It could be argued that Silicon Valley has benefitted the most from the California taxpayer.
Anything can be argued. And a lot of the drive behind the secessionist movement is the debt being accumulated by California as a whole. They don't want that debt.
My view is that the only fair way is to allot a fixed amount of debt per citizen (around $5500-6000 per capita) and let the weaker states go bankrupt.
still, the coating I would have suggested is well understood to be very chemically compatible with aluminum alloys, and is quite inexpensive.
And it is untested in a Martian environment. It's also worth noting here that Curiosity's tires experience considerable flexing as part of normal operation. A coated saw blade just doesn't see that kind of flexing.
Having said that, if I were running the unmanned Martian exploration program, I would be deploying a large number of much smaller rovers. For example, the Mars Exploration Rovers are proven technology. I would be launching several of them every two years to different locations on Mars using the Delta II, Atlas 5, and Falcon 9 rockets (I'd also consider foreign launchers, if the restriction on US-only launchers was lifted).
In that case where there's a lot of vehicles being manufactured rather than a few one-offs, it would make sense to investigate and use off-the-shelf technologies that could be applied to reduce manufacturing cost.
But if increased weight was a factor which stopped them from putting in more robust wheels, couldn't they have used something similar to what the Indian mars mission did, and launch the vehicle into a polar orbit, and from thereon, perform a Hohmann transfer?
They could, but it'd require more delta v and result in less payload. Putting the vehicle into a polar orbit is already less efficient because it takes more delta v to do that than to put the vehicle into a near equatorial orbit (especially from India). And then transitioning from that orbit to a Mars transfer orbit (or MTO, the Hohmann transfer you speak of) is another delta v cost.
Instead, launching almost directly (I understand there is a somewhat later boost after the vehicle drops the first stage) to MTO (as Curiosity did) is relatively efficient delta v-wise.
I'm sure those lessons will be applied. There might be another rover after that one, and maybe even one after that. So the lessons learned from Curiosity probably will be applied a few times. I'll just note that NASA could have built, launched, and operated a number of Mars Exploration Rovers for the total cost of Curiosity and apply the lessons of the MERs to more rovers by now than Curiosity will ever help.
If you or I can't afford to help researchers publish their data on the internet, the government can and should.
This is the outcome of government intervention in the scientific process - the generation of scientific activity which can't have long term value merely because it won't be saved. Maybe if we apply more of the poison, we'll save the victim.
It isn't printing money, since no physical greenbacks need be involved, just figures in a virtual ledger book.
There's so much fail in this sentence. "Printing money" is a saying not a literal description of the act. It means that you create currency without creating value. Inflation takes care of that hubris.
And how can anyone think that "figures in a virtual ledger book" is an adequate solution for anything productive or vital?
Perhaps by the time someone comes across your data, they will be smart enough (or have an AI that's smart enough) to figure it out. Or they could become architectural relics, providing valuable information to future societies. I think you discount your own research unfairly.
Like a room with a thousand Madonna portraits. Someone will be interested.
That they didn't even give them an abrasion resistant coating tells me that you had beancounters making engineering desicions.
It's the nature of the beast. The launch costs were just shy of $195 million. The mass of the vehicle ended up being 900 kg. That's roughly $215,000 per kg or $100,000 per pound. That's just the ante for putting something on the surface of Mars. Shaving off a mere 5 grams saves you more than $1000 just in launch costs. You then have to add in the testing to make sure the coating actually stays on and such.
Given that this decision didn't actually endanger the mission's success, it was a successful gamble too. That indicates to me that the bean counters were actually engineers.
I know weight is important and all, but.75mm of aluminium?
It's already been pointed out that the mission and those wheels exceeded the mission parameters. That means that 0.75 mm of aluminum was indeed enough. The common sense, eye-brow raising people are done here.
Your worry IMHO completely misses the point. In the real world, when someone screws up a prototype badly, they just make another cheap prototype which eliminates that failure mode and come up with more advanced and sophisticated screw ups. If 0.75 mm wheels weren't enough, then make the next generation of wheels a bit thicker.
But in the NASA world, who and what will use this knowledge? In my view, there won't be a lot of NASA Mars-oriented projects altogether, much less rover designs which can use this knowledge. NASA is notorious for spending vast sums of money, inching along over painfully long periods of time, and squandering the talent of generations of engineers and scientists, only to abandon the results when the activity can no longer be politically sustained. I believe that will happen here.
