Because right now, per a dollar spent, it will be the most effective, and that will be true for at least an order of magnitude more funding;. When it ceases to be the most effective, I'll advocate giving to other causes. In that regard, it isn't that dissimilar to why Give Well advocates giving to Against Malaria as the best way to save lives per a dollar spent https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf - yes at a sufficient level of funding that analysis will change but it hasn't yet. . And no, I didn't assert anywhere that it will make things worse in the long haul, and I'm not even sure where you are getting that idea. And yes, research and other things are good too. Right now, research for better solar and batteries is happening at a nearly break-neck pace. If you want to help longer term climate mitigation then one thing to do is give to specific solar which I also linked to.
No. This is fundamentally confused about how the carbon cycle works. Making a plant takes in CO2, and the CO2 I exhale represents the carbon eaten from that. Regular eating by itself is essentially carbon neutral. The energy cost is mostly coming from things like fertilizer, transport of material, etc. But yes, we're not going to make people completely carbon neutral- but we don't need to. We don't need to have a zero delta carbon society, just a much smaller production. And there are many things related to that that you can easily do to help out with that, both at a personal level, and at a level of helping others, such as donating to Cool Earth and Everybody Solar.
Sure, nothing here at all says that you have to be a "monk" and I certainly agree that we'd all rather be rich rather than poor, and that we all like being individuals but let's break this down.
I like meat. i eat it daily. I intend to continue doing so.
I like meat a lot. A lot. That doesn't mean I need to do something that causes ongoing damage. And I'm not suggesting that people engage in complete vegetarianism; heck I'm not a complete vegetarian myself so at minimum, that would be hypocritical in the extreme. But you don't need to eat meat every single day. And if you do care about being rich, then it is worth noting that meat is much more expensive than many non-meat options from a similar material.
I drive a ram pickup. I go where I want to when I want to.
I do not wait for public transport. ( I also ride a bicycle. It often seems to be the case that a city bus and a bicycle require roughly the same travel time). Public transport SUCKS.
By driving the pickup, you are actively causing harm. But I'm happy that you ride a bike. That's a good, low CO2 production transport method which is very healthy.
And yes, public transport in many locations sucks in much of the US. This is due to a variety of different issues. Much of the US is spread out in suburbs and low-density areas, which makes public transit tough. Also, there's a serious lack of funding for public transit- this is connected to an unfortunate self-reinforcing cycle where people don't use public transit because the transit sucks, and then as a result it doesn't get funding. It also combines in other ways with local cultural issues; for example when I lived in Boston, all sorts of people took the subway and bus as a regular thing, and the system worked pretty well. But, when I was in Birmingham, Alabama, the only people using the public transport were by and large black people of a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and poor white people. (One day when I was taking the bus there was on the bus a black guy who clearly had some sort of mental health issue and was talking outloud to himself describing every single person on the bus. When he got to me, he said something like "And then there's that white dude. Don't know what he's doing here.")
But you can make public transit better by helping lobby for more funding. And the better your public transit gets, the more people willing to use it. The same thing that works in the other direction works to help when you get a critical mass.
And here's an important point: If you are really concerned about going "where I want to when I want to" then it isn't hard to use public transit and to supplement that with other things like bikes. Heck, even having Uber for its occasional use is helpful- I'm currently living in Ames, Iowa, which doesn't have amazing public transit, so I do need to occasionally use Uber. But that's rare, and the use of Uber and Lyft still ends up costing far, far less than owning a car would.
I respect your right to make your own choices. Can you respect mine?
You won't see above anything where I at all said I was going to force you not to have a car. But all of our choices have limits- my rights to make a choice end where they threaten to harm others. Someone is allowed to extend their fist but not if it hits someone else's face. And for many different pollutants we've added taxes or cap and trade systems because of the harm they do to bystanders and it works. For example, the sulfur dioxide cap and trade system https://voxeu.org/article/lessons-climate-policy-us-sulphur-dioxide-cap-and-trade-programme helped spur massive technological innovation and essentially solved the problem of acid rain.
