I don't see your point here. Government does more then and now than just spend money. The key FDR policies which were destroyed were most of the government imposed oligopolies and a mild cut back on the power of the labor unions.
Given the choice between the two, I'd rather a nation not be so successful at waging war. I mean, why would you want a government that's better at killing people?
Think about it. Because losing a war is worse than being good at killing the other side. The problem isn't that the US is too good at fighting, but rather that it gets into too many scraps.
First, as I stated before, I favor basic income, but only if we cut the rest of the crap. I'm sorry, but your particular lifestyle and your expensive wants dressed up as needs are not as important to me as the future of the US. Even if they were, we don't need a host of programs to address each and every one of them individually.
Basic income doesn't have doughnut holes unless someone sticks in a hard cutoff which would be well above any income you're currently earning. But basic income along with all the crap does have doughnut holes.
In general, you personal finance, fiscal responsibility types like to make issues far more complicated then they are.
That makes no sense since personal responsibility simplifies those issues. If you're paying for your own expenses, then you don't need a complex government program, you don't have doughnut holes or other perverse incentives to do dumb stuff, you don't have me messing up your finances because I'm more concerned about the future of the US than your lifestyle.
The problem is not entitlements or interest rates, or any other random financial problem you can think up. People need more money.
No, I think entitlements are a huge part of the problem. For example, you stated the following:
Economics are zero-sum, unless you own a means of production, or your labor is worth anything (And for many it's not).
You ignore the most important aspect of economics, trade. Your labor is always worth something, as long as you are allowed to trade it for something of value. This is a thing which minimum wage, for example, can prevent by forcing employers not to hire you, but basic income can enable by allowing you to work at what you're actually worth until you can build up the job skills for a better job.
Zero sum thinking is harmful in a positive sum environment like the current real world. You're too intent on taking from others when you should be thinking more advantageously about growing your piece of the pie.
Moving on, entitlements buy votes. The same government that protects your health insurance is the same government which hands so much money to corporate welfare, which wages wars, and which does everything that it can get away with. You don't hear politicians ranting "Don't vote for him because he'll stop NSA spying or shipping money to Halliburton". No, it's "he'll take your benefits away".
Finally, entitlements create dependencies and obligations which are very difficult to deal with in the future. For example, everyone has known the fundamental problems of Social Security and Medicare since those programs were first created, namely, that the people who pay in, get far more out than is warranted by what they put in. Nobody has fixed them yet. The "doughnut hole" of Medicare has been around for more than a decade, it's not getting fixed. Same goes for the doughnut holes created by Obamacare.
People who know a useful repetitive skill will have no means of support their family and the most dangerous man is one with nothing left to lose. Social change is coming, either by progress or violence, but it is coming.
No use telling me. I'm not the problem. Do you want social change where you end up improving your life, or social change where you're on the bottom of the next society?
You do understand that basic income and minimum wage is the same thing?
That is wrong. There are two very important differences. First, basic income happens whether you are employed or not. Meanwhile minimum wage only happens if you are employed.
Second, basic income is not a direct cost to the employer while minimum wage keeps unemployed anyone whose work is currently worth less than minimum wage.
This leads to a huge difference in effect. Basic income is far less of a disincentive to employ low skill and less valuable workers than a minimum wage is. I think it's a particularly dumb idea to discourage employment of disadvantaged or low skilled workers, but that is the key effect of a minimum wage.
Your idea about 'revenue' is obviously guided by the 'broken window fallacy' which is a wrong analogy in macro economics.
Nonsense. Even in a scenario where the government can print its own money, debt has consequence in that lots of it strongly impair the future operation of the government and everyone who uses the currency of that government. And macroeconomics is the scale where most of the economic shenanigans which can be debunked by the broken window fallacy occur.
No, they aren't. For example, US law requires "actual malice" (intent to harm or willful neglect) in the uttering of such statements while in UK law one merely needs to show that the statement is defamatory.
Anyway, habitation structures are tested in deserts (and antarctica counts as that) for one simple reason: the inhabitants should feel a similarity to mars. That has nothing to do with the structures themselves. They only need to be airtight, need insulation and either cooling or heating, depending on situation. How to regenerate atmosphere we in principle know for our space stations and subs.
