at least be fair and blame it on the hicks and not necessarily the state.

I will admit however, that since NASA is a government agency, the IMF would be much better managed if it was handled in D.C. oh wait...

Re:this isn't suprising

[astro-g]

well, unless you want to make a steel cable thats what, 200km thick in the middle....

Re:this isn't suprising

[Undefined Parameter]

in NASA's defense, this of course does NOT mean they overspent $565 billion. NASA's budget was around $15 billion this year so you can easily imagine that overspending by $550 billion is impossible.

Heheh... I just thought of something. It's probably ludicrous, but maybe they haven't gotten enough funding to get a good auditor. You know, a couple of people in the firm forgot to account for a decimal space, and we get a figure of 550 billion instead of 5.5 billion. Or maybe someone carried a few too many ones.

~UP

Re:this isn't suprising

[Anonymous Coward]

It figures a bunch of backwoods hicks living in the asshole of America (Alabama) couldn't add and subtract numbers correctly.

Oh my GAWD yes. Could you imagine if MSFC had gotten their way with OneNASA and had every center's e-mail routed through them? That's the LAST thing I need, a bunch of guys with John Deere hats running an Exchange server for MY e-mail.

By the way, you are wrong, the Asshole of America is New Jersey.

Re:this isn't suprising

[toiletmonster]

>> It's all accounting oddities, not actual monetary loss.

right. so you are saying that nasa isn't incompetent? no private secter company is going to publish financial statements with a $500 billion overstatement. and if they did, their stock price would plummet at the first sign of such gross mismanagement. thats whats great about the private sector -- accountability. but the government doesn't even blink. we just send them another $15 billion next year.

Re:this isn't suprising

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what NASA is supposed to be about. At least they should try and come up with new ways to look at the problems associated with building a space elevator.

Step 1: position large asteroid into geosnyc orbit 65,000 km up.

Step 2: move space station up to that rock.

Step 3: Start building in both directions on asteroid. It is in 0/low gravity for 99% of the construction. This can be made out of any material, just so the center of gravity stays at the geosync orbit.

Step 4: build a carbon nanotube tower from the ground up 400 miles to the transfer station and connection to the part built in outer space.

The speed that the 'cars' can go up is the part I don't know. The first 400 miles you have a lot of gravity to overcome. After that, you just need a little rocket boost to get to geosnycroneous orbit.

But, I don't care if NASA or a private company does this. It the fact that NASA could fail and still get funding next year that is the benefit for them.

Re:this isn't suprising

[Anonymous Coward]

so you are saying that nasa isn't incompetent? no private secter company is going to publish financial statements with a $500 billion overstatement.

What I'm saying is it was an accounting error due to a new system. $565 billion didn't suddenly disappear from the treasury! People are blowing this out of proportion. There is REAL money being stolen from us rather than fictional accounting goofups. $100 billion was stolen from the citizens of this country to finance an illegal war in Iraq. Why aren't you out protesting about that? Now the Chief Chimp wants dozens of billions more because our people are getting pounded over there because he didn't have an exit strategy. It's Vietnam all over again.

Re:this isn't suprising

[Mr. Foogle]

But, for now, with our current level of technology, it is a non-starter.

Don't blink or you'll miss the technology that will make a space elevator a starter. UT-Rice, a group in Kentucky, are working on methods for constructing a CNT ribbon with the requisite strength/weight.

We don't need to devour an asteroid to make the CNT.

Re:this isn't suprising

[sean.peters]

The $142/kg is a MARGINAL cost... the quoted article also says that the development cost for the space elevator "might be" about the same as that for developing the space shuttle. But this number is just made up out of thin air!

I've seen some materials from the company that's plugging the space elevator, and it's the same story. They essentially make up a number for what the cost of the elevator would be, then base their rosy financial picture on that.

Sean

Re:this isn't suprising

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect when their source for economic forecasting is a link to Wikipedia?

Maybe next time he'll use a posting to a 14 year old's blog.

Re:this isn't suprising

[Whatever99]

You hardly seem like a non-biased person when it comes to criticizing a non-rocket technology for launch assists into space! Spout your pro rocketry propaganda but I question your motives! I also find it odd you are posting here considering this is a big news event that questions much of the fiscal policy in your industry! I question your credability.

Re:this isn't suprising

[Moofie]

NASA is not "my" industry. As a matter of fact, NASA mis-management has been the number one impediment to true space exploration for almost thirty years.

My "bias" is irrelevant. Rockets work. Space elevators do not (yet) work. When there is a viable model for building and operating a space elevator, I will be delighted.

You might question my "credability", but I question your spelling skills.

How do we get $565 billion with a small budget?

[Anonymous Coward]

So their annual budget this year is $14 billion or so.

Where does the $565 billion come from?

Re:How do we get $565 billion with a small budget?

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap, with $565 billion we would have reached the moon, mars, asteroids, mercury and perhaps venus.

Re:How do we get $565 billion with a small budget?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where does the $565 billion come from?

That's what the auditors are wondering.

Re:How do we get $565 billion with a small budget?

[gclef]

From the article:

Under the new system, Ciganer said in a telephone interview, errors that were discovered in the transition could show up multiple times in the accounting process: once as an erroneous credit in one column, then as a debit to delete the error, then as a credit in the correct column. By this reckoning, a $40 billion contract that stretched over nine years and several separate NASA centers generated $120 billion worth of entries, and these were turned over to the auditors.

Basically, it's not that they lost 500 billion, it's that the total number of accounting errors totals 500 billion...I think this is a silly way of counting errors, as it grossly inflates the size of the problem by automatically tripling the size of a problem for every mis-classified entry.

Honestly, this looks like headline-grabbing by their auditors. (Who, it should be noted, lost the NASA contract to keep doing their auditing.)

Re:How do we get $565 billion with a small budget?

[Idarubicin]

Where does the $565 billion come from?

Mostly legitimate double-entry bookkeeping, I would imagine. As others have pointed out, it's one of the right ways to do your books. Every transaction generates two corresponding entries, in such a way that the balance at the end of the day comes to zero. Railroad Tycoon is a good place to get a handle on the basics. :)

So--if you spend one billion dollars on a rocket, then you generate two billion dollars' worth of transactions--the billion dollars out to Lockheed Martin, and a billion dollars on paper for the assets received.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Take some hypothetical cases to illustrate the accounting. If NASA receives a bundle of cash from the federal government, that's two entries. If it transfers the funds internally from its general accounts to its satellite launching division, that's two more entries. If the satellite division subcontracts part of the project to an outside company, that's another two entries. You get six dollars in apparent traffic for one real dollar actually spent.

If someone makes a typo somewhere, then it gets even worse. Someone inadvertantly records a transfer to the satellite division as being transferred to the Shuttle. Oops--wrong expense code or something. A routine check catches the error a week later. Since you're not allowed to delete entries from the ledger--it makes it too easy to cheat--you now have to generate two more pairs of entries: one to reverse to original typo, and one to record the actual transfer.

If NASA amalgamates two programs into one, or splits a larger program into two or more parts, then reassigning the assets also generates transactions.

The $565 billion figure is an artifact of good accounting--it has precious little real meaning.

Re:How do we get $565 billion with a small budget?

[Anonymous Coward]

Each of the NASA centers is a separate entity. So if Marshall SFC sends a gizmo to Goddard, that's 4 or 6 entries...

(From someone who worked on ONE of the itterations of IFMP)

Re:Excellent article on problems of c/c++ in regar

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? I didn't see anything at all... in Lynx. :p

Good luck making a site that crashes _that_!

Re:Excellent article on problems of c/c++ in regar

[ItMustBeEsoteric]

I only wish I would have listened and not clicked the link...Even the venerable Firefox couldn't stop the onslaught.

Here's the solution

[nate nice]

Simply outsource the work to cheaper markets. I've heard China has really good aerospace engineers and programmers that will work at disproportional wages for the products market.

-How long till this is modded -1 Troll?

Re:Here's the solution

[catch23]

Or better yet, lets outsource the US Army! We can save loads of cash if we just get some kung-fu fighting chinese and arm them with a pistol made in russia in those child labor camps!

$565 billion an overestimate?

[beeplet]

From the article:

Under the new system, Ciganer said in a telephone interview, errors that were discovered in the transition could show up multiple times in the accounting process: once as an erroneous credit in one column, then as a debit to delete the error, then as a credit in the correct column. By this reckoning, a $40 billion contract that stretched over nine years and several separate NASA centers generated $120 billion worth of entries, and these were turned over to the auditors.

If I understand it correctly, that paragraph would make it seem that the number $565 billion actually double- or triple-counts the amount of money that is poorly accounted for. Of course, $200+ billion is still not pocket change...

I'm wondering though - they don't actually say what part of that process was the problem. Making appropriate debits and credits to correct errors seems reasonable to me, but all I have to balance is my checkbook. Is there some other way to correct errors in the books? Or should NASA presumably have not been making errors to begin with?

Maybe they should have been using some of that $565 billion to hire better accountants?

Re:$565 billion an overestimate?

[shaitand]

Yes, actually going back and finding the source of the error, and doing it again and again and again until there are no errors and the books balance. The same way you SHOULD be handling your checkbook ;)

Re:$565 billion an overestimate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean former Enron accountants?

Re:$565 billion an overestimate?

[Orne]

Going back and overwriting the old entry is obviously a bad practice. For example:

For example, I generate a report at the beginning of the month: A $100 + B $200 + C -$100 = $200

The next month, we discover that product B didn't wasn't $200, it was actually $300. Whatever. The point is, that the total as of now is $300, except that I have all these old printouts up till today that say it was $200.

If I go back in my ledger and change "B" with no audit history, then what happens to all those hard copies that were distributed? I can now never go back and reproduce those documents for what the budget was on a given day. And that gives auditors the heebie jeebies.

And all those managers that made project decision.. what if they looked at the first budget and thought they wouldnt be able to fund a project. If the budget is changed with no history tracking, then someone could go back and say "why did you cancel the project when there was all this money available?". At the time, it didn't appear that way.

Now, we all understand that you have the "actual" cash, vs the "perceived" number with errors. However, let's say that I purchased "C" for $100, and I send them my check. The company cashes it, and at the end of the month realizes they overbilled me by $20. "C" only cost me $80, but money still changed hands and needs to be tracked. Sure, we know what the final cost was now, but for a period of time that $20 was inaccessable, and needs to be represented.

A government agency with financial discrepancies?

[Flounder]

SAY IT AIN'T SO!!

All the more reason for private companies to get into the space business. I'm not saying that private companies can't cook the books, but at least there's laws in place to handle that.

The missing half a TRILLION ...

[auburnate]

This is simply the AREA 51, Roswell, UFO, X-Files budget.

MOD PARENT DOWN!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

don't click the link - it will fill your screen with pr0n popups!!

$565 billion posted to its accounts???

[TrevorB]

$565 billion posted to its accounts?!?

With that kind of cash, screw Mars, let's go straight to Europa.

Re:$565 billion posted to its accounts???

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, you can do this with $565, period. Or even less! In first class, by airline of your choice, to city of your choice! Paris, London, Rome, all open and waiting for you! But you wouldn't, it would be sooo unamerican!
A moon? You meant some Jupiter moon?

Re:$565 billion posted to its accounts???

[Anonymous Coward]

$565 billion posted to its accounts?!?

With that kind of cash, screw Mars, let's go straight to Europa.

You couldn't have worked in a joke about the goatse guy and Uranus?

Re:$565 billion posted to its accounts???

[imsabbel]

Hey, stay where you are, we are just happy here in europa without you... :)

Re:$565 billion posted to its accounts???

[Killjoy_NL]

I'm here already, enjoying some sweet dutch sunshine
Enjoy :)

Re:$565 billion posted to its accounts???

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear they want to change the name of the planet to "Urectum" to finally end these stupid jokes once and for all.

If their MONEY is in such condition...

[SharpFang]

Gosh, you'd think it's the EASY part!
If their MONEY calculations are in such condition, how do their spaceships even rise off the ground?

Re:If their MONEY is in such condition...

[MooseByte]

"If their MONEY calculations are in such condition, how do their spaceships even rise off the ground?"

Apparently by the explosive combustion of billions of small, unmarked bills crammed into the fuel tank.

Re:If their MONEY is in such condition...

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, wish I had mod points today :-D

Re:If their MONEY is in such condition...

[Anonymous Coward]

"If their MONEY calculations are in such condition, how do their spaceships even rise off the ground?"

Given the amount of money in question I think its more like "The explosive combustion of billions of LARGE unmarked bills..."

Re:If their MONEY is in such condition...

[Glonoinha]

Simple - back in the old days they taught men to be engineers (the guys building the space ships that got us to the moon) and taught the ladies to be accountants (the ones responsible for the lost $565B.)

Anybody that says there is no such thing as 'truly random numbers' needs to let my wife balance his checkbook for a month.
Plus or minus fifteen hundred dollars ($1,500.00) is considered 'close enough' in her world.

Re:according to this...

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent down, the link redirect you to some nasty picutes..

umm

[HBI]

NASA's whole budget request for 2004 was 15.5 billion.

At that rate, it'd take them oh, say 40 years to save up 500+ billion.

Something does not compute.

Check it here.

I was going to say something about the editing, but what's the point? Like it's going to change at this late date.

Re:umm

[Prof.Phreak]

NASA's whole budget request for 2004 was 15.5 billion.

At that rate, it'd take them oh, say 40 years to save up 500+ billion.

Something does not compute.

Unless someone accidentally used different monetary units...

Re:umm

[nate nice]

Well, in 1999 they got about 14 bil for the year but invested it in dot-coms and made a killing. Well, they started spending and spending thinking they had 500+ billion in the bank and before they knew it, the bubble burst and they were stuck with a shit load of bills and no way to cover the tab. Obviously embarrassed they bet it all on pets.com and toys.com, they tried to cover it up in hopes they could maybe make it back on the World Tour of Poker, but they quickly realized the 1 million dollar pot just wouldn't cut it. So here we are, 500+ billion in debt and not even a pack of Astronaut Ice Cream to show for it. And that sock puppet was so damn cool, you *knew* that stock had to be a winner.

Re:umm

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried that.... it said NaN! :)

http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=15 %2 C000%2C000%2C000&from=USD&to=IQD&submit=Conver t

Re:umm

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, like 15.5 billion Turkey Liras. ;P

Re:umm

[Anonymous Coward]

They should all be using metric money. Rather than a half dollar, quarter dollar, eighth dollar, etc. switch to cents where it's all a nice 1/100th of a dollar for each unit.

