The right message is to write to your congressman and FTC how Mylan is gouging you the voter, and that the congressman and gov't are doing such a poor job keeping Mylan in line that Mylan feels comfortable telling their constituents to "go fuck themselves".
At very least, it opens up an opportunity for someone to fuck over Mylan, if only with compulsory political donations.
When you have eighty percent of the market, you have a monopoly. The fact that your best competitor only has ten percent means it doesn't really count.
No, it only means your company is very successful. You need to be successfully prosecuted in a court of law for using your market position to stifle competition or extort money/business based on your market position before you're legally considered a monopoly.
But their position in the marketplace was considered to be a de facto monopoly.
1) That was Microsoft, not Google. 2) Having the lion share of the marketplace does not make a company a monopoly. Having proven in a court of law that one used their market position to eliminate competition or coerce money out of customers in thrall to that company makes the company a monopoly. Also, in the US, the prosecution has to be able to argue that the market position would be sustained over a period of time and not a temporary market condition. As far as I know, Google has not lost an antitrust decision in the US.
I don't know why I keep getting declared a conspiracy theorist for pointing out that it happened,
I don't know fuck-all about you, or ever accused you to be a conspiracy theorist. Whether Google is a monopoly or not is not conspiracy theory.
Pretty much, although its more about addressing the fact that 75% of current jobs are going to get wiped out by automation, and that automation is not going to create 75% new jobs. Basic presumptions about how the capitalist system needs to be re-examined, including whether the threat of survival is required in order for capitalism to function (I seriously doubt that).
As a side note, I don't think people understand how salary works in the country.
At a certain salary amount, when you receive it long enough, a CEO will earn more money than they can spend profligately in their lifetime. So why do people pursue more amounts of money beyond that point? Its about collecting enough money to either subsidize personal causes, or manipulate the political process. At that level, its about accruing money for power; it has nothing to do with earning enough money for consumer goods.
There will be a shitload of people who will not pursue a demanding job because their basic needs are satisfied. They don't matter to the economy. They don't produce anything significant. Before automation, the only way to get production from a job was to put the fear of starvation & homeless into people. Once automation takes away 50% of all the jobs that used to employ people, who cares if those people don't want to work? They're already deemed useless by market forces.
Is the extra $5K a year you'll make working as a janitor be worth it now?
Yes, because that janitor will have access to $5K more luxuries (or investment opportunities) than someone who only collects UBI with no alternate income. Supply and demand will still drive the consumer market; it just means UBIs will only have enough money to feed themselves, clothe themselves, and house themselves. If they want to buy that book, computer SoC, or LeBron James kicks, he's going to have to earn money outside of UBI to pay for them.
In order words, incentives to work will not be "dramatically" increased. They'll stay roughly the same due to market forces.
In other words, 97-99% of the population collect a UBI, regardless whether they have a job, so whatever payment the employer offers is pure profit. Its only a small percentage of people who can earn an astronomical amount of money who actually get taxed (to support UBI).
...that paid me under the table, while collecting my UBI...
Yes, I'd abuse the hell out of it.
You don't get what UBI is. Its not merely a form of welfare. Properly designed, everyone collects a UBI, except for the people in the 1% who actually earns so much money, they're the one's paying taxes to support UBI.
UBI is merely a base payment made to every (non-rich) person to ensure they have enough money to feed, clothe, house themselves, and generate enough consumer activity to keep the economy moving. There will be indispensable jobs that cannot be economically replaced by automation. There will need to be sufficient payment to provide motivation to work those jobs and it will mean workers will have access to luxuries that will not be available to mere UBI recipients.
In a properly designed system, you can't "cheat" a taxation system by finding ways of making money while collecting UBI. Almost no one under the top 1-3% incomes of workers (remaining) will be required to pay taxes to support UBI. People finding ways of making money outside of UBI is merely proof that a capitalist system can be maintained without threatening starvation & homelessness if they are the least capable of making enough money to support themselves.
Today, though, encryption technology has created personal, unbreakable locks in virtually everyone's possession.
No, they are breakable. We just don't know how many months or decades will pass before they become breakable.
Law enforcement still has the same obligation to search these devices if there is probably cause to believe they contain evidence of a crime
Law enforcement has no legal concept enshrined which requires it to violate the CotUS in order to pursue the possibility of crime. In fact, if the only way they can prove a crime is committed is to use information obtained by violating the self-incrimination, that is basically grounds to dismiss a case.
A court order to provide the passcode is not a violation of the 5th, because providing a key to your unbreakable lock is not an admission or statement of guilt.
Bullshit. That's just you making up crap to support coerced, self-incriminating investigations. The bottom line, if you believe technology has changed legal conditions to the point that it becomes impossible to conduct prosecutions due to a technologically invulnerable source, pass a Constitutional amendment delineating when such a search can be legally applied. Don't try to let court precedent create law.