But they have not been tested on Mars. I'm not being a pedant here, this is actually formalized in technology readiness levels (TRL). At that point in the Wikipedia article, there are two similar scales of technology readiness for NASA and the ESA, each from 0 to 9. To get past level "6", one has to test the technology or system in the actual environment it will be in. For example, the NASA white paper that establishes TRL has this to say about TRL 7:
TRL 7 is a significant step beyond TRL 6, requiring an actual system prototype demonstration in a space environment. It has not always been implemented in the past. In this case, the prototype should be near or at the scale of the planned operational system and the demonstration must take place in space. The driving purposes for achieving this level of maturity are to assure system engineering and development management confidence (more than for purposes of technology R&D). Therefore, the demonstration must be of a prototype of that application. Not all technologies in all systems will go to this level. TRL 7 would normally only be performed in cases where the technology and/or subsystem application is mission critical and relatively high risk. Example: the Mars Pathfinder Rover is a TRL 7 technology demonstration for future Mars micro-rovers based on that system design. Example: X-vehicles are TRL 7, as are the demonstration projects planned in the New Millennium spacecraft program.
Moving on
You don't know that. Thats the point. How do you know they are not working on stuff or talking to contractors?
Because they talk about such things when they do them.
You do realize that the New Deal didn't survive the onset of the Second World War? Most of those terrible policies (particularly, most of the business oligopolies that FDR created) had to be revoked in order for the US to successful wage war. And now the largest remnant of those days, Social Security, has tens of trillions (not billions!) in unfunded liabilities.
So, what will it take to civilize the USA? A basic income might be a start...
I might support that, as long as the rest of the social safety net gets radically drawn back (particularly minimum wage, pension funds, and health insurance subsidies). Otherwise it's just more spending without the revenue to support that spending.
I wonder if you thought stimulus was a dirty word back in 2009 when your 401K had lost 30% of its 'value'.
Of course, I did. And I note you don't actually present evidence that Keynesian stimulus works. As contrary evidence, I present the recent extremely weak recoveries in the US and Japan. Japan in particularly has borrow about twice its GDP without notable benefit.
But short of completely rearranging the priorities of US society, what would you have policy during a deep recession be?
[...]
I think we should leave that experimentation for the boom times when the society has some cushion of security - not when workers are struggling to keep up.
It doesn't usually happen that way in reality. Tough decisions tend to get put off until the country in question is painted into a corner. Greece is a recent example. They could have fixed the problems of their country any time in the last few decades. That just didn't happen.
Now they're suffering the consequences and blaming it on "austerity" policies while ignoring the bone-headed stuff they did to get to the point where others can force them to adopt those policies.
Republicans
It's not just a Republican party problem. It happens in lots of countries that just so happen to not have Republican parties.
The overwhelming majority of them are stolen from mostly law-abiding, legal gun owners.
Indeed, a major firearms contributor to the Cartel war in Mexico are weapons stolen from the Mexican government, a mostly law-abiding, legal gun owner.
Wow. When do people like you and the mass media get it: you don't know if it is a scam.
I don't care at this point. I'm not going to wait ten years for the gloating emails and other solid evidence to come to light.
Accusing them right now for scam is lible and insult.
It's legitimate opinion. That might be libel in UK and elsewhere, but there's no bag limit in the US.
We have the technology to send people there and let them build up their own homes since decades. The only thing preventing that to happen is either political will or money.
Remember how movies used to treat things different just because they happened to be in space? Vampires were totally more dangerous if they were "space vampires". Pirates were far more awesome if they were "space pirates". Sex was more awesome because it was... in spaaaace. Most of that junk doesn't substantially change just because it's in space. The tools may be different, but the trade is the same.
However, technology development is one of those areas where it does matter where the technology has been used. A Mars habitat which has only been deployed in Antarctica is going to have a lot of uncertainties with it that a successful habitat deployment on Mars will resolve. The same goes for all those other technologies in the appropriate environments in which they'll hypothetically be used.
Now. I've played loose with this before, but it's usually when someone makes a silly claim like "we've never done terraforming before" (which is a strong negative claim). Then it's a simple matter to rebut that by pointing out the practices of irrigation and road building which while not strictly terraforming (merely because they happen on Earth), otherwise meet the criteria of making a place more conducive to human habitation.
But bottom line is that there are still technology and development hurdles to overcome which Mars One is not even starting on.
So far there's no evidence that it's an outright fraud
Sure there is. I see two repliers who noted both the application fee (classic scam warning right there) and making false claims. To this I'd add the elephant in the tent: they completed astronaut selection for the alleged mission to Mars before they started any physical manifestation of the project. Where's the working prototype spaceship these astronauts will fly in? Where's the working prototype habitat these astronauts will stay in on Mars?
Even on their unjustifiably aggressive schedule, they picked the astronauts at least 15 years before they'll fly them. Even if all the current recruits are young, that's still going to result in huge attribution just from changing circumstance. But OTOH, if you're just looking for appearance rather than substance, astronauts selection is cheap (and profitable with those application fees). "Bending metal" is expensive and cuts into the profit margin.
This is why I think the onus is on the space community (The Planetary Society, the Mars Society, etc.)
