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What If the Apollo Program Had Continued?
proslack writes "The die had been cast years before Apollo 11 had even reached the moon. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam war was straining US finances. A fatal fire on the Apollo launch pad in January 1967 had blotted NASA's copybook. The Soviet moon effort seemed to be going nowhere. In the budget debates during the summer of 1967, Congress refused NASA's request to fund an extended moon programme.
What if things had been different that summer? Suppose Congress had granted NASA's wish, then fast-forward 40-odd years..." A nice little what-if sort of story that makes sorta nostalgic for a non-existent present.
We wouldn't have had Vietnam (this frees up the money) and the Cold War would still be going on (this motivates rocket development).
The whole thing was fueled by the ongoing Cold War pissing contest. Continuation of the space race would have meant dealing with the ever-increasing tension of the Cold War. So I'm sad we never got our cities on the moon, but it's a damn good trade-off for not having to worry so much about all-out nuclear war.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
We would be working with Zoidberg and be drinking Slurm.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Highly likely that:
1) We would have full time orbital manned space station at all times.
2) Visits between Moon and Orbital station would be LESS frequent.
3) Visits between Moon and Earth would be MORE frequent. (because Apollo lifts off from Earth. Public-Private partnership would see to it that NASA doesn't use the most economical way of transport)
4) No Space Shuttle. Rockets all the way. (Why mess with something that works)
5) Ion Spacecraft launched to Asteroids.
6) Still no man on Mars. But a permanent computerized research station on Mars that operates from fixed locations.
7) No Mars Rover. The Rover was a roaming answer. Fixed stations would necessitate no rover.
8) SALT II would have long been abandoned and Earth would be surrounded by nuke armed stations.
9) No Cruise missiles. Why build a Mosquito when an Elephant would be cheaper.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
We'd all be dead from toxic levels of perchlorate in our drinking water?
The rate of spending was unsustainable; we simply could not afford it, no matter how useful the research outputs might have been. On a more prosaic level, once the Cold War posturing had been successfully implemented, the political benefits would be virtually zero - even if the science would be extremely valuable.
...Vietnam was effectively the cold war. Rather than fight each other an an arena that had very high stakes (an invasion of Russia and the USA) the USA and Russia decided to fight in a number of "proxy" wars such as Vietnam and Korea.
And similarly, the cold war would have already ended itself. Soviet Russia while an interesting "experiment" ended up failing due to the fact that human nature plus the Soviet version of communism ended up with a government who could not financially sustain itself.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
No mention of Walmart anywhere in this article. I like this alter-verse.
Had we spent more on Apollo, we would have had more stuff on the moon. It is much less clear, though, that the economic relevance of doing so would have been any brighter than it is now.
TFA presents a fairly rosy picture, where lifting stuff, including vationers, out of Earth's gravity is routine and (relatively) cheap. Presumably, more Apollo would have driven some cost reduction; but that much?
TFA's predictions of bustling free markets on the moon seem even less plausible. With the possible exception of helium-3, the moon contains basically nothing worth shipping back to earth. Exploiting lunar resources really only makes sense to support lunar research activities(like big huge telescopes on the dark side) which might be "private" in the sense of "conducted by people not directly employed by the feds"; but would be largely publicly supported basic research stuff.
I'm not seeing it.
...but it's got no atmosphere...
Bow-ties are cool.
The Secret studios in Nevada where they faked the moon landings would be really busy, they would be having to fake not only the moon bases, but the Mars landings and the bases there as well.
Because we never made it past low earth orbit.
The Above thread is sarcastic, if you hadn't noticed.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Arizona would be littered with soundstages by now.
What if Kennedy had set a lesser goal, such as orbiting the moon?
The Russians quite probably could have achieved with with Soyuz-based technology. We "know" this, sorta, because recently someone proposed putting a Soyuz capsule around the moon for a rich billionaire with $100m to spare.
