Apparently your reading comprehension is not as good as you hoped.
I never said anything about guys getting salaries from Wall Street. It was Wall Street as a whole (and the top guys there all get the Carried Interest thing), and Shkreli.
You're actually a perfect illustration of the problem with spending money on space. I say "Dems will fuck this over because they want their left-wing social programs," and you just kinda go along with it. Then I say "Repubs will hate it because they'd rather cut taxes on the rich" and you start searching for hairs to split so you can defend Martin Shkreli's low low low tax bill.
Which is not a particularly good start for any pol who hopes to convince mi from Slashdot to support a $50 Billion Mars Launch instead of further tax relief for job creator Martin Shkreli.
So you're assuming the FAA will do one very special thing for drones (tail numbers for big planes are per aircraft, not per pilot), but not another (make the database searchable by county), despite the fact that would be pretty stupid (among other things, there'd be so many registrations from big counties that the list would be too long to be useful), your evidence seems to consist mostly of you not wanting them to do it that way so of course they'd do it that way?
All because you're convinced that a statistically significant number of people will try to get around the "do not fly a drone in the White House's airspace" restriction by putting a fake number on their drone? Which would be really dumb to do, given that every Jury ever would believe that drone jockey was not planning on highly illegal mischief?
Americans can be wonderfully obstreperous about complying with the most reasonable of governmental actions. And you, Mr. Scorpio, are not breaking the mold.
1) It can't be searched that way by civilians. The search box has one field, for the drones registration number, not a half-dozen including your name, address, general geographic location, etc.
2) What were you expecting to happen with law enforcement? Somebody died. If they can't get the registration number from a bystander/security camera/dashcam/etc. of course they'll get a warrant to force anyone with relevant info to help them with their inquiries. That means the FAA, local drone sellers, Youtube if they rustle up some drone flights from the area, etc.
Heck, this is already how it has to happen, with the caveat that since there's no official registration number on anyone's drone it is several orders of magnitude harder for you to prove it was not your drone at the scene of the crime.
Except with it being public, someone could lookup your registration number via your name/address.
They could then start flying it around an airport, the white house, or some other no fly zone with a drone that uses your number.
Suddenly you have the feds knocking on your door.
I really don't get what you;re talking about.
There's a search field. One field. It has a spot for the drone's registration number. There is no spot for your address. It will look like this.
Presumably a sufficiently clever hacker could crack into the system and get the entire database, but a) they could do that regardless of whether it was publicly searchable (none of the GAO database was searchable), and b) it would be rather silly to risk Federal jail time for a list of addresses of drone owners.
So maybe you mean they could place a fictional number into the system with your name/address, and then you'd have the Feds knocking at your door? But that also makes no sense because the FAA and the Feds would have the false number info regardless of whether the data was publicly searchable.
Or maybe you meant that someone hates you so much they'd find your drone registration, buy a drone with the same model as yours, put your id information on it, and then sit back and laugh as you get arrested? That's pretty much impossible (as I said they can't search by name) unless they've gotten a good enough look at your drone to remember the drone id number (because that would be the only way to use the search box), and if they do that they don't really need to search the FAA website because they know what your drone looks like and they know it's identification information.
Would you be comfortable with having the online database of gun owners publicly searchable?
Yes then the criminals will know where not to go. They will be able to see I have guns at my house, and they should really think twice before trying to break in.
Good luck with that.
What would actually happen is they'd wait until you were on vacation, and then specifically pick your house to ransack.
But to get the info you have to have a local drone registration number.
You can try random numbers until you get a local, but a) if you can do that why fuck would you be doing physical crime and not cyber-crime, and b) it leaves a whole lot of digital breadcrumbs.
People on Mars will have one thing that's worth billions back here to the people who sent them. Cold, hard data. Information on Mars. Observations, results from experiments, detailed data that only a human on the ground can obtain.
It's certainly fascinating, but if it was worth billions we'd be spending billions on it.
And maintaining a Mars colony would be a tens-of-billions a year-type endeavor. You'd need some resupply ships, probably at least one a year, a satellite (or more probably, a network of satellites) so they can communicate with home, etc.
None of which is particularly likely to happen is the source of a good 80-90% of the space spending in the world (non-governmental, for-profit, corporations) loses ownership of anything it sends to Mars, and the Martians themselves can sell the data to the highest bidder.
Governments might spend money, but they'd be trying to make the independent Mars government their own puppet-state, probably be sending extremely loyal combat-ready people and then arranging a "Civil War" when the 24 PhDs running Western Democracy base on the northern base object to the 50 Spetsnatz under Col. Imperialistovich on the southern bases attempt to replace the ruling council with Putin's favorite Romanov.
The interest rate on that debt was 4%. Today it's under 2%.
And nobody has ever won an election by focussing on debt-to-GDP ratio.
and then those poor babies have to send 15% to the government.
Dunno, what you are talking about, my taxes combined reach 50% — and I sure as heck do not work on Wall Street.
You really aren't a Wall Street type.
Wall Streeters get paid via something called "carried interest" which is basically an extremely successful hack of the tax code. It doesn't count as salary, it counts as an investment, and as such it qualifies for the capital gains tax rate of 15%.
It's not really growing any faster now then it did back in the 50s. And instead of it becoming easier and easier to convince people to pay for things collectively, we've entered an era of death-battles over trivial amounts of government spending. Seriously, back then we convinced people to pay like 5% of GDP for a moonshot. Today we can't get them to a single percent.