Nah, I think the best way is to let the suckers get parted from their money. Gullible people aren't good for business and this is a life lesson for those involved.
you americans are fucking crazy about your weapons. Do it like us and forbid them.
I notice that despite the Forbidding of Weapons, Americans still have them. If you don't have weapons and someone else does, then eventually there will be problems. And ultimately, you can't forbid weapons without having weapons to back that up.
A near-unanimous consensus among scientists maintain that climate change is happening and is a serious problem
What sort of "climate change"? After all, we expect the Earth to be hit, sooner or later by an asteroid similar in size to the one that killed off the dinosaurs. That degree of climate change is near-unanimously considered bad, but probably was not what you meant.
Second, if the sort of "climate change" happens to be the very specific "anthropogenic global warming" (AGW), then it's not a near universal consensus among scientists and that agreement worsens significantly when considering whether AGW is a significant problem.
He's not saying "scientists researching this who don't agree with me are bad scientists". He's saying "non-scientists saying the bulk of scientists are liars because they don't want to believe them is a problem".
Notice that he asserts without evidence that climate change deniers are somehow going to kill off all but a few people in the future:
Well, this is the worldâ(TM)s most technically advanced society, and we have people denying climate change. These guys are still in deep denial, and future generations, what few of them will be alive, are just going to go, âoeWhat were you freaking people doing? What was wrong with you?â
Asserting something without evidence is typical anti-science behavior.
Marx was first and foremost a theoretical economist and his economic theory is intended to be a scientific work, in as far as one can call economic theory science (not meant to be a slight on economists, by the way; after all, Mathematics is not universally considered a science either, because it isn't empirical).
Marx may have been other things first, but he was foremost a marketer for his pet theory.
Second, the various meanings of science are well established. A methodical study of a subject is considered a science in one sense of the word. By that meaning, math is a science. And anything which uses the various forms of the scientific method is a science in a more restrictive sense.
Here, economics is a scientific theory in the empirical sense of the word because it makes testable hypotheses about economic dynamics and behavior. Sure, it is difficult to properly and fully use the scientific method due to a confluence of factors such as: a good portion of the field is not amenable to controlled testing - the most rigorous form of the scientific method, the existence of vast conflicts of interest, and a variety of important aspects that are very hard to observe (human decision making, individual human behavior, deliberately hidden or obfuscated economic activity). But that's it. Really, if you look at the claims that economics is not a science, they are based on the fact that it is more difficult than normal to do science, not that science can't be done at all.
And I agree with the grandparent that Marx was presenting a moral interpretation of economics not a scientific one. There's too much dividing of behavior and ideas into good and bad categories. For example, it's painfully obvious that Marx thinks private ownership of the means of production is bad.
I'm not sure that conclusion is valid; what you are doing is painting it as a black/white issue. In the real world there will by necessity always be some degree of inequality, but society will not really be stable unless inequality is kept in check - hence, the mechanisms that make up capitalism have to be kept in check to some extent. I think it is plain, common sense.
Why do we want a really stable society? Why do we think that capitalism doesn't already have built in mechanisms to deal with income and wealth inequality?
The Fed has no choice, since it has only one mechanism for stimulating the economy.
Why is "stimulating the economy" a good idea?
Now government may need to shrink - but even government workers' wages pump money into the economy more efficiently and effectively than the Fed can.
LOL. More efficiently than dumping money from helicopters or shell games with trillion dollar coins? What's even more efficient is just not paying them in the first place.
It's worth noting a few things here. First, the human brain does this in 15-30 amps. So there's no reason to expect a much more efficient digital computer to take more power, unless we want it to, of course. Instead, there's plenty of reason to expect it would take orders of magnitude less power.
Moving on, the power consumption is for completely loading a brain into digital memory from scratch every second. At a terawatt of power (which I gather is about the peak power production of humanity), that's 10,000 people every second or the entire human population in a bit over eight days downloaded to computer.
But bits which aren't changed do not need power. Human brains are mostly memory or fixed structure not changes in said stuff. That greatly reduces the power draw even given your constraints.
This is not because he is protected by the rule of law, but because it is more costly to incarcerate or execute him than it is to let him go on being impotently seditious.
That's never been a problem before. It's not particularly costly to incarcerate or execute people. And being allowed to be "impotently seditious" has greater costs for the government down the road, such as it getting replaced.
So don't suddenly act like the expense to stay in there is better than doing something useful.
I certainly didn't do that. I compared it instead to something actively harmful, a program which squanders the labor of thousands of physicists for a couple of decades. And Hognoxious has a point about sunk costs. Sure, it'd be nice if the US didn't do dumb shit that cost trillions of dollars, but if the US were smart enough to not do that, what makes you think they'd still be dumb enough to fund the SSC?
