But if limited liability is granted now, it will be that much harder to retract years later.
Granted? Are you serious? "Limited liability" isn't something that should have to be "granted". If I want to off myself in a spectacular way and pay for it, that is frankly none of your or the legislature's business. These kinds of liabilities should never have been created in the first place, except for circumstances where people inexperienced people mistakenly assume excessive risk.
And given the kind of knee-jerk way in which legislation gets passed, who are you kidding about this "it will be harder to retract later"? Liability will be imposed the first time some likable person dies in a rocket launch.
If space companies aren't exempted from this kind of liability, they are going to go to states or nations where the liability laws are still a bit saner than here.
Your translation is erroneous. There are no "subsidies", not even in the form of assumption of risk or exemption from liability.
Instead, our liability laws are so out of whack that even if you are a billionaire, knowingly engage in risky behavior, pay for the privilege, acknowledge this in writing, and absolve everybody from liability, you can then turn around and still sue everybody even if they did exactly what they promised they would do.
Who is responsible for this? People like you, people who can't turn off their ideological blinders for a moment to take a rational look at what's going on around them. Ironically, it's often the same people who complain about the consequences of their ill-chosen policies (in this case, lots of stupid lawsuits).
The numbers you're quoting our specific acts by individiual policies. There is a general baseline that the article doesn't cover but is neither here nor there at this point.
I pointed you to an article on fiscal multipliers; it provides both general ranges across all policies and specific values. If you want a nice discussion of aggregate impact of fiscal multipliers, look here:
I'm not making a "principled stand". I'm just telling you a simple fact about our form of government: "paying attention" to minority views is an essential and fundamental part of it.
You set up a false dichotomy between "paying attention to minority views" and "ignoring the majority", and frankly, that is insane.
To be fair, there's a strong public interest in the banking sector not melting down
There is. But many of the institutions that were bailed out were simply investment houses, not banks, that could have gone under without causing a lot of problems. In addition, the US government didn't have to make the rescue a big tax payer gift; they could have rescued these companies but demanded steep compensation down the road for it.
And the conditions under which the banking sector got into this state were also created by government policies; FDIC and lots of other guarantees meant that banks behaved assuming already that they were going to get rescued. That is, they took on large amounts of risk because they knew they wouldn't have to pay for it if it didn't work out. This disaster had been a long term in the making.
And Obama's changes to banking regulation have failed to address the problems. This is just going to happen again a few years down the road.
In fact, a lot of case it as helped. but success in government isn't really reported. You know why? it's not unusual.
To use your words: wrong.
First, people talk a lot about this, in particular in economics. The question is: what is the multiplier on government spending? Is it negative, less than 1, or greater than 1? Nobody has a conclusive answer to this, and it depends a great deal on what the money is spent on. Even very simplistic econometric or Keynsian-style estimates often come out less than 1, but those don't even count opportunity costs and other hidden costs of government spending. Nevertheless, government keeps spending large amounts of money in areas that clearly have a multiplier of less than 1.
Success of government spending/investment may not be unusual, but its failure is also very common, and may predominate.
Until you decide that its perfectly alright to ignore the majority, its hard to justify paying any attention to the minority. Otherwise everyone gets what they want, both majorities and minorities.
"Paying attention" to what political minorities isn't the same as giving in to their every demand. Of course, you need to "pay attention" to minorities, in particular when it comes to injustices. And the demands of minorities frequently override the will of majority, via all three branches of government.
In short, I think your statement is insane. And your view of government has nothing to do with the kind of government we have in the US (or for that matter, any other liberal democracy or republic on the planet).
It does separate issues that are polarized (as almost all issues are these days) with issues that are simply pop-culture jokes.
How many pop culture petitions make it above 25000 votes? A few dozen a year? A few hundred? I would think the White House staff is large and competent enough to identify those quickly by hand, without some Rube Goldberg-like voting procedure.
Are those two different camps of the economic right? Perhaps "libertarians" versus "pro-business conservatives" or something along those lines?
Most modern democracies have a fairly standard set of parties (roughly from left to right): communists, social democrats, "classical" liberals, Christian democrats, and nationalists. In the US, Democrats comprise the left end of the spectrum, Republicans the right end of the spectrum, and classical liberals sit uncomfortably in the middle without their own party. Except for "classical" liberals, everybody else believes in big government and government intervention.
