Slashdot Mirror
LHC Successfully Cools To 1.9K In Lead-Up To Restart
Smelly Jeffrey writes "The BBC is reporting that the LHC has had all eight of its sectors cooled to 1.9 Kelvin. Their tagline is that it is now 'colder than deep space,' referring to the CMB. LHC engineers have spent nearly $40,000,000 USD on a new system to prevent the 'quench' condition that caused the LHC to be down for warming, repairs, and re-cooling over the last year. The LHC is now cold enough to begin colliding particles in search of the Higgs Boson. High power collisions won't be started until late December, or perhaps early January. However, a low-power beam through parts of the collider could be tested as early as next week!"
Time for my friends and I to throw yet another end-of-the-world party!
Then why are they spending all the energy to cool the things two months before it's needed?
I don't mean this as a sarcastic comment. I'm genuinely curious.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
They're doing low-power test runs. I managed in my brilliance not to notice either that paragraph in the article or the tagline at the end of the summary. /hangs head in shame.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"Related Stories
Science: The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and Fate 666 comments"
It's a sign, they're going to kill us all!
When every government balance sheet is dripping red, why are we doing this again ?
Your not. . . the LHC is localed in Geneva, and was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The monetary numbers were just converted to USD because the article is written/targeted to a US audience.
*Knock Knock* Hi, its the rest of the world here at your door, we'd love for you to come out and visit sometime!
We need to get rid of all these extra hadrons that have been piling up since the accident.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Has the LHC destroyed the Earth yet?
NO
Good. Carry on.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=2
the work done at LHC is about the only type of thing governments do that adds any value anyway.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'll keep an eye out for Doc Brown and his Delorean
"LHC engineers have spent nearly $40,000,000 USD on a new system to prevent quenching condition that ..."
No,
1. it is not to prevent quenching, it is to allow helium to escape properly. Superconductors will at some point in their life quench or lose superconductivity. This happens for various reasons though most are due to insufficient cooling, like the last case.
2. Couldn't this say $40,000,000 USD (FORTY MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) to be more dramatic?
Destroy the Earth by creating a massive black hole? Nope, not yet...
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
40 million is pretty cheap considering the US government doled out 600 billion in bailouts not long ago. Billion is the new million.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Mini blackholes will suck up the deficits.
Table-ized A.I.
They must know that this will cause a resonance cascade, even when the warnings indicate that the anti-mass spectrometer readings are dangerously high - yet at the last minute are deemed to be within acceptable limits.
The Large Hardon Collider is designed to pump various types of hardon up to huge energies before banging them together. However, many concerned citizens without the personal experience or understanding of what hardons do worry at the idea of the large hardons being sucked deep into a black hole.
The device will push large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they clash and spray matter in all directions. “It’s nothing that cosmic rays don’t do all the time all over the place,” reassured a particularly buff scientist. “It’s perfectly right and natural.”
Low-energy hardon physics and the temperature dependence of hardon production are well understood, as is the process of a hardon smoothly entering the nucleus. But some question what may happen at greater, hotter energies.
Church leaders have come out at the device. “They’re the same polarity!” said Pope Palpatine XVI. The Church worries that strange matter may recruit normal matter and turn it strange.
The Large Hardon Collider was to launch last September, but this has been delayed due to inexplicable and ill-timed failure to get a beam up. “I’m so sorry,” stammered a scientist, “this has never happened to us before.”
http://rocknerd.co.uk
And also: Large Hadron Goatse Cookies!
Ah, but don’t go home with your hadron
It will only drive you insane
You can’t shake it (or break it) with your Motown
You can’t melt it down in the rain.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I just think that this time around they keep a little low profile until it works fine
it was nice knowing you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Prepare for unforeseen consequences
if the balls touch, we all die
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Government balance sheets aren't "in the red" due to a lack of money, it's due to a lack of restraint. "Oh hey let's attack a country.. Oh hey let's attack another.. Let's give money to the banks with the stupidest management.. Let's give people money to not grow food.. Let's give people money to buy new cars.." and then when the budget problems come up "If this spending bill doesn't pass, we have no choice but to shut down libraries and fire departments!"