So even if we could fund a Mars colony with a minuscule tax, half the country would be aghast (aghast I tell you!) that the money was being spent to allow the upper-middle-class whites and Asians (there ain't a lot of astronauts with less then a PhD, which means lots of whites and Asians) to set up their own country free from interference from blacks/hispanics/working-clas whites/etc. The other half would be horrified that the money wasn't being used to cut Wall Street's taxes. Those poor job creators like Shkreli, working their fingers to the bone clicking buttons on a computer and "networking" (ie: getting drunk with the boys) to provide employment for greedy little ungrateful ordinary people, and then those poor babies have to send 15% to the government.
They'll have no exports. that means no source of cash to buy the things that Mars can't provide -- like modern medical supples, updated electronics, and other manufactured goods.
They'll also have no ability to pay for the rocket fuel to get to Mars in the first place, much less for additional trips to bring in new colonists when the PhD aquaculture guy who was running the potatoes gets himself run over by a rover.
Geeks really like to dream big about space, and the hate the bullshit conventional human institutions provide; but the problem is that the only sources of big-level funding for space have to be large-scale human institutions. Which means dealing with bullshit.
It can be done, but it's not easy. Most of the aliens in Farscape are human actors in makeup (Acquarans and Sebeceans don't even need make-up), and the puppets tend to be a lot more human-like then you're letting on.
Rygel, for example, has two arms, a kung-fu movie mustache, and he's wearing a robe so you can't tell whether he's standing on bipedal legs. He's also got a levitating sled so that his face can easily be brought into the frame with a human actor if the Director decides that he needs a close-up of both for this particular conversation.
Pilot looks like a guy in a really big hat at a workstation. He's literally embedded into the ship and the only limbs he still moves are his arms. He's got four of them, but they're arranged on the same horizontal plane so you can only see two at a time.
Keep in mind your view of gunshot injuries is going to heavily biased by the fact that a) you never meet the dead, and b) most of the people you know who are hit by them have a someone immediately provide medical attention.
You look at the death rate for a rag-tag rebel army advancing without the refrigeration equipment required for transfusions, against an Imperial Army that consists entirely of clones the Emperor doesn't particularly want back, neither whom even pretend to have a Medical Corps, and you'd see a much higher death rate. Particularly if neither has been armed by NATO, which went through a "let's make everything a tiny armor-piercing bullet that can pass all the way through a person without hitting anything important" kick back in the 80s refuses to change it's ammo despite the fact that none of them are shooting against heavily armored Soviets anymore.
As for the fingers comment, I'm not a Star Wars obsessive, but I can't remember a time a character got nailed in a finger and died. They hit the torso, a major limb with a nice juicy artery that would cause you to bleed out in a few minutes without a medic, or they miss.
The problem with alternatives to humanoids is how the fuck do you film them?
Even assuming you can figure out how to get the expressive bits of a 40 ft dinosouroid, a 5 ft 6 in human woman, and a 2 ft froggish-type-thing in the same frame, how can you get the audience to understand the dinosouroid is scared of something the froggish thing has in it's mid-limbs and the human is trying to smooth it over?
You really see the problem in Star Wars. Most of their aliens only look a little less human then the ones on Star Trek, and they tend to be incredibly hard to read. You just don't know what a delighted Jawa or Tusken look like. You really need a humanoid, about the normal human sized, who communicates with a system very close to speech (tho you can fake this one by claiming something like the Universal Translator or translator microbes), with a human-style face, and facial expressions that will be easily decipherable even under the make-up.
You can do it in books pretty easily, because the narrator can explain that it's really a big deal that that guy's ass-looking-part which just turned blue is actually his face, and that combined with his scales flattening down to provide more protection, means the shit is about to hit the fan. It's much harder to pull off in live action.
Happens in real life all the time. Bordeaux does a lot more then wine, Vegas does a lot more then gambling, Colorado has many people who are not currently high, etc. Even for entire countries: many Japanese are not robots, the Swiss aren't all bankers, etc. Hell multinational regions. The southern bits of the Arabian peninsula are known for fabulously wealthy men with multiple wives and expensive falconry hobbies, paid for by the energy industry, but they've got a lot more going on than that.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that if we're positing a universe where there are dozens of hundreds of intelligent races interacting, is that not everyone in every race will interact with everyone from every other race. And future pop culture simply doesn't have the bandwidth to transmit that this particular culture has bounty-hunting warriors you are likely to meet on your interstellar travels, while also having a bunch of farmers keeping the game fed so the bounty hunters can continue playing their silly game anymore then current pop culture can deal with other humans.
One thing I really liked about DS9 was it dealt with Bajor in enough detail that you could see that the normal portrayal of Bajorans as plucky resisters to Cardassian Imperialism was both true, and a huge over-simplification.
In real life a bullet is also pretty much one-and-done. It's almost always one and mission-killed. Particularly since modern firearms, military spec or not, have such a high rate of fire that if they hit you it's 2-3 times. Sometimes small-caliber weapons with extremely high-velocity armor-piercing rounds fail to stick around a human body long enough to do a bunch of damage, and if you have a medical corps as quick as America's you will typically be treated before you can bleed out. But if you get hit by an AK and there isn't an active medical corps to show up within 15 seconds of you being hit, the death rate is pretty comparable to Star Wars.
