The problem with this is, the people that start out chasing after the sun and the moon and the stars tend to deliver more than the people that deliver exactly what they promised. I see this in corporate programming all the time. Developers afraid of missing deadlines never take risks, and for that matter, never really push themselves. As a result, the client is actually grotesquely undeserved.
Translated to what we have at NASA or even the DOD today, you have an underpromising risk adverse group of people that still wind up burning through money unnecessarily because they spend it all trying to figure out how to do it all within a precise window. If you look at the sorts of radical research that came about between the 1950s and 1960s, versus what we have today, and I think you'd have to conclude that NASA has utterly lost its nerve. Sometimes you just have to put a guy up on top of a missile to see if it won't blow up. NASA would never do that today, and that is why we have not yet gone back to the moon or to mars.
It's that, they are all a bunch of pussies now, as are most American engineers.
Fair enough, but sometimes, and on rare occasions, the free market needs a kick in the ass. It doesn't mean you bail on it altogether, but, once in a generation, it gets stuck on something. So, you basically do the switch to nukes + electric, with subsidies, research, etc, and then, let the free market roll.
a) the gay marriage amendment b) USA PATRIOT, Homeland Security, all of that stuff c) the federal deficits.
But, I do like that he:
a) is pro-immigration, and is pro-amnesty, and really, is so right on the issue b) is a good deregulator on other fronts c) increased funding for the sciences. just gotta do it. d) deployed the f-22, building a new kind of carrier, and a lot of other cool stuff. e) was pro-nuclear rocket until zubrin f--- it up with his mars-now plan. But, mars-now is cool too. so, why complain? f) tax cuts, particularly on capital gains. g) the 2004 speech where he repudiated Reagan's government is the enemy slogan. it's not the size of the government or its existence thats a problem, its the rules. Paying a bunch of scientist a few hundred billion a year to build cool stuff or doling out some food to some hungry people doesn't mean more rules to me. banning fireplaces and guns does.
so, yeah, bush is a mixed bag. I see the anti-gay thing as more of an election year gimmick than a messianical message, and that Bush is so steadfastly in favor of amnesty, despite absolute hatred from the religious right, says to me that in some ways Bush is more libertarian than his own party.
Now, you don't have to throw away the free market to do GW. You probably will need to have the gov't build sequestration machines and then tax carbon outputs to offset the cost. The gov't would set the carbon level of the atmosphere, and we'd go on from there.
Here's the way I see things. Global warming and all of this other eco stuff most assuredly has an element of a sneaking socialism in it. BUT, even if you can convince yourself that rising CO2 doesn't change climate, and can convince yourself that people aren't responsible for it anyway, the indisputable scientific fact is that we have direct measurements of CO2 rising in the earth's atmosphere.
That's a big deal. SO, I see it as, like, yeah, there's a big dog shit on the floor, and I could pretend that it isn't there, but my house will smell like shit. So, the sooner that we just say yeah, it sucks to clean up dog shit, but it must be done, the better off it is. Remember the good times before you learned that dogs poop, but once you discover it, there's really no going back. It's just humanity growing up. You can't unlearn. The best you could do would be to raise your children to be stupid, and I love my son too much for that.
So, we have to saddle up and deal with it. In the case of CO2, then, the answer is in multiple places. We are in an extremely lucky time in that the cost of fuel is rising at the same time as our knowledge of the consequences burning that fuel, even luckier still that the providers of that fuel are real assholes, so we can use that to engineer a switch to a more atmospheric friendly fuel. We have to build lots of nuclear power plants, lots of electric trains, and lots of electric cars. We have to also have sequestration out the wazoo, because, if the atmospheric change is NOT our fault, than, we need still need to get rid of the CO2. And, finally, if there is some solar system thing that is heating the earth - as, melting martian ice caps suggest, then, we need to manipulate the earth's atmosphere to cool the planet down anyway.
Bottom line is, conservative arguments that say the earth is unchangable by man are utterly stupid. We accept changing environment every time we fertilize a depleted soil, build a levee to hold back a rising sea, construct artificial lakes to run boats in and then stock them with fish so we can drink beer and fish.
Just look at reality, be pragmatic, and get on with it already. It sucks, it does, that this issue is before us, but, that's not going to change it. Fixing it will.
I don't like people telling me what to do. It's really that simple. I am an iconoclastic anti-social rebel. When people form big groups and say, hey, why don't you get along either, well, I just want to laugh.
So, for me, the whole of idea of a cooperative socialist society is a bunch of crap, because, I want to do what I want to do, not what someone else tells me I should do, even if it might serve some "greater good".
Its so bad that when I see a hundred people in agreement on an issue, I instinctively have to disagree, even if I might buy into some of their arguments, largely because if I see a crowd of people getting roiled up, it usually means something stupid is about to happen. Even on slashdot, if I see a 100 people bashing Bush, well, I'll post he's the greatest. If, they were all cheering Bush the great, I'd probably call myself a liberal, and move on with life.
