That mentioned that mid-market products get priced out of the market by cheap knock offs whose price eventually gets raised to match the mid-market goods that were driven out, except the quality never gets put back in?
You're making the broad assumption that the mid-markets were better quality. Why is the cheaper product winning in the first place?
Except now you are a you with only a single option: "shit product for a bargain price" -- soon to be "shit product for the same price I used to pay for a decent product".
Or you can choose to pay more for said decent product.
We can't make rational decisions by considering cost vs benefits of a choice? That is absolutely the best way to make rational decisions so long as the usual bs move of externalizing environmental, societal, and future impacts isn't how we carry them out. As long as all costs are considered, then cost vs benefits is the only way to make a choice.
Wow, that's pretty broken. In other words, you only consider the costs of "externalizing environmental, societal, and future impacts" which is exactly the problem I was speaking of.
Ignoring the opportunity costs of a choice is not least harm. The reason we burn coal in the first place is because it is useful to do so. And that utility also generates externalities, but of the positive sort.
What would you propose we use a basis for decision making? Coin flip? Pray to the invisible hand of the market? Some other bullshit god?
Externalities are easy to engineer for. Just stick in some revenue-neutral tax on coal or whatever. Just be careful to avoid excessive costs because of a quasi-religious conviction that coal burning is bad. Past that, markets. Problem solved.
And your point is? I think I made clear at the beginning that I didn't get it. But who knows, maybe if people will keep telling me I didn't get it a bunch more times, then I'll realize yet again that I didn't get it.
So what? Freedom means the freedom to do stuff that's harmful to yourself and/or disliked by others. The earlier poster's assertion that it was some economic "jobs" argument that kept tobacco products going is absurd. It was the demand for tobacco products which kept them going.
While they're busy selling lowest-possible quality products, the acceptable-quality products are losing sales to them. Many times the moderate product lines can't even stay in business, leaving only a few over-the-top/boutique brands for the 1% and the bottom dweller products for everyone else. Once the moderate competition is dead, prices go way up on the poor quality products. So you and I end up with overpriced terrible products with the only alternative being to ridiculously overspend on a luxury product. And few manufacturers want to re-enter the market, because nothing will stop Walmart from simply dropping the prices to anti-competitive levels.
Unless, of course, we don't buy those products. If however, people choose to buy those products, then it looks to me like they value price over quality. At that point, who am I to disagree with their decisions?
Why do we not look outside of our nation for best case and best practices? Other places do have usable and demonstrative ways.
Why do people only become interested in best case/practices when defending spending? A good portion of the opposition to public funding and government spending would go away, if these things were done rather than merely talked about.
National defense being a better example of this than roads due to the need to reduce conflicts of interest. But I should point out that rent seeking is a notorious example of a thing that frequently requires public funding (and supporting regulation) to exist. The AT&T monopoly probably delayed design and implementation of the eventual internet considerably due to the interference of a state-mandated and supported monopoly with little interest in technology development of this sort (their computer development was in a sector where they experienced competition).
The internet fits in that middle group. Lots of large private networks were built around the same time - but they didn't take off like the internet.
That's pretty strong evidence right there that the internet would have happened anyway.
Designing the technology was not the hard part, in fact some of those large privately owned networks had technology that was, arguably, far more advanced than the internet technology at the time. Yet they didn't become the internet - because to BE an internet you needed a hands-off approach, and a willingness to let everybody use it and evolve it and expand it in all sorts of ways without trying to make money out of them all. A central controller or owner would have prevented it from succeeding. The internet was the exact OPPOSITE of a tragedy of the commons - it was a technology that couldn't happen UNLESS it was a commons.
Again doesn't require public funding to do that.
Really, what is the point of claiming that one needs public funding to have an internet? We conveniently can't have a pure counterexample due to the prevalence of promiscuous government spending. It also ignores the variety and extent of private networks that were being developed at the time, some which became part of the internet which as I already noted is a strong indication to the contrary. It's a variation of the "a few drops dirty the ocean" argument. Government spending is so prevalent that anything can be tainted with it. For example, you then went on to claim that public funding was instrumental to the development of Linux merely because Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux had a free college education in Finland.
My view on such things is that when you uncritically support public spending because the internet (computers, lasers, etc), you're opening the door to all sorts of waste and harms from unaccountable public spending simply because you aren't paying attention. In particular, we have a variety of massive projects that don't do useful things, like $400 billion on a poor jet fighter or $100 billion for a space station that barely does science. Or trillions spent across the developed world to transfer wealth from working people who need it to elderly who don't.
