Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
I'm sure you'll be amazed, but I agree.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
I'm not the one being quick to pick favorites. You're the one who picked "the market" and claimed nothing is better. I should be the one saying let's not be quick, and looked at history.
That's because you can't see from my comments, that I have a couple of decades of experience with markets, their operation, and how successful they can be. Nor can you see my extensive readings of history and the building and destruction of empires. So from your point of view, I agree that it would look a bit hurried. But I am in no way being "quick" about my judgment of markets.
The only value of empires is a quick process for deciding standards and building infrastructure, which tends to be somewhat quicker than democracy-based approaches. The huge downsides are a massive conflict of interest and insufficient competence of the elites that rule the empire and distribute its resources, and the conflicts generated by fighting over control of the empire.
Markets have none of those issues. They're merely the best approach we have yet discovered for distributing resources.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
Thinking about it, maybe a less insulting reply would be more productive here.
And there is a better way to distribute resources called Imperialism.
Here's my beef with the above statement. Imperialism is about redistributing resources and wealth for the top of a hierarchy. They all start well. That's because in order to move resources and such, you need common standards and widespread infrastructure.
And they all fail (usually very badly) because ultimately, it's about redistributing resources and wealth for the top of a hierarchy which just isn't and can't be sufficiently competent. It's another centrally managed economy like communism (which BTW consisted almost completely of two empires, China and Russia). They can be quite stable for a while, but that's not the same as good distribution of resources. There's a fundamental conflict of interest which gets resolved typically by dissolution of the empire in question.
There's are other problems as well, such as poor procedures for determining leadership. Because control is central, it's easy for parties to influence or take over. Meaning that there are far more power struggles in an empire than in a decentralized system. As Pournelle put it (in his short story, "Reflex"):
Some day they'd get a really bad Emperor. Or three Emperors all claiming the throne at once. Better to put a stop to this now, rather than leave the problem to their grandchildren."
You looked only at the shiny and pretty head of empire, not the corrupt and twisted tail.
As to corporatism, I see it as a dynamic when socialism and capitalism are both in play. Certain organizations specialize in and become very proficient at acquiring public resources. In our current developed world societies, those most commonly take the form of incorporated businesses, hence, the phrase, corporatism.
I believe some modest degree of socialism is required just to prevent those who don't have and are too incompetent to build a stake in society from harming society. They need their bread and circuses.
As to communism, it started as just a radical socialism-based ideology and detoured into empire building with both the USSR and China indulging in it. I think it's relatively high body count comes from the sheer irrationality of the beliefs combined with typical empire-building approaches. For example, Rome frequently negotiated very one-sided treaties with those it annexed, giving them a degree of self-rule. It understood how far to push and how to get what it wanted in a way that was palatable to its subjugated peoples.
While Stalin's horrific treatment of the defeated Ukrainians during the Homodor, a genocide via famine, was due in large part to the ridiculous ideology of the Soviets and Stalin's considerable paranoia and ruthlessness. The Romans could and did commit a variety of massacres and such, but they generally understood how to get subjugated peoples to obey without excess bloodshed. The Soviets never picked up that knack. I think that explains the relative differences in the lifespan of the two empires.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
Ultimately, claiming that the only way to ensure accountability is the profit motive is claiming that government itself doesn't and can't work.
You're right as far as I'm concerned. Once you decide government by its nature can't be held accountable, then nobody can be ultimately because government (or anything in its stead) perform similar roles and similar accountability issues whether for profit or not.
I'd say that the accountability problems of government are less due to the profit motive (though it does help) and more due to the vast size and complexity of modern governments.
For example, the UK government recently implemented changes in their disability benefits laws. They implemented some stringent medical tests (as I understand it) for determining whether someone had sufficient disability to qualify for incapacity benefits (which I gather among other things meant too disabled to work).
The end result was about two thirds of people came off the rolls completely (which ended up being more than 2% of the UK's total population!). More than half of those (878,000 people) excluded chose not to go through the tests at all. So how much of this was expected?
Apparently, the UK government had determined that more than a billion pounds were lost over six years due to fraud.
According to this news story, the average cost of incapacity benefits were almost 4,400 pounds per claimant per year. That ends up being about 3.8 billion pounds per year saved from the people who chose not to undergo the new tests for incapacity. It's possible that a measurable portion of that wasn't fraud, but I suspect most of it was fraud of some sort. Meaning the government was off in its estimates of fraud by probably a factor of 20.