And Star Wars is a classic example of a pop culture property you don't want to overanalyze. Blasters work like really cool machine guns, and are therefore completely deadly to uncool people, and very survivable for anyone who needs to make the next movie to resolve some interesting subplot.
It's written in 17th century English, actually more like mid or early 16th as the translators preferred archaic forms, and it's edited for style rather then clarity. Subsequent translations don't use the one syllable "pass" precisely because it's easily misinterpreted to mean something less important then the Second Coming. The NKJV, for example, specifies the world will "pass away."
Then he goes on in the very next verse to explain that the law is not fulfilled "until heaven and earth disappear," and that until God ends the world "not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law." In other words Matt 5:17 can't refer to his death on the cross, because the world still exists. It has to refer to the Second Coming.
To make sense of that verse, and justify their strong desire to not argue with Jews over precisely how many Matzvoh exist, Catholics and Orthodox Christians retconned a fairly clear reference to the Second Coming into a reference to the First Coming. I can't really blame them. Lobster tastes good, and in the absence of the Temple and Levite priesthood many of the old laws are unenforceable.
There's a reason that in the 1500s-1600s when numerous Europeans were trying to figure out how to strip as much Church tradition out of the Bible as possible, they could not come up with a single coherent religion, and the ended up re-adopting all Catholic theology they didn't have political reasons to discard.
Have you ever tried to get $2 Billion in financing for private industry?
I haven't, but my stepmom ran debt programs for Goodyear for 5 years or so. Retooling a factory is frequently in the $2 Billion range. Goodyear had proven revenue figures because the factories were already breaking even, and could prove that they had excellent business reasons to believe the retooling would strengthen the business to the point they could pay back the loans. And she still spent much of her time jetting over the globe negotiating the fine points of the mortgages because nobody would lend Goodyear money without really good collateral. These days her job no longer exists, because they're investment rated, and can issue bonds.
So to get two months worth of NASA's funding Musk's SpaceX is gonna need to either convince the finance weenies to give him an AAA rating, or he'll need to mortgage his other assets (like the Gigafactory).
Otherwise he'll have to be an order of magnitude more efficient then NASA.
Here's the problem: NASA's budget is $15-20 Billion.
The richest person in the world can only match that for five years without getting some revenue from the project. Which means the first multi-bnillionaire who actually tries to pay for a probe all the way to Mars is gonna get a bunch of really promising projects started, and then canned when he runs out of cash. Is the second billionaire gonna take an ex-billionaire's research and use it? Why would he share the glory? If he doesn't mind sharing, how does he access it?
Patents? How much would you insist on for that patent portfolio?
So for this to work, particularly for guys like Musk who barely hit the two-figures billion$, the private market has to be orders of magnitude more efficient then NASA, which does not seem terribly likely because the private market has had years to get beyond the ISS and still has not done so.
You're giving him way more slack then he deserves on these statements.
For example, he makes a point of calling all Mexican immigrants rapists. He calls them "immigrants" rather then "illegal," or "undocumented." The "but not legal Mexicans" bit comes three paragraphs later in a bit of the speech nobody will ever put on a sound-bite because it's three paragraphs after the newsworthy stuff. He's manipulating the media into telling his supporters one thing (all Mexican immigrants are evil and probably rapists), while manipulating you into interpreting his statements completely differently (only illegals are probably rapists), and that isn't precisely the MO of a paragon of intellectual honesty.
In the history of the Republic we've had multiple political movements based on anti-immigrant sentiment. At all times the leadership swore up and down that they were only against abuses in the system, and that there were some good Irish/Asians/etc. while their ground troops happily oppressed everyone who was vaguely associated with Irish/Asians/etc.
Here's the thing: The existence of NASA is totally irrelevant to whether SpaceX can get the Billion$ necessary to go to Mars through the private market.
In a lot of ways extra NASA spending would help SpaceX get to Mars because they'd probably be able to piggy-back on some of NASA's efforts (ie: a NASA contractor develops a great new rocket technology with government money, that it then sells to SpaceX), but there's no way it hurts it.
Hell, if we declare that the government can't do shit with $15 Billion a year, who is going to spend $15 Billion a year of his own private money trying it? Moreover a lot of things the government does are actually cheaper then when the private market does them do to economies of scale.
For example, it makes sense for the Feds to have a unified retirement system and Civil Service rules that are relatively pro-employee simply due to the number of employees, and the fact that if you increase their retention even 0.5% you have saved a lot of money. One private space company can't do that. Which means it has to pay it's employees (particularly high level people) a premium to compensate them for their risk of losing this gig with no notice, the lack of a pension, etc.
Just look at all of what was said. He talks about his famous wall, about people having to come into the country legally, all about border security and illegal immigration immediately before and after those questions and specifically in response to some of them without missing a beat. Yet you and plenty of others seriously want to believe that right in the middle, he broke stride and talked about something completely unrelated to those subjects for two sentences.
Ever watched a press conference on something that's not currently the #1 story the media is droning on and on about? Reporters always try to change the subject to the thing their networks are droning on and on about.
If you can't figure that shit out when it's happening, in real time, then you ain't gonna be a very good President.
That's pretty damn foolish if you ask me. The media is known for taking comments out of context and trolling with them. Hell, it's an inbred part of politics it seems. And yes, I'm refering to brother and sister becoming mom and dad because it always seems to be the same ones trying to smear the same people or types of people who are not part of their family. It appears you are caught up in it hook, line, and sinker too.