The Soviets did have the Luna programme - including Luna 10, the first artificial satellite of the moon. Interestingly, they focussed on robot exploration of the moon and remote collection of samples - probably closer in principle to the methods that will be used for future exploration of other planets in our solar system than manned flights.
what i mean is, just going out there just to have a look-see isn't a valid reason to spend quadrillions. we need to
1. discover an alien race, or
2. be faced with the definitive soon upcoming extinction of earth as a supportive biosphere for some reason, whether man made or cosmic or terrestrial in origin, or
3. discover some fantastic energy source or resource out there (or drug... spice?)
4. more tribal chest thumping and grandstanding a la the cold war
etc.
these are reasons that are easy to grasp and easily capture the attention and the imagination of all. this provides the political and cultural and popular compunction to spend large sums of cash on the endeavour
sure, there are lots of reasons to go out there right now. except they are all amorphous and ill-defined and longwinded. something pressing and urgent and/ or clear and easy to grasp is what is needed to get us motivated
there really is no motivation to go out there right now. again, i mean solid, clear, urgent, and earnest motivation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Even the Earth has a whole lot of undeveloped acreage in the ocean.
All the discussions about the space program overlook a critical fact. It costs about $10,000 a kilogram or more to lift anything into low earth orbit. That means that the entire manned space program is virtually useless : there's no point in learning how to put people into space and have them survive if no affordable way for a lot of people and supplies to go into space exists. If every kilo costs 10 grand, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to send robots and equipment into space than to send people. Even repairing Hubble never made any sense : it would have been a lot cheaper to build a brand new telescope every time than to pay for each repair mission.
The only way a moon base or a space station or a space hotel or anything else will ever be practical is if that launch cost is reduced through new technology. Personally, out of all the proposals I've ever seen, only one new technology makes the slightest bit of sense : laser launch.
We would still be driving around the planet in gasoline driven speedsters.
We would not have not cured world hunger.
We would have more than enough nuclear warheads to destroy the planet.
Wars would not have been abolished.
The 747 wouldn't still be the largest airliner.
Oh yeah.. wait a minute, where have I been?
We would have some buildings on the Moon, a much less unmanned space exploration history, a few more advances in the relevant technology, and even bigger a debt.
As interesting as going to the Moon can be, going there ourselves for 40 years continuously would serve little scientific purpose (cue the responses that we are meant to live in space like in all the cool scifi novels and that it should be our #1 priority regardless of reality), waste a lot of money (more than it'd be worth, scientifically) and divert resources from higher ROI science, like huge space telescopes and such.
So yeah, it was cool while it lasted, but I won't cry over what could have been, because it's not like there could possibly have been any drive to do more after over a decade of space racing.
You just got troll'd!
And now the US looks like it will be emulating the USSR in decline.
???
I presume you are talking about the economy? Capitalism has cycles. You can't take a 6-month period and extrapolate it indefinitely into the future.
Who is modding this "interesting"?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Would the Cold War have fizzled in the way that it really did, with Saudi Arabia flooding the oil market in 1984 and causing the oil dependent Soviet economy to collapse?
We still haven't established what happens long-term in low-gravity. We know that zero-g is not someplace you could live forever. Is lunar gravity sufficient? We don't actually know. And it's one thing to follow the science fiction cliche that the martians and moonies couldn't adapt to Earth gravity anymore.... it's another thing if the first moonie baby is horribly disfigured.
We don't even know if, were you to raise ten generations of rats in a 1-g centerfuge and ten generations on Earth if the centerfuge rats would be healthy by comparison.
Helium-3 is also present on Earth. You can buy it by the tank. If just getting access to Helium-3 was enough to make fusion possible, we'd at least have one pilot reactor that was able to produce a decent sized net energy gain.
There was a significant concern inside of NASA that our flawless luck of moon launches would run out. What if we had done a few more missions and 19 left us with dead astronauts on the moon when the LM couldn't lift off? Do you think we'd have continued at that point? Remember, there could have been one more moon landing with the hardware we had but NASA didn't want to launch it.
