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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."
The real truth is that all the members of the ISS team are actually on a weight loss program and are currently fasting.
If this is how we are going to do it, we should not be doing it. We should either commit the resources to do the project correctly or we move on to other needs.
Man, it's a slow news day. Next headline: Man eats christmas dinner, says it's pretty good.
We'd first have to go through Roland Piquepaille's ad-blog to read about that Christmas dinner!
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 would wonder if scrapping this project really will get us back to the moon any quicker. Interest in space is nowhere near as high as it was back in the days of the Apollo landings, and it's efforts like the ISS that are keeping space in the headlines. Without headlines like this, most people would be entirely content to have humanity remain on Earth indefinitely. Or until a huge comet hits and wipes us all out.
Santa's suicide mission go!
I'm sick of people not seeing the good science that is being done by NASA as it is. Just because it may be more science-fictiony to go to the moon doesn't make it more valuable. We will go to mars (which would be alot more benificial than going to the moon) in good time. Until then let's work on the ISS.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
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
"Russian ICBM Accidentally Fails to Destroy Space Station: Next Attempt Will Carry Live Warhead Instead of Food."
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
You don't understand the real purpose of the space station - it is there to have a real pair of human eyeballs watching for a missile launch. It is a final confirmation for the super powers that somebody is up to no-good, before they launch a counter strike and kill millions. The scientific stuff is secondary and to keep the guys from getting bored out of their skulls.
Oh well, what the hell...
As if they could see such a tiny (relitivly speaking) object from the space station.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
what are they going to do if the missiles are launched - "hey houston, you're fucked. over"
Nasa and other such organizations are essential to the survival of the human race. Without a proper space program then people will never leaver Earth/ The Solar System and then when something goes awry you can wave bye to the human race. Now, seeing as you obviously have moral objection to NASA, let's make a deal. If earth is ever under threat of destruction and NASA offers you tickets on any life boat they may think up you have to give them to me so you don't violate your moral objection to a government funded space program. Agree?
"A Russian-built cargo ship has successfully docked with the International Space Station"
Russian-built? What does that mean? It was built by Russians but was designed by someone else? Assembled in Russia from imported parts?
I don't get it.
Systems setup in 7-11s in Japan actually do the ordering itself? and not only mundane repeat orders. It actually orders depending on weather, temperature and date/time of year. E.g +3 degrees change in temperature and it orders more beer, etc.
Cool system, maybe Nasa could learn something from them.
Money that's taken by government inevitably has a sizable portion skimmed off the top to support bureaucracy. And there is little personal incentive in government for innovation and top performance.
So, the equations aren't equal.
Time and time again, the private sector has shown itself to be more efficient than the government (or any other monopoly, for that matter).
Even elements of government "run as businesses" don't function as efficiently as their private counterparts. If I have to get a package somewhere in two days, I'm not going to the US Postal Service -- I'm going to UPS or FedEx.
"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.
In future, please do no more than one of the following in a single post.
1. Accuse someone of making a stupid comment.
2. Commit errors in spelling, punctuation and sentence structure to the point where it impedes understanding of your comments.
It would be preferable if you did neither of these things when posting. However if you absolutely must do one then please refrain from doing the other.
Operational discoveries that can be applied to things like a mission to mars.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is about MAKING money.
Hey! Send up a Delta 4 Heavy packed to the hilt with food water and air. The probably wont have to resupply with that stuff for a few decades.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
What did they actually run out of, the frozen McDonald's or the Vodka.
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.
I think you're just trying to bait me at this point. You either didn't read my post, or you didn't understand it - the entire post outlaid which system is more appropriate. And it entirely says that a less government system creates more wealth.
The government does indeed land on things like comets, etc., for two reasons. One, it has to spend the money it takes in on something. And two, enough people are currently interested in such things that the government can please a majority of them by doing such things. If that were to change, the government would stop doing such things.
However, your saying that the government has a lack of incentive is true. If gold were found in large deposits on Mars tomorrow, who do you think would land there first? Burt Rutan and crew, or the Feds? Remember that the Feds have no shuttle program right now because the entire fleet is grounded due to the loss of 25% of the fleet!