Sometimes, the results are sufficiently useful that other parties can use them. But this is remarkably poor return on what NASA consumes.
Once again, I ask, what makes the lack of progress in "space science" an "illusion"? I wouldn't as you do, use the opinions of uninformed people (who I might add often don't actually have an opinion on the subject).
Instead, I'd look at the actual work or lack thereof of space activities that might fall under the vague category of "space science". There are several things that stand out: 1) a profoundly low expectation for anything labeled "space science", 2) a similar degree of ignorance or perhaps negligent indifference for basic economics and fiscal matters (for example, economies of scale, what one can do with a billion dollars, and the "learning curve" model for expectations of improving a process that you do repeatedly), 3) an ugly anti-scientific attitude (such as blaming ignorant people for the failures of modern efforts to advance scientific knowledge beyond Earth), and 4) a epic tolerance for opportunity cost such as the failure to use the greatest concentration of scientists that the human race probably will ever have.
"Plain English" is an oxymoron. And if you actually read the "plain English" in question, you'll see that the original post is claiming that paying taxes, wages, and environmental protection would keep business around. Ignoring that paying for these things actually are detrimental to a business (making the whole claim something of a non sequitur), where's the "make something of value that people will pay money for" part of the business? Does paying taxes and wages while obeying environmental regulation mean you have a business? Of course not.
The problem here isn't even that the author wrote something in "plain English" that could be misinterpreted, but that what they wrote just doesn't make any sense in the first place.
The really interesting science, that is, there is no guarantee of a return accountants would recognize as such.
Do you really believe that most of humanity are accountants?
In space science, this is worsened by rockets failing, the harsh conditions of space wrecking probes, the hazards of space junk, the very long-term nature of the work, the fact that all costs are up-front and the commercial rewards beyond satellite relays are never tangibly linked to space research by the public, creating the illusion that space has done nothing.
It's like you're trying to lose this argument. What makes the poor progress in "space science" an illusion? Want to know the fastest way to do space science with near future technology? Sample return. That's because the scientific infrastructure on Earth is vastly better than the scientific infrastructure anywhere else that we can get to in the near future.
Wrong. The free market is only good at doing research that immediately or near-immediately enhances someoneâ(TM)s income.
You are already wrong. Flawed premise leads to flawed conclusions.
Who are you to judge what is useful and what is not?
I'm pretty good at that actually. The market is pretty much dead now, but I am the top scorer on the Foresight Exchange which was a prediction betting market that ran since 1996. I would certainly test my acumen against any scientist spouting the "you can't judge research" myth. It'd be easy money.
But who wanted to spend money on someone studying Maxwellâ(TM)s Equations? Or on comparing Indo-European languages? Those donâ(TM)t pay off at all, unless you just want to get your name on a university endowment.
Maxwell's equations had a large near future payoff, kicking off such things as radio and electronic analog computers. And comparing Indo-European languages? No more reason exists for public funding than private. But someone would find it interesting and fund it just like they do studies of history. Even the researchers themselves could do that.
Who wanted to blow cash on phlogistons or the aether when you could fund some dudeâ(TM)s new flavour of steam engine and double your money a year later? Yet without those phlogistons and aether we wouldnâ(TM)t have atomic physics and semiconductors.
Because they wanted to be on the next big thing.
I see the same empty-headed reasoning used. You haven't even considered if the examples you use actually support your argument.
Here's the obvious two rebuttals. First, there's no point to taking risks without a return. Your claims about finite elements analysis are bizarre. It was already being developed and it doesn't take decades of work to turn FEA into viable algorithms and working code when a single person could do it in a few years.
Second, what risks really are being taken? It's easy to talk about taking risks when you get easy money from someone else and have little accountability for what you do with that money.
You just won't get that from private enterprise, even a "Kickstarter-driven" kind of private enterprise.
All science research should be made profit driven because the free market is so very great at funding expensive research.
The free market and private enterprise as a whole may not be great at funding expensive research, but it is great at doing useful and cost-effective research. If you really want the most expensive research possible, I'm ready to make it happen. Ten trillion dollars will get you started on the most expensive research ever conceived, but you'll need to put another ten in to get papers.
Why do you think they killed the shuttle program before there was a viable replacement?
