About 3 days into this, BHO should have turned to BP and said, "How large a diamater hole can you drill for me right beside this well, say 1000 - 2000 ft deep?"
"DoD, how small a diameter nuke do we have?"
Assuming the hole is bigger than the nuke (we have suitcase nukes, so this ought to be a "yes"), insert nuke into 1000 ft hole, detonate. Molten rock rushes to seal oil leak 1000 ft. underground. Problem solved.
Oh, don't get me started!!!! Everybody starts screaming "renewable energy" when something like this happens, and then starts blathering about windmills and solar and junk like that. CLUE: NONE OF THAT WILL POWER YOUR CAR DOWN THE HIGHWAY!!!! For that, right now, you need OIL! That's the bottom line. Period. End of story! No solar farm, no wind farm, no geothermal plant is going to change that until we get a really sexy battery breakthrough.
Almost every day, we seem to have another researcher somewhere that claims to have done that breakthru. Ha! Last best one I saw was from a couple university researchers that announced a nanowire lithium battery in December, 2007. Keep reading, find out that their nanowire anode is good for 10X capacity ONLY if a similar breakthrough is found for the cathode, which it has not. Without that, it is a 3X capacity nanowire battery. Plus, further research has been "funded" by... the Saudis, on Saudi soil. You think we're ever going to see this battery again, considering what success might do to Saudi oil exports???? Not freakin' likely!
The Chevy Volt will be about the best we can come up with for probably a really long time in the future. Most people's daily travels, about 85% of them, are less than 40 miles round trip, so 85% of most people's daily travels could be 100% electrically powered, and shifted to... coal, or natural gas. Nope, we STILL aren't going to be building enough windchargers or solar farms to do much about that for a VERY long time. Scientific American's January 2008 issue (possibly 2009, I forget) outlined a plan to go 100% solar, but that has a little drawback of requiring a breakthru in solar cell efficiency AND it'd take 100 years to implement. Back to the drawing board...
Lacking a battery breakthrough and an absolute necessity to stop using fossil fuels, maybe a crash program with solar thermal, which works already, and a smart grid to dristribute power could be combined with a 100% electric car transportation system that could (somehow) get its electricity in real time like the buses that get their power from overhead wires. Still needs a battery 'cuz you can't string those everywhere on the planet, but might work. Hideously expensive. Plus, you'd have to shoot all envirowackos of the sort that trump up roadblocks like some in California that a power wire running through a forest is somehow unacceptable. Geeeezzzzz... I'd like to boil these guys in oil, every one.
Oh yeah? After 3 more shuttle launches, they're going to be sending up OUR astronauts! Where's that "American Exceptionalism" now, eh? Maybe we ought to listen a little more to what they have to say, such as those 2 Russkies that said we don't have to worry about global warming, but instead a possible ice age come year 2012 or so...
No point to a manned space presence? How about we run out of some important rare earth metals, exhaust the mines here on earth? Wouldn't it be nice to have the technology to send miners to the asteroid belt, and extract those metals from asteroids? Esp. when one of the metals enables solar panels that provide inexhaustable electrical power from the sun?
You'll never be able to know the reason you'll need manned space flight 'til you really need it, and then if you don't have it, you're screwed. China will likely have the tech and OUR MONEY to go to the asteroids and mine the rare elements that will power THEIR country to cheap electricty, and world domination. Learn to speak Chinese, or... repeal the income taxes, so OUR country can grow back to a world economic leader, and, BTW, pay for a manned space program again.
We will not have a man-carrying launch vehicle in our lifetimes. We are totally without the economic capability to build one. The only way we'll ever be able to do it is to get out from under the income taxes, which have been killing our economy for over 50 years. But that won't likely happen until the economy goes completely belly up. That's probably 20 - 30 years away (hopefully - I'll probably be dead by that time) and after that, it'll take decades to recover, if ever. No more Americans in space, other than begging rides on other country's launchers. Don't like it? Repeal the income taxes NOW... get a headstart on the future.