>*Knock Knock* Hi, its the rest of the world here at your door, we'd love for you to come out and visit sometime!
But whenever we do, you guys tell us to go home! Is that because of our obsession for things that go boom, or some other issue?
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
Let's hope the shields hold up against those pesky bosons from the future!
+1: Concern Troll
I think there's a place in West Hollywood you can get that done for about $20.
(Bring a friend for 10% off.)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Searching for how the universe works and why the world is as it is represents a search for purpose which is as intrinsic a human need as food or shelter.
You're a waste of taxpayer dollars. Go pray for your food.
Because the food those people eat is produced using fertilizers, steel structures, engines based on petroleum combustion, transit networks, irrigation systems, computers and, ultimately, a market for the food - all of which come about because of technological advances (computers wouldn't work today if we didn't know about quantum mechanics - modern PC's are affected by quantum-scale artefacts), most of which were funded by military investment (Internet, etc.) or academic institutions, designed and implemented by people that went to university to study something other than fertilizer, using mathematics from previously theoretical subjects that they found could apply to modern physics, using even vaster ranges of technology to achieve their goals.
Did you know that the Moon missions visibly pushed scientific advancement for *decades* before and after they occurred? Did you know that previous "waste of time", purely-theoretical, large-scale, cutting-edge technology now powers most of the world, the world's satellites, thus world communications, thus enable people to even *find* those people, let alone help them?
How about that computer you just posted this troll on? Have you any idea how many man-hours it takes to build that? Considering your attitude, I should take it back, leave those raw materials in the ground and give someone a job instead... that makes sense, no? Or how about you *think* for a second about where those people are going to get their houses, pharmaceuticals, food, warmth, clothing, how they'll be found and helped and their progress tracked by your government to ensure they show up as a statistic at least?
Eighty years ago, the highest-level scientific research of splitting the "unsplittable" atom helped discover and then (50 years ago) harness the most destructive force held by man, culled from the annals of scientific research and weaponry, and now makes it power most of your country, provide pharmaceuticals, medical scanners and countless other innovations. Now think what'll happen in another 80 years when the tech discovered, manufactured and researched based on the findings of the LHC hits your country.
Unless you are at a library posting from a public computer you are hardly living your own words. It seems to me your own existance is substantially less valuable than the LHC, which at least has some potential for benefitting humanity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Other than you tactfully left out the word corruption, that's the best and most succinct description of the situation I've yet read.
In such a description you necessarily have to leave out things like leaders demonizing the people they are about to attack in order to keep themselves in power and so on (I'm protecting you from those awful sub-human evil fill_in_the blank, so you need me to stay in, and increase, my power), corporations that are now more powerful than all single countries and most coalitions of them and a few other things. But it's truly an inspiring and great beginning. Hope someone else reads it.
We're let these turkeys play us too long by far.
It's been estimated that most of the world's economy is the result of basic quantum mechanics research. The money put into QM research has been an absolutely incredible investment. Perhaps they're hoping that it will continue to be so.
I'm actually very curious to know more about this - have you got a link, article, citation anything for further reading?
Which is why I said "every government" - only on Slashdot does an AC get modded Informative for pointing out that the LHC is in Europe.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
colder than my wife... /bitter -- oh so bitter
(better make sure to check "post anonymously")
I've seen various estimates, but Leon Lederman (Nobel prize winner in physics) discusses it in his book "The God Particle." I think it was even in a similar context - why spend so much money doing high energy physics?
Sorry it's not a link, but the book is well worth reading. It's about the history of particle physics research, from an inside perspective, culminating with a discussion of the Higgs boson.
Doesn't seem very cool to me, in any commonly used temperature scale!
Actually "every government" is not having economic problems, unlike the US some European countries have come out of the recession.
Some Europeans countries are actually "in the black" with surpluses, and little or no unemployment. The US media is not very good at informing the public about the situation around the world.
Oh, and 40 million USD is not the real cost to European countries since it's obviously payed for in local currencies (Swiss Franc, Euros). The exchange rate inflates the numbers.
And it is a tiny amount for a continent with over 700 million people (twice that of the US) and a much bigger economy than the US! Even the EU has a larger GNP than the US, and the EU does not include all of Europe at all.
