""Hanford has not been cleared up and is leaking. Read about it on wikipedia. The numbers on there are talking about a million gallons of highly radioactive waste that has not yet entered the river. However bad it is now and/or was then, it has the potential to get much worse in the near future."
Funny, that's exactly what I was saying;)
We're in agreement, we're just not communicating.
Probably the most common problem, nowadays.
Most of those storage containers have, what, a roughly fifty year projected 50/50 containment life? Right about now, bar a few years;(
The sad thing about it, my friend, is that the discussion about the hazards, and the continual avoidance of responsibility for cleanup, has been going on for longer than you or I have been alive (likely, unless you're in your late 70s)
You said "Currently the stored (highly radioactive) waste is leaking into the groundwater, but has not yet reached the river."
But I showed you that it has already. Operational or not - and you didn't mention that at all in your post; it's still there, and given that the site hasn't been cleaned up, it is still a problem, neh? Did it just stop leaking? Leakage is still occurring and will likely get worse as the containers buried there, and the liquid waste facilities, continue to deteriorate.
It's also highly likely that there's a lot of that waste, even from the time period you refer to, sequestered in sediments and other places along the river.
I guess I'm wondering what point you're trying to make in your reply. "That's not the waste I was talking about" sounds like "that's not the droids you are looking for."
Not yet? Are you implying that Hanford isn't a major problem, "yet"? It's been a superfund site since the late 80s, and is not-so-debatedly our worse radioactive dump site. Why it hasn't been seriously dealt with, considering it's location and the cities downstream, and the sheer amount of waste stored there, escapes me.
I'm not being pedantic. Hanford is a horrible problem and we should have put major funding into cleaning it up back in the 80s, when the problem was recognized. I'm old enough to remember the news and science journal reports back when it started becoming a concern - decades late wrt to our knowledge about the dangers, as far as I'm concerned.
That's what got my ire up about this story - finding an old Manhattan Proj era safe with near-critical mass material in it just "buried" at the site - likely lost thru oversight and secrecy, and we're apparently just getting that deep into digging this stuff up? Obviously our cleanup/superfund programs are underfunded or not being done competently. (Not news, but still aggravating)
So make yourself clear, if you can.
Yeah, I'm angry. Not at you, specifically, but at the ignoramuses who have and continue to bury problems like this because it's "not their problem" - or, "it's not a/(our) problem...yet" or "we don't want to pay money to fix it, let our kids do it." Bullshit. Metric tons of bullshit.... superfund sites seem to exist at the whim of the current administration. Which is a travesty. We as a country need to own up to our past problems, and just fix them. Which will be costly, but not as costly as ceasing to exist as as a nation, culture, or society, or even a responsible political entity. If there is such a thing.
Not sorry if I seem to be ranting. Someone has to say it. I just wish I knew how to say it more clearly.
Even if those figures are off by an order of magnitude, we now know where all the water that carved the Martian surface went.
That doesn't even include any other subsurface glaciers we haven't found yet.
While it doesn't make Mars terraformable with current technology, it does lower the bar a bit. Large orbital mirrors aren't likely to work, and comet impacts will be redundant. Clean fusion devices might do the job.
Ares is already overweight and behind schedule; I would rather bet that it will become more so rather than less so before development is done. DIRECT is not immune to the same effects,
I would friend you for that incredibly insightful comment, but:
"You have over 200 friends and foes at the moment. This puts you over our limit of 200 relationships that we allow. At this point you may only remove relationships with users."
If terrorists can, or do, operate on that sort of small scale anywhere, then we're already screwed.
As was pointed out earlier, there are much better targets. Oil refineries. Chemical production plants. Any production facility that uses hazardous chemicals - thousands of those around. Large truck stops - think about it, hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline, just a few meters underground, vulnerable to anyone who can obtain a few hundred kgs of explosives, and a one ton truck. You think being downwind of a burning petrol storage facility is fun?
Remember the Oklahoma city bombing? Using readily available farm fertilizers? What if those idiots had seeded their truck with a lot of commonly available carcinogenic chemicals that were readily oxidized?