If they have an emergency and need supplies or personnel, you can send them. None of that is possible with a Mars mission.
Its a myth. NASA would never budget the money for a backup rescue launch to be ready to go if there was a problem at the Moonbase that could be survived by four days. They never have.
Only some at NASA. Robert Zubrin thought otherwise.
and is investigating fission and fusion drives
No they aren't. Its nothing more than the speculation stage.
Photonic propulsion can't deliver the momentum energy necessary for humans (or even a robot probe) to Mars in 3 days. You don't grasp how it works. You open up your solar sail, and sit there. The photons of light transfers its momentum to the mass that's your spacecraft. It takes vast amounts of distance & waiting to get the spacecraft moving. The distance from the Earth to the Mars is considered too short to make the technology useful. It could be useful for getting past Jupiter. But electromagnetic propulsion is way more practical, because electrons delivers a lot more propulsive energy than photons. It still may not be useful for a Mars level distance.
But fret not. Instead of chemical rockets, propulsion could be implemented by propelling Xenon or some other elemental ion by electrical charge. This is called an ion engine, and there is already a technologically reachable design called VASMR. This could probably cut the travel time to Mars to a month.
First off, since you concede Man has walked on the Moon, going back there is not advancing technology. The problems in sending Man to the Moon was worked out in the late 1960's. We'd be doing the same damn thing in 2020.
1) Living on the moon is not the same as VISITING the moon. I was talking about colonies. Colonization requires radically new technology we've not done before - but we would be able to reuse a lot of the tech we build for colonizing the moon to colonize mars later.
The Moon does not contain any organic compounds other than what has crashed on it by comets. Anything necessary to sustain life on the Moon would require shipping it from the Earth. And for what??? Even if it was possible to harvest H20 on the Moon (a small, glacier shelf's worth, in total), its probably not enough quantities to sustain a permanent presence, provide fuel for all future space missions, or even save money after factoring the cost to maintain a permanent observation room on the Moon!" The Moon is made up of similar sand compounds you'd find on a beach. You can't build a space program on glass structures. Until something else is found that would change the practical utility of the Moon (ore), the Moon is worthless.
The second mistake you make is thinking the US can afford to maintain a permanent presence on the Moon and a semi-permanent presence on Mars. That is a false notion. The reality is that there probably isn't the political will or discretionary funds for the US to even mount another visit on the Moon (Because a semi-permanent Moonbase would cost magnitudes more money to create and maintain). The question is whether you want to shutdown ISS, and have 10 more visits to the Moon, before the US doesn't want to fund an exclusive visitor center on the Moon, or a 2 year mission to Mars, and enough interest and technological advancement to sustain future permanent presence on Mars.
Mars may be closer to the asteroid belt but I'm willing to bet it's actually cheaper to mine them with launches off the moon. You can't launch from Mars for anywhere close to how cheaply you can do it from the lunar surface.
No, because there will have been no technological advancement in propulsion or long term space missions to get to the asteroid belt region and back. If you go to Mars, you have a reason to develop the capability to get there and back faster. If you only want to go to the Moon, its still going to be done with chemical rockets. You're not going to have a 2 year mission to Ceres before you've completed a 2 year mission to Mars (& back).
Erm - my whole point was to ask why that would be ?
Mars (probably) has an iron core center. It was formed in a process similar to Earth. The Moon was decidedly formed through a different process, although we don't know with certainty all the details. Mars used to have an atmosphere and "running water". Mars has the raw materials to sustain life (and manufacture useful items). Everything organic will have to be brought to the Moon, and that possibly even includes the H2O. Mars is a new challenging problem that would payoff with new commercial enterprises. The Moon would always be a parasite of Earth, and die without regular Earth shipments and funding.
Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.
You are absolutely right. Right now, spece exploration is exclusively in private hands. That is because public sector funds are not being spent on manned space exploration. Look at all that (zero) progress.
On the other hand, the private sector is obviously more efficient in developing ways of making a profit than government. So, why not let the government offload non-useful enterprises like the ISS to the private sector? Let the private sector develop commercial infrastructure to sustain the ISS (for space tourism). Once the private sector has built its infrastructure, then they will be more amenable to improve the economic utility of its current infrastructure by taking on more profitable ventures.
Now (US) government can take away the billions of dollars spent every year sending people to the ISS (and maintaining the ISS) on actual space exploration, like a Mars mission.
We know the ISS costs billions to maintain every year. Its costs money to put people up there (less to bring them back), pay those "astronauts" salaries, and the infrastructure and salaries of ground control to effect this transit. What are we gaining from the ISS now that pays back for this infrastructural cost? (Which doesn't help one iota in sending a man to Mars, or even the Moon).
