I think he can, but your comprehension of satire is lacking.
Perhaps you're right and my satire detection skills were off. I might have parsed that if OP hadn't blathered: "LOL no "we" can't! Even if we could, evolution is still happening, what "we" are you talking about at those time scales? And why is it important? It's never gonna happen."
That's a trope most of the anti-intellectual, anti-science folks pull out, ad nauseam. And so, while I agree that the first part reads as pretty good satire, the last bit read just like a standard anti-rationalist moron rather than someone satirizing one. As such, I'll give it a B-. A decent effort, but flailing at the end.
Had OP gone with something like, "LOL, no we can't. because Jebus you heathen scum!" it would have worked better IMHO. That said, is your "anti-reason moron" detector sensitive enough?
What is it with you religious types and your dog whistle language? "gravity well"?
And your space-addled brain sure picks some fancy words: "etiologies"??? You might want to look that one up!
" We absolutely CAN expand into the galaxy/universe "
LOL no "we" can't! Even if we could, evolution is still happening, what "we" are you talking about at those time scales?
And why is it important? It's never gonna happen.
Such a negative personality (I know, I know, "No, I'm not!"). The research to be done, technologies to be developed, and issues to be solved with becoming a space-faring race will pay us back many times over in solving the issues we have here on Earth.
"Religious types?" "dog whistle language?" I know you can type on a keyboard, but can you actually read for comprehension? I think not. If you could, you'd realize what a steaming load you're posting.
A bit of unsolicited advice for you, champ: 'tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
Taxes are the costs of living in a society. I own this country, and I don't want you to live in this country without paying me something for it.
That is because humans are territorial animals. I have no desire to allow you to live in this country for free, when I can take all the resources of this land for myself. If you want to live on this land, you're going to have to pay me, and the rest of us citizenry. Otherwise, GTFO.
Taxes are the tribute you, as a citizen, pay to other citizens like me, for allowing you to live in this country.
This is the punishment you get for having little power in life. Sucks, but your libertarian philosophy mistakenly led you to believe you had more power than you thought you had. This is why adults never teach their children to be libertarian, because that is the incorrect view of life.
Remember, life isn't free. People live under the power of others, and no one is interested in allowing you freedom to live your life on your own. You will always have to live your life under the rule of someone else, because someone else controls the land you live in.
If you don't like that system you will have to find a way to rule over the land you wish to live on without any other rulers over it. Maybe you can try your hand at becoming a Somali warlord?
When will the bike riders pay their fair share of the road?
Probably when they actually cause wear and tear on the roads. I can assure you that when an engineer does the pavement design for a road, bicycles don't enter into the design life calculations.
[Emphasis Added]
"Wear and tear on the roads." Translation: When the EMTs and sanitation crews that come to scrape the mangled (by a car/truck/bus) bicyclist up with a spatula.
...a mandatory registration fee for bicycles, perhaps.
Errr....Not so much. We are talking about the Federal government here, aren't we? That means the Interstate Highway System. I'm not sure I've *ever* seen a bicycle on an Interstate highway. And if I did, I'd be thinking, "That person is either insane or has a death wish."
I guess we could have a registration fee to pay for body parts clean up, should that become an issue.
Do you have any CONCEPT on what it will cost to charge that Tesla and what the restrictions on charging it will be after all the coal plants shut down in response to Obama's new EPA rules???? Hint: we get over 40% of our electricity from coal.
Take away 40% of the Electricity and what's left will have to be rationed with priorites for hospitals, refrigeration, etc (and of course GOVERNMENT, which when taken together (local,state+fed) is the biggest consumer and will put itself first)...[snip
You really don't know what you're talking about, do you? Even Forbes (hardly a bastion of the American Left) doesn't think anything of the sort. From the linked article:
Don’t believe the hype that these new EPA rules will destroy the economy or send electricity prices sky high. Back in the 1990s the EPA introduced rules to stop acid rain by slashing the emission of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. Critics thought it couldn’t be done, but ingenious engineers came up with new and better ways to scrub the pollutants out of the smokestacks. Andrew Weissman, senior energy advisor at law firm Haynes Boone, says that a key to getting rid of acid rain a generation ago was the creation of a cap-and-trade program for those emissions. Weissman, who helped pioneer emissions trading in the 1990s says that a national trading program is “a proven mechanism to use the full force of competitive markets to drive down costs” while avoiding disruptions to the power grid.[Emphasis added]
Sigh. Some people will believe anything as long as it fits with their existing bias.
Supply and demand. If you make travel by road artificially cheap (which it is - at least 1/3 of road budgets come from general taxation) then people will drive more rather than looking for public transit alternatives. The result is those alternatives are never created and those who would otherwise rely on them, for example the disabled who are unable to drive, lose out big time.
What is more, cheap gasoline further externalizes the environmental costs of greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions. Making gasoline more expensive may cause some short-term pain, but if it gives incentives to ICE owners/users to reduce emissions, either by driving less, using electric vehicles, public transportation, etc. ICE vehicle makers will also scramble to make more fuel efficient cars. We saw this effect during and after the 1973 oil embargo.
N.B. I live in a major US city where owning a car is a serious liability. YMMV. Pun intended.
Not directly related, but it's food for thought...
Mr. Jones related an incident from "some time back" when IBM
Canada Ltd. of Markham, Ont., ordered some parts from a new supplier
in Japan. The company noted in its order that acceptable quality
allowed for 1.5 per cent defects (a fairly high standard in North
America at the time).
The Japanese sent the order, with a few parts packaged
separately in plastic. The accompanying letter said: "We don't know
why you want 1.5 per cent defective parts, but for your convenience,
we've packed them separately."
