Your electricity example appears to be a gross insult to the intelligence of the readers if not intended as a direct one to myself, plus of course if fuel becomes cheap for these things it ALSO BECOMES CHEAP FOR CONVENTIONAL FLIGHT.
I'm making an obvious point. The actual cost of the energy of something in orbit is a lot cheaper than the cost of putting something in orbit. If that means you somehow look like an idiot as a result, that's your problem not mine.
And it's quite relevant because the factor of three greater cost of liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen over diesel fuel/liquid oxygen is due solely to the cost of energy of creating that liquid hydrogen.
Are you speaking about the policy or the political implications? Because the policy is doing precisely what we wanted it to do. 1) almost everyone is covered; 2) cost increases in the system as a whole are no longer going up by double-digits each year, 3) there is no three because we weren't trying to do a third thing.
And my rebuttals are
1) There's still a lot of uninsured and Medicaid is reducing its actual benefits - I think within ten to twenty years, it will effectively cease to become health insurance for most of the US.
2) Cost still increases faster than wages and we need to remember that we're still in a period of an unusually poor economic recovery - worst since the end of the Second World War.
3) Who is paying for the subsidies and the additional people on Medicaid? The rich aren't that rich.
4) As to not having any ulterior motives for Obamacare, I think that's been disproven by now. One of the architects, Johnathan Gruber indicates that the so-called "Cadillac tax" is a stealthy way to eliminate tax deductions for health care benefits. And I suspect some people may have intended Obamacare as a means to introduce single payer. After all, a natural consequence of the program is to dump more people on Medicaid.
Politically we thought it would be a vote-winner by now, and it clearly isn't, but if you think that we would trade health care reform for 70 Senate seats and 2/3 of the House you don't understand us at all.
I agree. And I'm thankful every day that the US public isn't similarly suicidal.
Moreover if we can't use them for health reform, there's probably an extremely strong fiscal conservative streak in that 70 Senate seats and 290-odd House seats, which means we can;t spend on space either.
I don't have a problem with that. I don't think the point of government is to give us "nice things" that we could get for ourselves.
Exactly, since we know exactly what we will get when we cut off funding and force millions to live in poverty in the streets.
Or not as the case may be. Just because you claim bad things will happen when funding is cut off, doesn't mean it's actually true. And we also need to keep in mind that good things happen when you cut off funding. For example, those taxpayers can keep that money and use the money to build things or employ people.
At least scientists can "vote with their feet" and move to China, India, Europe, and Japan, where there is still interest in building a space program.
And do what exactly? What would be the point of employing a NASA scientist even if you do have a space program?
I'll take these calls for funding increases seriously when they work on making existing NASA programs far more efficient than they currently are. As I see it, you already lose an order of magnitude in return on investment when you go NASA rather than with a private party that is actually interested in results and outcome. NASA doesn't get routinely embarrassed only because they spend more than an order of magnitude more than any private competition.
Now if the President, and the Congress were the same party; and a) the low-taxes hawk, b) the deficit hawks, or c) both could be convinced to shut up for 10 goddamn years and let the government pay for nice things (note: in the 60s we had much higher taxes and much higher government spending due to 'Nam and LBJ's Great Society) we could do something about that.
"Pay for nice things"? You had your chance in 2009-2011. They paid for a health care train wreck and some faux Keynesian spending. They couldn't muster the political will for any sort of space-oriented funding.
Similarly, there's a really good chance you'll get another case of disappointment in 2017-2019 too from the other side of the US political system. If the US government weren't pure shit at spending money, you wouldn't have a problem with low taxes people or deficit hawks. But it is pure shit at spending money. That's the real reason you never get nice things.
That's right. Call his bluff. You'll find that a lot of people are willing to cut spending across the board. And incidentally, lack of agreement on social welfare programs is a good reason to cut those programs. But it's not the only reason for or against cutting spending in a given program. There should be a consideration of return on investment which is usually completely missing from consideration in advocacy for increasing NASA or social welfare spending.
Yes, and just to remind that a lot of modern devices and technologies we have in all places now came from R&D from space programs
No, that stuff is an example of private profit, public risk projects. The R&D would have been done anyway, but they obtained a portion of the funding for the research via the federal government.