Two reasons: 1) because there never would be a viable replacement, especially while the Shuttle still flew, and 2) because the Shuttle and the rest of the manned space program had huge risks associated with it - bigger than the 2% chance of loss of crew (lose another Shuttle, the VAB, or the ISS and where is your manned space program?) which could be significantly reduced by not being dependent on the Shuttle.
Why do you think the Jupiter-Direct plan was never given a fair shake?
The plan had the serious defect of not throwing enough money at the usual contractors, particularly, ATK (Alliant Techsytems).
An FBI seizure is not a police seizure and the FBI doesn't hold police auctions
Just because the FBI doesn't auction it, doesn't mean that it doesn't get auctioned. Googling around, I found two different cases of assets that were seized by the FBI and auctioned off by the US Marshals.
I would say your response to the GP illustrates a bigger problem than cognitive dissonance: people are seeing the world in only black and white, only in extremes.
I just don't buy your interpretation of the original poster. If he wanted or deserved that sort of nuanced interpretation, he could have just put in a little more effort than a two sentence post.
The problem is far too many business miss just that. Instead they fight to the death over taxes, wages, and environmental protection that would help keep there business around in the future.
Because that bullshit is the only reason for existing.
This illustrates one of the bizarre cognitive dissonance of the anti-business side. Businesses can't do anything right. Yet we can dump on them huge tax loads, force them to pay arbitrarily high wages, and regulate the hell out of them, and they'll manage to stick around being evil. All the hardcore business advocates aren't even remotely that optimistic about what businesses can do.
Then money would have no value and I sure wouldn't accept it for any sort of payment. And then we'd have to create new money which did have value and as a result was scarce, which completely defeats your poorly thought out idea.
Give people a basic income, and let them create on their own or in ad hoc groups made possible through the internet.
I think it'd be a fair trade as long as we got rid of most of the labor law out there in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
It could be argued that Silicon Valley has benefitted the most from the California taxpayer.
Anything can be argued. And a lot of the drive behind the secessionist movement is the debt being accumulated by California as a whole. They don't want that debt.
My view is that the only fair way is to allot a fixed amount of debt per citizen (around $5500-6000 per capita) and let the weaker states go bankrupt.
still, the coating I would have suggested is well understood to be very chemically compatible with aluminum alloys, and is quite inexpensive.
And it is untested in a Martian environment. It's also worth noting here that Curiosity's tires experience considerable flexing as part of normal operation. A coated saw blade just doesn't see that kind of flexing.
Having said that, if I were running the unmanned Martian exploration program, I would be deploying a large number of much smaller rovers. For example, the Mars Exploration Rovers are proven technology. I would be launching several of them every two years to different locations on Mars using the Delta II, Atlas 5, and Falcon 9 rockets (I'd also consider foreign launchers, if the restriction on US-only launchers was lifted).
In that case where there's a lot of vehicles being manufactured rather than a few one-offs, it would make sense to investigate and use off-the-shelf technologies that could be applied to reduce manufacturing cost.
But if increased weight was a factor which stopped them from putting in more robust wheels, couldn't they have used something similar to what the Indian mars mission did, and launch the vehicle into a polar orbit, and from thereon, perform a Hohmann transfer?
They could, but it'd require more delta v and result in less payload. Putting the vehicle into a polar orbit is already less efficient because it takes more delta v to do that than to put the vehicle into a near equatorial orbit (especially from India). And then transitioning from that orbit to a Mars transfer orbit (or MTO, the Hohmann transfer you speak of) is another delta v cost.
Instead, launching almost directly (I understand there is a somewhat later boost after the vehicle drops the first stage) to MTO (as Curiosity did) is relatively efficient delta v-wise.
I'm sure those lessons will be applied. There might be another rover after that one, and maybe even one after that. So the lessons learned from Curiosity probably will be applied a few times. I'll just note that NASA could have built, launched, and operated a number of Mars Exploration Rovers for the total cost of Curiosity and apply the lessons of the MERs to more rovers by now than Curiosity will ever help.
If you or I can't afford to help researchers publish their data on the internet, the government can and should.
This is the outcome of government intervention in the scientific process - the generation of scientific activity which can't have long term value merely because it won't be saved. Maybe if we apply more of the poison, we'll save the victim.
It isn't printing money, since no physical greenbacks need be involved, just figures in a virtual ledger book.
There's so much fail in this sentence. "Printing money" is a saying not a literal description of the act. It means that you create currency without creating value. Inflation takes care of that hubris.