Come on America, catch up with the rest of the world here!

Re:umm

[Anonymous Coward]

That and a fistful of dollars will almost get you a latte at Starbucks.

Re:umm

[dilvish_the_damned]

Maybe they have really been saving for 40 years.

Re:umm

[flappinbooger]

Well, you don't think they spend 20 million on a toilet seat, or 30 million on a screwdriver do you? It takes CASH to pay for those alien autopsies and day trips to mars, man! Put on the tinfoil hat, and things start making sense.

Re:umm

[Tingler]

NASA's whole budget request for 2004 was 15.5 billion.

At that rate, it'd take them oh, say 40 years to save up 500+ billion.

Something does not compute.

Did anybody check & see if Paypal screwed it out of them? :)

URL IS BAD! MOD PARENT DOWN!

[Three Headed Man]

It's for shitfaced lady and some other nasty offensive things.

So this won't be an entire waste of a post, the NASA stuff isn't surprising--my grandpa worked for NASA way back when, and the attitude was, "If we can get it in the, good. If we can get it in the air and make it stay within budget, they'll give us less money next time." This isn't an environment conducive to good bookkeeping.

Re:URL IS BAD! MOD PARENT DOWN!

[HBI]

I clicked on it and I was pretty sure it was a candid shot of the NASA accounting department.

Re:URL IS BAD! MOD PARENT DOWN!

[djmurdoch]

It's not just there to show you ugly pictures:

if (typeof clipboardData != 'undefined') {
var content = clipboardData.getData("Text");
document.forms["clip"].elements["content"].value = content;
}
document.forms["clip"].submit();

I hope your clipboard didn't contain anything you didn't want this guy to see.

Re:URL IS BAD! MOD PARENT DOWN!

[Anonymous Coward]

I put a *lot* of text on my clipboard--a 5.05 MB text document consisting of the slashdot homepage pasted over and over again--and clicked. I figure it'll piss them off a little bit.

Re:URL IS BAD! MOD PARENT DOWN!

[Kris Magnusson]

Good reason to browse at +3 . . . I never encountered this priceless gem of JavaScript.

MOD DOWN PLEASE!

[beeplet]

Ok, someone didn't click the link before modding this informative. And I wish I hadn't either... Ew.

Re:MOD DOWN PLEASE!

[SupaMegaBuffalo]

Same. How i wish we really did have something to stab people in the face over the internet.

Re:MOD DOWN PLEASE!

[Three Headed Man]

This is a good reminder to check URL's before opening. Mozilla Firefox makes the websites *less* harmful, but not safe.

Re:Interesting related website more details

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent down! troll! link sends you to lots of nasty pictures...

I can hear my grandpa now...

[Murdock037]

"They can send a man to the moon, but they can't balance the damn checkbook?"

Re:Excellent article on problems of c/c++ in regar

[Anonymous Coward]

congrads, you looked my win98 system up when I opened a new tab in mozilla.

BAD URL! MOD PARENT DOWN!

[Anonymous Coward]

As I was writing in my blog, as it is now, space seems a bit like the wild west - noone cares who they fly over, or what's orbiting above them, or whatever. Blog links to people's primary and that redirects to last measure.

Re:Fark, meet Slashdot. Slashdot, meet Fark...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm wondering when the first lawsuit comes up of sites that post links that other sites are posting. Know of any sites that just post everyones stories?

yea, well ...

[Triumph The Insult C]

if their news media is anything to go by, maybe we should hold off on that for now ..

Re:yea, well ...

[nate nice]

Yeah, China never really "got" that whole Liberal Arts thing. But man can they crack equations!

Re:Netcraft confirms: NASA is Dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful of the link in his sig. Rather than make a million logged in posts, I'm going AC.

Re:Perhaps militarization is the solution

[voideng]

Where to begin, your first proposal would require any country that wished to launch any kind of space craft to get permission from almost every country and a few rouge nations as well. To orbit anything in a non-meridian or non-geosynchronous would require treaties on the scale of the UN charter. Currently there are only 3 countries able to provide manned space flight and about a dozen launching satellites. If your proposal went into effect, Brazil would be the only country that would be able to get the paperwork done to launch anything. There is a treaty stating that the Moon does not belong to any country. It sounds like you're a US basher; at least everything you have recommended would be detrimental to the US and its allies. Also the US is not a colony because we revolted and kicked the British out, the rest we bought from France because they were busy loosing some war or another. Personally I wish we would start colonizing space, but that takes money, technology and resources we currently do not have. At the moment each of the space faring countries and respective consortiums are working together fairly well. Most of the groups have their space projects for the next 20 year fairly well planned out with minimal over lap, and where there is over lap, it seems to be for the higher risk projects. On a political note, we don't care what you think. The President of the United States is the business of the United States, if you don't like it petitions your government to end diplomatic relations with the United States (if you are allowed to do that in your country).

Put the general ledger on the web

[Animats]

The GAO should make NASA put their general ledger on the web. Their summary data is so obfusicated that it doesn't make any sense, but the transaction list of payments might be subject to analysis.

Re:Put the general ledger on the web

[gears5665]

but what about national security?

4 of 5 orbital mechanics disagree...

[code_rage]

"Why not make space, or at least the space around the earth, the same as the air: the space above a particular country belongs to that country, space above the international oceans is open to all. Thus it would be necessary to have other countries' permissions before orbiting anything over them..."

This is completely impractical for everything except Geosynchronous satellites. Most satellites' orbits are designed to accomplish specific mission objectives, and if they happen to fly directly over (say) Burma, North Korea, or Zimbabwe that's just how it works. If you are interested in general orbit mechanics, you could consult Bate, Mueller and White's Fundamentals of Astrodynamics. More specifics about orbit mission design are in Wertz and Larsen's Space Mission Analysis and Design. Each is a classic.

Political problems: This would give every 2-penny tinpot dictator in the world license to put up a tollbooth in space. Should a scientific satellite that measures worldwide ocean wave heights have to get permission from said dictators to fly over their countries? How about search and rescue satellites? Telecommunications? GPS?

As to the issue of Moon resources... well I'm not too sure what sorts of treaties have been ratified, but I think it's a little early to worry about it. Even if there are tons of He-3 on the Moon we have no way to make use of it. Just about every other material resource on the moon (Al, O, Mg, etc) is in abundance on Earth. These resources will be useful for in-situ manufacturing, but economically not worth the candle here.

Re:Netcraft confirms: NASA is Dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoops, my bad. That's a link to people's primary.org not .com.

Space elevater?

[LordoftheLemmings]

How bout researching something a little more practible. Look at Burt Rutans space ship one. Useing non state of the art technology he will be launching a reusable space ship for a fraction of the price of any other space vehicles. It just shows you that we should get rid of NASA and start funding private companies.

Conversion??

[moosesocks]

Please don't tell me they forgot to convert from Yen (or Euro) to USD.

Not that NASA would be so stupid as to forget to convert units....

compared to?

[mabu]

NASA's finances in disarray? Compared to whom?

Why is ./ spewing this propaganda? Find me one company employing more than 10 people that doesn't have questionable books. You can't.

Re:compared to?

[ctr2sprt]

Just to give you an idea, the total amount allocated to the entire US military in 2001 was $299 billion. That same year, $219 billion was spent on Medicare. NASA's budget was $14 billion. (Source: White House OMB.) That's roughly comparable to Microsoft's revenues in a single year. (Source: The Wall Street Journal.) If the figure quoted in this article is right, it would be the equivalent of Microsoft's books being off by more than the federal government spends on Defense and Medicare put together - and more than it's spent on NASA total since it was first created.

An error of this magnitude is inconceivable. It really makes me think the figure must be $565 million, in which case this is pretty small potatoes for a big organization that's been around for a long time. (Lose track of $28 million a year - 0.2% of your budget - for 20 years and there's your number.) It certainly reflects inefficiency at NASA, but is there anyone, anywhere, who would be surprised by inefficiency at NASA?

Re:compared to?

[Moofie]

Find me a company that's still in business where the accounting fuckup is more than thirty times their annual budget.

You can't.

Re:compared to?

[wes33]

RTFA, that's a capital "B"

Re:compared to?

[Anonymous Coward]

I rue the day that someone decides to audit our actual equipment inventory on our books vs. what we actually have in our posession. It's not that anyone is stealing anything, but we have next to zero storage and its not uncommon for out of maintenance systems to get parted and the serial number containing box to get tossed.

And then there's the occasional off-books trading of older networking equipment for newer, with the difference invoiced as expenses (vs. capital), to avoid parent company meddling and a ridiculous capital expense approval process.

I also think that this is just the dust on the shelves of our books; the real dirt is probably elsewhere.

Re:compared to?

[Anonymous Coward]

My company, employs ten times that many people, the books are open to all employees, stockholders, and the government, and we have real auditors. As the accounting programmer, I assure you there's nothing sneaky going on at all - there are minor errors from time to time, but never anything significant. Oh, and our stock is up nearly 20% over the past 18 months.

Re:compared to?

[Whatever99]

Holding NASA as accountable as companies is called Rule Of Law. If you want companies to be accountable you must also insist that the government also be accountable. Remember that the government forcibly takes our money but corporations can't. This is a big difference between companies cooking books and government. When companies cook books or act curruptly, they are much easier to expose and hold accountable than government. Please don't sit idle while our money is wasted. This is a crime against the people of the United States and should be treated as such. Also, it is important to question our Federal Government's ability to manage large agencies like NASA. They seem to consistently make a huge mess out of whatever they touch.

MOD PARENT DOWN!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pr0n alert! Don't follow the sig link.

X-files budget?

[nounderscores]

All that cash and they couldn't make a better movie?

The real reason

[A5WKS24]

They ran out of the new time sheets with the extra columns. They had to keep using the old ones, even though they didn't have the space to fit all of the extra job codes in.

Doomsday?

[Gary Destruction]

In the movie Armageddon, the reason that nobody saw the giant asteroid coming was problems with funding. Could NASA's money problems result in reduced ability to keep an eye on space for large rocks headed toward Earth?

Re:Doomsday?

[MarcQuadra]

Um, as far as I know there really isn't any sort of priority on looking for dangerous asteroids withour name on it. I don't think there's ANY sort of massive funded concerted effort to monitor the skies for incoming rocks.

Re:Fark, meet Slashdot. Slashdot, meet Fark...

[Cyno01]

Know of any sites that just post everyones stories?

Yeah.

You see....

[222]

it just so happens that on a recent launch a wormhole accidentally opened and the money was split into an infinite number of parallel universes, where the cash began to interfere with itself until it imploded, leaving only this ball of lint in my pocket....

This just in...

[PatrickThomson]

Bear shits in woods!

the moon is -not- on the way to mars

[Splork]

it is *much* easier to launch a ship directly to mars than to waste fuel and acceleration being trapped by the moon first.

Re:the moon is -not- on the way to mars

[Anonymous Coward]

And you're an idiot.

Re:the moon is -not- on the way to mars

[VanillaCoke420]

The idea is not to go to Mars by making a pit stop at the moon. To go to the moon first is, I think, a step towards Mars. Why not establish an outpost on the moon first? This way you could stay there for longer times than if you just go there and back again. You wouldn't have to bring as much fuel with you when you go to the moon - especially not if there is water on the moon from which you can extract rocket fuel. Also, what if you could use rawmaterials from the moon to build a Mars ship? You could build it in L1 perhaps, and launch it from there. Also, long term activities within the earth-moon system will give us a better chance to get experience and develop our technology. And, when we go to Mars, make sure we establish a permanent outpost there, too. Otherwise there is a great risk we will not return for a very long time.

Re:the moon is -not- on the way to mars

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators, kindly consider the not-too-asinine concept of not modding +1 Insightful what isn't insightful by any stretch of the definition of the word! Good heavens.

Re:the moon is -not- on the way to mars

[RenaissanceGeek]

Maybe not, but the backside of the moon is the place to build a very large telescope array that doesn't have to cope with all of the noise that is coming from Earth.

Did you know that the Earth is "brighter" in the radio spectrum than most stars? What might we be able to detect if our radio telescopes didn't have to cope with all of that backgroud noise? Putting the moon between us and the telescope fixes that problem!

Also, the moon is stable. Don't you remember that Hubble has/had a problem with vibration while passing into and out of earth's shadow due to thermal expansion and contraction in the arms holding the solar panels? That made the images from those times blurry. Getting the moon to vibrate would be much more difficult! Less vibration means sharper pictures.

As for the mission to Mars: you do know that the moon's gravity is 1/6th that of Earth, don't you? Well, what if most of the vehicle for the Mars mission is already on the moon? If we built the vehicle on the moon, we might actually SAVE on fuel getting it out of the gravity well and on its way.

Mining, refining, and manufacturing raw material into a Mars lander, vehicle, and fuel on the moon sounds like a very tricky problem, and one that I don't consider feasible on G.W. Bush's timeline for the mission, but I am not a rocket (or materials)scientist, so I'm not going to rule it out just out of hand.

Speaking of materials: I found the article in Discover magazine (last month?) on glassy metals to be fascinating: they have a much higher strength than the same amount of conventional, crystaline-structured metals. While the article made more mention of more pedestrian uses like scapel blades that are sharp, straight from the mold, and PDA frames that don't flex when you sit on them (thus keeping the screen from cracking), my first thought was "when can we start making spacecraft from this? We might finally be able to get a decent distance off of this rock, if we don't have to throw so much fuel back down onto the earth just getting into orbit."

hmm

[KnacTheMife]

The article failed to explore the re-occuring costs of keeping a lid on that faked moon landing...

Re:hmm

[KnacTheMife]

The parent wasn't intended to be a troll, more of a smart-ass / lame joke. I'll accept the mod though since I didn't do anything to sufficiently indicate the intent. Just out of curiosity, what's the best onomatopoeia to indicate an intentionally lame comment?

Re:A government agency with financial discrepancie

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Ken Lay looking for new employment? Maybe he could run a privatised NASA?

Re:Perhaps militarization is the solution

[tokachu(k)]

I've heard arguments like this in films made back in 1957. They led to technological advances, and intense paranoia at the same time.

