A higher order species that has brains that can "cleans" itself without requiring sleep would have so much evolutionary advantage that they would rapidly take over the entire planet (sort of like flowering plants). Why hasn't 3+ billion years of evolutionary produced such a species?
Obviously because the advantages of sleep outweigh the disadvantages. Evolution is very tidy that way, and there is no such thing as a "higher order" species -- merely one better adapted to its niche. The very notion is simply humanocentrism. We can hardly compete with the humble tardigrade for adaptability, for example.
It's interesting to note that as far as we know, all animals sleep. Some give it up for certain periods in their life (e.g. migrating birds, baby orcas & dolphins), and some do it with half a brain at a time (e.g. dolphins & orcas again), but none avoid it their entire lives. Even ants sleep.
It would be interesting to see if all animals have channels like these. If so, then this may represent a fundamental need that all creatures with a central nervous system need. It would be interesting to see if animals without one (e.g. sponges & jellyfish) sleep too. Interestingly, it seems that the latter do sleep.
You're possibly setting yourself up for Alzheimer's. It's been known for a long time that buildup of amyloid plaques is worsened by lack of sleep and vice versa. (Sleep issues show up long before other symptoms of Alzheimer's). This provide a mechanism by showing how the plaques are regularly removed by good sleep.
For extra fun, sleep is also when myelin-repairing oligodendrocytes kick into gear. You probably won't develop MS from not sleeping, but it isn't good for your long-term health, as that function is necessary to the survival of brain cells. This impacts mood, memory, and moral judgement.
Oh, and then there's the fact that lack of sleep disrupts the ratio of leptin and ghrelin in your body, making you far hungrier when awake. This is part of the reason that lack of sleep is correlated with obesity. You also have lower testosterone (impacting your virility) & higher cortisol levels (wrecking your memory and weakening your immune system). Other hormone changes put you at higher risks of type 2 diabetes.
In short, you're killing yourself. Seek help if this isn't voluntary. Prioritize getting more sleep.
But again, although the negatives are greater, there are also positives... people spending money while they'd otherwise be at work, maybe working some side jobs or taking advantage of other opportunities.
Considering that furloughed workers weren't paid during that period and, worse, had no idea how long that period would last, I'd imagine most of them were hoarding their money as best they could.
Also, it's hard to a side job when you have no idea when you can be called back to work at any time. A lot of people working low-end part time jobs have the exact same problem with their main employers demanding Continuous Availability. The days of making ends meet by working two jobs have been replaced with trying to get by on one crappy one in the past few years thanks to the low supply of jobs and high supply of labor.
Electric cars went about 50 to 100 miles almost 100 years ago. They do the same today.
Hopefully by about 2100, they should go 200 miles.
The "low-end" 60 kW-h version of the Model S gets 208 miles by the more conservative EPA estimate. The more expensive 85 kW-h gets 310 miles by European standards or 265 miles by EPA ones.
Money, to oversimplify a bit, is nothing but an abstraction for the value of labor and materials. For over two weeks, nearly 800,000 people did no work and weren't paid any money to buy things with. Private contractors hired by the government had to put their work on hold too. Businesses that rely on the government for services or to give permits required by law to move forward had to halt their businesses and wait. That's just destroyed productivity right there -- work that could be done but wasn't for 16 days.
Economic value out the window.
You also may want to count all the businesses that relied on people who relied on government services -- tourism dollars lost due to parks being shuttered, local businesses that have furloughed employees as customers, etc.
Party whips are near powerless compared to the past in the current environment because of changes to eliminate earmarks and favoritism in the selection of committee members and chairs. The whip cracks the other way today, as seen by Boehner's actions over the past few crises.
How House Republicans changed House rules to prevent Democrats from working with 28 Republicans who would have signed a clean budget bill from bringing the bill to the floor. (aka House Resolution 368.)
That's funny . . . while all of the 800K furloughed gov't workers were getting paid vacations because the idiots in Congress couldn't (and still can't) agree on anything, my (privately owned) small business hired two new folks and signed a multi-year lease to triple our square footage. We *worked* while they sat around and did squat.
"Paid vacation?" Paid vacation is what happens when you voluntarily choose to block off a period of time to relax with work's permission. It's not how I would describe being told that (a) you can't come into work, (b) we won't pay you during this period, (c) you can be called back into work at any time, and (d) we *might* pay you later -- we hope your landlord, your utilities, and your other creditors are okay with that.
