Will Obama's "Commercial" Human Space Program Need a Bail-out Bigger than GM?
May 13, 2010 (LPAC)—As the Congress is forced to try to rally itself to make decisions on the future of human spaceflight, Apollo 17 Commander Gene Cernan told members of the Senate Committee on Commerce Tuesday afternoon, that NASA, itself, has little confidence that the crazy plan to have private companies ferrying American astronauts to low Earth orbit, will succeed.
Cernan and Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong, who also testified, were briefed, for two hours last week, by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on the Administration's "plan" to kill NASA's Constellation program. Cernan said that Bolden expressed his concern that the private companies "might have to be subsidized" by NASA until they succeed. According to Cernan's account, which he said was based on notes he took during the conversation, Bolden said it "may be a bail-out like GM or Chrysler — it may be the largest bail-out of all time," when the companies run into difficulties and out of money.
Cernan said that, based on his own experience, the program for private enterprises to safely launch astronauts into space within five years, and more cheaply than NASA can do, will, in fact take a decade, and cost two to three times as much as they predict." He told the Committee that there will be "unplanned delays, costing unallocated billions of dollars." He cited a study by the Aerospace Corporation, which projected that it would cost $10-12 billion, not the $6 billion the White House is allocating, to develop, test, and fly a new crew vehicle. And these costs do not include the necessary infrastructure, Cernan explained, including simulators to train the crew, changes needed to Mission Control in Houston, or the ships and command for sea-based rescue required for the returning craft.
His recommendation: stretch out and add to the Shuttle flights, to close the gap "on the front end," and "knock three, four, five years" off developing Orion, to close the gap from the "back end." Neil Armstrong added that he saw no reason not to continue to fly the Shuttle, and that since the design for Constellation was optimized for safety, the Constellation vehicles should be completed. Neither astronaut saw any value in Obama's offer to develop an "Orion lite" version, that would be taken to the station unmanned and just used for emergency escape. The Russians already provide that very well, with the Soyuz, they both pointed out.
Leaving aside embarrassingly idiotic queries from chairman Rockefeller (D-WV), and lies and obfuscation by greenie "science" advisor John Holdren, there was no defense of, but much skepticism concerning, wrecking the nation's manned exploration program.
from astar: It is fun that Holdren appears in the climategate emails urging on Jones that everyone must be "true believers" in global warming. No one wants to say any more that Jones is an attractive sort. But it is interesting to think he might have once been in fact, as opposed to perception, respectable. And then you think about what happened and you consider what politicians (oops, respectable scientists) like Holdren might have done to his environment in the past. And now you get to see something similar going on with respect to NASA maybe. And even some of the same players.
It is a hard call. But the big thing with this rogue is that it might interfere with game show tv signals and such. So how do you weigh it. Sort of happy outcomes no matter what.
I RTFA on prison work and I read the high mod posts. Yours is the only one I saw that mentioned in some way depressed US living standards as a result of the prison labor. This slave labor stuff was getting a revival in the 1970's and some unions would try to raise a fuss. And in the 1970's, SEUI was a reformist union! The general point is that if you do not have some basic principles you really pay attention to, and a lot of guts, you end up toast. You just lose and lose until nothing is left. This is pretty much the game since 1945.
Here is a fine question: What principle are you ready to die over today? None? Paradoxically, at this point, that is a fatal position.
As you say. I RTFA and it hardly made any claim, except perhaps optimism. Even in US advertising, puffery is not actionable.
But I recalling hearing there were perhaps a 100 sort of credible low-cost approaches. Pick one, spend a million dollars, and you could have scientific feasibility. I suspect their cost structure is different than ours, so they could have tried a number of approaches. Given that they did nukes, I am not sure really poor need be a big thing to get to feasibility. But whoever in the world makes a claim of net energy production on this will need to do more than a press announcement to be credible.
If you want to consider software that is immeadiately vital, you would look first at software that was directly embedded in the physical production process. Just looking at current popular concerns that match this, consider electrical utilities and freight transportation.
If you are looking at electrical utilities, you see 50 year old software, which is pretty good for a shelf life.