It was working well until Iraq was abandoned to ISIS.
Meanwhile half their neighbors have ousted their own dictators and voted in religious nutcases. Oh boy.. the world just keeps getting better doesn't it.
The world is better for it. What you don't get here is that first, we now have established precedent for getting rid of tyrannical governments. Second, why shouldn't the voted in religious nutcases get a chance to show they can govern?
I strongly believe that increasing our knowlege of the universe and how it works is far more profitable in the long run than getting involved in the middle east could ever be.
But I believe that spending money in a way that strongly impairs our future ability to gather knowledge of the universe is worse that dumping that money on two months of war.
I reminded them that the entire SSC project would have cost less than two months of the war in Iraq.
One expenditure keeps a newly minted US ally stabilized for at least two months. That at least fulfills concrete interests of the US. The other distracts thousands of physicists from doing productive work for two decades and sucks the oxygen out of the room for future physics research funding.
1
: to restrain or dominate by force
2
: to compel to an act or choice
3
: to achieve by force or threat
Exactly my point. Those do not apply. You merely claim they apply. For a good example, we aren't coerced to live on the same planet as seven billion other people, most whom will work for much less than anyone in the developed world. It just happened. Similarly, we live on a world where robotics and computers can do some jobs better than us. We aren't coerced to be worse workers for these tasks, it just happened. This is the fundamental reason anyone thinks the markets are broken these days.
Speak for yourself. Markets aren't tools, regardless of how you feel for some reason.
Why don't you quote the definition of "tool" like you did for "coercion". Then I can show you where you are wrong and we can move on.
As I said, "human sacrifice" has the connotation that you're forcing somebody else to give up something. Not all "sacrifices" are like that.
Unless the human sacrifice is voluntary. Then it doesn't involve coercion. Again, not common parlance.
You recognize yourself that "sacrificing" entitlement payments is different than "sacrificing" employers to pay for those entitlement payments. Hence the "human" to differentiate.
No, we use the words "coerced" or "forced" to make that distinction, eg, employers are "forced to sacrifice".
I already explained it. Human sacrifice in common parlance doesn't just mean any human being giving up something for somebody else. The person giving up something also didn't choose to give it up themselves. The implication here is that coercion was involved. Not every possible outcome involves coercion, thus not every possible outcome is a human sacrifice.
This is not the meaning of coercion. And I find it interesting how coercion means removing entitlement benefits which can be done without force, but coercion doesn't mean forcing someone to pay for those entitlement benefits.
No, I'm saying it's not a tool at all. It just happens to share characteristics of a tool. Not everything that shares characteristics with X is an X.
No. If a thing has the characteristics of being a tool, then it's a tool. You admit markets have the characteristics of being a tool, hence, you admit markets are tools. It doesn't matter that you feel differently for some reason.
I'm not interested in yet another attempt to redefine the English language to fit the rhetoric of the moment.
And there are enough people who figure out the best conditions for screwdrivers to form, we call them manufacturers.
No, manufacturers figure out the best conditions to manufacture stuff. They make whatever tool makes them money (aka what the market wants). The screwdriver is just a means to an end for them.
Again, yet another argument where you claim to disagree with me, but don't actually disagree.
For those who study markets, the market is the end. They can't just make whatever the market wants. That would equate to telling people whatever they want to hear. They, if they have integrity, are about discovering knowledge, a type of idea.
Notice what you actually claim here. Anyone who studies markets came to the same conclusion: markets are wonderful enough to elevate to the alleged status of religion or myth. Since you don't hold to this, that means you haven't studied markets.
Maybe you should study markets too then since it appears once again that your arguments are based a combination of ignorance of what markets are combined with abuse of the English language.
With markets or ideas, the preference is to the idea of markets itself. The guy saying markets are good (or its competition evil) isn't saying it to promote some non-market ideology. They're saying it to promote market ideology itself.
We're smart enough to separate our interests from those of promoters. And I'm not going to decide on your side just because the other side has a promoter you don't happen to like.
Other way around. You're the one arguing in semantics. I said it already that I'm using human sacrifice in common parlance. It's not like you don't know what that means, with your reference to killing someone on an altar. You and you alone choose not to use that definition, and picked definitions that make my/GP's message have the least sense.
I don't see the problem here. The argument was broken on semantics grounds since you weren't using common parlance. Hence, my rebuttal is on those semantics grounds where your argument becomes invalid. Pretty simple.