We CHASED the manufacturing jobs overseas via the income taxes making our products unviably expensive. We can either have high wages and provide good lives for our citizens, or we can have high income tax rates. Of course the gov't chose the latter. We need to take back the gov't, kill the income taxes dead, all of them, and return manufacturing and therefore prosperity to the USA. Nothing else is going to work. The income taxes have been killing our economy slowly for about 50 years. Things have been getting steadily worse. Ever notice how we used to have a recession, it'd be an annoyance for a short time, and we'd recover fairly quickly? Now they're projecting high unemployment for years to come. Why? The income tax has killed our ability to recover, because we don't have GOOD jobs for people to fill. Good jobs aren't found in Wal Mart and McDonalds, they're found in a Ford plant, building the world's best cars. But a lot of car company plants are in Mexico and Canada, chased overseas by the income taxes. Thanks to the income taxes, we have a choice of paying workers peanuts in order to have a reasonably competitively priced product, or moving production out of the country. Since workers won't work for peanuts, there's no alternative to moving the production out of the country. Get rid of the income taxes, and the money that was going to pay them can go to higher wages, and put many Americans to work to drive a consumer-driven recovery. No jobs == no recovery, and that's what's going on now.
Didn't say Obama was killing it. Said the income tax was killing it. Sure, BHO killed the moon mission and therefore the Mars mission, but overall, the lack of money and prosperity is traceable to the income taxes sucking the prosperity out of our society.
We can win at manufacturing without abusing workers. All we have to do is get rid of the income tax. The income tax is what makes our products too expensive. Repeal them, and our workers keep every penny they earn, anc can afford to power a consumer-driven economic recovery. 40 hr workweek, OSHA, high wages, everything remains intact.
There's no question about it. After 3 more shuttle missions, that's it. No more shuttles, no plans in place to go back, thanks to the genius in chief canceling the moon rocket.
Make no mistake, this is going to get steadily worse. We don't have money for most everything we need - health care, infrastructure maintenance, etc. We couldn't afford to build the interstate highway system any more.
This is the result of all our jobs going overseas, and especially the manufacturing jobs. GO to business school, they'll tell you that there are only 3 sources of wealth: agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. Manufacturing has largely been shipped out of the country, which has adversely impacted the mining industry too. Their good-paying jobs went elsewhere, too.
Until we get it back, we're going to continue to decline.
The thing that is really killing manufacturing is NOT the good wages it pays, NOT the union that ensures those wages for millions of workers, but instead it is the world's highest statutory income tax rate. The US Gov't's corporate income tax rate of 35% is sucking money out of our industries, and chasing their jobs overseas. State business taxes of about 4.5% puts the USA, overall, second only to Japan, which is a couple tenths of a percent higher than we are.
Kill the income tax, or die as a world leader. Its that simple. The best way to do it that I've seen is the Fair Tax (www.fairtax.org) but whatever we use, we absolutely, positively have to get rid of the income taxes, all of them (corporate, personal, social security, medicare, self employment, alternative minimum, gift, capital gains, etc.) or we're just going to keep sliding down toward 3rd world status. The flat tax, BTW, is just another income tax. Income taxes are toxic to our prosperity.
"The information posted to WikiLeaks is (as far as I have seen at least) not the kind of information that represents a threat to national security."
Do the lives of our citizens fighting in Iraq and Afghanstan count? I saw a classified manual on the details of some of our jammers, which protect our people from radio-detonated IEDs. Now the enemy knows the frequncies of (some of) our jammers, and can build their radio triggers outside of these ranges. How would you like to get in a Humveee and go riding around either war zone now? Our troops do, every day.
The army should get some nice, antique flamethrowers and walk into the wikileaks server room and toast both the equipment and anyone they find there.
Instead, build long tunnels between major cities, evacuate them down to between 0 and 3 psi, and run high speed trains through them. The trains would need very little energy to run thru the extremely thin atmosphere, and the pressure diffential can be used to generate electricity when needed. 2 birds, 1 stone.