Obviously, privacy of police officers is less equal than that of Planned Parenthood officials.
And you have a problem with that why? Police officers on duty don't have the same expectation of privacy that a private non profit and its officials have.
Are PP's employees "entirely different" from policemen?
What law enforcement powers do PP employees have again?
receiving even a little bit of tax money changes everything.
So PP employees should be able to go out and write tickets for speeding and stuff because they get a little tax money?
I notice you don't mention any applicable law. If we just go off of the vague assertion that it "changes everything" rather than a concrete law, then there are plenty of negative ways we could interpret that which make matters worse.
From what I'm reading here, this case doesn't look good for the activists. They committed fraud, they covertly videoed someone (which incidentally may be illegal to do even when the target is a police officer), and libeled Planned Parenthood afterward. The first two are felonies. The last a civil tort.
Or we could, you know, build clean garbage incineration units like they have in Europe which are actually net producers of energy.
Coal burning is actually a net producer of energy too. And if burning trash "cleanly" is so awesome as a power source, then why not dig up some of our monstrous trash heaps and burn those? Cleanly, of course.
Did NASA let this happen, or did Congress force it on NASA?
I believe both are true. A key point IMHO was in the wake of the massive downsizing from the Saturn V. NASA could no longer maintain the huge infrastructure of the Saturn period in the mid 70s. But rather than resize their ambitions for the budget they were getting, they overbuilt launch infrastructure (the Space Shuttle) in a gamble to get more funding for actual space exploration and development down the road. The Challenger accident ended that gamble.
At that point in 1986, the Shuttle had failed as a tool to gain more funding and enable more space activities. But they continued it for another quarter century, finally ending the program in 2010. We've since 1986 have had a vastly overpriced space station, at least two Shuttle predecessors, and two Saturn V-scale rockets developed without a point by NASA.
If NASA wanted a coherent, productive space strategy, they had numerous times where they could have changed their ways to get that, even in the face of congressional meddling. It has long been more important to lock in funding than it is to actually do anything in space.
Agreed. This report smells like sensationalized bullshit that makes light of what things really cost. The cost to essentially re-tool after decades out of the business of anything beyond low-earth orbit space travel has to be paid, and since NASA has to carry out the mission, they're the ones who first have to have everything in place. Measuring this against what contractors get is a head-fake; contractors should be specialists paid just for the piece of the puzzle required from them, so they should get paid less and later, after NASA has figured out to an excruciating degree of certainty what they need and how to get it done right so that contractors don't wind up making something useless.
Unless they had private industry do it. Then they wouldn't need to do all this stuff. It's worth noting that NASA actually did a study where they priced out how much a NASA contract for SpaceX's development of the Falcon 9 would cost. It turned out to be an order of magnitude greater than what SpaceX actually spent on development.
Besides, NASA is not for-profit like the private sector. Money doesn't disappear down a profit hole, CEO bonuses or golden parachutes.
Actually a lot of money does disappear exactly that way since NASA depends on private industry to actually build anything.
Unless there are examples of specific misappropriation
Like the existence of the Space Launch System? No reason for it aside from cash flow to the appropriate congressional districts. It has some of the most terrible economics since Titan III with a very low launch frequency and no compelling need for the capabilities it provides.
except only for pork mandated by Congress, because a congressman wants something sweet in his state or district. In THAT case, don't blame NASA, blame the Congressman (and the people who voted for him).
It's NASA's job to do NASA's job. They let this political rent seeking get way out of hand over the decades.
Yep. Turns out NASA doesn't get to say "oops" as often as SpaceX does, which makes things more expensive.
NASA does a lot of stuff which makes things more expensive. In addition to their skewed risk perception, they also reuse the Space Shuttle lineage despite no compelling reason to do so (particularly, the solid rocket motors which generate a variety of costs and risks), employ cost plus contracts (which should be the exclusive realm of gouging law firms), and make some of the worst economic decisions in the federal government.
Slashdot Mirror
That mentioned that mid-market products get priced out of the market by cheap knock offs whose price eventually gets raised to match the mid-market goods that were driven out, except the quality never gets put back in?
You're making the broad assumption that the mid-markets were better quality. Why is the cheaper product winning in the first place?
Except now you are a you with only a single option: "shit product for a bargain price" -- soon to be "shit product for the same price I used to pay for a decent product".
Or you can choose to pay more for said decent product.
We can't make rational decisions by considering cost vs benefits of a choice? That is absolutely the best way to make rational decisions so long as the usual bs move of externalizing environmental, societal, and future impacts isn't how we carry them out. As long as all costs are considered, then cost vs benefits is the only way to make a choice.