Politically, this translates into:
a) smaller government regulation, because I don't like all the cops required to enforce the laws. it's not so much about the size of government that bothers me, as much as it is about the rules that it imposes. If the government decided it wanted to do something like feed the poor of the planet earth, and it wouldn't cost too much, I could go along with it. Just don't give me new laws about it, but have a web site if I'm drunk and want to feel good about being an American.
b) private ownership of guns is essential. hold a gun in your hand, and you are free. It's a gut thing, and you just have to feel it.
c) free speech across the board. I don't like it when people trash my cultural icons in the media, but I reserve the right to trash theirs too more importantly than I feel the need for some oppressive body to say no to all of us.
d) free trade. don't tell me where to buy, who to work for, or who to hire. that means, be pro-immigration, even if it means amnesty. If don't want to learn spanish, I won't, but that would be more of a pain in the ass than any sort of soverieign imposition.
e) global warming. sigh. Even if global warming is not caused by rising co2 caused by man's sins of the SUV, the CO2 level is surely rising and there is an obvious need to manage the planet's atmosphere. So, therefor, I say, we need to invest in sequestration technologies while also switching to nuclear power and electric cars. It's no different than seeing a need to build a levee to stop a rising river. Freedom's alright, and I wish I wouldn't have to deal with it, but, sometimes you need to work together to stop the flood to stay dry, and to fix the air, just because, its not all mine, and I don't really want to own it all anyway. Just get on with building the nukes, electric cars, massive sequestration machines, and I'll deal with it. But don't bitch too much at me if I still want to drive a V8 from time to time. I'll plant some trees.
That's a really good point, and all kidding aside, they should just fix the frigging satellite. How much could it be? A billion dollars? Christ, we'll piss that away on my fearless fuhrer's (oops, I mean, my fellow Republican President) fucked up adventure in Iraq in a few days. Toss it onto the big Chinese loan, I say. It's not like we're ever going to pay them back!
The thing that you have to do is encourage an education in the arts to go with the sciences. The arts, to some extent, bound the sciences and lay context to them. Science gives a million facts, but art, I've concluded, is the glue that holds it all together. You can have a computer program of a few hundred thousands of lines that simulates an economic system, but you still need a Madison to write: "We the people, in order to perform a more perfect union".
I will tell you this though : If I see one more "it can hold xxxxxx library of congresses, or form a stack of xxxx trips to the moon", I'm going to throw up.
The other thing too, is that, the right wing is a diverse group, just as much as the left wing is. For us, we have a coalition of religious types and free market libertarian types. I fall into the latter. So, yeah, the thing to do is to understand that the vast majority of we Republicans are actually deists in practice - that is, God made the universe some however many billions of years ago, and set it off to the races, and that everything science has discovered is actually, well valid.
However, there is a bit of a civil war going on on the right side, and, so, the smart ones among us actually did jump parties and go with Democrats in the last election, so long as they don't promise to spend too much money on stupid socialism, as that is a better alternative than stupid and repressive things like banning gay marriage. For our side, its all about the profits, and well, if gays get married, from my neck of the woods, its only more profits for my wife, who is a photographer.
So, from you lefties, either the religious side in our party is going to tone it down, or, the Democratic Party is about to get a hell of a lot bigger.
Chaos by Gleick is one of my all time favorite books of science for laiety, but it was much more fun to grab a couple of fractals equations off of the internet and run them myself. "Surely you are joking", is another great book. I hope that if my son decides to build a cyclotron, I'll have the money to help him do it.
I write in a voice as the slashdot spokesman of the right wing, largely becuase I think its safe to say that I am the only Bush support on slashdot that can program in assembly language and is also self effacing enough to take my politics not too seriously. The reason, in all seriousness, is to not try and change your mind about your preferred economic system, because I can't, but at least that, if there are people like me to build some bridges of understanding, we can work together and over time put some of the political wars behind us and work for a better quality of life for all NATO members.
The thing though, is that, the left assumes that because we on the right are critical of science, that we do not support it.
Far from it!
If anything, right wingers support science even MORE. First off, we have a relentless need for new products that only scientific research can genuinely provide. Then, to get that product around the globe we've needed advances in everything from transportation to logistics, bringing in jet aircraft, super sized ships, massive cranes, computers, containers, along the way. Finally, to ensure that the reach of our consumer free trading system is global, we pour hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars every year into military research, so that, if we can't reason our way into our superior system, we can at least help those who are more backwards still to see the light.
Along the way of doing all this, we righties have learned that scientists use the sky is falling argument. And yes, we certainly understand that even if an experiment fails, the knowledge gained has some intrinsic value so therefor, at some level, its ok to say that the planet might freeze up, only to later learn that it might warm up. But, on the opposite side, we have shareholders (each other), our customers and employees, and they demand that planes fly farther, cheaper and faster, ships that hold more, goods delivered on an increasingly accurate schedule, and new products to be released on time, and so, at some point, the pure asthetic gain of knowledge gained must yield to the current demand for practical results.