I think that the correct course is not to choose voluntary poverty for the sake of a monkish "sustainability". Rather let us
No. No one has made that claim. The claim is that offset one's own individual carbon usage doesn't right now take much. That's to a large extent because what Cool Earth is doing has extremely high returns in terms of carbon reduction per a dollar, in a large part because they are dealing with a part of carbon reduction that is getting very little attention. Unfortunately, if they were anywhere close to be being fully funded, the marginal CO2 return on a dollar would go down substantially. It is only because there's so little going to it that this is an effective method. There's no way it will be effective on a very large scale. Worse, what they are doing essentially reduces the amount of CO2 being produced in a short-term fashion, it isn't a long-term solution. Planting trees will not at all solve this problem by itself, even as preserving rain forest now happens to be one of the most effective ways of reducing CO2 per a dollar spent given current expenditures.
There's nothing insane about that. Trying to eat fewer high CO2 producing foods takes minimal effort. But one reason that many people are in favor of a carbon tax (with appropriate offsets so it is reasonably revenue neutral) is because price calculations are a good way of getting people to do this essentially automatically. But if you do want to not think about it much, one thing you can do is simply donate to carbon offsetting causes. By some metrics, Cool Earth's rainforest preservation work has the most negative CO2 per a dollar https://www.coolearth.org/get-involved/donate-cool-earth/. They are extremely efficient, and by some metrics it is about $10 worth of offset to Cool Earth for a trans-Atlantic flight, which means that simply donating a very small amount each month will be more than enough. There are good similar work such as Everybody Solar which purchases solar panels for non-profits like museums and homeless shelters https://www.everybodysolar.org/, and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://self.org/ which gets solar lights for people in developing countries. (I don't unfortunately have a charity that I'm really happy with doing wind power right now to recommend and the same issue with nuclear power.) So, if you don't want to think about these things, by all means, feel free to donate.
I don't see what is insane about it. It makes implicitly a whole bunch of useful points: First, that transport and direct personal electrical consumption aren't the only producers of CO2. Second, that as our economy and society currently stands, the production of CO2 is going to be pretty large no matter what. Third, it gives a good feel for when one is talking about CO2 production just how much one is talking about. Honestly, this is substantially more CO2 than I would have expected for this, and I'm someone who cares a lot about minimizing CO2 production (I don't own a car and use public transit whenever possible and I rarely eat meat in part because of meat's CO2 and methane produciton). This seems useful and interesting.
They looked at how often they were using smartphones and checked if this was correlated with reported happiness and other depression symptoms. There's no control group because real-world psych studies have both practical and ethical issues often with asking people to do things that may be harmful, but this is a standard method. They did also some stats analysis to try to check if the causal direction went the other way (depressed or unhappy people being more likely to use smart phones). I haven't looked at the study in great detail, but from my perusal what they've done here looks not at all unreasonable. Of course, one does want follow-up studies, as one always does, but we shouldn't dismiss a result when we don't like what it says. If the study had found no correlation whatsoever would you have immediately accepted that result?
There's been a lot more articles than four in two years. Those are simply examples. But more to the point: Trump is President of the US; Stein never had a chance at winning anything. By nature allegations about one are much more concerning than allegations about the other (and by the same token, allegations about Clinton have also gotten a lot more attention than anything related to Stein).
Yeah, I don't see how this isn't just a hardware implementation of interval arithmetic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_arithmetic, which is a topic basic enough that I teach aspects of it as a secondary topic to my Calc I students. It is possible there's something deeper here that we're missing but if so, it doesn't stand out.
They changed the Trending section LAST NIGHT. That was BEFORE the #trumpshutdown had more tweets than #Schumershutdown.
Do you have a citation for this claim?
Let me guess, that poll is D+23 ? D+30 ?
Are we really going to have to have this discussion? Party affiliation is a fluid notion; people change whether they self-identify to pollsters as a given party to a large extent whether they are happy with the party or not. Using a high party affiliation is exactly the sort of notion that was the basis for "unskewing" polls in 2008 and 2012.
I guess you didn't take a Civics class to learn what is a Super majority. The Republicans DON'T control the Senate, which is why we're here.