This is what I think accountability means in a modern government. No one knows how much fraud there is, even to an order of magnitude. But when they put in accountability for it, a lot of the consumption magically goes away.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
No, you'd be wrong. The market is a very ancient thing, not 21st. [...] Corporatism [...] Imperialism [...] Socialism [...] communism
Let's stop the silliness. I realize some people such as yourself stop thinking the moment someone says words like "market". Today's markets aren't the bizaars of old. Electronic, near instantaneous, high information, that kind of thing.
Corporatism and imperialism are just ways to co-opt resources from others, just like socialism and communism. And all four are rather poor at what they do. I wouldn't be so quick to pick favorites.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
What is it about extreme libertarianism that makes so many people go after it like eccentric Spanish noblemen tilting after windmills? Is your view on society and politics so weak that you can only defend it from relatively ludicrous viewpoints? Is there's a legit reason for all the mouth-foaming? Please explain.
Our government is being managed for the benefit of corporate elites.
Well, someone has to buy their services. The corporate elites happen to be the ones with the money. If you were wealthy, I imagine you'd find yourself with plenty of opportunity to buy government services whether you wanted to or not.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
How about we just admit having an educated society is a good thing and we make a university education free to those who qualify.
Who's paying for that? My view is that the simplest approach is for students to pay for their own education. They're adults, they can work. If an education is really that valuable, then they'll find a way to pay for it. I'd also drop completely, the parts that don't work, like loan subsidies and guarantees.
The thing is an educated society is not always a good thing. For example, in the current US where we're running up the costs of education several-fold while simultaneously saddling a whole generation with onerous debt. Is the educated society worth that cost?
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 2
"The market" won't even train its own employees anymore
Ever wonder why things just happen? The answer to the above is that there's no incentive to train your own workforce when you can make the requirements sufficiently ridiculous that only an H1-B can fill them. Then you train the H1-B to do the actual job.
The market will cry and sob to it's capitol servants that they can't find anyone smart enough to hire and the government will say "well gee we better open the floodgates so all these people in socialist countries that bothered to provide education can come in" and the ideology will be drowned out.
And what do you know? Even you admit that is what's happening. I do find it odd that you think it's not self-perpetuating.
We know how old the universe is. That's not meager, that's one of the most profound discoveries of history.
We would have learned that anyway with Earth based observation.
Then you complain about NASA costing too much and at the same time want more Mars rovers.
Then you didn't get it. Those Mars rovers were paid for with existing NASA funding. More exploration, sooner. Don't you want that? My point here is that even ignoring whether NASA is actually doing anything useful or whether SpaceX and similar businesses can lower cost of access to space, we can still greatly improve what NASA does and the outcomes it gets through some simple changes such as doing things more than once.
As for your patronizing "read up..." - I WORK on this. For a private company, I'm not going to say which. And I dream of NASA contracts because then I'll be working on something that will be a real contribution.
Even worse. Someone who should know better, but chooses to sacrifice our future for a piece of the sugar. I will say this. Despite your claim to "work on this", you still sound profoundly ignorant, else you wouldn't continue to advocate an approach which is a proven failure over 60 years.
You've got private enterprise exploring even though they don't, you complain that NASA doesn't build enough telescopes and probes, even though no-one else would ever fund this real exploration of space.
Don't get me wrong. I find this to be a solid indication that what NASA does, isn't worth doing at the price. But ask yourself these questions: why should private enterprise get involved when NASA burns so much more? Why should suppliers who make such things get involved when NASA contracts are so much more plush and risk-free? If I were to come up with a space exploration system and actually launch it at someone's expense, what's to keep NASA from one-upping it with a much more expensive program than I can ever do?
That last question is quite relevant because there's been a few times particularly during the 90s when NASA killed private efforts (for example, the entire market for very small payload launches) by introducing its own publicly funded competitor. NASA can't be bothered to run a serious space exploration program, but it can be bothered to knock down the competition in order to avoid embarrassment.
Show me SpaceX's moon-mining project? You can't - doesn't exist. Show me Bigelow's Mars rovers? Or anyone's Europa probe? Or a private Hubble? Or McDonald's Planck replacement? Show me something that private enterprise is doing to explore space, not just exploit what NASA has already done for commercial gain. Of course private enterprise has a role to play here, but it would be nothing without the pioneering work of NASA. Private enterprise sits on the shoulders of giants to pick the cheap fruit.
The Keck telescopes are one such counterexample. The first attempts at a solar sail were privately funded (aside from cheap launches through the Russians). And then there's SETI which is privately funded these days.
As far as calling NASA "giants", I'm not saying that their work is completely without value, but that it isn't worth the cost that has been paid for it. Nor have they made even fairly mundane efforts to reduce their costs. Sure, it's nice that NASA's work actually gets used for something, but think about that. The only real value that we're getting out of NASA is some prep research for businesses like SpaceX or Bigelow. And we might know the age of the universe to a slightly greater accuracy than otherwise.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
Here's the thing, the free market isn't some magic fairy that shits pots of gold and sprinkles rainbow dust everywhere.