And really, I don't see the term, "human sacrifice" as being a relevant description at all. Sure, due to the vagaries of having to compete with those who work for far less, the price we command for our wages has declined and will continue to decline for some time to come and sure, we're for the most part human. But that doesn't mean our sacrifice is human sacrifice in the typical sense of the work. It's just sacrifice.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the choice between the two, I'd rather a nation not be so successful at waging war. I mean, why would you want a government that's better at killing people?
Think about it. Because losing a war is worse than being good at killing the other side. The problem isn't that the US is too good at fighting, but rather that it gets into too many scraps.
Basic income doesn't have doughnut holes unless someone sticks in a hard cutoff which would be well above any income you're currently earning. But basic income along with all the crap does have doughnut holes.
In general, you personal finance, fiscal responsibility types like to make issues far more complicated then they are.
That makes no sense since personal responsibility simplifies those issues. If you're paying for your own expenses, then you don't need a complex government program, you don't have doughnut holes or other perverse incentives to do dumb stuff, you don't have me messing up your finances because I'm more concerned about the future of the US than your lifestyle.
The problem is not entitlements or interest rates, or any other random financial problem you can think up. People need more money.
No, I think entitlements are a huge part of the problem. For example, you stated the following:
Economics are zero-sum, unless you own a means of production, or your labor is worth anything (And for many it's not).
You ignore the most important aspect of economics, trade. Your labor is always worth something, as long as you are allowed to trade it for something of value. This is a thing which minimum wage, for example, can prevent by forcing employers not to hire you, but basic income can enable by allowing you to work at what you're actually worth until you can build up the job skills for a better job.
Zero sum thinking is harmful in a positive sum environment like the current real world. You're too intent on taking from others when you should be thinking more advantageously about growing your piece of the pie.
Moving on, entitlements buy votes. The same government that protects your health insurance is the same government which hands so much money to corporate welfare, which wages wars, and which does everything that it can get away with. You don't hear politicians ranting "Don't vote for him because he'll stop NSA spying or shipping money to Halliburton". No, it's "he'll take your benefits away".
Finally, entitlements create dependencies and obligations which are very difficult to deal with in the future. For example, everyone has known the fundamental problems of Social Security and Medicare since those programs were first created, namely, that the people who pay in, get far more out than is warranted by what they put in. Nobody has fixed them yet. The "doughnut hole" of Medicare has been around for more than a decade, it's not getting fixed. Same goes for the doughnut holes created by Obamacare.
People who know a useful repetitive skill will have no means of support their family and the most dangerous man is one with nothing left to lose. Social change is coming, either by progress or violence, but it is coming.
No use telling me. I'm not the problem. Do you want social change where you end up improving your life, or social change where you're on the bottom of the next society?
You do understand that basic income and minimum wage is the same thing?
That is wrong. There are two very important differences. First, basic income happens whether you are employed or not. Meanwhile minimum wage only happens if you are employed.
Second, basic income is not a direct cost to the employer while minimum wage keeps unemployed anyone whose work is currently worth less than minimum wage.
This leads to a huge difference in effect. Basic income is far less of a disincentive to employ low skill and less valuable workers than a minimum wage is. I think it's a particularly dumb idea to discourage employment of disadvantaged or low skilled workers, but that is the key effect of a minimum wage.
Your idea about 'revenue' is obviously guided by the 'broken window fallacy' which is a wrong analogy in macro economics.
Nonsense. Even in a scenario where the government can print its own money, debt has consequence in that lots of it strongly impair the future operation of the government and everyone who uses the currency of that government. And macroeconomics is the scale where most of the economic shenanigans which can be debunked by the broken window fallacy occur.
Libel laws are pretty the same in the USA.
No, they aren't. For example, US law requires "actual malice" (intent to harm or willful neglect) in the uttering of such statements while in UK law one merely needs to show that the statement is defamatory.
Anyway, habitation structures are tested in deserts (and antarctica counts as that) for one simple reason: the inhabitants should feel a similarity to mars. That has nothing to do with the structures themselves. They only need to be airtight, need insulation and either cooling or heating, depending on situation. How to regenerate atmosphere we in principle know for our space stations and subs.
But they have not been tested on Mars. I'm not being a pedant here, this is actually formalized in technology readiness levels (TRL). At that point in the Wikipedia article, there are two similar scales of technology readiness for NASA and the ESA, each from 0 to 9. To get past level "6", one has to test the technology or system in the actual environment it will be in. For example, the NASA white paper that establishes TRL has this to say about TRL 7:
TRL 7 is a significant step beyond TRL 6, requiring an actual system prototype demonstration in a space environment. It has not always been implemented in the past. In this case, the prototype should be near or at the scale of the planned operational system and the demonstration must take place in space. The driving purposes for achieving this level of maturity are to assure system engineering and development management confidence (more than for purposes of technology R&D). Therefore, the demonstration must be of a prototype of that application. Not all technologies in all systems will go to this level. TRL 7 would normally only be performed in cases where the technology and/or subsystem application is mission critical and relatively high risk. Example: the Mars Pathfinder Rover is a TRL 7 technology demonstration for future Mars micro-rovers based on that system design. Example: X-vehicles are TRL 7, as are the demonstration projects planned in the New Millennium spacecraft program.