Wow, that's pretty broken. In other words, you only consider the costs of "externalizing environmental, societal, and future impacts" which is exactly the problem I was speaking of.
Ignoring the opportunity costs of a choice is not least harm. The reason we burn coal in the first place is because it is useful to do so. And that utility also generates externalities, but of the positive sort.
What would you propose we use a basis for decision making? Coin flip? Pray to the invisible hand of the market? Some other bullshit god?
Externalities are easy to engineer for. Just stick in some revenue-neutral tax on coal or whatever. Just be careful to avoid excessive costs because of a quasi-religious conviction that coal burning is bad. Past that, markets. Problem solved.
Please let's communicate.
Haven't we?
No. Sorry, I'm not continuing with this any more.
Coal should stay in the ground where it does the least harm.
And the least good. We can't make rational decisions by only considering exclusively the cost xor benefits of a choice.
I still think that is quite clear, even if you don't. I too respond in kind. Sounds like we have common ground. Please let's communicate.
That's not the same thing.
And your point is? I think I made clear at the beginning that I didn't get it. But who knows, maybe if people will keep telling me I didn't get it a bunch more times, then I'll realize yet again that I didn't get it.
How about explaining it then rather than just whine that I don't get it?
So what? Freedom means the freedom to do stuff that's harmful to yourself and/or disliked by others. The earlier poster's assertion that it was some economic "jobs" argument that kept tobacco products going is absurd. It was the demand for tobacco products which kept them going.
While they're busy selling lowest-possible quality products, the acceptable-quality products are losing sales to them. Many times the moderate product lines can't even stay in business, leaving only a few over-the-top/boutique brands for the 1% and the bottom dweller products for everyone else. Once the moderate competition is dead, prices go way up on the poor quality products. So you and I end up with overpriced terrible products with the only alternative being to ridiculously overspend on a luxury product. And few manufacturers want to re-enter the market, because nothing will stop Walmart from simply dropping the prices to anti-competitive levels.
Unless, of course, we don't buy those products. If however, people choose to buy those products, then it looks to me like they value price over quality. At that point, who am I to disagree with their decisions?
Seems way off topic to me. We do have plenty of other retailers out there even if Walmart and Amazon off each other.
Sounds like the problem solves itself.
Why do we not look outside of our nation for best case and best practices? Other places do have usable and demonstrative ways.
Why do people only become interested in best case/practices when defending spending? A good portion of the opposition to public funding and government spending would go away, if these things were done rather than merely talked about.
We still have tobacco because
We still have tobacco because people want to smoke it.
Anything ? No. Not at all.
But some things ? Yes.
National defense being a better example of this than roads due to the need to reduce conflicts of interest. But I should point out that rent seeking is a notorious example of a thing that frequently requires public funding (and supporting regulation) to exist. The AT&T monopoly probably delayed design and implementation of the eventual internet considerably due to the interference of a state-mandated and supported monopoly with little interest in technology development of this sort (their computer development was in a sector where they experienced competition).
The internet fits in that middle group. Lots of large private networks were built around the same time - but they didn't take off like the internet.
That's pretty strong evidence right there that the internet would have happened anyway.
Designing the technology was not the hard part, in fact some of those large privately owned networks had technology that was, arguably, far more advanced than the internet technology at the time. Yet they didn't become the internet - because to BE an internet you needed a hands-off approach, and a willingness to let everybody use it and evolve it and expand it in all sorts of ways without trying to make money out of them all. A central controller or owner would have prevented it from succeeding. The internet was the exact OPPOSITE of a tragedy of the commons - it was a technology that couldn't happen UNLESS it was a commons.
Again doesn't require public funding to do that.
Really, what is the point of claiming that one needs public funding to have an internet? We conveniently can't have a pure counterexample due to the prevalence of promiscuous government spending. It also ignores the variety and extent of private networks that were being developed at the time, some which became part of the internet which as I already noted is a strong indication to the contrary. It's a variation of the "a few drops dirty the ocean" argument. Government spending is so prevalent that anything can be tainted with it. For example, you then went on to claim that public funding was instrumental to the development of Linux merely because Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux had a free college education in Finland.
My view on such things is that when you uncritically support public spending because the internet (computers, lasers, etc), you're opening the door to all sorts of waste and harms from unaccountable public spending simply because you aren't paying attention. In particular, we have a variety of massive projects that don't do useful things, like $400 billion on a poor jet fighter or $100 billion for a space station that barely does science. Or trillions spent across the developed world to transfer wealth from working people who need it to elderly who don't.