And you're right - a business will only go if there is a net profit, either directly or indirectly. And your "billions of dollars" example is bad, because that's mostly government waste! Or do you not remember the $700 hammers and the $1000 dolalr toilet seats? It's very simple - if business can make a profit, they will go. If government has money to burn (which they take from you!) and can please enough people, they might go - and might fail miserably often (two shuttles, several Mars probes), but might not. It's a craphsoot with the government - whereas with private companies you can make educated guesses and/or do research and arrive at conclusions.
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Governments exist to enrich society. Corporations exist to enrich their shareholders. If society benefits in the latter case, it's a fortunate side effect. But time and time again, we've seen which side corps will pick when the chips are down.
.1%
That's why corporations spend their money researching (and marketing) a wide variety of *treatments* and governments spend their time researching *cures*.
I won't claim that government always succeeds at enriching society, but at least they generally make the effort and are somewhat accountable. Corporations are only about looking out for their shareholders and don't give a shit about anyone else, even their own employees.
In fact, I would challenge you to name two others!
Dept of Defense and Dept of Education.
And before you say "The FDA", I would point out the recent scandals. For further evidence, there was a very good special on PBS that showed that the FDA was aware that certain drugs caused heart problems - and they still approved them!
Because corporations and Randiots like yourself have been pressuring entities like the FDA or the SEC to stop interfering with corporations' shareholder-given right to sell poison to unsuspecting customers. Now that you've got politicians in office who have been happily defanging regulatory agencies, you have the gall to complain that they're not doing enough to interfere. Which is it? Do you want regulatory oversight or not?
accountability is much more direct in a private company or investment.
Maybe if the company is owned by handful of people. There's only accountability in a corporation if they don't make money; no one gets held accountable if they kill people.
The government does not have an incentive to create wealth - the government has an incentive to please as many people as possible, and offend as few as possible.
And this is a bad thing how? I'll take that over the countless numbers of corporations who have decided to fuck everyone else over to improve their profit margin by
You've been responding to my posts all night. Pay attention!
You've been stating things all night, so if that's not the same as it being true, that holds for you as well. Of course, you know what they say - arguing on the internet is useless. So this will be my last post.
Your problem with my examples is that you're thinking of now and only now. If mining gold further out in the solar system will occur, it wil occur in the future - when technology is better, and the "per-ounce cost of lifting" will have come down. No one is suggesting these things will happen now - and your inability to see a hypothetical example for what it is shows how staggeringly little imagination you have.
Right now, you are correct about satellites and tourism, but even in 1965 they were too expensive to be worhtwhile investments. Thankfully society progresses! (No thanks to the likes of you.)
You don't need a shuttle to mine gold on Mars. But my point was more that one accident halts the government's space flight program entirely. It sets them back YEARS at a time. Imagine if they had an accident trying to land someone on Mars? How long it would be before they tried again?
There isn't net profit NOW. So no one is going NOW. But in the future when there MAY be a profit, they MAY go then.
And is it mere distraction? Simply mentioning something as a distraction (because you don't want to, or can't, refute it) doesn't make it so. The government does waste billions of dollars - it is in all the papers and is well documented (do a goolge search for "government waste").
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so you're going to rely on a pair of human eyes that may or may not be asleep at the time to view an object hundreds of kilometres away in space in an unknown direction at an unknown time to launch a counterstrike in a nuclear war?
i *like* your style. say, you wouldn't be in charge of running the iraq theatre of operations for the united states army, would you?
It shouldn't have fallen on Russia, Europe, or even China to be the "space rescuers", it should have been the US. It is really sad how far America has backslid in space exploration since the '80s.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Where are those mod points when you need them?
Mod parrent up +Funny.
This whole scandal just came up because mcdonalds decided to cut their running costs and close their SpaceDonalds, which would have supplied the spacemen .. ofcourse ...
...
that wouldn't have been healthy but at least we wouldn't have to send up zillion dollar rockets to feed 2 astronauts
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
More likely something like:
Part Time Philosopher, Oft Times Romantic, Full Time Unix Geek
This is not going to work very well.
Use one of those orbit tracking programs or websites and see for yourself how small the area of the earth is that is visible at one time from the space station.