You do realize that's a really stupid thing to say right?
If you want to have education with a profit motive, then the RISK should be borne by universities. Getting government guaranteed loans with bankruptcy exemptions so it can be handed over to a for-PROFIT institution is total bullshit. In this situation, the university is motivated to crank up tuition with no ceiling. When the RISK is borne by universities, they'll price their damn "product" better, screen students better, perhaps even innovate (e.g. charge different amounts for degrees based on perceived ability to earn income).
You do realize that most universities aren't "for profit". It's actually pretty rare. Yet they still have a huge incentive to do this sort of thing.
Of course, that would lead to large stratification of education, with the wealthy drawn like a magnet to the best schools, the poor having to do with leftovers, etc.
Still sounds a lot better.
And I would argue that outcome is unacceptable for a 21st century superpower, due to the fact that the free market outcome would not adequately distribute available resources,
And what system distributes available resources better? Some system where students are leaching from "the public"? No way.
I would argue that the market is the 21st century way to distribute resources, that there isn't anything better out there, and I would be right. We've done "the public" approach to distributing resources, that leads to things like corporatism because specialized rent seekers of the form of profit, incorporated businesses are more efficient at getting funds from "the public" than anyone else is and mooching, because getting funds from "the public" in exchange for a vote is easier than working.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
This is why Education should be funded by The People. If we took the profit motive out of education we wouldn't have to worry about the "administration" making several times what the instructors do for not even teaching.
You'd have to take the profit motive out of society.You don't have administration making so much because the college is "for profit" (it rarely is BTW), but because the administrators are "for profit".
Consider geostationary orbits are around 42,000 km away.
Jupiter is at least 630,000,000 km away.
So what? Distances in space aren't like distances on Earth. If I drive ten times as far on Earth, I use ten times as much fuel. But I can fly orders of magnitude beyond geostationary orbit without using significantly more fuel. Escape velocity from the Solar System itself is roughly as much delta v from low Earth orbit (LEO) as LEO is from the surface of the Earth. And there are a variety of circumstances that make that a much simpler problem propulsion-wise (Orberth effect, high efficiency propulsion without atmosphere or gravity losses).
So leaving the Solar System is less than twice as hard propulsion-wise as getting to orbit. Getting there in a timely fashion with working gear makes those sorts of problems harder. But merely being four orders of magnitude further away just isn't that big a deal. If you can get your stuff working in space in isolation for long periods of time, you have it.
Fine for those things that you only need WalMart quality for,
Space probes should fall solidly in that category. If you look at most science done in the world, it's not pretty and it sure as hell isn't made of perfect, 4 meter titanium I-beams. I think we'll start seeing some real space science once mission costs drop about two orders of magnitude.
Scientists drilled through a kilometer of antarctic ice sheet to explore the lake beneath, so we have the know-how.
I'd have to disagree. That drill probably involves tens of tons of metal from the drilling platform to the well shaft to the bits. Now try to drill through a kilometer of ice with at most a few hundred kilograms of stuff for everything.
If I were doing it, the drill would just be a large piece of plutonium 238 (or maybe some other radioactive isotope with a shorter half life) completely encased with something hardcore chemically inert like platinum or iridium. There'd be a reel of fiber optic playing out behind it and you would just drop it on the ice and let it go.
Or maybe you could communicate with it via very low frequency radio waves and skip the fiber optic cable altogether.
If your thinking was employed 40 years ago would we have ever moved past Voyager?
I think we would be well ahead of where we are today because we'd be building infrastructure and doing space exploration instead of one off disposable technology development. To be blunt, the space science and exploration community is profoundly ignorant of economics and that has hurt us a lot.
Because you don't have the leg room to build crazy things like gps, or microwaves, or lasers, or cell phones, or all the other things we take for granted today because the NASA of 50 years ago was faced with a challenge and had the budget to over come it.
Nonsense. GPS is DoD not NASA. Microwaves, lasers, cell phones, etc were developed anyway.
Ok, that does work. Though I'd question whether it's going to have a cheaper marginal cost due to the varying heat flow over the course of the day, maintenance issues with molten salt, and lower power density than nuclear.
When they stop being a big part of the problems, we'll stop blaming them. Ever hear of the phrase "exporting the pollution"? That's environmentalists admitting that they chased off industry.
Maybe it's because our rotten fucking system can't build anything in a cost efficient manner, without pork?
That's what you get when you make industry too expensive to operate unsubsidized. Subsidies and rent seeking long predate the environmentalist movement, but it destroyed a bunch of otherwise competitive industries.