I certainly agree that you wouldn't expect to hear this on Fox News, but the reality is, most of us weller to do right wingers, even far righties like me who still support President Bush, watch the likes of Fox really more for entertainment, and view the likes of Hannity and Rush in the same kind of people as Howard Stern - shock jocks but not real values. For real news, we listen to NPR or read CNN's web site, the WSJ, the Economist, Scientific American, Discover, and yes, gasp, Slashdot.
Incidentally, this whole globalalization thing is a vision, actually, we stole from your liberal Roosevelt. We of course wanted to have protected markets but saw that the war which resulted was a disaster, and realized that if capital could flow everywhere on the planet, we could get really rich. We were the original isolationists, and now your side is. And, from you liberals, we learned that change is not so bad, in fact, change is really good, because, where there is change, there is opportunity, and where there is opportunity, there is profits.
That lesson, my friend, you liberals have seem to have forgotten, and if you rediscover it, pat yourselves on your back for one thing. Roosevelt's vision worked and the world is richer than it has ever been for it. You were right about that.
Makes me wonder what other skies aren't really falling either. This sort of thing, I wish scientists could see only undermines scientists more.
There was once a great piece on NPR, in which a scientist admitted that he wouldn't debate right wingers because they were better with people than he was. This right winger's first word of advice would be, to tell the truth and not overstate things, unless, you are planning to topple an oil rich dictator.
Or, to put it another way. If a million muslims in the middle east need a violent strong man to govern them, and they do not deserve to be liberated from totalitarian regimes, then why would you assume that they would respond differently when living in France or the United Kingdom?
Didn't Lorenz already determine decades ago that weather is a chaotic system, such that, we couldn't possibly build enough monitoring stations to actually get the weather more accurate than a week out? If the weather satellite could effectively sample the earth and extend the forecast out by a couple of days, then it is a big deal. But, probably, at best it might add a few hours to the precision, and therefor, is not such a big deal.
Seriously, such forecasting is already governed by a law of math that is almost as immutable as Einstein's dictum that nothing shall travel faster than the speed of light. One has to wonder, then, just how trustworthy super computing climate models are, if they cannot accurately forecast the weather for more than a few days.
Is that, the public sooner or later gets wise to it, and that undermines all of science. In the USA, we've seen a number of scientists argue all manner of shocking things in order to get funding, and all that has done is undermine science altogether.
We have seen proclamations of the end of all mankind if we do not research something, that it almost seems miraculous that we are still here at all, becuase we obviously haven't researched everything. Noted cynically, the last 50 years has seen a bevy of failed pronouncements by members of the academic community:
a) The asteroid will hit us at any second. b) We're real close on nuclear fusion. c) We'll have nuclear power in everything from planes and ships to cars. d) A cure for cancer is right around the corner. e) We've mastered bacteriological illnesses and we're real close to conquering the virus. f) The sea has an inexhaustable supply of fish, if we would just harness that we could feed the world. g) The planet is cooling down, and we're headed for an ice age. h) Global warming will cause more hurricanes. i) Eat plenty of eggs and cheese.
Instead, we haven't been hit by an asteroid, nuclear fusion is still decades away, nuclear power has been destroyed by
To make matters worse, people see scientists as just another kind of smart people, like doctors and lawyers. People already have a growing distrust of western medicine, witness the rise of alternative medicine. And nobody trusts lawyers.
The best approach for any scientist looking for funding is to tell the truth, and simply, and not to over-sensationalize things. That way, when something does need to be sensationalized, such as global warming, people will actually believe it, and right now, they don't.
Why else, might you ask, would 10,000 scientists, from the UN, argue for action, meaning research dollars, on global warning, only to fall on deaf ears.
Here's the real question. If Arabs, as many liberals say, are incapable of having a democracy, as Iraq would seem to prove, and the only way they can really be governed is with a violent strong man, then, how does multiculturalism stack up?
The bottom line is, you either can impose democracy militarily, and the USA simply hasn't quite figured out how to do so correctly, or, the other cultures are not as good, and should be treated as such.
Either the liberal belief in imposing democracy is wrong, or, the liberal belief that all cultures are equal is wrong! Either way you slice it, George W Bush had the theory right, but failed to adequately put his plan into implementation.
we've turned a credible military mission to bring democracy to the middle east
I know its tough to believe for a continent that hasn't spread democracy anywhere. Maybe someday when Europe actually lives up to its lofty preaching, it will be different, but for right now, if anyone advances the cause of Democracy in the world, it will be the United States, not tired old Europe.
1) Every Canadian, UK and other person that I work with has repeatedly said that American health care, if you have the company buying insurance, blows their own native care out of the water.