You must have no freaking clue what it's like to be yanked around by an employer like that. This is what people at the lower end have to deal with all the time. Ask someone who works retail what it's like to never know what their schedule is going to be too far in advance, because they are expected to be always available to cover someone else's shift. "Yeah, that guy got 4 days off last week? What's his problem?" You don't know what it's like to have a paycheck disappear when you're living paycheck to paycheck and the rent comes due. I've got friends in that boat, so screw you and your entitled perspective.
Let me correct you about the 'web video'. Skype came from Estonia, then it was bought by Microsoft. As far as OS 'manufacturers', people around the world contribute.
By "web video," I meant sites like YouTube & Hulu, not video chat. Your comment about people around the world contributing is true for large companies, but most of the leadership is from the US.
We need to stop thinking in terms of 'my country made more gooder widgits than your country'. This is the single most devastating thought process which prevents society from evolving.
Oh, not by a long-shot. A little competitive spirit is good for growth, and it's far, far less destructive than ideas like, "Your values are different and thus evil," "It's forgivable when we do it, but an atrocity when you do it," or "If I'm successful, it's all my doing; if I fail, it's all someone else's fault."
Well, you're complaining about one aspect of it. How about the mandate to insurance companies that they can't turn you away for preexisting conditions or drop you after you develop chronic conditions or you reach a lifetime cap on coverage?
Unaffordable without either (a) the individual mandate, or (b) even more massive direct subsidies to private insurers.
I suspect it will be massaged over the years to work out little wrinkles, with the end result being a single payer system.
I disagree, and its one of the reasons that I was so opposed to the ACA at it's time of passage. By establishing the front-lines of the healthcare debate so far in favor of the continued existence of private insurance companies (only regulated), it has insured that the battles will only be fought over how much further right it can be pulled until it collapses, with the Democrats forced to defend their position rather than reform it into something more usable.
The fight over Obamacare will dominate at least the next 10-20 years of politics until it's either pulled down or grudgingly accepted. That's an entire generation that won't receive public healthcare because Democrats were too weak to get a public option put in. Had the public option made it in as an alternative to private companies, we would give the American people a good taste of how a public healthcare system would work, and we might have made it to a single-payer system eventually.
But that was a disaster scenario from the GOP's perspective, so it couldn't happen. Instead, Americans will be faced with exclusively a crappy, expensive hybrid system that's more likely to sour people on public healthcare than to make them embrace it.
I predict that Obamacare will kill any hopes of true public healthcare for at least 50 years. Either it will get pulled down, or it will become so entrenched that even liberals are afraid to attack it (as we see today) for fear of losing the scraps they have. We'll have to wait until the predicted demographic shift kills the Republican Party before there's any hope of real healthcare reform.
Nobody ever scared anyone with tales of $50 ER visits. Who'd buy insurance to cover cheap healthcare?
I keep wanting to respond to this, but I think I just don't actually know what you're trying to say. Could you explain in more detail what your statement is meant to imply? I have no clue.
Are you implying there already is a place with $50 ER visits? Are you implying this would be a bad thing? Are you suggesting this is possible without some sort of public or private insurance system?
(And who the hell modded this complete cipher "Insightful?")
The fact that socialization is happening with the aid of a computer does not make it inherently more dangerous...
Yes it does. There is far more access to dangerous materials and dangerous people online than there is in person. While there's a slight advantage in a greater pool of potential victims to hide in the crowd of, the danger in the ability of predators of any stripe (not just sexual) to reach your kids from anywhere in the country or even the world. There's not as much ability for kids to tell what a "bad neighborhood" is online as in real life.
There's also less public shame for bad behavior and a greater tendency for people to act in herds of like-minded individuals. (See, e.g. the resurgence of white supremacist groups in the modern day or "thinspiration" sites.) You don't have to encounter people who disagree with you, unless you want to -- even if just to troll them. Witness comments section of any news or politics site.
[W]ithout the Interwebs this girl would still have been harassed, and we should be working to stop the harassment, not to stop the use of computers in harassment.
The harassment would have been completely different in tone and scale. Hiding behind a computer is quite different from doing something where witnesses who might disapprove would be present to act as a check or the much simpler one of being within arms reach. Witness Xbox Live, the domain of bullies who would be the bullied anywhere else.