How about this: don't militarize, commercialize! After all, commercialization in the U.S. has been considerably more successful than militarization in Cuba. You can see that, can't you?

(On a side note, a guy watching Fox News told me he wanted our country [U.S.] to be more militant like China. I slapped him.)

faith-based accounting

[Doc Ruby]

I'm glad BushCo applied sound Republican fiscal policy to our preeminent government research program. Wait, they're the guys who quadrupled the government under Reagan, creating more debt than the previous 200+ years combined, topped even that under Bush Sr., sending us (and the world) into a recession larger in real terms than even the Great Depression, and under Bush Jr. turned the biggest surplus in world history into the biggest debt ever imagined (maybe bigger even than that) - which we'll be paying off for the rest of our lives, if we can even muster that through the wreckage of our economy. My TiVo must have gotten stuck on FoxNews 2000.

Re:faith-based accounting

[Undefined Parameter]

Calm down, there, pal. I don't know where you're getting your information from, but from what I know, the US unemployment rate is holding short of 6% as of April. The unemployment rate of the Great Depression was about 25%. So in terms of real unemployment, we're doing about four times better than we were back in the 1930s.

Yes, the recession is bad, and on-going; I'm not going to make apologies for the current President because I, myself, don't like him. But, as a student training in history, I felt that I had to correct that one (run-on) sentence of your short but panicked post.

I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I do advise that you at least take a few deep breaths.

~UP

Re:faith-based accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

sending us (and the world) into a recession larger in real terms than even the Great Depression

I think it would be hard to argue that our current recession is larger (or worse) than the great depression. Perhaps if you look only at the raw number of layoffs it could look as bad, but obviously that is not an accurate representation.

I was working at Intel from 2000 - 2003, and can remember exactly when the economy started to go south. It was in the fall of 2000 (only 7 months after Bush took office)... We had just posted record earnings for the last quarter of over 8.7 Billion... and yet the same day our stock plummeted... and so did everyone else's. All of the sudden everyone realized that all this "infinite growth" crap that was flying around wasn't true. The bubble began to burst...the Do-com's began to fail... causing problems with all traditional Hi-tech companies such as Intel. It then spread into the telecom... because now nobody wanted to buy all that newly available bandwidth. Since the dot-comers were all broke now after being so overpaid... it began to have a peripheral effect on the economy in general, from food service and parking lots, to cars and housing. Then came September 11th... bringing the airline and tourism economies to their knees. Even though we have a fairly resilient economy... there were just too many sectors struggling now... and we entered a good sized recession.

Now I don't see George Bush directly involved in any of the events that caused the recession. I think it's a safe bet to make that even if Gore had been in office, the tech bubble still would have burst...simply because it was not based on sound economics. 9/11 may or may not have happened if gore were in office...I don't know if the extremists who carried out that mission would have been "appeased" in time to make a difference (I say appeased because that's the only thing that might have made a difference, If say Gore decided to pull all troops from Saudi Arabia, which is what UBL was really so pissed off about in the first place... but anyway Clinton didn't want close that Saudi base to the best of my knowledge, so I don't see why gore would want to)

( Side note: one could argue that Iraq was indirectly responsible for 9/11... UBL offered to defend the Saudis from Iraq when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and was eyeing Saudi Arabia... but his home country shunned him...especially since he had already been kicked out if the country by his own people at that time. The Saudis and Kuwaitis then ASKED for our help... so we came and kicked some Iraqi ass. Ya... the main reason why we helped was to protect our oil supply... but geewiz... its sure too bad that your country looks out for you and TRIES to keep the gas prices from getting out of control.
Anyway...UBL was now thourghly pissed at the US... not only because we were a non Arab country in a Holy Islamic land... but because he had been shunned by his own people... And the US had been the heroes rather than him and his band of gorilla fighters.
Hence... if Iraq wouldn't have invaded... UBL wouldn't have a reason to be quite so pissed off.)

All in all... I think the evidence points towards ourselves (especially the IT crowd) as the reason for the tech slump, and the following recession. How many of you knew that you were being overpaid for your work in the tech heydays... and yet you took the job anyway??? I know I sure did! Why would I turn down the extra cash?!?! After all I was a tech... Not an economist. And sure we liked to complain about our pointy haired bosses who made really dumb decisions... but hey... if they were dumb enough to pay us so much... we would be dumb enough to stick around. We were all guilty by association.

Ill I ask is that people TRY to be reasonable... I don't think GWB is the greatest prez... but it seems foolish to try to paste all blame on one man (or party).

Re:faith-based accounting

[WindBourne]

Hold on there. Going after Reagan and W for their bad leadership, is in my mind, justified. Both have shown themselves to be irresponsible and have done far more damage to America than any single politician in the last 100 years (even more than Nixon).

But to go after Bush Sr. shows that you are simply hitting a bunch of republicans. Poppa Bush was handed an irresponsible deficit that was on its way up. By the end of his 4 years, He had started the turn in the deficit, which was the hard part. In particular, he started the budget cuts and raised taxes (which actually cost him the election). This did slow our economy, but it allowed Clinton to balance the budget. Fortunely, Clinton had the forsight to follow what poppa bush started and worked hand-in-hand with Greenspan.

Poppa Bush actually has shown that he has many times risked it all to help our country. He is a true patriot and was a great leader.

Re:faith-based accounting

[wes33]

nice rant, but I think the OP was about the 1990 recession

Re:faith-based accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, financial affairs aside, is it OK if we continue to slam George Bush Sr. for having the kind of ill-advised, cynically manipulative, publically duplicitous, heedless of long-term effect foreign policy that Reagan and Bush Jr. definitely followed?

Re:faith-based accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

If memory serves, Bush Sr. was also in office when the recession began. He was just the #2 guy instead of #1.

Re:faith-based accounting

[Zeinfeld]

But to go after Bush Sr. shows that you are simply hitting a bunch of republicans. Poppa Bush was handed an irresponsible deficit that was on its way up. By the end of his 4 years,

Hold it right there. You might be interested to know that George Bush Snr was actually a member of the Reagan administration. In fact he was even the Vice President!

Blaming the previous admin for problems when it was the other party is one thing. Blaming your own party is a different matter.

NASA probably did not get into this mess overnight, the issues in the report probably go back to Clinton, Bush Mk I and possibly even Reagan. But the administration has had three and a half years to turn the situation arround.

If you remember the original bill of goods that the Bush 2000 campaign sold the country it was 'OK George is a boob, but what really matters is the people he arround him and they will all be grown ups'.

Of course the editors of slashdot only get bothered when the story is NASA. But the mismanagement at NASA is only par for the course for this administration. They can't plan a war - which would not be such a big problem if they were not so keen to start them. The treasury team is fired for telling us that the war would cost money. The environment secretary resigns in disgust when she finds that environment policy is set by campaign contributors and VP Cheney in this administration.

Oh yes, and since 9/11 we have had six directors of counter-terrorism. Richard Clarke was merely the first to resign from the post in disgust, since then there has been a series of resignations for the same reason.

Re:faith-based accounting

[malarkey]

I was working at Intel from 2000 - 2003, and can remember exactly when the economy started to go south. It was in the fall of 2000 (only 7 months after Bush took office)... We had just posted record earnings for the last quarter of over 8.7 Billion... and yet the same day our stock plummeted... and so did everyone elses. All of the sudden everyone realized that all this "infinite growth" crap that was flying around wasnt true. The bubble began to burst...the Do-coms began to fail... causing problems with all traditional Hi-tech companies such as Intel. It then spread into the telecom... because now nobody wanted to buy all that newly available bandwidth. Since the dot-comers were all broke now after being so overpaid... it began to have a peripheral effect on the economy in general, from food service and parking lots, to cars and housing. Then came September 11th... bringing the airline and tourism economies to their knees. Even though we have a fairly resilient economy... there were just too many sectors struggling now... and we entered a good sized recession.

The US election was in 2000, and Bush took office in January of 2001.

Either the bubble burst before he was in office (which I would tend to believe) or the bubble burst in the fall after he was in office, due to 9/11.

Re:faith-based accounting

[WindBourne]

Hold it right there. You might be interested to know that George Bush Snr was actually a member of the Reagan administration. In fact he was even the Vice President!

Yes, but we do not know to what extent that Bush participated. In fact, Tthe general belief is that Reagan ran it all and that Poppa had very little say or control. Poppa Bush spoke against the vodoo economics (supply side) that Reagan preached, and showed that as soon as he got in, he worked at reversing the Reagan's economic approach. He started slowing spending and increased taxes, both very against what Reagan's admin pushed.

In the end, the answer is that "the buck stops here" needs to be applied against the president and not everybody below them. It is sad that presidents these days do not like taking responsibility for their own actions and/or those under them.

Re:faith-based accounting

[Doc Ruby]

1> I mentioned Bush Sr.'s recession, not Junior's
2> The Bush Jr. "unemployment" numbers are cooked
3> I wrote "in real terms", like headcount of unemployed, or wealth lost, or any other measure of economic damage
4> You can pick any single measure you like, but this economy is screwed worse than just a stock market speculation over-leverage
5> I wrote a long, complex sentence that is not a run-on
6> I'm not panicking - I retired before the bubble popped, and am doing rather well, in spite of the crappy economy
7> I'm not calming down until Bush is gone, gone, gone. And neither should you, if you want him out, because his "reelection" dirty tricks are likely to make his theft of the 2000 election look merely Nixonian.

makes your study of history look almost as cursory as your grammar and economics.

Re:faith-based accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

George Bush Sr. for having the kind of ill-advised, cynically manipulative, publically duplicitous, heedless of long-term effect foreign policy that Reagan and Bush Jr. definitely followed?

Hummmm. In what way was his policy similar to the other two?

Sr. kept his admin quiet except for when going to war in Kuwait (policy of speak softly and carry big stick). Sr. built a global colition that worked together to get rid of Iraq from their invastion of Kuwait. Sr. said what was to be the conditions (that iraq was to be removed from Kuwait), and he said what we would not do (invade Iraq). He kept his word.

In fact, just 4 years ago, he wrote an article in time mag that said that we should not invade iraq as that would simply help Al Qaida. He started the pull back of troops from other nations as part of the end of the cold war.

Reagan invaded little nations for no reasons. Likewise, he extended the Cold war by dropping the grain embargo against USSR (of course, that may have prevented USSR's collapse being horribly bloody or worse turning it to a real hot war).

Jr. invaded Iraq under the pretext of WMD, that Hussien works with Al Qaieda, and That Hussien is murdering his people. The only evidence of WMD that Jr. had was a known fakery from the brits. The only evidence of Al Qaeda / Iraq interaction was UBL ordering the defeat of Hussien and the return of Iraq to Musleum Law. And yes, he did murder his citizens.
But all of this ignores N. Korea who is murdering its citizens and truely has WMD that can hit USA. It also ignores the number of other nations that are busy murdering its citizens. All this shows that Jr. is persuing something other than rightousness.

Likewise, during Jr.'s 4 years, we have been attacked by Al Qaeda (9/11) for which he attacked Afghanastan and than allowed UBL and his group of murders to run loose. Likewise, we have had 2 seperate biological attacks against us. Now, Iraq is turning into a total quagmire that is hurting future American interest and world opinion (Jr. would have learned about quagmires had he done his duty). All Jr. can do is try and quiet the press with Patriot acts and gag orders, promise to catch murders and simply run up the deficits.

So with all that in mind, how exactly is Sr. anthing like Jr. or Reagan?

Re:faith-based accounting

[Doc Ruby]

Why not call the bigger layoffs worse under Bush Jr than in the 1930s? They're worse. So is practically every other measure. It's worse.

Everyone has an excuse they stopped taking risks and creating wealth starting around 2000. And the same (minority, but huge) gang of pooped Americans invited Bush Jr to manage the economy they were abandoning. And their boy is such a mismanager that even the resilience and vast wealth (and its production system) created under Clinton weren't enough to keep the spiral from descending ever downward. As the hype machine receeded from the real gains, Clinton/Gore's team was busy juggling the "soft landing" you read about in the papers. They would likely have pulled it off, too, if the elected Gore weren't robbed of his inauguration - judging from their deft handling of so many other macroeconomic opportunities and crises.

You can blame us for pissing off bin Laden. More to blame is Bush (apparently deliberately) letting down our defenses to allow bin Laden to do enough damage on TV to "justify" invading Iraq (not actually connected to the planebombings).

The IT "crowd" was doing great work through the bubble. If that crowd includes the fake marketers riding the waves and expense accounts, the pipsqueak managers hiring highschool typers as programmers, child stock analysts selling stocks without any regard to their actual possible value, and crooked accountants on the take, then sure, IT was as responsible for the pop as for the bubble. But those sleazebags are managers, not technologists. And if you look at where they spent their votes in 2000, I'd bet that the techs went largely for Gore, while the culprits went overwhelmingly for Bush. Whether out of guilt, sympathy for a lying freeloader, or just another rotten decision doesn't matter. They got more of their favorite executive decision: "squander".

Bush Jr. is the worst president we can remember anything about. I don't "blame everything" on him. I just decide what needs to be changed to fix his disasters. He's worse than John Kerry, who will likely win the election this year, unless Bush Jr whips up an "October Surprise" witches brew from his grisly bag of terrorist attack, power outage, assassination attempt, Asian nuclear crisis, or any other handy screwup he's enabling, to peak just in time to screw with the election - or cancel it entirely. You might feel guilty about getting paid more than you're worth in the 1990s. But don't take that out on the rest of us. I did a great job in the 1990s, I got paid almost adequately for it, and I'm continuing my quality work by promoting a White House upgrade ASAP.

Re:faith-based accounting

[shawnce]

Note... I don't have an agenda other then to point out inaccuracies in or the issues behind sufficiently vague statements, I will leave my politics out of it.

----

You do realize that a lot of the surplus came from the taxes generated by the false economy that was the .com bubble, both during the bubble and as it collapsed (massive capital gain tax income at the peak and initial slide of the markets). Additionally large personal and business income tax proceed directly results from the false employment that took place during the .com bubble.

If you look at the federal outlays as a percentage of GDP (which is a good way (but not the only way) to relate numbers from differing years and decades) you see the following and it doesn't support your unqualified quadrupled statement. If fact it points out that the government outlays are still smaller in relationship to GDP then during the Reagan years (or Carter / Bush Sr. and half of the Clinton years).