P.S. The project straddles the Swiss and French borders on the *outskirts* of Geneva (and quite a few kilometers).
I'm dyslexic, and I don't get this.
Is that because of our obsession for things that go boom, or some other issue?
Seriously, as he said: "we'd love for you to come out and visit sometime!"
Really, consider it some time ..
Crap like this is truly more useful for people at large than the people who lives on the streets or would lose their homes.
Actually, WE (as in the US) have been one of the largest contributor countries, even though we aren't officially a part of the CERN treaty group. The US has nearly 1000 scientists involved in the various LHC experiments, and has directly contributed nearly $600M to the construction of the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Plus, it will contribute to construction of ALICE and LHCb, and many millions more in grants to US based research groups for operations and upgrades. And it has built two Tier 1 LHC computing centers (at Brookhaven and Fermilab), dozens of Tier 2 centers, and as well as a fully equipped remote operations center. So, I date say "yes", the US is slightly involved with this project....
Could you detect the ring with thermal imaging from an orbiting satellite?
It's really sad...cause it's true.
Time to activate the FNAL mole.
You delivered your argument well, but you could say something similar about any scientific goal, for absolutely any amount of money. Will the LHC lead to practical technology in 80 years? You think so, but how plausible is that really and why? What if I think we should spend $20B to study the mating habits of snails and promise some huge breakthrough in 80 years, will you also think that's a good investment?
I don't know whether the LHC is worth it, so I don't necessarily disagree with you, but simply citing successful past sponsored work (and ignoring failures) isn't very convincing. Furthermore, it's of absolutely no help if we are deciding between two mutually exclusive scientific research projects.
The beer cans will have labels showing coils going completely around them; when you've had them chilling on liquid helium long enough, the coils will turn blue, and that's when you'll know your beer is as cold as the interior of the Large Hadron Collider.
but, you don't get the ballmer signed edition...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
I wouldn't instantly dismiss spending $20B on studying mating habits of snails. Given that snails are very helpful to farmers, and given that farmers received 10 times that in aid ($258B) in a single year and the total market is about $1.5 trillion, spending a 10% of the given aid on studying how to produce better snails could provide significant returns in the long run.
If the study resulted in just a 0.1% increase in crop production, it would pay for itself in a single year!
Yes, I know, -1 Flamebait here I come.
You have great prediction powers, O Wise One!
When every government balance sheet is dripping red, why are we doing this again ?
You do realize USA spends more money per month, just to fund the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, compared to the entire cost of building the LHC over a decade, right?
Also, the physics/astronomy community benefits greatly from the success of LHC, and the worldwide scientific community as a whole also benefits. Now, who benefits from the wars?
... ATLAS ... CMS ... ALICE ... LHCb ...
Woah, woah, that's a tad too many scientific buzzwords! I'm all dizzy around here!
Cue the LHC Rap ...
... pump...to huge energies before banging them together ... faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible ... hardon smoothly entering ... greater, hotter energies ...
I feel strangely aroused...
Aahhhhhhhh!
Large Hardon Collider
All the previous reports that I've been reading, must have had the wrong spelling!
"Restraint" implies something desired, but totally unnecessary.
When you go deeply in debt paying for college, it's not a "lack of restraint" that put you in that bad situation, but an investment, which may or may not pay off.
So why is the government so roundly critized for similarly trying to get the education dollars remotely back up to where they were (per-capita) 30+ years ago?
I guess NASA represents a lack of restraint as well.
Roads, too. As well as all forms of public transit.
The government exists specifically to pay for all those things which we all find beneficial to society, and would be impractical to do individually, or otherwise piecemeal.
And even those areas of flagrant fraud and waste, while requiring a fix, won't come close to making up the national deficit. The bailout money, while significant this year, will barely be noticeable average over the decades between major bailouts, AND would presumably end up costing everyone far more money, if that money wasn't spent where and when it was needed.
It's only on /. that the rabid libertarian sentiment doesn't get you laughed out of the room. It's idiotic on it's face.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
evilviper, if I had points, I would SO mod you up!
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
If I had points, I would SO mod you up!