Tools matter. There's a difference between two hotheaded boys getting in a fist fight and two armed hotheaded boys getting into a fight. The same is true of cyberbullying v. in-person bullying. People act differently in different environments, and online is more (and less) dangerous for certain types of behavior.
Pretty much everything internet has been pioneered in America: ecommerce, social media, search engines, online maps, instant messaging, web video, blogs, BitTorrent and most other P2P services, Tor, etc. There may be a few earlier versions of these ideas that you can point to (e.g. Minitel), but the versions the world uses today are all defined by American companies.
There's a lot of other computer innovation in America too. The top CPU & GPU makers are all American companies. So are the top OS manufacturers. So are the top database vendors, the most of top networking hardware companies, and all the top cloud computing services. Behind the scenes, we have many companies that are world leaders in supply-chain automation like Amazon and Wall-mart.
Those are just my areas of knowledge. We also have a successful aerospace and pharmaceutical sector, so I suspect a lot of innovation there too. We've had a lot of innovation in energy too, but that technology is pretty much global at this point.
Ah, it's a speech from him. No, I'll trust a transcript. Or just a date & location, and I can look it up myself.
(Not that I'd be all that surprised if Obama broke yet another campaign promise, but I just don't think that one jived with the others I remembered on the issue of taxes.)
Creating jobs, for expanding services, support, and new product development is going to happen somewhere, with or without Ireland. So Ireland wants it to be in Ireland. Nothing is being destroyed, by either Apple or Ireland.
You're partially right. The jobs will happen somewhere, which is why the notion that tax avoidance "creates jobs" is utter BS. All it does is rob the American people of the revenue to pay for the services that Apple benefits from as an American company. That's the broken window -- higher debt and costs eventually shifted from the investor class to the working class and a more lawless market.
That's not a cost the Irish are paying. In fact, they're reaping the benefits of putting the stick to America, but that cost is being paid somewhere, and rent-seeking behavior weakens the ability of nations to address important causes like labor conditions, a clean environment, and trust in the financial sector by allowing the worst actors to simply demand lower and lower standards in exchange for putting the jobs that are going to happen anyway right there. The end result is a harsher, more dangerous world with greater class divisions, more unrest, and less trustworthy markets.
Some of my friends don't check their e-mail more than once every few weeks and don't sign in to any instant messenger often, but most of them are on Facebook at least once per day. If something else had quite the communications potential for reaching a long list of friends quickly, I'd be more than interested.
You just listed two technologies that used to do this exact thing before people got tired of them and moved onto the next big thing. Someday, Facebook will be the same for all of you.
I don't watch videos at work nor read Slashdot at home (most of the time). Got a text link for whatever point you were making?
Plus I'm not fond of waiting around and listening for minutes until someone gets to an important point that I could have reached in mere seconds of reading.
You know, if you want to just automatically churn out metal gun parts, you could do it with a CNC mill for a fraction of the cost. It's not like automated metalworking is a new thing. The plastic gun was mostly a stunt -- a dangerous one at that.
Or if you were willing to put in the time and elbow grease yourself, you could mill your own parts by hand for a fraction of that with power tools bought from Home Depot. It's not like there isn't a wealth of material at your fingertips on the internet from a devoted community of paranoid "gotta be able to make this myself once the gubbermint takes mah gun away" people to get you started. As a bonus, many of these people are smart and meticulous (despite my teasing), and it's all legal with the right licenses, so the material's more trustworthy than your average Anarchists's Cookbook nonsense.
And if you really don't care about having a polished, reusable model to show off, zip guns can be made with entirely off the shelf parts found in your local tool store too.
Sometimes reading past the title of the post is helpful. The GP answered your question before you asked it.
And then once they move to the next lowest rung on the race to the bottom, what -- are they gonna set up robots there or something?
I tend to find that if the only thing someone can offer in defense of a policy is that it's "job creating," then they damn it with faint praise. Many extremely negative behaviors "create jobs." Pimps create jobs. Drug lords create jobs. People who dump toxic waste create all kinds of jobs in the cleanup. Heck, bureaucratic redtape creates jobs to deal with it all!
Saying something "creates jobs" is nothing more than a prettier version of the broken window fallacy.
