Slashdot Mirror
Space Vs. Poverty Debate In India
MarkWhittington writes "Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was obliged recently to defend his country's space program, which involves the spending of billions of rupees when India still has a large number of people living in abject poverty. The debate raging in India parallels a similar one that has simmered in the United States for decades."
A prediction for the future, based on my experience with welfare programs in the United States of America:
India will decide to put the money into a welfare program.
Poor (and lazy) Indian girls make sure to get pregnant at the proper early age to ensure full benefits from the welfare program.
Then the Indian women will spend it all on fake fingernails and ridiculous-looking weaves while their children live on "Kraft dinner" and Kool-Aid.
They will then raise several generations of mindless, obese, unmotivated parasites who can't be bothered to get up from in front of the television long enough to kill the cockroaches that run across every surface in their government-provided housing.
And if you ask them, they will tell you it is "all whitey's fault".
Am I the only one that finds it funny that in a country with a bunch of cows people are afraid to eat them? I suspect is was originally just a matter of not having enough pasture land back in the day the made someone say they are holy so you can't raise and kill them. But if they are there ... mmm steak.
Maybe now that the US is largely out of the space business India has a chance but did anyone in India really think they had a chance of doing ground breaking space work? Most of these "me too" countries just repeat the space race from 50 years ago: hey look we got a guy in space, we've orbited, we've shot something at the moon etc. A country that can't figure out that a call centre needs to be staffed by people that speak english well enough to be understood can't really expect much for cutting edge space work IMHO. (only somewhat joking)