IF that were the case, then the renewables would be the baseload by a massive margin.
They aren't. At night, you have no solar power at all, that's a infinite dollars per watt marginal cost right there. You can't spend enough money to get power from a dark solar panel. Similar thing with wind when there's no wind.
Even if you could start and stop a nuclear plant in a few seconds, you still have that the marginal cost of the power is extreme cheap.
You're joking. These are all NASA firsts. These are all genuine exploration of the universe we live in.
There's something like eighty or ninety space projects right now? That's Genuine Exploration (TM), right? Here's the problem, the one I've been talking about since the first post. Once the funding dries up, the only thing we'll have to show for all those missions is a meager bit of knowledge, some pretty pictures, and a little litter in space.
Let's give a big example of this profound lack of ambition. The Moon is the only world outside of Earth where you can teleoperate in near real time. It has a number of basic elements, such as, oxygen, aluminum, iron, and titanium which we know we'll need in Earth orbit and elsewhere.
But nobody has done any prospecting for those elements aside from the crude collecting of the manned Apollo missions on the surface. All that exploration and we don't really know what's there. We also know that the Moon has a number of large lava tubes, some capable of storing a small city, but no one has ever been in one either directly or via a probe.
We also know that at least for the next future it's going to cost at least $2.5k per kg (that's the minimum estimated cost for SpaceX's Falcon Heavy which will throw 50 metric tons to LEO) to put anything in orbit from Earth. But the Moon with its absence of atmosphere and weaker gravity well, just might be able to put things in Earth orbit for less than it'd take from Earth itself.
Because the Moon is the only body in the Solar System next to Earth, that makes the Moon the most valuable body in the Solar System outside of Earth itself.
So what can we say about NASA exploration of the Moon's surface? NASA stopped doing it in 1972. Sure, they've occasionally put an imaging satellite in orbit and since managed a couple of interesting collisions with the surface, but that's it. The most valuable body in the Solar System and it's been ignored for forty years.
The reason is quite simple. If we start putting space probes on the lunar surface again, then NASA, its tail-wagging-dog supply chain, and US political leaders would have to explain why the second generation of Apollo never happened. It's all ego-driven.
Second example of this mentality are the Mars Exploration Rovers. The rovers were launched in mid 2003 and arrived half a year later at the beginning of 2004. With a few months, they had confirmed all the features of these rovers worked well. So why didn't they ever send more MERs? In 2005-2006, they could have sent several more MERs to explore other places on Mars. And they could have repeated that every couple of years.
They could have had a half dozen or more MERs on Mars by 2010 for the cost of the Mars Science Laboratory. The only real innovations they would need is to shave some weight so that the MERs could continued to be launched on Delta II rockets (the 2003 trajectories were unusually low delta-v) and an upgrading of the landing system so that it allows for more accurate landing.
More exploration over a shorter time frame. But building new technology was more important than exploration of Mars. We see this again in no follow on missions for more MSL vehicles and a vague plan for a single sample return mission that might happen this decade. This is your NASA at work. It's all ego-driven.
The same principle holds for Earth-facing satellites, space telescopes, probes to other planets, even manned vehicles. Where's the second or third Hubble telescopes? Overlapping climate observation platforms? It's all ego-driven.
The US doesn't want to be known as country which doesn't have mission X in space. But it doesn't care enough to have a second copy of mission X in space.
NASA ignores obvious economic principles such as economies of scale in the number of space probes or the launch frequency of a orbital launch system. It ridiculously overpays for space stations and orbital launch vehicles.
Baseload is the power that is cheaper than everything else in marginal cost. You run it all the time because there's no reason not to run it all the time. If you're generating too much power, turn off something more expensive.
I see this sort of propagandized research as a good reason for embracing James Hansen's coming departure from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA. While I agree with the main conclusion of the paper, that nuclear power has in general saved more lives than it has lost, I think he goes about it again in a haphazard fashion, heavily biased to nuclear power production.
For example, there is no breakdown of the data or consideration of alternative strategies. What's the break down of the various sources of deaths from fossil fuel burning? In particular, I was curious how many deaths he would attribute to elevated levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. As far as I can tell, it's not there in his research though I probably could figure it out eventually from a detailed analysis of his references.
Here's another big question. How effective would implementing other strategies, like pollution controls on coal power plants, be? If most of those lives can be saved merely by scrubbing coal power plant exhaust, then that's not a strong argument for nuclear power (and would become another propaganda element of the paper).
And once again, he exaggerates the risks of carbon dioxide emissions (in his "Implications" section).
I have no problem with Hansen putting out biased research. Just don't do it with public funds.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure you'll be amazed, but I agree.