[I]f the portions of government we shut down are so nonessential, why the fuck did we spend money on them in the first place?
What do you do for a living? Could your company survive without you doing your job for a few days? How about a week or a month? Be realistic here -- are you the kind of person who can take vacation without someone else having to do your job to keep everything from falling apart? If not, then do you know people like that?
That's what "non-essential" means. It doesn't mean that the work doesn't ever need to be done. It just means that we can go without it for a short time, like skipping a meal to make sure you can pay rent. Which a lot of furloughed workers may be doing right now, considering how little most civil servants are paid compared to equivalent private sector jobs.
Few things sadder than someone who proudly declares that they have nothing important to say and yet who fails to even deliver that simple of a message on time.
Manned spaceflight only makes sense with a huge breakthrough in propulsion. Otherwise, there is no where to go where a human being would be useful enough to make it worthwhile.
There's plenty of interesting science and engineering to do just right in our orbit. At the very least, it serves as an important testbed for building the technology to support human life in space as well as to discover the health risks of being in space that aren't apparent on the ground. (e.g. Space blindness.)
It's like all the people pooh-poohing ITER in the article about it today. ITER isn't going to be a commercial reactor. Neither is DEMO. But PROTO won't be able to be build without ITER and DEMO to do the fundamental research into addressing the problems we know about and to uncover the ones we don't. Manned space travel will never be practical without working our way through impractical manned space travel first. Real life isn't some sort of game where we can just spend enough research points and pop a working technology later. You have to meet problems head on to solve them.
Almost every federal project is a tiny fraction of the budget...
NASA isn't a single federal project. It's a department with a large variety of programs under its wing. Not every equivalent branch of the government is funded so little...or so much. The EPA gets roughly half of what NASA does. The National Parks Service gets about 1/6. NOAA gets 1/3. On the other hand, Homeland Security & State get over 3X NASA's budget each. Veteran's Affairs gets almost 8X. Defense gets about 38X.
They're not all the same, unless you deliberately slice them to the same size to win the argument through definition rather than merits.
Slashdot Mirror
It's only evil when you get caught.
Yeah, and then the blame belongs to the person who tattled on you.
A higher order species that has brains that can "cleans" itself without requiring sleep would have so much evolutionary advantage that they would rapidly take over the entire planet (sort of like flowering plants). Why hasn't 3+ billion years of evolutionary produced such a species?
Obviously because the advantages of sleep outweigh the disadvantages. Evolution is very tidy that way, and there is no such thing as a "higher order" species -- merely one better adapted to its niche. The very notion is simply humanocentrism. We can hardly compete with the humble tardigrade for adaptability, for example.
It's interesting to note that as far as we know, all animals sleep. Some give it up for certain periods in their life (e.g. migrating birds, baby orcas & dolphins), and some do it with half a brain at a time (e.g. dolphins & orcas again), but none avoid it their entire lives. Even ants sleep.
It would be interesting to see if all animals have channels like these. If so, then this may represent a fundamental need that all creatures with a central nervous system need. It would be interesting to see if animals without one (e.g. sponges & jellyfish) sleep too. Interestingly, it seems that the latter do sleep.
You're possibly setting yourself up for Alzheimer's. It's been known for a long time that buildup of amyloid plaques is worsened by lack of sleep and vice versa. (Sleep issues show up long before other symptoms of Alzheimer's). This provide a mechanism by showing how the plaques are regularly removed by good sleep.
For extra fun, sleep is also when myelin-repairing oligodendrocytes kick into gear. You probably won't develop MS from not sleeping, but it isn't good for your long-term health, as that function is necessary to the survival of brain cells. This impacts mood, memory, and moral judgement.
Oh, and then there's the fact that lack of sleep disrupts the ratio of leptin and ghrelin in your body, making you far hungrier when awake. This is part of the reason that lack of sleep is correlated with obesity. You also have lower testosterone (impacting your virility) & higher cortisol levels (wrecking your memory and weakening your immune system). Other hormone changes put you at higher risks of type 2 diabetes.
In short, you're killing yourself. Seek help if this isn't voluntary. Prioritize getting more sleep.
But again, although the negatives are greater, there are also positives... people spending money while they'd otherwise be at work, maybe working some side jobs or taking advantage of other opportunities.
Considering that furloughed workers weren't paid during that period and, worse, had no idea how long that period would last, I'd imagine most of them were hoarding their money as best they could.