The problem is, cutting off the Apollo program in favor of the Space Shuttle made fairly good sense at the time and awful sense in retrospect. Even a fool can predict the past.
Gentoo Sucks
While a great triumph for NASA, the Apollo program was chiefly devised to beat the USSR to the moon and thereby provide an immense propaganda victory over the commies. Once that was achieved, it had little practical use in developing space exploration.
.. X-15 rocket-powered aircraft .. set speed and altitude records in the early 1960s'
The US actually put its own space plane on the back burner for the duration of the Apollo program. What would have happened if the Apollo program never happened, they might have continued development of the X-15 and we would have had a safe reliable Space Shuttle decades sooner.
'The
Less gravity is good for the arthritis, too.
That's a brilliant plan. Moon = new Florida.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Kind silly spending $100B on something that only lasts 6 years.
The ISS and Hubble would probably be replaced with a small moon based research lab and observatory. While the value of the lab wouldn't be greater than the current ISS, moon-based telescopes (optical and radio) would probably far outperform anything we've got today.
The other changes would be the trickle-down effects of the technology developed to support such a base. Specifically, higher performance and cheaper solar power arrays would probably be commonplace.
I don't think a lunar base would be a stepping off point for a manned Mars mission. Robotics would be more or less where they are today, since the state of the art is not driven by NASA or military requirements. Unless the moon base revealed some necessity for having people on the ground, it might be an argument against further manned missions.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Gosh" said Billy.
Jane looked up, quizzically. "What's up?"
"I'm still coughing up blood," said Billy, who had stopped trying to revise his airlock safety certificate paper. "It's not getting any better. This moon dust is horrible. I wish we could go back to Earth, but sadly our bones are too damn weak. If only we had done some basic research before striking out into space and setting up colonies."
"Gosh", said Jane. "Anyway, it's time for your monthly wash, we've bought enough credits for 1 minute of hot water."
What? In 1969 Vietnam had been "won" already. If not for the US Congress deciding to pull the plug the whole fall of Saigon thing wouldn't have happened. But the most important thing is that the money for Vietnam was already spent. The remaining six years until the fall of Saigon was the US pulling out and telling the NVA to come back and be friends with their brothers in the South.
Too bad they didn't get the message amd decided that a brother that disagreed with them about politics was better off dead.
What benefits would we have got? Hard to say, probably nothing tangible - just a group of half-a-dozen scientists and technicians spending a few months at a time far out of the public gaze. There might be the occasional documentary, but there's only so much footage of rocks and dust - and one patch of dirt looks a lot like any other. So I doubt there'd be much about it in the news (again, just like antarctica). Just about the only time it would make the headlines is when there's a debate about cutting funding (again), or when something goes wrong - or when there's an expose about the billions being spent on it, for not-much in the way of returns.
Is that what we thought we'd get?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
you have to put the question in concrete direct and compelling terms, like: holy fucking shit, that planet we just found near regulus is showing clear signs of photosynthesis
then we have a deep and strong desire to get our asses to regulus. not some sort of vague idea to go "out there"
we need concrete goals, not nebulous ones (pun intended)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You're right, such speculation is a needless waste of time. Though not quite as silly as reading and complaining about said speculation in response to an article on that very subject.
You've almost got it. There was also the Soviet war in Afghanistan, though some historians call this the Second Cold War. (I disagree.) . In a way, our current involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, and to some extent with Iran and Syria is basically a "cleanup" of loose strings leftover from the Cold War. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about any other events surrounding these conflicts.
My blog
No, dumbshit, not just like "Soviet Russia". (It's just Russia now, FYI)
There's a whole spectrum between unbridled capitalism and total socialism. When a 12 trillion dollar economy cannot provide basic health care to all (no, ER visits don't count) there's a goddamned problem.