-- Excerpted from an article in The (Toronto) Globe and Mail
They'll never catch me then. I speak a secret language called "Syntactically Correct American English", an archaic language no one understands any more.[Emphasis Added]
However, if their database is wrong(translating BFF to Big Fat Friend for example), then it's kind of moot anyway. I mean, we would hope a detective wouldn't be standing there exclaiming "What the fuck does WTF mean!?" but that too is entirely possible if WTF goes away in a few years.
An interesting point. I was having a conversation with a neighbor yesterday about how, when I was younger, the acronym 'FTW' emphatically did not mean "For The Win." Rather it meant either "Fight The Whites" or "Fuck The World." So it seems that not only can these acronyms fade away, they can be used to give contradictory meanings as well.
Also, I was interested to note that It's no longer VD (Venereal Disease) or even STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease), but DRD (Dennis Rodman Disease). I'm sure Dennis really appreciates that.
> As such, would someone please explain to me why the IRS allows anyone (let alone the IRS' top administrator) to download their emails to their desktops and delete them from their servers?
Many companies not only allow this, they demand it. As people send around Word attachments and use long email strings as their personal institutional memory, many core email systems simply do not have the space to hold that data. They favor smaller, leaner email environments that they have some hope of maintaining, and are not willing or funded to take on responsibility for the Terabytes of data an individual bureaucrat may generate in a few years use. By making the individual responsible for it, they make expunging or preserving it the individual's problem, not theirs.
An interesting point. However, as an IT infrastructure guy myself, it seems to me that given the importance of email in enabling the functions of today's organizations, backups of email databases, whether from the server or from a local desktop are critical.
In my experience, users tend to be less than diligent in making sure that important emails are preserved.
It is true that server-based email database storage is often used by end users to organize and maintain huge amounts of data. Email quotas can help with that. However, there is no valid reason that the emails of a government official, especially the top administrator at a major government agency, should ever be lost. They should be preserved, not necessarily as a "gotcha" for alleged malfeasance, but as a record of our tax dollars at work.
To say "ensuring that emails are preserved is too costly/difficult/unwieldy to do" is certainly reasonable in the private sector, assuming there are no regulatory requirements (such as those promulgated by the SEC). In the public sector, not so much -- especially for the top managers of federal agencies.
So it seems to me that the IRS staff aren't doing their jobs properly, for whatever reason.
Not surprising. That seems to happen a lot. As such, would someone please explain to me why the IRS allows anyone (let alone the IRS' top administrator) to download their emails to their desktops and delete them from their servers? And even if they did, why don't server backups exist which contain those emails?
Are the IRS' IT staff that incompetent?
As for demanding that the NSA turn over email metadata for Lois Lerner's IRS email address, that assumes they even have such information. Emails internal to the IRS shouldn't go across the Internet. I assume (maybe incorrectly) that the NSA isn't actively capturing packets on the IRS' internal networks, so what is to be gained here, except highlighting the incompetence of the IRS and using the "NSA is capturing everything" meme to make the Obama administration look bad.
So. It's just business as usual. Nothing to see here, just political wrangling to distract us from the fact that our government is being run for the benefit of the monied interests and not its citizens. Move along.
Whose going to spend the money if it isn't the government?
NASA's half-assing it at nearly $20 Billion a year. Every year. That means in ten ears the spend more then any human individual could ever afford to spend. No private corporation has ever had the kind of sustained profit to spend that kind of money. You can get a lot of interesting-looking stuff from a public-private-partnership to get people into space, but you just don't get the scale required to get an actual human to Mars. To get this kind of thing done you have to be willing to totally waste $3 Billion a year for a decade even tho space elevators may never be a practical technology. And only government's do that.
I'm a starry-eyed optimist, and sincerely believe that we could make a good political case for governments (note the plural), a good business case for the business community, and an excellent intellectual case for the academic community to partner up in getting us to the point where space travel is efficient, economically viable and enhances our knowledge of the universe considerably.
Is this likely to happen? Sadly, no.
A manned mission to Mars as "the next big thing"(tm) is a poor idea, IMHO. We need to learn how to live, work, build and manufacture, efficiently and economically, in space first. This is not a short-term proposition.
I generally agree on inequality.
The problem with all this stuff is that we're in decline, and we're starting to argue more about how to divide up the shrinking pie then how to change it so the pie grows. Partly this is caused by the old gentry's continued dominance of the US System -- if everything in your life has gone right, then reducing the deficit is the only long-term issue you care about; OTOH if you're the guy who borrowed $50k for a useless degree you ain't in the gentry no more, and your trenchant points about how borrowing makes a lot of sense when interest rates are near-zero are ignored -- but mostly it's just what happens when the ship starts to sink.
A cogent analysis. It's clear that unless and until we can even out the production/distribution/access to the means of production and the wealth that drives those means, we will be stuck with the same-old same-old. For my part, I hope we can work this out soon, as I'm pushing 50 and would love to see us (Humanity) take its first real steps into space.
Unfortunately, the truth is that our current system will likely collapse under the weight of its own inertia and corruption, leaving the world a dangerous, anarchic mass -- with nuclear weapons. If we survive such a collapse and its aftermath, we may be able to create a more stable, productive and, hopefully, just civilization. If we do, we might have a chance to become a space-faring race.
From a selfish standpoint, this annoys me as I won't live to see that future, and I hope I don't live to see the aftermath of the collapse either.
OK, Wikipedia says fossils "are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past"
So I agree that laptops and coffee mugs don't become fossils, but that doens't mean thay can't still leave signs of their existance. According to the same source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_Footprints) dinosaurs footprints have been found. They are even said "These tracks were fossilized and largely hidden until many were unearthed". I know its surprising that Wikipedia si contradicting itself, yet there it is.