And by that standard the fucking internet would not exist.
Because the taint of public funding is required to do anything in this world.
Obviously, privacy of police officers is less equal than that of Planned Parenthood officials.
And you have a problem with that why? Police officers on duty don't have the same expectation of privacy that a private non profit and its officials have.
Are PP's employees "entirely different" from policemen?
What law enforcement powers do PP employees have again?
receiving even a little bit of tax money changes everything.
So PP employees should be able to go out and write tickets for speeding and stuff because they get a little tax money?
I notice you don't mention any applicable law. If we just go off of the vague assertion that it "changes everything" rather than a concrete law, then there are plenty of negative ways we could interpret that which make matters worse.
From what I'm reading here, this case doesn't look good for the activists. They committed fraud, they covertly videoed someone (which incidentally may be illegal to do even when the target is a police officer), and libeled Planned Parenthood afterward. The first two are felonies. The last a civil tort.
Or we could, you know, build clean garbage incineration units like they have in Europe which are actually net producers of energy.
Coal burning is actually a net producer of energy too. And if burning trash "cleanly" is so awesome as a power source, then why not dig up some of our monstrous trash heaps and burn those? Cleanly, of course.
/s
BRB I need to throw some batteries away.
And providing services to people is generally a state level responsibility. I too disagree that it should be a federal level responsibility.
Did NASA let this happen, or did Congress force it on NASA?
I believe both are true. A key point IMHO was in the wake of the massive downsizing from the Saturn V. NASA could no longer maintain the huge infrastructure of the Saturn period in the mid 70s. But rather than resize their ambitions for the budget they were getting, they overbuilt launch infrastructure (the Space Shuttle) in a gamble to get more funding for actual space exploration and development down the road. The Challenger accident ended that gamble.
At that point in 1986, the Shuttle had failed as a tool to gain more funding and enable more space activities. But they continued it for another quarter century, finally ending the program in 2010. We've since 1986 have had a vastly overpriced space station, at least two Shuttle predecessors, and two Saturn V-scale rockets developed without a point by NASA.
If NASA wanted a coherent, productive space strategy, they had numerous times where they could have changed their ways to get that, even in the face of congressional meddling. It has long been more important to lock in funding than it is to actually do anything in space.
They don't design rockets - they design requirements for rockets.
They shouldn't be doing that. Private industry already has adequate rockets for NASA's purposes.
Agreed. This report smells like sensationalized bullshit that makes light of what things really cost. The cost to essentially re-tool after decades out of the business of anything beyond low-earth orbit space travel has to be paid, and since NASA has to carry out the mission, they're the ones who first have to have everything in place. Measuring this against what contractors get is a head-fake; contractors should be specialists paid just for the piece of the puzzle required from them, so they should get paid less and later, after NASA has figured out to an excruciating degree of certainty what they need and how to get it done right so that contractors don't wind up making something useless.
Unless they had private industry do it. Then they wouldn't need to do all this stuff. It's worth noting that NASA actually did a study where they priced out how much a NASA contract for SpaceX's development of the Falcon 9 would cost. It turned out to be an order of magnitude greater than what SpaceX actually spent on development.
Besides, NASA is not for-profit like the private sector. Money doesn't disappear down a profit hole, CEO bonuses or golden parachutes.
Actually a lot of money does disappear exactly that way since NASA depends on private industry to actually build anything.
Unless there are examples of specific misappropriation
Like the existence of the Space Launch System? No reason for it aside from cash flow to the appropriate congressional districts. It has some of the most terrible economics since Titan III with a very low launch frequency and no compelling need for the capabilities it provides.
except only for pork mandated by Congress, because a congressman wants something sweet in his state or district. In THAT case, don't blame NASA, blame the Congressman (and the people who voted for him).
It's NASA's job to do NASA's job. They let this political rent seeking get way out of hand over the decades.
I suppose if you had it as large bills, it would fit in a pocket.
He's saving $9k per year. That hunk of change is worth a bit of grief.
Yep. Turns out NASA doesn't get to say "oops" as often as SpaceX does, which makes things more expensive.
NASA does a lot of stuff which makes things more expensive. In addition to their skewed risk perception, they also reuse the Space Shuttle lineage despite no compelling reason to do so (particularly, the solid rocket motors which generate a variety of costs and risks), employ cost plus contracts (which should be the exclusive realm of gouging law firms), and make some of the worst economic decisions in the federal government.