On the other hand, in a sensible society, you produce a lot of machine tools, and you make lots of continuous improvements. So the shelf life of the controlling software is real short. And putting a government critical path component in gives me lots of warm fuzzies (NOT).
So I guess you could play programmer licensing games and so on. So we might know more than we did about programming than 50 years ago, but if you eliminate all the current fads, what do we really know and how often do we really apply it? So what body of knowledge do you base compentcy (spell) for licensing upon?
acm sometimes has occasion to make official statements on licensing issues. For some reason texas get this in their head every once in a while.
I suppose I should mention that proveability approaches get a little further along over time. I recall that somebody recently managed to prove a microkernel. At the present time, I suppose we could talk about some sort of proven components to use when possible, maybe government generated. But last I looked you almost had to have special languages.
Impossible is a funny word. The classical electron is impossible (how could you possibly explain that dense a charge), but people did not make a big deal about it.
So here a few uncited rememberances
Some people saw some ball lighting go into a barrel of water and boil it all, completely as I recall. This gives a number for energy and it is much too high for a simple explanation.
So the problem is there is too much electrical charge in too little volume. Sound familiar?
I thought it was all cleared up decades ago with some sort of dynamic vortex theory.
Personal story: from a reliable adult when i was in high school. A lightning storm. A big hit on a tree near some utility lines near the adults home. At a coincident time, claim of some ball lightning showing up on the kitchen counter, perhaps associated with telephone wiring and equipment. It moved down the counter and disappeared in the wall. A charred area was pointed out. So I suppose this was almost 50 years ago. The adult is gone. I assume the char spot is gone. So maybe you have hundreds of years of such reports. And we have thousands of years of religious oriented reports of miracles. It is fun to try sorting out the difference. Probably, it is silly to assign some uniform true/false value to all the reports in either example.
there is sort of an assumption that money has an intrinsic value. from a physical point of view it is hard to conclude that most of this software is used in an actually productive process or is necessary to support an actual productive process. so the software has no connection to changing nature for man, so how does it make the world as a whole a richer place? so why should the world as a whole be interesting in BSA's problems.
at an extreme, try arguing that being a quant for goldman sucks is a productive behavior.
there is something a little narrow about your perspective. I recall being in the military as a draftee and I do not really recall a lot of choice. admittedly, it was one those crap big asian land wars that no one both patriotic and sensible should go for. but no one really complains about world war II and we are still doing personnel expenses for that.
and so there are problems. but i think you should go with current personnel costs than with the junk contracting out Blackwater crap that started up big time under Rumsfeld. I do not want to play "I get to pick the alternatives" Lipmann scams, but I am just saying.
as it happens, I have pretty good anti-war creds. S-2 and I got to be real friendly. and it was real rare for a draftee to say anything good about a lifer. But you might work on trying to get a handle on the reasons people join up, not the economic reasons. again, just saying.
First of all, there is the interesting question of quantification. I have seen some predictions that start with the CO2 stuff and come up with a lag time of what, 600 years. science does not have to be quantified by any means, but none of your points are very interesting without some verified numbers. overwhelming natural processes is a bit interesting, but it is not that anyone can really claim that natural processes should dominate. Now I do like the acidification of the ocean claim.
but being a bit nasty, I might make a nice physical claim that increased insolation would allow me to predict a nicely corresponding global temperature increase. but, since insolation seems to have increased 25% over the past, very long, period without an obvious death of the biosphere, maybe i am missing something somewhere. Now it seems the awg computer models change whatever it is that think of as their physical basis rather often, if i feel emperical, I guess I would say the models are going to continue changing their code significantly. but plug in long term isolation and tell me what the awg models say. my, such settled science.
so i am probably narrow. I really think of an interesting model as a set of partial differential equations. nice physical basis. and i have not done that stuff for a long time. but i sometimes see comments on slashdot from people who sound like they might really know something about reliable modeling of physical processes and they did not seem very impressed with the awg types.
on models, I recently saw something about a problem with duplicating the cosmic background radiation models. I do not recall any claims of hiding the basis of the models or hiding the data and i bet it is all very physical, but you go from having a signal to not having a signal. computer models are maybe only maybe 60-70 years old. sort of science, and sort of math, but probably not science in the way Jones wants to think. You can phrase an aspect of the problem in an interesting way: did a computer model ever yield a new fundamental principle of the universe?
so i have had occasion to think sort of weak thoughts about this. Yah, it seems reasonable to think everything is compromised. personally, i have had owned wifi routers and satellite modems. I tried openbsd for a desktop. my firewall has been openbsd for a decade. so what am i using now: stupid win xp. ah well, at least is supports flash and the audio works. and it is easy to reinstall everytime it gets infected enough to be noticeable. i figure i should try pc-bsd. why not? because if you look broadly enough, who has physical security?
