You can't be bothered to spend your own money. But you can be bothered to hope for the worst for people who mildly disagree with you. You are only alive today because others were a hell of a lot less selfish than you.
Margaret Thatcher detested the poor and especially the Irish.
We call this "making shit up".
She didn't believe in any form of social safety net and stigmatized the poor as work-shy (much like Romney and Republicans of today).
So what? What makes that a bad idea? It's worth noting here that the various social safety nets haven't actually been demonstrated to help people. It's merely assumed that they do. My take is that it is an instrument to keep people poor and dependent (which would violate several lines of that prayer BTW).
She eliminated food assistance programs and the free milk program for poor children in British schools earning her the nickname "Margaret the Milk Snatcher".
How do these help people who can already feed themselves? Also there's the matter of opportunity cost. At some point, you have to make choices about what you want your schools and government to be doing with limited funding.
I don't see how that behavior can be reconciled with the teachings of St Francis of Assisi at all?
Eh, I don't see how those teachings can be reconciled with themselves. If everyone lives a life of poverty as he apparently advocated, then how are they going to survive? Where will food, clothing, or shelter come from? The things that keep us alive come from people who have material stuff not those who don't. Then again, he never had to run a country.
And if we look at the actual prayer itself, we don't see Francis of Assisi's teachings in it. It seems rather generic and according to Wikipedia, may not have been written by him.
In particular, one doesn't need to live in poverty in order to live by that prayer. One doesn't need a government-based social safety net that causes more harm than help in order to live by that prayer.
I know you cannot possibly be stupid enough to really think that the FDA is a rogue agency that does not answer to any outside force and gets it's funding by magic with no orders to follow, so I'm not accusing you of being so stupid, I'm instead accusing you of pretending be so stupid by pushing such a simplistic and unrealistic viewpoint as presumably some sort of childish game to see how many of the gullible you can convince.
It can't possibly be that the FDA kills more people than it helps? That can't possibly be it.
The DoE was not trying to start the industry so much as it was trying to prove that green products that are competitive to fossil fuels could actually be built.
It failed hard then. The existence of a heavily subsidized good in no way determines whether the good would be competitive in the absence of the subsidy.
If Fisker decides to take a green energy loan and build a hybrid sports car instead of an actual green commodity car
Tesla didn't build a "green commodity car" either.
Nobody could have predicted them being so stupid in the first place
That's in error for two reasons. First, it's quite predictable what happened and continues to happen. Second, what makes you think Fisker Automotive acted stupidly? I think instead that the company was failing and the strings on the remaining $300 million either weren't worth the effort or were financially unattainable.
the unfortunate thing about investing is sometimes you hit a dud
It's embarrassing to call this "investment". You have to have a positive return first. You know, get more out than you put in.
Compared to what? As I see it, the mess of the 70s created those conditions. I find it interesting how the cure is blamed for the disease. I guess some things never change.
Of course, it's still a funeral. And I don't think you get the distinction. From Wikipedia:
The most recent state funeral for someone outside the royal family was that of Churchill in 1965.
So it would have been the first state funeral for someone outside of the Royal family in almost 50 years. The process is also more extensive. I gather they parade the body through London and put it on display for three days, then bury it. OTOH, I gather that a number of people get funerals with full military honors each year.
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate -- "It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it". That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people: "All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!" but when people come and say: "But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!" You say: "Look" It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!"
Sounds a lot better when you understand the context. The things we demand or take from "society" are actually demanded or taken from our fellow man. As to the "some people will never get a job" quote, you have three of the five googled instances of the quote, all from the same copy/pasted comment that you gave above.
Then you move on to:
The thing I hate her most for is usurping the prayer of St Francis of Assisi. I cannot her it now without thinking about how she did the exact opposite of every single statement - it brings thoughts of selfish greed, self importance and hypocrisy instead of peace and humility now.
That indicates your problem. You could have chosen to view the prayer and her works in the better light they deserve. You have poisoned your worldview for at least three decades.
Another was changing the law and backdating it when she tried to take money earmarked for London transport, despite the judge saying it was not only legally but morally wrong,
End the Cold War? Reverse the economic decline of the UK? Not worth mentioning. But mess with your pet public transportation scheme, and you'll be bitter till the end of time.
Sure, but none were started as long-term projects.
That doesn't matter.
But since you mentioned that, I think universities and religions would examples of long term projects that started with that intent. Space exploration can be considered another example, if you're of the category of optimism that thinks humanity will eventually spread past Earth.
