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Japanese Startup Wants To Rain Down Man-Made Meteor For Tokyo Olympics (sciencealert.com)
A startup called Star-ALE wants to create a man-made meteor shower over the city of Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics opening ceremonies. The pyrotechnics show, Star-ALE says, will be visible from an area 200km across Japan, and the pyrotechnics will actually shower from space. Starting next year, Star-ALE will begin sending a fleet of microsatellites carrying 500 to 1000 specially-developed pellets that ignite and intensely glow as they re-enter the earth's atmosphere. ScienceAlert reports: But wonderment comes at a cost, and in this case, that cost isn't cheap. Each combustible pellet comes in at about $8,100 to produce, and that's not including the costs involved in actually launching the Sky Canvas satellite. The company has tested its source particles in the lab, using a vacuum chamber and hot gases to simulate the conditions the pellets would encounter upon re-entering Earth's atmosphere. In its testing, the particles burn with an apparent magnitude of -1, which should ensure they're clearly visible in the night sky, even in the polluted skyline of a metropolis like Tokyo.
I made the above comment in good faith, as I did with a similar comment elsewhere in this thread. Both are at -1.
The effect of hosting the Olympics on Greek debt has been widely reported.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-08-02/how-the-2004-olympics-triggered-greeces-decline
http://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/a-dark-olympic-legacy-for-greece/news-story/8dcf6d1e8df9fe2e0f93ff12e74b1b72
Furthermore, there are economic studies in the US that show that public subsidies for sports venues aren't worth it.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/use-of-taxpayer-money-for-pro-sports-arenas-draws-fresh-scrutiny-1425856677
My comments are supported by plenty of research on these topics. There's no good reason why my posts were modded down. I'm not sure why I bother trying to make good posts if moderators are going to downmod them to -1 where most people won't see them. I can only assume I was modded down because someone disagreed with my posts, which is a blatant abuse of moderation.
Why is this post at -1? These are legitimate issues that have been raised by many people.
I'll again cite this article: http://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/a-dark-olympic-legacy-for-greece/news-story/8dcf6d1e8df9fe2e0f93ff12e74b1b72.
The article notes that Sydney fared much better with the costs of hosting the Summer Olympics because they had plans to continue using the venues they built, even after the Olympics were over. They brought in additional revenue which helped to offset the costs. The Olympic Stadium in 1996 was Turner Field in Atlanta. That stadium is now being replaced, but the Braves have played there for 20 years. That hasn't happened in Athens, where those venues were built at a similarly large price tag but have subsequently sat vacant.
In the case of the World Cup, Qatar is using migrant workers, who have awful working conditions, to build numerous stadiums in the desert for the 2022 World Cup. Many of these stadiums won't long term uses. It would have been far better to choose the primary competing bid from the United States, which has more than enough stadiums to host the World Cup. No additional venues would be built to host the World Cup in the US; we would use what we already have. It's a far less costly solution and one that produces far less waste and has much less environmental impact.
There's no good reason for the above post to be at -1. I can only assume it was modded down because someone disagreed. That's an abuse of moderation. Too often, posts that get modded down incorrectly don't get modded back up and people don't see them. Why bother making good comments when abusive moderators are going to mod them down?