Moving on
You don't know that. Thats the point. How do you know they are not working on stuff or talking to contractors?
Because they talk about such things when they do them.
So, what will it take to civilize the USA? A basic income might be a start...
I might support that, as long as the rest of the social safety net gets radically drawn back (particularly minimum wage, pension funds, and health insurance subsidies). Otherwise it's just more spending without the revenue to support that spending.
I wonder if you thought stimulus was a dirty word back in 2009 when your 401K had lost 30% of its 'value'.
Of course, I did. And I note you don't actually present evidence that Keynesian stimulus works. As contrary evidence, I present the recent extremely weak recoveries in the US and Japan. Japan in particularly has borrow about twice its GDP without notable benefit.
But short of completely rearranging the priorities of US society, what would you have policy during a deep recession be?
[...]
I think we should leave that experimentation for the boom times when the society has some cushion of security - not when workers are struggling to keep up.
It doesn't usually happen that way in reality. Tough decisions tend to get put off until the country in question is painted into a corner. Greece is a recent example. They could have fixed the problems of their country any time in the last few decades. That just didn't happen.
Now they're suffering the consequences and blaming it on "austerity" policies while ignoring the bone-headed stuff they did to get to the point where others can force them to adopt those policies.
Republicans
It's not just a Republican party problem. It happens in lots of countries that just so happen to not have Republican parties.
The overwhelming majority of them are stolen from mostly law-abiding, legal gun owners.
Indeed, a major firearms contributor to the Cartel war in Mexico are weapons stolen from the Mexican government, a mostly law-abiding, legal gun owner.
Wow. When do people like you and the mass media get it: you don't know if it is a scam.
I don't care at this point. I'm not going to wait ten years for the gloating emails and other solid evidence to come to light.
Accusing them right now for scam is lible and insult.
It's legitimate opinion. That might be libel in UK and elsewhere, but there's no bag limit in the US.
We have the technology to send people there and let them build up their own homes since decades. The only thing preventing that to happen is either political will or money.
Remember how movies used to treat things different just because they happened to be in space? Vampires were totally more dangerous if they were "space vampires". Pirates were far more awesome if they were "space pirates". Sex was more awesome because it was ... in spaaaace. Most of that junk doesn't substantially change just because it's in space. The tools may be different, but the trade is the same.
However, technology development is one of those areas where it does matter where the technology has been used. A Mars habitat which has only been deployed in Antarctica is going to have a lot of uncertainties with it that a successful habitat deployment on Mars will resolve. The same goes for all those other technologies in the appropriate environments in which they'll hypothetically be used.
Now. I've played loose with this before, but it's usually when someone makes a silly claim like "we've never done terraforming before" (which is a strong negative claim). Then it's a simple matter to rebut that by pointing out the practices of irrigation and road building which while not strictly terraforming (merely because they happen on Earth), otherwise meet the criteria of making a place more conducive to human habitation.
But bottom line is that there are still technology and development hurdles to overcome which Mars One is not even starting on.
So far there's no evidence that it's an outright fraud
Sure there is. I see two repliers who noted both the application fee (classic scam warning right there) and making false claims. To this I'd add the elephant in the tent: they completed astronaut selection for the alleged mission to Mars before they started any physical manifestation of the project. Where's the working prototype spaceship these astronauts will fly in? Where's the working prototype habitat these astronauts will stay in on Mars?
Even on their unjustifiably aggressive schedule, they picked the astronauts at least 15 years before they'll fly them. Even if all the current recruits are young, that's still going to result in huge attribution just from changing circumstance. But OTOH, if you're just looking for appearance rather than substance, astronauts selection is cheap (and profitable with those application fees). "Bending metal" is expensive and cuts into the profit margin.
This is why I think the onus is on the space community (The Planetary Society, the Mars Society, etc.)
Nah, I think the best way is to let the suckers get parted from their money. Gullible people aren't good for business and this is a life lesson for those involved.
you americans are fucking crazy about your weapons. Do it like us and forbid them.
I notice that despite the Forbidding of Weapons, Americans still have them. If you don't have weapons and someone else does, then eventually there will be problems. And ultimately, you can't forbid weapons without having weapons to back that up.