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Actually, the whole system is getting close to 1.8K, but some magnets aren't quite down there yet. About 2/3 of the ring has cyro authorization (cold enough to power up the magnets) but the magnets haven't been energized yet. All the magnets have to be powered up. Then comes low power beam testing and alignment. Then maybe they can do some science.
There are supposed to be two big fixes in place now. First, the quench protection system now covers not just the magnets, but the connections to them. (The basic idea is that if a superconducting magnet ceases to be superconductive at some hot spot (in which case all the energy in the magnet comes out as heat), the system dumps the energy into resistive loads, and heats up the entire magnet quickly to make it resistive, so that the energy is dumped throughout the magnet, not just at the hot spot. Last time, a hot spot developed at a welded splice. Second, the venting system for dealing with the gaseous helium released after a quench has been improved, with bigger rupture discs. Last time, the vents weren't big enough, and there was substantial damage to the cryogenic plumbing.
None of this has anything to do with the physics. It's all plumbing and DC power control.
The original design documents say a quench is supposed to be recoverable within three hours. That was rather optimistic.
Brookhaven will also be getting a new Advanced Proton Source (think high energy x-ray machine)... Work will be starting on it this year at Argonne. An APS is like a collider except instead of smashing two particles together, the particle stream is focused on a fixed object. Uses vary from looking at the structure of materials to seeing the spray pattern of an injector nozzle... very cool stuff. Learn more about Argonne's APS here http://www.aps.anl.gov/
Let me guess, they'll do the experiment on December 21, 2012, right?
Interesting.
Let's try a list!
- Roads.. maybe you don't use them?
- Well regulated skies so the plane you're landing in doesn't have an unexpected conjoining with another one taking off
- A nationwide electrical grid
- Required emergency care, regardless of ability to pay (that comes out of a similar source as medicare/medicaid - without it, no pay, no treatment.. got hit by a car walking down the street? No insurance? Tough luck, bub)
- Regulated banking sys...ok. bad example.
Government may do a lot wrong, but most people take for granted the stuff they do right, that they use every day. That's a small list, but not anywhere near complete. Almost every mass transit system in the US wouldn't exist if not for public funds, and often public involvement in their yearly operations.
Mind you, most of the actual politicians need their brains washed out with lye, and lobbyists should be sequestered 20,000 leauges under the sea, and there's billions in waste every year, but if not for those governments, I doubt you'd be online right now saying how little they do. LHC is one great example of where they really shine, it's true.
I for one look forward to the LHC setting the scene for scientists to make a pill that gives my old fella a few more inches.
Error one: 0.1% of 1.5 trillion is 1.5 billion Error two: Just because you produced 0.1% more crop doesn't mean you sold the extra food at the same price as all the other food. Increase in production != Increase in demand.
How is it costing us LESS money to keep the banks afloat so that housing prices can stay artificially inflated, maintaining an artificial bubble at great expense? How is it costing us LESS to spend resources on WAR, which is not an investment but money tossed in to a blackhole never to be recovered? How is it costing us LESS to pay people NOT to do things? None of those things are an investment. They're all tossing money at buying ABSOLUTELY NOTHING and maintaining poorly run countries and businesses at great taxpayer expense.
Your rant set up a bunch of strawmen the GP post didn't even propose, then knocked them down leaving his original complaints completely unharmed. And you're calling his comments idiotic on their face? Then people mod you insightful? What the fuck? Is it opposite day around here?
This begs for an "except for , what did the governments ever did for us" joke.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The web is not the Internet.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
So how does the parent's post about governments doing good have anything to do with the GP's post about governments spending money on crap that has no real value other than to save a few thousand jobs in the very very short term only to further bankrupt a nation?
Wake up. That is not insightful, that's posting for the sake of posting.
Awesome my captcha is "provoke"
True, but doesn't change the conclusion that it would be worth investigating, and such a study shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
So you covered the bailout with wild speculation on what might have happened, how about the GPs other points about military waste (are all those bases in over half the countries on the planet really neccessary?), the ludicrous primary industry manipulation that ends up with farmers paid to not grow crops, the auto industry that can't compete still not competitive thanks to handouts? Massively corrupt bureaucrats selling our childrens future to their cronies in every industry is what puts us in the red, not roads and NASA.