That's kind of the point. We have just as much evidence for a dinosaur civilization as we do for an extra-solar civilization. Which makes both, IMHO, just as likely.
And how do we know about those cities if they are compeltely lost? Perhaps from some record or artifact? Or is there a really old guy that remembers it and talks about it while sitting on the front porch when children wander up?
Yes. Through references to them from other places that we knew existed or have found.
My point wasn't (and never was) that I believe that there was a race of technologically advanced dinosaurs who were wiped out 65 million years ago. I was making the point that even on our own planet that it's possible that there are some circumstances and events we will *never* be able to identify or prove.
That's one of the shortcomings of of the Fermi Paradox. The example of intelligent dinosaurs was simply to point this out.
I'll say it one more time. I wasn't positing the existence of an intelligent, technological race of dinosaurs. I was making the point that given the time scales involved just here on Earth, finding evidence of such a civilization might well be impossible. Add the vastness of space to the even more (4.6 billion vs. 13.7 billion years) enormous time scales (as in the Fermi Paradox), and the problem is exponentially more difficult.
Apparently I've been unclear. I have been quite careful to not say anything about whether space exploration is a good idea in this thread. i personally like it, but that doesn't mean that a) I'm convinced I can convince everyone else to pay for it, or b) the difficulty of achieving a) doesn't show that the Fermi Paradox is not much of a Paradox.
You aren't exactly a champion of clarity either. You have a half-paragraph mentioning "other good reasons to go into space," but you don't actually mention any. You actually contradict your claimed position that space exploration is a good thing by pooh-poohing the only reason anyone on this thread has given for going into space (population growth). I haven't said that it's objectively the best reason to go into space, what I've said is that it's the reason most likely to convince everyone else we should go into space. Partly this is because it would be a justification for spending huge sums of money, and partly it's because when your population is shrinking you don't have huge sums of free money to spend. When you have six workers per retiree you have a lot more money to play with then when you have five. OTOH if you have 10 workers per retiree, and it's going up to 11, you can jack up Social Security 5% and still have some cash left over for investing in the future. There's a reason japan hasn;t done anything interesting since the mid-90s, and the US has spent the past 4 years or so mired in suicidal games ofr chicken over what to do with miniscule portions of the budget.
Moreover you're conflating a bunch of things that are only vaguely related. The Fermi paradox assumes a significant proportion of intelligent life is Starfleet. We'd have seen Starfleet. If the Klingon space race is Klingon state A beating Klingon state B to Qu'Nos III and then everyone goes home because they're all focused on balancing the budget with a shrinking work-force then of course we don't see Warbirds parked around Jupiter. If the US races Russia to Mars, but nobody builds a base on Mars, and everybody stops when somebody wins; that's not Starfleet.
On a note completely unrelated to the paradox:
If you have an argument that will convince working class voters, many of whom have trouble paying for staples (especially gas, but an awful lot of people get food stamps), that we should increase the NASA budget to Starfleet levels I'm all ears. If they had a bunch of kids who needed work (ie: population growth), it would be pretty easy to convince them to do so. Since they don't, and they're gonna assume the money comes from their personal budgets, you got a tough order.
Thanks for the clarification. It's much appreciated.
As for the Fermi Paradox, I'm of the mind (and if you read any of my other posts on this topic it's a bit clearer) that space-time is really big. This, to me at least, suggests that even if multi-cellular life is rare, and intelligent, technological life is rarer still, there's a good chance that other intelligent, technological civilizations did/do/will exist in our observable universe. However, given the timescales, distances and (IMHO) rarity of intelligent/technological civilizations, not to mention the technologies and energy requirements for interstellar travel, it doesn't surprise me that we haven't seen any evidence of extra-solar civilizations.
My original reply to your post didn't relate to the Fermi Paradox. Rather, I took issue with your assertion:
Pretty much the only reason to spend money on your equivalent of NASA is if your population is growing at an exponential rate, so you actually need the space.
(apparently, you were responding to someone else WRT that) that population issues would drive space exploration/colonization. I still say that's not a reasonable motivation, nor is it feasible.
I did at least attempt to address some of the reasons I think the development of space exploration/colonization is a good thing in my last reply:
Is why does the Federal government care? That they do begs the question, what are they trying to hide? Are the Stingrays (which are useful as a law enforcement tool -- assuming proper warrants are obtained and appropriate restrictions adhered to) just a smokescreen for other spy technologies being used by the Feds (think parallel construction here) and shared with local LEO? If so, that's a big problem.
If not, I'm guessing that Hanlon's Razor applies here in spades.
Where do you live? I'd love to live in a place where population growth was driven solely by birth rate. In the real world we also have a little thing called a "death rate," which is higher then the birth rate in every industrialized country in the world. The actual number of people being added every year is a about half your number.
And even if your number was right, you're intentionally misinterpreting my point. I didn't say that we'd actually solve the population growth problem by going to space (indeed, I was very careful to not call population growth a problem). I said we have no incentive to actually spend money on space unless we had a population growth problem, and we could a) use some of our excess working age adults creating a space program, and b) find work for some of those adults permanently by moving them to Mars.
Since in reality we're almost certainly going to have the opposite problem, there's no reason for us to start an interplanetary empire, much less the intersteller empire assumed by the Fermi paradox.
A worthwhile point WRT death rates. I live on a planet called Earth, where the death rate is less than half of the birth rate. How about you?
So, even if you halved the numbers I quoted and (the very conservative assumptions I made), you'd still need almost 40 space elevators to make that work.
However, you ignored the context in which the example was offered. Did you do that on purpose just to be contrary, or did you miss it entirely?