However, I might like a box with some limited vetted software (sort of a joke) and hardware it takes a big crowbar to get to. Can it run random stuff or even take software updates? Nah. if it costs like a netbook, get a new one every year.
I hear in a telephone call a few minutes ago that european banks simply stopped lending today.
glass-steagall got introduced in the senate today, something like mccain-cantwell amendment to the dodd joke. enemies say it will pass. I suppose next week. if the usa goes glass-steagall, everything will just stop world-wide while a non-monetarist system is set up. then you will have a chance to live long enough to retire. paradoxical, is it not.
I caught a little of some fox commentator really pushing the its just an accident theory. people just love fox so much. But this morning, on fox i also caught some ron paul interview. so paul is at least a decent guy, has some character, and has a little bit of a notion of reality, even if his economics sucks. so what does the world look lime to paul. world wide currency crisis. I like to talk a lot about weimar 1923, so there is a little correlation. the most interesting thing to me was he cited the start of the problem as 1971, presumedly nixon's treasury secretary collapsing bretton woods. looks like he has been talking to larouche to me. interesting times.
poke around on today's news slugs on larouchepac.com
yah, this particular rule was unconstitional, presumedly because the fcc could not make a good case that congress had given them that particular authority area. I admit i have not read the actual decision. but no one is ever going to say the fcc cannot make rules. but originally, someone was seemingly complaining about the existence of fcc rule making apparatus.
The appeals court’s 3-0 decision, which was written by one of the court’s more liberal members, Judge David S. Tatel, focused on the narrow issue of whether the F.C.C. had authority to regulate Comcast’s network management practices.
something off center about your argument. fcc is executive, but it also has legislative and judicial functions. In fact, these extras are impossible to get rid of.
this area is called administrative law. It is supposed to be simple, informal, and navigateable without a lawyer:-)
the reason it is constitutional is that while you have go into the admin court system, when you exhaust your remedies, you get to go to the usual courts in the other branch of government.
as far as rules, agencies can make all sorts of binding rules, persumedly from within their enabling language. and all the admin judges will take them as gospel. but once you leave the admin system, the other judges will feel quite free to slap the agency around.
Actually, having rules is a positive. I have seen programs repeatedly try to run without any rules! for the admin review judge, a question becomes "do i shut this program down". Interesting considerations at that point.
haha, sorry no cites handy, but i recall the gdp did go up and the amount it went up was about the same as the vulture bonuses -) one might feel the need to actually think somewhere in this.
I did not look but i seem to recall picken's texas adventure involved chines turbines, because the usa did not manufacture them big enough
and i did look at at a wikipedia article, maybe wind turbine, that said the manufacturers of the biggest wind turbines are in germany.
you seem to have some sense, but look at some patterns and see if you are whistling past the graveyard. patterns can change and all that i do agree, but there is some effort and wisdom involved. at the moment, even sanity would be a nice change.
so there are usually a few interesting questions that somehow never come up
where will the turbines be manufactured? I doubt we have the capability anymore, so i would guess china
are we dealing with generation or batteries? the usual thing for alt energy is it takes more energy to create the installation then it will ever produce. (nukes produce twice as much energy as they take to build.)
suppose you were serious about wind power. I hear a long time ago that the energy content of the wind, world-wide, is about world energy demand, which would be interesting. I recently tried to research this and came up with a paper based on a climate model that did not look very physical to me. this was a try based on a drag coefficient prediction. somehow, I think a back of the envelope energy thing would give you a straightforward order of magnitude number that would be pretty convincing and actually meaniful. pooh, thinking about it, this is the sort of thing you could have a bright high school student do. a couple input numbers and a trivial equation. is it too trivial or too embarassing? If you push me, I suppose i would try to come up with the numbers, but it is not like I think this will ever be built.