And how can anyone think that "figures in a virtual ledger book" is an adequate solution for anything productive or vital?
Perhaps by the time someone comes across your data, they will be smart enough (or have an AI that's smart enough) to figure it out. Or they could become architectural relics, providing valuable information to future societies. I think you discount your own research unfairly.
Like a room with a thousand Madonna portraits. Someone will be interested.
That they didn't even give them an abrasion resistant coating tells me that you had beancounters making engineering desicions.
It's the nature of the beast. The launch costs were just shy of $195 million. The mass of the vehicle ended up being 900 kg. That's roughly $215,000 per kg or $100,000 per pound. That's just the ante for putting something on the surface of Mars. Shaving off a mere 5 grams saves you more than $1000 just in launch costs. You then have to add in the testing to make sure the coating actually stays on and such.
Given that this decision didn't actually endanger the mission's success, it was a successful gamble too. That indicates to me that the bean counters were actually engineers.
I know weight is important and all, but .75mm of aluminium?
It's already been pointed out that the mission and those wheels exceeded the mission parameters. That means that 0.75 mm of aluminum was indeed enough. The common sense, eye-brow raising people are done here.
Your worry IMHO completely misses the point. In the real world, when someone screws up a prototype badly, they just make another cheap prototype which eliminates that failure mode and come up with more advanced and sophisticated screw ups. If 0.75 mm wheels weren't enough, then make the next generation of wheels a bit thicker.
But in the NASA world, who and what will use this knowledge? In my view, there won't be a lot of NASA Mars-oriented projects altogether, much less rover designs which can use this knowledge. NASA is notorious for spending vast sums of money, inching along over painfully long periods of time, and squandering the talent of generations of engineers and scientists, only to abandon the results when the activity can no longer be politically sustained. I believe that will happen here.
Sometimes, the results are sufficiently useful that other parties can use them. But this is remarkably poor return on what NASA consumes.
Once again, I ask, what makes the lack of progress in "space science" an "illusion"? I wouldn't as you do, use the opinions of uninformed people (who I might add often don't actually have an opinion on the subject).
Instead, I'd look at the actual work or lack thereof of space activities that might fall under the vague category of "space science". There are several things that stand out: 1) a profoundly low expectation for anything labeled "space science", 2) a similar degree of ignorance or perhaps negligent indifference for basic economics and fiscal matters (for example, economies of scale, what one can do with a billion dollars, and the "learning curve" model for expectations of improving a process that you do repeatedly), 3) an ugly anti-scientific attitude (such as blaming ignorant people for the failures of modern efforts to advance scientific knowledge beyond Earth), and 4) a epic tolerance for opportunity cost such as the failure to use the greatest concentration of scientists that the human race probably will ever have.
Dude, it's in plain English.
"Plain English" is an oxymoron. And if you actually read the "plain English" in question, you'll see that the original post is claiming that paying taxes, wages, and environmental protection would keep business around. Ignoring that paying for these things actually are detrimental to a business (making the whole claim something of a non sequitur), where's the "make something of value that people will pay money for" part of the business? Does paying taxes and wages while obeying environmental regulation mean you have a business? Of course not.
The problem here isn't even that the author wrote something in "plain English" that could be misinterpreted, but that what they wrote just doesn't make any sense in the first place.
The really interesting science, that is, there is no guarantee of a return accountants would recognize as such.
Do you really believe that most of humanity are accountants?
In space science, this is worsened by rockets failing, the harsh conditions of space wrecking probes, the hazards of space junk, the very long-term nature of the work, the fact that all costs are up-front and the commercial rewards beyond satellite relays are never tangibly linked to space research by the public, creating the illusion that space has done nothing.
It's like you're trying to lose this argument. What makes the poor progress in "space science" an illusion? Want to know the fastest way to do space science with near future technology? Sample return. That's because the scientific infrastructure on Earth is vastly better than the scientific infrastructure anywhere else that we can get to in the near future.
Wrong. The free market is only good at doing research that immediately or near-immediately enhances someoneâ(TM)s income.
You are already wrong. Flawed premise leads to flawed conclusions.
Who are you to judge what is useful and what is not?
I'm pretty good at that actually. The market is pretty much dead now, but I am the top scorer on the Foresight Exchange which was a prediction betting market that ran since 1996. I would certainly test my acumen against any scientist spouting the "you can't judge research" myth. It'd be easy money.
