Roku has been mentioned many times, but one thing I like in particular with the Roku (and that is unique, as far as I know) is that you can do a media search for something like a video rental and then compare prices from several different providers - Amazon Prime vs Google Play vs others. Overall it's been a very solid experience.
Wealth redistribution forced by Government is not inherent. Distribution via barter for goods and services - yes. At the point of a gun with threat of jail - no.
Define wealth redistribution. If we observe that one group of people is consistently gaining wealth, while the other groups are maintaining or losing wealth, is that not direct evidence that wealth is being redistributed?
Here's what's going on: The rich have built a society that SYSTEMATICALLY removes money from the lower and middle class and gives it to the rich. When the lower classes unite (via democracy) to try to adjust the system to end this redistributionism, the rich create a narrative via their political puppets (the republicans) to claim that anything other than this regulation in favor of the rich is immoral. Do you see what's happening here? You're making a distinction between the government redistributing wealth directly (by tax policy) or indirectly (by regulation that favors the rich and moves money their way discreetly). And you're claiming that it's not ok in the first case, but is ok in the latter case. Why? In a truly equal society, it ought to be a meritocracy, such that people who work hard and have good ideas move upward. Social mobility is declining, though. Inequality is increasing. We're moving more and more towards a caste system, where your lifestyle is determined almost entirely by who your parents were, and who your grandparents were, and so on. By arguing against government intervention, you are saying that this is how things ought to be.
Ultimately, the way this gets fixed is by isolating the capital from government so government and politics become the philosophers of society, and limiting the scale of personal wealth and business so that they cannot compete with government except when they form voluntary associations.
Well, I think capitalism causes many problems and so many solutions are needed - it's tremendously efficient and powerful, but it needs to be restrained. I agree that generally this is a good first step though - moving to public campaign financing and outlawing our current state-sanctioned system of bribery as campaign funding would be the beginning of reform, until that happens all the people with the power to improve things are beholden to the corporations and rich families that pay for their campaigns.
Some people make the argument that private charities are a bad thing, and all should be done by government alone. If that's your position, I have nothing to say to you.
I certainly believe private charities do a lot of good in the world, but I also disagree on a few things: first of all, that private charities are always (or even on average) more effective than the government, second, that charities are matched well to needs (breast cancer research is WAY overfunded compared to other, more deadly cancers for instance), third, that charitable giving ought to be incentivized with tax policy, and fourth, that most deductions are about charitable giving... they are far more often about encouraging behavior (alternative energy, taking out a home loan) or selectively helping out certain people (parents, investors). And it's worth mentioning that a huge portion of charitable giving in the U.S. goes to religious groups and churches... and I can say from first hand experience that's mostly used for salaries for clergy and buildings that are mostly vacant 6 days of the week. That's a far cry from helping the poor, and while I think churches do offer value to the community, I can also say that the bible never said "tithe only if you get a tax deduction". Why do we need to give a tax break to people who make religious donations?
I think most people would agree that people who have very high income but use deductions to completely avoid paying taxes are abusing the system at the expense of the rest of the taxpayers.
Return on capital is higher than the return on labor
What dark smelly place did you pull that from? The units aren't the same, how do you compare?
Both rates are highly variable and set on markets.
Capitalists invest to earn their living, same as everybody. How does that equal whatever propaganda you started with?
Labor is inherently limited - you only have a certain amount of hours in the day to work, and for most people their ability to earn a higher hourly rate is largely dictated by their employer.
Capital has no such restriction. You can plop $100 in an index fund and it will reliably make you ~7% wealthier, every year, for life. The more money you put in there, the more it grows. What's more, you can continue to make money from labor - capital requires no direct time investment, $1B takes no more time to manage than $100 if you use the same index fund.
Capital is a massive, massive advantage, and all else being equal, the person with capital will always come out ahead, from the simple fact that they can earn exactly the same labor rate as anyone else, while their capital passively builds wealth for them.
People are failing to understand that deductions are part of determining your taxes and are exactly that, deductions from your income. They are not part of your income, and are thus untaxable.
Not true. They are part of your income, because they all represent discretionary spending of one kind or another (donating to a charity, buying energy efficient appliances, whatever). Deductions are really a tool to incentivize certain spending behaviors by the taxpayers... or stated another way, a handout for people who play by the right rules.