Environmentalists NEED bashed. In fact, I can't think of a bunch that more richly deserves bashing.
They approach things as if money is no object, and act simply on the fear that they can create about a subject.
No, solar is a non-starter in 2010. See the plan to go 100% solar in the January, 2008 Scientific American. Sure, it can be done. They figure it'd take about 100 years to build, PROVIDING they have some breakthrus in solar cell efficiency.
And, of course, pinhead envirowackos are ALREADY trying to lock up the best solar areas in question from being developed, which would be the Mojave Desert, courtesy of collabaration from the wicked witch of the west, Ms. Pelosi. If there's any way to screw up the country, the envirowackos, with dems in their hip pockets, will try it.
If you are Harrison Ford, or Miley Cirus, or some other celebrity, do you really think that the operator is NOT going to whip out a pocket camera and image the screen, and sell it to some of the low-life websites that exploit such things for cash? Or, what if he simply posts it on the internet? Of course not every operator will do that, but there's always a bad apple in every basket, somewhere.
Yes, this quest for ridiculous mpg is going to get a lot of people killed for a variety of reasons. Electronic controls ARE more unreliable than mechanical controls. Last throttle problem I had was my '69 Ford Galaxy, and I just went to the dealer, bought a new cable, and replaced the broken one - 1 screw to unfasten/fasten it if I remember correctly. The cable simply broke. No other accelerator problems on my cars, ever, and I've been driving since 1963.
Electrical parts absolutely are more error prone. For one thing, they require electricity, which has a nasty habit of going away for a variety of reasons. Then the electrical part stops working.
Wait 'til they get electronic steering, and your car does a hard left into a retaining wall... at 75 mph... all by itself.
At least with unintended acceleration, you can use the MECHANICAL gearshift lever to put it into neutral, and the MECHANICAL brakes to slow the car.
One thing that a firearm absolutely must do is to go bang each time you pull the trigger. This firearm isn't going to do that. Either the bad guys will figure out how to jam the signal from the watch, or the user will forget the watch, or the battery will go down in the watch, or (substitute your own horror story here...)
People that rely on this gun are going to get killed when it fails to perform it's prmary function.
Over the last 20 years, cell phones have gone from a novelty to ubiquitous, and traffic fatalities have gone from around 40,000 a year to.... what? 60,000? 80,000? Did all those terrible cell-phone talkers drive it up to 100,000?
Naw, its now about... 40,000.
Real suspicios that the people that talk on cell phones and crash are the same people that used to crash while talking to someone in the car, or adjusting the radio, or trying to walk and chew gum at the same time.
NASA is not an industry, it is a government program. I consumes, but does not produce. It has no "sales." Sure, lots of science gets done, but couldn't this science be done in a corporate settting, seeking answers to questions demanded by citizens willing to pay for it? If not, then is it really worth doing?
We just have to quit this spend, spend, spend addiction we have. We need to stop. Balance the budget, by law. That will see the end of these things that are simply money sinks.
Factory work can make people with high school diplomas valuable enough to earn a good living. Unskilled? No, just trained on the job, or in night classes. Union jobs the only good ones? Fine, we can do unions.
Our country's problem is that more and more and more of our jobs are going overseas because the cost of labor added to the cost of the highest statutory corporate income tax on the planet makes the cost of doing business here higher than the cost of doing business in a lot of other places. So, the American worker has to get higher and higher education in order to make the same relative amount of money. IOW, the real wages, for most people, have and continue to go down.
The answer is to get manufacturing back, train people with less-than-rocket-scientist IQ's to do work that will get them solidly into the middle class, and significantly above the poverty line. If we need unions to do it, we use unions to do it. But this current strategy of pauperizing the American workforce to compete with the work-for-peanuts foreign work force is a non-starter with me, as it ought to be with forward-looking Americans everywhere.