Of course it's the same people. They always do it to the front-runner because "front-runner is DOOOMED! DOOMED I TELL YOU!" is inherently more ratings-worthy then "Bobby Jindall once again implies he does not love his mother."
It goes in cycles. For awhile it was new (and thus ratings-worthy) to bash the hell out of Hillary. Biden was going to come in and steal her lunch money. "Feel the Bern" was more then an impotent expression of white liberal rage. There was a lot of smoke to the Benghazi scandal. Polls that indicated she might lose the whitest states in the country were huge news, despite the fact the exact same poll showed she;'d wipe the competition out in the next two states.Then that got old, and not ratings-worthy; so as soon as that idiot implied that Benghazi was political, and she didn't stink up a debate, she started walking on water again. In about a month two or three relatively trivial other things (probably related to her continued weakness in the white/Iowa/New Hampshire vote relative to Sanders) will be merged with some other random piece of vaguely anti-Hillaryish infotainment and she'll be doomed again.
In Trump's case he actually prefers the negative attention, because the guy who said that 15-20% of the potential ratings points are "rapists" despite all evidence to the contrary, is never gonna be embraced by the media.
Either Trump's not smart enough to figure out that he is answering a totally different set of policy questions then the reporter is asking, in which case he should be pilloried in the media for not understanding the requirements of the job he is trying to get.
This is most likely it. It is completely supported by his answers. Look at his answers to the MSNBC reporter...
It's definitely possible.
It's just as likely he knew exactly what he was answering, and he knew that his supporters would watch the video and then go into paroxysms of pro-Trump rage against the biased media, and therefore he did it anyway.
But given the aforementioned Mexican immigrants are rapists thing,* I'm not gonna give him the benefit of the doubt on any ridiculous ethnically-based statement.
*Which was just stupid. If you're a criminal of any type in Mexico, especially a rapist, why the fuck would you leave? You can kidnap 16-year-old girls, have your way with them, murder them, bury the bodies in the hills and nobody with arrest powers cares. Granted state-side we get our share of ethnic Latino criminals, but most of them are at least raised in the US, they tend to be from Central American countries that are not Mexico, and they aren't any rapier then us natives.
There are stark differences for a modern Christian.
As an Atheist who has read the entire Bible, including the Old Testament, and scanned significant bits of the Koran, I would actually prefer to live under the rule of a Koranic literalist. The Koran is just as bad as the Old Testament, and the Old Testament is part of the Bible. Period. But at least the Koran is clear, so I can figure out which lies to tell to whom to avoid punishment.
The New Testament's supposed compassion really doesn't help, because Jesus never literally says flat-out "OK we'll be tolerant, sex-positive, set up an independent Judiciary which respects the right to disagree with me, etc." He says a bunch of vague-ass shit about changing everything, fails to mention what any of that shit means, adds in an Authoritarian "Render unto Caesar" comment, and spends the whole time denouncing various sins that modern Christians don't think are particularly sinful (such as anything involving sex, and not believing in Him), without specifying any sort of legal or ethical framework that a sinner such as myself could use.
Don't get me wrong. If you add in an ethical framework from some other source (such as Catholic Church Traditions, or modern progressive Christianity) it is inherently better for me then Koranic literalism because modern ethical frameworks tend to rein in the most brutal tendencies of Ancient Near Eastern religious documents, but if you're gonna let the Christians cheat and reinterpret their Bible to include numerous post-Enlightenment, then you also have to let the Muslims cheat and use a Koranic government that lets Rima Fakih run around without a headscarf protecting the "glories of her hair" from us nasty male eyeballs.
Incidentally, if you want to know how seriously Christians take their Bible the "Glories of a woman's hair" comment I just made is actually a paraphrase of 1 Corinthians in the New Testament. Which means to an actual Biblical literalist, any time you see a woman's hair she is sinning. Hair covering's also part of the Jewish Tradition.
It's interesting that you ignore half the Bible in your attempt to defend the Bible. If you ignore the bits of OJ Simpson's life where he's not murdering two people and beating up a couple of memorabilia dealers, he's also quite mellow.
It's also interesting that you use the New Testament, which is probably the least clear statement of religious rules in the history of human-kind. In Matthew 5:17 Jesus explicitly states the he did not come to abolish any of the rulings of the previous covenant. But, of course, the New Covenant must by definition change some of those laws or it's not new. Jesus clearly meant he only wants some changed (but not others). Which ones should be changed are never explained in the Bible. So, from the Bible alone, you have no clue whether you're still banned from eating Lobster.
Don't get me wrong. Religions that are actually religions (ie: they give you clear guidance on what God wants you to do, and the penalties for disobeying him) are much more objectionable to my Atheist relativist ass then modern Christianity. But that's not because I think the Bible is the source of pretty much any of the moral content of modern Christianity. It's because modern Christians do their damndest to rationalize an inherently Agnostic, Relativistic, form of post-Enlightenment morality into the Bible.
If they went the other way, and tried to bolt on an brutal Puritan form of morality, I would hate that, and I would think it was inherently immoral. But it would also be much more Christian (by the Biblical definition) then the values they currently espouse because the Biblical support for being cruel to fornicators actually exists, whereas the Biblical support for a moral right to fornification is basically a combination of handwaving and broadening Christ's call for compassion to the point it is meaningless.
In practice Confederate PoWs had their weapons taken from them, and would not have been allowed to demand reams and reams of paper to send petitions to Abe Lincoln.