2) America produces 4500 calories per day per person in food products. I'd be willing to bet that the volume of food we eat has more to do with our lower life expectancy than anything else.
3) The statistics with which one judges health are often skewed. For example, look at infant mortality - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality. Note that in the USA, an infant is considered to be just about anything that is born, regardless of viability, whereas the Europeans tend to establish mininum birthweight and other criteria.
It is unfortunate that the liberal reputation for critical analysis exceeds the pap digesting reality. Were this not the case, and objectivity actually possible in the left wing, one would easily see, in a bipartisan way, that Michael Moore's film is pure propaganda, should not be taken seriously, and neither should socialist medicine.
The question is, if Germany has the bomb, how much do they make that threat?
The thing about civilization, is that, you can never be to arrogant to believe that you are incapable of doing the same sort of wrongs that others have done in the past. Witness what my Republican buddies in the USA have been up to... we've turned a credible military mission to bring democracy to the middle east into an excuse for xenophobia at home.
If the USA left Europe to its own devices, every European nation would have the bomb within 20 years. I would not be so convinced that the past is something in the past. The Polish Prime Minister recently pointed out, when arguing for a higher share of votes within the EU, that his country would have 20 million more people today if not for the German genocide of World War II.
Poland knows that any EU assurance of defence against Russia is worthless, because, it's always been worthless for the entire nation's history. So, as soon as the USA leaves NATO, and hence Poland, Poland goes and gets the atomic bomb. Now, do the Germans sit there with a cross border state, without the bomb? I don't think so.
I, even though I am tempted at times to pull the plug on Europe, still calm myself down periodically. NATO exists for a reason. With the USA and Canada on one side, and Europe on the other (particularly France and the UK), the Atlantic Ocean is essentially turned into a lake for nations of similar cultural leanings. This makes trade between the continents so common that we take it for granted.
In a world without NATO, the Atlantic becomes a battleground again. Or, at least, some nations will not be able to trade. I imagine the Germans would feel the need to have a large navy again... Do we remember the lessons of 1914? Or is it too long in the past!
Would be to establish an EU and USA joint research program aimed at creating new technologies to improve automation in medicine. Regardless of economic system, you would find lower overall costs as time went on, reducing tax burdens for EU citizens and checking the increase in health care premiums in the USA, making health care more accessible for everyone, worldwide.
The central thrust of your argument is that, because health care is a necessity, the government should provide it. But you forget that scarcity ALWAYS exists, and whether you are a socialist or a capitalist doesn't change that at all. In the case of socialist systems, everyone does not get a particular good or a service.
For example, in the UK, proposals have been aired so that no one who smokes will actually get health care, and, the government makes policy decisions such that some people will not get a particular treatment. The only way that you can get it, thus, is to pay it out of pocket. Basically, you get rationing. It's no different with health than it is with gasoline in Iran. Sure, its theoretically available to everyone, but, no one ever actually has it, because the caps have to be artificially put into place.
In the USA, on the other hand, if you have the money or benefits, you can find health insurance that works for your lifestyle. I might, for example, pay a higher premium because I smoke, but, I'm still going to get my million dollar cancer cure at the end of the day, and insurance commpanies will still have made money off of me even after writing that check. Thus, for people willing to pay anything, and they do, there is superior health care. For a time, in the USA, there were more MRI's in absolute terms in the Philadelphia area than in all of Canada. The wait time was short, whereas things have to be scheduled more.
It's readily apparent that scarcity exists. Slapping a socialist label on it will undermine health care for the vast majority of people that do have it. Sure, 40 million people in the USA may not have adequate health coverage, but what about the 250 million people that DO.
The issue, in both cases, is that advancing technology has made health care more expensive. 50 years ago, there was an x-ray machine and the doctor or nurse just did it. Now, the medical dollar must support a bevy of things from CAT scanners to MRIs, real time medical monitors, all of which are attended by a fleet of technicians, who are nearly as expensive as the doctors. Over time, what will happens is that automation will visit the field of medicine, rather than just absolute discovery, as is the case now, and that will drive down the cost of medicine. Doctors are already comfortable with sending samples to a lab technicians for results, and often times those techs are now overseas. Imagine when computers give you the bacteria counts, etc, and suddenly you don't need all those techs any more than you need people to manually turn rubber to form tires with. Right now, car makers make more cars than they ever did, and with far less people, and the same thing is going to happen to medicine.
So, does that mean that government cannot help at all? No. The answer not some foolish to turn to a socialism that we already know screws the overwhelming majority. The answer is a set of prudent investments by the government in medical automatician research, so that we can get the hardware and the software needed to reduce the cost of medicine, and not just simply shuffle resources around, as the socialists would have us do.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this is, the people that start out chasing after the sun and the moon and the stars tend to deliver more than the people that deliver exactly what they promised. I see this in corporate programming all the time. Developers afraid of missing deadlines never take risks, and for that matter, never really push themselves. As a result, the client is actually grotesquely undeserved.