Probably what confuses you is that Republicans say that they favor free markets when in practice they don't. (Of course, Democrats also say they stand for a lot of things that, in practice, they don't stand for.)
There is no "disagreement on the right" because "libertarians" and "classical liberals" aren't actually part of "the right". Republicans and Democrats are similar in their level of intervention in the market. The only people who would like less intervention are actual liberals, but both Republicans and Democrats are ganging up on them, trying to give them a bad name (and succeeding). Liberalism has been successfully marginalized in both the US and Europe for the time being.
Crony capitalism is what actually happens when you implement captialism in the real world. Capitalism is the theory, cronyism is the practice.
Well, yes, in the sense that crony capitalism is what happens when various people try to "fix" capitalism by "protecting jobs" or "attracting business" or whatever, and politicians (both on the left and the right) have delusions of grandeur of being able to do this.
The solution, however, is not to get rid of capitalism, but to get rid of attempts to tinker with it. Let businesses fail and don't have the government "invest" in companies, period.
I mean, what alternative did you have in mind? If you don't like markets deciding where to put money and resources, and giving the responsibility to government leads to cronyism, who is left to make those decisions?
This makes the erroneous assumption that only those things are worthy of attention of government that a large percentage of the public agrees with. That is a disturbing view of how government should work.
If 25000 people bother to petition the White House about some issue, the president's staff should damned well pay attention and consider it. It doesn't matter whether any of the other 330 million people in the country approve or not. And if the president needs to make economic decisions by conducting unbiased polls of academic economists, he is obviously not up to his job and should resign.
"Rather, SouthingtonSOS is saying that there is ample evidence that violent video games, along with violent media of all kinds, including TV and movies portraying story after story showing a continuous stream of violence and killing, has contributed to increasing aggressiveness, fear, anxiety and is desensitizing our children to acts of violence including bullying.
The "or" means it could contribute only to a single one of them and the entire statement would still be true, but totally meaningless. Furthermore, "aggressiveness, fear, anxiety and desensitization" aren't the same as school violence or mass murder.
They are trying to push a political agenda by innuendo and guilt-by-association. Even if these people had a reasonable cause, such deliberate deception is unacceptable.
No reasonable person assumes that Moore's law is "inevitable". But if you're going to predict the future or write software, it's reasonable to assume that there is a strong possibility that it will continue.
If you look at human economic history, there are analogous regularities; they are different from Moore's law in that growth has increased in a series of "technological revolutions" that occur at ever decreasing intervals. Based on that, it is reasonable to entertain the possibility that another major shift in how we live and how we produce things is about to occur. It's not "wild-eyed optimism", it's pragmatism.
I think the problem with pessimists like you is that you really seem to know very little about the history of the human race, or the profound advances that have been happening outside the computer field. In any case, nobody is forcing you to move to a space station, and most people who predict such a future probably prefer less funding, rather than more funding, for NASA, so it doesn't affect you. Just go back to whatever it is you're doing and stop worrying about us.
But mainly, there were actually useful places and things to discover, not just the chance of Yet Another Fucking Asteroid.
What could there possibly be to discover in the asteroid belt and on other planets, right? if it's not scantily clad native women, you aren't interested, right? You really must hate science and technology.
There is tons of science to be done all over the solar system, and riches (metals, precious metals, rare earths) that dwarf anything available on earth
Living in a glorified space station is not many people's idea of fun. Psycholgically, it would be like living in a submarine or something, which is to say most people would go insane after a few months.
How about living in your own, personally customized space habitat that is several miles in diameter?
Your idea of anti-gravity drugs is amusingly off the wall, but like many space nutter ideas based on science fiction rather than scientific evidence.
Are you really this dumb? Obviously I was talking about drugs to counteract bone loss.
Different people get them to different degrees, and there are good ways of counteracting them (mostly exercise). People have already stayed in zero G for six months several times, and they recovered.
People really need to stop being such naysayers and ninnies. The issues we face with space exploration (radiation, bone loss) are far less serious than what the explorers faced during the age of discovery (parasites, scurvy, and lots more). Even if we shipped off people tomorrow with no new technology, they'd come back healthier than most explorers in the history of humanity. Just read some of the early journals of exploration to get an idea of what they had to deal with.