My original point, which I'll reproduce here was:
The resources required to move enough people off-planet to outstrip birth rates would be far more than are available to us. There are many other good reasons to go off-planet and even create colonies elsewhere, but that isn't one of them.
The point of my little exercise was to show that using space exploration/colonization for population control was a poor idea.
You don't believe that space exploration is a good idea. So be it. That's fine with me. I believe that it is. The expansion of human knowledge, enhancing/improving our engineering skills and know how, attempting to create the conditions for a civilization that can survive in the long term are just a few. There are so many reasons to strive to be a space-faring race. If you don't think so, more power to you. I won't try to change your mind.
However, there are those of us who believe that it's a wonderful idea that should be pursued vigorously. What are the short term costs/benefits? That's a complicated discussion. But the long term benefits are clear, IMHO.
So, rather than just attack an example you agree with (albeit for different reasons), I invite you to engage in rational discourse.
"Even our most durable polymers would break down in much less than 65 million years and erosion and the action of plate tectonics would likely wipe out any trace of such a civilization."
If there are traces of dinosaur bones, feathers, teeth, etc, then there would definately be signs of dino laptops, coffee mugs, or whatever else they built. Sure, the polymers would have broken down, but some would have fossilized or left some traces of their existance.
Maybe. Maybe not. There are human cities just a few thousand years old that have been completely lost. We know that the people who lived there used fire, stone tools, possibly even ceramics yet there's no trace. After 65 million years, perhaps we don't recognize the remnants of such things. Besides, stuff like laptops and coffee mugs don't fossilize.
We also have the donosaurs to thank. Without them and their era's vegatation, we wouldn't have all the coal and oil energy to be as technological as we are. Imagine where the human race would be now if there was no coal or oil available. We will still be burning wood or maybe slowly developing hydro power. Plastics come from that petrolium also. It would be hard to make all those iPhones without plastic.
I am aware of the origin of fossil fuels (although dinosaurs themselves aren't a big source for them), but I'm not sure what this (other than to highlight your poor spelling), has to do with the subject at hand.
My point, if you bothered to actually read my initial post, is that there is currently just as much evidence that intelligent life exists in other star systems as there is for intelligent dinosaurs -- none. Conjecture and speculation are all well and good, but not very predictive in terms of reality.
That's the level of discourse you're offering? You've been watching too much television, friend. Sigh.
If you don't trust the word of The Phantom Mensch, how about Stephen Hawking, he's pretty smart:
"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans,"
"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."
Given the vastness of space and the enormous resources available outside our gravity well, there's very little reason for any technologically advanced civilization to come here and destroy us. Which assumes that such entities could get here in the first place.
The probability of such an event is extremely low (approaching zero) or it would have happened already -- in which case we wouldn't be here. It's so cute how so many people think that there's something special about our place/location in the universe. Y'all need to get over yourselves.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw
The quote above is interesting, but he left out an important bit when he wrote it. Let me add it in...
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man, while survival depends on the reasonable man.
Think on that for a bit.
You've made my point for me. Without unreasonable men, we'd still be cowering in caves. Without reasonable men, we couldn't have made it this far. The OP suggested that it was foolish to even try to explore space. Unreasonable men extend our reach. Reasonable men put that reach within our grasp. We need both.
It's only a fallacious argument if you assume no other technology besides rockets will actually work in getting people off-planet. If $10 billion a year into anti-grav research for five years creates something like the Grav Plates of Honor Harrington then going to space will basically be free. Same with a Space Elevator, the amount of power provided by a Dilithium equivalent, etc. Hell a $$150 Billion a year rocket program would probably find a bunch of economies of scale that we don't have now to reduce the cost of going to Venus or Mars significantly.
That would be some technology, friend! With ~136,000,000 births per yearwe'd have to continuously send ~370,000 people a day on their way to outer space.
How many space elevators would that take? Let's assume that each elevator car travels at an average of 929 miles/hour. Which would be
quite a feat in itself. That would mean it would take one day (24 hours) for each elevator car to reach the elevator's space terminus and one day to return to earth.
Assuming we could fit 1,000 people (that's one big elevator car!) in each elevator car, and have five cars on each elevator, that's 5,000 people per elevator, per day. To just *match* current birth rates, we would need 74 of these space elevators operating continuously.
This, of course, assumes that we can make a space elevator car travel at supersonic speeds and does not include any materials, supplies or luggage for all those people. It would be quite the undertaking. Theoretically possible, I guess, but highly unlikely -- as you'd need to find almost 400,000 people every day who want to colonize elsewhere. Good luck with that.
An interesting point. However, given the action of plate tectonics and erosion causing the extreme remodeling of the earth in the last 65 million years, it's possible that intelligent, even technologically advanced, dinosaurs could have existed, yet all traces have been erased by natural processes. That's not even a hypothesis, nor is it even science, as the idea isn't falsifiable. However, it is just as valid a conjecture as any that posit the existence (or non-existence) of extra-solar intelligent life.
No, if they existed, their geostationary satellites would be visible above the Indian ocean (stable point for those due to Earth gravity). Decay of those orbits is very, very, slow. Even if destroyed my micrometeorites, sufficients small parts should have remained. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
That only works if an intelligent species had the ability to reach orbit. Note that I didn't say "space-faring" or "Earth-orbit-faring." I said "intelligent, even technologically advanced," which does not necessarily imply space-based capabilities. That said, my point is that all of this is rank speculation unless and until we get some hard evidence.
Don't think Diplomats, think Conquistadors. A space faring alien species that shows up here will be like gun toting soldiers in a stone age civilization. Killing, pillaging and burning for sport and decimating us without even trying.
That's the level of discourse you're offering? You've been watching too much television, friend. Sigh.