It makes way more sense to get other countries to subsidize the maintenance cost of the ISS, who will inevitably offload the work to the private sector, who may be able to make a profit on space tourism. It should be obvious that there isn't enough scientific and engineering research that can be conducted on the ISS to justify the ISS's yearly support costs.
If NASA removed itself and budget from the ISS, the billions of dollars used to maintain the ISS program now can be used on a Mars mission!
Seeing as the world can't even make a simple semi-permanent habitation on the moon, something that's only four days away with current rocket tech, there's zero chance at putting people on Mars.
The world can make a semi-permanent habitation on the Moon! They did it in 1969. What you are not grasping is, "Why pay billions of dollars to sustain a semi-permanent habitation on the Moon??? What are you accomplishing???"
There are metric tons of people on earth willing to risk a journey to Mars. All that needs to be done is demonstrate that a person could survive a 6-9 month journey in space, and be able to harvest materials from Mars to go back (and survive on Mars indefinitely). The only thing you do by redemonstrating this experiment first on the Moon is waste hundreds of billions of dollars. And that may take away enough available money to delay a Mars trip by a century!
Frankly, when people can't grasp that the ISS was a huge waste of money and time, they now want to cling to the Moon.
More-over, if we do build a permanent settlement there - with launch capability, then suddenly further expansion becomes a great deal cheaper. You need a lot less fuel to launch from the moon than from earth since the gravity is way lower and there's no atmospheric drag.
Launch capability for what? There's not a lot of H2O on the Moon. It wouldn't make Mars travel easier. We'd probably have to spend decades, if not a century, locating & developing ways to collect H2O on the Moon before it could be of some sort of benefit for space exploration. The Moon is a huge waste of time.
Right now, the only chemical propellants to get anywhere in the solar system are only accessible on Earth. Even considering nuclear fuels, until they find deposits on the Moon, they only are accessible on Earth.
> I'm not sure what makes Mars more attractive than the moon for a first colony. Most of the difficulties about living on the Moon are present on Mars as well
1) The Moon has been done already.
Technology doesn't advance by working the same problems.
The Moon is a big waste of time. 2) Mars has more mass & more likelihood of materials worth mining.
Also, the Moon is basically a big grain of silica. There's nothing there worth collecting (other than He3). 3) Mars is closer to the asteroid region, for exploration/mining support 4) Mars would be more likely to sustain a permanent colony independent from Earth. 5) Kinetically, it doesn't take much more energy to go to Mars than the Moon. The difference is in transit time.
The only people that were not responsible for the outcome are the non-voters
They are also responsible for the result, because they were capable of acting, but chose not to act. The people who voted for the loser are not responsible for the outcome, because they acted, and their action did not result in their choice. How can you be responsible for the actions of the winner, when you acted to not put him/her in power?
if the voter turnout is south of 1% then that monster will have very little power.
We live in a Constitutional Republic, not a Direct Democracy. If only 1% of the population votes in the US, and results in a PotUS, that PotUS has all the power that the CotUS bequeaths to him. It would be a significant amount of power, whether there was 99% participation, 75% participation, 55% participation, 25% participation, or 1% participation.
Her zealot supporters are just as irritating as she is. They just don't grasp that HRC holds the most culpability for her loss. Hillary lost to a guy who could not keep his promises consistent within the same speech, refused to reveal his tax returns (but his voters are to blame for that), and most of all, was taped talking about how he would sexually assault married women.
Her supporters can't comprehend the most basic obvious fact: any competent politician should have crushed him in an election. Why couldn't HRC crush Trump? Because she and her supporters couldn't grasp that HRC politically was damaged goods! HRC still had to persuade the majority of voters (across 270 electoral votes) she would be a better PotUS than Trump. And she failed! She failed to grasp she created a perception problem with her email server, she failed to actually address it (other than say, "yeah, I made a mistake, now ignore it", rather than show actual remorse), she failed to convince a significant part of the population (Midwest/South/Southwest) she was a better agent their issues (jobs & whatever), she failed to get Democrat voters off their fannies and vote. Her whole campaign was "Look at this loser. You have no choice but vote for me." Yeah, that's brilliant marketing.
Comey recanted the investigation the day before the election. Hillary voters think independents stopped listening to the news and didn't know that when they went to vote. The only way Comey could have swung the election was the four states that had a margin less than 1% before the election. Putin probably had an influence on voter perception, but HRC had months to address it. The only way Comey could swing that election was for HRC to skip out on Michigan and Wisconsin and say, "vote for me, despite that I give you the impression I am above the law, because Trump is so much worse than me." This is how a loser loses an election against an amateur politician with a narcissistic personality disorder.