If it was an actual operating expense for a business, you would have a point, but that's already accounted for - businesses don't pay taxes on revenues, only on profits. Otherwise it would be impossible for Wal-mart and others to survive on the razor-thin profit margins they are known for. Deductions and operating expenses are not the same thing.
The $150k isn't a deduction in that case, it's a cost. A business is generally only taxed on profit (revenue - costs). Deductions are loopholes meant to incentivize things like solar panels and donating to charities. So the situation you are worried about could never exist.
Was it because they gave their entire >$1M income that year to a bunch of homeless shelters?
I'd be willing to bet real money that not a single person on that list gave all their income to homeless shelters. Do you really think there ought to be a legitimate way for people with that kind of income to skip paying taxes and leave the rest of us with the bill? Sure, it's legal, but is it right? Conservatives get totally bent out of shape at the concept that a single mom making $12k a year doesn't pay any taxes, or might even get a tax credit. Where's the outrage that millionaires aren't paying taxes? That's the point that this bill is meant to address, and it's completely valid. In addition, if you actually care about fiscal conservatism, getting a balanced budget, making the freeloading millionaires pay their share is going to go a lot further than taking grocery money from single moms.
Having attended a lot of schooling and even earned a degree does not imply you know the first thing about civics, if that isn't what you studied. If that was not true, there would not be so many ridiculous videos on the internet asking college students how say "the electoral collage works" and getting blank stairs or completely confused answers.
Conservatives on the other hand tend to be 'preoccupied' with the system and learn the rules.
Citation? Civic knowledge coming out of college is comparable between political affiliations (that is to say, equally bad for conservatives and liberals) but it's a well established fact that the more time you spend in college, the more likely you are to vote, and the more liberal you tend to become. So conservatives at a given level of education do no better than democrats at their civic knowledge, yet as a whole tend to be less educated... looks like your narrative that conservatives have any special regard for the constitution isn't holding up.
By the way, this should be very clear by the fact that most conservatives are currently screaming for suspects on the FBI watchlist to have their second-amendment rights revoked without any kind of due process or appeals process. Oh, and the fact that the republicans just nominated a guy who wants to ban immigrants based on religion. All of this should be terrifying to any Constitutionalist.
So be honest about it, first - do you want to redistribute wealth, or do you want to fund Government?
Wealth redistribution is inherent to capitalism or any economic system. In unrestrained capitalism, over any appreciable timeframe, you'll get a unidirectional flow to whatever market participants have more capital to begin with.
The only question is whether this is a feature or a bug. Do you want money to flow from the lower and middle class to the upper class? Because that is the way the system works. Allowing such a system to operate unchecked (i.e. not supporting progressive taxation) is the same as regulating in favor of the wealthy. My intent is actually to minimize this one-sided redistributionism, through a combination of tax policy and government regulation. In a similar style to the republican policies of the mid-twentieth century.
Government is government. Private is private. Government's not supposed to treat us differently - equality for all, right? Then why the differences in tax/income distribution?
Did you not read what I wrote? We must tax at different rates, because capitalism's natural state makes the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - inequality of opportunity is inherently part of it. Progressive taxes worked very well all the way until the 80's to help establish America's most prosperous era and most healthy and vibrant middle class. Then Reagan gutted that and things have been heading downhill ever since.
If the rich are so bothered at being taxed more, they can always give up their money to enjoy a nice low tax rate, right? And I for one would happily accept the burden of all that money even if it meant a lot of taxes... somehow I'm sure I could manage to survive.
Tell me, how is it anything less than a gift to completely absolve these people from their tax burden? Seriously? Whether I give you $10 directly or allow you to avoid paying $10 that you would otherwise owe, the outcome is the same. And the rich are disproportionately benefiting from our current tax structure.
The fact of the matter is that we've increasingly got government regulation in favor of the rich. Inequality is skyrocketing in the country, class mobility is tanking. Every metric we've got shows that we're trending towards a two-class society of haves and have-nots. Stop being an apologist for the greed of the rich.
left want to use taxes not to pay for the goods and services received, but to redistribute wealth to "make it equal". THAT is the fundamental difference between Conservatism and Liberalism in the US: Conservatives want to see equality of opportunity - everyone starts the race at the same line.
If that was true, conservatives would be in favor of a 100% estate tax, right? Because that makes sure that everybody is starting off with the same opportunity. Oh, and we need to make sure that there's equality of voting "opportunity", so surely you oppose private funding of political campaigns?