figure this has been an issue since 1102. somewhere else i hear that in that timespan the attitude towards children has changed quite a bit, something about "little adults". and of course the age of consent has varied a lot over that time, if the phrase has meaning.
so if we do a little moral relativism, this is not easy to get a decent perspective on. but if we consider some social control aspects, it is easy to get to "ugly".
so the church put together some secret policy in the 80's and shared it a bit. it does not have seemed to have covered the problem.
but here is the real question? so after a thousand years, why now is this an issue? The broadest pattern is that the current church is a social center for opposition to genocide.
I think the oneil, dyson stuff misses the point of Hawking remarks. He is saying lets all be scared, and the real reason for being scared is that these guys would not be properly worshipable of their gaia equivalent. Personally, I think earth will always have sort of a collectability value for us and so end up in a museum. or maybe a theme park.
it seems he is rather tech imagination limited, which also may be what he pushes. It sort of looks like generation ship tech, Pooh, with a decent economic structure, we could be seriously working on that sort of stuff right now. So, it is a bit too big a step this century to be set as a public goal and so on. it would not be the correct response to the spirit of the times. But if we pay attention to business, i expect it will be on the agenda next century. and do you really feel comfortable about predicting tech details a century out if you are not intending to suppress fundamental science development?
note that it is not what we would currently expect of an eye-witness account. but i use the term, with the qualifier "bit", in an obvious way. I guess you might compare it to the noah flood stuff. Again, eye witness stuff, but a different approach to the treatment of the event than we would use just now. things have to "fit" to last. but the time scale always impressed me too.
here is a flood link that looks at some flooding 9500 years ago, these guys figured 2k square kilometers of prime farm land.
the dates might be in the same magnitude. on the flood, there are the religious obstacles and on the volcano, some crap established science that pretty well argues nobody was around these parts 20k years ago. and this was very unassailable in the 1950s.
I live in oregon and maybe 20k years ago we had a volcano blow its top off, mt mazma. covered multiple states in multiple feet of ash. a bit of the eye witness accounts are still around. looks like to me, these things are often troublesome.
I lived in seattle when mt st. helen went. I looked up and saw the plume and chose to immeadiate drive to the closed office and shut the computers down. This was winchester tech, sort of a big platter set, with external air blown in to keep the head up. The ceo wanted to burn me for an assumed failure to protect capital assets in my custody, but had to settle for being mean to my second.
now seattle was never really bothered, but eastern washington got feet of ash drift in places. I hear from the manufacturer hardware techs that a lot of disks had to be completely rebuilt.
so i would say some caution is justified, particularly with life critical tech.
as far as bailouts, nobody owes these stockholders anything. usa tsa budget is already pretty much an airline pr boondoggle.
I seem to recall that way back when, the multics was designed to never be shut down. I guess one ran continuously for 14 years. More recently, I recall tandem, but do not know much about them, and i wonder if they are even still around. I have not hard of them this millenium.
We are so proud of our computers, but they have been so shoddy forever. I suppose you could argue it is not a mature industry, but you really really want to use say the auto industry as your shining example for the future of computers?
I think a lot of this stems from crap accounting principles. I think of the difficulty in writing down nominal capital values and the peculiar distinctions between the capital and expense.
looking internationally, figure that everyone important is on board for draconian ip protection. all sides.
so you might think that you have a "side" that is otherwise, oh, like the pirate party or rms or even eff. I might give you rms or even eff, but the way things work, the first thing a reasonable person things about the pirate party is probably a gang-counter-gang thing. so I figure you have pretty much an unsolvable problem.
this does not mean you are right or wrong in principle, just that you are going to lose big time. so spend your time where you have a chance to actually win. or be really really creative and smart and dedicated.
Slashdot Mirror
Will Obama's "Commercial" Human Space Program Need a Bail-out Bigger than GM?