But who wanted to spend money on someone studying Maxwellâ(TM)s Equations? Or on comparing Indo-European languages? Those donâ(TM)t pay off at all, unless you just want to get your name on a university endowment.
Maxwell's equations had a large near future payoff, kicking off such things as radio and electronic analog computers. And comparing Indo-European languages? No more reason exists for public funding than private. But someone would find it interesting and fund it just like they do studies of history. Even the researchers themselves could do that.
Who wanted to blow cash on phlogistons or the aether when you could fund some dudeâ(TM)s new flavour of steam engine and double your money a year later? Yet without those phlogistons and aether we wouldnâ(TM)t have atomic physics and semiconductors.
Because they wanted to be on the next big thing.
I see the same empty-headed reasoning used. You haven't even considered if the examples you use actually support your argument.
Sorry dude, but you have no way of knowing if a research will be useful or not, does not work that way.
Works that way for anyone who actually does research.
Second, what risks really are being taken? It's easy to talk about taking risks when you get easy money from someone else and have little accountability for what you do with that money.
You just won't get that from private enterprise, even a "Kickstarter-driven" kind of private enterprise.
Ever try?
All science research should be made profit driven because the free market is so very great at funding expensive research.
The free market and private enterprise as a whole may not be great at funding expensive research, but it is great at doing useful and cost-effective research. If you really want the most expensive research possible, I'm ready to make it happen. Ten trillion dollars will get you started on the most expensive research ever conceived, but you'll need to put another ten in to get papers.
Why do you think they killed the shuttle program before there was a viable replacement?
Two reasons: 1) because there never would be a viable replacement, especially while the Shuttle still flew, and 2) because the Shuttle and the rest of the manned space program had huge risks associated with it - bigger than the 2% chance of loss of crew (lose another Shuttle, the VAB, or the ISS and where is your manned space program?) which could be significantly reduced by not being dependent on the Shuttle.
Why do you think the Jupiter-Direct plan was never given a fair shake?
The plan had the serious defect of not throwing enough money at the usual contractors, particularly, ATK (Alliant Techsytems).
An FBI seizure is not a police seizure and the FBI doesn't hold police auctions
Just because the FBI doesn't auction it, doesn't mean that it doesn't get auctioned. Googling around, I found two different cases of assets that were seized by the FBI and auctioned off by the US Marshals.
Pulse length of such systems is unrelated to the input energy and charge time to fire them
But it was clear from the original post that the longer pulse length was so that more energy would be brought to bear on the target.
and instead comes down to geometry and basic technique being used
Geometry and "basic technique" has nothing to do with pulse length either.
Analogue: 1 bit can be an infinite amount of values, so an infinite amount more information can sent in a single bit.
Except that you don't have the ability to measure an infinite spread of values. In reality, it's finite information too.
I would say your response to the GP illustrates a bigger problem than cognitive dissonance: people are seeing the world in only black and white, only in extremes.
I just don't buy your interpretation of the original poster. If he wanted or deserved that sort of nuanced interpretation, he could have just put in a little more effort than a two sentence post.
No, that's too expensive because shifting to different crops takes different machinery.
Ok, so we use different machinery then for the different crop. Problem solved.
And you just can't just grow whatever crop wherever you want.
Oh yea, we have to grow a crop which is appropriate for that region. Amazing how easy these problems are to solve.
With a pulsed laser, you could be talking about the difference between 8 ns and 10 ns for something to fail.
And the subsequent increase in charge time for the next pulse. Don't forget that part.
The problem is far too many business miss just that. Instead they fight to the death over taxes, wages, and environmental protection that would help keep there business around in the future.
Because that bullshit is the only reason for existing.
This illustrates one of the bizarre cognitive dissonance of the anti-business side. Businesses can't do anything right. Yet we can dump on them huge tax loads, force them to pay arbitrarily high wages, and regulate the hell out of them, and they'll manage to stick around being evil. All the hardcore business advocates aren't even remotely that optimistic about what businesses can do.
End the artificial scarcity of money.
Then money would have no value and I sure wouldn't accept it for any sort of payment. And then we'd have to create new money which did have value and as a result was scarce, which completely defeats your poorly thought out idea.
Give people a basic income, and let them create on their own or in ad hoc groups made possible through the internet.
I think it'd be a fair trade as long as we got rid of most of the labor law out there in the process.
Their second and third generation descendants also have much lower fertility just like any other long term US citizens. It's just not happening.