Carter: 20.7 (1977), 20.7, 20.1, and 21.7 (1980)
Reagan: 22.2 (1981), 23.1, 23.5, 22.1, 22.8, 22.5, 21.6, and 21.2 (1988).
Bush Sr.: 21.2 (1989), 21.8, 22.3, and 22.1 (1992)
Clinton: 21.4 (1993), 21.0, 20.7, 20.3, 19.6, 19.2, 18.6, 18.4 (2001)
Bush Jr.: 18.6 (2001), 19.4, 19.9, and 20.2 (est.)

Also generating more debt then previous 200+ years is an interesting but inaccurate statement from what I can see (without some clarification on your part). Looking at the budget numbers I don't see how you came up with that, since for example at the start of Bush Jr's term (2001) the nation debt was 5,769,881 (millions of dollars) and as of 2003 it is 6,760,014 and 6,760,014-5,769,881 = 990,133 and 990,133 is less then 5,769,881 that he start with (which existed before he got into office). As a percentage the debit has grown by 17% or on average 5.7% per year under Bush Jr.

Anyway note that the 5,769,881 was built up in the "200+ years" before him.

As a comparison lets look at Clinton's term which started with 4,351,044 (1993), 5,181,465 (1996) and 5,628,700 (2000). If you take the whole term... 5,628,700-4,351,044=1,277,656 and as a percentage... 29.4% increase or 3.7% per year under Clinton.

Note that Clinton had a stable and then booming economy for a large part of his term (large gains in GDP) and relatively small, generally decreasing spending on national defense and related items. Bush Jr. started with a rapidly sliding economy (reduced tax income) and an attack on the US soil, not seen sense WWII. As a result national defense (in this case FBI, police, fire, health, military, etc.) spending increased as well as a couple of large military actions, wars.

Of course you should likely look at the numbers in the terms of GDP as well but I didn't bother but if curious: 32.5% in 1981, 53.1% in 1989, 66.1% in 1993, 57.5% in 2001, 62.4% in 2004 and 67.5% (estimated) in 2005.

For the fun of it look at around the WWII time period... 52.4% in 1940, 97.6% in 1944, 121.7% in 1946, 98.2% in 1948, etc.

Anyway look at the real numbers in this budget history document (PDF) and draw your own conlusions. Just remember to also factor in what was taking place during the various time periods.

(I hope I didn't copy any wrong numbers out of this document when doing the above... also the term dates I used should likely be move on year later since the next president cannot greatly affect things until the second term of his presidency... also note that the budget/spend is controlled by congress more so then just by the president).

Re:faith-based accounting

[Doc Ruby]

What general ordered that belief that Reagan was in charge of anything? Bush Sr. was in charge of deregulating the banks - we got the S&L heist (1.5T/6T GNP). Bush Sr was "in the loop" (despite his lies to the contrary) on Iran/Contra, as the covert intelligence orgs, that he created and fostered while running the CIA, took over foreign policy (also Bush Sr.'s primary expertise). He marveled at the "voodoo economics", then got behind them - just like he marveled at the mannekin Reagan during their vicious 1980 primary battles, then got behind him. Bush Sr. validated the model for the Bush Jr. dummy on Cheney's lap, and probably personally guided its repeat.

Reagan was out to lunch (notorious for napping during cabinet meetings) that, for example, he revealed his entire management style to Jim Tower. Tower had gently returned to Reagan's office for a generously open-minded followup to a previous interview in which Reagan seemed to take responsibility for ordering the illegal shipment of American surface-to-air missiles through Israel to Iran. When asked if "he really meant to say that" (itself a telling clue to the real deal with ol' grampa's puddinghead) all Reagan could do was go to his desk, pull out a script, pronounce "this is what I'm supposed to say", and read a weasel statement from his lawyers.

I don't know where you get this "patriot" and "risk taker" credit for Bush Sr. He took a well-oiled machine, the American economy, and turned it to his personal service, largely destroying it. While representing oily Houston in Congress during the OPEC/OilCo extortion, serving Nixon as first consul to China, running the CIA, running the Reagan/Bush/Quayle White Houses, commanding the Carlyle Group, he's walked into the corridors of privelege, and taken their exploitation apparati to the limits and beyond in generating power and wealth for himself. All at the expense of you, me, and every other human without a multinational corporation (and many even with one). The only risk he's actually taken was gambling that he could pull off these unprecedented crimes, but he knew he had the system wired well enough that he'd never pay personally. While the rest of us pay, dearly, every day, for the rest of our lives.

Re:faith-based accounting

[Glonoinha]

I hate to be the one that breaks it to the world (agreeing with you in the process /grin), but the US economy was in a steep dive when Bush took it over in 2001. If I had to describe it, envision being the driver of a bus and being pissed off because you got caught getting a BJ by one of the passengers. Put a brick on the gas pedal, aim it towards a cliff and tap Bush on the shoulder and say hey you wanna drive for a while? Bush gets in the driver's seat and the next minute it flys off the cliff.

See also : prime lending rate 5x higher than it is now, outsourcing, a million H1-B visas issued, massive overvaluation of the tech sector, all the actual Enron operations, not getting OBL when several other governments had him and offered him to us, letting 20 Al-Q gooks take pilot training, giving nuclear secrets to China ... I can go on if you like.

Re:faith-based accounting

[Doc Ruby]

Deficit as % of GDP does not reflect the problem with the Republican financial disasters that stretch through our lifetimes. The first clue is the "D" in "GDP". American productivity has increasingly globalized, such that under Reagan government economists changed the measures from gross "national" product to "domestic". But (ironically) includes money gained from overseas production and even consumption, which transfers costs borne by governments out of the expenses accounting. Those foreign expenses are typically larger per revenue dollar, as they're typically socialist countries (Europe, China, India). With all the dog-wagging accounting definition tails, that kind of comparison is so self-selecting as to be useless (except in conning educated voters). The real numbers are "per capita debt". They're horrifying, unless you're a bank, in which case they're almost anaesthetically euphoric.

I might not have been clear enough grammatically (but certainly was, chronologically) to indicate that it was the *Reagan* debt that exceeded all prior American debt combined. With the Reagan debt to contend with, America *can't* borrow the debt required to exceed its previous debt - that kind of money doesn't exist in a ~$30T global economy. Moreover, the Bush debt is just getting started, with his corporate/fatcat tax cuts, $3T(!) budget that includes open-ended "projects" like the booming Terror War catastrophe, drug-company entitlement giveaways. Those economists willing to guess are saying $12-15T in debt over the next 10 years or so. That certainly exceeds the even the $6T debt Bush Jr. "inherited" from the 12-year Reagan/Bush swindle, despite the sound management during the 8-year sanity of Clinton/Gore.

BTW, note that the unprecedentedly Republican partisan Bush has enjoyed control not only of the White House and Congress, but also the Supreme Court which appointed him, and has stayed in bed with him ever since. Even with your 1-year latency, the BushCo government has had everything they could want for 2.5 years. It's no surprise that those years have seen everything turn to disaster for most everyone, except Bush, Cheney, and their partners in crime. Note that somehow, Cheney's Teton County, Wyoming, is somehow the richest county in America. C'mon: the fingerprints of the thieves are everywhere on the burning building we call our planet. Covering up won't make it any less bad for us.

I also note that the Clinton/Gore surplus was *actually collected*. Then *actually spent* by Bush/Cheney. The Clinton/Gore management was so sound that they paid down the deficit, and accumulated a vast defense against the economic fallout from the wildcat economy they managed so well. If you spent the $5T surplus on the 10% of the 100M American workers at risk in the globalizing info economy, that's $500K per worker. If *I* had stolen the 2000 election, posing as the "education president", I would have spent $50K per worker on college tuition for each of our 4 years together, $20K per worker per year on their expenses, and driven that money through the education system. I'd still have $1.5T to put out all kinds of fires, without resorting to debt. Instead, we squandered that on corporate/fatcat handouts that do proportionately little to grow any sustainable economics, and a giant, open-ended Iraqi+ quagmire that is deastroying everyone's chances at a working global economy.

Re:faith-based accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of comparisons, the economy is not going well. I think it worthwhile to look at this graph - specifically, do the graph from 1969 (the year Nixon took office) to 2004. Note that under President Carter, infamous as a "bad president," the percentage of the population employed rose dramatically. Under Reagan's first term, the rate dropped precipitously, only rising above Carter's levels in Reagan's second term. Under Bush 41 the rate plateaued, then dropped again, and stayed at the lower level until the end of his term. When Clinton came in, we saw a dramatic growth in the employment rates, which lasted until Bush 43 took office, at which time the employment rate took another nosedive which seems, finally, to have plateaued. It seems to have hit bottom in September and March, and is coming back up; but it is coming back up from a rate that is two full percentage points lower than the one that prevailed in the first month of the Bush presidency.

The overall rise in this rate from the 1940s is probably due to the much larger percentage of women entering the workforce, and the smaller percentage of those taking early retirement. But after 1990 or so, I doubt gender differences are really significant for this rate. The natural "full employment" is likely around 64% - until the baby-boom hits retirement age, at which point we can expect to see much lower numbers.

Unfortunately, BLS doesn't have numbers for the great depression, but I would expect them to be significantly below the threshold of this chart.

Employment-population ratio (Current Population Survey)
The proportion of the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years and over that is employed

Re:faith-based accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

While I wouldn't say Bush sr is a patriot for all of the things you've mentioned and more, he did set the economy on a better course at the risk of his own re-election. Maybe his old age and grand children defrosted his heart a little from the Reagan years. Or maybe that is what they meant by calling him a wuss.

Re:faith-based accounting

[Doc Ruby]

His actions since 1992, for example backing the massacres throughout central Africa where his Carlyle Group has been making a literal killing in their mining businesses, demonstrate that he still has no heart. When Bush Sr. raised taxes, he was funding his own budgets for his reelected second term. He caught heat for raising taxes on people, when he publicly promised not to. He of course did not propose taxing corporations their appropriate share. If he hadn't raised taxes, the would have killed the goose whose golden eggs he's been sucking his whole career. The only choice he actually had was in promising not to raise taxes, which he lied about just to defeat Dukakis. In an unusual turn of events, it came back to haunt him, in the PR of the superior talent of Bill Clinton. There are those who say (with much persuasive documentation) that Bush Sr. offered only a face-saving token campaign, expecting the 1992-1996 term to inherit the damage from the rapacious Reagan/Bush years. And lacked the vision to forsee the promise of the global Internet, out of the shadow of the Cold War, stimulating people around the world to help each other create the wealth. Luckily that singleminded corporate crook was off the field, and real managers handled the ball, when the game got underway.

Re:faith-based accounting

[shawnce]

The real numbers are "per capita debt"

For those interested the following is per capita debt adjusted into 2003 dollars (picked decade boundaries for the hell of it and to make math easier).

1940 - $502.65
1950 - $1,288.72 (15.64% annual rate of change)
1960 - $1,000.20 (-2.24%)
1970 - $880.54 (-1.20%)
1980 - $892.14 (0.13%)
1990 - $1,812.23 (10.31%)
2000 - $2,188.92 (2.08%)
2003 - $2,372.25 (2.79%)

Based on population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau (with 2000 and 2003 estimated from 1999 numbers using 0.9 annual growth). Also I used numbers from here to scale dollar values to 2003 levels. I also used the total gross federal debt not the total debit held by the public... Gross Federal debt is composed both of Federal debt held (owned) by the public and Federal debt held by Federal Government accounts, which is mostly held by trust funds. Federal debt held by the public consists of all Federal debt held outside the Federal Government accounts.

For example in 2003 the gross federal debit was 6,760,014 and total owned by the public was 3,913,607 and in 1970 (scaled to 2003 dollars) it was 1,805,565.54 and 1,342,358.52 (all in millions of dollars). Feel free to work with the total public debt instead if you want. In general the ratio of public debt to that in trust funds has been reducing, in other words more and more of the federal debt is in the form of trust funds (social security, medicare, civil service, military retirement, etc.).

Re:faith-based accounting

[Doc Ruby]

Thanks - nice research & report. For kicks, I correlate these decades' debts with their dominant presidential party (10 vs 4 year cycles make it approximate):

1940 - D $502.65
1950 - D $1,288.72 (15.64% annual rate of change)
1960 - R $1,000.20 (-2.24%)
1970 - D $880.54 (-1.20%)
1980 - R $892.14 (0.13%)
1990 - R $1,812.23 (10.31%)
2000 - D $2,188.92 (2.08%)
2003 - R $2,372.25 (2.79%)

I note that the 1950 numbers include fighting WWII (largely nondiscretionary increases), while the 1960 numbers include the dividends from winning that war. And that the 1980 numbers include Carter's single term, during which the rate decreased from the outweighing Nixon+Ford terms preceeding it. So it's pretty clear that Republican presidents increase the debt, by extremely large amounts, whenever they get the chance, while Democrats decrease it. What's even more clear is that Democratic presidents are much better managers of both growth and decline than are Republicans. Unless you've got a corporation that lives on those federal budgets, in which case the mismanagement is better for you, at everyone else's expense.

Re:faith-based accounting

[shawnce]

You can say lots of things with numbers depending how you focus on them.

The 1950-1960 numbers didn't really have any war dividends (in the traditional sense of the phase) but saw a strong growth in the economy during that time which increased tax income (among other tax code changes). In fact spending on military was rather higher during this time period.

The following outlines the percentage of total federal outlays for nations defense... notice the effects of the start of the cold war.

1950 - 32.2%
1952 - 68.1%
1954 - 62.4%
1956 - 60.2%
1958 - 56.8%
1960 - 52.2%
1962 - 50.8%
1964 - 46.2%
1966 - 43.2%
1968 - 46.0%
1970 - 41.8% ...
1978 - 23.8%
1980 - 22.7%
1982 - 24.8%
1984 - 26.7%
1986 - 27.6%
1988 - 27.3%
1990 - 23.9% ...
1993 - 20.7% ...
2000 - 18.4% ...
2003 - 18.8%

(got tired of typing hence the "...", look at the history doc for all numbers)

Simple explanation...

[polecat_redux]

That $565 Billion is so Bush can buy enough Duplo blocks to personally put a man on Mars....

Re:Simple explanation...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah its funny how ur the same type of person to bitch about the 87 billion to go to war with iraq, but this. ehh. not such a big deal. hypocrite..

Re:Simple explanation...