This makes most of most space research uninteresting from a private point of view.
The fact that you are completely unwilling to use your own money makes it uninteresting. That shows up in the priorities for NASA where it's more important which congressional districts the money is spent in than what the money is spent on and where it's more important to develop new toys than to deploy those new toys in an alien environment and do any sort of interesting space activity.
the only exception being the occasional long term planning industry, like Pharma or the Energy sector
Space development is one of those "occasional" long term planning industries right now.
Are you going to sneer at him next because the USA and the Soviet Union never formed the CoDominion?
Yet. The USSR isn't out for the count, given that a former KGB officer is running the show. Similarly, the economic foundation of the CoDominium is still there, namely, that nuclear weapons are stabilizing and prevent economically destructive wars, only if they aren't widely available to the crazies.
So we just need more politicians who create scientific visions.
"Scientific visions" such as "let's blow $150 billion in today's money on a national prestige project"? That could buy a lot of science, if you were so inclined.
"Nonlinear" is not an equivalent phrase to prohibitively expensive. He doesn't actually say a thing about fuel consumption costs. It's all about "expending energy" which is not actually a significant cost constraint in rocketry.
For example, as I recall, getting a 100 kg adult to Earth orbit using kerosene and liquid oxygen costs around $10,000 in propellant. It goes up to $30,000 if you use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The actual cost of the energy required to put a person in orbit, if it were electricity? Around $1000 per person. The cost for suborbital to the other side of the world, will be at most about half those figures with a significantly lower energy cost (perhaps about a quarter that required to go to orbit). And it's obviously going to cost substantially more than just fuel cost.
Now look at what he writes, aside from the preliminary hand waving about non-linearity, air resistance, expending energy, rockets not being magical, etc, none of which says anything about actual constraints on real world rockets, he spends more than two thirds of the article discussing the two nearly irrelevant aspects I noted before.
You know you have quality bullshit when the first argument out of the gate is based on an fantasy security argument. If security is going to cause such major problems for a hypersonic or suborbital vehicle, then don't do that level of security. Dubya is no longer in office, we don't need to go hardcore stupid on security any more.
Then the second is convenience - conveniently ignoring that greatly shortening an air flight is convenience as well. It also ignores that most of the reason the flight was "inconvenient" was done by piling on the earlier ludicrous demands for security from argument one. Don't have those demands and you don't have so much inconvenience.
That's it. At no time did he ever mention real world constraints like fuel consumption. I can see, for suborbital flights, that the fuel costs alone could be in the many thousands of dollars per person. That's kind of expensive even for a fast ride.
Businesses don't babysit websites looking for the cheapest airfare for a flight they won't even know they need to take till a week or two before. Instead, they pay extra so that those cheap airfares can exist in the first place.
But as the other poster said, the owners of a businesses are legally separate. This is relevant to your claim, because rights don't just mean natural rights, but also legal rights.
Ok, how is it relevant then? I didn't restrict consideration of rights to natural or legal rights. You have yet to speak of rights.
You can't just say you're incorporated on your own, and expect other people to not come after you if your company did something to them. No, it takes government law (read: force and coercion) to redirect grievances towards your company.
A fact which supports my assertion that corporations aren't being treated with special privileges or rights (aside from their raison d'etre, providing limited liability for limited ownership).
See, you wondered why another poster doesn't get so worked up about the US government, I would ask the same of you in reverse: why aren't you getting worked up over corporations, what with them being legal entities created and supported by governments the world all over, and they've been doing this long before the US existed as a country.
Because they don't cause the harm that governments have caused even over recent times: they don't control the world's militariesor fight the world's wars; they didn't kill a few hundred million people with the power of the state last century; they are merely a legal instrument for organizing people and business; they effectively cease to exist when they run out of money; they haven't driven away trillions of dollars a year in economic activity just from the US; they aren't Hoovering up the world's cell phone calls; and they aren't making the short-sighted global policy decisions that can harm billions of peoples' lives today.