The real problem here is that you never just "discuss" an issue. I explained why I had my opinion of the matter and then you started the petty high school name calling. For example,
Are you really blaming the FDA for doing what they were told by elected officials chasing the extreme (and IMHO Godless) end of the "Christian" vote?
The answer was "Of course" with an explanation why. A couple of posts later you wrote:
I should never have used a metaphor in a discussion with someone that pretends to be mentally retarded enough to take it literally:(
Oh look, petty name calling.
All I can say is that if you want discussion rather than "petty high school debate", then don't be the source of the problem.
As to the adversarial nature of this "discussion", it's worth noting the large number of people who just tell me what is self-evidently right. I'm far from perfect here, but it's not that common to see an actual "discussion" here. It's more common to see people just dump whatever opinions they think are true.
Way back when, "seven of five" posted this:
Since these folks enjoy the same public roads, military, police and fire protection, etc as everyone else, then they can help pay for them. Otherwise, they're just mooching off the public good. If it's too much to ask, they can move to some godforsaken island and fend for themselves. Libertarianism cuts both ways --- if you don't want to pay for the FDA, fine, but don't complain when your family members die from tainted medicine.
I was originally responding to the unwarranted assumption that the FDA saved lives. This is not a frivolous argument by me. There are blogs that speak of increasing costs and declining innovation in drug research over the past few decades.
It's reasonable to address one of the big factors causing that. Namely, regulatory agencies like the FDA which place a higher priority on safety of medical treatments than on the health of the people who would need those treatments.
Mega-scale engineering like you propose will never happen, ever.
We've already developed many of the technologies that will make them happen. I find it interesting how people can in the face of what we've already done claim something, which just isn't that much harder, will never happen.
We'll see if they're still "moving forwards nicely" when they have some accidents. Part of the Devil's bargain here is that the Chinese program continues as long as it doesn't embarrass the political leadership. Sooner or later, they will lose crew or have other things fail.
Last time that happened with a rocket in 1996, the Chinese abandoned almost all commercial launches.
I should never have used a metaphor in a discussion with someone that pretends to be mentally retarded enough to take it literally:(
You poor thing. That's how debate works. I didn't take the metaphor literally. I didn't start looking for bite marks on the seat of my trousers. Instead, I employed a standard rhetorical tactic of turning the metaphor against your argument.
Metaphors are two-edged and your own metaphor can be used against you. It's happened to me before.
Because even shipping just a screw back from there would make it a $100K screw?
How about a million screws then? Economies of scale work, you know. An auto company doesn't build a factory just to make a single car. There's one common, highly demanded product for Earth orbit that currently costs about $5,000 to $10,000 per kg to launch into space - oxygen. The Moon has plenty of it. It can also provide several metals, aluminum, iron, titanium, to Earth orbit and elsewhere.
The presence of aluminum and oxygen even allows for metal-oxygen hybrid motors, a means for leaving the Moon from anywhere on its surface without requiring resource inputs from Earth.
There was the lunar Surveyor program. The first vehicles that NASA landed on any other body in the Solar System were build by Hughes's company.
I think the point here is that if private enterprise had been encouraged in the 60s (or at least NASA and the government had stayed out of the way back then) to set up space launch business, it would be a radically different world today. And Hughes Aircraft Company might well have been one of the businesses that could exploit any such openings back then.
Also, this argues for improving robots, which will be absolutely required for the conquest of space. That environment will be forever hostile to unprotected humans.
Or it argues to the need of protecting or improving humans. We currently have the technology to protect humans.
Why not spend a thousand years perfecting the machines we must have?
Because you wouldn't have done anything to improve the lot of people living in between now and then. Or expand the horizons of human civilization. And there's a good chance we hit a road bump between now and "perfect machines".
For example, who's going to allow the launch of von Neumann robots in the midst of widespread public hysteria about artificial intelligence? Wouldn't it be a bit of irony to have developed "perfect" robotic probes only to have those blocked from use for millennia?
By using current technology rather than waiting and hoping for future technology, we avoid a big failure mode of space colonization that the future technology never comes.
Humans are burdensome to support at our primitive level of technology.
They aren't that much of a burden. Another aspect of the problem here is that it isn't that hard. The main obstacles are economic not technological.
I also notice you conveniently brush aside my numbers.
The presence of numbers can't defend a massive non sequitur. For example, why speak of going to Alpha Centauri when there are many places in the Solar System that can be reached in less time than it takes light to reach Alpha Centauri? Mars can be reached in about six months; the Moon in three days; I think Venus is about four to five months; and Earth crossing asteroids in weeks.
