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National Planetary Exploration Car Wash and Bake Sale
An anonymous reader writes "To attract media and Congressional attention to the deep NASA planetary exploration cuts proposed to take place October 1, and the need to restore the planetary budget to present or higher levels, a National Planetary Exploration Car Wash and Bake Sale is being planned for June 9th. Organizations already involved include planetary groups at many universities, research institutions, and Moon Express (Google Lunar X Prize)."
I'm not an American, but I gotta acknowledge that never-say-die spirit of 'em Americans.
The "Car Wash 'n Bake Sale" is a stroke of genius !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Wants to throw support behind a good cause.
Signs up for Twitter.
The only place those trilliions should go is back to the hard working people they were taken from. If individuals want a space program, then they can get out their check books and voluntarily pay for one.
Boy, your just showing your ignorance there. NASA routinely runs less than a penny per federal dollar.
It makes no sense to try to balance the budget with cuts to NASA.
From Wikipedia:
NASA's FY 2011 budget of $18.4 billion represents about 0.5% of the $3.4 trillion United States federal budget during the year, or about 35% of total spending on academic scientific research in the United States.
it's pantyWAIST.
Seriously, get your insults right! :)
You can say just about the same thing about all other government services. You want medical care, school systems, highway infrastructure, social security?? Then why don't you get out your own checkbook and pay for it yourself, and give me back the taxes I paid for the services you use.
How about stopping the stupid cannabis war? Not only do you need about 33% of the current police force (I kid you not), but also there will be massive hippy protest to stop costly wars, saving even more.
Problem? I'm sure some cannabis smokers who get high before bedtime will totally bring evil to the world! (not)
Here be signatures
Now imagine if the Department of Defense instead went out and spent their time trying to raise the money they need from private benefactors, rather than this silly attempt at shaming the government into giving them more stolen money. It wouldn't matter how many people don't want to fund them; if they find enough money, even if it comes from just one benefactor, they could go forward with buying guns and stuff.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
"It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Compassion is a ridiculously easy system to game to your advantage. Worse than that, once it gets settled, only those who game the system can get anything out of it.
Look at both history and the way begging goes in the poorer parts of the modern world. You can find professional beggars who put more effort into looking desperate than they do into finding work, even to the extent of crippling themselves, removing limbs, tearing off skin to fake skin diseases, and so on.
There are also huge biases built in. Women get more charity than men. It's easier to find charity money for starving kids than it is to prevent them from starving in the first place. Cancer victims are fashionable, tuberculosis victims are ignored.
I simply do not believe it is possible for pure charity to be fair.
I don't know much about the US welfare system, so it might well be a complete disaster, but in general the state welfare model can be made blind to all this bias, and in most of the developed world, that's exactly the point of it.
Wash it down with some Tang?
Sigs are for losers
Now imagine if these people instead went out and spent their time trying to raise the money they need from private benefactors, rather than this silly attempt at shaming the government into giving them more stolen money.
Now imagine that they have been trying that tack, and they're still broke.
Going into space benefits us all. It has already paid dividends. It can pay more. It makes more sense than blowing the money on highways when we could be building rail, which can carry ten times as many passengers per dollar spent in the best case, and achieves parity in the worst case.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What's tragic is how many people here equate liberty with money. "The Road to Serfdom" is going to end up as a how-to manual.
... It can pay more. It makes more sense than blowing the money on highways when we could be building rail, which can carry ten times as many passengers per dollar spent in the best case, and achieves parity in the worst case.
That hasn't been its record in the USA. Here it has been a sink of massive subsidies resulting in a vastly underused infrastructure that most people will avoid if they have a choice.
NASA should sell beer to raise money. Call it Moon Brew, plaster it in patriotic imagery and tell men it makes them smarter and promotes scientific progress at the same time.
Only 100 billion more barrels to Titan!
pushes out private charity
What does this mean? That once an organized effort is providing all the starving people with food, private individuals no longer throw money at a lucky few?
It sounds like complaining that the professional firemen push out citizen fire brigades. That's the whole point of it.
We humans would like to think that we're special, but the fact is, we're just another species on this planet.
And 99.99% of the species that have evolved on this planet have gone extinct on this planet.
Doesn't matter if it's failure to compete, a slow climate change, a rapid disease or a near-instant asteroid strike, sooner or later, nearly every species gets wiped out.
If we really want to be special, we need to leave Earth and spread out, because while the Earth's environment is the safest for us *individually* over the short term, it is also a near-guaranteed death sentence for our *species* over the long term.
In order to effectively and reliably fund things, one needs regular sources of funding. And simply going to people and asking for a fraction of a cent is not an efficient or reliable way of getting money. Moreover, scientific research,like defense, is a public good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good which means that everyone benefits whether they pay for it or not. Thus, people will have no incentive given the option not to pay for it since they will benefit either way. The only effective or fair way to pay for public goods is for everyone to pay.
That hasn't been its record in the USA. Here it has been a sink of massive subsidies resulting in a vastly underused infrastructure that most people will avoid if they have a choice.
That is massively false. That has only been true since the federal government not only permitted but actually actively aided the car companies in buying up and shutting down profitable and active public transportation systems to increase demand for automobiles, which coincided directly with the otherwise unnecessary introduction of the federal highway system, which was deliberately routed in order to destroy some cities and towns and to pursue other political goals. Therefore, the history of public transportation in the USA goes like this: Successful public transportation was actively eradicated by the federal government for the benefit of big auto, but was quite profitable until then.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
All government is a tradeoff. In your view are taxes for defense not ok then? Absolutes are really easy to state, but the universe is tricky and complicated. If one took your conclusion to its logical standpoint no form of government would be acceptable at all. That's not even libertarianism. That's anarchy.
Sure, it could happen. But makes that miniscule chance compelling?
Well, it's risk management. If it happens odds are we more or less all die. So if we can do something about it then we should. You try not to worry about what you can't do anything about, but if you can do something and you don't that's lame. Meanwhile we get commercial benefits from it, without blowing anyone up but volunteers. I call it a win.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So there are a variety of problems with this. First, what do you mean by harm? Second, while it does depend what yardstick you measure success, I suspect that if one looks at history, you will consider a lot of things we have today to be signs of success that came due to government funding. For example, most of the funding for cancer research in the last seventy years has been from the government. For example, in 1950, childhood leukemia was death sentence. Now, most children with leukemia survive to adulthood, and with some types of leukemia survival rates exceed 90% http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/news/childhood-leukemia-survival-rates-improve-significantly http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/LeukemiainChildren/OverviewGuide/childhood-leukemia-overview-survival-rates. Similar data holds for most other types of cancer as well many other diseases. And while charity (especially to groups like the Jimmy Fund) has certainly helped fund that research, the largescale success came from government funding. So, do you think fewer children dying of cancer is a decent way to measure success?
And it bears note that cancer is not the only example of this. One can go back centuries and point to research and exploration done by governments, where no one else had the resources to do so.
Another relevant measure of success might be the survival of humanity as a whole. Thus for example, existential threats to humanity like large near Earth asteroids are an obvious threat. Are you ok with taxes that go to fund defense against such threats?