And if you look at the complaints that supposedly back the call for the various ills of corporations you find a combination of ignorance of the law (eg, the usual complete ignorance of what corporate personhood means), misattribution of flaws of society on corporation (eg, rich people can buy laws because corporations, rich people can evade responsibility for their actions because corporations), a confusion of government and private actors, and an outlook on the world that is profoundly stupid (such as proposing to punitively tax low salary employers like Walmart on the basis that they are "benefiting" from poverty program "subsidies" - would they rather than Walmart just automate those jobs instead to avoid paying that tax?).
One suggestion is to not treat science as a proper noun. We don't capitalize most such words and science doesn't really have that much of an edge up on say, market, to warrant the pedestal.
Before Locke formalized the scientific method it was something else entirely. Philosophical thought about the nature of the world. Including loads of 'scientific' nonsense.
What is "it"? You can't study the world without context, there's always an implicit empirical aspect to any such study.
QA, do you have an opinion on anything else other than manned spaceflight and 3D printers? I find it mystifying how I've read bunches of your posts over the years, and I have yet to see an opinion expressed on anything which wasn't closely related to those two (mostly anti-spaceflight stuff, but with the occasional foray as today into 3D printing). But perhaps you have a different persona for expressing opinions on politics or whatnot. Not like I'd know.
Wrong. Businesses file for incorporation so their owners are legally separate from that business and cannot be held liable for the actions of their corporations. Businesses exist for one purpose: to make a profit. They do not have families, get sick, love or sacrifice for each other. They don't care if their backyard is a toxic waste dump or if fish can live in the river. We don't get rid of people when then stop being profitable.
How is that even remotely relevant to my claim? Reasons or purposes aren't rights. Presence or lack of emotions aren't rights. Does a car have more rights than you because it doesn't have a family or feel emotions? Does your computer have more rights than you because it doesn't care if your backyard is a toxic waste dump? These observations are nonsensical in any context.
Corporations are not people and money is not speech. We are coming very close to fascism in the US and it should scare the hell out of everyone.
Corporations aren't people anywhere in the world today, including the US. And money isn't speech, but speech isn't free as in beer.
Even if things worked that way, you'd still be acting in a suspicious manner. After all, most people don't throw their hard drives into the microwave for some reason. But recycling a hard drive that doesn't work anymore? What's suspicious about that?
Anthropomorphizing is not this ridiculous caricature. It is a very effective process by which we relate new information to information we inherently have. Would you rather relate new information in a way you and others can readily understand or in a way you and others can't readily understand?
Sure, it's not perfect, but usually you're looking for good enough, not perfect. For example, consider this example from my neighbor, Yellowstone National Park. You are tourist and come across a bull (male) elk. It's a 600 pound member of the deer family with an antler spread around two meters wide. There are correct and incorrect ways to anthropomorphize the behavior of that bull elk. The following is the incorrect way which unfortunate, real world tourists use each year:
"That's a pretty elk. I know he wants me to pet him, because I would like being petted if I were a pretty elk too!"
Their world gets rocked as a result. Consider the alternate approach:
"That's a big elk in the middle of rut season. I bet he'll be pissed if a crazy human tries to touch him. I would if I were running around hyped up on hormones."
Look! No headbutt Ma! Obviously, neither approach captures what it means to be elk or those elk sensibilities. There is this certain lack of nuance of the elk point of view. But one approach, which I would go as far as to label an entirely correct approach to understanding in this scenario, keeps you from finding out what pointy antlers backed by 600 pounds of enraged elk can do to a person.
My view is that humanity and our behaviors are sufficiently complex that one can shoehorn any understandable phenomenon into an anthropomorphic basis. The real problem is not the process, but insufficient understanding of the problem needed to come up with a sufficiently correct anthropomorphic model.
Slashdot Mirror
Your electricity example appears to be a gross insult to the intelligence of the readers if not intended as a direct one to myself, plus of course if fuel becomes cheap for these things it ALSO BECOMES CHEAP FOR CONVENTIONAL FLIGHT.
I'm making an obvious point. The actual cost of the energy of something in orbit is a lot cheaper than the cost of putting something in orbit. If that means you somehow look like an idiot as a result, that's your problem not mine.