Translated to what we have at NASA or even the DOD today, you have an underpromising risk adverse group of people that still wind up burning through money unnecessarily because they spend it all trying to figure out how to do it all within a precise window. If you look at the sorts of radical research that came about between the 1950s and 1960s, versus what we have today, and I think you'd have to conclude that NASA has utterly lost its nerve. Sometimes you just have to put a guy up on top of a missile to see if it won't blow up. NASA would never do that today, and that is why we have not yet gone back to the moon or to mars.
It's that, they are all a bunch of pussies now, as are most American engineers.
Fair enough, but sometimes, and on rare occasions, the free market needs a kick in the ass. It doesn't mean you bail on it altogether, but, once in a generation, it gets stuck on something. So, you basically do the switch to nukes + electric, with subsidies, research, etc, and then, let the free market roll.
Not far off perhaps :-). M.U.L.E. is one of my all time favorite video games.
These things I do not like about Bush:
a) the gay marriage amendment
b) USA PATRIOT, Homeland Security, all of that stuff
c) the federal deficits.
But, I do like that he:
a) is pro-immigration, and is pro-amnesty, and really, is so right on the issue
b) is a good deregulator on other fronts
c) increased funding for the sciences. just gotta do it.
d) deployed the f-22, building a new kind of carrier, and a lot of other cool stuff.
e) was pro-nuclear rocket until zubrin f--- it up with his mars-now plan. But, mars-now is cool too. so, why complain?
f) tax cuts, particularly on capital gains.
g) the 2004 speech where he repudiated Reagan's government is the enemy slogan. it's not the size of the government or its existence thats a problem, its the rules. Paying a bunch of scientist a few hundred billion a year to build cool stuff or doling out some food to some hungry people doesn't mean more rules to me. banning fireplaces and guns does.
so, yeah, bush is a mixed bag. I see the anti-gay thing as more of an election year gimmick than a messianical message, and that Bush is so steadfastly in favor of amnesty, despite absolute hatred from the religious right, says to me that in some ways Bush is more libertarian than his own party.
Now, you don't have to throw away the free market to do GW. You probably will need to have the gov't build sequestration machines and then tax carbon outputs to offset the cost. The gov't would set the carbon level of the atmosphere, and we'd go on from there.
Here's the way I see things. Global warming and all of this other eco stuff most assuredly has an element of a sneaking socialism in it. BUT, even if you can convince yourself that rising CO2 doesn't change climate, and can convince yourself that people aren't responsible for it anyway, the indisputable scientific fact is that we have direct measurements of CO2 rising in the earth's atmosphere.
That's a big deal. SO, I see it as, like, yeah, there's a big dog shit on the floor, and I could pretend that it isn't there, but my house will smell like shit. So, the sooner that we just say yeah, it sucks to clean up dog shit, but it must be done, the better off it is. Remember the good times before you learned that dogs poop, but once you discover it, there's really no going back. It's just humanity growing up. You can't unlearn. The best you could do would be to raise your children to be stupid, and I love my son too much for that.
So, we have to saddle up and deal with it. In the case of CO2, then, the answer is in multiple places. We are in an extremely lucky time in that the cost of fuel is rising at the same time as our knowledge of the consequences burning that fuel, even luckier still that the providers of that fuel are real assholes, so we can use that to engineer a switch to a more atmospheric friendly fuel. We have to build lots of nuclear power plants, lots of electric trains, and lots of electric cars. We have to also have sequestration out the wazoo, because, if the atmospheric change is NOT our fault, than, we need still need to get rid of the CO2. And, finally, if there is some solar system thing that is heating the earth - as, melting martian ice caps suggest, then, we need to manipulate the earth's atmosphere to cool the planet down anyway.
Bottom line is, conservative arguments that say the earth is unchangable by man are utterly stupid. We accept changing environment every time we fertilize a depleted soil, build a levee to hold back a rising sea, construct artificial lakes to run boats in and then stock them with fish so we can drink beer and fish.
Just look at reality, be pragmatic, and get on with it already. It sucks, it does, that this issue is before us, but, that's not going to change it. Fixing it will.
Let's move on it, people.
I don't like people telling me what to do. It's really that simple. I am an iconoclastic anti-social rebel. When people form big groups and say, hey, why don't you get along either, well, I just want to laugh.
So, for me, the whole of idea of a cooperative socialist society is a bunch of crap, because, I want to do what I want to do, not what someone else tells me I should do, even if it might serve some "greater good".
Its so bad that when I see a hundred people in agreement on an issue, I instinctively have to disagree, even if I might buy into some of their arguments, largely because if I see a crowd of people getting roiled up, it usually means something stupid is about to happen. Even on slashdot, if I see a 100 people bashing Bush, well, I'll post he's the greatest. If, they were all cheering Bush the great, I'd probably call myself a liberal, and move on with life.