Also, it's hard to a side job when you have no idea when you can be called back to work at any time. A lot of people working low-end part time jobs have the exact same problem with their main employers demanding Continuous Availability. The days of making ends meet by working two jobs have been replaced with trying to get by on one crappy one in the past few years thanks to the low supply of jobs and high supply of labor.
Electric cars went about 50 to 100 miles almost 100 years ago.
They do the same today.
Hopefully by about 2100, they should go 200 miles.
The "low-end" 60 kW-h version of the Model S gets 208 miles by the more conservative EPA estimate. The more expensive 85 kW-h gets 310 miles by European standards or 265 miles by EPA ones.
How did all that money just leave the economy?
Money, to oversimplify a bit, is nothing but an abstraction for the value of labor and materials. For over two weeks, nearly 800,000 people did no work and weren't paid any money to buy things with. Private contractors hired by the government had to put their work on hold too. Businesses that rely on the government for services or to give permits required by law to move forward had to halt their businesses and wait. That's just destroyed productivity right there -- work that could be done but wasn't for 16 days.
Economic value out the window.
You also may want to count all the businesses that relied on people who relied on government services -- tourism dollars lost due to parks being shuttered, local businesses that have furloughed employees as customers, etc.
Party whips are near powerless compared to the past in the current environment because of changes to eliminate earmarks and favoritism in the selection of committee members and chairs. The whip cracks the other way today, as seen by Boehner's actions over the past few crises.
How House Republicans changed House rules to prevent Democrats from working with 28 Republicans who would have signed a clean budget bill from bringing the bill to the floor. (aka House Resolution 368.)
For bonus reading:
19 Times Democrats Tried to Negotiate with Republicans to avert the shutdown by sending the Senate's proposed budget to a bicameral conference committee.
That's funny . . . while all of the 800K furloughed gov't workers were getting paid vacations because the idiots in Congress couldn't (and still can't) agree on anything, my (privately owned) small business hired two new folks and signed a multi-year lease to triple our square footage. We *worked* while they sat around and did squat.
"Paid vacation?" Paid vacation is what happens when you voluntarily choose to block off a period of time to relax with work's permission. It's not how I would describe being told that (a) you can't come into work, (b) we won't pay you during this period, (c) you can be called back into work at any time, and (d) we *might* pay you later -- we hope your landlord, your utilities, and your other creditors are okay with that.
You must have no freaking clue what it's like to be yanked around by an employer like that. This is what people at the lower end have to deal with all the time. Ask someone who works retail what it's like to never know what their schedule is going to be too far in advance, because they are expected to be always available to cover someone else's shift. "Yeah, that guy got 4 days off last week? What's his problem?" You don't know what it's like to have a paycheck disappear when you're living paycheck to paycheck and the rent comes due. I've got friends in that boat, so screw you and your entitled perspective.
Let me correct you about the 'web video'. Skype came from Estonia, then it was bought by Microsoft.
As far as OS 'manufacturers', people around the world contribute.
By "web video," I meant sites like YouTube & Hulu, not video chat. Your comment about people around the world contributing is true for large companies, but most of the leadership is from the US.
We need to stop thinking in terms of 'my country made more gooder widgits than your country'. This is the single most devastating thought process which prevents society from evolving.
Oh, not by a long-shot. A little competitive spirit is good for growth, and it's far, far less destructive than ideas like, "Your values are different and thus evil," "It's forgivable when we do it, but an atrocity when you do it," or "If I'm successful, it's all my doing; if I fail, it's all someone else's fault."
Well, you're complaining about one aspect of it. How about the mandate to insurance companies that they can't turn you away for preexisting conditions or drop you after you develop chronic conditions or you reach a lifetime cap on coverage?
Unaffordable without either (a) the individual mandate, or (b) even more massive direct subsidies to private insurers.
I suspect it will be massaged over the years to work out little wrinkles, with the end result being a single payer system.
I disagree, and its one of the reasons that I was so opposed to the ACA at it's time of passage. By establishing the front-lines of the healthcare debate so far in favor of the continued existence of private insurance companies (only regulated), it has insured that the battles will only be fought over how much further right it can be pulled until it collapses, with the Democrats forced to defend their position rather than reform it into something more usable.