Wow, that must the be the least insightful post ever to be modded +5 insightful.
I agree, it is idiotic on it is face.
And even those areas of flagrant fraud and waste, while requiring a fix, won't come close to making up the national deficit. The bailout money, while significant this year, will barely be noticeable average over the decades between major bailouts, AND would presumably end up costing everyone far more money, if that money wasn't spent where and when it was needed.
Read this over:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/102xx/doc10297/SummaryforWeb_LTBO.pdf
I know, I know, the CBO is part of the "vast right wing conspiracy". Probably tea-baggers, the lot of 'em, eh? EH?
I predict they will discover the Higgs-Boson particle, aka "The God Particle", on December 21, 2012.
Shortly thereafter the flux of strange quarks created at the same time will cause the fabric of the Universe to reformat to its original state, just like last time. Thus bringing the end of our world and the beginning of the next cycle as predicted by the Mayan callendar.
Or maybe it will be more of a "Silent Earth" scenario. (Google it, I'm too tired to link it myself, its bedtime)
It'll send a message back through time and stop itself!
My web domain.
For a start, without quantum physics, there would be no transistor. Without transistors, there would be no modern computers, no pocket calculators, no M3 players, no mobile phones, no digital TV (well, I'm not sure if that one would be a disadvantage :-)), no internet. I'm pretty sure more than 90% of the people posting here have a job that simply wouldn't exist without the transistor.
And that's just the transistor. I've not yet mentioned Lasers (CD player, laser printer, laser pointer, precise measurements for industry), superconductors (maglev trains, medical NMR tomographs - the latter also use quantum effects very directly for their imaging) or atomic clocks (GPS). I also didn't mention the use of quantum physics in chemistry (I don't know how many of the current chemical products were developed using quantum chemistry, but I guess it's a lot of them). And I'm sure there's a lot more I didn't even think of.
In short, the modern world as we know it would not exist without knowledge of quantum mechanics.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
We have to hide the fact that aliens already gave us clean burning focus confined Fusion from Boron-hydrogen interactions. Compared to most large scale cover ups this is a piece of cake. We've cornered off enough of the richest Boron fields to last 10,00 years. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760#
Indeed, just give everyone living on the streets a few dollars (because with $40 million, it won't be more than that). I'm sure that will save them. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm interested in your thoughts on th "Let's raid Afghanistan and Iraq!" policy.
It's the restraint of people to pay taxes.
The money has to come from somewhere...
Well, fortunately it's a complex machine, so they can easily avoid the reals by simply making sure the imaginary part doesn't vanish.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Is that because of our obsession for things that go boom
Jeeps, I didn't know you had an LHC as well.
>*Knock Knock* Hi, its the rest of the world here at your door, we'd love for you to come out and visit sometime!
But whenever we do, you guys tell us to go home! Is that because of our obsession for things that go boom, or some other issue?
No. It's because you speak very loudly and can't be bothered to speak the local language. Even when you're visiting England.
And even those areas of flagrant fraud and waste, while requiring a fix, won't come close to making up the national deficit.
I think you seriously underestimate the depth and vastness of the corruption that's infiltrated the US government. Everyone is out for themselves pilfering whatever they can get away with at the expense of the American People. It's the new American Way.
For the love of God man, think about all of those poor Physicists, Engineers and Technicians that would be out of a job and slowly starving while living in the starlight hotel if we did that!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
-The aqueduct
-Sanitation
-Roads
-Irrigation
-Medicine, Education, Health
-Wine
-Public Baths
-Public order
All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I refuse to believe, 3 years after seeing the original sig, that you are still making a movie :-)
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
Not to mention that disassembling it will require a VAST amount of money and the market for several stories of detector and superconductors that require a good years installation isn't that great (outside of the academic sphere of influence that the LHC is sitting in). So even though I personally think it is money well spent, if you did take the view that it should be broken down and sold for bits, you wouldn't get much return on your investment. Far better to let it continue on and do what it was designed to do. And of course we could always raise the (same old tired) argument about why not spend our defence budget on the needy and homeless? Why not the media budget? and so forth.