But NASA, as well as the military, and lots and lots and lots of other things that the government does absolutely has to be severly scaled back, UNLESS we do something to supercharge the American economy, such as passing the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax would broaden the tax base by taxing criminals and the idle rich and even tourists. It would eliminate the ball and chain that drags down our industry, and cause $10 - $15 trillion that is sequestered overseas, American money that is hidden both legally and illegally overseas for the purpose of avoiding the income taxes, to come rushing back into the country. It would then be invested, and factories would be built across the land. And people, who don't necessarily want to get a masters degree, or possibly are not capable of getting a master's degree, could have a path to a prosperous life, instead of working in a crappy-paying retail job that puts them far too close to the poverty line.
But America isn't likely to pass the Fair Tax any time soon. So, the necessary thing is to deep-six the major governmental money sinks that return us virtually nothing. The military job can be done by defending, rather than chasing all over the globe. We can be secure with citizen militias, rather than a standing army that consumes outrageous amounts of money. And, of course, there's no $$$ at all in going to the moon or Mars or the asteroids.
Then there's the insane drug war that consumes trillions of dollars. Stop it. Legalize all that stuff and quit spending obscene amounts of money chasing drug dealers, who are winning anyway. The only thing that comes out of the drug war is expense, and the drugs are still widely available. We just spend, spend, spend on hundreds of thousands of cops and thousands of jail cells and thousands of guards to operate the jail cells. And things continue to get worse anyway.
We have to stop the spending. Period. Unless we can revitalize the industrial infrastructure to pay for it, which I just don't see happening. We're going to continue to try to "soak the rich" and of course deprive them of the money to invest in our infrastructure, and we're going to stick it to the corporations (I just heard Obama say we're not going to continue the corporate welfare for the oil companies... wonderful... price of gas will go up for all of us...) and... we will never, ever have a conducive environment for industrial excellence like that. Big business is the solution, and not the problem. But the attitude is to punish them. We just keep hitting ourselve when we do it.
Slashdot Mirror
What's worse about it? Just your irrational fear of all things nuclear?
BP can do nothing in the short term.
About 3 days into this, BHO should have turned to BP and said, "How large a diamater hole can you drill for me right beside this well, say 1000 - 2000 ft deep?"
"DoD, how small a diameter nuke do we have?"
Assuming the hole is bigger than the nuke (we have suitcase nukes, so this ought to be a "yes"), insert nuke into 1000 ft hole, detonate. Molten rock rushes to seal oil leak 1000 ft. underground. Problem solved.
Oh, don't get me started!!!! Everybody starts screaming "renewable energy" when something like this happens, and then starts blathering about windmills and solar and junk like that. CLUE: NONE OF THAT WILL POWER YOUR CAR DOWN THE HIGHWAY!!!! For that, right now, you need OIL! That's the bottom line. Period. End of story! No solar farm, no wind farm, no geothermal plant is going to change that until we get a really sexy battery breakthrough.
Almost every day, we seem to have another researcher somewhere that claims to have done that breakthru. Ha! Last best one I saw was from a couple university researchers that announced a nanowire lithium battery in December, 2007. Keep reading, find out that their nanowire anode is good for 10X capacity ONLY if a similar breakthrough is found for the cathode, which it has not. Without that, it is a 3X capacity nanowire battery. Plus, further research has been "funded" by... the Saudis, on Saudi soil. You think we're ever going to see this battery again, considering what success might do to Saudi oil exports???? Not freakin' likely!
The Chevy Volt will be about the best we can come up with for probably a really long time in the future. Most people's daily travels, about 85% of them, are less than 40 miles round trip, so 85% of most people's daily travels could be 100% electrically powered, and shifted to... coal, or natural gas. Nope, we STILL aren't going to be building enough windchargers or solar farms to do much about that for a VERY long time. Scientific American's January 2008 issue (possibly 2009, I forget) outlined a plan to go 100% solar, but that has a little drawback of requiring a breakthru in solar cell efficiency AND it'd take 100 years to implement. Back to the drawing board...