And it's quite relevant because the factor of three greater cost of liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen over diesel fuel/liquid oxygen is due solely to the cost of energy of creating that liquid hydrogen.
Unless you have a plan for funding NASA from some other source, that's going to remain a NASA problem for the rest of its life.
Are you speaking about the policy or the political implications? Because the policy is doing precisely what we wanted it to do. 1) almost everyone is covered; 2) cost increases in the system as a whole are no longer going up by double-digits each year, 3) there is no three because we weren't trying to do a third thing.
And my rebuttals are
1) There's still a lot of uninsured and Medicaid is reducing its actual benefits - I think within ten to twenty years, it will effectively cease to become health insurance for most of the US.
2) Cost still increases faster than wages and we need to remember that we're still in a period of an unusually poor economic recovery - worst since the end of the Second World War.
3) Who is paying for the subsidies and the additional people on Medicaid? The rich aren't that rich.
4) As to not having any ulterior motives for Obamacare, I think that's been disproven by now. One of the architects, Johnathan Gruber indicates that the so-called "Cadillac tax" is a stealthy way to eliminate tax deductions for health care benefits. And I suspect some people may have intended Obamacare as a means to introduce single payer. After all, a natural consequence of the program is to dump more people on Medicaid.
Politically we thought it would be a vote-winner by now, and it clearly isn't, but if you think that we would trade health care reform for 70 Senate seats and 2/3 of the House you don't understand us at all.
I agree. And I'm thankful every day that the US public isn't similarly suicidal.
Moreover if we can't use them for health reform, there's probably an extremely strong fiscal conservative streak in that 70 Senate seats and 290-odd House seats, which means we can;t spend on space either.
I don't have a problem with that. I don't think the point of government is to give us "nice things" that we could get for ourselves.
Exactly, since we know exactly what we will get when we cut off funding and force millions to live in poverty in the streets.
Or not as the case may be. Just because you claim bad things will happen when funding is cut off, doesn't mean it's actually true. And we also need to keep in mind that good things happen when you cut off funding. For example, those taxpayers can keep that money and use the money to build things or employ people.
At least scientists can "vote with their feet" and move to China, India, Europe, and Japan, where there is still interest in building a space program.
And do what exactly? What would be the point of employing a NASA scientist even if you do have a space program?
I'll take these calls for funding increases seriously when they work on making existing NASA programs far more efficient than they currently are. As I see it, you already lose an order of magnitude in return on investment when you go NASA rather than with a private party that is actually interested in results and outcome. NASA doesn't get routinely embarrassed only because they spend more than an order of magnitude more than any private competition.
Now if the President, and the Congress were the same party; and a) the low-taxes hawk, b) the deficit hawks, or c) both could be convinced to shut up for 10 goddamn years and let the government pay for nice things (note: in the 60s we had much higher taxes and much higher government spending due to 'Nam and LBJ's Great Society) we could do something about that.
"Pay for nice things"? You had your chance in 2009-2011. They paid for a health care train wreck and some faux Keynesian spending. They couldn't muster the political will for any sort of space-oriented funding. Similarly, there's a really good chance you'll get another case of disappointment in 2017-2019 too from the other side of the US political system. If the US government weren't pure shit at spending money, you wouldn't have a problem with low taxes people or deficit hawks. But it is pure shit at spending money. That's the real reason you never get nice things.
That's right. Call his bluff. You'll find that a lot of people are willing to cut spending across the board. And incidentally, lack of agreement on social welfare programs is a good reason to cut those programs. But it's not the only reason for or against cutting spending in a given program. There should be a consideration of return on investment which is usually completely missing from consideration in advocacy for increasing NASA or social welfare spending.
Yes, and just to remind that a lot of modern devices and technologies we have in all places now came from R&D from space programs
No, that stuff is an example of private profit, public risk projects. The R&D would have been done anyway, but they obtained a portion of the funding for the research via the federal government.
This makes most of most space research uninteresting from a private point of view.