The natural state of capitalism is that wealth is redistributed towards the rich. Don't believe me? Take two identical twins, the only difference is that at 18 one of them gets $100k put into an index fund. It's simple math that the person with the head start will always, always come out ahead thanks to the magic of compounding interest. Unless you have some serious luck in the case of the poor one, or serious screwups in the case of the rich one, the poor person will remain poor and the rich person will remain rich.
So, the point is, if you really support equality of opportunity, as you claim, you ought to be in favor of things that minimize the inherently unbalanced flow of wealth in a capitalist market, since that makes opportunity among market participants less and less equal as time goes on. Things like highly progressive marginal tax rates, 90% or so at the top bracket (like in Eisenhower's day) and aggressive regulation and government action against anti-competitive monopolies (like another great Republican, Teddy Roosevelt pushed for).
Conservatives of today are a mockery of historical conservative values. Ever since Reagan, all conservatives have really stood for is protecting the de facto nobility of the U.S. Inequality is increasing, both of opportunity and outcome. Wake up.
Except: you have to bring water (and food, and fuel) anyhow. And you have to do something with human waste, which is largely water.
Build your ship such that the sleeping quarters are surrounded by fuel, water, waste, and all the assorted *very massive* material that you are already bringing. Send astronauts there if a solar event is detected. Problem solved. The day-to-day cosmic radiation doesn't have much of an impact - Colorado has a higher than normal level of background radiation due to uranium in the soil, but it hasn't manifested itself through increased cancer rates. So there's reason to believe that there may be a minimum threshold of background activity required to produce a measurable increase in cancer risk.
Yes.. and no. No, you can't determine anything from looking at the number and rate of flights in a simple minded fashion. Yes, you can learn a great deal from examining the detailed manifests and determining if spares are being shipped at a greater-than-expected rate (or less than, or not at all). Bog standard logistics analysis that dates back the better part of a century.
I never claimed that ISS data doesn't usefully inform Mars mission planning - merely the maximum resupply interval observed on the ISS tells us nothing useful about the resupply interval we could achieve for Mars missions. The ISS isn't meant by design or operations to go as long as possible without resupply, and so it isn't a meaningful upper limit on the capability of mission length with current technology. The OP's cited resupply interval is basically an arbitrary number.
Actually, that doesn't decrease the risk - it actually increases the risk due to the greater number of launch and assembly operations, the increased number of burns, the requirement to rendezvous in Mars orbit (as opposed to staying with the same vehicle), and the requirement that the vehicle operate (and operate untended) for a much longer period than a simple out-and-back spacecraft. (Etc... etc...)
If the extra launches are providing contingency options, they decrease risk. This is how redundancy works - you have a larger risk of a failure happening somewhere, but now you can accrue one or more failure without an impact to mission success. The chance of failure increases linearly, (p+p) but the chance of all systems failing decreases in a multiplicative fashion (p*p)... so if your system has a 10% chance of failing, adding redundancy will give you a 20% chance of one of the systems failing, but a 1% chance of a failure actually hurting you. It's generally a worthwhile trade.
A nice bit of circular logic - any estimate that disagrees with yours is simply unreasonable.
That's not an example of circular logic. If it were a fallacy, it would more likely be a No True Scotsman. But for that, I would actually have to reject different risk estimates as unreasonable - care to offer one? At this point, you're assuming I'm using "reasonable" as an opportunity to weasel, but really what I meant was "neither very conservative nor very optimistic".
There is no chance that Musk is planning nothing more than a one-way Dragon V2 manned landing - otherwise he could do that in 2018, right? There is a new rocket coming, powered by giant methane-powered engines, which will dwarf the Falcon 9 (and every previous rocket that has flown, ever). THAT is what will send people to Mars, and it's going to have enough capacity to send 100 at a time. It's called the Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT).
What about sending robots first to build at least partially self-sustaining habitats? What about finding ways to protect people from the cosmic radiation during at least three years (x2) long journey to and from the planet? What about ways of bringing them back? What about the storage of supplies, more importantly food, for six years and the mass of a rocket? What about the loss of muscles and bones mass? Last time I checked currently we have no means of creating artificial gravity in space.
The safest, most efficient, and most low-tech mission profile would send a return vehicle to Mars (and many of the habitats and supplies) to be fueled and ready for return before astronauts even leave the Earth. So yes, robots will go first and have everything totally good to go.