This is a complete abuse of language. They have a majority. They don't have a super-majority. Control of the senate is exactly what they have, and is reflected in who the majority leader is, who controls committees, etc. Senate control is not determined by having enough votes to override a flilibuster. This is why for example PredictIt discusses what party will "control the senate" https://www.predictit.org/Market/2703/Which-party-will-control-the-Senate-after-2018-midterms. This is standard language. Now, putting the language issue aside, the point that the Republicans don't have enough votes to overcome a filibuster is a valid one in terms of explaining part of what is going on, but the idea that that means the Republicans lack control is pretty awful phrasing both in terms of denotations and connotations.
Because in 2013, in that case, it literally was. The Republicans at the time voted AGAINST the bill because it contained OBAMACARE financing. The contents of the actual CR was the issue that caused the shutdown, and it was all in order for sitting President at the time to pass his legislative agenda.
It doesn't because the Democrats did not vote against the contents of the bill. They voted because the bill didn't contain non-CR, non-related items, mostly Amnesty for a bunch of illegal aliens.
Maybe you should ask yourself why the Democrats voted against 6 years of CHIP funding and an open governement, to try and force Amnesty of some 3M illegal aliens. Seems mighty Anti-american to me.
Disagrees with you doesn't make something "Anti-American" and it is disturbing that people decide that legitimate disagreements are in that category. Your comment also ignores that the people in question literally came here as young children and have lived in the US their entire lives, engaging in study here and economic productivity. If you want to throw around words like "Anti-American" I suppose someone can say that doing economic damage to the US as part of punishing people for the actions of their parents sounds Anti-American. But the majority of Americans, and even the majority of Republicans are in favor of DACA- see the last link above. The idea that DACA is somehow uniquely D
I don't quite agree with this either. Vulcan and ACES https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Cryogenic_Evolved_Stage are both very interesting projects which could both reduce some space costs and allow types of missions that are close to impossible right now. Tony Bruno, the new head of ULA, has really shaken things up there.
There's really a massive amount of scientific literature trying to understand how much warming will happen and how bad it will be. Papers suggesting that one aspect will not be bad or might be overestimated are not at all uncommon. But that's very different than thinking that global warming itself isn't a serious problem. Unfortunately, people who have made not believing in global warming an article of faith and tribal loyalty will always respond in one of two ways: something about the danger of global warming is obvious alarmist nonsense, and anything that actual scientists do that suggests an upper bound on how bad some aspect is must in fact mean that global warming is no problem at all.
Or note that vast majority of the Democratic Senators didn't vote for this, and maybe realize that the "Blue Dog" Democrats you are blaming are actually mostly agreeing with the policies you want?
Almost every single one of these AGs is a Democrat. I still don't fully understand how NN became a partisan issue, but in so far as it has become one, it is pretty clear that there's a pretty massive difference between the Democrats and the Republicans at play here. When people claim that the parties are functionally identical, they are ignoring things like this.
The validity of an argument is in general independent of its source. Evidence is not- in particular, if a source of evidence has shown a pattern of lying and taking things out of context, that's something that should be taken into account. Or are you arguing that if you knew someone who lied repeatedly you wouldn't be more skeptical when they tell a story than when a friend who hasn't been caught lying does?
There's no reason to think Zuma failed in any way other than unconfirmed rumors. SpaceX has stated explicitly that everything they did worked fine http://spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=52053. And all four of the launch failures happened much, much earlier in their program in terms of launches. Moreover, the ability to land the first stages means that SpaceX is actually getting *more* information about the state of their rockets than others since they can do a detailed inspection after the landing.
Meanwhile other rockets such as the Delta are at 100% success rate.
So, almost no one has a 100% success rate. Note by the way, that this is part of why both the Dragon and Starliner(the Boeing capsule) have an ability for the capsule to separate if there's an issue with the rocket. It is interesting that you mention the Delta, since around 9%
of Deltas have failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_(rocket_family)#Launch_reliability. Last I checked, 91% is not 100%. (Granted, many of the failures were early Deltas and many of those failures were partial failures where people in a capsule above might survive). But, in fact, NASA doesn't think that man-rating any version of the Delta makes sense https://www.wired.com/2008/07/why-nasa-isnt-t/, whereas NASA is in favor of man-rating the Falcon 9, Block 5, so the people who think about this sort of thing have thought very carefully about this. Part of why NASA won't man-rate the Delta is because its regular flight profile subjects payloads to 6 gs, but a major part is also its lack of redundant systems where adding them in would require massive work.