I'm not the one being quick to pick favorites. You're the one who picked "the market" and claimed nothing is better. I should be the one saying let's not be quick, and looked at history.
That's because you can't see from my comments, that I have a couple of decades of experience with markets, their operation, and how successful they can be. Nor can you see my extensive readings of history and the building and destruction of empires. So from your point of view, I agree that it would look a bit hurried. But I am in no way being "quick" about my judgment of markets.
The only value of empires is a quick process for deciding standards and building infrastructure, which tends to be somewhat quicker than democracy-based approaches. The huge downsides are a massive conflict of interest and insufficient competence of the elites that rule the empire and distribute its resources, and the conflicts generated by fighting over control of the empire.
Markets have none of those issues. They're merely the best approach we have yet discovered for distributing resources.
And there is a better way to distribute resources called Imperialism.
Here's my beef with the above statement. Imperialism is about redistributing resources and wealth for the top of a hierarchy. They all start well. That's because in order to move resources and such, you need common standards and widespread infrastructure.
And they all fail (usually very badly) because ultimately, it's about redistributing resources and wealth for the top of a hierarchy which just isn't and can't be sufficiently competent. It's another centrally managed economy like communism (which BTW consisted almost completely of two empires, China and Russia). They can be quite stable for a while, but that's not the same as good distribution of resources. There's a fundamental conflict of interest which gets resolved typically by dissolution of the empire in question.
There's are other problems as well, such as poor procedures for determining leadership. Because control is central, it's easy for parties to influence or take over. Meaning that there are far more power struggles in an empire than in a decentralized system. As Pournelle put it (in his short story, "Reflex"):
Some day they'd get a really bad Emperor. Or three Emperors all claiming the throne at once. Better to put a stop to this now, rather than leave the problem to their grandchildren."
You looked only at the shiny and pretty head of empire, not the corrupt and twisted tail.
As to corporatism, I see it as a dynamic when socialism and capitalism are both in play. Certain organizations specialize in and become very proficient at acquiring public resources. In our current developed world societies, those most commonly take the form of incorporated businesses, hence, the phrase, corporatism.
I believe some modest degree of socialism is required just to prevent those who don't have and are too incompetent to build a stake in society from harming society. They need their bread and circuses.
As to communism, it started as just a radical socialism-based ideology and detoured into empire building with both the USSR and China indulging in it. I think it's relatively high body count comes from the sheer irrationality of the beliefs combined with typical empire-building approaches. For example, Rome frequently negotiated very one-sided treaties with those it annexed, giving them a degree of self-rule. It understood how far to push and how to get what it wanted in a way that was palatable to its subjugated peoples.
While Stalin's horrific treatment of the defeated Ukrainians during the Homodor, a genocide via famine, was due in large part to the ridiculous ideology of the Soviets and Stalin's considerable paranoia and ruthlessness. The Romans could and did commit a variety of massacres and such, but they generally understood how to get subjugated peoples to obey without excess bloodshed. The Soviets never picked up that knack. I think that explains the relative differences in the lifespan of the two empires.
Ultimately, claiming that the only way to ensure accountability is the profit motive is claiming that government itself doesn't and can't work.
You're right as far as I'm concerned. Once you decide government by its nature can't be held accountable, then nobody can be ultimately because government (or anything in its stead) perform similar roles and similar accountability issues whether for profit or not.
I'd say that the accountability problems of government are less due to the profit motive (though it does help) and more due to the vast size and complexity of modern governments.
For example, the UK government recently implemented changes in their disability benefits laws. They implemented some stringent medical tests (as I understand it) for determining whether someone had sufficient disability to qualify for incapacity benefits (which I gather among other things meant too disabled to work).
The end result was about two thirds of people came off the rolls completely (which ended up being more than 2% of the UK's total population!). More than half of those (878,000 people) excluded chose not to go through the tests at all. So how much of this was expected?
Apparently, the UK government had determined that more than a billion pounds were lost over six years due to fraud.
According to this news story, the average cost of incapacity benefits were almost 4,400 pounds per claimant per year. That ends up being about 3.8 billion pounds per year saved from the people who chose not to undergo the new tests for incapacity. It's possible that a measurable portion of that wasn't fraud, but I suspect most of it was fraud of some sort. Meaning the government was off in its estimates of fraud by probably a factor of 20.
This is what I think accountability means in a modern government. No one knows how much fraud there is, even to an order of magnitude. But when they put in accountability for it, a lot of the consumption magically goes away.
No, you'd be wrong. The market is a very ancient thing, not 21st. [...] Corporatism [...] Imperialism [...] Socialism [...] communism
Let's stop the silliness. I realize some people such as yourself stop thinking the moment someone says words like "market". Today's markets aren't the bizaars of old. Electronic, near instantaneous, high information, that kind of thing.