Cosmic radiation is a solvable problem - the most efficient answer is to create a bunker within the ship that is surrounded by fuel, water, waste, and as much material as possible - this is stuff you have to carry anyway, so just designing the ship properly will address much of the risk.
And, are you kidding about the artificial gravity thing? It's called centrifugal force. Besides, loss of muscle and bone mass is one of the best studied problems we've got with human spaceflight, and we understand lots of ways to mitigate the problem.
Read up on Mars Direct sometime - it's a fast and easy mission profile compared to most, and almost certainly very similar to the plan Elon's got in mind. Especially since he's developing a massive new methane-fueled rocket which strongly suggests that he plans to synthesize fuel on Mars (methane is one of the easiest things to generate in-situ thanks to the Sabatier process).
... trying to do a better job than most media folks of identifying the issues, and articulating some ways that we could adjust our politics that would make things better.
You've literally defined AI in such a way that most humans wouldn't even qualify. It sounds like you are expecting something out of a science fiction book. Be realistic, and you'll find that by almost any reasonable definition of the problem, we've made tremendous progress in the past 10 years.
Now, the people who say "You can't complain because of ________" are tyrants, pure and simple. They need to be confronted as such, in exactly those very terms.
Jeebus. No they aren't. The meaning of "you can't complain" in this context has nothing to do with free speech, and everything to do with pointing out hypocrisy. A person who complains about politics but doesn't vote is akin to a person who complains about what's on the TV but won't push the button to change the channel. So, this should be better read as: if you can't be bothered to take an hour every couple of years to vote, clearly you aren't serious about politics and so I'm not going to take you seriously.
The thing is, while dissipating energy from your cold junctions on Earth is dead easy -- convection, conduction, evaporation into the atmosphere -- the only option you have in space is radiation. And that translates into enormous fields of radiating surfaces, probably with channels to carry some sort of working fluid, and shading from the Sun. It's not going to be as easy as you imply.
It's not easy, but it's by no means impossible. We haven't even begun to push the limits of engineering for radiating heat away - one of the cooler ideas I've seen is an active phase-change radiator system, that extrudes molten metal into space (sodium, for instance), where it hardens and radiates all that excess energy associated with the phase change, before pulling it back into the system for another pass through the loop. Credit: A book called Saturn Run, that had some really innovative ideas about near-future spacecraft design.
The ISS hasn't gone an extended period without resupply because it wasn't designed to and there's no reason to. So that's an invalid datapoint with respect to what mission duration modern technology can achieve.
Admittedly, the astronauts will be more cut off from support or bailout options than on previous missions, but that can be remedied with a conservative mission profile. For instance, have a fully-fueled and checked out return vehicle (or better yet, multiple) and contingency supplies ready to go at Mars before the astronauts even leave Earth. This mission is far less dangerous than sailing voyages that were commonplace in the 1800's. We will never have a 100% guarantee of success, but if humans should never do anything risky, we should never do anything at all that involves leaving the house.
A reasonable estimate will show that the risk of death associated with a trip to Mars is about the same as or less than the risk from being a smoker. If we have no problem allowing people to make that choice with their lives, why can't we tolerate that same risk for a far more worthwhile cause?
Nevermind that it will be thousands of times more expensive to put them in space; the radiation in space quickly renders all but the most expensive solar options non-functional in less than a year. This is a very stupid idea.
What the hell are you talking about? There's solar panel degradation in space, sure, but it isn't nearly as severe as you seem to think it is - you apparently forget that terrestrial solar panels take quite a beating from UV radiation as well, so the degradation you see on orbit is of a higher degree, but not fundamentally different.
Also, look at the goddamn timelines that Bezos is talking about - all of your objections might apply in the next decade or two, but Bezos is predicting a couple hundred years from now, when modern assumptions about technology limits are close to meaningless. Even then, in our lifetimes, there's nothing stopping a solar-thermal station that is virtually impervious to radiation, and that has a comparable efficiency to photovoltaic panels.
Protip: I know this is slashdot, but you should actually RTFS if you expect to contribute meaningfully to the discussion. Also, maybe you should assume that a dude who owns a rocket company knows a thing or two about spaceflight? But no, random internet guy can surely point out the glaring errors in his opinion after reading the article headline and thinking about it for all of 17 seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
Roku has been mentioned many times, but one thing I like in particular with the Roku (and that is unique, as far as I know) is that you can do a media search for something like a video rental and then compare prices from several different providers - Amazon Prime vs Google Play vs others. Overall it's been a very solid experience.