As we've recently seen, unchecked capitalism is not a good thing since the markets aren't rational after all. And as we've seen with USSR in the past, that doesn't work either. I see no problem emulating nations like Canada, New Zealand, or Sweden. Hell, I've got friends in South America with better basic health care for the poor than we have here in the states.
Soviet Russia was not just socialism. Limited socialism has been in place in much of Europe for years. And while I wouldn't trade our unemployment rate for theirs (even now), they are hardly in some kind of a Soviet-style decline.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Mantoya
Sorry, but remarks like this also reminds me Major Frank Burns - "When are you two going to learn about Chinese treachery? Did Pearl Harbor teach you nothing?"
Similar to the upcoming US election results
The recent bust might not have anything to do with his assessment.
The Soviet Union was done in by rampant corruption. Some see the previous
administration as a repeat of what was going on in the Soviet Union prior
to it's collapse. At a certain point, you need to reign in your own greed.
This isn't just altruism, it's also enlightened self interest.
If you steal too much ultimately the system won't be able to sustain itself
anymore and it will collapse. "Greed with no rules" ultimately destroys itself.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I know people say that the Soviet Union wasn't real communism. You can't get to the ideal version of communism without killing and hurting a whole bunch of people who don't want to be a part of it.
Just because they got stuck on the intermediary step doesn't mean they aren't sufficient to show the failure of communism. You have to get stuck on the government-coercion intermediary step because you have to force people into the communistic system.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I remember when it happened and it was one of those big collective "oh shit!!" moments. Everyone grokked what this meant, the rooskies now had the high ground and could do stuff we weren't even close to doing yet. Ya, there was also a lot of grudging admiration..but it was tempered with some sober reality. The US people were used to being topdogs in about any tech out there, I mean this was just a default assumption "we're the bestus in anything!!", it was taken for granted, so this really got to people. Of course we caught up quickly, but it really was a good kick to the pants.
Interesting, maybe, but incorrect. The US first got involved in VietNam in the fifties, before the first Cosmonaut reached space. We landed on the moon in 1969, only four years before we stopped bombing North Vietnam (I was stationed in Thailand then and saw the last B-52 leave Utapao to drop the last bomb).
The cold war ended during the Reagan Presidency and had nothing to do with rocket development; it was economics that stopped the cold war, the USSR went broke. If you have a Saturn V rocket that can get to the moon and back, an ICBM is trivial by comparison.
Free Martian Whores!
You're forgetting that saying something like that makes the speaker feel good about themselves, therefore evidence and logic are irrelevant. Making the US to be the bad guy/in decline is still very trendy with the kids despite Obama's election. Might take them a while to unlearn that reflexive cynicism and paranoia. /voted for Obama
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I am sorry but if you think what we have now is capitalism, you are clearly mistaken.
Liberty.
between the following situations:
1. there are lions out there who want to eat you
fills you with a vague unsettling feeling. you know this to be 100% true, but what to do about it? nothing more is done
2. look, on the other end of the valley, that's a lion staring at us
your mind instantly begins to scheme, your hands are instantly filled with intent: build a trap, build a defense, run away, go and kill it, etc
its psychological. you have to see the threat/ treasure in front of you before you actually do anything about it. i'm not saying it is good, i'm not saying it is bad, i'm just saying it is 100% true of human nature, this psychology
of course, something like a planet-killing asteroid, looming at us with 3 days warning before armageddeon is not a scenario such a psychology is properly equipped to deal with. so it is my hope that mankind bridges, on serendipity, the time between now, and some hypothetical future state where dispatching planet-killing asteroids is an afterthought, or their long term detection is accurate and foolproof
until such a hypothetical time, we are riding on luck, because indeed, the threat is real, but too vague to actually compel mankind to do anything about it. no one is going to spend trillions on asteroid defense. just not going to happen right now
now another way we might be compelled to spend trillions: a hit by a major asteroid, but not a planet killer, that does debilitating damage to the biosphere, but nothing mortal to civilization. then you have nothing to worry about: we WILL prepare, we WILL spend quadrillions, we WILL focus a hell of a lot more on outer space at such a time
in fact, its almost in the best interest of mankind for the earth to be hit by a major, non-planet killing asteroid right now. that would burn into us the need to spend a lot on outer space, fix our attention and focus, and definitely kick space exploration into high gear. in fact, amongst the reasons to kick space exploration into high gear (aliens discovered, resources needed, etc.), it is the only nonhypothetical reason to get our asses focused and motivated: a valid real threat to mankind and the planet
in fact, in the name of furthering mankind's technological progress, maybe some evil mastermind billionaire today should redirect some perfectly sized asteroid our way. he will of course be consciously responsible for the death of thousands or even millions of people, as well as untold trillions in damage, but his motivation can also be excused: "hey, get off your ass now, before its too late"
mr. bill gates, are you listening? its time to blue screen a comet, or windows tunguska edition
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you change a single moment in your past, will everything change?