The fight over Obamacare will dominate at least the next 10-20 years of politics until it's either pulled down or grudgingly accepted. That's an entire generation that won't receive public healthcare because Democrats were too weak to get a public option put in. Had the public option made it in as an alternative to private companies, we would give the American people a good taste of how a public healthcare system would work, and we might have made it to a single-payer system eventually.
But that was a disaster scenario from the GOP's perspective, so it couldn't happen. Instead, Americans will be faced with exclusively a crappy, expensive hybrid system that's more likely to sour people on public healthcare than to make them embrace it.
I predict that Obamacare will kill any hopes of true public healthcare for at least 50 years. Either it will get pulled down, or it will become so entrenched that even liberals are afraid to attack it (as we see today) for fear of losing the scraps they have. We'll have to wait until the predicted demographic shift kills the Republican Party before there's any hope of real healthcare reform.
Nobody ever scared anyone with tales of $50 ER visits. Who'd buy insurance to cover cheap healthcare?
I keep wanting to respond to this, but I think I just don't actually know what you're trying to say. Could you explain in more detail what your statement is meant to imply? I have no clue.
Are you implying there already is a place with $50 ER visits? Are you implying this would be a bad thing? Are you suggesting this is possible without some sort of public or private insurance system?
(And who the hell modded this complete cipher "Insightful?")
The fact that socialization is happening with the aid of a computer does not make it inherently more dangerous...
Yes it does. There is far more access to dangerous materials and dangerous people online than there is in person. While there's a slight advantage in a greater pool of potential victims to hide in the crowd of, the danger in the ability of predators of any stripe (not just sexual) to reach your kids from anywhere in the country or even the world. There's not as much ability for kids to tell what a "bad neighborhood" is online as in real life.
There's also less public shame for bad behavior and a greater tendency for people to act in herds of like-minded individuals. (See, e.g. the resurgence of white supremacist groups in the modern day or "thinspiration" sites.) You don't have to encounter people who disagree with you, unless you want to -- even if just to troll them. Witness comments section of any news or politics site.
[W]ithout the Interwebs this girl would still have been harassed, and we should be working to stop the harassment, not to stop the use of computers in harassment.
The harassment would have been completely different in tone and scale. Hiding behind a computer is quite different from doing something where witnesses who might disapprove would be present to act as a check or the much simpler one of being within arms reach. Witness Xbox Live, the domain of bullies who would be the bullied anywhere else.
Tools matter. There's a difference between two hotheaded boys getting in a fist fight and two armed hotheaded boys getting into a fight. The same is true of cyberbullying v. in-person bullying. People act differently in different environments, and online is more (and less) dangerous for certain types of behavior.
Define recent years, for one thing.
Pretty much everything internet has been pioneered in America: ecommerce, social media, search engines, online maps, instant messaging, web video, blogs, BitTorrent and most other P2P services, Tor, etc. There may be a few earlier versions of these ideas that you can point to (e.g. Minitel), but the versions the world uses today are all defined by American companies.
There's a lot of other computer innovation in America too. The top CPU & GPU makers are all American companies. So are the top OS manufacturers. So are the top database vendors, the most of top networking hardware companies, and all the top cloud computing services. Behind the scenes, we have many companies that are world leaders in supply-chain automation like Amazon and Wall-mart.
Those are just my areas of knowledge. We also have a successful aerospace and pharmaceutical sector, so I suspect a lot of innovation there too. We've had a lot of innovation in energy too, but that technology is pretty much global at this point.
Ah, it's a speech from him. No, I'll trust a transcript. Or just a date & location, and I can look it up myself.
(Not that I'd be all that surprised if Obama broke yet another campaign promise, but I just don't think that one jived with the others I remembered on the issue of taxes.)
Creating jobs, for expanding services, support, and new product development is going to happen somewhere, with or without Ireland. So Ireland wants it to be in Ireland. Nothing is being destroyed, by either Apple or Ireland.
You're partially right. The jobs will happen somewhere, which is why the notion that tax avoidance "creates jobs" is utter BS. All it does is rob the American people of the revenue to pay for the services that Apple benefits from as an American company. That's the broken window -- higher debt and costs eventually shifted from the investor class to the working class and a more lawless market.
