Slashdot Mirror
Russian Supply Ship Docks At ISS
CryptoJoe writes "Space.com and CNN report a successful docking between the Russian-built cargo ship Progress 16 and the International Space Station (ISS). NASA had indicated that a failure of Progress 16 would lead to the evacuation of the ISS because food supplies are critically low."
Not to sound like an ass but how could food supplies ever get that low.
Every detail/mission about the ISS is planned from start to finish. Including food stocks. Was there not a red flag somewhere that said "okay, we are going to be there for x days but have y amount of food?" No stays are "overextended" moreso that their food stores should be able to cover them in the event they can't make it back to earth (weather or other prohibiting factors)
Sure they've remedy'd it now but I'm scared at what could go wrong with something like a Mars mission where you can't just send up a supply ship...
I take issue with this. I know, libertarians say this like neocons say "why do you hate America so much?". But I'd like you to explain how the first following scenario creates wealth, whereas the second only redistributes it.
ResearchCo solicits investment from the public. ResearchCo develops Velcro with this money. Velcro is then marketed and sold to the public, with a portion of the costs paid back to the investors.
NASA taxes the public. NASA develops Velcro with this money. Velcro is then marketed and sold to the public; however, there are no licensing fees, so the cost is equivalent to (in the first example) the cost of ResearchCo velcro less the costs paid back to the investors.
No, they're not precisely equivalent cases, but the flow of things is the same. Why the difference? Can you explain it to me?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
About 105 years ago during the Anglo South African War, the ZAR forces fired a single bomb into the besieged town of Maffeking on Christmas day. This was odd, since the Brits and Boers never fought on religious days - never on Sundays and Christmas was unthinkable. When the British soldiers went to investigate and defuse the apparently dud bomb, they found that the shell had a traditional English Christmas pudding in its casing.
Oh well, what the hell...
"I would wonder if scrapping this project really will get us back to the moon any quicker."
Getting to the moon quickly was done years ago. The trick is to develop space based technologies that allow people to do more than just take some photos, grab a few rocks and have a quick game of golf.
It is different from a corporation in that a corporation has an incentive to skim as little as possible off the top to support its "bureacracy" - the government has no incentive to keep its costs low. Corporation A competes with Corporation B - the competition to win customers involves keeping prices low, and lower operating costs mean lower prices, and thereby more consumers, and ultimately more money. Who does the government compete with? No one! There is no incentive to make its "bureaucracy" smaller. In fact, there is just the opposite - if you don't spend your budget it shrinks the following year.
Corporations have every incentive for innovation and top performance - to get customers! The more customers you get, the better your corporation. What customers does the government try to get? None - it forces people to pay taxes regardless of whether they use the service the government provices.
He's not changing the subject - you just don't understand his responses.
> > > Money that's taken by government inevitably has a sizable portion skimmed off the top to support bureaucracy.
> > How is this different from in a corporation?
> It is different from a corporation in that a corporation has an incentive to skim as little as possible off the top to support its "bureacracy" - the government has no incentive to keep its costs low.
But corporations are not autonomous entities. They are run by people.
Specifically they are run by the very "bureacracy" that we are discussing.
So an "incentive" given to the corporation may or may not translate to actual actions-- since the "bureacracy" makes the decisions, not the corporation, the bureaucracy has the capacity to make decisions which serve the interests of the bureaucracy, not the corporation.
In theory this might lead to the corporation not surviving, freeing up resources for other, more efficient corporations. In practice the corporation can probably survive this and continue bogging down its sector of the market, especially if all the other corporations in the same market space-- since they are all also run by people-- are behaving in the same manner. And since the bureaucracies running all these companies have no personal incentive to put the interests of the company over that of their own-- the corporation is who will suffer if they do so, not them-- chances are good that in practice they will all behave in that manner, all the time.