In The end of Eternity, Asimov said that there was some "inertia" in time, if something changed in the past things somewhat keep being more or less the same, as most significative changes arent isolated events but more massive trends. If french revolution didnt happened that exact day, could had happened anyway a day or a year after. The apollo program could had been cancelled in a later date anyway.
Also, if it continued everything could had changed, even things that could look unrelated. Maybe arpanet and then internet would not exist now, as all could have been more focused in space, or maybe the IBM PC never saw the light, You know, the kind of stuff that make that if you kill a butterfly in the past, you get another president in the present
No, but history says you can extrapolate it twenty years into the future.
The book chronicles a real estate boom (like our generation had a few years ago) and the aforementioned stock market boom. The similarities between that time and ours, economically and sociologically, are astounding.
Give us another fifteen to twenty five years and our economy will be ok, most likely.
Free Martian Whores!
According to The New York Times .
While we are daydreaming about what might have been, I'd like to imagine an alternate history where NASA didn't stop iterating.
NASA got the Saturn V through an iterative development cycle. Get Werner von Braun, have him build rockets very similar to ones he had built before; fly them, collect data, improve the design. Fly the new ones, collect data, improve the design. Over and over.
And then, for the Space Shuttle, NASA essentially said "We don't need to do that test and improve cycle anymore; we are just going to design the Space Shuttle on paper, build it, and be done." NASA's unsung heroes of rocket surgery managed to make it work, but that's a triumph of hard work and overtime against management stupidity.
It would have been cheaper to keep the test/improve cycle going than to spend ten years building the shuttle and flying nothing. According to Wikipedia, the Shuttle program will have cost $174 billion by its conclusion in 2010; the Saturn V program cost $32 to $45 billion in today's dollars ($6.5 billion in 1960's dollars; the inflation is depressing, isn't it?). But at the time the Shuttle project was started, the Saturn V had already been paid for; just keeping it flying would have cost even less than those numbers suggest. And besides, you wouldn't need a Saturn V for every flight; just for ones where you need that kind of crazy lift capacity.
It would actually have been far cheaper to keep flying expendables, but keep developing them, and hopefully iterate into something reusable. Take the rockets from the 1960's, and spend 20 years flying and improving them, and what would you have in the 1980's? A lot more stuff flying, more safely, and a lot cheaper.
The Shuttle was a mistake, of management more than anything else.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Why?
Some see the previous
administration as a repeat of what was going on in the Soviet Union prior
to it's collapse.
I see the previous administration more akin to the gradual stagnation the Soviet Union experience in the late 60s-early 70s.
I see the *current* administration as to a source of rampant corruption, and very similar to what the Soviet Union was "done in by".
Gigantic budget deficits as far as the eye can see, centralization of economic, industrial, social, and financial policy, huge expenditures upon shady projects with little oversight, and bipartisan efforts to snatch as many crumbs as possible from the budget with little or no thought as to what that will to do the nation.