NASA is insisting, quite appropriately on at least a few Falcon 9 Block 5 flights before they put people on it. The Block 5 is going to be the final version of the rocket and has a lot of tweaks which will make reuse easier but also other bits that will improve safety and reliability.
The idea of a crewed test flight is that docking with the ISS and some related aspects including the long-return flight from the ISS are not easy. So a crewed test flight before the full-up docking is intended. Frankly, it seems redundant to me, but it will be pretty safe.
Even if Boeing (who has the knowledge and a successful track record) builds the capsule, fact is SpaceX has yet to have a single fully successful mission (they always had a major problem) and has a track record of ignoring problems.
Ok. There's so much wrong here, I'm not sure where to begin. First of all, Boeing and SpaceX have different capsule systems. Space X is using the Dragon 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_2 on top of a Falcon 9. Boeing is using the Starliner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CST-100_Starliner on top of an Atlas rocket.
As for the idea hat SpaceX has yet to have a single successful mission, this is demonstrably not true as a glance at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches where for example you can see 17 successful launches in 2017 alone. While SpaceX has had some very high profile failures, there success rate at this point is close comparable to other major rocket companies, and the Dragon spacecraft has also successfully returned to Earth. Moreover, one of the major things that people think of a as a "failure" of SpaceX is when one of their rocket's first stages doesn't land successfully. In fact, that didn't happen at all in 2017, and moreover isn't an issue anyways because it isn't an issue for mission success, simply an issue for if they have a rocket available for cheap reuse later.
I suppose one could point to the rumors of failure of Zuma, but it is pretty clear that if anything failed there it was on the Northrop-Grumman payload end, not SpaceX, as demonstrated by the fact that SpaceX did not halt flights after the Zuma launch.
All of that said, there are some signs that SpaceX has been too fast and loose with some safety issues. A recent set of government audits found serious safety and protocol issues at pretty much all the major space contractors but with more issues at SpaceX than any of the others https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-22/top-u-s-space-contractors-cited-for-lapses-by-pentagon-watchdog. However, none of those issues have so far translated into any substantial problem.
Not really good practice. The trip to the ISS is very short, a matter of hours (although the Soyuz in some orbital profiles had to take a little longer). The journey to Mars is on the order of months. The Dragon is also much, much smaller, and since the Red Dragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Red_Dragon has been canceled, there's not even a benefit from that. All of that said, I do agree that where spaceflight is concerned we definitely live in exciting times.
Slashdot Mirror
Because right now, per a dollar spent, it will be the most effective, and that will be true for at least an order of magnitude more funding;. When it ceases to be the most effective, I'll advocate giving to other causes. In that regard, it isn't that dissimilar to why Give Well advocates giving to Against Malaria as the best way to save lives per a dollar spent https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf - yes at a sufficient level of funding that analysis will change but it hasn't yet. . And no, I didn't assert anywhere that it will make things worse in the long haul, and I'm not even sure where you are getting that idea. And yes, research and other things are good too. Right now, research for better solar and batteries is happening at a nearly break-neck pace. If you want to help longer term climate mitigation then one thing to do is give to specific solar which I also linked to.
No. This is fundamentally confused about how the carbon cycle works. Making a plant takes in CO2, and the CO2 I exhale represents the carbon eaten from that. Regular eating by itself is essentially carbon neutral. The energy cost is mostly coming from things like fertilizer, transport of material, etc. But yes, we're not going to make people completely carbon neutral- but we don't need to. We don't need to have a zero delta carbon society, just a much smaller production. And there are many things related to that that you can easily do to help out with that, both at a personal level, and at a level of helping others, such as donating to Cool Earth and Everybody Solar.
I like meat. i eat it daily. I intend to continue doing so.
I like meat a lot. A lot. That doesn't mean I need to do something that causes ongoing damage. And I'm not suggesting that people engage in complete vegetarianism; heck I'm not a complete vegetarian myself so at minimum, that would be hypocritical in the extreme. But you don't need to eat meat every single day. And if you do care about being rich, then it is worth noting that meat is much more expensive than many non-meat options from a similar material.