Your argument is a strawman. You are conflating access with potential damage, and the potential is already there, on much larger scales than what you suggest. The effort required to pull off what you suggest would be a lot more than what is already necessary to create havoc with our existing infrastructure.
I suggest you take a step back, do some reading, and try to drop your paranoia about anything "nuclear".
Another thing you haven't considered is if someone figures out a way to mount a non-invasive attack on the reactor and cause a run-away reaction.
Whose to say a terrorist attack couldn't be mounted *after* the reactor is dug up and put on a truck when it contains the most radioactive elements, provoked into a run-away reaction and simply driven into a large city. It's readily portable size makes it a very juicy target indeed.
Oh? Do you have some proposed method as to how to do this? Because if you do, then you should go and apply to Hyperion or some of the other companies building these things, and suggest this to them, so they can learn how to defend against it.
If you don't then shut the fuck up, and pull your head out of your ass. Don't you think that the engineers who build these things haven't already considered that? Especially considering that these power facilities have to be approved by our nuclear and power facility regulatory agencies?
(FWIW I'm a proponent both of modern nuclear tech and solar/wind tech - they both have advantages on the scales they are most efficient at. Nuclear plants for larger scale power - cities and industry - and solar/wind for rural areas and smaller populated areas which don't need centralized power production on this scale. These power plants might just be the bridge we need between the two to get rid of our horridly costly, polluting coal-fired plants that power a lot of our small towns and rural areas. )
I'm sorry to say it, but you are exactly the sort of person who is completely counter-productive in any discussion about this sort of technology, because you have little or no idea what you are talking about.
Mod me flamebait, because this post is intended as a kick in the ass; which is just so. I am just so damned sick and tired of ignorant reactionary morons who impede any damned solution we have to solving our energy problems that I am ready to exile the whole lot of them to the moon where they can figure it out for themselves, if they can.
Anyone who doesn't keep backups of their email - whether it's google, yahoo, hotmail, or their local ISP deserves what they get. If it's important to you, you back it up.
I sync all my email accounts to an outside hard drive (on my fileserver) every day, and burn a DVD every week. Yeah, there's going to be stuff in there I didn't want to back up. I can always delete it later. Storage space is cheap nowadays.
Anyone who doesn't should turn in their geek card;)
I find it highly suspicious that we haven't been hit with an ELE from space in the past 60 million years.
You may have been going for a funny mod, but...
Actually there was a "minor" extinction level event approx 35 million years ago at the end of the Eocene. There are several craters associated with this event, including the one under Chesapeake bay, and one in what is now Siberia.
There are other minor extinction events that we still don't know the cause, or causes, of. It is very possible that a lot of minor extinction events can be associated with asteroid impacts - not all large (>1-2 km size object) will necessarily produce an extinction event. If one occurred in a very deep ocean location it would likely have very different effects than one that occurred on land or in shallow sea waters, and that's just a very basic view of the various impact scenarios.
As we continue to gather data about impacts and the fossil record, it's very likely we'll find more impacts associated with more extinction events, especially regional or local ones. The hard part is differentiating the impact scenarios from other local or regional events; but at least we have the tools to start doing so now that we didn't have just a few decades ago. I suspect that the next few decades will show us that impacts have played a much greater part in the evolution of life than we suspect.
We can only hope that the data will convince our public and politicians that we need to develop a capability to prevent such impacts. Even the impact of a smaller object - say, 1 km wide or so - would have global consequences to our civilization, no matter where it occurred.
Life on this planet isn't really that fragile - it's survived for many hundreds of millions of years. Our human civilization, however, is extremely fragile. Being aware of how nature can disrupt that should be of primary importance for us, now that we have the tools to figure it out. To not do so, to ignore what we could learn about how to protect ourselves from impacts, or global climate change, or the resources we consume, is extraordinarily short-sighted and points to a failure of our governments, our people, and our society to work for the survival of our species. (Most people want their family lines to survive...)
If we don't survive, then all we've done before, and all we do now, is pointless.