We are currently watching the socialization of all of our societies "little ills", including the failure of our major industrial sectors (Auto Industry and Large cutbacks in our military industrial complex), socialization of trillions of dollars of losses in the financial sector, and socialization of our escalating health care costs.
There are only so many economic guarantees that can be placed upon the Federal Government before it begins to loose credibility, and before the dollar collapses. While we aren't at that point yet (we are years away, even with trillion+ dollar deficits), there is nothing to suggest that our deficits won't continue to grow through at least 2020, and probably through 2050 (if we last that long). Worse, its not like this money is being spent on pressing concerns; an immediate war, an epidemic crises, or a massive natural disaster. This money isn't even being "invested" in future growth (ie industrial or financial policy). This is money being blown on "societal welfare", or "public goodies", also know as ways to game for votes.
$1 spent on road construction does not get you an additional $1 in economic growth; the same is true for medicare, social security, carbon credits, or bank bailouts.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I was actually thinking more along the lines of "In a civil war re-enactment we need lots of Indians to shoot."
Ok, I'm more a child of the early 90s than the late 70s.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why?
What is the base purpose? For a few to accumulate much, live high, while others endure hardship, or for most to live OK ( with enough security so they don't just die from lack of basic necessities ( food, basic healthcare ) ) but with enough insecurity to incentive hard work and production, and still a few ( and probably more, since the "feeding ground" would be larger ) wealthy living high?
If the economy only has the purpose of remaking the aristocracy and serf conditions of long ago, then I am at a lose as to why the many should participate. CEO's get away with "what is in it for me". What is in it for those "less than" the CEO's?
So, why? Because people are more important than money.
emt 377 emt 4
Besides which, the US abandoned it's capitalistic manufacturing base about 35 years ago
We may not make as much consumer crap as we used to, but our industrial output (until the recent recession) has been climbing, not falling. It's just that our productivity has been climbing even faster, leading to a net loss in jobs.
Don't worry about the Chinese. They've been artificially pumping up the US dollar for years. Inevitably, the dollar will eventually be worth less against their currency and they'll be sitting on a whole pile of our debt that isn't worth nearly what they paid for it.
In other words, a dollar isn't worth anything if you don't eventually trade it back for something American. Right now, we give them paper and they give us stuff... what a deal, right? Eventually they'll want stuff in exchange for this paper... expect to see some manufacturing jobs return this way.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Procreation. Not sure what that has to do with anything ...
Once again, this has nothing to do with socialized healthcare. If you're going to respond to someone's comment it's generally considered good form to actually respond to it, instead of going off on a tangent.
Money isn't important at all - money is just a physical object which we use to represent human effort/action. And no, people are not more important than their actions. Human life has no intrinsic value except to the individual to whom it belongs - to society as a whole you provide value only when you actually do something.
IIRC, the Soviets did provide NK with MiG fighters and other military equipment. They didn't support them to the great extent that China did though.
So, why? Because people are more important than money.
That's a nice platitude, but what about people that fuck up their own bodies? Smokers, the obese, heroin addicts... socialized healthcare for the lot of them! And of course once you accept that, then people will start to look at the books and say, "Wow, smokers are expensive!" and then the government will tell you that you can't smoke. Oh, and you can't be fat because fat people are the next line item. Oh, and now you can't ride a motorcycle because motorcycle injuries are our largest ER expense...
Socialized healthcare isn't going to be a panacea, and it's not possible to provide it in unlimited amounts to everyone. Right now cost is the main mediator - with a government pay system it will be government bean counters making rules. Maybe you see one or the other as morally superior, but I can't agree with you. Denying a kidney to a person because they are too old is not morally superior to denying a kidney to someone because they are too poor - either way someone isn't getting a kidney.
All that said, we actually have socialized health care right now, but it's expensive and based around the ER. I'm all for changing the way we pay for basic services to reduce costs... I just don't have any grand expectations.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
...but this post requires a response.