A near-unanimous consensus among scientists maintain that climate change is happening and is a serious problem
What sort of "climate change"? After all, we expect the Earth to be hit, sooner or later by an asteroid similar in size to the one that killed off the dinosaurs. That degree of climate change is near-unanimously considered bad, but probably was not what you meant.
Second, if the sort of "climate change" happens to be the very specific "anthropogenic global warming" (AGW), then it's not a near universal consensus among scientists and that agreement worsens significantly when considering whether AGW is a significant problem.
He's not saying "scientists researching this who don't agree with me are bad scientists". He's saying "non-scientists saying the bulk of scientists are liars because they don't want to believe them is a problem".
Notice that he asserts without evidence that climate change deniers are somehow going to kill off all but a few people in the future:
Well, this is the worldâ(TM)s most technically advanced society, and we have people denying climate change. These guys are still in deep denial, and future generations, what few of them will be alive, are just going to go, âoeWhat were you freaking people doing? What was wrong with you?â
Asserting something without evidence is typical anti-science behavior.
Sorry, watts.
Marx was first and foremost a theoretical economist and his economic theory is intended to be a scientific work, in as far as one can call economic theory science (not meant to be a slight on economists, by the way; after all, Mathematics is not universally considered a science either, because it isn't empirical).
Marx may have been other things first, but he was foremost a marketer for his pet theory.
Second, the various meanings of science are well established. A methodical study of a subject is considered a science in one sense of the word. By that meaning, math is a science. And anything which uses the various forms of the scientific method is a science in a more restrictive sense. Here, economics is a scientific theory in the empirical sense of the word because it makes testable hypotheses about economic dynamics and behavior. Sure, it is difficult to properly and fully use the scientific method due to a confluence of factors such as: a good portion of the field is not amenable to controlled testing - the most rigorous form of the scientific method, the existence of vast conflicts of interest, and a variety of important aspects that are very hard to observe (human decision making, individual human behavior, deliberately hidden or obfuscated economic activity). But that's it. Really, if you look at the claims that economics is not a science, they are based on the fact that it is more difficult than normal to do science, not that science can't be done at all.
And I agree with the grandparent that Marx was presenting a moral interpretation of economics not a scientific one. There's too much dividing of behavior and ideas into good and bad categories. For example, it's painfully obvious that Marx thinks private ownership of the means of production is bad.
I'm not sure that conclusion is valid; what you are doing is painting it as a black/white issue. In the real world there will by necessity always be some degree of inequality, but society will not really be stable unless inequality is kept in check - hence, the mechanisms that make up capitalism have to be kept in check to some extent. I think it is plain, common sense.
Why do we want a really stable society? Why do we think that capitalism doesn't already have built in mechanisms to deal with income and wealth inequality?
The Fed has no choice, since it has only one mechanism for stimulating the economy.
Why is "stimulating the economy" a good idea?
Now government may need to shrink - but even government workers' wages pump money into the economy more efficiently and effectively than the Fed can.
LOL. More efficiently than dumping money from helicopters or shell games with trillion dollar coins? What's even more efficient is just not paying them in the first place.
It's worth noting a few things here. First, the human brain does this in 15-30 amps. So there's no reason to expect a much more efficient digital computer to take more power, unless we want it to, of course. Instead, there's plenty of reason to expect it would take orders of magnitude less power.
Moving on, the power consumption is for completely loading a brain into digital memory from scratch every second. At a terawatt of power (which I gather is about the peak power production of humanity), that's 10,000 people every second or the entire human population in a bit over eight days downloaded to computer.
But bits which aren't changed do not need power. Human brains are mostly memory or fixed structure not changes in said stuff. That greatly reduces the power draw even given your constraints.
This is not because he is protected by the rule of law, but because it is more costly to incarcerate or execute him than it is to let him go on being impotently seditious.
That's never been a problem before. It's not particularly costly to incarcerate or execute people. And being allowed to be "impotently seditious" has greater costs for the government down the road, such as it getting replaced.
So don't suddenly act like the expense to stay in there is better than doing something useful.
I certainly didn't do that. I compared it instead to something actively harmful, a program which squanders the labor of thousands of physicists for a couple of decades. And Hognoxious has a point about sunk costs. Sure, it'd be nice if the US didn't do dumb shit that cost trillions of dollars, but if the US were smart enough to not do that, what makes you think they'd still be dumb enough to fund the SSC?
Yeah, sure... how's it working out for that ally?
It was working well until Iraq was abandoned to ISIS.
Meanwhile half their neighbors have ousted their own dictators and voted in religious nutcases. Oh boy.. the world just keeps getting better doesn't it.
The world is better for it. What you don't get here is that first, we now have established precedent for getting rid of tyrannical governments. Second, why shouldn't the voted in religious nutcases get a chance to show they can govern?