More than going to the moon or mars - "known quantities", we need to put much more money into finding, investigating and exploring near earth asteroids, in order to develop the capabilities we'll need in the future to deal with those NEAs (and comets, eventually) which may pose a threat to us; and also to begin the investigation into harvesting resources from them. This is where much of the political and scientific vision has failed in the last few decades.
There are those who will argue that it's not important. To them, I just say, isn't it best to spend our limited space access resources more wisely, to kill at least two birds with one launch? I don't think that a return to the moon, or a manned mission to Mars* (as great as that would be) would gain us as much as several unmanned and perhaps one or two manned missions to local orbital asteroids would gain us.
*Yeah, finding out whether or not there has been life on Mars - something that will likely only be done by putting scientists on it's surface - is a great thing. I just think it is outweighed by other considerations.
We would gain both the ability to track more of the threats against us, plus the ability to start mining objects that don't have any gravity well worth speaking of and aren't geologically differentiated objects
So what they are actually measuring is how social and cultural stimuli of one sort - money - makes changes in the brain.
If the concept of value differs from individual to individual - which it does - then what they've measured is only one facet of that sort of stimuli.
They could put additional images in there, like, say, beautiful members of the opposite (or same) sex, music, art, sunrises and sunsets, and other things that don't necessarily have monetary value; would the results be the same? Would people's brains be stimulated in the same way? I doubt it.
What they are measuring, as far as I can tell, is how the monetary value of an object stimulates the brain - not anything as general as the concept of "value".
If they are limiting their concept of "value" to monetary value, then their study really doesn't prove anything, other than that their subjects value money, which as you point out is unfortunately a predisposition of modern society.
This probably has a lot of relevance to economists, but I fail to see how it has any relevance at all to how the brain works. A rat scurrying across the floor could be seen as valuable to someone who is starving to death. That rat doesn't have monetary value - it has survival value. Perhaps they should have expanded their study a bit.
I guess what I'm really asking is aren't they really finding out how societal and cultural mores affect people, more than how "objects" in general stimulate the brain?
What about objects that are "valuable" to people without having any monetary value? Art, music... while some people put monetary value on those objects, I doubt that most people do.
As an example, I have a portrait of myself done by an artist in a bar some years ago; it was done freely and given freely, yet I consider it one of the most "valuable" objects I own. I also have a considerable rock collection - none of it collected for any monetary value, but just for my memories of the trip I collected it on. I daresay many people have similar.
There are an awful lot of things the people own that have "sentimental" value - value only to themselves, for their own reasons. Putting a monetary value on objects has to have skewed their results considerably.
I'm no psych researcher, this is just my opinion... which isn't worth much to anyone but me, honestly;)
How, exactly, did they determine what qualifies as "junk" and what doesn't? Monetary rewards? Doesn't that invalidate their experiment by restricting it to people who regard money as a means to an end?
I got a cheap company emblazoned sweatshirt for my Xmas bonus (only I haven't gotten it yet, some delay in shipping, apparently.) The last two years' sweatshirts fell apart after only a few washings.
That after going over and above my job duties to the point where I was told to slow down. Apparently my company doesn't like people actually doing their jobs to greater than the description. Fucks with the budget paperwork. We can't spend money on such extravagant things as new hallway heaters and emergency lighting.
I work in housing apartment maintenance - for subsidized housing - and most of our tenants are college students, and too many of them aren't very appreciative of how hard a lot of us grunts work to keep their living places warm and comfortable. Be lucky you have what you do.
We don't get paid much, for jack of all trades (plumbing, electrical, carpentry, sheetrock, cleaning, snow removal, etc) work; ten bucks an hour out here even for more than a decade's experience - so all you students and others living in sub housing out there, show some appreciation for the people who keep your places up for you. 24/7 on-call means that if someone lights a grease fire while cooking the bacon, or someone's kid puts a whole roll of toilet paper in the toilet and floods the bathroom, we have to be there, holiday or not.