First if you think that what we've had in the last 40 years even remotely resembles unchecked capitalism you should try starting your own business (as I have). And no, I don't mean IT consulting. I mean a business that actually makes a product. Government is everywhere. Regulations, taxes, insurance, audits, min wage, overtime, unemployment tax, etc. They interfere at every turn and have driven manufacturing away. What they haven't driven out, they are taking over. The USA could do with a few decades of unchecked capitalism. By unchecked I mean no interference & no bailouts.
You say the markets are not rationale? They are far more rationale than the state. The state that is now propping up a failed automobile industry that the market would have fixed or done away with years ago. Check your premises.
As for health care... You mention people in South America with better health care. Bunk. In 2006 alone, Bush signed a foreign aid bill that sent $20.6B to South America. TANSTAAFL.
You have no right to health care or a job or a living wage or a house. You have no right to the fruits of someone else's (doctors & nurses) labor. You have the right to your life, your liberty and to pursue happiness, not to actually be happy. That's up to you.
I can think of no one who said it better than Ayn Rand. Yes, Ayn Rand. People quote it because it's relevant. Criticize it when you've read it.
From Atlas Shrugged...
"I quit when medicine was placed under state control, some years ago," said Dr. Hendricks. "Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill?
That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun.
I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward.
I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything - except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the "welfare" of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only "to serve".
That a man who is willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards - never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy.
I have often wondered at the smugness with which they assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind - yet what is it they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands?
Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors their system will now produce.
Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it - and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't."
Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Book 3, "A is A"
"Actually, no they aren't. Some people have no value, some people have negative value."
People, in general are. Your couple of examples really dont change the fundamentals.
"Simple: money to live on. If they don't want to work, then they don't get any money, and they starve to death. What are they going to do, take all the CEOs into slavery and make them work the fields? There's not enough CEOs to produce that much food."
I never said people should not work. In fact, I did say that "there should be enough insecurity to prompt productivity" ( or words to that effect ). But why cant that work ( and hard work ) produce an ability to have a couple small conveniences and food and healthcare? Perhaps you will come back with "what about (some small number ) of people who choose cigarettes and hookers and a million other bad choice items" rather than these other things. Your argument I would hold true, for them, but not everyone, nor even most do that.
"And what's with all the complaining about CEOs?"
There is lots there to complain about.
"something that's completely the fault of the Democrats"
Which is? The complaining, or the events leading to the complaining. I have a hard time believeing Every Democrat is 100% to blame, and all Republican is 100% pure as the driven snow in this. I am going to suggest you examine your bias.
"If you're not a stockholder, your opinion on their pay is irrelevant."
They affect society, I am part of society, so I have to say I dont agree with the above.
"And if you are a stockholder, look in the mirror for someone to blame"
I'm not, and you have a point, but it only goes so far. My only option as a stockholder is to withhold my funding. ( Something I would do were I in a position to invest. ) Stockholder control of the company is too diffuse to allow stockholders, in general, to do anything. Unfortunately, as we see, ethical or moral based investing does not keep unethical companies from getting investors.
"Overpaid CEOs usually mean companies that don't perform as well as the competition."
I agree, over the long term. Wall street is focused on the short term.
"If everyone did this, companies wouldn't waste so much on CEO paychecks."
Absolutely, but this has as much chance as working in the real world as Marx's Utopia.
emt 377 emt 4
Very interesting post. I have also heard horror stories from relatives abroad, though none of them have worried about running out of money due to medical bills.
Recently I went to the Dr. because I had a cold that I was afraid was infectious. My doc touched my belly and sent me down to the ER to check for appendicitis.
A few weeks later I got a bill for over $1000. I have decent (by American standards) insurance. I really can't afford to go back to the hospital, though I was reffered to a specialist.. I hope whatever they found on that expensive CT scan wasn't too important...
By the way, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US (when we aren't in a depression) is medical bills. If that isn't a sign of a totally broken system I don't know what is.