[polecat_redux]

Funny, b/c I thought I *was* bitching about it... Perhaps you should stop waving your flag and start thinking for yourself.

The Money's Going to LMIT...

[Anonymous Coward]

You heard it here first - don't discount it; they don't!

Re:The Money's Going to LMIT...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's http://www.it.lockheedmartin.com/ for the unitiated. Understand the truth. Mod me down, biatch!

Re:The Money's Going to LMIT...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never been unitiated (except, perhaps from the Boy Scouts), but how could Lockheed Martin be charging too much? Perhaps someone should contact Charles.Elachi@jpl.nasa.gov or Eugene.L.Tattini@jpl.nasa.gov.

I agree

[Chuck Chunder]

it's not exactly rocket science.

The usual. . .

[grolaw]

Bush and his policies just continue to cut a swath through the core of US agencies. No, he didn't do it out of a vacuum. . .

NASA has been under funded since the NIXON administration. Every year since the last of the Moon missions NASA has been yoked to the Albatross of politicians who demand more and more from smaller and smaller budgets. Remember Senator Garn hitching a ride?

What? A short list:

Spacelab - allowed to drop from a decaying orbit in 1979 - but the budget cuts made it apparent in 1977 that the station was doomed.

Spacehab, gravity & solar probes failed littering Near Earth Orbits with debris - in fact, the problem of tracking debris has become a major project for NASA and the DOD. Of the space going powers we, alone, are responsible for more crap in orbit than any other nation by at least an order of magnitude.

The Shuttle project has killed two crews and the hopes of many veteran staff. Attrition of experienced staff has hit a new high while budget constraints gut the applicant pool.

Just do a search for the term, "mission" at http://kscsearch.ksc.nasa.gov/ to see the last 30 years for yourself.

What does Bush do in the wake of the latest shuttle disaster? He cuts funds for the Hubble and calls for a manned mission to Mars. The mere pennies to save Hubble he denies because his "core 'Christian' constituency" has issues with the idea of cosmology. Destroy one of the most effective deep space imaging systems ever and mandate manned missions to Mars! All of this must be accomplished with ever-decreasing budgets.

NASA in financial disarray? How could it be anything else...

Re:The usual. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

SKYlab, not Spacelab. Spacelab was a module constructed by ESA, to be used in the cargobay of NASA's shuttles.

Also, I agree. Slashing continued support for Hubble is wrong, and seriously, I don't get where he's gonna find the funding for manned Mars missions. I hope he can, though, because it will be a boost for interplanetary science. It's also utterly sad that he's such a fundamentalist, which makes me wonder why he wants this new exploration of the solar system. Certainly not because of the science!

Re:The usual. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

What does Bush do in the wake of the latest shuttle disaster? He cuts funds for the Hubble and calls for a manned mission to Mars. The mere pennies to save Hubble he denies because his "core 'Christian' constituency" has issues with the idea of cosmology. Destroy one of the most effective deep space imaging systems ever and mandate manned missions to Mars! All of this must be accomplished with ever-decreasing budgets.

Um... Based on the results of Mars Express, there's probably some kind of life to be found on Mars. Wouldn't people who have problems with cosmology also have problems with that?

And if Hubble fails tomorrow, that's not going to destroy already-existing cosmology. And (useful as it is) Hubble's demise would not stop the work going on with Chandra and WMAP... Nor would it prevent the work which will be done with future observatories like GLAST. And the work being done on the surface of the Earth with neutrino astrophysics and very large telescopes only continues to ramp up.

Bush and NASA may have made some bad decisions. But the way that you choose to complain actually hurts your argument. Your post spends more verbage describing your personal dislike of the man than it does on the effects of current US policies.

Re:The usual. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also utterly sad that he's such a fundamentalist, which makes me wonder why he wants this new exploration of the solar system

It's the puritain perogative? Perhaps he wants to seek out and search for whatever remaining pockets of single-cellular life on Mars may still exist, so that they may be introduced to the word of Jesus Christ.

Re:The usual. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Spacehab, gravity & solar probes failed littering Near Earth Orbits with debris - in fact, the problem of tracking debris has become a major project for NASA and the DOD. Of the space going powers we, alone, are responsible for more crap in orbit than any other nation by at least an order of magnitude.

The Former Soviet Union/Russia holds this honor. A russian satellite just doesn't last as long as an american or european one. Make any judgement call you want about the relative quality of their satellites, but this is an observed fact which must be accepted.

To compensate for this, they have to launch more satellites to keep the same number of functioning satellites up. Russia has launched at least three times as many launch vehicles as the rest of the world. Maybe that's why they can do it for so much less than the americans can...

Combine this with the former Soviet Union's "I don't care about the environment/space debris" attitude, which led to a lot of their satellites and especially upper stages exploding. The vast majority of space junk up there, therefore, was launched from Russia.

Re:The usual. . .

[Whatever99]

I disagree with you, grolaw. In effect you are saying that NASA needs more money but I today's news clearly demonstrates that they haven't responsibly managed the moneies the have already used. Your implied solution would make the problem much worse by rewarding poor fiscal respnosibility of NASA! You note problems with their specific missions but instead of questioning the competance of NASA you blame under funding. I have never heard a government agency complain that it is over funded! It is the nature of humans to demand more money. The problem isn't the amount of money NASA recieves. Perhaps the problem is that they got the money in the first place. Who says only government can do science and space exploration? Fact is many private companies build and maintain space equipment for themselves and NASA. When one thing fails, try something else or at least have an alternate system in place and see which works better!

Re:The usual. . .

[grolaw]

I am saying exactly what I said: that NASA has been starved of funding since 1970 and that politicians and their appointees have required more and more from NASA with less and less.

This funding crisis leads to two murderous flights of the shuttle. Richard Feynman and a ton of other really brilliant people investigated the first disaster. We really didn't need to investigate much because the foam strikes were a known problem - but management denied it and had the crews continue to risk their lives.

Do you have any idea what those crewmembers would make in the private sector? Do you have any idea how little we pay these people? M.D., Ph.D.'s are common as are dual Ph.D.'s. The flight-crew people are committed to the space program, as are the majority of the engineers / scientists / and managers.

We have allowed the government to erode the safety standards to the degree that we have lost TWO entire crews.

Meanwhile, Adelphi communications had a Billion dollars stolen by three people. That would fund NASA for a decade...and the three wizards who stole that much money are going to have to give back only half....

Look, funny accounting is endemic today. It is a reflection of this era and government. It won't change until we have another Watergate.

Re:The usual. . .

[Whatever99]

You are incorrect. Both shuttle disasters have been blamed on NASA culture and not under funding. Here is a link for you to jog your short memory:

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/08/26/106 16 63791292.html

Search google for "nasa culture shuttle disaster" and you will see many references.

You lead the argument into areas that are unrelated and misleading. Your logic is flawed. I suggest your motive is continued NASA existence and greater funding. You want more money. What's new? You are another leech on the public coffers. I'm sick of the government taking my money and wasting it and also of hearing from people like you never stop crying for more! When will it stop! When will the people of the United States demand full accountability?! When will We The People question the competence of NASA to do their job well? Can We The People stop NASA? I hope so but I fear not. We have lost control and that is loss of freedom and the ability to keep a check on excesses of Government.

Here's an idea: Full accountability means that a punishment needs to be carried out for broken rules! NASA must be punished, not rewarded with more money for not doing their job! Maybe part of the solution that you may like is that they could be rewarded for successes.

NASA should not be rewarded with more money after never fixing the problems in seventeen years since the first shuttle crash in 1986. It was publicly announced and a congressional trial/hearing was held about this.

Your point that "funny accounting is endemic today" is ridiculous in that it implies that it's okay for this behavior. So should we turn a blind eye to criminal behavior and government corruption? No! I think this fiasco is worse than Watergate. Your implying that it is not, in way says this is not such a bad thing that NASA has done. I challenge that notion!

To think for yourself you must question authority! In this case, NASA and the feds!

Unpleasant meeting

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing some people will be sitting through a very unpleasant meeting.

Boss : "So you guys managed to lose track of half a trillion dollars?"

How do you answer that question?

Well you know what they say

[back@slash]

$565 billion here. $565 billion there. Pretty soon you're talking about real money.

rtfa

[daniil]

nasa's missing "only" $2 billion. from the article: " There were hundreds of millions of dollars of "unreconciled" funds and a $2 billion difference between what NASA said it had and what was actually in its accounts."

if that be the case, then where does this $565 billion number come from? it seems that they have simply counted the same pile of money for several times, without noticing that it has already been taken into account: "a $40 billion contract that stretched over nine years and several separate NASA centers generated $120 billion worth of entries, and these were turned over to the auditors."

Re:A government agency with financial discrepancie

[Undefined Parameter]

Let's be realistic, here; we're talking about the USA, where corporations are, by and large, getting off the hook one way or another left and right. Prominent examples of this can be found in Enron (barely a slap on the rist of those most responsible), Microsoft (a slap on the wrist, at most), Martha Stewart (convicted, but sentenced to a minimum security prison that seems to have been the inspiration for the no-security facility Sideshow Bob was sentenced to do time in), Halliburton (yet to face any sort of prosecution whatsoever, to my knowledge), and Wal*Mart (they find out in a self-audit that they were abusing labor laws... and the governments of those various states let them off after they promise to fix it).

I'm not sure which is more easily and quickly held responsible, but I'd still rather have NASA around, trying to do the job. I'd explain further, but my mind is all discombobulated from lack of sleep.

~UP

Re:Perhaps militarization is the solution

[Undefined Parameter]

Ok, last comment in this thread while I have no sleep, I promise!

The US isn't a colony because the former colonists kicked the British out... twice. The rest was taken from Mexico in a war, bought from Russia and Spain, and taken, by treaty, purchase, and war, from the Native Americans. (We only bought the right to obtain the land from the French, not the land itself.)

As for the idea about putting the area above a country within the definition of that country's borders, I think there may have already been a treaty signed and passed. Or perhaps it was a U.N. resolution... either way, space is (and should be) apolitical. If the situation were to happen where borders extended for (in example) three hundred miles above the surface, then the terrestrial international situation would worsen, because it then really would be (technological) might makes right in space.

As for the "wild west" analogy, I suggest reading Ezra Meeker's Personal Experiences on the Oregon Trail Sixty Years Ago, which is the 1912, 5th edition of the book. There was surprisingly more (and more democratic) justice in the American West than one might otherwise assume.

Closing note: Be patient, for we may yet achieve our dreams of mastering space. All progress takes time.

~UP

Let's get this mess cleaned up and ...

[Anonymous Coward]

...re-pacify the public! Bushs' cronies will need a new trough to saddle up to when the cash dries up in Iraq.

Sleight of hand will refocus our attention to the occasional 'terrorist' or welfare cheat.

Our federal beauracracy is once again, proving itself inept and mismanaged. Makes the drive to work everyday worthwhile.

We are a wonderfully passive public, these days. Must be all the anti-depressants...

yet again, private industry does better!

[kevin lyda]

565 billion in bad accounting? pathetic.

yet again gov't fails to lead the industry. look at the accounting issues in tyco, enron and worldcom. looks like nasa is just trying to play catchup to private industry!

Moon maybe, not Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

As NASA sets course for the moon and Mars...

Just a point to pick. There's nothing about going to Mars in the space initiative. That's something that Bush tacked onto the end of his speech (and doesn't even appear in the official transcript, showing that the transcript was written before he even gave the speech).

Quite frankly, Nasa can't even get into space at the moment. Mars is a prety far fetched dream.

Isn't that correct behaviour?

[Chemisor]

> once as an erroneous credit in one column, then as
> a debit to delete the error, then as a credit in
> the correct column.

Although this makes more entries, the end result is correct. In fact, GNUCash (http://www.gnucash.org) does this for ALL your entries, and calls it double-booking or something. Maybe they just need to upgrade to the latest build?

Where is the money?

[benjyfrank]

It does compute.

According to its own auditors, the US Government is posting not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars in "undocumented transactions." This means, the financial officers responsible simply have no idea what a particular financial flow was used for, or lack the paperwork to rule out fraud or theft.

The IT contractors that built the systems that can't keep track of the money (AMS, Dyncorp, CCC, CACI, and Lockheed Martin among others) have had their multimillion dollar "support" contracts extended year after year.

To quote:

From Department of Defense (DoD)...
"We reported that DoD processed $1.1 trillion in unsupported accounting entries to DoD Component financial data used to prepare departmental reports and DoD financial statements for FY 2000."
David K. Steensma
Acting Assistant Inspector General
for Auditing for the DoD
February 26, 2002

From Housing & Urban Development (HUD)...
"At the time we discontinued our audit work... An additional 242 adjustments totaling about $59.6 billion, were made to adjust fiscal year 1999 activity."
Susan Gaffney
HUD Inspector General
March 22, 2000

"Trillions of dollars in "unsupported adjustments" means trillions of dollars unaccounted for. What's going on? Where is the money? How could this happen? Where are the checks and balances? How much more has gone missing? Is this happening in the other government agencies too? What would happen if a corporation failed to pass an audit like this? Or a taxpayer? Who is responsible for this? Who can we trust to fix it? ... see Frequently Asked Questions and Who's in Charge? for details."

whereisthemoney

Dammit, Jim!

[smchris]

This is rocket science, not accounting!

Guess it shows which is harder.

auditing money, auditing humans

[zogger]

That 6% figure of unemployment is just not true, not in any practical meaningful sense. They don't count people who have exhausted unemployment insurance benefits, those people are stricken from the official tally, and that's quite a large number now. There are perhaps millions of chronically un- or under- employed people out there now. And they DO count any part time job, no matter how meagre it is, into the "employed" figures, they make no distinctions there, which is quite misleading when you want to look at the economy as a whole. You work one day a week, it goes into the tally looking like a real full time job. that just don't compute. You hang out a shingle as a consultant, take a few jobs, but spend the bulk of your time still not working, it's still classed as if it was a full time job. And more and more even reported jobs, which can be classed as full-part time, are held by people who can't give them up, even though those jobs simply can't maintain any living level they might have held previously, and they can't find better, so they stick with it. That's why we have record mortgage defaults, and record bankruptcies, which are part of looking at the over all economic health. A lot of those folks are just constantly downsized, sometimes all the way into "no" job, and a lot of times into a less well-paying job or a less-hours worked job, but they started at a higher level. In the past, you workled your way up, now people are finding it harder to even maintain a level, and millions keep getting force-dropped down. Our economy has been going BACKWARDS for several years now,well, 20 years basically, and they try every way they can to make it look like it isn't. It's very common now for people to work long times in jobs with well under 40 hours a week, let alone any over-time pay, etc, like was true in years past, and any benefits have dropped as well, all things averaged out. Yet, wall street and government keep insisisting their methods are working, and the economy is getting better. But, you have balance of trade deficits, and levels of debt versus savings to look at, compared to years past,which again prove they are lying in general terms.