That's not a cost the Irish are paying. In fact, they're reaping the benefits of putting the stick to America, but that cost is being paid somewhere, and rent-seeking behavior weakens the ability of nations to address important causes like labor conditions, a clean environment, and trust in the financial sector by allowing the worst actors to simply demand lower and lower standards in exchange for putting the jobs that are going to happen anyway right there. The end result is a harsher, more dangerous world with greater class divisions, more unrest, and less trustworthy markets.
Some of my friends don't check their e-mail more than once every few weeks and don't sign in to any instant messenger often, but most of them are on Facebook at least once per day. If something else had quite the communications potential for reaching a long list of friends quickly, I'd be more than interested.
You just listed two technologies that used to do this exact thing before people got tired of them and moved onto the next big thing. Someday, Facebook will be the same for all of you.
I don't watch videos at work nor read Slashdot at home (most of the time). Got a text link for whatever point you were making?
Plus I'm not fond of waiting around and listening for minutes until someone gets to an important point that I could have reached in mere seconds of reading.
You know, if you want to just automatically churn out metal gun parts, you could do it with a CNC mill for a fraction of the cost. It's not like automated metalworking is a new thing. The plastic gun was mostly a stunt -- a dangerous one at that.
Or if you were willing to put in the time and elbow grease yourself, you could mill your own parts by hand for a fraction of that with power tools bought from Home Depot. It's not like there isn't a wealth of material at your fingertips on the internet from a devoted community of paranoid "gotta be able to make this myself once the gubbermint takes mah gun away" people to get you started. As a bonus, many of these people are smart and meticulous (despite my teasing), and it's all legal with the right licenses, so the material's more trustworthy than your average Anarchists's Cookbook nonsense.
And if you really don't care about having a polished, reusable model to show off, zip guns can be made with entirely off the shelf parts found in your local tool store too.
Sometimes reading past the title of the post is helpful. The GP answered your question before you asked it.
And then once they move to the next lowest rung on the race to the bottom, what -- are they gonna set up robots there or something?
I tend to find that if the only thing someone can offer in defense of a policy is that it's "job creating," then they damn it with faint praise. Many extremely negative behaviors "create jobs." Pimps create jobs. Drug lords create jobs. People who dump toxic waste create all kinds of jobs in the cleanup. Heck, bureaucratic redtape creates jobs to deal with it all!
Saying something "creates jobs" is nothing more than a prettier version of the broken window fallacy.
[I]f the portions of government we shut down are so nonessential, why the fuck did we spend money on them in the first place?
What do you do for a living? Could your company survive without you doing your job for a few days? How about a week or a month? Be realistic here -- are you the kind of person who can take vacation without someone else having to do your job to keep everything from falling apart? If not, then do you know people like that?
That's what "non-essential" means. It doesn't mean that the work doesn't ever need to be done. It just means that we can go without it for a short time, like skipping a meal to make sure you can pay rent. Which a lot of furloughed workers may be doing right now, considering how little most civil servants are paid compared to equivalent private sector jobs.
Few things sadder than someone who proudly declares that they have nothing important to say and yet who fails to even deliver that simple of a message on time.
Manned spaceflight only makes sense with a huge breakthrough in propulsion. Otherwise, there is no where to go where a human being would be useful enough to make it worthwhile.
There's plenty of interesting science and engineering to do just right in our orbit. At the very least, it serves as an important testbed for building the technology to support human life in space as well as to discover the health risks of being in space that aren't apparent on the ground. (e.g. Space blindness.)
It's like all the people pooh-poohing ITER in the article about it today. ITER isn't going to be a commercial reactor. Neither is DEMO. But PROTO won't be able to be build without ITER and DEMO to do the fundamental research into addressing the problems we know about and to uncover the ones we don't. Manned space travel will never be practical without working our way through impractical manned space travel first. Real life isn't some sort of game where we can just spend enough research points and pop a working technology later. You have to meet problems head on to solve them.
Almost every federal project is a tiny fraction of the budget...
NASA isn't a single federal project. It's a department with a large variety of programs under its wing. Not every equivalent branch of the government is funded so little ...or so much. The EPA gets roughly half of what NASA does. The National Parks Service gets about 1/6. NOAA gets 1/3. On the other hand, Homeland Security & State get over 3X NASA's budget each. Veteran's Affairs gets almost 8X. Defense gets about 38X.
They're not all the same, unless you deliberately slice them to the same size to win the argument through definition rather than merits.