So give us a chocolate, or something;-D... and fer chrissakes don't call us on Xmas day because you left your keys laying on the floor at some bar the night before! We'll be there, but we'll be a bit irritated;)
The last decent figure I saw - this was some time ago - was about a half billion per launch. Of course this doesn't include infrastructure.
Anytime I want to read pie-in-the-sky conjecture about the space program from people who have little to no idea what they're talking about, I come to Slashdot.
I don't know why I bother to even read this site anymore.
If I had the money, I'd buy the thing, set up a launch pad and a refueling station, and rent flights out to NASA.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to turn around a shuttle for relaunch? Or to build the infrastructure capable of refurbishing and relaunching it? Apparently not. We're not talking about paltry hundreds of millions here.
The rest of your rant is offtopic, but I'll note one thing - Obama is hardly the person to pick on about the bailouts. According to some sources I've seen, we've already spent nearly five trillion, and that decision wasn't his. So take your rabid partisanship and shove it. It's inappropriate in this discussion.
Personally, I think it's great that NASA is at least willing to go to the effort to prep a shuttle for a museum. No, it won't be cheap - it's not like they could just hand one over without making sure it is cleaned up. I'll bet the Smithsonian will go for it. Fifty mill is reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't have a preferred vector. Newton still applies.
SB
""Hanford has not been cleared up and is leaking. Read about it on wikipedia. The numbers on there are talking about a million gallons of highly radioactive waste that has not yet entered the river. However bad it is now and/or was then, it has the potential to get much worse in the near future."
Funny, that's exactly what I was saying ;)
We're in agreement, we're just not communicating.
Probably the most common problem, nowadays.
Most of those storage containers have, what, a roughly fifty year projected 50/50 containment life? Right about now, bar a few years ;(
The sad thing about it, my friend, is that the discussion about the hazards, and the continual avoidance of responsibility for cleanup, has been going on for longer than you or I have been alive (likely, unless you're in your late 70s)
When do we make a serious effort at fixing it?
Yeah, I thought so.
Cheers :)
SB
You said "Currently the stored (highly radioactive) waste is leaking into the groundwater, but has not yet reached the river."
But I showed you that it has already. Operational or not - and you didn't mention that at all in your post; it's still there, and given that the site hasn't been cleaned up, it is still a problem, neh? Did it just stop leaking? Leakage is still occurring and will likely get worse as the containers buried there, and the liquid waste facilities, continue to deteriorate.
It's also highly likely that there's a lot of that waste, even from the time period you refer to, sequestered in sediments and other places along the river.
I guess I'm wondering what point you're trying to make in your reply. "That's not the waste I was talking about" sounds like "that's not the droids you are looking for."
Not yet? Are you implying that Hanford isn't a major problem, "yet"? It's been a superfund site since the late 80s, and is not-so-debatedly our worse radioactive dump site. Why it hasn't been seriously dealt with, considering it's location and the cities downstream, and the sheer amount of waste stored there, escapes me.
I'm not being pedantic. Hanford is a horrible problem and we should have put major funding into cleaning it up back in the 80s, when the problem was recognized. I'm old enough to remember the news and science journal reports back when it started becoming a concern - decades late wrt to our knowledge about the dangers, as far as I'm concerned.
That's what got my ire up about this story - finding an old Manhattan Proj era safe with near-critical mass material in it just "buried" at the site - likely lost thru oversight and secrecy, and we're apparently just getting that deep into digging this stuff up? Obviously our cleanup/superfund programs are underfunded or not being done competently. (Not news, but still aggravating)
So make yourself clear, if you can.
Yeah, I'm angry. Not at you, specifically, but at the ignoramuses who have and continue to bury problems like this because it's "not their problem" - or, "it's not a /(our) problem...yet" or "we don't want to pay money to fix it, let our kids do it." Bullshit. Metric tons of bullshit. ... superfund sites seem to exist at the whim of the current administration. Which is a travesty. We as a country need to own up to our past problems, and just fix them. Which will be costly, but not as costly as ceasing to exist as as a nation, culture, or society, or even a responsible political entity. If there is such a thing.