Lacking a battery breakthrough and an absolute necessity to stop using fossil fuels, maybe a crash program with solar thermal, which works already, and a smart grid to dristribute power could be combined with a 100% electric car transportation system that could (somehow) get its electricity in real time like the buses that get their power from overhead wires. Still needs a battery 'cuz you can't string those everywhere on the planet, but might work. Hideously expensive. Plus, you'd have to shoot all envirowackos of the sort that trump up roadblocks like some in California that a power wire running through a forest is somehow unacceptable. Geeeezzzzz... I'd like to boil these guys in oil, every one.
I say we just take off and nuke it from orbit... only way to be sure.
Oh yeah? After 3 more shuttle launches, they're going to be sending up OUR astronauts! Where's that "American Exceptionalism" now, eh? Maybe we ought to listen a little more to what they have to say, such as those 2 Russkies that said we don't have to worry about global warming, but instead a possible ice age come year 2012 or so...
My policy is not to buy anything that needs jailbroken. If everyone did that, they wouldn't be using that ****.
It was... the income taxes sucking the life out of our industries...
No point to a manned space presence? How about we run out of some important rare earth metals, exhaust the mines here on earth? Wouldn't it be nice to have the technology to send miners to the asteroid belt, and extract those metals from asteroids? Esp. when one of the metals enables solar panels that provide inexhaustable electrical power from the sun?
You'll never be able to know the reason you'll need manned space flight 'til you really need it, and then if you don't have it, you're screwed. China will likely have the tech and OUR MONEY to go to the asteroids and mine the rare elements that will power THEIR country to cheap electricty, and world domination. Learn to speak Chinese, or... repeal the income taxes, so OUR country can grow back to a world economic leader, and, BTW, pay for a manned space program again.
We will not have a man-carrying launch vehicle in our lifetimes. We are totally without the economic capability to build one. The only way we'll ever be able to do it is to get out from under the income taxes, which have been killing our economy for over 50 years. But that won't likely happen until the economy goes completely belly up. That's probably 20 - 30 years away (hopefully - I'll probably be dead by that time) and after that, it'll take decades to recover, if ever. No more Americans in space, other than begging rides on other country's launchers. Don't like it? Repeal the income taxes NOW... get a headstart on the future.
We CHASED the manufacturing jobs overseas via the income taxes making our products unviably expensive. We can either have high wages and provide good lives for our citizens, or we can have high income tax rates. Of course the gov't chose the latter. We need to take back the gov't, kill the income taxes dead, all of them, and return manufacturing and therefore prosperity to the USA. Nothing else is going to work. The income taxes have been killing our economy slowly for about 50 years. Things have been getting steadily worse. Ever notice how we used to have a recession, it'd be an annoyance for a short time, and we'd recover fairly quickly? Now they're projecting high unemployment for years to come. Why? The income tax has killed our ability to recover, because we don't have GOOD jobs for people to fill. Good jobs aren't found in Wal Mart and McDonalds, they're found in a Ford plant, building the world's best cars. But a lot of car company plants are in Mexico and Canada, chased overseas by the income taxes. Thanks to the income taxes, we have a choice of paying workers peanuts in order to have a reasonably competitively priced product, or moving production out of the country. Since workers won't work for peanuts, there's no alternative to moving the production out of the country. Get rid of the income taxes, and the money that was going to pay them can go to higher wages, and put many Americans to work to drive a consumer-driven recovery. No jobs == no recovery, and that's what's going on now.
Didn't say Obama was killing it. Said the income tax was killing it. Sure, BHO killed the moon mission and therefore the Mars mission, but overall, the lack of money and prosperity is traceable to the income taxes sucking the prosperity out of our society.
We can win at manufacturing without abusing workers. All we have to do is get rid of the income tax. The income tax is what makes our products too expensive. Repeal them, and our workers keep every penny they earn, anc can afford to power a consumer-driven economic recovery. 40 hr workweek, OSHA, high wages, everything remains intact.
There's no question about it. After 3 more shuttle missions, that's it. No more shuttles, no plans in place to go back, thanks to the genius in chief canceling the moon rocket.