The remainder of your post is merely situationals. They may combine to increase the probability that private enterprise will efficiently perform a task but if we're talking about actual real life and not models they aren't going to hold all the time. There may be government-sector programs which do have incentives to watch their costs, though this likely doesn't happen often. There may be Corporations A which have no corresponding Corporations B, and this does happen often. In fact, it happens to at least a small extent the majority of the time, since there are many different ways to compete and it is not hard to carve out a market niche; almost no businesses compete purely on price except in those markets that are truly commodities, and these markets are probably not interesting enough to justify discussion. Innovation and top performance are one way to get customers but they are not the only, and possibly not even the best way. Your statements do work as a model, but so many assumptions must be met for the model to hold I would question their utility for decisionmaking except in those cases that are so clear-cut and unambiguous that it would be obvious what to do even without the model. And even in those cases, this just means that the market can do a better job than the government could. It doesn't mean the market does or is going to do a good job.
The reason why the government can "get money regardless" isn't systemic. It comes into play becuase the government, like corporations are, is run by people, and these people have the capability to act on their own interests rather than those of the government. And while the systemic advantages to capitalism work great in a vacuum, they don't provide much more protection from this once you start allowing in people than those advantages that government posesses do. Corporations at heart have the same flaw as government-- that the people making the decisions are eternally spending other people's money. In one case they're spending the incorporated entity's money and in the other they're spending the public's money, but the only really important difference is that the public has a lot more money.
The checks and "incentives" in capitalism do provide some protection against the kinds of bureaucratic complacency that plague the efficiency of government programs. But bureaucracies are self-sustaining, and most often they can find ways to brush these "incentives" aside when it suits them, the same way that bureaucracies in government brush aside th
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Not if Atkins is to be believed on the merits of healthy and balanced diet of lard and lard.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
OK, so you're saying Russians are guilty because NASA fucked up the Shuttle program. Is it just me or someone else thinks this reasoning is funny?
Let's not forget that the sole reason why ANYONE is still up there is because Russians have more reliable transport spacecraft.
"NASA is going to try, blah blah blah..." Try to fix your shuttle program first, then move on to Mars program. Until then, outsourse the Mars program to Russia. They've already done much of the "isolated ecosystem" work, here on Earth.
Governments do not exist to enrich society. They exist to protect rights. The Declaration of Independence says it best:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 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,"
It doesn't say "to enrich society". It doesn't say that in the Constitution, either. It's strange that you attribute a function (enriching society) to government that it was never created to do. Society should enrich society. So your definition of government is flawed.
How is the government accountable? By voting? Surely you would not suggest such a thing, when most races end in ties and most politicians are 'bipartisan" to everyone's detriment.
What has the Department of Defense provided the private sector? How silly! Most DoD stuff is private sector built (Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, etc.) for the government. That shows how little you know!
As for the Department of Education, we have spent TRILLIONS on public schools, and they are arguably the worst in the world. The Japanese, Europeans, and Canadians all have higher standards of education than the US and spend far less per student than we do. If that's "enriching society", you have a WARPED definition of enriching.
You do realise that it was the FDA that prevented companies from seeing the European trial results of most drugs? Obviously not. There should be de-regulation. Not everything will be perfect all the time. But when the government approves a medicine it knows to be harmful, and prevents private companies from seeing evidence to the contrary, no one wins. And companies don't sell posion when there is profit to be made - killing your customers is the quickest way to losing them.
Heh, and your accountability argument is laughable. The reason people are not held accountable now is because they're able to utilise donations to political parties to curry favours - in a government that serves only its legitimate purpose that couldn't happen.
The prinicipal of mutual exclusivity is where it's bad. If loggers want to cut down trees, and environmentalists want to save the spotted owl, whom should the government please? The government offends the loggers to please the environmentalists - they offend the environmentalists to please the loggers.
A logging company has incentive to provide for the owls - it doesn't want to lose environmentally conscious customers.
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
This never happened before in humanity's recorded history :-)
And besides, how do you apply the word "correctly" to the art of spaceflight? There is no single correct way to do things. There is no even a single correct way to cross the street, as far as I know. If you require perfection then I guess you should remain dirtside until some [supposedly] benevolent extraterrestrials, like Qax, offer you a free ride in one of their ships. Anything else involves risk and uncertainty, and most definitely something somewhere will be done incorrectly, even if you throw resources at the problem. To err is human.