Not sorry if I seem to be ranting. Someone has to say it. I just wish I knew how to say it more clearly.
SB
Even if those figures are off by an order of magnitude, we now know where all the water that carved the Martian surface went.
That doesn't even include any other subsurface glaciers we haven't found yet.
While it doesn't make Mars terraformable with current technology, it does lower the bar a bit. Large orbital mirrors aren't likely to work, and comet impacts will be redundant. Clean fusion devices might do the job.
SB
"Currently the stored (highly radioactive) waste is leaking into the groundwater, but has not yet reached the river. "
Oh? Not everyone agrees with you.
http://www.doh.wa.gov/Hanford/publications/overview/columbia.html
Note the date.
SB
"It was unearthed in a waste pit at Hanford, Washington, inside a beaten up old safe."
Someone tag this Feynman ;D
SB
I bow to your expertise. ;)
That might possibly one of the most interesting puns I've seen on slashdot that wasn't intended as a troll. ;)
SB
That later go on to become public officials.
Fixed.
SB
Ares is already overweight and behind schedule; I would rather bet that it will become more so rather than less so before development is done. DIRECT is not immune to the same effects,
Low bidder syndrome.
SB
the dark centers of solar spots (should the inside of the sun not be hotter instead of cooler?)
In visible light, sunspots look "cooler" than their surroundings.
This is because their emissions are further up the spectrum. Take a look at sunspots in the xray region sometime.
SB
I would friend you for that incredibly insightful comment, but:
"You have over 200 friends and foes at the moment. This puts you over our limit of 200 relationships that we allow. At this point you may only remove relationships with users."
Bah humbug @ Limits ;)
Happy new year, fwiw
SB
If terrorists can, or do, operate on that sort of small scale anywhere, then we're already screwed.
As was pointed out earlier, there are much better targets. Oil refineries. Chemical production plants. Any production facility that uses hazardous chemicals - thousands of those around. Large truck stops - think about it, hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline, just a few meters underground, vulnerable to anyone who can obtain a few hundred kgs of explosives, and a one ton truck. You think being downwind of a burning petrol storage facility is fun?
Remember the Oklahoma city bombing? Using readily available farm fertilizers? What if those idiots had seeded their truck with a lot of commonly available carcinogenic chemicals that were readily oxidized?
Your argument is a strawman. You are conflating access with potential damage, and the potential is already there, on much larger scales than what you suggest. The effort required to pull off what you suggest would be a lot more than what is already necessary to create havoc with our existing infrastructure.
I suggest you take a step back, do some reading, and try to drop your paranoia about anything "nuclear".
Another thing you haven't considered is if someone figures out a way to mount a non-invasive attack on the reactor and cause a run-away reaction.
Whose to say a terrorist attack couldn't be mounted *after* the reactor is dug up and put on a truck when it contains the most radioactive elements, provoked into a run-away reaction and simply driven into a large city. It's readily portable size makes it a very juicy target indeed.
Oh? Do you have some proposed method as to how to do this? Because if you do, then you should go and apply to Hyperion or some of the other companies building these things, and suggest this to them, so they can learn how to defend against it.
If you don't then shut the fuck up, and pull your head out of your ass. Don't you think that the engineers who build these things haven't already considered that? Especially considering that these power facilities have to be approved by our nuclear and power facility regulatory agencies?
(FWIW I'm a proponent both of modern nuclear tech and solar/wind tech - they both have advantages on the scales they are most efficient at. Nuclear plants for larger scale power - cities and industry - and solar/wind for rural areas and smaller populated areas which don't need centralized power production on this scale. These power plants might just be the bridge we need between the two to get rid of our horridly costly, polluting coal-fired plants that power a lot of our small towns and rural areas. )
I'm sorry to say it, but you are exactly the sort of person who is completely counter-productive in any discussion about this sort of technology, because you have little or no idea what you are talking about.
Mod me flamebait, because this post is intended as a kick in the ass; which is just so. I am just so damned sick and tired of ignorant reactionary morons who impede any damned solution we have to solving our energy problems that I am ready to exile the whole lot of them to the moon where they can figure it out for themselves, if they can.
SB
Anyone who doesn't keep backups of their email - whether it's google, yahoo, hotmail, or their local ISP deserves what they get. If it's important to you, you back it up.
I sync all my email accounts to an outside hard drive (on my fileserver) every day, and burn a DVD every week. Yeah, there's going to be stuff in there I didn't want to back up. I can always delete it later. Storage space is cheap nowadays.
Anyone who doesn't should turn in their geek card ;)
SB
I find it highly suspicious that we haven't been hit with an ELE from space in the past 60 million years.
You may have been going for a funny mod, but...
Actually there was a "minor" extinction level event approx 35 million years ago at the end of the Eocene. There are several craters associated with this event, including the one under Chesapeake bay, and one in what is now Siberia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene-Oligocene_extinction_event is a good place to start if you want to know more. (Anyone with time please contribute to that, I wish I had time)
There are other minor extinction events that we still don't know the cause, or causes, of. It is very possible that a lot of minor extinction events can be associated with asteroid impacts - not all large (>1-2 km size object) will necessarily produce an extinction event. If one occurred in a very deep ocean location it would likely have very different effects than one that occurred on land or in shallow sea waters, and that's just a very basic view of the various impact scenarios.
As we continue to gather data about impacts and the fossil record, it's very likely we'll find more impacts associated with more extinction events, especially regional or local ones. The hard part is differentiating the impact scenarios from other local or regional events; but at least we have the tools to start doing so now that we didn't have just a few decades ago. I suspect that the next few decades will show us that impacts have played a much greater part in the evolution of life than we suspect.
We can only hope that the data will convince our public and politicians that we need to develop a capability to prevent such impacts. Even the impact of a smaller object - say, 1 km wide or so - would have global consequences to our civilization, no matter where it occurred.
Life on this planet isn't really that fragile - it's survived for many hundreds of millions of years. Our human civilization, however, is extremely fragile. Being aware of how nature can disrupt that should be of primary importance for us, now that we have the tools to figure it out. To not do so, to ignore what we could learn about how to protect ourselves from impacts, or global climate change, or the resources we consume, is extraordinarily short-sighted and points to a failure of our governments, our people, and our society to work for the survival of our species. (Most people want their family lines to survive...)
If we don't survive, then all we've done before, and all we do now, is pointless.
More than going to the moon or mars - "known quantities", we need to put much more money into finding, investigating and exploring near earth asteroids, in order to develop the capabilities we'll need in the future to deal with those NEAs (and comets, eventually) which may pose a threat to us; and also to begin the investigation into harvesting resources from them. This is where much of the political and scientific vision has failed in the last few decades.
There are those who will argue that it's not important. To them, I just say, isn't it best to spend our limited space access resources more wisely, to kill at least two birds with one launch? I don't think that a return to the moon, or a manned mission to Mars* (as great as that would be) would gain us as much as several unmanned and perhaps one or two manned missions to local orbital asteroids would gain us.
*Yeah, finding out whether or not there has been life on Mars - something that will likely only be done by putting scientists on it's surface - is a great thing. I just think it is outweighed by other considerations.
We would gain both the ability to track more of the threats against us, plus the ability to start mining objects that don't have any gravity well worth speaking of and aren't geologically differentiated objects
So what they are actually measuring is how social and cultural stimuli of one sort - money - makes changes in the brain.
If the concept of value differs from individual to individual - which it does - then what they've measured is only one facet of that sort of stimuli.
They could put additional images in there, like, say, beautiful members of the opposite (or same) sex, music, art, sunrises and sunsets, and other things that don't necessarily have monetary value; would the results be the same? Would people's brains be stimulated in the same way? I doubt it.
What they are measuring, as far as I can tell, is how the monetary value of an object stimulates the brain - not anything as general as the concept of "value".
If they are limiting their concept of "value" to monetary value, then their study really doesn't prove anything, other than that their subjects value money, which as you point out is unfortunately a predisposition of modern society.