Wealth redistribution forced by Government is not inherent. Distribution via barter for goods and services - yes. At the point of a gun with threat of jail - no.
Define wealth redistribution. If we observe that one group of people is consistently gaining wealth, while the other groups are maintaining or losing wealth, is that not direct evidence that wealth is being redistributed?
Here's what's going on: The rich have built a society that SYSTEMATICALLY removes money from the lower and middle class and gives it to the rich. When the lower classes unite (via democracy) to try to adjust the system to end this redistributionism, the rich create a narrative via their political puppets (the republicans) to claim that anything other than this regulation in favor of the rich is immoral. Do you see what's happening here? You're making a distinction between the government redistributing wealth directly (by tax policy) or indirectly (by regulation that favors the rich and moves money their way discreetly). And you're claiming that it's not ok in the first case, but is ok in the latter case. Why? In a truly equal society, it ought to be a meritocracy, such that people who work hard and have good ideas move upward. Social mobility is declining, though. Inequality is increasing. We're moving more and more towards a caste system, where your lifestyle is determined almost entirely by who your parents were, and who your grandparents were, and so on. By arguing against government intervention, you are saying that this is how things ought to be.
Ultimately, the way this gets fixed is by isolating the capital from government so government and politics become the philosophers of society, and limiting the scale of personal wealth and business so that they cannot compete with government except when they form voluntary associations.
Well, I think capitalism causes many problems and so many solutions are needed - it's tremendously efficient and powerful, but it needs to be restrained. I agree that generally this is a good first step though - moving to public campaign financing and outlawing our current state-sanctioned system of bribery as campaign funding would be the beginning of reform, until that happens all the people with the power to improve things are beholden to the corporations and rich families that pay for their campaigns.
Some people make the argument that private charities are a bad thing, and all should be done by government alone. If that's your position, I have nothing to say to you.
I certainly believe private charities do a lot of good in the world, but I also disagree on a few things: first of all, that private charities are always (or even on average) more effective than the government, second, that charities are matched well to needs (breast cancer research is WAY overfunded compared to other, more deadly cancers for instance), third, that charitable giving ought to be incentivized with tax policy, and fourth, that most deductions are about charitable giving... they are far more often about encouraging behavior (alternative energy, taking out a home loan) or selectively helping out certain people (parents, investors). And it's worth mentioning that a huge portion of charitable giving in the U.S. goes to religious groups and churches... and I can say from first hand experience that's mostly used for salaries for clergy and buildings that are mostly vacant 6 days of the week. That's a far cry from helping the poor, and while I think churches do offer value to the community, I can also say that the bible never said "tithe only if you get a tax deduction". Why do we need to give a tax break to people who make religious donations?
I think most people would agree that people who have very high income but use deductions to completely avoid paying taxes are abusing the system at the expense of the rest of the taxpayers.
What dark smelly place did you pull that from? The units aren't the same, how do you compare?
Both rates are highly variable and set on markets.
Capitalists invest to earn their living, same as everybody. How does that equal whatever propaganda you started with?
Labor is inherently limited - you only have a certain amount of hours in the day to work, and for most people their ability to earn a higher hourly rate is largely dictated by their employer.
Capital has no such restriction. You can plop $100 in an index fund and it will reliably make you ~7% wealthier, every year, for life. The more money you put in there, the more it grows. What's more, you can continue to make money from labor - capital requires no direct time investment, $1B takes no more time to manage than $100 if you use the same index fund.
Capital is a massive, massive advantage, and all else being equal, the person with capital will always come out ahead, from the simple fact that they can earn exactly the same labor rate as anyone else, while their capital passively builds wealth for them.
People are failing to understand that deductions are part of determining your taxes and are exactly that, deductions from your income. They are not part of your income, and are thus untaxable.
Not true. They are part of your income, because they all represent discretionary spending of one kind or another (donating to a charity, buying energy efficient appliances, whatever). Deductions are really a tool to incentivize certain spending behaviors by the taxpayers... or stated another way, a handout for people who play by the right rules.
If it was an actual operating expense for a business, you would have a point, but that's already accounted for - businesses don't pay taxes on revenues, only on profits. Otherwise it would be impossible for Wal-mart and others to survive on the razor-thin profit margins they are known for. Deductions and operating expenses are not the same thing.