May 13, 2010 (LPAC)—As the Congress is forced to try to rally itself to make decisions on the future of human spaceflight, Apollo 17 Commander Gene Cernan told members of the Senate Committee on Commerce Tuesday afternoon, that NASA, itself, has little confidence that the crazy plan to have private companies ferrying American astronauts to low Earth orbit, will succeed.
Cernan and Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong, who also testified, were briefed, for two hours last week, by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on the Administration's "plan" to kill NASA's Constellation program. Cernan said that Bolden expressed his concern that the private companies "might have to be subsidized" by NASA until they succeed. According to Cernan's account, which he said was based on notes he took during the conversation, Bolden said it "may be a bail-out like GM or Chrysler — it may be the largest bail-out of all time," when the companies run into difficulties and out of money.
Cernan said that, based on his own experience, the program for private enterprises to safely launch astronauts into space within five years, and more cheaply than NASA can do, will, in fact take a decade, and cost two to three times as much as they predict." He told the Committee that there will be "unplanned delays, costing unallocated billions of dollars." He cited a study by the Aerospace Corporation, which projected that it would cost $10-12 billion, not the $6 billion the White House is allocating, to develop, test, and fly a new crew vehicle. And these costs do not include the necessary infrastructure, Cernan explained, including simulators to train the crew, changes needed to Mission Control in Houston, or the ships and command for sea-based rescue required for the returning craft.
His recommendation: stretch out and add to the Shuttle flights, to close the gap "on the front end," and "knock three, four, five years" off developing Orion, to close the gap from the "back end." Neil Armstrong added that he saw no reason not to continue to fly the Shuttle, and that since the design for Constellation was optimized for safety, the Constellation vehicles should be completed. Neither astronaut saw any value in Obama's offer to develop an "Orion lite" version, that would be taken to the station unmanned and just used for emergency escape. The Russians already provide that very well, with the Soyuz, they both pointed out.
Leaving aside embarrassingly idiotic queries from chairman Rockefeller (D-WV), and lies and obfuscation by greenie "science" advisor John Holdren, there was no defense of, but much skepticism concerning, wrecking the nation's manned exploration program.
from astar: It is fun that Holdren appears in the climategate emails urging on Jones that everyone must be "true believers" in global warming. No one wants to say any more that Jones is an attractive sort. But it is interesting to think he might have once been in fact, as opposed to perception, respectable. And then you think about what happened and you consider what politicians (oops, respectable scientists) like Holdren might have done to his environment in the past. And now you get to see something similar going on with respect to NASA maybe. And even some of the same players.
It is a hard call. But the big thing with this rogue is that it might interfere with game show tv signals and such. So how do you weigh it. Sort of happy outcomes no matter what.
I RTFA on prison work and I read the high mod posts. Yours is the only one I saw that mentioned in some way depressed US living standards as a result of the prison labor. This slave labor stuff was getting a revival in the 1970's and some unions would try to raise a fuss. And in the 1970's, SEUI was a reformist union! The general point is that if you do not have some basic principles you really pay attention to, and a lot of guts, you end up toast. You just lose and lose until nothing is left. This is pretty much the game since 1945.
Here is a fine question: What principle are you ready to die over today? None? Paradoxically, at this point, that is a fatal position.
As you say. I RTFA and it hardly made any claim, except perhaps optimism. Even in US advertising, puffery is not actionable.
But I recalling hearing there were perhaps a 100 sort of credible low-cost approaches. Pick one, spend a million dollars, and you could have scientific feasibility. I suspect their cost structure is different than ours, so they could have tried a number of approaches. Given that they did nukes, I am not sure really poor need be a big thing to get to feasibility. But whoever in the world makes a claim of net energy production on this will need to do more than a press announcement to be credible.
shelf life is a good point
If you want to consider software that is immeadiately vital, you would look first at software that was directly embedded in the physical production process. Just looking at current popular concerns that match this, consider electrical utilities and freight transportation.
If you are looking at electrical utilities, you see 50 year old software, which is pretty good for a shelf life.
On the other hand, in a sensible society, you produce a lot of machine tools, and you make lots of continuous improvements. So the shelf life of the controlling software is real short. And putting a government critical path component in gives me lots of warm fuzzies (NOT).