Here's what Hawking said when giving his Michelson-Morley award lecture:
I think you'll notice it over the next decade as the currency collapses and the United States is torn to shreds by Civil War. You think it can't happen? Two years ago, no-one thought there could be another Great Depression either, yet here we are.
Also, understand that no government spending is "necessary". Rather, all government spending is in pursuit of two goals, re-election, and a cushy job for when the public realizes that you have betrayed them.
Also, the physics/astronomy community benefits greatly from the success of LHC, and the worldwide scientific community as a whole also benefits. Now, who benefits from the wars?
Defense contractors.
Well hey, the Silent Earth scenario seems pretty groovy!
An intoxicating mix of mellow dance and ambient soul...
The earth reformatted, not so much. Unless... I head for the boot sector!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
""When every government balance sheet""
"Hi, its the rest of the world here at your door, we'd love for you to come out and visit sometime!"
Wow. Every government is cited, and you point out the LHC is located in Europe and built by a Euro organization. Guess this supports the Euro-centric view that is so modern these days, when you even don't consider yourselves part of the world's many governments. Sort of like when you ship off your carbon credits to China, thus the EU has far better pollution standards.
"and was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research."
I suppose. But most things these days in science is an international effort. I guess you forgot the subpar magnets were made in the US in your EU chess puffing exercise.
This project, while impressive in scale and technological ambition, has not be one to write home about by any country affiliated with it so far (see word 'any'). And while I expect scientific discoveries from it, from what I've read about it, it doesn't seem that it'll push the state of things like Fermi's did for years; it seems more a significant stepping stone, but that also depends on where some the boundaries it's exploring actually are.
When your next gen one comes online, then you can squawk about how great it is.
It's only on /. that the rabid libertarian sentiment doesn't get you laughed out of the room. It's idiotic on it's face.
What rabid libertarian sentiment? How does a generic criticism of US government spending suddenly qualify as rabid libertarian sentiment?
Here's my take. Public funds aren't free money. Every public service you mention comes at a cost. Government is not just a list of benefits. In that light it is reasonable to become concerned, either if there is a surfeit of government spending where the benefit doesn't exceed the cost or if the trend of overall spending seems to be going to unsustainable places. In my view, both apply to the US today.
For example, a huge portion of government spending goes to entitlements to old people. What are the benefits of paying many hundreds of billions per year to the elderly at the expense of everyone else? Social Security is alleged to provide "retirement insurance" though it doesn't. Medicare provides huge incentives for the elderly to hide or transfer their assets and nurse health care at the public teat. Both programs are growing at a rate that threatens the solvency of the US.
Why try to dump more money into education when it's clear (from the fact that education costs are increasing faster than the rate of inflation and the increasing intellectual weakness of college graduates) that too much money is already being pumped into education? What is the point of NASA? For example, it has spent the last four years attempting to build a rocket, the Ares I that already exists as the Delta IV Heavy.
The government exists specifically to pay for all those things which we all find beneficial to society, and would be impractical to do individually, or otherwise piecemeal.
The government exists to do those things that we truly need, but can't do ourselves: security, a decisive system for settling disagreement that all parties agree upon, development of some public goods, etc. The problem now is that spending is now spent on wants not on needs that can only be provided by government. Sure, security of food sounds a nice idea, but we don't need farming subsidies in the slightest. Education subsidies sound good, but we'd still educate people (and probably get better value for the money). Maybe there's a valid security risk of old grandmothers eating catfood, but we don't need the vast scale of Social Security to provide that security net for them. Maybe there should be a health care last resort for the people who can't afford anything else. But that's not Medicare, which already has passed beyond any reasonable spending limits and still rapidly grows in spending.
Do we really need a military of the size we have, geared to fight wars we've never experienced? Did we really need to "nation build" Iraq, especially given that most of the money probably didn't go to Iraq, but rather to foreign (especially US) contractors?
Do we need to "rescue" businesses by spending hundreds of billions on them, only to do the same thing again in a few years? How do we benefit from partial government ownership of banks and car companies? Or extreme favoritism to labor unions and people who borrowed too much money?