Overall I have to say that I like my insurance, but if my company didn't offer a group plan I would be stuck in the individual market that specifically excludes the prior conditions that I actually need medical care for.
I'm willing to roll the dice with a goverment plan because one day I would like to start a business, but I simply can't live without company group rate insurance.
Also, for all the great care I get, have spent tens of thousands of dollars if you count my premiums and what my company pays which basically comes out of my pay. I have a feeling that the kind of money I already drop on health care would go a long way in a public / private insurance model.
The space shuttle was a noble goal: "Make a reusable launch vehicle, one that can be operated every few days without having to be thrown away." "Every few days" turned into "every several months" and "without having to be thrown away" turned into "with only part of it being thrown away, part fished out of the ocean, and part torn apart and rebuilt", but the long term goal was good. No matter how many incremental improvements you make to an expendible rocket, you either need to make the non-incremental change of adding flyback systems or you need to accept that the price of each trip will include building and discarding one of the largest and highest performance vehicles in history. The Delta, Atlas, etc. people made the latter choice, and although iteration still led them to better satellite launchers than Shuttle, it's not something we can build a real space program on.
The trouble with the RLV alternative is that, if making a reusable orbital vehicle in shot is too hard (as I'd agree NASA proved), the only way to get there incrementally is from reusable suborbital vehicles. Start with something like the DC-X, bump up to something that can hit Mach 10, Mach 15, Mach 20, Mach 25, increasing the size and performance as necessary. But long before you've made enough incremental improvements to reach orbit, you'll probably have made too many for the public's patience. "We made it to the moon in 1969!" they'll tell their Congressmen; "why are we wasting so much money" (i.e. a tiny fraction of that expense) "on rockets that can't even stay in space?" Or worse, you'll lose the program to administrators who think "Here's a great opportunity to experiment with multi-lobed tanks, lifting bodies, linear aerospike engines, and a bunch of other untested technology all at once, just as soon as we weed the competition down to a single contract to the guys who made the best Powerpoint slides! What could possibly go wrong? Whateration, did you say?"
what you describe depends upon the existence of some mythical past where these elements of human nature were not present. on the contrary, the behavior you describe is part of every historical epoch, in every society. rather, what you describe is new to your personal experience, not new to humanity. you're projecting
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
His doctor strongly recommended he pay out of his own pocket and get the treatment immediately. That's what he did. So explain to me again the point of government health care?
Great, he was able to pay for costly medical procedures himself. Many -- perhaps most -- people are not.
Back in 2004 I was in a low-paying job where I had no health insurance. I broke my wrist, which required about twelve grand in surgery to repair properly. Where was someone making barely above minimum wage going to come up with that kind of money? Maybe work out a payment plan, but who is going to want to deal with someone with as horrible credit as I had back then, and who was barely making enough to pay the bills as it was? Or perhaps I should have just splinted it myself and hoped it healed without leaving that hand crippled for life?
I was fortunate enough to have parents with money, and they were able to take care of this for me. Not all are so lucky.
Every time I hear someone whinge about waiting lists, I have to sigh. Waiting a few months for treatment might not be great but it beats the stuffing out of not getting treatment at all, which is what many people are facing today, right here in the US.
And, finally, I don't really see what's so great about our current system. Insurance companies exist to make profit, not to provide healthcare. A system where there is a profit motive in denying claims seems pretty dumb to me.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Build a linear induction motor up the side of Mauna Kea and launch all your bulk materials that way, leave the low-acceleration launch capacity for humans.
There are degrees of "good". We moan about the NHS in the UK, in that we might have to wait a few hours to be seen to, but it's still miles better than not having any treatment at all, or being lumbered with a massive bill.
Same with the public transport. Yeah, we moan about the trains being crap here - but that doesn't mean it's anywhere near comparable to not having any at all!
I can give examples until I'm blue in the face and some people still wont be convinced.
If you dig for shit in any system, even one you'd think was perfect, you'll find it.