The fact that you are completely unwilling to use your own money makes it uninteresting. That shows up in the priorities for NASA where it's more important which congressional districts the money is spent in than what the money is spent on and where it's more important to develop new toys than to deploy those new toys in an alien environment and do any sort of interesting space activity.
the only exception being the occasional long term planning industry, like Pharma or the Energy sector
Space development is one of those "occasional" long term planning industries right now.
Are you going to sneer at him next because the USA and the Soviet Union never formed the CoDominion?
Yet. The USSR isn't out for the count, given that a former KGB officer is running the show. Similarly, the economic foundation of the CoDominium is still there, namely, that nuclear weapons are stabilizing and prevent economically destructive wars, only if they aren't widely available to the crazies.
Last time I checked all flight within the atmosphere was "sub-orbital".
Nah, he meant free fall trajectories. Like jumping.
So we just need more politicians who create scientific visions.
"Scientific visions" such as "let's blow $150 billion in today's money on a national prestige project"? That could buy a lot of science, if you were so inclined.
Nominal income hasn't significantly changed in the US since 2000, and has only improved 20% since 1980 (that's less than 3% per year).
The US isn't the only place that has people.
but it's not going to be something that "people" do, it'll be for the rich.
This would be an excellent way to help relieve of that burden of being too wealthy, wouldn't it?
"Nonlinear" is not an equivalent phrase to prohibitively expensive. He doesn't actually say a thing about fuel consumption costs. It's all about "expending energy" which is not actually a significant cost constraint in rocketry.
For example, as I recall, getting a 100 kg adult to Earth orbit using kerosene and liquid oxygen costs around $10,000 in propellant. It goes up to $30,000 if you use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The actual cost of the energy required to put a person in orbit, if it were electricity? Around $1000 per person. The cost for suborbital to the other side of the world, will be at most about half those figures with a significantly lower energy cost (perhaps about a quarter that required to go to orbit). And it's obviously going to cost substantially more than just fuel cost.
Now look at what he writes, aside from the preliminary hand waving about non-linearity, air resistance, expending energy, rockets not being magical, etc, none of which says anything about actual constraints on real world rockets, he spends more than two thirds of the article discussing the two nearly irrelevant aspects I noted before.
You know you have quality bullshit when the first argument out of the gate is based on an fantasy security argument. If security is going to cause such major problems for a hypersonic or suborbital vehicle, then don't do that level of security. Dubya is no longer in office, we don't need to go hardcore stupid on security any more. Then the second is convenience - conveniently ignoring that greatly shortening an air flight is convenience as well. It also ignores that most of the reason the flight was "inconvenient" was done by piling on the earlier ludicrous demands for security from argument one. Don't have those demands and you don't have so much inconvenience.
That's it. At no time did he ever mention real world constraints like fuel consumption. I can see, for suborbital flights, that the fuel costs alone could be in the many thousands of dollars per person. That's kind of expensive even for a fast ride.
Businesses don't babysit websites looking for the cheapest airfare for a flight they won't even know they need to take till a week or two before. Instead, they pay extra so that those cheap airfares can exist in the first place.
But as the other poster said, the owners of a businesses are legally separate. This is relevant to your claim, because rights don't just mean natural rights, but also legal rights.
Ok, how is it relevant then? I didn't restrict consideration of rights to natural or legal rights. You have yet to speak of rights.
You can't just say you're incorporated on your own, and expect other people to not come after you if your company did something to them. No, it takes government law (read: force and coercion) to redirect grievances towards your company.
A fact which supports my assertion that corporations aren't being treated with special privileges or rights (aside from their raison d'etre, providing limited liability for limited ownership).
See, you wondered why another poster doesn't get so worked up about the US government, I would ask the same of you in reverse: why aren't you getting worked up over corporations, what with them being legal entities created and supported by governments the world all over, and they've been doing this long before the US existed as a country.
Because they don't cause the harm that governments have caused even over recent times: they don't control the world's militariesor fight the world's wars; they didn't kill a few hundred million people with the power of the state last century; they are merely a legal instrument for organizing people and business; they effectively cease to exist when they run out of money; they haven't driven away trillions of dollars a year in economic activity just from the US; they aren't Hoovering up the world's cell phone calls; and they aren't making the short-sighted global policy decisions that can harm billions of peoples' lives today.