Politically, this translates into:
a) smaller government regulation, because I don't like all the cops required to enforce the laws. it's not so much about the size of government that bothers me, as much as it is about the rules that it imposes. If the government decided it wanted to do something like feed the poor of the planet earth, and it wouldn't cost too much, I could go along with it. Just don't give me new laws about it, but have a web site if I'm drunk and want to feel good about being an American.
b) private ownership of guns is essential. hold a gun in your hand, and you are free. It's a gut thing, and you just have to feel it.
c) free speech across the board. I don't like it when people trash my cultural icons in the media, but I reserve the right to trash theirs too more importantly than I feel the need for some oppressive body to say no to all of us.
d) free trade. don't tell me where to buy, who to work for, or who to hire. that means, be pro-immigration, even if it means amnesty. If don't want to learn spanish, I won't, but that would be more of a pain in the ass than any sort of soverieign imposition.
e) global warming. sigh. Even if global warming is not caused by rising co2 caused by man's sins of the SUV, the CO2 level is surely rising and there is an obvious need to manage the planet's atmosphere. So, therefor, I say, we need to invest in sequestration technologies while also switching to nuclear power and electric cars. It's no different than seeing a need to build a levee to stop a rising river. Freedom's alright, and I wish I wouldn't have to deal with it, but, sometimes you need to work together to stop the flood to stay dry, and to fix the air, just because, its not all mine, and I don't really want to own it all anyway. Just get on with building the nukes, electric cars, massive sequestration machines, and I'll deal with it. But don't bitch too much at me if I still want to drive a V8 from time to time. I'll plant some trees.
From whose budget does the satellite come? Is that a NASA thing or does the NOAA have its own budget for satellites?
That's a really good point, and all kidding aside, they should just fix the frigging satellite. How much could it be? A billion dollars? Christ, we'll piss that away on my fearless fuhrer's (oops, I mean, my fellow Republican President) fucked up adventure in Iraq in a few days. Toss it onto the big Chinese loan, I say. It's not like we're ever going to pay them back!
The thing that you have to do is encourage an education in the arts to go with the sciences. The arts, to some extent, bound the sciences and lay context to them. Science gives a million facts, but art, I've concluded, is the glue that holds it all together. You can have a computer program of a few hundred thousands of lines that simulates an economic system, but you still need a Madison to write: "We the people, in order to perform a more perfect union".
I will tell you this though : If I see one more "it can hold xxxxxx library of congresses, or form a stack of xxxx trips to the moon", I'm going to throw up.
The other thing too, is that, the right wing is a diverse group, just as much as the left wing is. For us, we have a coalition of religious types and free market libertarian types. I fall into the latter. So, yeah, the thing to do is to understand that the vast majority of we Republicans are actually deists in practice - that is, God made the universe some however many billions of years ago, and set it off to the races, and that everything science has discovered is actually, well valid.
However, there is a bit of a civil war going on on the right side, and, so, the smart ones among us actually did jump parties and go with Democrats in the last election, so long as they don't promise to spend too much money on stupid socialism, as that is a better alternative than stupid and repressive things like banning gay marriage. For our side, its all about the profits, and well, if gays get married, from my neck of the woods, its only more profits for my wife, who is a photographer.
So, from you lefties, either the religious side in our party is going to tone it down, or, the Democratic Party is about to get a hell of a lot bigger.
Chaos by Gleick is one of my all time favorite books of science for laiety, but it was much more fun to grab a couple of fractals equations off of the internet and run them myself. "Surely you are joking", is another great book. I hope that if my son decides to build a cyclotron, I'll have the money to help him do it.
I write in a voice as the slashdot spokesman of the right wing, largely becuase I think its safe to say that I am the only Bush support on slashdot that can program in assembly language and is also self effacing enough to take my politics not too seriously. The reason, in all seriousness, is to not try and change your mind about your preferred economic system, because I can't, but at least that, if there are people like me to build some bridges of understanding, we can work together and over time put some of the political wars behind us and work for a better quality of life for all NATO members.
The thing though, is that, the left assumes that because we on the right are critical of science, that we do not support it.
Far from it!
If anything, right wingers support science even MORE. First off, we have a relentless need for new products that only scientific research can genuinely provide. Then, to get that product around the globe we've needed advances in everything from transportation to logistics, bringing in jet aircraft, super sized ships, massive cranes, computers, containers, along the way. Finally, to ensure that the reach of our consumer free trading system is global, we pour hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars every year into military research, so that, if we can't reason our way into our superior system, we can at least help those who are more backwards still to see the light.
Along the way of doing all this, we righties have learned that scientists use the sky is falling argument. And yes, we certainly understand that even if an experiment fails, the knowledge gained has some intrinsic value so therefor, at some level, its ok to say that the planet might freeze up, only to later learn that it might warm up. But, on the opposite side, we have shareholders (each other), our customers and employees, and they demand that planes fly farther, cheaper and faster, ships that hold more, goods delivered on an increasingly accurate schedule, and new products to be released on time, and so, at some point, the pure asthetic gain of knowledge gained must yield to the current demand for practical results.