At some point, it has to be realized that government spending isn't inherently a good idea and that much more than half of it is spent on petty things that we don't need, but merely are too cheap to buy with our own money.
What if I think we should spend $20B to study the mating habits of snails and promise some huge breakthrough in 80 years, will you also think that's a good investment?
Why not? We'd no doubt see great advances in progress decades before and after throwing $20 billion at snails. Surely, it was The Snail Project with its inspiration and snails and stuff that inspired us to do all these wonderful things.
What? How on Earth did you end up with 17.5 cents?
$40 000 000 / 700 000 000 = 0.06 (0.057) cents
Oh, wait you screwed up the numbers! You did it the other way around! You divided 700m people by 40m USD! That would give you 17.5 cents.
NASA's requested 2010 budget is ~$20 billion. Whether or not that's a waste of money hardly matters since it's (comparatively) a very small amount.
I'm talking about things like the military budget of about a trillion dollars a year. Or social security, to protect people's "right" to not work (notice: I'm not claiming some people can't work, but social security exists so everyone can stop working because there's this idea that after a certain age, people deserve to mooch off of everyone else).
And the bailout is much worse than just spending $600 billion. It's paying $600 billion to the worst banks to keep them from being bought by banks that were well run.
One more thing. I speak as a current student, and the whole "education needs more money" argument, is completely bullshit. Know what happened at my schools? "Hey so we have a bunch of money and they say we have to spend it." So they bought smart boards and upgraded gyms and none of it matters because the problem is the system, not the lack of shiny things. Some schools could probably use more money, but just throwing money in the general direction of the problem isn't going to help at all.
And what makes you assume that Gothmolly lives in the US?
Bubble? Where the hell do you live? Housing prices around here are 1/5th what they were just a few years ago. That's lower than pre-bubble prices, while the population has been growing the whole time.
Well, A) Going to war with Afghanistan earlier would have prevented the destruction of the World Trade Center, which cost an obscene amount of money. B) South Korea is a strong ally, and a valuable trading partner (while North Korea is not), so the US is apparently making money back on that war.
If you're referring to social security, that's quite easy. It's been shown, time and time again, that the homeless are such a draw on the public that paying them just enough NOT to be homeless is a huge savings for us all.
And that's BESIDES the humanitarian side of things (minimal social safety net), which almost all Americans firmly believe in.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Having waves of elderly people homeless is a huge cost to the public. So much so that the minimal amount of money they get from social security is actually a reduction in government spending on them.
Social security is just fine. Medicare is a huge problem which threatens to bankrupt the US. However, Medicare is just one segment of the overall problem of ballooning medical costs, which lead to 9 out of 10 bankruptcies, and a huge segment of the US population uninsured. It's a much bigger problem which needs to be addressed. Getting rid of medicare, and leaving the elderly to use the emergency room as their only medical care, will be vastly more expensive, not less. "Don't get sick, and if you do get sick: die quickly." doesn't work.
The money spent on K-12 education, adjusted for inflation, is 30% lower than it was 30 years ago, (per-capita/per-student).
For the rest of your "do we..." questions I'll just say: The experts have all resoundingly said, YES WE DO., and you've provided NO evidence to support your claim that we don't, so I will summarily dismiss you out of hand, as your comment deserves.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
By all means... Prove it!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
i've been waiting for this ... dont ask why.
Read radical news here
"All right, apart from better sanitation, medicine, education, irrigation, public health, roads, freshwater, public order....What have the Romans done for us...."
Here a link to the Wikipedia article on the book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Particle:_If_the_Universe_Is_the_Answer,_What_Is_the_Question%3F
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how inflation works and where babies come from.
Bubble? Where the hell do you live? Housing prices around here are 1/5th what they were just a few years ago. That's lower than pre-bubble prices, while the population has been growing the whole time.
What does population have to do with it? There's no demand; the ratio of housing prices to income is still too high, houses are still unaffordable. As a nation, median household income grew by 60% from 1990 to 2006, but median home prices more than doubled (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/14/AR2007091401170.html, http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/son/index.htm). In a lot of places, it was much worse than the median. A correction was and still is due if you expect people are actually going to buy any of these houses.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk