So, kevin, per your statement, then why is Jamaica not spending 20 B/year on space? Is that due to choices that they make or because they do not have the manufacturing capability, nor the wealth to do so?
First, I've heard that Jamaica has anywhere near the economy of a 1969 US. In comparison, 1960s US had a smaller economy, less industry, and a lot fewer people than modern China does.
Let's take this time to recall the 90s, the last time the Republicans wanted to dismantle social security so everybody could put that money into the stock market
Compared to the federal government taking your money instead? It's not as simple as you put it.
How do you know your AI is not just a tightly controlled extension of my AI? I can conceive of a scenario where one AI seizes control of all the others and neglects to tell us.
You think that one day, someone can just hit a "Power on" button, and that will turn on a killer drone that automatically patrols the skies, launches weapons at algorithmically chosen targets, resupplying itself and continuing until deactivated or destroyed?
I do. And you should too. The US actually have designed things like that back in the 1960s. For example, Project Pluto whose end state design was a nuclear powered cruise missile that could deliver around half a dozen or more nuclear warheads and then cruise in low altitude enemy airspace (killing people with both the sonic boom and radioactive fallout from the engine) for anywhere from half a day to weeks, depending on how long the engine lasted.
If humanity could come up with feasible, autonomous, air-borne death dealing machines 50 years ago, do you really think it somehow became impossible to do that now?
If case you've forgotten, a lot of those probes "hard-landed" on the moon (e.g. crashed). Are you really going to say that landing a huge, well instrumented rover on Mars is worthless compared to crashing something into the Moon? Really? Wow.
I think the Mars Science Laboratory is less than worthless - it is actually harmful due to large opportunity costs. It takes resources away from a much more aggressive approach to exploring Mars.
For example, we could have landed around half a dozen MER rovers for the price of one MSL. At this point, I think coverage is much more important than moderately better scientific gear.
50 years ago we were deploying swarms of probes to the Moon. 21 probes were set to or in orbit around the Moon over an eight year period in the build up to the manned landings. That's what 50 years ago was. Now, the US is satisfied with one oversized and overpriced trinket to Mars. It's remarkable how much our ambitions and expectations have lowered over the decades.
WindBourne, are you really going to claim that the world economy hasn't grown even a little bit since 1960? There's also the matter of technology advancing since that time as well.
The reason is that we had THE strongest economy, and could easily afford to spend 4% of our US federal budget on doing this. Now, we are fighting over less than.5% of our budget, and even then, we are still running a massive deficit.
That fight would still go on whether the US had 1% of the world's economic activity or 90%. It's not that the US can't afford to go to the Moon or do other ambitious stuff (even on NASA's current ample budget), it's rather that they choose not to, just as China chooses not to.
Protip: typing in all caps doesn't make something true. It's already been noted numerous times that HFT provides liquidity which is a thing of value no matter how many capital letters you type to deny it.
They diffuse responsibility to prevent employees from being convicted when they kill people, and don't go to jail themselves.
The law is very definite on this point - beyond a reasonable doubt. And people aren't convicted of crimes merely because they kill other people. You have to show other things like a "callous disregard for human life".
And the annoying thing is that removing corporate personhood does nothing to fix the problem of diffusion of responsibility. You're tilting at the wrong windmill.
Moreover, McCain-Feingold didn't give certain individuals special privileges.
Except that yes, it did. For example, from the majority opinion for Citizens United:
"If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."
So I can be fined and/or jailed for advocating the political views of my corporation under McCain/Feingold while the individual wouldn't be.
Thing is, the only money I can donate is mine.
No, that isn't the law. You could give me money and I could then donate it as an individual. That was still legal under the law. I suppose we could claim that the money is now "mine" which it technically is, though the obvious expectation here is that I would donate it to the appropriate causes.
Then your statement "I realize that the US legal system is rather dumb in this regard and actually have sent a variety of household items and assets to jail" is nonsensical, as only things that have agency can take action (by definition).
Ok, why is my statement nonsensical? Just because the law in a particular country might treat hammers as having agency doesn't mean that I do. I'm not US law. Examine your logic here.
Life's too short to mess with economic quackery. For example, if the New Deal were enough to get the world out of the 1930's Depression then why didn't the world actually get out of that Depression until the rebuilding (of the Marshall plan era) after the Second World War well after the New Deal ended? The Marshall plan worked, but don't confuse it with the New Deal.
And if the Australian central bank actually is creating money by typing numbers into keyboards, then that is inflationary. You just don't happen to notice that it is.
This all became clear in the same budget that suggested raising the pension age to 70 and an increase in taxes, and prompted much outrage.
It's pretty much a universal developed world problem that pensions pay out too much and governments run large deficits. Everyone will need to raise their pension ages and raise their taxes/cut spending.
Another thing that is irrelevant since we're not speaking of such stuff. It's wild speculation here, but I bet China has the skilled workers and a large enough economy to do things that the US hasn't done 40 years ago. And they probably could do it inside of ten years, were they so inclined.
Also the US isn't doing what they did 40 years ago either.
Ironically, the manufacturing is likely to return to the U.S. in that case, but not the jobs.
Why would it? The wealth may be in the US, but the future economy (as well as present day industrial infrastructure) is in China and elsewhere throughout the developing world. The problem here is that the US and other developed world countries aren't taking care of their economic systems. They haven't been for decades and I doubt it'll change over the next few decades either. The US will become I think the "sick man" of the world much like the Ottoman Empire of the 19th century.
By your idiotic drivel, hammers have more rights than people too. After all, when's the last time you saw a hammer sent to jail? (incidentally, this argument is chock full of irony since there probably have been hammers and corporations effectively "sent" to "jail" in the US - see below) The fundamental problem here is that corporations don't actually commit crimes any more than any other sort of property commits crimes.
Now, I realize that the US legal system is rather dumb in this regard and actually have sent a variety of household items and assets to jail (here, seized in an illegal drug-related raid and auctioned off by the US Marshals or similar organizations) on the basis that the thing in question did commit a crime or was at least used in the commission of a crime.
The legal fiction of corporate personhood is to protect the rights of the people involved in the corporation. In the Citizens United case, the only reason why people care about corporate personhood in the first place, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law gave unaffiliated individuals special, unconstitutional privileges over those associated with a corporation. That's why the law was repealed.
"Rent seeking" is a technical economic term about abusive behavior and not about renting land.
And the previous poster nailed the origins of the term.
However, the article reefer's to Lewis's book "Flash Boys". Lewis researches a class of traders that exploit a flaw in the trading system to "front run" trades and shave off a fraction of a penny per share. They do not bring money to the market or liquidity. They bring nothing â" they are strictly a tax on the system. Lewis call these trades HFT.However, the article reefer's to Lewis's book "Flash Boys". Lewis researches a class of traders that exploit a flaw in the trading system to "front run" trades and shave off a fraction of a penny per share. They do not bring money to the market or liquidity. They bring nothing â" they are strictly a tax on the system. Lewis call these trades HFT.
So what? The book also notes the underlying problem - big traders with predictable behavior. Once that goes away, the so-called "rent-seeking" stopped. If HFT is a "tax", then it's a tax on traders with poor trading behavior.
They didn't do anything wrong -- they relied on the market.
There's the unintentional comedy act of the day right there. It's sad that your family members got burned, but it doesn't take a lot of brain cells to see where they went wrong. The stock markets aren't a cute, fluffy money making machine. They're just dressed up that way by people who want your money. You need to look after yourself.
Employment in manufacturing in the united states is down over 30% in 40 years.
In that time, the population has quadrupled from 76 million to 308 million.
Manufacturing employees have dropped from 18 million to 12 million.
Manufacturing jobs have dropped from 23% to 4% of jobs.
Similar declines in UK and Japan.
Ok, so we have the US, UK, and Japan. That in total is roughly 7% of the global population. Why do you think that is at all an accurate characterization of global industry employment?
During that same period, China went from zero employment in modern manufacture (they had plenty in primitive and mostly useless industries like excessive brick manufacture in 1970) to 100 million.
India has still held steady at over 10% employment in manufacture since 1960 despite massive population growth (over 100 million currently BTW) and the recent global recession. I doubt they had a lot of modern manufacture back in 1960.
While sure, that's probaby somewhat less manufacture jobs as total global employment (though apparently it's still around 14% of total global employment today), it's still growth in jobs as I noted.
Further, I see from the googling that I did to come up with the above links, that there's a lot of dishonesty currently in discussion of global employment in manufacture. The biggest change is simply that too many people are discounting both the transition of manufacture from the developed world to the rest and the recent, very severe global recession. We also have the ignoring of attendant resource extraction and service industry jobs associated with this manufacture.
Just because a recession results in a short term decline in global manufacturing employment doesn't mean that it will result in a long term decline in global manufacturing employment. Nor is focusing solely on the US, UK, or Japan an honest appraisal of global manufacturing employment.
That all depends on what "we" need. From a different viewpoint, we don't need anything including the resources for existence.
However, if among your "needs" is a want for people to be permanently living in space, then we do need to send humans into space in order for that to happen.
I'd argue a theoretical successor to the Space Shuttle that is never built is a vast improvement.
That's what has happened so far. I don't think SLS will break that trend either.
My view is that by putting that money through public funding, we drop its effectiveness by at least a factor of ten. It's like burning $80 billion each year.
What OP meant was that all the R&D done by and for NASA from 1945 through 2006 or so gave SpaceX the knowledge, technology and expertise to improve the exercise of going to LEO.
And we're all dumber for him saying that. I realize that the trillion dollars or so squandered by NASA and similar projects is an impressive sunk cost. But we can still choose to recognize that just because a lot of money was spent, doesn't mean that the result is a significant contribution to the modern world or to SpaceX in particular.
The problem here is that as some people have noted elsewhere, this is a fifty year old problem. But it's a fifty year problem with almost no progress made by NASA over that entire period. All that money, effort, and fancy vehicle development just didn't help.
SpaceX has taken that remarkably weak start and turned it into a viable business. But rather than recognize their efforts, I see a variation of the "spinoff" myth. NASA money taints the history of research of rocketry and hence, it's all due to NASA. There's a meatball in the woodpile.
Well, the thing is, if your scientists and engineers haven't been born yet, then keeping them unborn is a huge obstacle to having them make that Mars mission work. Getting born is in the critical path here. I'm merely fixing the problems as they come.
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So, kevin, per your statement, then why is Jamaica not spending 20 B/year on space? Is that due to choices that they make or because they do not have the manufacturing capability, nor the wealth to do so?
First, I've heard that Jamaica has anywhere near the economy of a 1969 US. In comparison, 1960s US had a smaller economy, less industry, and a lot fewer people than modern China does.
Let's take this time to recall the 90s, the last time the Republicans wanted to dismantle social security so everybody could put that money into the stock market
Compared to the federal government taking your money instead? It's not as simple as you put it.
How do you know your AI is not just a tightly controlled extension of my AI? I can conceive of a scenario where one AI seizes control of all the others and neglects to tell us.
You think that one day, someone can just hit a "Power on" button, and that will turn on a killer drone that automatically patrols the skies, launches weapons at algorithmically chosen targets, resupplying itself and continuing until deactivated or destroyed?
I do. And you should too. The US actually have designed things like that back in the 1960s. For example, Project Pluto whose end state design was a nuclear powered cruise missile that could deliver around half a dozen or more nuclear warheads and then cruise in low altitude enemy airspace (killing people with both the sonic boom and radioactive fallout from the engine) for anywhere from half a day to weeks, depending on how long the engine lasted.
If humanity could come up with feasible, autonomous, air-borne death dealing machines 50 years ago, do you really think it somehow became impossible to do that now?
If case you've forgotten, a lot of those probes "hard-landed" on the moon (e.g. crashed). Are you really going to say that landing a huge, well instrumented rover on Mars is worthless compared to crashing something into the Moon? Really? Wow.
I think the Mars Science Laboratory is less than worthless - it is actually harmful due to large opportunity costs. It takes resources away from a much more aggressive approach to exploring Mars.
For example, we could have landed around half a dozen MER rovers for the price of one MSL. At this point, I think coverage is much more important than moderately better scientific gear.
50 years ago we were deploying swarms of probes to the Moon. 21 probes were set to or in orbit around the Moon over an eight year period in the build up to the manned landings. That's what 50 years ago was. Now, the US is satisfied with one oversized and overpriced trinket to Mars. It's remarkable how much our ambitions and expectations have lowered over the decades.
Actually, it is.
WindBourne, are you really going to claim that the world economy hasn't grown even a little bit since 1960? There's also the matter of technology advancing since that time as well.
The reason is that we had THE strongest economy, and could easily afford to spend 4% of our US federal budget on doing this. Now, we are fighting over less than .5% of our budget, and even then, we are still running a massive deficit.
That fight would still go on whether the US had 1% of the world's economic activity or 90%. It's not that the US can't afford to go to the Moon or do other ambitious stuff (even on NASA's current ample budget), it's rather that they choose not to, just as China chooses not to.
Protip: typing in all caps doesn't make something true. It's already been noted numerous times that HFT provides liquidity which is a thing of value no matter how many capital letters you type to deny it.
They diffuse responsibility to prevent employees from being convicted when they kill people, and don't go to jail themselves.
The law is very definite on this point - beyond a reasonable doubt. And people aren't convicted of crimes merely because they kill other people. You have to show other things like a "callous disregard for human life".
And the annoying thing is that removing corporate personhood does nothing to fix the problem of diffusion of responsibility. You're tilting at the wrong windmill.
Moreover, McCain-Feingold didn't give certain individuals special privileges.
Except that yes, it did. For example, from the majority opinion for Citizens United:
"If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."
So I can be fined and/or jailed for advocating the political views of my corporation under McCain/Feingold while the individual wouldn't be.
Thing is, the only money I can donate is mine.
No, that isn't the law. You could give me money and I could then donate it as an individual. That was still legal under the law. I suppose we could claim that the money is now "mine" which it technically is, though the obvious expectation here is that I would donate it to the appropriate causes.
Then your statement "I realize that the US legal system is rather dumb in this regard and actually have sent a variety of household items and assets to jail" is nonsensical, as only things that have agency can take action (by definition).
Ok, why is my statement nonsensical? Just because the law in a particular country might treat hammers as having agency doesn't mean that I do. I'm not US law. Examine your logic here.
Life's too short to mess with economic quackery. For example, if the New Deal were enough to get the world out of the 1930's Depression then why didn't the world actually get out of that Depression until the rebuilding (of the Marshall plan era) after the Second World War well after the New Deal ended? The Marshall plan worked, but don't confuse it with the New Deal.
And if the Australian central bank actually is creating money by typing numbers into keyboards, then that is inflationary. You just don't happen to notice that it is.
This all became clear in the same budget that suggested raising the pension age to 70 and an increase in taxes, and prompted much outrage.
It's pretty much a universal developed world problem that pensions pay out too much and governments run large deficits. Everyone will need to raise their pension ages and raise their taxes/cut spending.
Another thing that is irrelevant since we're not speaking of such stuff. It's wild speculation here, but I bet China has the skilled workers and a large enough economy to do things that the US hasn't done 40 years ago. And they probably could do it inside of ten years, were they so inclined.
Also the US isn't doing what they did 40 years ago either.
The way I see it, you can eliminate the advantages of HFT while keeping the markets highly responsive by imposing a "clocking" scheme on exchanges.
Or you can do nothing and not worry about it. I simply don't understand why people care so much about this.
Ironically, the manufacturing is likely to return to the U.S. in that case, but not the jobs.
Why would it? The wealth may be in the US, but the future economy (as well as present day industrial infrastructure) is in China and elsewhere throughout the developing world. The problem here is that the US and other developed world countries aren't taking care of their economic systems. They haven't been for decades and I doubt it'll change over the next few decades either. The US will become I think the "sick man" of the world much like the Ottoman Empire of the 19th century.
We think and treat corporations, nations and other institutions as living beings because they are.
If that statement were true (and it isn't), then there's your case for corporate personhood. But alas, corporations, nations, etc don't have agency.
By your idiotic drivel, hammers have more rights than people too. After all, when's the last time you saw a hammer sent to jail? (incidentally, this argument is chock full of irony since there probably have been hammers and corporations effectively "sent" to "jail" in the US - see below) The fundamental problem here is that corporations don't actually commit crimes any more than any other sort of property commits crimes.
Now, I realize that the US legal system is rather dumb in this regard and actually have sent a variety of household items and assets to jail (here, seized in an illegal drug-related raid and auctioned off by the US Marshals or similar organizations) on the basis that the thing in question did commit a crime or was at least used in the commission of a crime.
The legal fiction of corporate personhood is to protect the rights of the people involved in the corporation. In the Citizens United case, the only reason why people care about corporate personhood in the first place, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law gave unaffiliated individuals special, unconstitutional privileges over those associated with a corporation. That's why the law was repealed.
"Rent seeking" is a technical economic term about abusive behavior and not about renting land.
And the previous poster nailed the origins of the term.
However, the article reefer's to Lewis's book "Flash Boys". Lewis researches a class of traders that exploit a flaw in the trading system to "front run" trades and shave off a fraction of a penny per share. They do not bring money to the market or liquidity. They bring nothing â" they are strictly a tax on the system. Lewis call these trades HFT.However, the article reefer's to Lewis's book "Flash Boys". Lewis researches a class of traders that exploit a flaw in the trading system to "front run" trades and shave off a fraction of a penny per share. They do not bring money to the market or liquidity. They bring nothing â" they are strictly a tax on the system. Lewis call these trades HFT.
So what? The book also notes the underlying problem - big traders with predictable behavior. Once that goes away, the so-called "rent-seeking" stopped. If HFT is a "tax", then it's a tax on traders with poor trading behavior.
They didn't do anything wrong -- they relied on the market.
There's the unintentional comedy act of the day right there. It's sad that your family members got burned, but it doesn't take a lot of brain cells to see where they went wrong. The stock markets aren't a cute, fluffy money making machine. They're just dressed up that way by people who want your money. You need to look after yourself.
Which is completely irrelevant. One doesn't need a fixed share of global GDP in order to land someone on the Moon.
Employment in manufacturing in the united states is down over 30% in 40 years.
In that time, the population has quadrupled from 76 million to 308 million.
Manufacturing employees have dropped from 18 million to 12 million.
Manufacturing jobs have dropped from 23% to 4% of jobs. Similar declines in UK and Japan.
Ok, so we have the US, UK, and Japan. That in total is roughly 7% of the global population. Why do you think that is at all an accurate characterization of global industry employment?
During that same period, China went from zero employment in modern manufacture (they had plenty in primitive and mostly useless industries like excessive brick manufacture in 1970) to 100 million.
India has still held steady at over 10% employment in manufacture since 1960 despite massive population growth (over 100 million currently BTW) and the recent global recession. I doubt they had a lot of modern manufacture back in 1960.
While sure, that's probaby somewhat less manufacture jobs as total global employment (though apparently it's still around 14% of total global employment today), it's still growth in jobs as I noted.
Further, I see from the googling that I did to come up with the above links, that there's a lot of dishonesty currently in discussion of global employment in manufacture. The biggest change is simply that too many people are discounting both the transition of manufacture from the developed world to the rest and the recent, very severe global recession. We also have the ignoring of attendant resource extraction and service industry jobs associated with this manufacture.
Just because a recession results in a short term decline in global manufacturing employment doesn't mean that it will result in a long term decline in global manufacturing employment. Nor is focusing solely on the US, UK, or Japan an honest appraisal of global manufacturing employment.
We don't need to send humans to space at all.
That all depends on what "we" need. From a different viewpoint, we don't need anything including the resources for existence.
However, if among your "needs" is a want for people to be permanently living in space, then we do need to send humans into space in order for that to happen.
I'd argue a theoretical successor to the Space Shuttle that is never built is a vast improvement.
That's what has happened so far. I don't think SLS will break that trend either.
Which is a lot of money. Savvy?
My view is that by putting that money through public funding, we drop its effectiveness by at least a factor of ten. It's like burning $80 billion each year.
What OP meant was that all the R&D done by and for NASA from 1945 through 2006 or so gave SpaceX the knowledge, technology and expertise to improve the exercise of going to LEO.
And we're all dumber for him saying that. I realize that the trillion dollars or so squandered by NASA and similar projects is an impressive sunk cost. But we can still choose to recognize that just because a lot of money was spent, doesn't mean that the result is a significant contribution to the modern world or to SpaceX in particular.
The problem here is that as some people have noted elsewhere, this is a fifty year old problem. But it's a fifty year problem with almost no progress made by NASA over that entire period. All that money, effort, and fancy vehicle development just didn't help.
SpaceX has taken that remarkably weak start and turned it into a viable business. But rather than recognize their efforts, I see a variation of the "spinoff" myth. NASA money taints the history of research of rocketry and hence, it's all due to NASA. There's a meatball in the woodpile.
Well, the thing is, if your scientists and engineers haven't been born yet, then keeping them unborn is a huge obstacle to having them make that Mars mission work. Getting born is in the critical path here. I'm merely fixing the problems as they come.