The poor benefit handsomely from our, I would say overly progressive, tax system.
Overly progressive? If only we could return to the good old days of the 1950's when men were men, women were women, and the top marginal tax was 90%.
The $150k isn't a deduction in that case, it's a cost. A business is generally only taxed on profit (revenue - costs). Deductions are loopholes meant to incentivize things like solar panels and donating to charities. So the situation you are worried about could never exist.
I have met many, and strangely enough, the lazy slobs have mostly been conservatives.
Was it because they gave their entire >$1M income that year to a bunch of homeless shelters?
I'd be willing to bet real money that not a single person on that list gave all their income to homeless shelters. Do you really think there ought to be a legitimate way for people with that kind of income to skip paying taxes and leave the rest of us with the bill? Sure, it's legal, but is it right? Conservatives get totally bent out of shape at the concept that a single mom making $12k a year doesn't pay any taxes, or might even get a tax credit. Where's the outrage that millionaires aren't paying taxes? That's the point that this bill is meant to address, and it's completely valid. In addition, if you actually care about fiscal conservatism, getting a balanced budget, making the freeloading millionaires pay their share is going to go a lot further than taking grocery money from single moms.
Having attended a lot of schooling and even earned a degree does not imply you know the first thing about civics, if that isn't what you studied. If that was not true, there would not be so many ridiculous videos on the internet asking college students how say "the electoral collage works" and getting blank stairs or completely confused answers.
Conservatives on the other hand tend to be 'preoccupied' with the system and learn the rules.
Citation? Civic knowledge coming out of college is comparable between political affiliations (that is to say, equally bad for conservatives and liberals) but it's a well established fact that the more time you spend in college, the more likely you are to vote, and the more liberal you tend to become. So conservatives at a given level of education do no better than democrats at their civic knowledge, yet as a whole tend to be less educated... looks like your narrative that conservatives have any special regard for the constitution isn't holding up.
By the way, this should be very clear by the fact that most conservatives are currently screaming for suspects on the FBI watchlist to have their second-amendment rights revoked without any kind of due process or appeals process. Oh, and the fact that the republicans just nominated a guy who wants to ban immigrants based on religion. All of this should be terrifying to any Constitutionalist.
Wealth redistribution is inherent to capitalism or any economic system. In unrestrained capitalism, over any appreciable timeframe, you'll get a unidirectional flow to whatever market participants have more capital to begin with.
The only question is whether this is a feature or a bug. Do you want money to flow from the lower and middle class to the upper class? Because that is the way the system works. Allowing such a system to operate unchecked (i.e. not supporting progressive taxation) is the same as regulating in favor of the wealthy. My intent is actually to minimize this one-sided redistributionism, through a combination of tax policy and government regulation. In a similar style to the republican policies of the mid-twentieth century.
Government is government. Private is private. Government's not supposed to treat us differently - equality for all, right? Then why the differences in tax/income distribution?
Did you not read what I wrote? We must tax at different rates, because capitalism's natural state makes the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - inequality of opportunity is inherently part of it. Progressive taxes worked very well all the way until the 80's to help establish America's most prosperous era and most healthy and vibrant middle class. Then Reagan gutted that and things have been heading downhill ever since.
If the rich are so bothered at being taxed more, they can always give up their money to enjoy a nice low tax rate, right? And I for one would happily accept the burden of all that money even if it meant a lot of taxes... somehow I'm sure I could manage to survive.
You sure about that? Democrats are generally more educated.
They aren't gifts; they are money you never owed. If you keep any tax money that you owe the government, it's called tax fraud.
In 2011, 7000 households with income over $1M paid no federal income tax whatsoever.
Tell me, how is it anything less than a gift to completely absolve these people from their tax burden? Seriously? Whether I give you $10 directly or allow you to avoid paying $10 that you would otherwise owe, the outcome is the same. And the rich are disproportionately benefiting from our current tax structure.
The fact of the matter is that we've increasingly got government regulation in favor of the rich. Inequality is skyrocketing in the country, class mobility is tanking. Every metric we've got shows that we're trending towards a two-class society of haves and have-nots. Stop being an apologist for the greed of the rich.
If that was true, conservatives would be in favor of a 100% estate tax, right? Because that makes sure that everybody is starting off with the same opportunity. Oh, and we need to make sure that there's equality of voting "opportunity", so surely you oppose private funding of political campaigns?