So I guess you could play programmer licensing games and so on. So we might know more than we did about programming than 50 years ago, but if you eliminate all the current fads, what do we really know and how often do we really apply it? So what body of knowledge do you base compentcy (spell) for licensing upon?
acm sometimes has occasion to make official statements on licensing issues. For some reason texas get this in their head every once in a while.
I suppose I should mention that proveability approaches get a little further along over time. I recall that somebody recently managed to prove a microkernel. At the present time, I suppose we could talk about some sort of proven components to use when possible, maybe government generated. But last I looked you almost had to have special languages.
Impossible is a funny word. The classical electron is impossible (how could you possibly explain that dense a charge), but people did not make a big deal about it.
So here a few uncited rememberances
Some people saw some ball lighting go into a barrel of water and boil it all, completely as I recall. This gives a number for energy and it is much too high for a simple explanation.
So the problem is there is too much electrical charge in too little volume. Sound familiar?
I thought it was all cleared up decades ago with some sort of dynamic vortex theory.
Personal story: from a reliable adult when i was in high school. A lightning storm. A big hit on a tree near some utility lines near the adults home. At a coincident time, claim of some ball lightning showing up on the kitchen counter, perhaps associated with telephone wiring and equipment. It moved down the counter and disappeared in the wall. A charred area was pointed out. So I suppose this was almost 50 years ago. The adult is gone. I assume the char spot is gone. So maybe you have hundreds of years of such reports. And we have thousands of years of religious oriented reports of miracles. It is fun to try sorting out the difference. Probably, it is silly to assign some uniform true/false value to all the reports in either example.
there is sort of an assumption that money has an intrinsic value. from a physical point of view it is hard to conclude that most of this software is used in an actually productive process or is necessary to support an actual productive process. so the software has no connection to changing nature for man, so how does it make the world as a whole a richer place? so why should the world as a whole be interesting in BSA's problems.
at an extreme, try arguing that being a quant for goldman sucks is a productive behavior.
there is something a little narrow about your perspective. I recall being in the military as a draftee and I do not really recall a lot of choice. admittedly, it was one those crap big asian land wars that no one both patriotic and sensible should go for. but no one really complains about world war II and we are still doing personnel expenses for that.
and so there are problems. but i think you should go with current personnel costs than with the junk contracting out Blackwater crap that started up big time under Rumsfeld. I do not want to play "I get to pick the alternatives" Lipmann scams, but I am just saying.
as it happens, I have pretty good anti-war creds. S-2 and I got to be real friendly. and it was real rare for a draftee to say anything good about a lifer. But you might work on trying to get a handle on the reasons people join up, not the economic reasons. again, just saying.
Yah, I did not realize it was so offensive. I will try to do better. Might be too much internet messaging on my part.
I will take a shot at it.
First of all, there is the interesting question of quantification. I have seen some predictions that start with the CO2 stuff and come up with a lag time of what, 600 years. science does not have to be quantified by any means, but none of your points are very interesting without some verified numbers. overwhelming natural processes is a bit interesting, but it is not that anyone can really claim that natural processes should dominate. Now I do like the acidification of the ocean claim.
but being a bit nasty, I might make a nice physical claim that increased insolation would allow me to predict a nicely corresponding global temperature increase. but, since insolation seems to have increased 25% over the past, very long, period without an obvious death of the biosphere, maybe i am missing something somewhere. Now it seems the awg computer models change whatever it is that think of as their physical basis rather often, if i feel emperical, I guess I would say the models are going to continue changing their code significantly. but plug in long term isolation and tell me what the awg models say. my, such settled science.
so i am probably narrow. I really think of an interesting model as a set of partial differential equations. nice physical basis. and i have not done that stuff for a long time. but i sometimes see comments on slashdot from people who sound like they might really know something about reliable modeling of physical processes and they did not seem very impressed with the awg types.
on models, I recently saw something about a problem with duplicating the cosmic background radiation models. I do not recall any claims of hiding the basis of the models or hiding the data and i bet it is all very physical, but you go from having a signal to not having a signal. computer models are maybe only maybe 60-70 years old. sort of science, and sort of math, but probably not science in the way Jones wants to think. You can phrase an aspect of the problem in an interesting way: did a computer model ever yield a new fundamental principle of the universe?
so i have had occasion to think sort of weak thoughts about this. Yah, it seems reasonable to think everything is compromised. personally, i have had owned wifi routers and satellite modems. I tried openbsd for a desktop. my firewall has been openbsd for a decade. so what am i using now: stupid win xp. ah well, at least is supports flash and the audio works. and it is easy to reinstall everytime it gets infected enough to be noticeable. i figure i should try pc-bsd. why not? because if you look broadly enough, who has physical security?