Comey is a one time thing. But dummy Democrats can't grasp they are still screwed in 2020. Because they will still put up a shitty candidate, rather than a candidate that truly inspires the majority of the US population, and they will still find ways to make excuses when their Wall Street funded, politically correct, uninspiring candidate only has a marginal advantage to Trump, and learns nothing when they lose in an electoral college voting system by a battleground state. It could be Tim Kaine, it could even be Biden; it will probably be the same result as HRC.
He doesn't know what you're talking about. Most grad students I know, that had to eat ramen noodles near daily to maintain housing and college tuition, that were able to eventually move to a more comfortable economic milleu, have more compassion and common sense than this asshole.
Don't expect the government to come to the rescue just because you failed to plan for the future.
Of course. But to be frank, you can't even count on that nest egg being there, even if you scrimp and save. There are a ton of ways Wall Street, with the cooperation or active abettance of the US Treasury, can either seize that nest egg, or fritter it away via inflation. Just study the details of economic collapses (starting with Great Depression, particularly Germany, but also look at foreign economic collapses, whether its Argentina, Norway/Sweden, the Asian currency collapse in 1998) and recessions (stuff like the S&L collapse in the late 1980's).
The last near-banking collapse in 2007-2008 should be quite instructive as well. After 75 years of no banking scares, the US/world economic systems nearly collapsed like an Argentinian bank. Basically, the US Treasury and Federal Reserve bailed out the banks by buying their toxic assets, and the 0% interest Fed lending window; the alleged 2009 infrastructure spending bill of under $800 billion dollars was a sham. The banking system didn't even go into near collapse by subprime mortgage loans, they were less than 5% of the entire loan market. It was the unregulated derivatives gambling posed in part by the subprime loans which threatened the entire system, and the short lending that suddenly wasn't there when Lehman was declared bankrupt. And look at who went to prison for the chicanery? Hell, that fucker Jamie Dimon still has a job after the London Whale fiasco lost $6.8 billion dollars. And now Trump and the banks want to reduce SEC regulation and oversight??? And now I'm supposed to "trust" Wall Street and the Fed Reserve ???
Did you really require that last iPhone, TV, new car, gaming-system, vacation-trip, restaurant-visit, bar-visit or could you have skipped it or bought something cheaper that provided the same functionality and saved some $$ for the future?
You see, you're part of the bullshit. A shitload of people don't even have the spare cash for recent model iPhone, or meal at a restaurant. I'm supposed to give up all alcohol for the next 40 years, because if I do that, and invest wisely, I am guaranteed that nest egg will even be there? Its not old people (unless they're poor) giving up cable TV service.
And the young people that builds up debt for school for taking some obscure classes that will never result in any money..
And really, all the 18 year olds, who never had to manage thousands of dollars in loans before, decided they're going to pursue an BS for an IT degree, and don't realize there won't be a job that will pay off the loans they accrued pursuing the degree, are the whole fault of the student loan debt slavery system???
Millennials (don't listen to this pompous asshole who gets his information from print media), realize that your parent sold you a bullshit story that all you needed to do was work hard, get your college degree, buy a house, and set aside money for your retirement, and most likely you will have a relatively comfortable, worry free life. They were lucky enough to live in an era where if you were that careful and responsible, this would probably be the result. What they didn't tell you was that foreign labor markets and now technology would take away those blue collar jobs. They're not telling you now that technology moves so fast, they're going to take away ALL the blue collar jobs, along with the professional jobs, like doctor, lawyer, insurance adjuster, etc. (There will still be architecture jobs, but the available jobs will shrink to a bunch of rich overseas billionaires, and those jobs will go the educated natives (not of this country) that are closer to the construction jobs.)
You do need to "save" money, pare down your discretionary spending, but you also have to realize that the rich people own all the banks, the media companies that tell you to invest your
Cigarettes are not good. They require a controlled environment, and will still deteriorate due to their organic components. What you'd be counting on is a legal crackdown on tobacco use, but then you're dealing in narcotics. In an actual collapse of civilization, tobacco would still exist; still be cultivatable, and luxury items would be produced after basic survival requirements were met.
Distilled alcohol is a good idea, not stuff like beer. But learning beer making skills would give you a marketable skill in the TEOTWAWKI.
But the smartest item to stockpile would be ammunition. Besides the need for self-defense, killing people for stuff you need to survive, it would also be a barter item that would not degrade over a century. Stock up on the 9mm parabellum, 5.56x45 NATO, and other rounds you may prefer.
Slashdot Mirror
That is the wrong message to tell Mylan.
The right message is to write to your congressman and FTC how Mylan is gouging you the voter, and that the congressman and gov't are doing such a poor job keeping Mylan in line that Mylan feels comfortable telling their constituents to "go fuck themselves".
At very least, it opens up an opportunity for someone to fuck over Mylan, if only with compulsory political donations.
When you have eighty percent of the market, you have a monopoly. The fact that your best competitor only has ten percent means it doesn't really count.
No, it only means your company is very successful. You need to be successfully prosecuted in a court of law for using your market position to stifle competition or extort money/business based on your market position before you're legally considered a monopoly.
But their position in the marketplace was considered to be a de facto monopoly.
1) That was Microsoft, not Google.
2) Having the lion share of the marketplace does not make a company a monopoly. Having proven in a court of law that one used their market position to eliminate competition or coerce money out of customers in thrall to that company makes the company a monopoly. Also, in the US, the prosecution has to be able to argue that the market position would be sustained over a period of time and not a temporary market condition. As far as I know, Google has not lost an antitrust decision in the US.
I don't know why I keep getting declared a conspiracy theorist for pointing out that it happened,
I don't know fuck-all about you, or ever accused you to be a conspiracy theorist. Whether Google is a monopoly or not is not conspiracy theory.
But technically, Google is not a monopoly, since it has many competitors, which includes Bing.
Pretty much, although its more about addressing the fact that 75% of current jobs are going to get wiped out by automation, and that automation is not going to create 75% new jobs. Basic presumptions about how the capitalist system needs to be re-examined, including whether the threat of survival is required in order for capitalism to function (I seriously doubt that).
As a side note, I don't think people understand how salary works in the country.
At a certain salary amount, when you receive it long enough, a CEO will earn more money than they can spend profligately in their lifetime. So why do people pursue more amounts of money beyond that point? Its about collecting enough money to either subsidize personal causes, or manipulate the political process. At that level, its about accruing money for power; it has nothing to do with earning enough money for consumer goods.
There will be a shitload of people who will not pursue a demanding job because their basic needs are satisfied. They don't matter to the economy. They don't produce anything significant. Before automation, the only way to get production from a job was to put the fear of starvation & homeless into people. Once automation takes away 50% of all the jobs that used to employ people, who cares if those people don't want to work? They're already deemed useless by market forces.
Is the extra $5K a year you'll make working as a janitor be worth it now?
Yes, because that janitor will have access to $5K more luxuries (or investment opportunities) than someone who only collects UBI with no alternate income. Supply and demand will still drive the consumer market; it just means UBIs will only have enough money to feed themselves, clothe themselves, and house themselves. If they want to buy that book, computer SoC, or LeBron James kicks, he's going to have to earn money outside of UBI to pay for them.
In order words, incentives to work will not be "dramatically" increased. They'll stay roughly the same due to market forces.
In other words, 97-99% of the population collect a UBI, regardless whether they have a job, so whatever payment the employer offers is pure profit. Its only a small percentage of people who can earn an astronomical amount of money who actually get taxed (to support UBI).
...that paid me under the table, while collecting my UBI...
Yes, I'd abuse the hell out of it.
You don't get what UBI is. Its not merely a form of welfare. Properly designed, everyone collects a UBI, except for the people in the 1% who actually earns so much money, they're the one's paying taxes to support UBI.
UBI is merely a base payment made to every (non-rich) person to ensure they have enough money to feed, clothe, house themselves, and generate enough consumer activity to keep the economy moving. There will be indispensable jobs that cannot be economically replaced by automation. There will need to be sufficient payment to provide motivation to work those jobs and it will mean workers will have access to luxuries that will not be available to mere UBI recipients.
In a properly designed system, you can't "cheat" a taxation system by finding ways of making money while collecting UBI. Almost no one under the top 1-3% incomes of workers (remaining) will be required to pay taxes to support UBI. People finding ways of making money outside of UBI is merely proof that a capitalist system can be maintained without threatening starvation & homelessness if they are the least capable of making enough money to support themselves.
Today, though, encryption technology has created personal, unbreakable locks in virtually everyone's possession.
No, they are breakable. We just don't know how many months or decades will pass before they become breakable.
Law enforcement still has the same obligation to search these devices if there is probably cause to believe they contain evidence of a crime
Law enforcement has no legal concept enshrined which requires it to violate the CotUS in order to pursue the possibility of crime. In fact, if the only way they can prove a crime is committed is to use information obtained by violating the self-incrimination, that is basically grounds to dismiss a case.
A court order to provide the passcode is not a violation of the 5th, because providing a key to your unbreakable lock is not an admission or statement of guilt.
Bullshit. That's just you making up crap to support coerced, self-incriminating investigations. The bottom line, if you believe technology has changed legal conditions to the point that it becomes impossible to conduct prosecutions due to a technologically invulnerable source, pass a Constitutional amendment delineating when such a search can be legally applied. Don't try to let court precedent create law.
You get what you pay for.
If they have an emergency and need supplies or personnel, you can send them. None of that is possible with a Mars mission.
Its a myth. NASA would never budget the money for a backup rescue launch to be ready to go if there was a problem at the Moonbase that could be survived by four days. They never have.
We dont know shit about surviving in space. Were just now starting to really answer a lot of the important questions.
Well, if that's the case, you shouldn't have any problem securing future funding for the ISS to answer those questions, huh?
Even NASA thinks 6-9 months is too long
Only some at NASA. Robert Zubrin thought otherwise.
and is investigating fission and fusion drives
No they aren't. Its nothing more than the speculation stage.
Photonic propulsion can't deliver the momentum energy necessary for humans (or even a robot probe) to Mars in 3 days. You don't grasp how it works. You open up your solar sail, and sit there. The photons of light transfers its momentum to the mass that's your spacecraft. It takes vast amounts of distance & waiting to get the spacecraft moving. The distance from the Earth to the Mars is considered too short to make the technology useful. It could be useful for getting past Jupiter. But electromagnetic propulsion is way more practical, because electrons delivers a lot more propulsive energy than photons. It still may not be useful for a Mars level distance.
But fret not. Instead of chemical rockets, propulsion could be implemented by propelling Xenon or some other elemental ion by electrical charge. This is called an ion engine, and there is already a technologically reachable design called VASMR. This could probably cut the travel time to Mars to a month.
First off, since you concede Man has walked on the Moon, going back there is not advancing technology. The problems in sending Man to the Moon was worked out in the late 1960's. We'd be doing the same damn thing in 2020.
1) Living on the moon is not the same as VISITING the moon. I was talking about colonies. Colonization requires radically new technology we've not done before - but we would be able to reuse a lot of the tech we build for colonizing the moon to colonize mars later.
The Moon does not contain any organic compounds other than what has crashed on it by comets. Anything necessary to sustain life on the Moon would require shipping it from the Earth. And for what??? Even if it was possible to harvest H20 on the Moon (a small, glacier shelf's worth, in total), its probably not enough quantities to sustain a permanent presence, provide fuel for all future space missions, or even save money after factoring the cost to maintain a permanent observation room on the Moon!" The Moon is made up of similar sand compounds you'd find on a beach. You can't build a space program on glass structures. Until something else is found that would change the practical utility of the Moon (ore), the Moon is worthless.
The second mistake you make is thinking the US can afford to maintain a permanent presence on the Moon and a semi-permanent presence on Mars. That is a false notion. The reality is that there probably isn't the political will or discretionary funds for the US to even mount another visit on the Moon (Because a semi-permanent Moonbase would cost magnitudes more money to create and maintain). The question is whether you want to shutdown ISS, and have 10 more visits to the Moon, before the US doesn't want to fund an exclusive visitor center on the Moon, or a 2 year mission to Mars, and enough interest and technological advancement to sustain future permanent presence on Mars.
Mars may be closer to the asteroid belt but I'm willing to bet it's actually cheaper to mine them with launches off the moon. You can't launch from Mars for anywhere close to how cheaply you can do it from the lunar surface.
No, because there will have been no technological advancement in propulsion or long term space missions to get to the asteroid belt region and back. If you go to Mars, you have a reason to develop the capability to get there and back faster. If you only want to go to the Moon, its still going to be done with chemical rockets. You're not going to have a 2 year mission to Ceres before you've completed a 2 year mission to Mars (& back).
Erm - my whole point was to ask why that would be ?
Mars (probably) has an iron core center. It was formed in a process similar to Earth. The Moon was decidedly formed through a different process, although we don't know with certainty all the details. Mars used to have an atmosphere and "running water". Mars has the raw materials to sustain life (and manufacture useful items). Everything organic will have to be brought to the Moon, and that possibly even includes the H2O. Mars is a new challenging problem that would payoff with new commercial enterprises. The Moon would always be a parasite of Earth, and die without regular Earth shipments and funding.
Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.
You are absolutely right. Right now, spece exploration is exclusively in private hands. That is because public sector funds are not being spent on manned space exploration. Look at all that (zero) progress.
On the other hand, the private sector is obviously more efficient in developing ways of making a profit than government. So, why not let the government offload non-useful enterprises like the ISS to the private sector? Let the private sector develop commercial infrastructure to sustain the ISS (for space tourism). Once the private sector has built its infrastructure, then they will be more amenable to improve the economic utility of its current infrastructure by taking on more profitable ventures.
Now (US) government can take away the billions of dollars spent every year sending people to the ISS (and maintaining the ISS) on actual space exploration, like a Mars mission.
We know the ISS costs billions to maintain every year. Its costs money to put people up there (less to bring them back), pay those "astronauts" salaries, and the infrastructure and salaries of ground control to effect this transit. What are we gaining from the ISS now that pays back for this infrastructural cost? (Which doesn't help one iota in sending a man to Mars, or even the Moon).
It makes way more sense to get other countries to subsidize the maintenance cost of the ISS, who will inevitably offload the work to the private sector, who may be able to make a profit on space tourism. It should be obvious that there isn't enough scientific and engineering research that can be conducted on the ISS to justify the ISS's yearly support costs.
If NASA removed itself and budget from the ISS, the billions of dollars used to maintain the ISS program now can be used on a Mars mission!
Seeing as the world can't even make a simple semi-permanent habitation on the moon, something that's only four days away with current rocket tech, there's zero chance at putting people on Mars.
The world can make a semi-permanent habitation on the Moon! They did it in 1969. What you are not grasping is, "Why pay billions of dollars to sustain a semi-permanent habitation on the Moon??? What are you accomplishing???"
There are metric tons of people on earth willing to risk a journey to Mars. All that needs to be done is demonstrate that a person could survive a 6-9 month journey in space, and be able to harvest materials from Mars to go back (and survive on Mars indefinitely). The only thing you do by redemonstrating this experiment first on the Moon is waste hundreds of billions of dollars. And that may take away enough available money to delay a Mars trip by a century!
Frankly, when people can't grasp that the ISS was a huge waste of money and time, they now want to cling to the Moon.
More-over, if we do build a permanent settlement there - with launch capability, then suddenly further expansion becomes a great deal cheaper. You need a lot less fuel to launch from the moon than from earth since the gravity is way lower and there's no atmospheric drag.
Launch capability for what? There's not a lot of H2O on the Moon. It wouldn't make Mars travel easier. We'd probably have to spend decades, if not a century, locating & developing ways to collect H2O on the Moon before it could be of some sort of benefit for space exploration. The Moon is a huge waste of time.
Right now, the only chemical propellants to get anywhere in the solar system are only accessible on Earth. Even considering nuclear fuels, until they find deposits on the Moon, they only are accessible on Earth.
> I'm not sure what makes Mars more attractive than the moon for a first colony. Most of the difficulties about living on the Moon are present on Mars as well
1) The Moon has been done already.
Technology doesn't advance by working the same problems.
The Moon is a big waste of time.
2) Mars has more mass & more likelihood of materials worth mining.
Also, the Moon is basically a big grain of silica. There's nothing there worth collecting (other than He3).
3) Mars is closer to the asteroid region, for exploration/mining support
4) Mars would be more likely to sustain a permanent colony independent from Earth.
5) Kinetically, it doesn't take much more energy to go to Mars than the Moon. The difference is in transit time.
The only people that were not responsible for the outcome are the non-voters
They are also responsible for the result, because they were capable of acting, but chose not to act. The people who voted for the loser are not responsible for the outcome, because they acted, and their action did not result in their choice. How can you be responsible for the actions of the winner, when you acted to not put him/her in power?
if the voter turnout is south of 1% then that monster will have very little power.
We live in a Constitutional Republic, not a Direct Democracy. If only 1% of the population votes in the US, and results in a PotUS, that PotUS has all the power that the CotUS bequeaths to him. It would be a significant amount of power, whether there was 99% participation, 75% participation, 55% participation, 25% participation, or 1% participation.
Her zealot supporters are just as irritating as she is. They just don't grasp that HRC holds the most culpability for her loss. Hillary lost to a guy who could not keep his promises consistent within the same speech, refused to reveal his tax returns (but his voters are to blame for that), and most of all, was taped talking about how he would sexually assault married women.
Her supporters can't comprehend the most basic obvious fact: any competent politician should have crushed him in an election. Why couldn't HRC crush Trump? Because she and her supporters couldn't grasp that HRC politically was damaged goods! HRC still had to persuade the majority of voters (across 270 electoral votes) she would be a better PotUS than Trump. And she failed! She failed to grasp she created a perception problem with her email server, she failed to actually address it (other than say, "yeah, I made a mistake, now ignore it", rather than show actual remorse), she failed to convince a significant part of the population (Midwest/South/Southwest) she was a better agent their issues (jobs & whatever), she failed to get Democrat voters off their fannies and vote. Her whole campaign was "Look at this loser. You have no choice but vote for me." Yeah, that's brilliant marketing.
Comey recanted the investigation the day before the election. Hillary voters think independents stopped listening to the news and didn't know that when they went to vote. The only way Comey could have swung the election was the four states that had a margin less than 1% before the election. Putin probably had an influence on voter perception, but HRC had months to address it. The only way Comey could swing that election was for HRC to skip out on Michigan and Wisconsin and say, "vote for me, despite that I give you the impression I am above the law, because Trump is so much worse than me." This is how a loser loses an election against an amateur politician with a narcissistic personality disorder.
Comey is a one time thing. But dummy Democrats can't grasp they are still screwed in 2020. Because they will still put up a shitty candidate, rather than a candidate that truly inspires the majority of the US population, and they will still find ways to make excuses when their Wall Street funded, politically correct, uninspiring candidate only has a marginal advantage to Trump, and learns nothing when they lose in an electoral college voting system by a battleground state. It could be Tim Kaine, it could even be Biden; it will probably be the same result as HRC.
He doesn't know what you're talking about. Most grad students I know, that had to eat ramen noodles near daily to maintain housing and college tuition, that were able to eventually move to a more comfortable economic milleu, have more compassion and common sense than this asshole.
Don't expect the government to come to the rescue just because you failed to plan for the future.
Of course. But to be frank, you can't even count on that nest egg being there, even if you scrimp and save. There are a ton of ways Wall Street, with the cooperation or active abettance of the US Treasury, can either seize that nest egg, or fritter it away via inflation. Just study the details of economic collapses (starting with Great Depression, particularly Germany, but also look at foreign economic collapses, whether its Argentina, Norway/Sweden, the Asian currency collapse in 1998) and recessions (stuff like the S&L collapse in the late 1980's).
The last near-banking collapse in 2007-2008 should be quite instructive as well. After 75 years of no banking scares, the US/world economic systems nearly collapsed like an Argentinian bank. Basically, the US Treasury and Federal Reserve bailed out the banks by buying their toxic assets, and the 0% interest Fed lending window; the alleged 2009 infrastructure spending bill of under $800 billion dollars was a sham. The banking system didn't even go into near collapse by subprime mortgage loans, they were less than 5% of the entire loan market. It was the unregulated derivatives gambling posed in part by the subprime loans which threatened the entire system, and the short lending that suddenly wasn't there when Lehman was declared bankrupt. And look at who went to prison for the chicanery? Hell, that fucker Jamie Dimon still has a job after the London Whale fiasco lost $6.8 billion dollars. And now Trump and the banks want to reduce SEC regulation and oversight??? And now I'm supposed to "trust" Wall Street and the Fed Reserve ???
Did you really require that last iPhone, TV, new car, gaming-system, vacation-trip, restaurant-visit, bar-visit or could you have skipped it or bought something cheaper that provided the same functionality and saved some $$ for the future?
You see, you're part of the bullshit. A shitload of people don't even have the spare cash for recent model iPhone, or meal at a restaurant. I'm supposed to give up all alcohol for the next 40 years, because if I do that, and invest wisely, I am guaranteed that nest egg will even be there? Its not old people (unless they're poor) giving up cable TV service.
And the young people that builds up debt for school for taking some obscure classes that will never result in any money..
And really, all the 18 year olds, who never had to manage thousands of dollars in loans before, decided they're going to pursue an BS for an IT degree, and don't realize there won't be a job that will pay off the loans they accrued pursuing the degree, are the whole fault of the student loan debt slavery system???
Millennials (don't listen to this pompous asshole who gets his information from print media), realize that your parent sold you a bullshit story that all you needed to do was work hard, get your college degree, buy a house, and set aside money for your retirement, and most likely you will have a relatively comfortable, worry free life. They were lucky enough to live in an era where if you were that careful and responsible, this would probably be the result. What they didn't tell you was that foreign labor markets and now technology would take away those blue collar jobs. They're not telling you now that technology moves so fast, they're going to take away ALL the blue collar jobs, along with the professional jobs, like doctor, lawyer, insurance adjuster, etc. (There will still be architecture jobs, but the available jobs will shrink to a bunch of rich overseas billionaires, and those jobs will go the educated natives (not of this country) that are closer to the construction jobs.)
You do need to "save" money, pare down your discretionary spending, but you also have to realize that the rich people own all the banks, the media companies that tell you to invest your
Cigarettes are not good. They require a controlled environment, and will still deteriorate due to their organic components. What you'd be counting on is a legal crackdown on tobacco use, but then you're dealing in narcotics. In an actual collapse of civilization, tobacco would still exist; still be cultivatable, and luxury items would be produced after basic survival requirements were met.
Distilled alcohol is a good idea, not stuff like beer. But learning beer making skills would give you a marketable skill in the TEOTWAWKI.
But the smartest item to stockpile would be ammunition. Besides the need for self-defense, killing people for stuff you need to survive, it would also be a barter item that would not degrade over a century. Stock up on the 9mm parabellum, 5.56x45 NATO, and other rounds you may prefer.