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Apparently your reading comprehension is not as good as you hoped.
I never said anything about guys getting salaries from Wall Street. It was Wall Street as a whole (and the top guys there all get the Carried Interest thing), and Shkreli.
You're actually a perfect illustration of the problem with spending money on space. I say "Dems will fuck this over because they want their left-wing social programs," and you just kinda go along with it. Then I say "Repubs will hate it because they'd rather cut taxes on the rich" and you start searching for hairs to split so you can defend Martin Shkreli's low low low tax bill.
Which is not a particularly good start for any pol who hopes to convince mi from Slashdot to support a $50 Billion Mars Launch instead of further tax relief for job creator Martin Shkreli.
So you're assuming the FAA will do one very special thing for drones (tail numbers for big planes are per aircraft, not per pilot), but not another (make the database searchable by county), despite the fact that would be pretty stupid (among other things, there'd be so many registrations from big counties that the list would be too long to be useful), your evidence seems to consist mostly of you not wanting them to do it that way so of course they'd do it that way?
All because you're convinced that a statistically significant number of people will try to get around the "do not fly a drone in the White House's airspace" restriction by putting a fake number on their drone? Which would be really dumb to do, given that every Jury ever would believe that drone jockey was not planning on highly illegal mischief?
Americans can be wonderfully obstreperous about complying with the most reasonable of governmental actions. And you, Mr. Scorpio, are not breaking the mold.
Two points:
1) It can't be searched that way by civilians. The search box has one field, for the drones registration number, not a half-dozen including your name, address, general geographic location, etc.
2) What were you expecting to happen with law enforcement? Somebody died. If they can't get the registration number from a bystander/security camera/dashcam/etc. of course they'll get a warrant to force anyone with relevant info to help them with their inquiries. That means the FAA, local drone sellers, Youtube if they rustle up some drone flights from the area, etc.
Heck, this is already how it has to happen, with the caveat that since there's no official registration number on anyone's drone it is several orders of magnitude harder for you to prove it was not your drone at the scene of the crime.
Except with it being public, someone could lookup your registration number via your name/address.
They could then start flying it around an airport, the white house, or some other no fly zone with a drone that uses your number.
Suddenly you have the feds knocking on your door.
I really don't get what you;re talking about.
There's a search field. One field. It has a spot for the drone's registration number. There is no spot for your address. It will look like this.
Presumably a sufficiently clever hacker could crack into the system and get the entire database, but a) they could do that regardless of whether it was publicly searchable (none of the GAO database was searchable), and b) it would be rather silly to risk Federal jail time for a list of addresses of drone owners.
So maybe you mean they could place a fictional number into the system with your name/address, and then you'd have the Feds knocking at your door? But that also makes no sense because the FAA and the Feds would have the false number info regardless of whether the data was publicly searchable.
Or maybe you meant that someone hates you so much they'd find your drone registration, buy a drone with the same model as yours, put your id information on it, and then sit back and laugh as you get arrested? That's pretty much impossible (as I said they can't search by name) unless they've gotten a good enough look at your drone to remember the drone id number (because that would be the only way to use the search box), and if they do that they don't really need to search the FAA website because they know what your drone looks like and they know it's identification information.
Would you be comfortable with having the online database of gun owners publicly searchable?
Yes then the criminals will know where not to go. They will be able to see I have guns at my house, and they should really think twice before trying to break in.
Good luck with that.
What would actually happen is they'd wait until you were on vacation, and then specifically pick your house to ransack.
But to get the info you have to have a local drone registration number.
You can try random numbers until you get a local, but a) if you can do that why fuck would you be doing physical crime and not cyber-crime, and b) it leaves a whole lot of digital breadcrumbs.
People on Mars will have one thing that's worth billions back here to the people who sent them. Cold, hard data. Information on Mars. Observations, results from experiments, detailed data that only a human on the ground can obtain.
It's certainly fascinating, but if it was worth billions we'd be spending billions on it.
And maintaining a Mars colony would be a tens-of-billions a year-type endeavor. You'd need some resupply ships, probably at least one a year, a satellite (or more probably, a network of satellites) so they can communicate with home, etc.
None of which is particularly likely to happen is the source of a good 80-90% of the space spending in the world (non-governmental, for-profit, corporations) loses ownership of anything it sends to Mars, and the Martians themselves can sell the data to the highest bidder.
Governments might spend money, but they'd be trying to make the independent Mars government their own puppet-state, probably be sending extremely loyal combat-ready people and then arranging a "Civil War" when the 24 PhDs running Western Democracy base on the northern base object to the 50 Spetsnatz under Col. Imperialistovich on the southern bases attempt to replace the ruling council with Putin's favorite Romanov.
That may be because our National Debt in 1969 was below 30% of the GDP, whereas today it approaches 120%.
The interest rate on that debt was 4%. Today it's under 2%.
And nobody has ever won an election by focussing on debt-to-GDP ratio.
Dunno, what you are talking about, my taxes combined reach 50% — and I sure as heck do not work on Wall Street.
You really aren't a Wall Street type.
Wall Streeters get paid via something called "carried interest" which is basically an extremely successful hack of the tax code. It doesn't count as salary, it counts as an investment, and as such it qualifies for the capital gains tax rate of 15%.