Similarly, it's pretty irrelevant that there is a lot of volume in space. We're not trying to use every bit of volume in space.
Second, going to space traditionally means going to interesting places or doing something interesting in space, not going to a random nowhere in space. That has been true as long as people have spoken of the matter. I don't care why you're misrepresenting the meaning of "go to space". There's no point to it aside from annoying everyone on the internet.
The entire solar system is a few planets in a huge volume of NOTHING.
No one (at least outside of fiction) has ever characterized the Solar System as anything other than what it is. It's been known for a long time that distances in space are a bit longer than those to your neighborhood grocery store. It's also been known for a long time that the "space loons" have been talking about going to the "few planets" in space (and the many other interesting objects in space) not the "huge volume of NOTHING".
How many more pictures of dead rocks or frozen wastelands do you need
Well, why haven't we taken enough pictures of dead rocks and frozen wastelands on Earth?
how will having humans floating around a tin can help?
Why isn't everyone just living in the most optimal environments for humans? Why do we have people in the seas, living on mountains, arid deserts, and the frigid polar ice caps? Why did we make thousands of vast cities, some in rather hostile locations, rather than just live on a beach?
It's pretty clear you don't think about this. This is not the first time I've corrected such statements by you and yet you still insist on repeating the same grotesquely wrong statements without even a hint that you've read my previous rebuttals. It doesn't take that long to learn the point of view of people with whom you disagree. Yet you never bother to try.
At other times, I've changed to "exploring the Moon", "exploring nearby asteroids", or just "exploring the Solar System". My perfidy knows no bounds - well except those of time.
A robot with a meat or just connected to a meatbrain remotely is a good approach.
The former can be just an augmented human. The latter has little advantage over the current approach once the robot gets too far away from the meatbrain.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't be bothered to spend your own money. But you can be bothered to hope for the worst for people who mildly disagree with you. You are only alive today because others were a hell of a lot less selfish than you.
Margaret Thatcher detested the poor and especially the Irish.
We call this "making shit up".
She didn't believe in any form of social safety net and stigmatized the poor as work-shy (much like Romney and Republicans of today).
So what? What makes that a bad idea? It's worth noting here that the various social safety nets haven't actually been demonstrated to help people. It's merely assumed that they do. My take is that it is an instrument to keep people poor and dependent (which would violate several lines of that prayer BTW).
She eliminated food assistance programs and the free milk program for poor children in British schools earning her the nickname "Margaret the Milk Snatcher".
How do these help people who can already feed themselves? Also there's the matter of opportunity cost. At some point, you have to make choices about what you want your schools and government to be doing with limited funding.
I don't see how that behavior can be reconciled with the teachings of St Francis of Assisi at all?
Eh, I don't see how those teachings can be reconciled with themselves. If everyone lives a life of poverty as he apparently advocated, then how are they going to survive? Where will food, clothing, or shelter come from? The things that keep us alive come from people who have material stuff not those who don't. Then again, he never had to run a country.
And if we look at the actual prayer itself, we don't see Francis of Assisi's teachings in it. It seems rather generic and according to Wikipedia, may not have been written by him.
In particular, one doesn't need to live in poverty in order to live by that prayer. One doesn't need a government-based social safety net that causes more harm than help in order to live by that prayer.
Boldface and caps are so sincere. How could you not?
I know you cannot possibly be stupid enough to really think that the FDA is a rogue agency that does not answer to any outside force and gets it's funding by magic with no orders to follow, so I'm not accusing you of being so stupid, I'm instead accusing you of pretending be so stupid by pushing such a simplistic and unrealistic viewpoint as presumably some sort of childish game to see how many of the gullible you can convince.
It can't possibly be that the FDA kills more people than it helps? That can't possibly be it.
The DoE was not trying to start the industry so much as it was trying to prove that green products that are competitive to fossil fuels could actually be built.
It failed hard then. The existence of a heavily subsidized good in no way determines whether the good would be competitive in the absence of the subsidy.
If Fisker decides to take a green energy loan and build a hybrid sports car instead of an actual green commodity car
Tesla didn't build a "green commodity car" either.
Nobody could have predicted them being so stupid in the first place
That's in error for two reasons. First, it's quite predictable what happened and continues to happen. Second, what makes you think Fisker Automotive acted stupidly? I think instead that the company was failing and the strings on the remaining $300 million either weren't worth the effort or were financially unattainable.
the unfortunate thing about investing is sometimes you hit a dud
It's embarrassing to call this "investment". You have to have a positive return first. You know, get more out than you put in.