It will take 100 minutes to see a band-shaped area of the world, and several hours to see everything.
making money? like printing dollar bills?
ah, you mean they earn money. that is not money making, that is money redistributing.
it is actually very easy to understand.
imagine, i have 100 moneys. i buy a product of the company you described for, say, 50 moneys.
now i have got 50 moneys less and the company one of their products less, but 50 moneys more.
that is redistribution, nothing else. wealth cannot be created, only redistributed.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
It was food mismanagement. They simple ate too much at each meal. We are not going to mars until we can get a working bio-dome.
When shuttles are grounded it would be only natural of NASA to give russians some money to build more Soyuzes and Progresses especially considering that they can do it on the cheap. But, no, Department of State said: evil Russkies are building a nuclear power plant in Iran, so NASA is prohibited from expanding the cooperation with Russia beyond the original ISS contract
This argument is ridiculous! If what you're saying were true, then we'd all only ever have the money we started out with in the 1500s!
The company that you gave "50 moneys" to, in order to continue to get customers, will use your 50 moneys to improve their efficiency. (Why? If they don't, you'll buy from some other company that does - competition.) So if they can then offer their product for 45 moneys, when you get your next paycheck, if you buy their product again, you'll have 5 extra moneys. Wealth is created through competition - if it were only redistribution there would be a set amount of money in society and it would just go back and forth. But if that were the case it would be the same as if everyone just kept their money - why give it away if I'm just going to get the same thing back eventually?
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Ah, now you are learning! See how futile it is to argue like this? (I have nothing better to do. ;) )
;)
However, if it weren't for examples, what fun could we have?
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you are making a big mistake in assuming that money is something real and thus mixing wealth and money.
in fact, money is virtual and stands for debt.
when you work for your employer, he owes you a debt for your work. normally it would be some physical value but it is unpractical so he gives you money as a symbol for a physical value. first, the coins were of gold and silver and already had their physical value. later paper money were issued by a bank and this paper money stood for a fixed value in gold, silver, gems, whatever.
now money in most countries is backed by absolutely nothing and is worthless (only that people are accepting it as if it had worth)
the government can just print some more money to pay the bills.
so, the argument isn't rediculous at all. there is already more money around than in 1500s because
1) more bills are printed
2) as money stands for debt, if there are more people there are more debt possibilities
3) as money stands for debt, if there are more natural resources exploited, there are more debt possibilities
imagine i find a gem. i pay some jewellier for making it nice and sell the gem for a large sum of moneys.
i owe the jewellier a bit, the buyer of the gem owes me lot, and there is a gem less in the earth.
the jewellier gets some of my virtual wealth (aka money), i get money from the buyer and he gets the gem. the money were redistrubuted from one pocket to another. no money were maid.
the buyer has less money now but a real object instead. as long as people think that money has real value, i became more wealthy after selling the gem. but if a hyperinflation happens (and such has happened often enough) i would be the loser.
this is oversimplified but backed by reality. during and after the collapse of the ussr and in the beginning of the 1990s the russian monetary system was collapsed and mostly barter was used.
to your second argument:
this only works in a complete competition markets. well, i've got news for you. complete competition is wishful thinking. it rarely happens in the reality. and wealth is really just redistributed but not exactly back and forth.
he who posesses much wealth would just accumulate more and more of it, if nothing extraordinary happens.
he who posesses very little wealth would just lose and lose even more, as long nothing extraordinary happens.
only in the "middle class" wealth is redistributed more or less back and forth but the "middle class" erodes.
anyway, it is not possible to just seat on the wealth because people would starve in that case. either you take the wealth of others by force or you must give the others a bit of your wealth to receive theirs.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
Money is only as real as we make it.
You're right about it standing for debt - that's the case today. However, money is supposed to be redeemable for something. If you have it, you should be able to get something for it, even in the abstract - you can't get a "debt".
But that's the way it is today - it represents debt. Aside from the fallaciousness of basing our money on an abstraction instead of something real, let's look at your arguments.
1) If you have 100 dollar bills, and they are each worth 1 dollar of debt, and then the government prints ten more dollar bills, you say that the amount of debt increases to match the government's printing. If that were true, that means that ten dollars of debt was just created by the government. You've just argued that the government creates debt by printing money, which I would completely agree with. However, if you look at the corollary to your own argument, it means that the government would stop creating debt if it stopped printing money!
2) You assume that population will always grow. While that may be the case (especially in the US), it ignores the fact that it may not always be the case, and such situations as China where population is strictly controlled and where an increase in population (according to the Chinese) is highly undesirable.