I drive a ram pickup. I go where I want to when I want to. I do not wait for public transport. ( I also ride a bicycle. It often seems to be the case that a city bus and a bicycle require roughly the same travel time). Public transport SUCKS .
By driving the pickup, you are actively causing harm. But I'm happy that you ride a bike. That's a good, low CO2 production transport method which is very healthy. And yes, public transport in many locations sucks in much of the US. This is due to a variety of different issues. Much of the US is spread out in suburbs and low-density areas, which makes public transit tough. Also, there's a serious lack of funding for public transit- this is connected to an unfortunate self-reinforcing cycle where people don't use public transit because the transit sucks, and then as a result it doesn't get funding. It also combines in other ways with local cultural issues; for example when I lived in Boston, all sorts of people took the subway and bus as a regular thing, and the system worked pretty well. But, when I was in Birmingham, Alabama, the only people using the public transport were by and large black people of a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and poor white people. (One day when I was taking the bus there was on the bus a black guy who clearly had some sort of mental health issue and was talking outloud to himself describing every single person on the bus. When he got to me, he said something like "And then there's that white dude. Don't know what he's doing here.")
But you can make public transit better by helping lobby for more funding. And the better your public transit gets, the more people willing to use it. The same thing that works in the other direction works to help when you get a critical mass.
And here's an important point: If you are really concerned about going "where I want to when I want to" then it isn't hard to use public transit and to supplement that with other things like bikes. Heck, even having Uber for its occasional use is helpful- I'm currently living in Ames, Iowa, which doesn't have amazing public transit, so I do need to occasionally use Uber. But that's rare, and the use of Uber and Lyft still ends up costing far, far less than owning a car would.
I respect your right to make your own choices. Can you respect mine?
You won't see above anything where I at all said I was going to force you not to have a car. But all of our choices have limits- my rights to make a choice end where they threaten to harm others. Someone is allowed to extend their fist but not if it hits someone else's face. And for many different pollutants we've added taxes or cap and trade systems because of the harm they do to bystanders and it works. For example, the sulfur dioxide cap and trade system https://voxeu.org/article/lessons-climate-policy-us-sulphur-dioxide-cap-and-trade-programme helped spur massive technological innovation and essentially solved the problem of acid rain.
I think that the correct course is not to choose voluntary poverty for the sake of a monkish "sustainability". Rather let us
No. No one has made that claim. The claim is that offset one's own individual carbon usage doesn't right now take much. That's to a large extent because what Cool Earth is doing has extremely high returns in terms of carbon reduction per a dollar, in a large part because they are dealing with a part of carbon reduction that is getting very little attention. Unfortunately, if they were anywhere close to be being fully funded, the marginal CO2 return on a dollar would go down substantially. It is only because there's so little going to it that this is an effective method. There's no way it will be effective on a very large scale. Worse, what they are doing essentially reduces the amount of CO2 being produced in a short-term fashion, it isn't a long-term solution. Planting trees will not at all solve this problem by itself, even as preserving rain forest now happens to be one of the most effective ways of reducing CO2 per a dollar spent given current expenditures.
There's nothing insane about that. Trying to eat fewer high CO2 producing foods takes minimal effort. But one reason that many people are in favor of a carbon tax (with appropriate offsets so it is reasonably revenue neutral) is because price calculations are a good way of getting people to do this essentially automatically. But if you do want to not think about it much, one thing you can do is simply donate to carbon offsetting causes. By some metrics, Cool Earth's rainforest preservation work has the most negative CO2 per a dollar https://www.coolearth.org/get-involved/donate-cool-earth/. They are extremely efficient, and by some metrics it is about $10 worth of offset to Cool Earth for a trans-Atlantic flight, which means that simply donating a very small amount each month will be more than enough. There are good similar work such as Everybody Solar which purchases solar panels for non-profits like museums and homeless shelters https://www.everybodysolar.org/, and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://self.org/ which gets solar lights for people in developing countries. (I don't unfortunately have a charity that I'm really happy with doing wind power right now to recommend and the same issue with nuclear power.) So, if you don't want to think about these things, by all means, feel free to donate.