And if you look at the complaints that supposedly back the call for the various ills of corporations you find a combination of ignorance of the law (eg, the usual complete ignorance of what corporate personhood means), misattribution of flaws of society on corporation (eg, rich people can buy laws because corporations, rich people can evade responsibility for their actions because corporations), a confusion of government and private actors, and an outlook on the world that is profoundly stupid (such as proposing to punitively tax low salary employers like Walmart on the basis that they are "benefiting" from poverty program "subsidies" - would they rather than Walmart just automate those jobs instead to avoid paying that tax?).
to what Science actually is
One suggestion is to not treat science as a proper noun. We don't capitalize most such words and science doesn't really have that much of an edge up on say, market, to warrant the pedestal.
Before Locke formalized the scientific method it was something else entirely. Philosophical thought about the nature of the world. Including loads of 'scientific' nonsense.
What is "it"? You can't study the world without context, there's always an implicit empirical aspect to any such study.
Right, philosophy is science by pure reason. It's just been superseded by evidence-based science over the last couple of hundred years.
Pure reason is not science and never has been.
Thank you. That actually is interesting.
QA, do you have an opinion on anything else other than manned spaceflight and 3D printers? I find it mystifying how I've read bunches of your posts over the years, and I have yet to see an opinion expressed on anything which wasn't closely related to those two (mostly anti-spaceflight stuff, but with the occasional foray as today into 3D printing). But perhaps you have a different persona for expressing opinions on politics or whatnot. Not like I'd know.
Wrong. Businesses file for incorporation so their owners are legally separate from that business and cannot be held liable for the actions of their corporations. Businesses exist for one purpose: to make a profit. They do not have families, get sick, love or sacrifice for each other. They don't care if their backyard is a toxic waste dump or if fish can live in the river. We don't get rid of people when then stop being profitable.
How is that even remotely relevant to my claim? Reasons or purposes aren't rights. Presence or lack of emotions aren't rights. Does a car have more rights than you because it doesn't have a family or feel emotions? Does your computer have more rights than you because it doesn't care if your backyard is a toxic waste dump? These observations are nonsensical in any context.
Corporations are not people and money is not speech. We are coming very close to fascism in the US and it should scare the hell out of everyone.
Corporations aren't people anywhere in the world today, including the US. And money isn't speech, but speech isn't free as in beer.
Even if things worked that way, you'd still be acting in a suspicious manner. After all, most people don't throw their hard drives into the microwave for some reason. But recycling a hard drive that doesn't work anymore? What's suspicious about that?
Anthropomorphizing is not this ridiculous caricature. It is a very effective process by which we relate new information to information we inherently have. Would you rather relate new information in a way you and others can readily understand or in a way you and others can't readily understand?
Sure, it's not perfect, but usually you're looking for good enough, not perfect. For example, consider this example from my neighbor, Yellowstone National Park. You are tourist and come across a bull (male) elk. It's a 600 pound member of the deer family with an antler spread around two meters wide. There are correct and incorrect ways to anthropomorphize the behavior of that bull elk. The following is the incorrect way which unfortunate, real world tourists use each year: "That's a pretty elk. I know he wants me to pet him, because I would like being petted if I were a pretty elk too!" Their world gets rocked as a result. Consider the alternate approach: "That's a big elk in the middle of rut season. I bet he'll be pissed if a crazy human tries to touch him. I would if I were running around hyped up on hormones." Look! No headbutt Ma! Obviously, neither approach captures what it means to be elk or those elk sensibilities. There is this certain lack of nuance of the elk point of view. But one approach, which I would go as far as to label an entirely correct approach to understanding in this scenario, keeps you from finding out what pointy antlers backed by 600 pounds of enraged elk can do to a person.
My view is that humanity and our behaviors are sufficiently complex that one can shoehorn any understandable phenomenon into an anthropomorphic basis. The real problem is not the process, but insufficient understanding of the problem needed to come up with a sufficiently correct anthropomorphic model.