Sure, but words don't move mass, you have to build it. And you're sending people? We have no example of a man made 100% self-sustaining, self-repairing and self-powered technology.
It's not just some theoretical rocket drive, it's all the engineering realities around it. What engineered system is 100% reliable?
You know any Home Depots in space on the way?
No one's going anywhere. Not me, not you, not now, not ever. And no one else is coming here either.
Deal with it.
If it were up to folks like you, we'd still be living in caves and scavenging (raw) what the big predators couldn't eat.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw
So why don't you stop being so fucking reasonable! Jerk.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he can, but your comprehension of satire is lacking.
Perhaps you're right and my satire detection skills were off. I might have parsed that if OP hadn't blathered: "LOL no "we" can't! Even if we could, evolution is still happening, what "we" are you talking about at those time scales? And why is it important? It's never gonna happen."
That's a trope most of the anti-intellectual, anti-science folks pull out, ad nauseam. And so, while I agree that the first part reads as pretty good satire, the last bit read just like a standard anti-rationalist moron rather than someone satirizing one. As such, I'll give it a B-. A decent effort, but flailing at the end.
Had OP gone with something like, "LOL, no we can't. because Jebus you heathen scum!" it would have worked better IMHO. That said, is your "anti-reason moron" detector sensitive enough?
What is it with you religious types and your dog whistle language? "gravity well"?
And your space-addled brain sure picks some fancy words: "etiologies"??? You might want to look that one up!
" We absolutely CAN expand into the galaxy/universe "
LOL no "we" can't! Even if we could, evolution is still happening, what "we" are you talking about at those time scales?
And why is it important? It's never gonna happen.
Such a negative personality (I know, I know, "No, I'm not!"). The research to be done, technologies to be developed, and issues to be solved with becoming a space-faring race will pay us back many times over in solving the issues we have here on Earth.
"Religious types?" "dog whistle language?" I know you can type on a keyboard, but can you actually read for comprehension? I think not. If you could, you'd realize what a steaming load you're posting.
A bit of unsolicited advice for you, champ: 'tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
Cheers!
New taxes are never the solution. Ever.
Taxes are the costs of living in a society. I own this country, and I don't want you to live in this country without paying me something for it.
That is because humans are territorial animals. I have no desire to allow you to live in this country for free, when I can take all the resources of this land for myself. If you want to live on this land, you're going to have to pay me, and the rest of us citizenry. Otherwise, GTFO.
Taxes are the tribute you, as a citizen, pay to other citizens like me, for allowing you to live in this country.
This is the punishment you get for having little power in life. Sucks, but your libertarian philosophy mistakenly led you to believe you had more power than you thought you had. This is why adults never teach their children to be libertarian, because that is the incorrect view of life.
Remember, life isn't free. People live under the power of others, and no one is interested in allowing you freedom to live your life on your own. You will always have to live your life under the rule of someone else, because someone else controls the land you live in.
If you don't like that system you will have to find a way to rule over the land you wish to live on without any other rulers over it. Maybe you can try your hand at becoming a Somali warlord?
That's not bad, but I think Oliver Wendell Holmes said it (he wasn't the first, but he's the one most often cited) more succinctly: "Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society."
When will the bike riders pay their fair share of the road?
Probably when they actually cause wear and tear on the roads. I can assure you that when an engineer does the pavement design for a road, bicycles don't enter into the design life calculations.
[Emphasis Added]
"Wear and tear on the roads." Translation: When the EMTs and sanitation crews that come to scrape the mangled (by a car/truck/bus) bicyclist up with a spatula.
...a mandatory registration fee for bicycles, perhaps.
Errr....Not so much. We are talking about the Federal government here, aren't we? That means the Interstate Highway System. I'm not sure I've *ever* seen a bicycle on an Interstate highway. And if I did, I'd be thinking, "That person is either insane or has a death wish."
I guess we could have a registration fee to pay for body parts clean up, should that become an issue.
Do you have any CONCEPT on what it will cost to charge that Tesla and what the restrictions on charging it will be after all the coal plants shut down in response to Obama's new EPA rules???? Hint: we get over 40% of our electricity from coal.
Take away 40% of the Electricity and what's left will have to be rationed with priorites for hospitals, refrigeration, etc (and of course GOVERNMENT, which when taken together (local,state+fed) is the biggest consumer and will put itself first)...[snip
You really don't know what you're talking about, do you? Even Forbes (hardly a bastion of the American Left) doesn't think anything of the sort. From the linked article:
Sigh. Some people will believe anything as long as it fits with their existing bias.
Supply and demand. If you make travel by road artificially cheap (which it is - at least 1/3 of road budgets come from general taxation) then people will drive more rather than looking for public transit alternatives. The result is those alternatives are never created and those who would otherwise rely on them, for example the disabled who are unable to drive, lose out big time.
What is more, cheap gasoline further externalizes the environmental costs of greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions. Making gasoline more expensive may cause some short-term pain, but if it gives incentives to ICE owners/users to reduce emissions, either by driving less, using electric vehicles, public transportation, etc. ICE vehicle makers will also scramble to make more fuel efficient cars. We saw this effect during and after the 1973 oil embargo.
N.B. I live in a major US city where owning a car is a serious liability. YMMV. Pun intended.
Not directly related, but it's food for thought...
They'll never catch me then. I speak a secret language called "Syntactically Correct American English", an archaic language no one understands any more.[Emphasis Added]
Are you referring to this guy?
>
However, if their database is wrong(translating BFF to Big Fat Friend for example), then it's kind of moot anyway. I mean, we would hope a detective wouldn't be standing there exclaiming "What the fuck does WTF mean!?" but that too is entirely possible if WTF goes away in a few years.