It's not really growing any faster now then it did back in the 50s. And instead of it becoming easier and easier to convince people to pay for things collectively, we've entered an era of death-battles over trivial amounts of government spending. Seriously, back then we convinced people to pay like 5% of GDP for a moonshot. Today we can't get them to a single percent.
So even if we could fund a Mars colony with a minuscule tax, half the country would be aghast (aghast I tell you!) that the money was being spent to allow the upper-middle-class whites and Asians (there ain't a lot of astronauts with less then a PhD, which means lots of whites and Asians) to set up their own country free from interference from blacks/hispanics/working-clas whites/etc. The other half would be horrified that the money wasn't being used to cut Wall Street's taxes. Those poor job creators like Shkreli, working their fingers to the bone clicking buttons on a computer and "networking" (ie: getting drunk with the boys) to provide employment for greedy little ungrateful ordinary people, and then those poor babies have to send 15% to the government.
They'll have no exports. that means no source of cash to buy the things that Mars can't provide -- like modern medical supples, updated electronics, and other manufactured goods.
They'll also have no ability to pay for the rocket fuel to get to Mars in the first place, much less for additional trips to bring in new colonists when the PhD aquaculture guy who was running the potatoes gets himself run over by a rover.
Geeks really like to dream big about space, and the hate the bullshit conventional human institutions provide; but the problem is that the only sources of big-level funding for space have to be large-scale human institutions. Which means dealing with bullshit.
It can be done, but it's not easy. Most of the aliens in Farscape are human actors in makeup (Acquarans and Sebeceans don't even need make-up), and the puppets tend to be a lot more human-like then you're letting on.
Rygel, for example, has two arms, a kung-fu movie mustache, and he's wearing a robe so you can't tell whether he's standing on bipedal legs. He's also got a levitating sled so that his face can easily be brought into the frame with a human actor if the Director decides that he needs a close-up of both for this particular conversation.
Pilot looks like a guy in a really big hat at a workstation. He's literally embedded into the ship and the only limbs he still moves are his arms. He's got four of them, but they're arranged on the same horizontal plane so you can only see two at a time.
Keep in mind your view of gunshot injuries is going to heavily biased by the fact that a) you never meet the dead, and b) most of the people you know who are hit by them have a someone immediately provide medical attention.
You look at the death rate for a rag-tag rebel army advancing without the refrigeration equipment required for transfusions, against an Imperial Army that consists entirely of clones the Emperor doesn't particularly want back, neither whom even pretend to have a Medical Corps, and you'd see a much higher death rate. Particularly if neither has been armed by NATO, which went through a "let's make everything a tiny armor-piercing bullet that can pass all the way through a person without hitting anything important" kick back in the 80s refuses to change it's ammo despite the fact that none of them are shooting against heavily armored Soviets anymore.
As for the fingers comment, I'm not a Star Wars obsessive, but I can't remember a time a character got nailed in a finger and died. They hit the torso, a major limb with a nice juicy artery that would cause you to bleed out in a few minutes without a medic, or they miss.
The problem with alternatives to humanoids is how the fuck do you film them?
Even assuming you can figure out how to get the expressive bits of a 40 ft dinosouroid, a 5 ft 6 in human woman, and a 2 ft froggish-type-thing in the same frame, how can you get the audience to understand the dinosouroid is scared of something the froggish thing has in it's mid-limbs and the human is trying to smooth it over?
You really see the problem in Star Wars. Most of their aliens only look a little less human then the ones on Star Trek, and they tend to be incredibly hard to read. You just don't know what a delighted Jawa or Tusken look like. You really need a humanoid, about the normal human sized, who communicates with a system very close to speech (tho you can fake this one by claiming something like the Universal Translator or translator microbes), with a human-style face, and facial expressions that will be easily decipherable even under the make-up.
You can do it in books pretty easily, because the narrator can explain that it's really a big deal that that guy's ass-looking-part which just turned blue is actually his face, and that combined with his scales flattening down to provide more protection, means the shit is about to hit the fan. It's much harder to pull off in live action.
Happens in real life all the time. Bordeaux does a lot more then wine, Vegas does a lot more then gambling, Colorado has many people who are not currently high, etc. Even for entire countries: many Japanese are not robots, the Swiss aren't all bankers, etc. Hell multinational regions. The southern bits of the Arabian peninsula are known for fabulously wealthy men with multiple wives and expensive falconry hobbies, paid for by the energy industry, but they've got a lot more going on than that.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that if we're positing a universe where there are dozens of hundreds of intelligent races interacting, is that not everyone in every race will interact with everyone from every other race. And future pop culture simply doesn't have the bandwidth to transmit that this particular culture has bounty-hunting warriors you are likely to meet on your interstellar travels, while also having a bunch of farmers keeping the game fed so the bounty hunters can continue playing their silly game anymore then current pop culture can deal with other humans.
One thing I really liked about DS9 was it dealt with Bajor in enough detail that you could see that the normal portrayal of Bajorans as plucky resisters to Cardassian Imperialism was both true, and a huge over-simplification.
In real life a bullet is also pretty much one-and-done. It's almost always one and mission-killed. Particularly since modern firearms, military spec or not, have such a high rate of fire that if they hit you it's 2-3 times. Sometimes small-caliber weapons with extremely high-velocity armor-piercing rounds fail to stick around a human body long enough to do a bunch of damage, and if you have a medical corps as quick as America's you will typically be treated before you can bleed out. But if you get hit by an AK and there isn't an active medical corps to show up within 15 seconds of you being hit, the death rate is pretty comparable to Star Wars.