I don't see what is insane about it. It makes implicitly a whole bunch of useful points: First, that transport and direct personal electrical consumption aren't the only producers of CO2. Second, that as our economy and society currently stands, the production of CO2 is going to be pretty large no matter what. Third, it gives a good feel for when one is talking about CO2 production just how much one is talking about. Honestly, this is substantially more CO2 than I would have expected for this, and I'm someone who cares a lot about minimizing CO2 production (I don't own a car and use public transit whenever possible and I rarely eat meat in part because of meat's CO2 and methane produciton). This seems useful and interesting.
They looked at how often they were using smartphones and checked if this was correlated with reported happiness and other depression symptoms. There's no control group because real-world psych studies have both practical and ethical issues often with asking people to do things that may be harmful, but this is a standard method. They did also some stats analysis to try to check if the causal direction went the other way (depressed or unhappy people being more likely to use smart phones). I haven't looked at the study in great detail, but from my perusal what they've done here looks not at all unreasonable. Of course, one does want follow-up studies, as one always does, but we shouldn't dismiss a result when we don't like what it says. If the study had found no correlation whatsoever would you have immediately accepted that result?
There's been a lot more articles than four in two years. Those are simply examples. But more to the point: Trump is President of the US; Stein never had a chance at winning anything. By nature allegations about one are much more concerning than allegations about the other (and by the same token, allegations about Clinton have also gotten a lot more attention than anything related to Stein).
What are you talking about? There's been a massive amount of attention to Russian support of Jill Stein. This has included aspects of Senate investigations https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/19/jill-stein-trump-russia-investigation-documents. There were many mainstream media reports on it such as https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/why-are-senate-russia-investigators-interested-jill-stein-n831261 and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/senate-intelligence-committee-jill-stein-russia.
Yeah, I don't see how this isn't just a hardware implementation of interval arithmetic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_arithmetic, which is a topic basic enough that I teach aspects of it as a secondary topic to my Calc I students. It is possible there's something deeper here that we're missing but if so, it doesn't stand out.
They changed the Trending section LAST NIGHT. That was BEFORE the #trumpshutdown had more tweets than #Schumershutdown.
Do you have a citation for this claim?
Let me guess, that poll is D+23 ? D+30 ?
Are we really going to have to have this discussion? Party affiliation is a fluid notion; people change whether they self-identify to pollsters as a given party to a large extent whether they are happy with the party or not. Using a high party affiliation is exactly the sort of notion that was the basis for "unskewing" polls in 2008 and 2012.
I guess you didn't take a Civics class to learn what is a Super majority. The Republicans DON'T control the Senate, which is why we're here.
This is a complete abuse of language. They have a majority. They don't have a super-majority. Control of the senate is exactly what they have, and is reflected in who the majority leader is, who controls committees, etc. Senate control is not determined by having enough votes to override a flilibuster. This is why for example PredictIt discusses what party will "control the senate" https://www.predictit.org/Market/2703/Which-party-will-control-the-Senate-after-2018-midterms. This is standard language. Now, putting the language issue aside, the point that the Republicans don't have enough votes to overcome a filibuster is a valid one in terms of explaining part of what is going on, but the idea that that means the Republicans lack control is pretty awful phrasing both in terms of denotations and connotations.
Because in 2013, in that case, it literally was. The Republicans at the time voted AGAINST the bill because it contained OBAMACARE financing. The contents of the actual CR was the issue that caused the shutdown, and it was all in order for sitting President at the time to pass his legislative agenda.
That wasn't Trump's argument. See here http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/369756-trumps-comments-blaming-obama-for-2013-government-shutdown-resurface.
Yesterday's bill was different. It had none of Trump's agenda even in it. The Democrats even got a bone in the form of 6 years of CHIP financing.
Schumer, the guy you like blaming, explicitly offered funding for the wall in negotiations with Trump. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/01/20/schumer-offered-trump-something-democrats-hate-to-get-something-republicans-broadly-like/.
