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NASA Jet Propulsion Lab Lays Off 300 Engineers
Ghost of Von Karmen writes "NASA JPL, the lab that brought us missions such as Voyager, Cassini, and the Mars Exploration Rovers will eliminate about 300 engineering related positions due to Congressional budget cuts, according to various sources. The cuts reflect a change in emphasis away from robotic technology and toward human exploration of space. Prof. Elachi, head of JPL has indicated that the lab may pursue Department of Defense contracts to minimize additional reductions in personnel."
The cuts reflect a change in emphasis away from robotic technology and toward human exploration of space.
The cuts reflect the tremendous cost of warmongering around the world...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Because humans in space is the most important way to conduct space exploration.
Okay... I couldn't keep a straight face either.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
http://www.house.gov/writerep/
Commenting here will accomplish nothing. You MUST write your Congressional representative. Be civil.
Gov't employees laid off..
Is this April 1st?
Seriously though, remember it's not about the science.
It's about making it safe for corporations to own things in space. Corporations need people in space, not robots. Right now, the people are cheaper and do more than robots.
Not researching robots and spending lots of money figuring out how to make them do things is another public policy misstep. Sad.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
And I'm sure somebody will say that education is still usefull- despite this becoming almost a cliche story. You never hear "Major Labortory/Tech Company to lay off C-level exectutives in an attempt to keep R&D running". Why would any young person go into science or technology if this is the way they treat people?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
What stupidity is this? Robots are the cheapest way to explore space. The technology advances in robotics actually have real use on Earth. Yep, let's remove the federally funded program that has the most impact at NASA and replace it with a pipe dream of 2 missions. One to the moon, and one to mars. What then. Astronaut: Hmm, hey it would be nice to have some remote control robots out there in the harshest environments ever... or, Astronaut: Let's climb into a plastic bag filled with air and dance around in a low G environment. Oops, don't fall down, or you puncture your suit and quickly die.
Listen to Elachi's speeches.
This is not a permanent shift from robotics to manned exploration in the NASA mindset. This is a painful but hopefully temporary shift to get the CEV up faster so we don't have such a large down time between when the shuttle expires and the CEV comes on line. Robotics is still the acknowledged way to go, just not this year.
JPL funding for '06 is the same order of magnitude as '03, just much less than '04 and '05.
The advetised rate of unemployment is 6%, but once people stop collecting their money, they're no longer counted. Anyone know the true percentage of people without work in the US?
God spoke to me.
Email has a habit of getting deleted or lost in the spam.
Faxing produces a peice of paper that doesn't go through security and is harder to get deleted.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
During some news report I actually heard that it was closer to around 8-10% - they're a lot more honest in Europe in how they count people without employment. Basically, in Europe:
unemployed = No income
In the U.S.:
unemployed = Collecting unemployment
Pray tell, what is space supposed to be about?
I'm against weapons in space (weaponizing space will automatically cause me to not vote for someone), but last I checked, space wasn't about anything, really. We can explore it, we can exploit it. DoD is involved in both to some extent. So is NASA.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The kid is in town and he gets paid. Every single group that paid got PAID.
Big oil, big pharma, Halliburton, Religous right, Banks, Real Estate, Developers etc. etc. etc.
Didn't see JPL on that list.. goodbye.
I believe money can be much better spent on robotic exploration rather than on manned missions. I also think the return on investment in terms of new technology is going to be better per money spent (although manned expeditions cost much more).
Of the 12 astronauts that walked on the Moon, only one was a geologist. I'm afraid this will happen again on the Moon and on Mars, if (and it's a big if) the US administrations will have sufficient will and attention span to make astronauts get there at all.
But I'm not sure what you remember.
Some terrorists flew planes into our buildings and killed a bunch of our people.
So we invaded Afghanistan because that is where the group that they belonged to were headquartered at the time.
Then, for some reason, we invaded Iraq. And we're still paying for Iraq. And our people are still dying in Iraq.
What did Iraq have to do with those terrorists?
Not only this, but it used be that the top executive at Fortune 500 companies 20 years age got something like 20X what a "normal" lay person gets paid (though I'm sure stock options were there aplenty to). These days it's ballooned to ballooned to 50x and up. And when they do get laid off, they have so many parachute clauses and termination pay-offs that being laid-off is the best thing that could have every happened to them - you don't even have to be good at your job - witness Carlo Fiorina at HP. Or Meg Whitman at Ebay - (she's a billionaire from heading ebay! And I was there from the beginning, DESPITE her blunders, it was going up anyway, if anything it was a free ride).
2 /b3885011_mz001.htm
Sorry if it seems I'm picking on the girls, these just happen to be the companies I follow--.--, there are percentage wise also a lot of crappy guy CEOs - Darl McBride for one.
The CEO of Costco is one of those people I still look up to in business, most of the rest are ratbags willing to sell out the company in order to grab as much as they can in their short tenors as leaders. The Costco CEO (and co-founder, I believe) only pays himself 250,000 a year and insists on paying his workers a decent wage (something like 15-16 dollars/hour to start with) plus health benefits unlike Walmart.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_2
- the earth is flat,
- the earth is the center of the universe,
- we all were created based on intelligent design,
- search for the creator,
- radiation is good for the creation,
- mercury can be converted into gold,
- spontaneous combustion of people does happen,
- ozone holes do not exist and affect only countries,
- global warming cannot happen?
Sorry for the exaggeration, but what most people in the US still do not realize is that NASA is not the only research institution facing mass layoffs. There is a broad program running to shut down research labs nationwide. At the same time tens of billions of dollars are shifted to religious extremists. It makes me feel sick when I see what is happening.straw man... sorry, you lose. Come back when you choose logic.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
And this is precisely the reason that the specifications are so onerous.
Do you really think it makes a difference that a screwdriver meets this rigorous of a specification in 90% of the cases? No. It's just another way for the powers that be to pass big dollar contracts to their buds in industry. Often these contracts are written in such a precise way to make sure that only one or two contractors (and usually one) can do the job.
Oh yeah, and the cost for doing these contracts isn't that bad if the cost of all the specialists and paperwork is amortized over hundreds of projects.
That is all.
You can whack off to whatever you like. But don't waste my time with bullshit about "he thought there were WMD" when even Margaret Thatcher got the memo about Bush lying about WMD. Nixon had "a secret plan to end the war" in 1968, too, you know. I guess you figure that since Bush also believes god talks to him about invading Iraq, god must have put Bush up to the WMD scam, too. Clown.
--
make install -not war
"It's just another way for the powers that be to pass big dollar contracts to their buds in industry."
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Without specifications, you end up with screwdrivers with the tensile strength of peanut brittle, all because the guy who owned the shoddy screwdriver factory was a friend of a friend of a US Senator.
Yes, but we owe the following things to anyone crazy enough to join the military:
I once seriously considered joining the military -- but that was when I was young(er) and naieve enough to think that our leaders weren't going to go around the world starting wars for no reason. It has since become apparent that, by the standards of today, I am a pacifist. There's no way in hell I will join the military now, and I won't even do classified work, though there's a good chance I could double my salary by doing so. I imagine that many principled clear-thinking people are making similar decisions (which explains the disparity in pay).
These two points will probably make it harder for the US to defend itself against a real threat, should one emerge. People like myself will respond to the threat by saying "wow, everyone who answered The Call got screwed by our leaders the last time - I'll sit this one out." Kind of like our parents who became jaded the same way 30 years ago.