And Star Wars is a classic example of a pop culture property you don't want to overanalyze. Blasters work like really cool machine guns, and are therefore completely deadly to uncool people, and very survivable for anyone who needs to make the next movie to resolve some interesting subplot.
That's the King James Version.
It's written in 17th century English, actually more like mid or early 16th as the translators preferred archaic forms, and it's edited for style rather then clarity. Subsequent translations don't use the one syllable "pass" precisely because it's easily misinterpreted to mean something less important then the Second Coming. The NKJV, for example, specifies the world will "pass away."
Then he goes on in the very next verse to explain that the law is not fulfilled "until heaven and earth disappear," and that until God ends the world "not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law." In other words Matt 5:17 can't refer to his death on the cross, because the world still exists. It has to refer to the Second Coming.
To make sense of that verse, and justify their strong desire to not argue with Jews over precisely how many Matzvoh exist, Catholics and Orthodox Christians retconned a fairly clear reference to the Second Coming into a reference to the First Coming. I can't really blame them. Lobster tastes good, and in the absence of the Temple and Levite priesthood many of the old laws are unenforceable.
There's a reason that in the 1500s-1600s when numerous Europeans were trying to figure out how to strip as much Church tradition out of the Bible as possible, they could not come up with a single coherent religion, and the ended up re-adopting all Catholic theology they didn't have political reasons to discard.
Have you ever tried to get $2 Billion in financing for private industry?
I haven't, but my stepmom ran debt programs for Goodyear for 5 years or so. Retooling a factory is frequently in the $2 Billion range. Goodyear had proven revenue figures because the factories were already breaking even, and could prove that they had excellent business reasons to believe the retooling would strengthen the business to the point they could pay back the loans. And she still spent much of her time jetting over the globe negotiating the fine points of the mortgages because nobody would lend Goodyear money without really good collateral. These days her job no longer exists, because they're investment rated, and can issue bonds.
So to get two months worth of NASA's funding Musk's SpaceX is gonna need to either convince the finance weenies to give him an AAA rating, or he'll need to mortgage his other assets (like the Gigafactory).
Otherwise he'll have to be an order of magnitude more efficient then NASA.
Here's the problem:
NASA's budget is $15-20 Billion.
The richest person in the world can only match that for five years without getting some revenue from the project. Which means the first multi-bnillionaire who actually tries to pay for a probe all the way to Mars is gonna get a bunch of really promising projects started, and then canned when he runs out of cash. Is the second billionaire gonna take an ex-billionaire's research and use it? Why would he share the glory? If he doesn't mind sharing, how does he access it?
Patents? How much would you insist on for that patent portfolio?
So for this to work, particularly for guys like Musk who barely hit the two-figures billion$, the private market has to be orders of magnitude more efficient then NASA, which does not seem terribly likely because the private market has had years to get beyond the ISS and still has not done so.
You're giving him way more slack then he deserves on these statements.
For example, he makes a point of calling all Mexican immigrants rapists. He calls them "immigrants" rather then "illegal," or "undocumented." The "but not legal Mexicans" bit comes three paragraphs later in a bit of the speech nobody will ever put on a sound-bite because it's three paragraphs after the newsworthy stuff. He's manipulating the media into telling his supporters one thing (all Mexican immigrants are evil and probably rapists), while manipulating you into interpreting his statements completely differently (only illegals are probably rapists), and that isn't precisely the MO of a paragon of intellectual honesty.
In the history of the Republic we've had multiple political movements based on anti-immigrant sentiment. At all times the leadership swore up and down that they were only against abuses in the system, and that there were some good Irish/Asians/etc. while their ground troops happily oppressed everyone who was vaguely associated with Irish/Asians/etc.
Here's the thing:
The existence of NASA is totally irrelevant to whether SpaceX can get the Billion$ necessary to go to Mars through the private market.
In a lot of ways extra NASA spending would help SpaceX get to Mars because they'd probably be able to piggy-back on some of NASA's efforts (ie: a NASA contractor develops a great new rocket technology with government money, that it then sells to SpaceX), but there's no way it hurts it.
Hell, if we declare that the government can't do shit with $15 Billion a year, who is going to spend $15 Billion a year of his own private money trying it? Moreover a lot of things the government does are actually cheaper then when the private market does them do to economies of scale.
For example, it makes sense for the Feds to have a unified retirement system and Civil Service rules that are relatively pro-employee simply due to the number of employees, and the fact that if you increase their retention even 0.5% you have saved a lot of money. One private space company can't do that. Which means it has to pay it's employees (particularly high level people) a premium to compensate them for their risk of losing this gig with no notice, the lack of a pension, etc.
Just look at all of what was said. He talks about his famous wall, about people having to come into the country legally, all about border security and illegal immigration immediately before and after those questions and specifically in response to some of them without missing a beat. Yet you and plenty of others seriously want to believe that right in the middle, he broke stride and talked about something completely unrelated to those subjects for two sentences.
Ever watched a press conference on something that's not currently the #1 story the media is droning on and on about? Reporters always try to change the subject to the thing their networks are droning on and on about.
If you can't figure that shit out when it's happening, in real time, then you ain't gonna be a very good President.
That's pretty damn foolish if you ask me. The media is known for taking comments out of context and trolling with them. Hell, it's an inbred part of politics it seems. And yes, I'm refering to brother and sister becoming mom and dad because it always seems to be the same ones trying to smear the same people or types of people who are not part of their family. It appears you are caught up in it hook, line, and sinker too.