We didn't "give it up"; alchemy continuously transitioned into modern chemistry.
Don't think of it as "giving up".
I think NASA should "give up" on human space flight altogether... and leave it to the private sector. NASA should focus on exploration with space probes, fund basic research, and make the resulting data publicly and freely available. The rest will take care of itself.
You really need to read articles you point to; none of the other problems are particularly serious: they are temporary or mild, and they probably have simple treatments. Bone loss is the only really serious consequence, and even that may not matter if you don't worry about actually returning to 1G.
In any case, spinning a space station isn't hard anyway, and it's almost certainly sufficient to spend part of the day in 1G.
I doubt we'll even bother with terraforming. Space is a much nicer environment than Mars. Radiation is not a problem once you start exploiting asteroids for building materials (since you can easily make walls a few feet thick). Gravity can be handled either via rotation or (in the future) via drugs.
People like you were also prognosticating that we were all going to starve, that the environment would be destroyed by pollution, that we'd run out of oil, that we'd freeze to death, that we'd boil to death... it ain't happening.
The solar system is a tremendously rich place, full of water, hydrocarbons, and metals, in convenient large chunks that are easy to exploit and easy to move around. They provide everything we need in a form that is far simpler to use than anything on earth. Food and oxygen production are trivial in space: there's plenty of sun, space, water, and carbon. Add some algae, and you get all the oxygen and food you would ever need.
As soon as we capture and exploit the first chunks of iron, carbon, and water in space, there will be an explosion of innovation and movement into the solar system; it will make the changes of the last century look like child's play. Within a few decades, engineering in space will dwarf the entire infrastructure we have built on earth. And we need no new technology for any of that.
And you seem not to understand that we do the reductions by efficiency gains, not by simply switching off a coal plant.
We have an exponential growth in energy usage. You cannot offset that by efficiency gains, even if you made every single process (manufacturing, travel, etc.) on the planet 100% thermodynamically efficient, i.e. as efficient as possible; it's mathematically impossible.
Why is it that a german car manufactor only needs half the energy to craft one in comparison with an american one?
(Citation?)
Bangladesh's economy is even more energy efficient. It's easy to increase energy efficiency if you accept a lower standard of living. Germany hasn't found a magic bullet in terms of energy efficiency, it just sits on a line between the US and Bangladesh in terms of possible tradeoffs between energy efficiency and wealth.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like he has already found someone else to vilify.
Granted? Are you serious? "Limited liability" isn't something that should have to be "granted". If I want to off myself in a spectacular way and pay for it, that is frankly none of your or the legislature's business. These kinds of liabilities should never have been created in the first place, except for circumstances where people inexperienced people mistakenly assume excessive risk.
And given the kind of knee-jerk way in which legislation gets passed, who are you kidding about this "it will be harder to retract later"? Liability will be imposed the first time some likable person dies in a rocket launch.
If space companies aren't exempted from this kind of liability, they are going to go to states or nations where the liability laws are still a bit saner than here.
Your translation is erroneous. There are no "subsidies", not even in the form of assumption of risk or exemption from liability.
Instead, our liability laws are so out of whack that even if you are a billionaire, knowingly engage in risky behavior, pay for the privilege, acknowledge this in writing, and absolve everybody from liability, you can then turn around and still sue everybody even if they did exactly what they promised they would do.
Who is responsible for this? People like you, people who can't turn off their ideological blinders for a moment to take a rational look at what's going on around them. Ironically, it's often the same people who complain about the consequences of their ill-chosen policies (in this case, lots of stupid lawsuits).
Yes it is. OECD lists US government spending as around 40% of GDP:
http://tinyurl.com/ad6r4nw
So does Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending
I pointed you to an article on fiscal multipliers; it provides both general ranges across all policies and specific values. If you want a nice discussion of aggregate impact of fiscal multipliers, look here:
http://www.voxeu.org/article/determining-size-fiscal-multiplier
Note that even in the best of cases, that rises only to about 1.6.
Here is a good discussion in the context of US policy:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123258618204604599.html
You've provided no data to support your ludicrously implausible claims. I think it's clear you don't really know what you're talking about.
So you deny that you wrote this sentence?