I strongly believe that increasing our knowlege of the universe and how it works is far more profitable in the long run than getting involved in the middle east could ever be.
But I believe that spending money in a way that strongly impairs our future ability to gather knowledge of the universe is worse that dumping that money on two months of war.
I reminded them that the entire SSC project would have cost less than two months of the war in Iraq.
One expenditure keeps a newly minted US ally stabilized for at least two months. That at least fulfills concrete interests of the US. The other distracts thousands of physicists from doing productive work for two decades and sucks the oxygen out of the room for future physics research funding.
A company I was going to work for lost funding a day before I was to start working there. That was damned exciting.
1 : to restrain or dominate by force
2 : to compel to an act or choice
3 : to achieve by force or threat
Exactly my point. Those do not apply. You merely claim they apply. For a good example, we aren't coerced to live on the same planet as seven billion other people, most whom will work for much less than anyone in the developed world. It just happened. Similarly, we live on a world where robotics and computers can do some jobs better than us. We aren't coerced to be worse workers for these tasks, it just happened. This is the fundamental reason anyone thinks the markets are broken these days.
Speak for yourself. Markets aren't tools, regardless of how you feel for some reason.
Why don't you quote the definition of "tool" like you did for "coercion". Then I can show you where you are wrong and we can move on.
As I said, "human sacrifice" has the connotation that you're forcing somebody else to give up something. Not all "sacrifices" are like that.
Unless the human sacrifice is voluntary. Then it doesn't involve coercion. Again, not common parlance.
You recognize yourself that "sacrificing" entitlement payments is different than "sacrificing" employers to pay for those entitlement payments. Hence the "human" to differentiate.
No, we use the words "coerced" or "forced" to make that distinction, eg, employers are "forced to sacrifice".
Like e^(i*pi) = -1? I don't see the 2 in that one.
Now cast forward one million years and try to imagine who would apply much effort to studying what we do today.
Strong AI. What prizes did I win?
Oh, so the world really is that black and white to you.
Yes, because the world is that black and white.
I already explained it. Human sacrifice in common parlance doesn't just mean any human being giving up something for somebody else. The person giving up something also didn't choose to give it up themselves. The implication here is that coercion was involved. Not every possible outcome involves coercion, thus not every possible outcome is a human sacrifice.
This is not the meaning of coercion. And I find it interesting how coercion means removing entitlement benefits which can be done without force, but coercion doesn't mean forcing someone to pay for those entitlement benefits.
No, I'm saying it's not a tool at all. It just happens to share characteristics of a tool. Not everything that shares characteristics with X is an X.
No. If a thing has the characteristics of being a tool, then it's a tool. You admit markets have the characteristics of being a tool, hence, you admit markets are tools. It doesn't matter that you feel differently for some reason.
I'm not interested in yet another attempt to redefine the English language to fit the rhetoric of the moment.
And there are enough people who figure out the best conditions for screwdrivers to form, we call them manufacturers.
No, manufacturers figure out the best conditions to manufacture stuff. They make whatever tool makes them money (aka what the market wants). The screwdriver is just a means to an end for them.
Again, yet another argument where you claim to disagree with me, but don't actually disagree.
For those who study markets, the market is the end. They can't just make whatever the market wants. That would equate to telling people whatever they want to hear. They, if they have integrity, are about discovering knowledge, a type of idea.
Notice what you actually claim here. Anyone who studies markets came to the same conclusion: markets are wonderful enough to elevate to the alleged status of religion or myth. Since you don't hold to this, that means you haven't studied markets.
Maybe you should study markets too then since it appears once again that your arguments are based a combination of ignorance of what markets are combined with abuse of the English language.
With markets or ideas, the preference is to the idea of markets itself. The guy saying markets are good (or its competition evil) isn't saying it to promote some non-market ideology. They're saying it to promote market ideology itself.
We're smart enough to separate our interests from those of promoters. And I'm not going to decide on your side just because the other side has a promoter you don't happen to like.
Other way around. You're the one arguing in semantics. I said it already that I'm using human sacrifice in common parlance. It's not like you don't know what that means, with your reference to killing someone on an altar. You and you alone choose not to use that definition, and picked definitions that make my/GP's message have the least sense.
I don't see the problem here. The argument was broken on semantics grounds since you weren't using common parlance. Hence, my rebuttal is on those semantics grounds where your argument becomes invalid. Pretty simple.
And really, I don't see the term, "human sacrifice" as being a relevant description at all. Sure, due to the vagaries of having to compete with those who work for far less, the price we command for our wages has declined and will continue to decline for some time to come and sure, we're for the most part human. But that doesn't mean our sacrifice is human sacrifice in the typical sense of the work. It's just sacrifice.