An interesting point. I was having a conversation with a neighbor yesterday about how, when I was younger, the acronym 'FTW' emphatically did not mean "For The Win." Rather it meant either "Fight The Whites" or "Fuck The World." So it seems that not only can these acronyms fade away, they can be used to give contradictory meanings as well.
Also, I was interested to note that It's no longer VD (Venereal Disease) or even STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease), but DRD (Dennis Rodman Disease). I'm sure Dennis really appreciates that.
> As such, would someone please explain to me why the IRS allows anyone (let alone the IRS' top administrator) to download their emails to their desktops and delete them from their servers?
Many companies not only allow this, they demand it. As people send around Word attachments and use long email strings as their personal institutional memory, many core email systems simply do not have the space to hold that data. They favor smaller, leaner email environments that they have some hope of maintaining, and are not willing or funded to take on responsibility for the Terabytes of data an individual bureaucrat may generate in a few years use. By making the individual responsible for it, they make expunging or preserving it the individual's problem, not theirs.
An interesting point. However, as an IT infrastructure guy myself, it seems to me that given the importance of email in enabling the functions of today's organizations, backups of email databases, whether from the server or from a local desktop are critical.
In my experience, users tend to be less than diligent in making sure that important emails are preserved.
It is true that server-based email database storage is often used by end users to organize and maintain huge amounts of data. Email quotas can help with that. However, there is no valid reason that the emails of a government official, especially the top administrator at a major government agency, should ever be lost. They should be preserved, not necessarily as a "gotcha" for alleged malfeasance, but as a record of our tax dollars at work.
To say "ensuring that emails are preserved is too costly/difficult/unwieldy to do" is certainly reasonable in the private sector, assuming there are no regulatory requirements (such as those promulgated by the SEC). In the public sector, not so much -- especially for the top managers of federal agencies.
So it seems to me that the IRS staff aren't doing their jobs properly, for whatever reason.
Nixon was impeached for threatening to use the IRS as a political weapon. Obama has done it.
Nixon did not threaten to do so, he did so. And lots more, too
Not surprising. That seems to happen a lot. As such, would someone please explain to me why the IRS allows anyone (let alone the IRS' top administrator) to download their emails to their desktops and delete them from their servers? And even if they did, why don't server backups exist which contain those emails?
Are the IRS' IT staff that incompetent?
As for demanding that the NSA turn over email metadata for Lois Lerner's IRS email address, that assumes they even have such information. Emails internal to the IRS shouldn't go across the Internet. I assume (maybe incorrectly) that the NSA isn't actively capturing packets on the IRS' internal networks, so what is to be gained here, except highlighting the incompetence of the IRS and using the "NSA is capturing everything" meme to make the Obama administration look bad.
So. It's just business as usual. Nothing to see here, just political wrangling to distract us from the fact that our government is being run for the benefit of the monied interests and not its citizens. Move along.
Whose going to spend the money if it isn't the government?
NASA's half-assing it at nearly $20 Billion a year. Every year. That means in ten ears the spend more then any human individual could ever afford to spend. No private corporation has ever had the kind of sustained profit to spend that kind of money. You can get a lot of interesting-looking stuff from a public-private-partnership to get people into space, but you just don't get the scale required to get an actual human to Mars. To get this kind of thing done you have to be willing to totally waste $3 Billion a year for a decade even tho space elevators may never be a practical technology. And only government's do that.
I'm a starry-eyed optimist, and sincerely believe that we could make a good political case for governments (note the plural), a good business case for the business community, and an excellent intellectual case for the academic community to partner up in getting us to the point where space travel is efficient, economically viable and enhances our knowledge of the universe considerably.
Is this likely to happen? Sadly, no.
A manned mission to Mars as "the next big thing"(tm) is a poor idea, IMHO. We need to learn how to live, work, build and manufacture, efficiently and economically, in space first. This is not a short-term proposition.
I generally agree on inequality.
The problem with all this stuff is that we're in decline, and we're starting to argue more about how to divide up the shrinking pie then how to change it so the pie grows. Partly this is caused by the old gentry's continued dominance of the US System -- if everything in your life has gone right, then reducing the deficit is the only long-term issue you care about; OTOH if you're the guy who borrowed $50k for a useless degree you ain't in the gentry no more, and your trenchant points about how borrowing makes a lot of sense when interest rates are near-zero are ignored -- but mostly it's just what happens when the ship starts to sink.
A cogent analysis. It's clear that unless and until we can even out the production/distribution/access to the means of production and the wealth that drives those means, we will be stuck with the same-old same-old. For my part, I hope we can work this out soon, as I'm pushing 50 and would love to see us (Humanity) take its first real steps into space.
Unfortunately, the truth is that our current system will likely collapse under the weight of its own inertia and corruption, leaving the world a dangerous, anarchic mass -- with nuclear weapons. If we survive such a collapse and its aftermath, we may be able to create a more stable, productive and, hopefully, just civilization. If we do, we might have a chance to become a space-faring race.
From a selfish standpoint, this annoys me as I won't live to see that future, and I hope I don't live to see the aftermath of the collapse either.
OK, Wikipedia says fossils "are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past"
So I agree that laptops and coffee mugs don't become fossils, but that doens't mean thay can't still leave signs of their existance. According to the same source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_Footprints) dinosaurs footprints have been found. They are even said "These tracks were fossilized and largely hidden until many were unearthed". I know its surprising that Wikipedia si contradicting itself, yet there it is.
That's kind of the point. We have just as much evidence for a dinosaur civilization as we do for an extra-solar civilization. Which makes both, IMHO, just as likely.