I certainly agree that you wouldn't expect to hear this on Fox News, but the reality is, most of us weller to do right wingers, even far righties like me who still support President Bush, watch the likes of Fox really more for entertainment, and view the likes of Hannity and Rush in the same kind of people as Howard Stern - shock jocks but not real values. For real news, we listen to NPR or read CNN's web site, the WSJ, the Economist, Scientific American, Discover, and yes, gasp, Slashdot.
Incidentally, this whole globalalization thing is a vision, actually, we stole from your liberal Roosevelt. We of course wanted to have protected markets but saw that the war which resulted was a disaster, and realized that if capital could flow everywhere on the planet, we could get really rich. We were the original isolationists, and now your side is. And, from you liberals, we learned that change is not so bad, in fact, change is really good, because, where there is change, there is opportunity, and where there is opportunity, there is profits.
That lesson, my friend, you liberals have seem to have forgotten, and if you rediscover it, pat yourselves on your back for one thing. Roosevelt's vision worked and the world is richer than it has ever been for it. You were right about that.
Makes me wonder what other skies aren't really falling either. This sort of thing, I wish scientists could see only undermines scientists more.
There was once a great piece on NPR, in which a scientist admitted that he wouldn't debate right wingers because they were better with people than he was. This right winger's first word of advice would be, to tell the truth and not overstate things, unless, you are planning to topple an oil rich dictator.
Or, to put it another way. If a million muslims in the middle east need a violent strong man to govern them, and they do not deserve to be liberated from totalitarian regimes, then why would you assume that they would respond differently when living in France or the United Kingdom?
Didn't Lorenz already determine decades ago that weather is a chaotic system, such that, we couldn't possibly build enough monitoring stations to actually get the weather more accurate than a week out? If the weather satellite could effectively sample the earth and extend the forecast out by a couple of days, then it is a big deal. But, probably, at best it might add a few hours to the precision, and therefor, is not such a big deal.
Seriously, such forecasting is already governed by a law of math that is almost as immutable as Einstein's dictum that nothing shall travel faster than the speed of light. One has to wonder, then, just how trustworthy super computing climate models are, if they cannot accurately forecast the weather for more than a few days.
Is that, the public sooner or later gets wise to it, and that undermines all of science. In the USA, we've seen a number of scientists argue all manner of shocking things in order to get funding, and all that has done is undermine science altogether.
We have seen proclamations of the end of all mankind if we do not research something, that it almost seems miraculous that we are still here at all, becuase we obviously haven't researched everything. Noted cynically, the last 50 years has seen a bevy of failed pronouncements by members of the academic community:
a) The asteroid will hit us at any second.
b) We're real close on nuclear fusion.
c) We'll have nuclear power in everything from planes and ships to cars.
d) A cure for cancer is right around the corner.
e) We've mastered bacteriological illnesses and we're real close to conquering the virus.
f) The sea has an inexhaustable supply of fish, if we would just harness that we could feed the world.
g) The planet is cooling down, and we're headed for an ice age.
h) Global warming will cause more hurricanes.
i) Eat plenty of eggs and cheese.
Instead, we haven't been hit by an asteroid, nuclear fusion is still decades away, nuclear power has been destroyed by
To make matters worse, people see scientists as just another kind of smart people, like doctors and lawyers. People already have a growing distrust of western medicine, witness the rise of alternative medicine. And nobody trusts lawyers.
The best approach for any scientist looking for funding is to tell the truth, and simply, and not to over-sensationalize things. That way, when something does need to be sensationalized, such as global warming, people will actually believe it, and right now, they don't.
Why else, might you ask, would 10,000 scientists, from the UN, argue for action, meaning research dollars, on global warning, only to fall on deaf ears.
Here's the real question. If Arabs, as many liberals say, are incapable of having a democracy, as Iraq would seem to prove, and the only way they can really be governed is with a violent strong man, then, how does multiculturalism stack up?
The bottom line is, you either can impose democracy militarily, and the USA simply hasn't quite figured out how to do so correctly, or, the other cultures are not as good, and should be treated as such.
Either the liberal belief in imposing democracy is wrong, or, the liberal belief that all cultures are equal is wrong! Either way you slice it, George W Bush had the theory right, but failed to adequately put his plan into implementation.
we've turned a credible military mission to bring democracy to the middle east
I know its tough to believe for a continent that hasn't spread democracy anywhere. Maybe someday when Europe actually lives up to its lofty preaching, it will be different, but for right now, if anyone advances the cause of Democracy in the world, it will be the United States, not tired old Europe.
1) Every Canadian, UK and other person that I work with has repeatedly said that American health care, if you have the company buying insurance, blows their own native care out of the water.