The natural state of capitalism is that wealth is redistributed towards the rich. Don't believe me? Take two identical twins, the only difference is that at 18 one of them gets $100k put into an index fund. It's simple math that the person with the head start will always, always come out ahead thanks to the magic of compounding interest. Unless you have some serious luck in the case of the poor one, or serious screwups in the case of the rich one, the poor person will remain poor and the rich person will remain rich.
So, the point is, if you really support equality of opportunity, as you claim, you ought to be in favor of things that minimize the inherently unbalanced flow of wealth in a capitalist market, since that makes opportunity among market participants less and less equal as time goes on. Things like highly progressive marginal tax rates, 90% or so at the top bracket (like in Eisenhower's day) and aggressive regulation and government action against anti-competitive monopolies (like another great Republican, Teddy Roosevelt pushed for).
Conservatives of today are a mockery of historical conservative values. Ever since Reagan, all conservatives have really stood for is protecting the de facto nobility of the U.S. Inequality is increasing, both of opportunity and outcome. Wake up.
Except: you have to bring water (and food, and fuel) anyhow. And you have to do something with human waste, which is largely water.
Build your ship such that the sleeping quarters are surrounded by fuel, water, waste, and all the assorted *very massive* material that you are already bringing. Send astronauts there if a solar event is detected. Problem solved. The day-to-day cosmic radiation doesn't have much of an impact - Colorado has a higher than normal level of background radiation due to uranium in the soil, but it hasn't manifested itself through increased cancer rates. So there's reason to believe that there may be a minimum threshold of background activity required to produce a measurable increase in cancer risk.
Yes.. and no. No, you can't determine anything from looking at the number and rate of flights in a simple minded fashion. Yes, you can learn a great deal from examining the detailed manifests and determining if spares are being shipped at a greater-than-expected rate (or less than, or not at all). Bog standard logistics analysis that dates back the better part of a century.
I never claimed that ISS data doesn't usefully inform Mars mission planning - merely the maximum resupply interval observed on the ISS tells us nothing useful about the resupply interval we could achieve for Mars missions. The ISS isn't meant by design or operations to go as long as possible without resupply, and so it isn't a meaningful upper limit on the capability of mission length with current technology. The OP's cited resupply interval is basically an arbitrary number.
Actually, that doesn't decrease the risk - it actually increases the risk due to the greater number of launch and assembly operations, the increased number of burns, the requirement to rendezvous in Mars orbit (as opposed to staying with the same vehicle), and the requirement that the vehicle operate (and operate untended) for a much longer period than a simple out-and-back spacecraft. (Etc... etc...)
If the extra launches are providing contingency options, they decrease risk. This is how redundancy works - you have a larger risk of a failure happening somewhere, but now you can accrue one or more failure without an impact to mission success. The chance of failure increases linearly, (p+p) but the chance of all systems failing decreases in a multiplicative fashion (p*p)... so if your system has a 10% chance of failing, adding redundancy will give you a 20% chance of one of the systems failing, but a 1% chance of a failure actually hurting you. It's generally a worthwhile trade.
A nice bit of circular logic - any estimate that disagrees with yours is simply unreasonable.
That's not an example of circular logic. If it were a fallacy, it would more likely be a No True Scotsman. But for that, I would actually have to reject different risk estimates as unreasonable - care to offer one? At this point, you're assuming I'm using "reasonable" as an opportunity to weasel, but really what I meant was "neither very conservative nor very optimistic".
There is no chance that Musk is planning nothing more than a one-way Dragon V2 manned landing - otherwise he could do that in 2018, right? There is a new rocket coming, powered by giant methane-powered engines, which will dwarf the Falcon 9 (and every previous rocket that has flown, ever). THAT is what will send people to Mars, and it's going to have enough capacity to send 100 at a time. It's called the Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT).
What about sending robots first to build at least partially self-sustaining habitats? What about finding ways to protect people from the cosmic radiation during at least three years (x2) long journey to and from the planet? What about ways of bringing them back? What about the storage of supplies, more importantly food, for six years and the mass of a rocket? What about the loss of muscles and bones mass? Last time I checked currently we have no means of creating artificial gravity in space.
The safest, most efficient, and most low-tech mission profile would send a return vehicle to Mars (and many of the habitats and supplies) to be fueled and ready for return before astronauts even leave the Earth. So yes, robots will go first and have everything totally good to go.