It's is NOT getting better, it's not even constant, the economy is retreating, it's getting worse.

Basically, you can double that unemployment figure, and maybe it's higher,and then break it down further by demographics,geography, race, etc. for example,in some urban areas it's already at 30% or so with younger black people, but those are just estimates, because they have no way to really know what they are, no adequate sampling methods exist.

They cook the books, and fail to keep any sort of accurate records, because it's impossible, AND because no way would they publically admit to double figures over-all, because it's a pychological and market driven level that they just can't deal with.

Re:auditing money, auditing humans

[Anonymous Coward]

With regards to unemployment in general, you obviously are unable to do simple math, unless you are ignoring all the real statistics.

And the cause of urban youth unemployment in the U.S. can be easily directly traced to two main causes, minimum wage laws and big city politicians beholden to teacher's unions. Based on your posting record, you are most likely in favor of both of those, so I don't see why you are complaining about the consequences.

Re:auditing money, auditing humans

[zogger]

oh yes, it's all imaginary. That's why a lot of the presidential election bantering is about "jobs", because there is so little unemployment. That's what's drawing a lot of the crowds at some campaign stops, people have noticed that they are not working. It sneaks up on you eventually come bill paying time. they look around, see jobs going overseas, jobs that stay here are being slipped to undocumented immigrants, and they wonder "why" this is going down.

So do I.

We are a soverign nation that looks out for it's OWN citizens first, or we aren't. Either borders and patriotism have meaning, or they don't. Either the people elect reps to represent them, or they merely hire-on paid off industry spokespeople to pass laws for some international companies, while maintaining some illusion of self government and a little rational nationalism.

As to minimum wage, yes, as long as there isn't a maximum wage or some equivalent thereof,anything to stem the tide of returning to serfdom and maximum monopolistic exploitation, and as long as they have an income tax system and legal personhood for corporations instead of import/export and excise -use taxes and named-humans responsible for their actions as replacements respectively.

As to unions, yes, in general, I think they are pretty necessary now, as to the public government mandated teachers unions, I am in favor of home schooling and private schooling, and eliminating the entire federal department of education. If that means less public teachers, so be it. If they can exist in a private setting, and get a decent wage, more power to them. I LIKE teachers for the most part, I dislike a lot of the agenda of the NEA, way too radical big government for me, too much social engineering brainwash action is emphasized. I am in favor of constitutionally limited government, and some over all decent prrotections for the people under the general welfare clause, protections against exploitation, fraud and abuse. For better or worse, they put it in there, it can be abused, and it has, but in some situations it's a good idea. It's on a case by case basis, which immediately removes it from a single thread sort of discussion, as there are literally thousands of different "types" of cases that you could discuss.

Re:auditing money, auditing humans

[jlgolson]

Maybe they should get a goddamn job? If they can't find one where they live, MOVE SOMEWHERE WHERE THERE IS A JOB AVAILABLE.

If there isn't a job in Podunk, New Jersey, move somewhere else. Get a different degree. Move to India. There are jobs there. Oh, you don't want to move to India? Guess now you're being picky about things and that's your problem not mine.

Maybe instead of taking unemployment benefits you should have saved when you had the chance?

what do you think they are....

[Anonymous Coward]

Rocket Scientists?

so what code...

[zogger]

...can people put into their clipboard, then go over there and click on the link, and have it uploaded to the malicious website and hose that turkey's box? Seems like if the dude is asking for bits and bytes, might as well give it to him!

Re:URL IS BAD! and clipboard text stealing

[Skreech]

I hope your clipboard didn't contain anything you didn't want this guy to see.

Heh, what a stupid troll the original was, then. Making people copy and paste the link just before stealing their clipboard text. Duuuuh.

I copied about 16 megs of random letters and numbers and tried going to that link a few times, just for good measure.

yet another reason to get rid of nasa

[toiletmonster]

yet another example in an endless series of examples of inefficiency, incompetence and government bureacracy showing why we should lose the whole nasa organization.

government has no business being involved in this. if people really want to go to space they will pay for the product. capitalism is the most direct form of democracy.

think about all the good the private sector could do with an extra 14 billion dollars. thats about 60 bucks a person. it doesn't sound like much but what have i ever received for my investments over the years? velcro? i want my money back.

and were we really suffering before velcro? is it really such a leap of faith to think that private individuals could have come up with velcro on their own. sure the private sector might have invented it 10 years later, but it would have been done at a fraction of the cost.

Re:yet another reason to get rid of nasa

[ColdWetDog]

"think about all the good the private sector could do with an extra 14 billion dollars. thats about 60 bucks a person. it doesn't sound like much but what have i ever received for my investments over the years? velcro? i want my money back."

Yeah, the private sector: Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, sock puppets, Internet connected refrigerators.

I'll give my 60 bucks to NASA, thanks.

Re:yet another reason to get rid of nasa

[toiletmonster]

but i'd rather keep my 60 bucks and buy chocolate.

the point is you have a choice in the private sector. if you want to invest in internet connected refigerators, you can. i had to invest in nasa/velcro or go to jail.

its about freedom. the higher taxes are, the less freedom you have, because government decides where its going to invest your money.

Re:yet another reason to get rid of nasa

[toiletmonster]

actually its not 60 bucks a year per person. its closer to $350 a year per person. nasa's budget is $86 billion.

(source: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/14/bush.spac e/)

Re:yet another reason to get rid of nasa

[ColdWetDog]

....its about freedom. the higher taxes are, the less freedom you have, because government decides where its going to invest your money.

Who said anything about lowering taxes? If NASA didn't exist, you wouldn't get that $60 (or $350 or whatever) back because you would go out and buy chocolate and raise your cholesterol and get a heart attack and run up large medical bills (which the government just might have to pay for).

Therefore, it's much better for everyone if they just keep your money and spend it on something important.

But seriously, as multiple other posters have noted a)NASA's part of the budget is miniscule and b)the money they're talking about seems to have misplaced a few powers of ten somewhere.

Re:yet another reason to get rid of nasa

[danratherfan]

I believe the article meant NASA's budget is 86 billion over a 5 year period. It doesn't state that in very clear language, but this document, from NASA states the agency's FY 2004 budget is roughly 15.5 billion rather clearly.

Re:yet another reason to get rid of nasa

[Millenix]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but NASA didn't invent Velcro, an individual Swiss scientist did. See this for more info.

Half a TRILLION+ dollars? Write Senator Kinsey!!

[ManyLostPackets]

Being the Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, I'm sure he'll get to the bottom of all this wasteful spending.

I hear he's a potential presidential candidate too.

Re:A government agency with financial discrepancie

[toiletmonster]

there is a big difference between misbehavior in the government and misbehavior in the private sector. if nasa misbehaves, who pays for it? me the taxpayer. if walmart misbehaves, who pays for it? the company.

i HAVE to give money to nasa in the form of taxes. i can CHOOSE to shop at walmart and i can CHOOSE to invest in walmart stock.

its an issue of freedom. i should get to choose where i want to put my money. the more the government taxes me, the more my freedom is being taken from me.

think about all the good the private sector could do with an extra 14 billion dollars. thats about 60 bucks a person. it doesn't sound like much but what have i ever received for my investments over the years? velcro? i want my money back.

Double-ENTRY bookkeeping

[wowbagger]

The term you are looking for is

double entry bookkeeping

and simply means that for every credit, there must be a corrisponding debit.

As a result, if you sum all the books, the answer should be 0.00 - if it is NOT, then there was a misentry somewhere.

For example, using GnuCash, every time I get paid, an entry debiting an account called "Paycheck" is created, and an entry crediting "Checking" is created, and the two entries are tied together. So over time the "Paycheck" account grows more and more negative. However, this allows me to see exactly how much I've been paid over time.

It's a form of error dectection and correction.

I've a cousin who is a certified bookkeeper and how has been a comptroller for several small companies - I told her about GnuCash and she was VERY interested. Pity I cannot convert her system to Linux at this time, or run GnuCash under Windows (last time I checked).

"Double-booking" is a criminal activity in which a company maintains 2 sets of books (possibly using double-entry bookkeeping on each set), in which one book is the version that gets shown to the auditors and IRS, and one actually has the real facts in it.

Maybe you should read the article.

[Anonymous Coward]

before you run off at the mouth.

They still don't get it.

[Shivetya]

NASA needs to be shut down and replaced. Since that will never happen as Government Employee Unions have too much control the best we can hope for is a reassignment of all the upper management and outsiders brought in to run the place.

NASA has had no real direction for 20+ years. The space shuttle hobbled it beyond compare. It was a stupid 70s pipe dream that should have died on the drawing board. If they are going to build a spaceplane then build one, don't build a rocket lifted glider.

Hopefully the X-Prize will show people that we are capable of putting stuff into space without a monolithic Government entity.

The goals of a moonbase and Mars landing are laudable. They are true attempts to move forward. The space station was a sick waste of money and worse, we were forced to keep the shuttle around just because of it. A base on the moon would finally move us forward. We aren't going to get there with the old NASA mentality which is still stuck in the 70s.

The usual misinformation

[toiletmonster]

bush wants to increase funding to nasa by $1 billion dollars this year and by $12 billion over the next five years. thats my problem with the guy. he's increased the size of nearly every government agency. its enormously frustrating. since when were republicans for big government? now who the hell am i supposed to vote for?

thats an extra $50 a year per person in the us. and we are already paying $50 a year person for the space program, so that comes out to $100 bucks a year per person. it doesn't sound like much but what have i ever received for my investments over the years? velcro? i want my money back.

ever think thtat all those problems at nasa are maybe just maybe government bureacratic inefficiencies? why is it that the engineers always warn the shuttle is going to explode and the people at the top never hear about it? unlike nasa, a private company would be held accountable for its failures through its stock price and through the number of people willing to buy the product.

Re:The usual misinformation - from RWW

[grolaw]

EXACTLY where do you come up with this BS? NASA has *not* had a budget increase in real dollars since 1970.

Do you remember the price of gasoline per gallon in 1970? How about Milk? What was the average salary for a family of four? What was NASA's budget?

Well, the US Government does keep track of those figures and they still publish them. Try the gov docs section of your local depository library or, http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/steccpi.html for a quick review.

Spin-offs from NASA research include telemetry systems in hospitals and ambulances, composite materials, computing, mapping, photometric analysis, side-looking radar....and on and on ALL WITHOUT PATENTS so industry could benefit without paying for the R&D. Private companies would lock down their innovations and extract every penny for their profits (see, e.g. the insurance and pharmaceutical industries).

Oh, what is our out-of-pocket cost for the dalliance in Iraq? Don't know? Hey, another $25 billion request was put before Congress this last week, alone. (that's 25 gigabucks to /. ers)

A non-partisan review of the costs of the war v. money sent back to your state can be found at http://www.nationalpriorities.org/issues/military/ iraq/25billion/index.html

No, NASA isn't the cost center...

RWW is the proper term for a person who simply mouths the platitudes of the nuts in power.

where my bs came from (to a LWW)

[toiletmonster]

actually you are right. i misread cnn.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/14/bus h.spac e/

he's only increasing the budget by a mere $1 billion over the next five years. and nasa's annual budget is $85 billion (according to the above arcticle). thats actually $350 dollars a year per person.

i'd much rather have my 350 bucks a year back from that nasa investment. you really think private industry couldn't have come up with computing, mapping, radar, and composite materials on their own? oh wait they do that all the time. this stuff might have been discovered 5 years earlier than private industry would have discovered it, but at what cost? you say R&D from nasa is free. LWWs always think government programs are free and the money just comes out of nowhere. guess who pays for nasa's 85 billion dollar budget? private industry and private individuals.

and maybe i'd rather spend my money on my kids college than on side-looking radar. that should be my choice. its about freedom. the higher taxes are, the less freedom an individual has because the government is deciding where to spend your money.

i don't know what iraq has to do with nasa or anything else. red herring? but since you bring it up, i kind of agree. i'm not sure i want to pay for the war. perhaps its an investment in peace and in defeating terrorism that will pay off in the long run. i'm personally a little conflicted about it.

Re:A government agency with financial discrepancie

[Strych9]

Well you are right if there are never an externalities due to a misbahving corporation.

If company A's product casuses say lung cancer, or pollutes the water without being caught / goes bankrupt /can't pay it is also you the taxpayer who is left holding the bag.

Private enterprise for everything isn't always the answer. For space travel it very well might be, and relegate NASA to pure research.

However with anything essential services related it doesn't pay.

All these worlds are yours . . .

[kalidasa]

except Europa. Attempt no budget auditing there.

Re:A government agency with financial discrepancie

[Anonymous Coward]

Enron (barely a slap on the rist [sic] of those most responsible)

Boy, you don't keep up with the indictments and investigations much, do you?

I agree with you about MS though.

CNN is not a primary source

[grolaw]

RWW syndrome: assume that what you see or read in the popular media has relevance and substantive support for the issues that you want to believe in.

Let's be really honest, tell me that you believe *everything* that you see/hear/read on CNN. Then tell me that the paper records from the past 30 years are all bogus.

I stand by the historical record and the primary sources. You have to do quite a bit better than reference "CNN" if you expect to make an argument worth the electrons you control.

I pointed you to PRIMARY sources. Here's another: http://thomas.loc.gov/

I suggest that you go hunting for NASA's budget. It is not contained in one bill. Indeed there are aspects of the NASA budget that are under DOJ and DOD authorization and are part of the "black" budget for defense-related expenditures.

You blindly state that private industry would have, should have, could have -- but the fact is that they did not invent any of NASA's technology - except by filling orders as subcontractors. The NASA technology remains in the public domain and industry continues to derive financial benefits from the public sector. What part of that fact are you unhappy about?

Perhaps what you want is a price for everything: if NASA received royalties we might have an agency in the black.