It doesn't because the Democrats did not vote against the contents of the bill. They voted because the bill didn't contain non-CR, non-related items, mostly Amnesty for a bunch of illegal aliens. Maybe you should ask yourself why the Democrats voted against 6 years of CHIP funding and an open governement, to try and force Amnesty of some 3M illegal aliens. Seems mighty Anti-american to me.
Disagrees with you doesn't make something "Anti-American" and it is disturbing that people decide that legitimate disagreements are in that category. Your comment also ignores that the people in question literally came here as young children and have lived in the US their entire lives, engaging in study here and economic productivity. If you want to throw around words like "Anti-American" I suppose someone can say that doing economic damage to the US as part of punishing people for the actions of their parents sounds Anti-American. But the majority of Americans, and even the majority of Republicans are in favor of DACA- see the last link above. The idea that DACA is somehow uniquely D
The TrumpShutdown Hashtag got far more Tweets than SchumerSchutdown http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trumpshutdown-beats-schumershutdown-hashtag-battle-assign-blame/story?id=52487452. Twitter didn't make a political decision there. This is also in keeping with the fact that more Americans blame the Republicans than the Democrats for the shutdown https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/more-blame-republicans-than-democrats-for-potential-government-shutdown-post-abc-poll-finds/2018/01/19/c4fce2f6-fd32-11e7-ad8c-ecbb62019393_story.html?utm_term=.2b05358862e7, and that you can make reasonable arguments blaming a whole bunch of groups for the shutdown depending on what you want to focus on https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/01/18/if-the-government-shuts-down-heres-your-cheat-sheet-on-which-party-to-blame/?utm_term=.e08056687732, but given that the Republicans control the House, the Senate and the Presidency, and Trump explicitly said repeatedly during the Obama administration that any shut down would be the President's fault http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/369756-trumps-comments-blaming-obama-for-2013-government-shutdown-resurface, #TrumpShutdown makes a fair bit of sense anyhow.
I don't quite agree with this either. Vulcan and ACES https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Cryogenic_Evolved_Stage are both very interesting projects which could both reduce some space costs and allow types of missions that are close to impossible right now. Tony Bruno, the new head of ULA, has really shaken things up there.
Valid point: Majority, not vast majority.
There's really a massive amount of scientific literature trying to understand how much warming will happen and how bad it will be. Papers suggesting that one aspect will not be bad or might be overestimated are not at all uncommon. But that's very different than thinking that global warming itself isn't a serious problem. Unfortunately, people who have made not believing in global warming an article of faith and tribal loyalty will always respond in one of two ways: something about the danger of global warming is obvious alarmist nonsense, and anything that actual scientists do that suggests an upper bound on how bad some aspect is must in fact mean that global warming is no problem at all.
Or note that vast majority of the Democratic Senators didn't vote for this, and maybe realize that the "Blue Dog" Democrats you are blaming are actually mostly agreeing with the policies you want?
Almost every single one of these AGs is a Democrat. I still don't fully understand how NN became a partisan issue, but in so far as it has become one, it is pretty clear that there's a pretty massive difference between the Democrats and the Republicans at play here. When people claim that the parties are functionally identical, they are ignoring things like this.
No. Project Veritas claims to release all the videos. You have no idea how many videos they have that they didn't release. That videos are in large chunks doesn't mean there isn't released videos. And given that they never released any video with their attempted sting on the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/a-woman-approached-the-post-with-dramatic--and-false--tale-about-roy-moore-sje-appears-to-be-part-of-undercover-sting-operation/2017/11/27/0c2e335a-cfb6-11e7-9d3a-bcbe2af58c3a_story.html?utm_term=.ed859f92fdc9, the idea they are releasing all their videos seems at best to be questionable.
The validity of an argument is in general independent of its source. Evidence is not- in particular, if a source of evidence has shown a pattern of lying and taking things out of context, that's something that should be taken into account. Or are you arguing that if you knew someone who lied repeatedly you wouldn't be more skeptical when they tell a story than when a friend who hasn't been caught lying does?