Make no mistake, this is going to get steadily worse. We don't have money for most everything we need - health care, infrastructure maintenance, etc. We couldn't afford to build the interstate highway system any more.
This is the result of all our jobs going overseas, and especially the manufacturing jobs. GO to business school, they'll tell you that there are only 3 sources of wealth: agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. Manufacturing has largely been shipped out of the country, which has adversely impacted the mining industry too. Their good-paying jobs went elsewhere, too.
Until we get it back, we're going to continue to decline.
The thing that is really killing manufacturing is NOT the good wages it pays, NOT the union that ensures those wages for millions of workers, but instead it is the world's highest statutory income tax rate. The US Gov't's corporate income tax rate of 35% is sucking money out of our industries, and chasing their jobs overseas. State business taxes of about 4.5% puts the USA, overall, second only to Japan, which is a couple tenths of a percent higher than we are.
Kill the income tax, or die as a world leader. Its that simple. The best way to do it that I've seen is the Fair Tax (www.fairtax.org) but whatever we use, we absolutely, positively have to get rid of the income taxes, all of them (corporate, personal, social security, medicare, self employment, alternative minimum, gift, capital gains, etc.) or we're just going to keep sliding down toward 3rd world status. The flat tax, BTW, is just another income tax. Income taxes are toxic to our prosperity.
"The information posted to WikiLeaks is (as far as I have seen at least) not the kind of information that represents a threat to national security."
Do the lives of our citizens fighting in Iraq and Afghanstan count? I saw a classified manual on the details of some of our jammers, which protect our people from radio-detonated IEDs. Now the enemy knows the frequncies of (some of) our jammers, and can build their radio triggers outside of these ranges. How would you like to get in a Humveee and go riding around either war zone now? Our troops do, every day.
The army should get some nice, antique flamethrowers and walk into the wikileaks server room and toast both the equipment and anyone they find there.
Instead, build long tunnels between major cities, evacuate them down to between 0 and 3 psi, and run high speed trains through them. The trains would need very little energy to run thru the extremely thin atmosphere, and the pressure diffential can be used to generate electricity when needed. 2 birds, 1 stone.
Environmentalists NEED bashed. In fact, I can't think of a bunch that more richly deserves bashing.
They approach things as if money is no object, and act simply on the fear that they can create about a subject.
No, solar is a non-starter in 2010. See the plan to go 100% solar in the January, 2008 Scientific American. Sure, it can be done. They figure it'd take about 100 years to build, PROVIDING they have some breakthrus in solar cell efficiency.
And, of course, pinhead envirowackos are ALREADY trying to lock up the best solar areas in question from being developed, which would be the Mojave Desert, courtesy of collabaration from the wicked witch of the west, Ms. Pelosi. If there's any way to screw up the country, the envirowackos, with dems in their hip pockets, will try it.
The nation needs 2000 new nuke plants, not 2.
If you are Harrison Ford, or Miley Cirus, or some other celebrity, do you really think that the operator is NOT going to whip out a pocket camera and image the screen, and sell it to some of the low-life websites that exploit such things for cash? Or, what if he simply posts it on the internet? Of course not every operator will do that, but there's always a bad apple in every basket, somewhere.
Yes, this quest for ridiculous mpg is going to get a lot of people killed for a variety of reasons. Electronic controls ARE more unreliable than mechanical controls. Last throttle problem I had was my '69 Ford Galaxy, and I just went to the dealer, bought a new cable, and replaced the broken one - 1 screw to unfasten/fasten it if I remember correctly. The cable simply broke. No other accelerator problems on my cars, ever, and I've been driving since 1963.
Electrical parts absolutely are more error prone. For one thing, they require electricity, which has a nasty habit of going away for a variety of reasons. Then the electrical part stops working.
Wait 'til they get electronic steering, and your car does a hard left into a retaining wall... at 75 mph... all by itself.
At least with unintended acceleration, you can use the MECHANICAL gearshift lever to put it into neutral, and the MECHANICAL brakes to slow the car.