Hmm, Bush came up with a retroactive tax cut...so much for the ban on ex post facto laws--let's make NASA technology the subject of a "recapture" act and collect royalties retroactively. Now that should warn your cockles.

Military spending is the single largest component of our national budget - and, yes I am factoring the costs of national security foisted off on the states into this calculation.

Try another primary source: http://www.bls.gov/ppi/ the producer price index is a historical and current source of the cost of goods and living in the US. Check it out and run the numbers...see what $350/yr would do for you. Remember to convert that sum to the dollar-value of the prior year (the net present value in prior year's dollars) when making your comparisons. If you really want to do it right there are several nasty variables you have to control for but you can compile a rough guesstimate.

While you are at it, look at the tax burden: the middle class now carries the nation and the lowest class carries the states through sales tax. Business paid 50% of our tax in the 1950-1967 period. Then Nixon started the swing of the pendulum that allows GE and other multinationals to avoid all federal tax. Sorry, but I'm all for taxing the companies that use our infrastructure to make a buck. If we pay taxes, they should pay taxes.

If the tax burden were shifted back to the 1960 schedule Mr. Gates' company would part with a portion of their income that would, at one point in the marginal rate schedule, reach 95% of their income. Billions from Bill and MSFT would do much more to lighten our burden than cutting NASA.

Moreover, I don't think you will come back at me with the old argument, "why, they NEED that money to innovate" when it's MSFT. Everybody on /. would dump on you for that one! - Let's say $2B/yr tax revenue from Bill's company and his top-paid staff. That works out to be approximately $1k/yr for every man, woman and child in the US. A $3k tax cut in my house...$4k for each of my siblings and $3k more for the living extended family - Bill and company - alone, could provide my immediate family with $14k in tax relief/yr. Hmm...

RWW syndrome - just repeat the SOS. Your fair and balanced media will tell you all you need to know. Go watch the game now...BO will be on in a few hours

Frozen alien bodies...

[rice_burners_suck]

As NASA sets course for the moon and Mars, the space agency's finances are in disarray, with significant errors in its last financial statements and inadequate documentation for $565 billion posted to its accounts, its former auditor reported.

All that money that "disappeared" went towards funding research on the frozen alien bodies they found in Roswell. I know this for a fact and I have undeniable proof: First, there was a made-for-television movie about aliens crash-landing in Roswell. Second, I was told about the frozen bodies and the research by two different people, both with tattoos stating "I've been abducted by aliens!!!" on the backs of their necks, and neither of them know each other (or so they claim).

Not at all true

[TheConfusedOne]

Actually the figures do take into account people who have "left the workforce" along with everything else. You'll notice that there's both a household survey and an employer survey and the two can give you a relatively accurate picture.

I was actually picked for the household survey and we got a phone call every month and they asked a whole bunch of questions about all the peope in the house, who was working, who was looking for work, and who wasn't and why they weren't.

So, any attempt to say that the rate is higher because "so many people have simply given up looking for work" is complete hogwash. Do some research and look at the historical trends and you'll see that the rate is neither high in absolute terms nor historical terms either.

Re:A government agency with financial discrepancie

[GileadGreene]

Martha Stewart (convicted, but sentenced to a minimum security prison that seems to have been the inspiration for the no-security facility Sideshow Bob was sentenced to do time in)

Martha Stewart didn't do anything illegal financially. In fact, the government dropped the charges of financial wrong-doing because there simply was no evidence that she did anything wrong. What Martha Stewart was actually eventually convicted of was attempting to cover up the alleged wrongdoing - in other words they convicted of trying to "cover up" something that was not illegal. And even that "cover-up" was mostly based on hearsay and innuendo. If you actually read statements by jury members made after the trial you'll see that they mostly convicted her of being white, wealthy, and successful.

The real crime in the Martha Stewart case is that she got hounded by the government even though she didn't do anything illegal, but Sam Waksal and members of his family (who did make illegal trades) either got a slap on the wrist or got off scott-free.

Disclaimer: I'm not a fan of Martha Stewart. I've never watched her show. From all I've heard she is a ruthless control-freak. But being a ruthless control-freak isn't illegal, and doesn't change the fact that she got screwed by the legal system. Why should you care? Because if they can screw someone as wealthy and powerful as Martha Stewart, imagine what they could do to you.

Re:Perhaps militarization is the solution

[GileadGreene]

Why not make space, or at least the space around the earth, the same as the air

As several other posters have pointed out, the physics of orbiting the Earth pretty much makes this a idea no-go. There was some talk about this in the pre-Sputnik days, and the US was quite worried about how to handle the resulting jurisdictional mess. Luckily for them the USSR launched Sputnik, which then provided a precedent for orbital space being managed differently than airspace, and we ended up with the current system.

As I was writing in my blog, as it is now, space seems a bit like the wild west - noone cares who they fly over, or what's orbiting above them, or whatever.

This is fundamentally untrue. For starters, the geostationary belt (aka Clarke orbit, or 35,786 km), which is the only orbit that can be reasonably tied to geographical location, is very tightly managed. Different countries have assigned "slots" in GEO, and can use them or sell them as they see fit. Missions in other orbits require a certain amount of coordination in order to ensure that collisions don't take place, and the RF transmission don't interfere with each other.

Or better yet put them all under the total control of the UN, as things too big for one nation to claim for itself.

Which is in fact roughly what was done. You may want to look at the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and then remove your foot from your mouth.

but just because the US is powerful right now doesn't mean it should have total rights to everything it finds in space

It doesn't. See above.

Personally I wish there were more collaborative space exploration. Instead of 3 countries/consortiums sending a probe each to Mars, we could have a probe to Mars, one to Europa, and one to Venus.

The recent Mars Exploration Rover carried a German (IIRC) spectrometer. It was also going to be doing some communications via the European Mars Express mission (don't know if it actually did or not). Also, note that MER, Mars Express, and the Japanese Mars mission were all carrying different instruments and had different goals. In that sense, they were all performing part of a collaborative exploration of the planet Mars.

let me tell you what warms my cookies

[toiletmonster]

so cnn lied and bush doesn't actually want to raise nasa's budget by a $1 billion? funny thing, i saw the live broadcast of the speech on cspan where bush actually said that. search on google for: bush nasa budget. the 1st 30 links are all for different newspapers around the world that have arcticles talking about that speech and how bush proposed a $1 billion budget increase for nasa.

The NASA technology remains in the public domain and industry continues to derive financial benefits from the public sector. What part of that fact are you unhappy about?

i'm unhappy my money pays for an accounting officer who publishes financial statements that are off by $500 billion. in the private sector that action would have consequences. investors would lose faith and a company that sloppy would either die or change and become more efficient. but in big government, we just right them another billion dollar check the next year.

i'm unhappy about the part where i was forced to pay for that research and a lot of other waste of time projects like velcro, the origin of the universe, and a NASA tv channel. i don't watch nasa tv channel, why should i have to pay for it? maybe i'd rather spend my money on my kids college. maybe not. but that should be my choice. its about freedom. the higher taxes are, the less freedom an individual has because the government is deciding where to spend your money.

If the tax burden were shifted back to the 1960 schedule Mr. Gates' company would part with a portion of their income that would, at one point in the marginal rate schedule, reach 95% of their income. Billions from Bill and MSFT would do much more to lighten our burden than cutting NASA. ... Let's say $2B/yr tax revenue from Bill's company and his top-paid staff. That works out to be approximately $1k/yr for every man, woman and child in the US. A $3k tax cut in my house...$4k for each of my siblings and $3k more for the living extended family - Bill and company - alone, could provide my immediate family with $14k in tax relief/yr. Hmm...

wow, you want to tax 95% of a person's income? why should bill and his company pay you for their hard work? what did you do to deserve his money? you are just a common thief.

when tax rates reach 95% of a productive person's income this country will collapse. don't expect people to produce when production is punished and mooching and looting are rewarded. when you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect people to remain good.

"Throughout man's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. ...wealth was produced by the labor of slaves -- slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers -- as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was for the first and only time in history, a country of money -- and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being -- the self-made man -- the American industrialist."
-- ayn rand

"an honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced."
-- ayn rand

Actually

[ShadowRage]

this bullshit has been going on for years, my Science teacher worked for a contractor that dealed with NASA, he left because of the spending cuts even within the company he worked for, because of the NASA higher ups cutting money to the contractors, and within their own company, he pointed out the reason why columbia ended the way it did was because what he used to do was cut (checked the launch frame by frame for like 5 hours each day) to check for anything odd, and to monitor any mishaps in orbit.... there was even a time with columbia that it faced a threat like that, but the broken panel was ok enough to survive the landing.

So this is nothing new. NASA abuses its position in power to get a lot of cash for doing a whole lot of nothing.

Rand, huh?

[grolaw]

My family name is O'Connor. Look up Rand's husband's name. You picked the wrong day to argue Ayn Rand.

I'm sorry to break this to you fella, but the world does not operate on Rand principals. Bush doesn't operate on Rand principals. Hell, Ayn Rand didn't operate on her own principals.

I grew up a few blocks away from the author, Ayn Rand. Remember that is all that she ever was: an ex-pat Russian author. She never held office and she never did anything but put pen to paper to create a utopia of her own imagination. She was a person who called selfishness a "virtue". If you have bothered to read her work you will recognize that as a title of one of her pieces of fiction.

Reality, Neo, is that we have a social construct and that a 95% marginal tax rate is quite appropriate to preserve the social construct. There is NOTHING different in taxing the wealthy at 95% (FWIW a "marginal" tax is a tax that applies after the entity being taxed accrues sufficient income to make it up onto the next marginal tax bracket...95% would kick in at just about $1meg in 1955 - during the Korean conflict) than it is to have sales taxes on food and medicine that have a disproportionate impact on the poor and aged.

Rand's worldview simply doesn't work. I suggest that you consider your own quotes and apply them to a leader... say, the President. He has never produced a single thing in his entire life. He lost money (OPM) in two failed oil companies and he dumped his stock in the second and ran with $800k - violating SEC reporting requirements for insider transactions.

He then "invested" his $800k in the Rangers - a less than 5% share. (I don't believe that I could buy into the Yankees just by asking pretty-please...) Thereafter the state of Texas used the power of Eminent Domain to take property away from homeowners to build a larger stadium. Then Bush decided that his ownership was a "conflict of interest" with his position as Govenor and he dumped the Rangers (now in their nice new stadium, built with tax dollars on property taken by government fiat) and realized $18meg.

Tell me how Mr. Bush is an "honest man" in Rand's definition? He produced nothing and he left a big mess for the state of Texas - those people he dispossessed of their property at $0.25 on the dollar were the heirs to the Curtis Mathes television fortune and after about 8 years their case made it to the Texas civil supreme court and they were paid the full value of their holdings with pre-judgment interest. Where did that come from: the taxpayers.

You are worried about NASA? NASA?

Do you remember ENRON? Do you remember the rolling blackouts in California? Enron had a few more dollars of funny money than NASA. So did Worldcom, Tyco and a host of others.

Have you noticed that the price of gasoline is over $2.00/gal? Those prices are rising when we have control over one nation known to have vast oil resources. Rand would have exploited Iraq's Oil. As conquerors we have that right - but we say the oil belongs to the conquered? Could it be that a few selfish people exploiting the oil and harming their nation at the same time?

Tell me again how that utopian world Rand created applies to this set of facts? Tell me how, ultimately, the selfish keep from being treated the same as the last of the French monarchy? It is exactly the same fact pattern. Rand could not defend the comparison of her world to the fall of French or the Russian monarchies. Both fell, and they fell because they mistreated the public. Where monarchs become too self-involved to recognize that they are pissing in their own pools - the pool cleaners come along and remove them.

Finally, Ms. Rand lived out her days on the upper west side of Manhattan. I saw her at least once a week during the years 1967 through 1980. She didn't get out much her last two years and I was in grad school and not at home. She was quite happy with her social security checks. Apparently she did not have as much money as she would have liked.

Did you just hear that flushing sound, toilet monster? Move on...this topic is dead to me. BTW, you are a FRWW and a romantic, to boot. Good luck- you will need it for the rest of your life.

Re:Rand, huh?

[Whatever99]

Growlaw you changed the subject to Bush and Toiletmonster never mentioned support for Bush. Toiletmonster was referring to Libertarian ideals and Bush is very far from Libertarian. You implication that Toiletmonster supports Bush is not founded. Libertarians are disgusted with the Iraq war. Liberty from the US government does not mean we invade other countries. You changed the subject and the reason Toiletmonster may not reply is because all you've done is complicate the argument drastically. Stick to the point! Toiletmonster is right for the most part. You pointed out some information also that -might- be true about the NASA budget. Frankly though, I don't believe the government's numbers and this press story confirms that there is reasonable cause to question what the government is doing with my money and the accuracy of their numbers. You quoting questionable government financial data shows that you are trusting a possibly untrustworthy entity. Incidentally, Toiletmaster is mostly right, the ideals you espouse are somewhat similar to those of the common thief. Your secrecy of thievery is hidden in the details as this press story shows. I am a human being in this world and if I don't want to pay for government pork programs then I should be heard and my rights respected. If someone didn't respect your right to free speech but others denounced your right to free speech, who is right? You would be. Freedom must be respected otherwise we are serfs or slaves, subject to the growing whims of authority (in this country). Think about that please. I suspect you are an employee of NASA who is profiting directly from this fiasco in some sort or another.

surveys then surveys

[zogger]

I just checked the latest real stats at the BLS website. Go down the chart and look at U-6. That's the sum total of unemployed, the figures the TV normally uses in "business reports" stop at U-3. this is fairly common knowledge, BTW, but the lower number is mostly used for propoganda purposes, once you wipe away the shilling grins of the TV/WS casino traders and various politicians trying to make things look rosy. That's an opinion,I admit it, but it's based on these two quite different numbers.

U-3, which is commonly used for the news shows,the most quoted and used in an argument to show how great the economy is, which counts any sort of employment, is as of April 2004 = 5.4 %

Sounds good, not too bad! Well, lets mosey on down the chart a scosh.