Corporatism and imperialism are just ways to co-opt resources from others, just like socialism and communism. And all four are rather poor at what they do. I wouldn't be so quick to pick favorites.
What is it about extreme libertarianism that makes so many people go after it like eccentric Spanish noblemen tilting after windmills? Is your view on society and politics so weak that you can only defend it from relatively ludicrous viewpoints? Is there's a legit reason for all the mouth-foaming? Please explain.
Our government is being managed for the benefit of corporate elites.
Well, someone has to buy their services. The corporate elites happen to be the ones with the money. If you were wealthy, I imagine you'd find yourself with plenty of opportunity to buy government services whether you wanted to or not.
How about we just admit having an educated society is a good thing and we make a university education free to those who qualify.
Who's paying for that? My view is that the simplest approach is for students to pay for their own education. They're adults, they can work. If an education is really that valuable, then they'll find a way to pay for it. I'd also drop completely, the parts that don't work, like loan subsidies and guarantees.
The thing is an educated society is not always a good thing. For example, in the current US where we're running up the costs of education several-fold while simultaneously saddling a whole generation with onerous debt. Is the educated society worth that cost?
"The market" won't even train its own employees anymore
Ever wonder why things just happen? The answer to the above is that there's no incentive to train your own workforce when you can make the requirements sufficiently ridiculous that only an H1-B can fill them. Then you train the H1-B to do the actual job.
The market will cry and sob to it's capitol servants that they can't find anyone smart enough to hire and the government will say "well gee we better open the floodgates so all these people in socialist countries that bothered to provide education can come in" and the ideology will be drowned out.
And what do you know? Even you admit that is what's happening. I do find it odd that you think it's not self-perpetuating.
We know how old the universe is. That's not meager, that's one of the most profound discoveries of history.
We would have learned that anyway with Earth based observation.
Then you complain about NASA costing too much and at the same time want more Mars rovers.
Then you didn't get it. Those Mars rovers were paid for with existing NASA funding. More exploration, sooner. Don't you want that? My point here is that even ignoring whether NASA is actually doing anything useful or whether SpaceX and similar businesses can lower cost of access to space, we can still greatly improve what NASA does and the outcomes it gets through some simple changes such as doing things more than once.
As for your patronizing "read up..." - I WORK on this. For a private company, I'm not going to say which. And I dream of NASA contracts because then I'll be working on something that will be a real contribution.
Even worse. Someone who should know better, but chooses to sacrifice our future for a piece of the sugar. I will say this. Despite your claim to "work on this", you still sound profoundly ignorant, else you wouldn't continue to advocate an approach which is a proven failure over 60 years.
You've got private enterprise exploring even though they don't, you complain that NASA doesn't build enough telescopes and probes, even though no-one else would ever fund this real exploration of space.
Don't get me wrong. I find this to be a solid indication that what NASA does, isn't worth doing at the price. But ask yourself these questions: why should private enterprise get involved when NASA burns so much more? Why should suppliers who make such things get involved when NASA contracts are so much more plush and risk-free? If I were to come up with a space exploration system and actually launch it at someone's expense, what's to keep NASA from one-upping it with a much more expensive program than I can ever do?
That last question is quite relevant because there's been a few times particularly during the 90s when NASA killed private efforts (for example, the entire market for very small payload launches) by introducing its own publicly funded competitor. NASA can't be bothered to run a serious space exploration program, but it can be bothered to knock down the competition in order to avoid embarrassment.
Show me SpaceX's moon-mining project? You can't - doesn't exist. Show me Bigelow's Mars rovers? Or anyone's Europa probe? Or a private Hubble? Or McDonald's Planck replacement? Show me something that private enterprise is doing to explore space, not just exploit what NASA has already done for commercial gain. Of course private enterprise has a role to play here, but it would be nothing without the pioneering work of NASA. Private enterprise sits on the shoulders of giants to pick the cheap fruit.
The Keck telescopes are one such counterexample. The first attempts at a solar sail were privately funded (aside from cheap launches through the Russians). And then there's SETI which is privately funded these days.
As far as calling NASA "giants", I'm not saying that their work is completely without value, but that it isn't worth the cost that has been paid for it. Nor have they made even fairly mundane efforts to reduce their costs. Sure, it's nice that NASA's work actually gets used for something, but think about that. The only real value that we're getting out of NASA is some prep research for businesses like SpaceX or Bigelow. And we might know the age of the universe to a slightly greater accuracy than otherwise.
Here's the thing, the free market isn't some magic fairy that shits pots of gold and sprinkles rainbow dust everywhere.