One thing that a firearm absolutely must do is to go bang each time you pull the trigger. This firearm isn't going to do that. Either the bad guys will figure out how to jam the signal from the watch, or the user will forget the watch, or the battery will go down in the watch, or (substitute your own horror story here...)
People that rely on this gun are going to get killed when it fails to perform it's prmary function.
Over the last 20 years, cell phones have gone from a novelty to ubiquitous, and traffic fatalities have gone from around 40,000 a year to.... what? 60,000? 80,000? Did all those terrible cell-phone talkers drive it up to 100,000?
Naw, its now about... 40,000.
Real suspicios that the people that talk on cell phones and crash are the same people that used to crash while talking to someone in the car, or adjusting the radio, or trying to walk and chew gum at the same time.
>Only the sociopathic rich, 'tards, and teenagers would do it.
Cellphone use while driving would likely increase...
NASA is not an industry, it is a government program. I consumes, but does not produce. It has no "sales." Sure, lots of science gets done, but couldn't this science be done in a corporate settting, seeking answers to questions demanded by citizens willing to pay for it? If not, then is it really worth doing?
We just have to quit this spend, spend, spend addiction we have. We need to stop. Balance the budget, by law. That will see the end of these things that are simply money sinks.
Factory work can make people with high school diplomas valuable enough to earn a good living. Unskilled? No, just trained on the job, or in night classes. Union jobs the only good ones? Fine, we can do unions.
Our country's problem is that more and more and more of our jobs are going overseas because the cost of labor added to the cost of the highest statutory corporate income tax on the planet makes the cost of doing business here higher than the cost of doing business in a lot of other places. So, the American worker has to get higher and higher education in order to make the same relative amount of money. IOW, the real wages, for most people, have and continue to go down.
The answer is to get manufacturing back, train people with less-than-rocket-scientist IQ's to do work that will get them solidly into the middle class, and significantly above the poverty line. If we need unions to do it, we use unions to do it. But this current strategy of pauperizing the American workforce to compete with the work-for-peanuts foreign work force is a non-starter with me, as it ought to be with forward-looking Americans everywhere.
But NASA, as well as the military, and lots and lots and lots of other things that the government does absolutely has to be severly scaled back, UNLESS we do something to supercharge the American economy, such as passing the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax would broaden the tax base by taxing criminals and the idle rich and even tourists. It would eliminate the ball and chain that drags down our industry, and cause $10 - $15 trillion that is sequestered overseas, American money that is hidden both legally and illegally overseas for the purpose of avoiding the income taxes, to come rushing back into the country. It would then be invested, and factories would be built across the land. And people, who don't necessarily want to get a masters degree, or possibly are not capable of getting a master's degree, could have a path to a prosperous life, instead of working in a crappy-paying retail job that puts them far too close to the poverty line.
But America isn't likely to pass the Fair Tax any time soon. So, the necessary thing is to deep-six the major governmental money sinks that return us virtually nothing. The military job can be done by defending, rather than chasing all over the globe. We can be secure with citizen militias, rather than a standing army that consumes outrageous amounts of money. And, of course, there's no $$$ at all in going to the moon or Mars or the asteroids.
Then there's the insane drug war that consumes trillions of dollars. Stop it. Legalize all that stuff and quit spending obscene amounts of money chasing drug dealers, who are winning anyway. The only thing that comes out of the drug war is expense, and the drugs are still widely available. We just spend, spend, spend on hundreds of thousands of cops and thousands of jail cells and thousands of guards to operate the jail cells. And things continue to get worse anyway.
We have to stop the spending. Period. Unless we can revitalize the industrial infrastructure to pay for it, which I just don't see happening. We're going to continue to try to "soak the rich" and of course deprive them of the money to invest in our infrastructure, and we're going to stick it to the corporations (I just heard Obama say we're not going to continue the corporate welfare for the oil companies... wonderful... price of gas will go up for all of us...) and... we will never, ever have a conducive environment for industrial excellence like that. Big business is the solution, and not the problem. But the attitude is to punish them. We just keep hitting ourselve when we do it.