Yep. And I imagine that when megascale projects are done in space, it'll be in space with real technologies too.
The cold war ended because of the fall of the soviet union which was inevitable in the modern economic climate.
It's only inevitable in poorly informed hindsight.
Compared to what? As I see it, the mess of the 70s created those conditions. I find it interesting how the cure is blamed for the disease. I guess some things never change.
So not a state funeral - but not far off...
Of course, it's still a funeral. And I don't think you get the distinction. From Wikipedia:
The most recent state funeral for someone outside the royal family was that of Churchill in 1965.
So it would have been the first state funeral for someone outside of the Royal family in almost 50 years. The process is also more extensive. I gather they parade the body through London and put it on display for three days, then bury it. OTOH, I gather that a number of people get funerals with full military honors each year.
And endeavour is spelled endeavor.
Endeavour is the correct spelling for those of us from the United Kingdom.
He'd have to have crawled out from under a mighty big rock to not have known that in the first place.
She started us on the "no such thing as society" route
The full quote is:
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate -- "It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it". That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people: "All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!" but when people come and say: "But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!" You say: "Look" It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!"
Sounds a lot better when you understand the context. The things we demand or take from "society" are actually demanded or taken from our fellow man. As to the "some people will never get a job" quote, you have three of the five googled instances of the quote, all from the same copy/pasted comment that you gave above.
Then you move on to:
The thing I hate her most for is usurping the prayer of St Francis of Assisi. I cannot her it now without thinking about how she did the exact opposite of every single statement - it brings thoughts of selfish greed, self importance and hypocrisy instead of peace and humility now.
That indicates your problem. You could have chosen to view the prayer and her works in the better light they deserve. You have poisoned your worldview for at least three decades.
Another was changing the law and backdating it when she tried to take money earmarked for London transport, despite the judge saying it was not only legally but morally wrong,
End the Cold War? Reverse the economic decline of the UK? Not worth mentioning. But mess with your pet public transportation scheme, and you'll be bitter till the end of time.
Sure, but none were started as long-term projects.
That doesn't matter.
But since you mentioned that, I think universities and religions would examples of long term projects that started with that intent. Space exploration can be considered another example, if you're of the category of optimism that thinks humanity will eventually spread past Earth.
The transportation systems of many large countries are megascale projects with most of the work done in the past few decades.
Are you really blaming the FDA for doing what they were told by elected officials chasing the extreme (and IMHO Godless) end of the "Christian" vote?
The answer was "Of course" with an explanation why. A couple of posts later you wrote:
I should never have used a metaphor in a discussion with someone that pretends to be mentally retarded enough to take it literally :(
Oh look, petty name calling.
All I can say is that if you want discussion rather than "petty high school debate", then don't be the source of the problem.
As to the adversarial nature of this "discussion", it's worth noting the large number of people who just tell me what is self-evidently right. I'm far from perfect here, but it's not that common to see an actual "discussion" here. It's more common to see people just dump whatever opinions they think are true.
Way back when, "seven of five" posted this:
Since these folks enjoy the same public roads, military, police and fire protection, etc as everyone else, then they can help pay for them. Otherwise, they're just mooching off the public good. If it's too much to ask, they can move to some godforsaken island and fend for themselves. Libertarianism cuts both ways --- if you don't want to pay for the FDA, fine, but don't complain when your family members die from tainted medicine.
I was originally responding to the unwarranted assumption that the FDA saved lives. This is not a frivolous argument by me. There are blogs that speak of increasing costs and declining innovation in drug research over the past few decades.
It's reasonable to address one of the big factors causing that. Namely, regulatory agencies like the FDA which place a higher priority on safety of medical treatments than on the health of the people who would need those treatments.
Mega-scale engineering like you propose will never happen, ever.
We've already developed many of the technologies that will make them happen. I find it interesting how people can in the face of what we've already done claim something, which just isn't that much harder, will never happen.
Railroad networks, stock markets, human society. There's some stuff out there, if you look.
We'll see if they're still "moving forwards nicely" when they have some accidents. Part of the Devil's bargain here is that the Chinese program continues as long as it doesn't embarrass the political leadership. Sooner or later, they will lose crew or have other things fail.
Last time that happened with a rocket in 1996, the Chinese abandoned almost all commercial launches.