You do realize that's a really stupid thing to say right?
If you want to have education with a profit motive, then the RISK should be borne by universities. Getting government guaranteed loans with bankruptcy exemptions so it can be handed over to a for-PROFIT institution is total bullshit. In this situation, the university is motivated to crank up tuition with no ceiling. When the RISK is borne by universities, they'll price their damn "product" better, screen students better, perhaps even innovate (e.g. charge different amounts for degrees based on perceived ability to earn income).
You do realize that most universities aren't "for profit". It's actually pretty rare. Yet they still have a huge incentive to do this sort of thing.
Of course, that would lead to large stratification of education, with the wealthy drawn like a magnet to the best schools, the poor having to do with leftovers, etc.
Still sounds a lot better.
And I would argue that outcome is unacceptable for a 21st century superpower, due to the fact that the free market outcome would not adequately distribute available resources,
And what system distributes available resources better? Some system where students are leaching from "the public"? No way.
I would argue that the market is the 21st century way to distribute resources, that there isn't anything better out there, and I would be right. We've done "the public" approach to distributing resources, that leads to things like corporatism because specialized rent seekers of the form of profit, incorporated businesses are more efficient at getting funds from "the public" than anyone else is and mooching, because getting funds from "the public" in exchange for a vote is easier than working.
This is why Education should be funded by The People. If we took the profit motive out of education we wouldn't have to worry about the "administration" making several times what the instructors do for not even teaching.
You'd have to take the profit motive out of society.You don't have administration making so much because the college is "for profit" (it rarely is BTW), but because the administrators are "for profit".
Consider geostationary orbits are around 42,000 km away.
Jupiter is at least 630,000,000 km away.
So what? Distances in space aren't like distances on Earth. If I drive ten times as far on Earth, I use ten times as much fuel. But I can fly orders of magnitude beyond geostationary orbit without using significantly more fuel. Escape velocity from the Solar System itself is roughly as much delta v from low Earth orbit (LEO) as LEO is from the surface of the Earth. And there are a variety of circumstances that make that a much simpler problem propulsion-wise (Orberth effect, high efficiency propulsion without atmosphere or gravity losses).
So leaving the Solar System is less than twice as hard propulsion-wise as getting to orbit. Getting there in a timely fashion with working gear makes those sorts of problems harder. But merely being four orders of magnitude further away just isn't that big a deal. If you can get your stuff working in space in isolation for long periods of time, you have it.
Fine for those things that you only need WalMart quality for,
Space probes should fall solidly in that category. If you look at most science done in the world, it's not pretty and it sure as hell isn't made of perfect, 4 meter titanium I-beams. I think we'll start seeing some real space science once mission costs drop about two orders of magnitude.
Scientists drilled through a kilometer of antarctic ice sheet to explore the lake beneath, so we have the know-how.
I'd have to disagree. That drill probably involves tens of tons of metal from the drilling platform to the well shaft to the bits. Now try to drill through a kilometer of ice with at most a few hundred kilograms of stuff for everything.
If I were doing it, the drill would just be a large piece of plutonium 238 (or maybe some other radioactive isotope with a shorter half life) completely encased with something hardcore chemically inert like platinum or iridium. There'd be a reel of fiber optic playing out behind it and you would just drop it on the ice and let it go.
Or maybe you could communicate with it via very low frequency radio waves and skip the fiber optic cable altogether.
If your thinking was employed 40 years ago would we have ever moved past Voyager?
I think we would be well ahead of where we are today because we'd be building infrastructure and doing space exploration instead of one off disposable technology development. To be blunt, the space science and exploration community is profoundly ignorant of economics and that has hurt us a lot.
Because you don't have the leg room to build crazy things like gps, or microwaves, or lasers, or cell phones, or all the other things we take for granted today because the NASA of 50 years ago was faced with a challenge and had the budget to over come it.
Nonsense. GPS is DoD not NASA. Microwaves, lasers, cell phones, etc were developed anyway.
Ok, that does work. Though I'd question whether it's going to have a cheaper marginal cost due to the varying heat flow over the course of the day, maintenance issues with molten salt, and lower power density than nuclear.
Why must we always blame "the environmentalists"?
When they stop being a big part of the problems, we'll stop blaming them. Ever hear of the phrase "exporting the pollution"? That's environmentalists admitting that they chased off industry.
Maybe it's because our rotten fucking system can't build anything in a cost efficient manner, without pork?
That's what you get when you make industry too expensive to operate unsubsidized. Subsidies and rent seeking long predate the environmentalist movement, but it destroyed a bunch of otherwise competitive industries.
IF that were the case, then the renewables would be the baseload by a massive margin.