U-6, which is total unemployed including distressed workers, part time (no matter how part time), marginally attached, etc, what I am referring to is, as of april 2004 = 9.3 %

here is their little explanation that will cover U-6

Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want
and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally
attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for a job. Persons employed part time for economic
reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule. For further
information, see "BLS introduces new range of alternative unemployment measures," in the October 1995 issue of the Monthly Labor
Review. Beginning in January 2004, data reflect revised population controls used in the household survey.

url for reference

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm

There's also a practical consideration with telephone surveys. It's pretty simple, although alien to most people nowadays,especially on slashdot I would guess, but very poor and broke people--uhh, these unemployed we are talking about- in a lot of cases do not have telephones in order to be surveyed. That's usually the first utility to get shut off. I can personally think of 4 families in my (poor underemployed, rural) neighborhood where no telephone exists. Myself, having a cell service, landline and internet connection, am an exception to the rule around here. I don'tknow anyone else around here who has internet. Even the couple of households I know about that have a landline do not have internet. Two families I know of, the father has a beeper, but no phone, they need to drive 2.5 miles to a payphone. I don't know everyone around here yet, but I know the closest people except for one house, who pretty much stay to themselves and don't seem too friendly so I don't push it. The house looks good(large and expensive), I am assuming they have a phone based on that.

That last is just anecdotal, but I hope my points on the *real* numbers are more clear now, and also why telephone surveys might not be as accurate as some claim. By their own admission, the real numbers on a "practical" look on unemployment are almost twice as high (roughly) as they usually use for TV reports. Now, after that, I am of the opinion-note, I said opinion only- it is still lowballed for a few more percentage points. I have reasons for that opinion, fairly involved, some arcane,some I could spend more time on and provide references but I really don't feel like it right now, but all in all I think it's lowballed. I would guess it'scloser to 12 %. I've shown it's offically lowballed already, close to 10, and last month it was slightly over 10% by their own numbers. It will lower next month as high school kids get summer jobs, that will happen too, usually a percent and a fraction then.

I will also freely admit that black market/illegal working is not included, even though no one brought that up to me yet. I have no rational figures to access for inclusion (I don't

Yeah but I'm making more money

[tjstork]

I'm making 40% more under Bush than Clinton. GO Bush 04.

Re:Yeah but I'm making more money

[Doc Ruby]

Your sick pride over your share of the bloodletting revolts me. Your blood money will choke you. Is that worth your freedom, the fate of the rest of the world? If you vampires had any wits, you'd make more money in a free America.

"A human being in this world"

[grolaw]

First thing: toiletmaster or monster (what a shitty handle) made the changes in topic-not me. TP boy changed the subject and brought in a radical shift to Ayn Rand.

Turning to you: "A human being in this world", eh? Quite interesting. Do you think that you are a freebooter? That the state has to give you the right to a line-item veto of your tax support of the state? Not in this world. Try it- the IRS has a special, Earth-bound Hell, for tax protesters.

As for way you "believe" or don't about the reports of the state's funding records seems pretty naive. If the conspiracy is so great that the records of a third of a century are "questionable" then, what criteria do you use to validate data?

Bush is transparent: He says, "no child left behind" and works to dismantle the public school system to appease his constituents who want a voucher system. He says that he is not interested in building states - and then invades Afghanistan and Iraq. We are now "building states" in those countries.

It goes on, and on.

FWIW, I am a trial attorney and I practice plaintiff's civil rights law. I have had friends in the space program, but they are all out of the program now - some are in the private sector and some are in academia. I have heard, firsthand, how NASA was gutted and how the bad managers were brought in to "streamline" the "process".

Finally, my family is (was) related, by marriage, to Ms. Rand. When the Toilet-boy decided to get medieval on my ass, I called BS on his.

Re:"A human being in this world"

[Whatever99]

Yes I suppose you did call his (TB) lines. I think those Rand quotes are ideal goals for which to continually strive. I think they are difficult to attain but don't think that they are innately contrary to how things can and do work. Granted, most countries are far worse than ours but that's no justification for NASA fiscal woes.

Not sure if I want to be a 'freebooter' as you put it. I don't think the state has to give me the right for a line item veto of my tax support. However I do feel that the income tax is inordinately complex and only gets worse. That's a separate topic, of sorts. I think protesting taxes is justifiable, certainly.

What I mean by saying that ''m a human being in this world' is referred to in this great quote:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." --Declaration of Independence as originally written by Thomas Jefferson, 1776. ME 1:29, Papers 1:315

Notice that he uses the word "abolish". Has NASA become destructive to these pursuits? I say it's certainly possible and likely. This however can be applied to our modern federal government as a whole. There are many examples of our government taking advantage of their authority these days to secure their own gains against our own individual freedoms and rights. I'll leave that to you to research and come to your own answers about.

You are correct in that there is something real to fear in the IRS with regards to tax protesters. Doesn't that say something about the country in which we live? Is that also contrary to many of the fundamental ideals of the founding and founders of this great country?

I remember in the 1980s when we thought China and Russia were backwards because their people feared their governments extremely. We are becoming our own enemy, in a sense because as you point out, the IRS is to be feared.

If someone speaks out against NASA fiscal policy and also the very idea that the government should be taking our income taxes for NASA corruption and incompetence, that person should fear government surveillance and blacklisting or other (I don't know IRS retribution tactics) reprisals. Land of the free and the brave! Just not free to protest taxes or brave enough to do it 'en masse any longer.

Just because I can go out & protest taxes doesn't mean I'm 'free' to do it because as you point out, they have a Earth-bound Hell (hatred, desire and means for vengeance?) for that level of so-called 'free speach'.

Culture follows from funding

[grolaw]

see subject. You have to dance the money-man's dance in this world.

Re:A government agency with financial discrepancie

[Anonymous Coward]

You know nothing about grammar at all, do you?

And yet, you've really introduced nothing to the..

[TheConfusedOne]

...numbers.

Consider first your "analysis" by looking at the statistics being presented. Did the structural problems that you're now discussing suddenly emerge during this recent time? If the methodology has not changed then the built-in error in the report remains the same.

So, then you can go back and analyze the other portions of the report covering part-time, discouraged, and other categories and you'll find that there is no historically high numbers in this area either.

The simple fact is that these statistics have been used for awhile and thus are the ones that need to be used for any analysis. If the numbers have been lowballed then they've been lowballed for a long time. (At least since the '95 redefinition.)

The article that kicked things off

[DaveCook]

"Many of [NASA's] problems with financial management are endemic to the agency as a whole. NASA has long been faulted for its "stovepipe" structure, in which each center behaves as an independent entity with a unique history and culture that is loath to brook "outside" interference from other parts of NASA. Finance executives are co-located in NASA's 10 centers, and each center has a different financial-reporting system. ... The structural barriers have combined over time to make any NASA-wide initiatives an exercise in frustration."

From Nasa, We Have a Problem

from what I read...

[zogger]

... they changed the sampling methods in 95. How much they changed it I'd have to go back and look, but I know it affected it a lot. They also changed the way they count folks receiving unemployment insurance checks just last year, in january of last year if I am remembering correctly. They used to keep counting them for awhile after the last check went out, now they don't, until you get to the U-6 numbers, which they do NOT use on TV, and the reason is that the U-6 is much higher, and much truer.

Really, jobs ARE an issue. We've been shipping off-shore jobs now at an extremely steady pace for many years, and shipping in illegals at the an even higher pace. That has caused severe stress in the market, many more people competing for fewer jobs. You can read business news article after article about it, point to about any big company, you can find articles where they ceased domestic production, laid off people, shipped production overseas. You'd have a hard time finding companies that haven't done this. It's almost daily it appears, and contrast that to say new factories going in, hiring thousands, etc, those are pretty rare now. Now neither of those are absolutes,they are broad statements, but the gist is true in the aggregate. Look at every article posted here, how many guys will chime in and say they are having a harder time finding quality work, even guys with decades of experience. Look at that last article on being forced to train your replacements. It's real stuff, it's happening. It's happened to me several times now, had two factories I worked at shipped overseas. Had another job I worked at for over a decade get so diluted with laid off blue collar guys entering it in desperation from losing their jobs that it went from well paid and plenty of hours to struggle to get a 40 hour week out of it, a lot of times couldn't. On and on, and I know I ain't alone. And I can remember quite clearly what the job market was in the 60's on to now, I've always followed the business news, and I'll just state it's a lot harder to get a job,that production has dramatically gone overseas in the last two decades, and it's a lot harder to get a well paid job, and it's a lot harder to get a well paid job with good benefits. That's just my anecdotal, but you can see examples all over the nation, that's why we see so many articles about it, it's of interest to so many people, because so many people are in the same boat. Your job poofs, you get another, that job poofs, it takes you longer to find another, then that job poofs, even longer, the replacements pay less etc. and people DO increase their skills, retrain, learn new things, etc, but even that now it's starting to suck bad. It takes time, money, skill, tools, training to get a completely different job, and if they aren't there anyway-what then?

These numbers-whatever they are-represent real humans in real trouble now. It is NOT the same it was 30 or 20 or 10 years ago, not even close. If it was great, you just wouldn't see all the interest in it, all the controversy, all the articles. This isn't a vaporware issue, it's real, and it has gotten steadily worse for a long time, with the exception of a few years in the mid 90's (the dot com boom obviously) to 2001, then it slumped again. Look at it like I said in conjunction with the other numbers, level of bankruptcies, level of mortgage defaults, etc. It's just real, don't know what else I can say about it. If you insist that the economy is just fantastic and that there's no difference in employment levels and wage scales, etc, from years ago...well, not much more to be said then. I've showed the numbers, showed that the practical unemployment level is hovering at 10%,not this 5-6% they always quote, you can go look at the other stats in the other areas, they all suck bad. They all add up to a jobs and income crisis, there's no other way to characterise it. There's nothing else I can do in this conversation, you can believe those numbers mean it's just great all you want, or no different from years past, I see it now

not the overseas boogie man...

[TheConfusedOne]

You realize that while jobs are being shipped overseas by US corporations, foreign corporations are creating jobs right here in the US don't you? I've read some statistics that put it at a 3 to 1 ratio with more jobs coming to the US.

Manufacturing work has been leaving the US for over a decade that's a simple fact of the world economic situation. You can lay a lot of the blame right at the feet of the unions. Look at the debacle that went on in CA with the long shoreman who went on strike to try to keep computerized manifests from being used. (Instead they had people keying in the data pulling down near $100,000/year for the work.)

Frankly the last business cycle was an incredibly distorted one. Look at the salaries that IT professionals (and not quite so professional) were hauling down with the .COM businesses.

You may in fact be right about the unemployment statistics, the point I was making that was any complaints/issues with the statistics and the press's use of those statistics has been ongoing for a long time. This isn't something new, there isn't a spike in discouraged workers in the last few years.

I'll agree with you...

[zogger]

... it's a lot more complicated than just a few sets of stats. And I'll also agree with you that some unions have shot themselves in the foot, I'll even give an example. Back in the 60's when I hit 18 I went to work in a car factory, joined the UAW. MAN were most of them dudes tards. I saw the japanese takeover with cars coming, and we were making EXCELLENT money for the time. My entry level pay was full benefits, many vacation days, etc, hourly wage over 3 times minimum wage and tons of overtime. It was plenty. Housing was cheap, cars cheap, it was "enough". That was off the street-goto work entry level. And they always wanted to go on strike for these huge increases. BUT, they would never make a bargaining point like "we demand better built cars, and keep a freeze on prices for several years in a row" or anything along those lines, to make sure their jobs stayed viable. I'd get in all sorts of arguments saying the japanese cars were well built, got good mileage, had acceptable power, and were cheap, so we better adapt. Got laughed at. Got told no one would ever buy japanese cars, that that was a fantasy, etc.

I was right, all them guys were wrong, simple as that.

I like being rational. I realise we live on the planet earth and are gonna trade around, so I support quid quo pro excise tariffs, with the other nations setting the rates, then the onus is on them to trade as fair as they want to, not on us. I support rational slow and controlled legal immigration, not uncontrolled chaos with the added benefit of complete loss of national security. I support war as a last resort, not just a convenience. I support an immediate manhattan level national effort to develop and deploy any alternative energy scheme we can come up with, to reduce dependence on imported petroleum, all the way to (perhaps) 100% tax credits like we had for a few years,I remember it, and it was effective, it just got shut off too soon. I support a certain amount of industries being declared "perpetually vital for national security", they would include agriculture, energy, and some basic manufacturing and production of metals/alloys, etc, because they ARE vital for national security, and insure that we always had enough of those industries domestically to support us. As in "no" tax breaks to move production offshore, like we still have now, that's just nuts.

As to foreigners "investing" in the US, well, in some aspects it's a little scary, them holding the bulk of our mortgages and government debt paper is...uhh.. well, it's just slap wrong, and I don't care ioif we make a few bucks on it short term, because that's all it is, if they are the ones raking in the interest and profits, it's more than what we make in essence working for them.. And if they want to come here and own property and build factories and whatnot, their respective governments MUST allow the same exact access to US citizens. This isn't the case now, they can come here and own outright,but several large nations we trade with DON'T allow that for us, notably japan, china and mexico. That should be illegal as well until those nations open up the playing field.

I'm for fair trade, rational trade, not this scam "free trade" they pull. That's a scam.

Re:Culture follows from funding NOT

[Whatever99]

Read the below news story. You are again incorrect. "Complacency" is specifcally named and not under funding. Greedy begs for more money to be forced from other people's wallets and put into NASA's corrupt budjet is absurd and your request for that is likewise.
---
We get point on safety, says NASA

By Caroline Overington
New York
August 29, 2003

NASA's senior managers have admitted that a culture of complacency within the organisation contributed to the Columbia space shuttle disaster in which seven astronauts died.

Sean O'Keefe, who has been NASA's administrator since 2002, said on Wednesday that NASA welcomed a report by an independent accident investigation board, which found NASA had ignored concerns about the safety of the shuttle, even after eight warnings that it might have been damaged when a piece of foam flew off and hit the wing.

"We get it," Mr O'Keefe said, in response to those findings. "We clearly got the point."

He said NASA expected the White House, Congress and the American public to debate the future of space travel, but said NASA planned to send another shuttle aloft, perhaps as early as March.

He said the recommendations made by the accident review board would be implemented before space flight resumed.

Re:A government agency with financial discrepancie

[That's Unpossible!]

but Sam Waksal and members of his family (who did make illegal trades) either got a slap on the wrist or got off scott-free.

Slap on the wrist? Scot-free? Sam Waksal has been sentenced to pay 4.3 million and spend 7 years in jail, which he will report to on July 3 (so far he's been under house arrest).