Of course it's the same people. They always do it to the front-runner because "front-runner is DOOOMED! DOOMED I TELL YOU!" is inherently more ratings-worthy then "Bobby Jindall once again implies he does not love his mother."
It goes in cycles. For awhile it was new (and thus ratings-worthy) to bash the hell out of Hillary. Biden was going to come in and steal her lunch money. "Feel the Bern" was more then an impotent expression of white liberal rage. There was a lot of smoke to the Benghazi scandal. Polls that indicated she might lose the whitest states in the country were huge news, despite the fact the exact same poll showed she;'d wipe the competition out in the next two states.Then that got old, and not ratings-worthy; so as soon as that idiot implied that Benghazi was political, and she didn't stink up a debate, she started walking on water again. In about a month two or three relatively trivial other things (probably related to her continued weakness in the white/Iowa/New Hampshire vote relative to Sanders) will be merged with some other random piece of vaguely anti-Hillaryish infotainment and she'll be doomed again.
In Trump's case he actually prefers the negative attention, because the guy who said that 15-20% of the potential ratings points are "rapists" despite all evidence to the contrary, is never gonna be embraced by the media.
This is most likely it. It is completely supported by his answers. Look at his answers to the MSNBC reporter...
It's definitely possible.
It's just as likely he knew exactly what he was answering, and he knew that his supporters would watch the video and then go into paroxysms of pro-Trump rage against the biased media, and therefore he did it anyway.
But given the aforementioned Mexican immigrants are rapists thing,* I'm not gonna give him the benefit of the doubt on any ridiculous ethnically-based statement.
*Which was just stupid. If you're a criminal of any type in Mexico, especially a rapist, why the fuck would you leave? You can kidnap 16-year-old girls, have your way with them, murder them, bury the bodies in the hills and nobody with arrest powers cares. Granted state-side we get our share of ethnic Latino criminals, but most of them are at least raised in the US, they tend to be from Central American countries that are not Mexico, and they aren't any rapier then us natives.
There are stark differences for a modern Christian.
As an Atheist who has read the entire Bible, including the Old Testament, and scanned significant bits of the Koran, I would actually prefer to live under the rule of a Koranic literalist. The Koran is just as bad as the Old Testament, and the Old Testament is part of the Bible. Period. But at least the Koran is clear, so I can figure out which lies to tell to whom to avoid punishment.
The New Testament's supposed compassion really doesn't help, because Jesus never literally says flat-out "OK we'll be tolerant, sex-positive, set up an independent Judiciary which respects the right to disagree with me, etc." He says a bunch of vague-ass shit about changing everything, fails to mention what any of that shit means, adds in an Authoritarian "Render unto Caesar" comment, and spends the whole time denouncing various sins that modern Christians don't think are particularly sinful (such as anything involving sex, and not believing in Him), without specifying any sort of legal or ethical framework that a sinner such as myself could use.
Don't get me wrong. If you add in an ethical framework from some other source (such as Catholic Church Traditions, or modern progressive Christianity) it is inherently better for me then Koranic literalism because modern ethical frameworks tend to rein in the most brutal tendencies of Ancient Near Eastern religious documents, but if you're gonna let the Christians cheat and reinterpret their Bible to include numerous post-Enlightenment, then you also have to let the Muslims cheat and use a Koranic government that lets Rima Fakih run around without a headscarf protecting the "glories of her hair" from us nasty male eyeballs.
Incidentally, if you want to know how seriously Christians take their Bible the "Glories of a woman's hair" comment I just made is actually a paraphrase of 1 Corinthians in the New Testament. Which means to an actual Biblical literalist, any time you see a woman's hair she is sinning. Hair covering's also part of the Jewish Tradition.
It's interesting that you ignore half the Bible in your attempt to defend the Bible. If you ignore the bits of OJ Simpson's life where he's not murdering two people and beating up a couple of memorabilia dealers, he's also quite mellow.
It's also interesting that you use the New Testament, which is probably the least clear statement of religious rules in the history of human-kind. In Matthew 5:17 Jesus explicitly states the he did not come to abolish any of the rulings of the previous covenant. But, of course, the New Covenant must by definition change some of those laws or it's not new. Jesus clearly meant he only wants some changed (but not others). Which ones should be changed are never explained in the Bible. So, from the Bible alone, you have no clue whether you're still banned from eating Lobster.
Don't get me wrong. Religions that are actually religions (ie: they give you clear guidance on what God wants you to do, and the penalties for disobeying him) are much more objectionable to my Atheist relativist ass then modern Christianity. But that's not because I think the Bible is the source of pretty much any of the moral content of modern Christianity. It's because modern Christians do their damndest to rationalize an inherently Agnostic, Relativistic, form of post-Enlightenment morality into the Bible.
If they went the other way, and tried to bolt on an brutal Puritan form of morality, I would hate that, and I would think it was inherently immoral. But it would also be much more Christian (by the Biblical definition) then the values they currently espouse because the Biblical support for being cruel to fornicators actually exists, whereas the Biblical support for a moral right to fornification is basically a combination of handwaving and broadening Christ's call for compassion to the point it is meaningless.
In legal theory.
In practice Confederate PoWs had their weapons taken from them, and would not have been allowed to demand reams and reams of paper to send petitions to Abe Lincoln.