They aren't. At night, you have no solar power at all, that's a infinite dollars per watt marginal cost right there. You can't spend enough money to get power from a dark solar panel. Similar thing with wind when there's no wind.
Even if you could start and stop a nuclear plant in a few seconds, you still have that the marginal cost of the power is extreme cheap.
You're joking. These are all NASA firsts. These are all genuine exploration of the universe we live in.
There's something like eighty or ninety space projects right now? That's Genuine Exploration (TM), right? Here's the problem, the one I've been talking about since the first post. Once the funding dries up, the only thing we'll have to show for all those missions is a meager bit of knowledge, some pretty pictures, and a little litter in space.
Let's give a big example of this profound lack of ambition. The Moon is the only world outside of Earth where you can teleoperate in near real time. It has a number of basic elements, such as, oxygen, aluminum, iron, and titanium which we know we'll need in Earth orbit and elsewhere.
But nobody has done any prospecting for those elements aside from the crude collecting of the manned Apollo missions on the surface. All that exploration and we don't really know what's there. We also know that the Moon has a number of large lava tubes, some capable of storing a small city, but no one has ever been in one either directly or via a probe.
We also know that at least for the next future it's going to cost at least $2.5k per kg (that's the minimum estimated cost for SpaceX's Falcon Heavy which will throw 50 metric tons to LEO) to put anything in orbit from Earth. But the Moon with its absence of atmosphere and weaker gravity well, just might be able to put things in Earth orbit for less than it'd take from Earth itself.
Because the Moon is the only body in the Solar System next to Earth, that makes the Moon the most valuable body in the Solar System outside of Earth itself.
So what can we say about NASA exploration of the Moon's surface? NASA stopped doing it in 1972. Sure, they've occasionally put an imaging satellite in orbit and since managed a couple of interesting collisions with the surface, but that's it. The most valuable body in the Solar System and it's been ignored for forty years.
The reason is quite simple. If we start putting space probes on the lunar surface again, then NASA, its tail-wagging-dog supply chain, and US political leaders would have to explain why the second generation of Apollo never happened. It's all ego-driven.
Second example of this mentality are the Mars Exploration Rovers. The rovers were launched in mid 2003 and arrived half a year later at the beginning of 2004. With a few months, they had confirmed all the features of these rovers worked well. So why didn't they ever send more MERs? In 2005-2006, they could have sent several more MERs to explore other places on Mars. And they could have repeated that every couple of years.
They could have had a half dozen or more MERs on Mars by 2010 for the cost of the Mars Science Laboratory. The only real innovations they would need is to shave some weight so that the MERs could continued to be launched on Delta II rockets (the 2003 trajectories were unusually low delta-v) and an upgrading of the landing system so that it allows for more accurate landing.
More exploration over a shorter time frame. But building new technology was more important than exploration of Mars. We see this again in no follow on missions for more MSL vehicles and a vague plan for a single sample return mission that might happen this decade. This is your NASA at work. It's all ego-driven.
The same principle holds for Earth-facing satellites, space telescopes, probes to other planets, even manned vehicles. Where's the second or third Hubble telescopes? Overlapping climate observation platforms? It's all ego-driven.
The US doesn't want to be known as country which doesn't have mission X in space. But it doesn't care enough to have a second copy of mission X in space.
NASA ignores obvious economic principles such as economies of scale in the number of space probes or the launch frequency of a orbital launch system. It ridiculously overpays for space stations and orbital launch vehicles.
Baseload is the power that is cheaper than everything else in marginal cost. You run it all the time because there's no reason not to run it all the time. If you're generating too much power, turn off something more expensive.
There has never been a failure of a dam built specifically for hydroelectric power
Counterexamples abound if you look.
I see this sort of propagandized research as a good reason for embracing James Hansen's coming departure from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA. While I agree with the main conclusion of the paper, that nuclear power has in general saved more lives than it has lost, I think he goes about it again in a haphazard fashion, heavily biased to nuclear power production.
For example, there is no breakdown of the data or consideration of alternative strategies. What's the break down of the various sources of deaths from fossil fuel burning? In particular, I was curious how many deaths he would attribute to elevated levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. As far as I can tell, it's not there in his research though I probably could figure it out eventually from a detailed analysis of his references.
Here's another big question. How effective would implementing other strategies, like pollution controls on coal power plants, be? If most of those lives can be saved merely by scrubbing coal power plant exhaust, then that's not a strong argument for nuclear power (and would become another propaganda element of the paper).
And once again, he exaggerates the risks of carbon dioxide emissions (in his "Implications" section).
I have no problem with Hansen putting out biased research. Just don't do it with public funds.
The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.