Veritas means truth. In that context, it is worth keeping in mind that this is James O'Keefe who runs it, a man who has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to edit videos and take anything out of context http://www.cracked.com/article_20369_5-major-news-stories-that-forgot-to-tell-you-best-part.html https://www.npr.org/2011/03/14/134525412/Segments-Of-NPR-Gotcha-Video-Taken-Out-Of-Context are two detailed examples. This is a man who literally lied about who he was as part of an attempt to bug a US Senator's phone http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/01/acorn_gotcha_man_arrested_for.html. Pretty much anything he says should be assigned zero credibility. It may well be that Twitter employees are reading direct messages routinely, or even doing so for political aims, but anything by Project Veritas should not be taken as serious evidence for such a claim.
Meanwhile other rockets such as the Delta are at 100% success rate.
So, almost no one has a 100% success rate. Note by the way, that this is part of why both the Dragon and Starliner(the Boeing capsule) have an ability for the capsule to separate if there's an issue with the rocket. It is interesting that you mention the Delta, since around 9% of Deltas have failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_(rocket_family)#Launch_reliability. Last I checked, 91% is not 100%. (Granted, many of the failures were early Deltas and many of those failures were partial failures where people in a capsule above might survive). But, in fact, NASA doesn't think that man-rating any version of the Delta makes sense https://www.wired.com/2008/07/why-nasa-isnt-t/, whereas NASA is in favor of man-rating the Falcon 9, Block 5, so the people who think about this sort of thing have thought very carefully about this. Part of why NASA won't man-rate the Delta is because its regular flight profile subjects payloads to 6 gs, but a major part is also its lack of redundant systems where adding them in would require massive work.
NASA is insisting, quite appropriately on at least a few Falcon 9 Block 5 flights before they put people on it. The Block 5 is going to be the final version of the rocket and has a lot of tweaks which will make reuse easier but also other bits that will improve safety and reliability.
The idea of a crewed test flight is that docking with the ISS and some related aspects including the long-return flight from the ISS are not easy. So a crewed test flight before the full-up docking is intended. Frankly, it seems redundant to me, but it will be pretty safe.
Even if Boeing (who has the knowledge and a successful track record) builds the capsule, fact is SpaceX has yet to have a single fully successful mission (they always had a major problem) and has a track record of ignoring problems.
Ok. There's so much wrong here, I'm not sure where to begin. First of all, Boeing and SpaceX have different capsule systems. Space X is using the Dragon 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_2 on top of a Falcon 9. Boeing is using the Starliner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CST-100_Starliner on top of an Atlas rocket. As for the idea hat SpaceX has yet to have a single successful mission, this is demonstrably not true as a glance at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches where for example you can see 17 successful launches in 2017 alone. While SpaceX has had some very high profile failures, there success rate at this point is close comparable to other major rocket companies, and the Dragon spacecraft has also successfully returned to Earth. Moreover, one of the major things that people think of a as a "failure" of SpaceX is when one of their rocket's first stages doesn't land successfully. In fact, that didn't happen at all in 2017, and moreover isn't an issue anyways because it isn't an issue for mission success, simply an issue for if they have a rocket available for cheap reuse later.
I suppose one could point to the rumors of failure of Zuma, but it is pretty clear that if anything failed there it was on the Northrop-Grumman payload end, not SpaceX, as demonstrated by the fact that SpaceX did not halt flights after the Zuma launch.
All of that said, there are some signs that SpaceX has been too fast and loose with some safety issues. A recent set of government audits found serious safety and protocol issues at pretty much all the major space contractors but with more issues at SpaceX than any of the others https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-22/top-u-s-space-contractors-cited-for-lapses-by-pentagon-watchdog. However, none of those issues have so far translated into any substantial problem.
SpaceX's plans with the BFR do not involve asteroid mining or any in-space construction. Musk is in general, a bit skeptical of most space-mining and space industries plans. See for example http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-interview-at-the-royal-aeronautical-society-2012-11-16.
Not really good practice. The trip to the ISS is very short, a matter of hours (although the Soyuz in some orbital profiles had to take a little longer). The journey to Mars is on the order of months. The Dragon is also much, much smaller, and since the Red Dragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Red_Dragon has been canceled, there's not even a benefit from that. All of that said, I do agree that where spaceflight is concerned we definitely live in exciting times.