And how do we know about those cities if they are compeltely lost? Perhaps from some record or artifact? Or is there a really old guy that remembers it and talks about it while sitting on the front porch when children wander up?
Yes. Through references to them from other places that we knew existed or have found.
My point wasn't (and never was) that I believe that there was a race of technologically advanced dinosaurs who were wiped out 65 million years ago. I was making the point that even on our own planet that it's possible that there are some circumstances and events we will *never* be able to identify or prove.
That's one of the shortcomings of of the Fermi Paradox. The example of intelligent dinosaurs was simply to point this out.
I'll say it one more time. I wasn't positing the existence of an intelligent, technological race of dinosaurs. I was making the point that given the time scales involved just here on Earth, finding evidence of such a civilization might well be impossible. Add the vastness of space to the even more (4.6 billion vs. 13.7 billion years) enormous time scales (as in the Fermi Paradox), and the problem is exponentially more difficult.
Apparently I've been unclear. I have been quite careful to not say anything about whether space exploration is a good idea in this thread. i personally like it, but that doesn't mean that a) I'm convinced I can convince everyone else to pay for it, or b) the difficulty of achieving a) doesn't show that the Fermi Paradox is not much of a Paradox.
You aren't exactly a champion of clarity either. You have a half-paragraph mentioning "other good reasons to go into space," but you don't actually mention any. You actually contradict your claimed position that space exploration is a good thing by pooh-poohing the only reason anyone on this thread has given for going into space (population growth). I haven't said that it's objectively the best reason to go into space, what I've said is that it's the reason most likely to convince everyone else we should go into space. Partly this is because it would be a justification for spending huge sums of money, and partly it's because when your population is shrinking you don't have huge sums of free money to spend. When you have six workers per retiree you have a lot more money to play with then when you have five. OTOH if you have 10 workers per retiree, and it's going up to 11, you can jack up Social Security 5% and still have some cash left over for investing in the future. There's a reason japan hasn;t done anything interesting since the mid-90s, and the US has spent the past 4 years or so mired in suicidal games ofr chicken over what to do with miniscule portions of the budget.
Moreover you're conflating a bunch of things that are only vaguely related. The Fermi paradox assumes a significant proportion of intelligent life is Starfleet. We'd have seen Starfleet. If the Klingon space race is Klingon state A beating Klingon state B to Qu'Nos III and then everyone goes home because they're all focused on balancing the budget with a shrinking work-force then of course we don't see Warbirds parked around Jupiter. If the US races Russia to Mars, but nobody builds a base on Mars, and everybody stops when somebody wins; that's not Starfleet.
On a note completely unrelated to the paradox: If you have an argument that will convince working class voters, many of whom have trouble paying for staples (especially gas, but an awful lot of people get food stamps), that we should increase the NASA budget to Starfleet levels I'm all ears. If they had a bunch of kids who needed work (ie: population growth), it would be pretty easy to convince them to do so. Since they don't, and they're gonna assume the money comes from their personal budgets, you got a tough order.
Thanks for the clarification. It's much appreciated.
As for the Fermi Paradox, I'm of the mind (and if you read any of my other posts on this topic it's a bit clearer) that space-time is really big. This, to me at least, suggests that even if multi-cellular life is rare, and intelligent, technological life is rarer still, there's a good chance that other intelligent, technological civilizations did/do/will exist in our observable universe. However, given the timescales, distances and (IMHO) rarity of intelligent/technological civilizations, not to mention the technologies and energy requirements for interstellar travel, it doesn't surprise me that we haven't seen any evidence of extra-solar civilizations.
My original reply to your post didn't relate to the Fermi Paradox. Rather, I took issue with your assertion:
(apparently, you were responding to someone else WRT that) that population issues would drive space exploration/colonization. I still say that's not a reasonable motivation, nor is it feasible.
I did at least attempt to address some of the reasons I think the development of space exploration/colonization is a good thing in my last reply:
Is why does the Federal government care? That they do begs the question, what are they trying to hide? Are the Stingrays (which are useful as a law enforcement tool -- assuming proper warrants are obtained and appropriate restrictions adhered to) just a smokescreen for other spy technologies being used by the Feds (think parallel construction here) and shared with local LEO? If so, that's a big problem.
If not, I'm guessing that Hanlon's Razor applies here in spades.
Where do you live? I'd love to live in a place where population growth was driven solely by birth rate. In the real world we also have a little thing called a "death rate," which is higher then the birth rate in every industrialized country in the world. The actual number of people being added every year is a about half your number.
And even if your number was right, you're intentionally misinterpreting my point. I didn't say that we'd actually solve the population growth problem by going to space (indeed, I was very careful to not call population growth a problem). I said we have no incentive to actually spend money on space unless we had a population growth problem, and we could a) use some of our excess working age adults creating a space program, and b) find work for some of those adults permanently by moving them to Mars.
Since in reality we're almost certainly going to have the opposite problem, there's no reason for us to start an interplanetary empire, much less the intersteller empire assumed by the Fermi paradox.
A worthwhile point WRT death rates. I live on a planet called Earth, where the death rate is less than half of the birth rate. How about you?
So, even if you halved the numbers I quoted and (the very conservative assumptions I made), you'd still need almost 40 space elevators to make that work.
However, you ignored the context in which the example was offered. Did you do that on purpose just to be contrary, or did you miss it entirely?
My original point, which I'll reproduce here was:
The point of my little exercise was to show that using space exploration/colonization for population control was a poor idea.
You don't believe that space exploration is a good idea. So be it. That's fine with me. I believe that it is. The expansion of human knowledge, enhancing/improving our engineering skills and know how, attempting to create the conditions for a civilization that can survive in the long term are just a few. There are so many reasons to strive to be a space-faring race. If you don't think so, more power to you. I won't try to change your mind.