However, I might like a box with some limited vetted software (sort of a joke) and hardware it takes a big crowbar to get to. Can it run random stuff or even take software updates? Nah. if it costs like a netbook, get a new one every year.
ah well
I hear in a telephone call a few minutes ago that european banks simply stopped lending today.
glass-steagall got introduced in the senate today, something like mccain-cantwell amendment to the dodd joke. enemies say it will pass. I suppose next week. if the usa goes glass-steagall, everything will just stop world-wide while a non-monetarist system is set up. then you will have a chance to live long enough to retire. paradoxical, is it not.
I caught a little of some fox commentator really pushing the its just an accident theory. people just love fox so much. But this morning, on fox i also caught some ron paul interview. so paul is at least a decent guy, has some character, and has a little bit of a notion of reality, even if his economics sucks. so what does the world look lime to paul. world wide currency crisis. I like to talk a lot about weimar 1923, so there is a little correlation. the most interesting thing to me was he cited the start of the problem as 1971, presumedly nixon's treasury secretary collapsing bretton woods. looks like he has been talking to larouche to me. interesting times.
poke around on today's news slugs on larouchepac.com
you are right. i as getting sucked in by the op. sloppy.
yah, this particular rule was unconstitional, presumedly because the fcc could not make a good case that congress had given them that particular authority area. I admit i have not read the actual decision. but no one is ever going to say the fcc cannot make rules. but originally, someone was seemingly complaining about the existence of fcc rule making apparatus.
The appeals court’s 3-0 decision, which was written by one of the court’s more liberal members, Judge David S. Tatel, focused on the narrow issue of whether the F.C.C. had authority to regulate Comcast’s network management practices.
something off center about your argument. fcc is executive, but it also has legislative and judicial functions. In fact, these extras are impossible to get rid of.
this area is called administrative law. It is supposed to be simple, informal, and navigateable without a lawyer :-)
the reason it is constitutional is that while you have go into the admin court system, when you exhaust your remedies, you get to go to the usual courts in the other branch of government.
as far as rules, agencies can make all sorts of binding rules, persumedly from within their enabling language. and all the admin judges will take them as gospel. but once you leave the admin system, the other judges will feel quite free to slap the agency around.
Actually, having rules is a positive. I have seen programs repeatedly try to run without any rules! for the admin review judge, a question becomes "do i shut this program down". Interesting considerations at that point.
haha, sorry no cites handy, but i recall the gdp did go up and the amount it went up was about the same as the vulture bonuses -) one might feel the need to actually think somewhere in this.
perhaps, but i do like machine tools figures, so i googled machine tool manufacturing decline and here is the first url i looked at.
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2009/labotz240709.html
I did not look but i seem to recall picken's texas adventure involved chines turbines, because the usa did not manufacture them big enough
and i did look at at a wikipedia article, maybe wind turbine, that said the manufacturers of the biggest wind turbines are in germany.
you seem to have some sense, but look at some patterns and see if you are whistling past the graveyard. patterns can change and all that i do agree, but there is some effort and wisdom involved. at the moment, even sanity would be a nice change.
so there are usually a few interesting questions that somehow never come up
where will the turbines be manufactured? I doubt we have the capability anymore, so i would guess china
are we dealing with generation or batteries? the usual thing for alt energy is it takes more energy to create the installation then it will ever produce. (nukes produce twice as much energy as they take to build.)
suppose you were serious about wind power. I hear a long time ago that the energy content of the wind, world-wide, is about world energy demand, which would be interesting. I recently tried to research this and came up with a paper based on a climate model that did not look very physical to me. this was a try based on a drag coefficient prediction. somehow, I think a back of the envelope energy thing would give you a straightforward order of magnitude number that would be pretty convincing and actually meaniful. pooh, thinking about it, this is the sort of thing you could have a bright high school student do. a couple input numbers and a trivial equation. is it too trivial or too embarassing? If you push me, I suppose i would try to come up with the numbers, but it is not like I think this will ever be built.