I should never have used a metaphor in a discussion with someone that pretends to be mentally retarded enough to take it literally :(
You poor thing. That's how debate works. I didn't take the metaphor literally. I didn't start looking for bite marks on the seat of my trousers. Instead, I employed a standard rhetorical tactic of turning the metaphor against your argument.
Metaphors are two-edged and your own metaphor can be used against you. It's happened to me before.
Because even shipping just a screw back from there would make it a $100K screw?
How about a million screws then? Economies of scale work, you know. An auto company doesn't build a factory just to make a single car. There's one common, highly demanded product for Earth orbit that currently costs about $5,000 to $10,000 per kg to launch into space - oxygen. The Moon has plenty of it. It can also provide several metals, aluminum, iron, titanium, to Earth orbit and elsewhere.
The presence of aluminum and oxygen even allows for metal-oxygen hybrid motors, a means for leaving the Moon from anywhere on its surface without requiring resource inputs from Earth.
There was the lunar Surveyor program. The first vehicles that NASA landed on any other body in the Solar System were build by Hughes's company.
I think the point here is that if private enterprise had been encouraged in the 60s (or at least NASA and the government had stayed out of the way back then) to set up space launch business, it would be a radically different world today. And Hughes Aircraft Company might well have been one of the businesses that could exploit any such openings back then.
The Moon incidentally is the only place where such [human] capabilities don't shine due to its closeness to Earth.
We can build a lot of infrastructure and manufacturing capability on the Moon without a single person present. So why aren't we trying?
Also, this argues for improving robots, which will be absolutely required for the conquest of space. That environment will be forever hostile to unprotected humans.
Or it argues to the need of protecting or improving humans. We currently have the technology to protect humans.
Why not spend a thousand years perfecting the machines we must have?
Because you wouldn't have done anything to improve the lot of people living in between now and then. Or expand the horizons of human civilization. And there's a good chance we hit a road bump between now and "perfect machines".
For example, who's going to allow the launch of von Neumann robots in the midst of widespread public hysteria about artificial intelligence? Wouldn't it be a bit of irony to have developed "perfect" robotic probes only to have those blocked from use for millennia?
By using current technology rather than waiting and hoping for future technology, we avoid a big failure mode of space colonization that the future technology never comes.
Humans are burdensome to support at our primitive level of technology.
They aren't that much of a burden. Another aspect of the problem here is that it isn't that hard. The main obstacles are economic not technological.
I also notice you conveniently brush aside my numbers.
The presence of numbers can't defend a massive non sequitur. For example, why speak of going to Alpha Centauri when there are many places in the Solar System that can be reached in less time than it takes light to reach Alpha Centauri? Mars can be reached in about six months; the Moon in three days; I think Venus is about four to five months; and Earth crossing asteroids in weeks.
Similarly, it's pretty irrelevant that there is a lot of volume in space. We're not trying to use every bit of volume in space.
Second, going to space traditionally means going to interesting places or doing something interesting in space, not going to a random nowhere in space. That has been true as long as people have spoken of the matter. I don't care why you're misrepresenting the meaning of "go to space". There's no point to it aside from annoying everyone on the internet.
The entire solar system is a few planets in a huge volume of NOTHING.
No one (at least outside of fiction) has ever characterized the Solar System as anything other than what it is. It's been known for a long time that distances in space are a bit longer than those to your neighborhood grocery store. It's also been known for a long time that the "space loons" have been talking about going to the "few planets" in space (and the many other interesting objects in space) not the "huge volume of NOTHING".
How many more pictures of dead rocks or frozen wastelands do you need
Well, why haven't we taken enough pictures of dead rocks and frozen wastelands on Earth?
how will having humans floating around a tin can help?
Why isn't everyone just living in the most optimal environments for humans? Why do we have people in the seas, living on mountains, arid deserts, and the frigid polar ice caps? Why did we make thousands of vast cities, some in rather hostile locations, rather than just live on a beach?
It's pretty clear you don't think about this. This is not the first time I've corrected such statements by you and yet you still insist on repeating the same grotesquely wrong statements without even a hint that you've read my previous rebuttals. It doesn't take that long to learn the point of view of people with whom you disagree. Yet you never bother to try.
At other times, I've changed to "exploring the Moon", "exploring nearby asteroids", or just "exploring the Solar System". My perfidy knows no bounds - well except those of time.
A robot with a meat or just connected to a meatbrain remotely is a good approach.
The former can be just an augmented human. The latter has little advantage over the current approach once the robot gets too far away from the meatbrain.