However, there are those of us who believe that it's a wonderful idea that should be pursued vigorously. What are the short term costs/benefits? That's a complicated discussion. But the long term benefits are clear, IMHO.
So, rather than just attack an example you agree with (albeit for different reasons), I invite you to engage in rational discourse.
"Even our most durable polymers would break down in much less than 65 million years and erosion and the action of plate tectonics would likely wipe out any trace of such a civilization."
If there are traces of dinosaur bones, feathers, teeth, etc, then there would definately be signs of dino laptops, coffee mugs, or whatever else they built. Sure, the polymers would have broken down, but some would have fossilized or left some traces of their existance.
Maybe. Maybe not. There are human cities just a few thousand years old that have been completely lost. We know that the people who lived there used fire, stone tools, possibly even ceramics yet there's no trace. After 65 million years, perhaps we don't recognize the remnants of such things. Besides, stuff like laptops and coffee mugs don't fossilize.
We also have the donosaurs to thank. Without them and their era's vegatation, we wouldn't have all the coal and oil energy to be as technological as we are. Imagine where the human race would be now if there was no coal or oil available. We will still be burning wood or maybe slowly developing hydro power. Plastics come from that petrolium also. It would be hard to make all those iPhones without plastic.
I am aware of the origin of fossil fuels (although dinosaurs themselves aren't a big source for them), but I'm not sure what this (other than to highlight your poor spelling), has to do with the subject at hand.
My point, if you bothered to actually read my initial post, is that there is currently just as much evidence that intelligent life exists in other star systems as there is for intelligent dinosaurs -- none. Conjecture and speculation are all well and good, but not very predictive in terms of reality.
That's the level of discourse you're offering? You've been watching too much television, friend. Sigh.
If you don't trust the word of The Phantom Mensch, how about Stephen Hawking, he's pretty smart:
"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."
Given the vastness of space and the enormous resources available outside our gravity well, there's very little reason for any technologically advanced civilization to come here and destroy us. Which assumes that such entities could get here in the first place.
The probability of such an event is extremely low (approaching zero) or it would have happened already -- in which case we wouldn't be here. It's so cute how so many people think that there's something special about our place/location in the universe. Y'all need to get over yourselves.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw
The quote above is interesting, but he left out an important bit when he wrote it. Let me add it in...
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man, while survival depends on the reasonable man.
Think on that for a bit.
You've made my point for me. Without unreasonable men, we'd still be cowering in caves. Without reasonable men, we couldn't have made it this far. The OP suggested that it was foolish to even try to explore space. Unreasonable men extend our reach. Reasonable men put that reach within our grasp. We need both.
It's only a fallacious argument if you assume no other technology besides rockets will actually work in getting people off-planet. If $10 billion a year into anti-grav research for five years creates something like the Grav Plates of Honor Harrington then going to space will basically be free. Same with a Space Elevator, the amount of power provided by a Dilithium equivalent, etc. Hell a $$150 Billion a year rocket program would probably find a bunch of economies of scale that we don't have now to reduce the cost of going to Venus or Mars significantly.
That would be some technology, friend! With ~136,000,000 births per yearwe'd have to continuously send ~370,000 people a day on their way to outer space.
How many space elevators would that take? Let's assume that each elevator car travels at an average of 929 miles/hour. Which would be quite a feat in itself. That would mean it would take one day (24 hours) for each elevator car to reach the elevator's space terminus and one day to return to earth.
Assuming we could fit 1,000 people (that's one big elevator car!) in each elevator car, and have five cars on each elevator, that's 5,000 people per elevator, per day. To just *match* current birth rates, we would need 74 of these space elevators operating continuously.
This, of course, assumes that we can make a space elevator car travel at supersonic speeds and does not include any materials, supplies or luggage for all those people. It would be quite the undertaking. Theoretically possible, I guess, but highly unlikely -- as you'd need to find almost 400,000 people every day who want to colonize elsewhere. Good luck with that.
An interesting point. However, given the action of plate tectonics and erosion causing the extreme remodeling of the earth in the last 65 million years, it's possible that intelligent, even technologically advanced, dinosaurs could have existed, yet all traces have been erased by natural processes. That's not even a hypothesis, nor is it even science, as the idea isn't falsifiable. However, it is just as valid a conjecture as any that posit the existence (or non-existence) of extra-solar intelligent life.
No, if they existed, their geostationary satellites would be visible above the Indian ocean (stable point for those due to Earth gravity). Decay of those orbits is very, very, slow. Even if destroyed my micrometeorites, sufficients small parts should have remained. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
That only works if an intelligent species had the ability to reach orbit. Note that I didn't say "space-faring" or "Earth-orbit-faring." I said "intelligent, even technologically advanced," which does not necessarily imply space-based capabilities. That said, my point is that all of this is rank speculation unless and until we get some hard evidence.
Don't think Diplomats, think Conquistadors. A space faring alien species that shows up here will be like gun toting soldiers in a stone age civilization. Killing, pillaging and burning for sport and decimating us without even trying.
That's the level of discourse you're offering? You've been watching too much television, friend. Sigh.
Sure, but words don't move mass, you have to build it. And you're sending people? We have no example of a man made 100% self-sustaining, self-repairing and self-powered technology.
It's not just some theoretical rocket drive, it's all the engineering realities around it. What engineered system is 100% reliable?
You know any Home Depots in space on the way?
No one's going anywhere. Not me, not you, not now, not ever. And no one else is coming here either.
Deal with it.
If it were up to folks like you, we'd still be living in caves and scavenging (raw) what the big predators couldn't eat.
-- George Bernard Shaw
So why don't you stop being so fucking reasonable! Jerk.