figure this has been an issue since 1102. somewhere else i hear that in that timespan the attitude towards children has changed quite a bit, something about "little adults". and of course the age of consent has varied a lot over that time, if the phrase has meaning.
so if we do a little moral relativism, this is not easy to get a decent perspective on. but if we consider some social control aspects, it is easy to get to "ugly".
so the church put together some secret policy in the 80's and shared it a bit. it does not have seemed to have covered the problem.
but here is the real question? so after a thousand years, why now is this an issue? The broadest pattern is that the current church is a social center for opposition to genocide.
I think the oneil, dyson stuff misses the point of Hawking remarks. He is saying lets all be scared, and the real reason for being scared is that these guys would not be properly worshipable of their gaia equivalent. Personally, I think earth will always have sort of a collectability value for us and so end up in a museum. or maybe a theme park.
it seems he is rather tech imagination limited, which also may be what he pushes. It sort of looks like generation ship tech, Pooh, with a decent economic structure, we could be seriously working on that sort of stuff right now. So, it is a bit too big a step this century to be set as a public goal and so on. it would not be the correct response to the spirit of the times. But if we pay attention to business, i expect it will be on the agenda next century. and do you really feel comfortable about predicting tech details a century out if you are not intending to suppress fundamental science development?
the 20k number is the outer edge of one range i saw. it might have high flakiness.
but here is a bit about the indian legend
http://oregonexplorer.info/craterlake/history.html
note that it is not what we would currently expect of an eye-witness account. but i use the term, with the qualifier "bit", in an obvious way. I guess you might compare it to the noah flood stuff. Again, eye witness stuff, but a different approach to the treatment of the event than we would use just now. things have to "fit" to last. but the time scale always impressed me too.
here is a flood link that looks at some flooding 9500 years ago, these guys figured 2k square kilometers of prime farm land.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090123101207.htm
the dates might be in the same magnitude. on the flood, there are the religious obstacles and on the volcano, some crap established science that pretty well argues nobody was around these parts 20k years ago. and this was very unassailable in the 1950s.
I live in oregon and maybe 20k years ago we had a volcano blow its top off, mt mazma. covered multiple states in multiple feet of ash. a bit of the eye witness accounts are still around. looks like to me, these things are often troublesome.
I lived in seattle when mt st. helen went. I looked up and saw the plume and chose to immeadiate drive to the closed office and shut the computers down. This was winchester tech, sort of a big platter set, with external air blown in to keep the head up. The ceo wanted to burn me for an assumed failure to protect capital assets in my custody, but had to settle for being mean to my second.
now seattle was never really bothered, but eastern washington got feet of ash drift in places. I hear from the manufacturer hardware techs that a lot of disks had to be completely rebuilt.
so i would say some caution is justified, particularly with life critical tech.
as far as bailouts, nobody owes these stockholders anything. usa tsa budget is already pretty much an airline pr boondoggle.
I seem to recall that way back when, the multics was designed to never be shut down. I guess one ran continuously for 14 years. More recently, I recall tandem, but do not know much about them, and i wonder if they are even still around. I have not hard of them this millenium.
We are so proud of our computers, but they have been so shoddy forever. I suppose you could argue it is not a mature industry, but you really really want to use say the auto industry as your shining example for the future of computers?
I think a lot of this stems from crap accounting principles. I think of the difficulty in writing down nominal capital values and the peculiar distinctions between the capital and expense.
looking internationally, figure that everyone important is on board for draconian ip protection.
all sides.
so you might think that you have a "side" that is otherwise, oh, like the pirate party or rms or even eff. I might give you rms or even eff, but the way things work, the first thing a reasonable person things about the pirate party is probably a gang-counter-gang thing. so I figure you have pretty much an unsolvable problem.
this does not mean you are right or wrong in principle, just that you are going to lose big time. so spend your time where you have a chance to actually win. or be really really creative and smart and dedicated.