Cosmic radiation is a solvable problem - the most efficient answer is to create a bunker within the ship that is surrounded by fuel, water, waste, and as much material as possible - this is stuff you have to carry anyway, so just designing the ship properly will address much of the risk.
And, are you kidding about the artificial gravity thing? It's called centrifugal force. Besides, loss of muscle and bone mass is one of the best studied problems we've got with human spaceflight, and we understand lots of ways to mitigate the problem.
Read up on Mars Direct sometime - it's a fast and easy mission profile compared to most, and almost certainly very similar to the plan Elon's got in mind. Especially since he's developing a massive new methane-fueled rocket which strongly suggests that he plans to synthesize fuel on Mars (methane is one of the easiest things to generate in-situ thanks to the Sabatier process).
... trying to do a better job than most media folks of identifying the issues, and articulating some ways that we could adjust our politics that would make things better.
You've literally defined AI in such a way that most humans wouldn't even qualify. It sounds like you are expecting something out of a science fiction book. Be realistic, and you'll find that by almost any reasonable definition of the problem, we've made tremendous progress in the past 10 years.
Now, the people who say "You can't complain because of ________" are tyrants, pure and simple. They need to be confronted as such, in exactly those very terms.
Jeebus. No they aren't. The meaning of "you can't complain" in this context has nothing to do with free speech, and everything to do with pointing out hypocrisy. A person who complains about politics but doesn't vote is akin to a person who complains about what's on the TV but won't push the button to change the channel. So, this should be better read as: if you can't be bothered to take an hour every couple of years to vote, clearly you aren't serious about politics and so I'm not going to take you seriously.
The thing is, while dissipating energy from your cold junctions on Earth is dead easy -- convection, conduction, evaporation into the atmosphere -- the only option you have in space is radiation. And that translates into enormous fields of radiating surfaces, probably with channels to carry some sort of working fluid, and shading from the Sun. It's not going to be as easy as you imply.
It's not easy, but it's by no means impossible. We haven't even begun to push the limits of engineering for radiating heat away - one of the cooler ideas I've seen is an active phase-change radiator system, that extrudes molten metal into space (sodium, for instance), where it hardens and radiates all that excess energy associated with the phase change, before pulling it back into the system for another pass through the loop. Credit: A book called Saturn Run, that had some really innovative ideas about near-future spacecraft design.
The ISS hasn't gone an extended period without resupply because it wasn't designed to and there's no reason to. So that's an invalid datapoint with respect to what mission duration modern technology can achieve.
Admittedly, the astronauts will be more cut off from support or bailout options than on previous missions, but that can be remedied with a conservative mission profile. For instance, have a fully-fueled and checked out return vehicle (or better yet, multiple) and contingency supplies ready to go at Mars before the astronauts even leave Earth. This mission is far less dangerous than sailing voyages that were commonplace in the 1800's. We will never have a 100% guarantee of success, but if humans should never do anything risky, we should never do anything at all that involves leaving the house.
A reasonable estimate will show that the risk of death associated with a trip to Mars is about the same as or less than the risk from being a smoker. If we have no problem allowing people to make that choice with their lives, why can't we tolerate that same risk for a far more worthwhile cause?
Nevermind that it will be thousands of times more expensive to put them in space; the radiation in space quickly renders all but the most expensive solar options non-functional in less than a year. This is a very stupid idea.
What the hell are you talking about? There's solar panel degradation in space, sure, but it isn't nearly as severe as you seem to think it is - you apparently forget that terrestrial solar panels take quite a beating from UV radiation as well, so the degradation you see on orbit is of a higher degree, but not fundamentally different.
Also, look at the goddamn timelines that Bezos is talking about - all of your objections might apply in the next decade or two, but Bezos is predicting a couple hundred years from now, when modern assumptions about technology limits are close to meaningless. Even then, in our lifetimes, there's nothing stopping a solar-thermal station that is virtually impervious to radiation, and that has a comparable efficiency to photovoltaic panels.
Protip: I know this is slashdot, but you should actually RTFS if you expect to contribute meaningfully to the discussion. Also, maybe you should assume that a dude who owns a rocket company knows a thing or two about spaceflight? But no, random internet guy can surely point out the glaring errors in his opinion after reading the article headline and thinking about it for all of 17 seconds.