3) Natural resources are finite. No matter how much you'd like to think otherwise, there's only so much gold, oil, etc. in the earth. That defines scarcity.
To use your gem example - if you do find a gem, that is one less that someone else can find. (Granted, the earth makes new ones, but that can take hundreds, thousands, or millions of years.) The reason the person who buys your gem (after it is made nice by the jeweller) is because that gem is rare - they are willing to part with their money in exchange for the gem. They consider owning something rare a greater advantage than holding on to the money they would have otherwise had.
You then talk about hyperinflation - which is what happens when the government prints more money. Since your own argument shows that the government creates more debt by printing more money, it would seem to me that you've just contradicted yourself.
Oh, and using the USSR is a bad example. The USSR's money system collapsed in the 1990s because communism failed, and the state (on which that monetary system was based) could no longer support the people as it said it would. It was the rought transition from communism to quasi-capitalism that plagued the USSR then, but things are improving for them (slowly).
You argument about possessing wealth and it growing and growing if he does nothing with it falls by your own argument that the government printing money causes more debt.
The next argument is very true, for the same reason.
Your next argument about the middle class is partly true - it does erode, but for the same reason as above.
This last part ignores the very basics of what a market economy is all about (even a government regulated one as we currently have), so I suggest you read up on economics.
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"Their manned space flight program has produced little of value in recent years anyway."
I think that just about says it all. A government program has produced little of value in recent years anyway. If that's the case then NASA's budget should be reduced in the are of manned space flight. But the government hasn't done that. Furthermore, it should be increased in robotic exploration, since we agree that that has become more valuable, but it has only occurred very minimally.
Well, I'm sorry you don't wish to live in a world of imagination. It's imagination that allows people to think of ways to make things better. Only looking at the static NOW provides no incentives for future examinations, and there's no fun in anything! It is human imagination which propels us, and makes us better, and I'm sorry you choose not to engage yours. After all, someone once imagined Slashdot, and that's provided us this forum to engage each other.
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economics are very theoretical. reality often differs from the theory.
the people have their basic needs first.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
The human race.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
A massive missile launch would probably be over the north pole. What orbit is the ISS in again where they can see the north pole well? At best, they'd get a good look once every hour or two.
And why do they want to rely on Human eyes, anyways? Radar is more reliable and accurate - you can get a count of the missiles, determine their course, where they were launched from, and where they will hit.
I don't reply to ACs
Yes, but in 1960, landing on the moon was something *imaginary* - it took almost ten years to actually become a reality.
In 2005, asteroid mining is imaginary - but what I was saying is that it is likely imaginary now in the same way the moon landing was in 1960. As technology advances, the "imaginary" becomes reality. That will happen again - it's just a matter of time.
Someone did create Slashdot. Someone did create NASA. The difference is that Slashdot has a business model and a method for generating income, so it will likely stick around; NASA has a bureaucracy which you yourself have admitted "hasn't done much in manned flight lately". (Granted, it has in robotic flight.)
I'll take what free enterprise might provide someday over what the government provides now. To me, that's the possibility of something, versus my money being stolen!
As of yet, all you've done throughout this whole argument is say that my arguments are negative or bad. That may or may not be - I provide examples and logic though! You have not done that! You just say that my arguments are bad, but provide none of your own.
Since you are incapable of defending your position, and I have given you ample opportunity to do so, I must conclude that your position, by your own lack of logic and example, is untenable. Since you have provided no examples of your own (real or imaginary!), you can not defend your own position, and therefore, by default, I am forced to conclude that your position in the argument is invalid.
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*So as a society, it is therefore safest to assume that each person knows what is best for him or herself.*
Knows and does are two things, usually.
Two examples:
1: We often "know" that not smoking or losing weight are "best" for us. But how often, as a society, do we do this? Also, isnt it "best" for a rich person to not have such poverty around him/her that those without would kill him to take it?
2: Enron/Worldcom. Was it "best" for these people to take the actions they did? Demonstratably, the answer is no, it seems to have landed them without a company to make money from, and possibly, with some sactions.
Communism failed because it did not take into account the fundamental drives of the people that constitute the economy. It is my belief that pure, unregulated capitalism would fail for the same basic reason, failing to take into account the people's fundamental drives.
emt 377 emt 4