This probably has a lot of relevance to economists, but I fail to see how it has any relevance at all to how the brain works. A rat scurrying across the floor could be seen as valuable to someone who is starving to death. That rat doesn't have monetary value - it has survival value. Perhaps they should have expanded their study a bit.
SB
I guess what I'm really asking is aren't they really finding out how societal and cultural mores affect people, more than how "objects" in general stimulate the brain?
Enlighten me...
SB
What about objects that are "valuable" to people without having any monetary value? Art, music... while some people put monetary value on those objects, I doubt that most people do.
As an example, I have a portrait of myself done by an artist in a bar some years ago; it was done freely and given freely, yet I consider it one of the most "valuable" objects I own. I also have a considerable rock collection - none of it collected for any monetary value, but just for my memories of the trip I collected it on. I daresay many people have similar.
There are an awful lot of things the people own that have "sentimental" value - value only to themselves, for their own reasons. Putting a monetary value on objects has to have skewed their results considerably.
I'm no psych researcher, this is just my opinion... which isn't worth much to anyone but me, honestly ;)
Thanks
SB
You seriously must teach us how you post to slashdot via telepathy ;)
SB
How, exactly, did they determine what qualifies as "junk" and what doesn't? Monetary rewards? Doesn't that invalidate their experiment by restricting it to people who regard money as a means to an end?
SB
Of course they do. The difference is that parrots have evolved enormously since then ;)
SB
I got a cheap company emblazoned sweatshirt for my Xmas bonus (only I haven't gotten it yet, some delay in shipping, apparently.) The last two years' sweatshirts fell apart after only a few washings.
That after going over and above my job duties to the point where I was told to slow down. Apparently my company doesn't like people actually doing their jobs to greater than the description. Fucks with the budget paperwork. We can't spend money on such extravagant things as new hallway heaters and emergency lighting.
I work in housing apartment maintenance - for subsidized housing - and most of our tenants are college students, and too many of them aren't very appreciative of how hard a lot of us grunts work to keep their living places warm and comfortable. Be lucky you have what you do.
We don't get paid much, for jack of all trades (plumbing, electrical, carpentry, sheetrock, cleaning, snow removal, etc) work; ten bucks an hour out here even for more than a decade's experience - so all you students and others living in sub housing out there, show some appreciation for the people who keep your places up for you. 24/7 on-call means that if someone lights a grease fire while cooking the bacon, or someone's kid puts a whole roll of toilet paper in the toilet and floods the bathroom, we have to be there, holiday or not.
So give us a chocolate, or something ;-D ... and fer chrissakes don't call us on Xmas day because you left your keys laying on the floor at some bar the night before! We'll be there, but we'll be a bit irritated ;)
Merry Christmas!
SB
More importantly, did they freeze it and preserve it's DNA? ;)
SB
Read Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies. It may change your mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Clarke
Clarke is hardly a conspiracy theorist.
SB
The last decent figure I saw - this was some time ago - was about a half billion per launch. Of course this doesn't include infrastructure.
Anytime I want to read pie-in-the-sky conjecture about the space program from people who have little to no idea what they're talking about, I come to Slashdot.
I don't know why I bother to even read this site anymore.
SB
If I had the money, I'd buy the thing, set up a launch pad and a refueling station, and rent flights out to NASA.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to turn around a shuttle for relaunch? Or to build the infrastructure capable of refurbishing and relaunching it? Apparently not. We're not talking about paltry hundreds of millions here.
The rest of your rant is offtopic, but I'll note one thing - Obama is hardly the person to pick on about the bailouts. According to some sources I've seen, we've already spent nearly five trillion, and that decision wasn't his. So take your rabid partisanship and shove it. It's inappropriate in this discussion.
Personally, I think it's great that NASA is at least willing to go to the effort to prep a shuttle for a museum. No, it won't be cheap - it's not like they could just hand one over without making sure it is cleaned up. I'll bet the Smithsonian will go for it. Fifty mill is reasonable.
SB