Come on, have a look on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_multiplier
Values given are between about 0.25 and 2. Even those are almost certainly overestimates, given that they fail to account for opportunity costs.
A value of 7 is ridiculous. How would that even be possible, given that US government spending is 40% of GDP?
And why would the multiplier be lower during a downturn?
I'm not making a "principled stand". I'm just telling you a simple fact about our form of government: "paying attention" to minority views is an essential and fundamental part of it.
You set up a false dichotomy between "paying attention to minority views" and "ignoring the majority", and frankly, that is insane.
There is. But many of the institutions that were bailed out were simply investment houses, not banks, that could have gone under without causing a lot of problems. In addition, the US government didn't have to make the rescue a big tax payer gift; they could have rescued these companies but demanded steep compensation down the road for it.
And the conditions under which the banking sector got into this state were also created by government policies; FDIC and lots of other guarantees meant that banks behaved assuming already that they were going to get rescued. That is, they took on large amounts of risk because they knew they wouldn't have to pay for it if it didn't work out. This disaster had been a long term in the making.
And Obama's changes to banking regulation have failed to address the problems. This is just going to happen again a few years down the road.
To use your words: wrong.
First, people talk a lot about this, in particular in economics. The question is: what is the multiplier on government spending? Is it negative, less than 1, or greater than 1? Nobody has a conclusive answer to this, and it depends a great deal on what the money is spent on. Even very simplistic econometric or Keynsian-style estimates often come out less than 1, but those don't even count opportunity costs and other hidden costs of government spending. Nevertheless, government keeps spending large amounts of money in areas that clearly have a multiplier of less than 1.
Success of government spending/investment may not be unusual, but its failure is also very common, and may predominate.
"Paying attention" to what political minorities isn't the same as giving in to their every demand. Of course, you need to "pay attention" to minorities, in particular when it comes to injustices. And the demands of minorities frequently override the will of majority, via all three branches of government.
In short, I think your statement is insane. And your view of government has nothing to do with the kind of government we have in the US (or for that matter, any other liberal democracy or republic on the planet).
How many pop culture petitions make it above 25000 votes? A few dozen a year? A few hundred? I would think the White House staff is large and competent enough to identify those quickly by hand, without some Rube Goldberg-like voting procedure.
Most modern democracies have a fairly standard set of parties (roughly from left to right): communists, social democrats, "classical" liberals, Christian democrats, and nationalists. In the US, Democrats comprise the left end of the spectrum, Republicans the right end of the spectrum, and classical liberals sit uncomfortably in the middle without their own party. Except for "classical" liberals, everybody else believes in big government and government intervention.
Probably what confuses you is that Republicans say that they favor free markets when in practice they don't. (Of course, Democrats also say they stand for a lot of things that, in practice, they don't stand for.)
There is no "disagreement on the right" because "libertarians" and "classical liberals" aren't actually part of "the right". Republicans and Democrats are similar in their level of intervention in the market. The only people who would like less intervention are actual liberals, but both Republicans and Democrats are ganging up on them, trying to give them a bad name (and succeeding). Liberalism has been successfully marginalized in both the US and Europe for the time being.
Well, yes, in the sense that crony capitalism is what happens when various people try to "fix" capitalism by "protecting jobs" or "attracting business" or whatever, and politicians (both on the left and the right) have delusions of grandeur of being able to do this.
The solution, however, is not to get rid of capitalism, but to get rid of attempts to tinker with it. Let businesses fail and don't have the government "invest" in companies, period.
I mean, what alternative did you have in mind? If you don't like markets deciding where to put money and resources, and giving the responsibility to government leads to cronyism, who is left to make those decisions?
This makes the erroneous assumption that only those things are worthy of attention of government that a large percentage of the public agrees with. That is a disturbing view of how government should work.
If 25000 people bother to petition the White House about some issue, the president's staff should damned well pay attention and consider it. It doesn't matter whether any of the other 330 million people in the country approve or not. And if the president needs to make economic decisions by conducting unbiased polls of academic economists, he is obviously not up to his job and should resign.
The "or" means it could contribute only to a single one of them and the entire statement would still be true, but totally meaningless. Furthermore, "aggressiveness, fear, anxiety and desensitization" aren't the same as school violence or mass murder.