2) America produces 4500 calories per day per person in food products. I'd be willing to bet that the volume of food we eat has more to do with our lower life expectancy than anything else.
3) The statistics with which one judges health are often skewed. For example, look at infant mortality - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality. Note that in the USA, an infant is considered to be just about anything that is born, regardless of viability, whereas the Europeans tend to establish mininum birthweight and other criteria.
It is unfortunate that the liberal reputation for critical analysis exceeds the pap digesting reality. Were this not the case, and objectivity actually possible in the left wing, one would easily see, in a bipartisan way, that Michael Moore's film is pure propaganda, should not be taken seriously, and neither should socialist medicine.
I mean, how about some good old Goering Beer and Hitler Sausage!
Sure, the Apple II was really cool, but that was a long time ago. Come on Woz, quit it with all these pranks and get back into computers!
The question is, if Germany has the bomb, how much do they make that threat?
The thing about civilization, is that, you can never be to arrogant to believe that you are incapable of doing the same sort of wrongs that others have done in the past. Witness what my Republican buddies in the USA have been up to... we've turned a credible military mission to bring democracy to the middle east into an excuse for xenophobia at home.
If the USA left Europe to its own devices, every European nation would have the bomb within 20 years. I would not be so convinced that the past is something in the past. The Polish Prime Minister recently pointed out, when arguing for a higher share of votes within the EU, that his country would have 20 million more people today if not for the German genocide of World War II.
Poland knows that any EU assurance of defence against Russia is worthless, because, it's always been worthless for the entire nation's history. So, as soon as the USA leaves NATO, and hence Poland, Poland goes and gets the atomic bomb. Now, do the Germans sit there with a cross border state, without the bomb? I don't think so.
I, even though I am tempted at times to pull the plug on Europe, still calm myself down periodically. NATO exists for a reason. With the USA and Canada on one side, and Europe on the other (particularly France and the UK), the Atlantic Ocean is essentially turned into a lake for nations of similar cultural leanings. This makes trade between the continents so common that we take it for granted.
In a world without NATO, the Atlantic becomes a battleground again. Or, at least, some nations will not be able to trade. I imagine the Germans would feel the need to have a large navy again... Do we remember the lessons of 1914? Or is it too long in the past!
Would be to establish an EU and USA joint research program aimed at creating new technologies to improve automation in medicine. Regardless of economic system, you would find lower overall costs as time went on, reducing tax burdens for EU citizens and checking the increase in health care premiums in the USA, making health care more accessible for everyone, worldwide.
The central thrust of your argument is that, because health care is a necessity, the government should provide it. But you forget that scarcity ALWAYS exists, and whether you are a socialist or a capitalist doesn't change that at all. In the case of socialist systems, everyone does not get a particular good or a service.
For example, in the UK, proposals have been aired so that no one who smokes will actually get health care, and, the government makes policy decisions such that some people will not get a particular treatment. The only way that you can get it, thus, is to pay it out of pocket. Basically, you get rationing. It's no different with health than it is with gasoline in Iran. Sure, its theoretically available to everyone, but, no one ever actually has it, because the caps have to be artificially put into place.
In the USA, on the other hand, if you have the money or benefits, you can find health insurance that works for your lifestyle. I might, for example, pay a higher premium because I smoke, but, I'm still going to get my million dollar cancer cure at the end of the day, and insurance commpanies will still have made money off of me even after writing that check. Thus, for people willing to pay anything, and they do, there is superior health care. For a time, in the USA, there were more MRI's in absolute terms in the Philadelphia area than in all of Canada. The wait time was short, whereas things have to be scheduled more.
It's readily apparent that scarcity exists. Slapping a socialist label on it will undermine health care for the vast majority of people that do have it. Sure, 40 million people in the USA may not have adequate health coverage, but what about the 250 million people that DO.
The issue, in both cases, is that advancing technology has made health care more expensive. 50 years ago, there was an x-ray machine and the doctor or nurse just did it. Now, the medical dollar must support a bevy of things from CAT scanners to MRIs, real time medical monitors, all of which are attended by a fleet of technicians, who are nearly as expensive as the doctors. Over time, what will happens is that automation will visit the field of medicine, rather than just absolute discovery, as is the case now, and that will drive down the cost of medicine. Doctors are already comfortable with sending samples to a lab technicians for results, and often times those techs are now overseas. Imagine when computers give you the bacteria counts, etc, and suddenly you don't need all those techs any more than you need people to manually turn rubber to form tires with. Right now, car makers make more cars than they ever did, and with far less people, and the same thing is going to happen to medicine.
So, does that mean that government cannot help at all? No. The answer not some foolish to turn to a socialism that we already know screws the overwhelming majority. The answer is a set of prudent investments by the government in medical automatician research, so that we can get the hardware and the software needed to reduce the cost of medicine, and not just simply shuffle resources around, as the socialists would have us do.