They are trying to push a political agenda by innuendo and guilt-by-association. Even if these people had a reasonable cause, such deliberate deception is unacceptable.
No reasonable person assumes that Moore's law is "inevitable". But if you're going to predict the future or write software, it's reasonable to assume that there is a strong possibility that it will continue.
If you look at human economic history, there are analogous regularities; they are different from Moore's law in that growth has increased in a series of "technological revolutions" that occur at ever decreasing intervals. Based on that, it is reasonable to entertain the possibility that another major shift in how we live and how we produce things is about to occur. It's not "wild-eyed optimism", it's pragmatism.
I think the problem with pessimists like you is that you really seem to know very little about the history of the human race, or the profound advances that have been happening outside the computer field. In any case, nobody is forcing you to move to a space station, and most people who predict such a future probably prefer less funding, rather than more funding, for NASA, so it doesn't affect you. Just go back to whatever it is you're doing and stop worrying about us.
What could there possibly be to discover in the asteroid belt and on other planets, right? if it's not scantily clad native women, you aren't interested, right? You really must hate science and technology.
There is tons of science to be done all over the solar system, and riches (metals, precious metals, rare earths) that dwarf anything available on earth
How about living in your own, personally customized space habitat that is several miles in diameter?
Are you really this dumb? Obviously I was talking about drugs to counteract bone loss.
Different people get them to different degrees, and there are good ways of counteracting them (mostly exercise). People have already stayed in zero G for six months several times, and they recovered.
People really need to stop being such naysayers and ninnies. The issues we face with space exploration (radiation, bone loss) are far less serious than what the explorers faced during the age of discovery (parasites, scurvy, and lots more). Even if we shipped off people tomorrow with no new technology, they'd come back healthier than most explorers in the history of humanity. Just read some of the early journals of exploration to get an idea of what they had to deal with.
We didn't "give it up"; alchemy continuously transitioned into modern chemistry.
I think NASA should "give up" on human space flight altogether... and leave it to the private sector. NASA should focus on exploration with space probes, fund basic research, and make the resulting data publicly and freely available. The rest will take care of itself.
You really need to read articles you point to; none of the other problems are particularly serious: they are temporary or mild, and they probably have simple treatments. Bone loss is the only really serious consequence, and even that may not matter if you don't worry about actually returning to 1G.
In any case, spinning a space station isn't hard anyway, and it's almost certainly sufficient to spend part of the day in 1G.
The only serious problem with lack of gravity is spaceflight osteopenia, but that can probably be handled via drugs or other tricks.
People may also just stop worrying about it, since it probably wouldn't kill you, just make return to a full gravity environment difficult.
I doubt we'll even bother with terraforming. Space is a much nicer environment than Mars. Radiation is not a problem once you start exploiting asteroids for building materials (since you can easily make walls a few feet thick). Gravity can be handled either via rotation or (in the future) via drugs.
People like you were also prognosticating that we were all going to starve, that the environment would be destroyed by pollution, that we'd run out of oil, that we'd freeze to death, that we'd boil to death... it ain't happening.
The solar system is a tremendously rich place, full of water, hydrocarbons, and metals, in convenient large chunks that are easy to exploit and easy to move around. They provide everything we need in a form that is far simpler to use than anything on earth. Food and oxygen production are trivial in space: there's plenty of sun, space, water, and carbon. Add some algae, and you get all the oxygen and food you would ever need.
As soon as we capture and exploit the first chunks of iron, carbon, and water in space, there will be an explosion of innovation and movement into the solar system; it will make the changes of the last century look like child's play. Within a few decades, engineering in space will dwarf the entire infrastructure we have built on earth. And we need no new technology for any of that.
We have an exponential growth in energy usage. You cannot offset that by efficiency gains, even if you made every single process (manufacturing, travel, etc.) on the planet 100% thermodynamically efficient, i.e. as efficient as possible; it's mathematically impossible.
(Citation?)
Bangladesh's economy is even more energy efficient. It's easy to increase energy efficiency if you accept a lower standard of living. Germany hasn't found a magic bullet in terms of energy efficiency, it just sits on a line between the US and Bangladesh in terms of possible tradeoffs between energy efficiency and wealth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gdp-energy-efficiency.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity