It's also worth noting that they were selling food from on campus concessionary services. I think Brown University should be stripped completely of this power and control, but well, that's what they have.
Would you practice to drive a dangerous car by playing videogames? At some point, you have to practice with the device in question in order to operate safely with that device.
As others have noted, he received a much longer prison sentence than the heads of the drug smuggling ring did (one who actually got a reduced sentence by testifying against Anaya, the secret compartment maker). They made an example of him.
You do know there are legitimate issues here? A head of a 5 employee business where everyone works in the same building or room is naturally going to have a harder time explaining why they didn't know their employees were engaged in illegal activities than a head of 1,000 or more employees dispersed over a continent or two.
It's worth noting here the Fast and Furious "gun walking" scandal. ATF personnel knew in the summer of 2010 that the straw weapon purchases (ultimately for about two thousand apparently high quality weapons) which they were allowing but deliberately not monitoring (allegedly as part of a plan to catch gun smugglers and their buyers) were going straight to Sinaloa cartel factions and being used to commit many hundreds of crimes such as murder. But they let that program continue another half a year until a border agent was killed in a shoot out involving two such weapons.
It's worth noting here that most of those straw purchases wouldn't have happened without ATF interference and we don't know what else might have been smuggled into Mexico in connection with those guns.
No one from the ATF has been prosecuted for assisting in these crimes. After all, they knew without a doubt in the summer of 2010 that crimes were being committed with those weapons, yet they did nothing for another half a year until someone too important to ignore died. In comparison, Alfred Anaya of the story is merely suspected to have known that his secret compartments were used for drug smuggling.
And none of Anaya's devices ever killed anyone while as of more than two years ago, F&F weapons turned up at over 200 murder scenes in both Mexico and the US.
And because the Obama administration is shielding the people involved, we don't know if the real purpose of the effort was to catch gun smugglers and complicit members of the Sinaloa Cartel or something sinister such as creating a false pretext for federal gun control laws or deliberately providing smuggling services for the Sinaloa Cartel.
And I'm tired of people who think that doing something again that was done fifty years ago counts as new exploration.
Well, as I noted, you can still be exploring even if someone else had done it first, such as using Delta airlines to explore NYC.
NASA has given us people on the moon, robots on mars, images of the cosmic microwave background, evidence that there might have been water on Mars, probes that have been to the outer planets, probes that have left the solar system, images of the deep field array increasing the known stellar population of the observable universe by a factor of 100 billion, provided bounds on the age of the universe according to the standard lambda-CDM model, contributed to the first actual space station, and found planets outside our solar system.
And that is remarkably poor ambition for someone who claims to care about things that haven't been done before. NASA has flushed more than a trillion dollars on such things.
We should have a lot more to show for what's been spent. Why don't we? Almost no infrastructure development. It's also worth noting that in the 80s and 90s, NASA actually was an obstacle to space development including exploration by opposing commercial activities in space. Prior to 1984, all things launched from the US had to be launched on the Space Shuttle by law. Now, most NASA payloads are launched on commercial launch vehicles. Imagine if NASA had encouraged commercial launch from the very beginning in the early 60s rather than be forced by law in the mid 80s through the early 90s.
It's made minor refinements on achievements NASA made fifty years ago
Major advances not minor refinements. The barriers to space exploration are mostly economic. In turn, lowering the cost of putting something in space is the largest such obstacle. A huge part of this debate is merely your failure to acknowledge the big problems.
Government funded space exploration is the only exploration with a track history, the only exploration which has done anything fundamentally new, and the only exploration that will take us to new places.
And has done for a monstrously inefficient price tag which I don't think you're even close to comprehending. As I've noted here, I think we're beginning to see that change with businesses like SpaceX to a far more powerful private enterprise ecosystem for development and exploration, driven by need to support valuable activities in space rather than national ego.
I imagine a lot of Indians are already dying of heart disease, cancer, and other developed world illnesses. And those numbers will grow as the diseases and parasites you mention are steadily eradicated.
What do you mean by "proof"? I mentioned solar cells and computers. I think the vast amounts of non-NASA-based funding for that research, is sufficient evidence. But maybe you have some other research in mind.
After all your moving of goalposts, all your redefinitions, you end up at the point I was at originally: Private Enterprise has yet to explore anything space related. Next time could you just have a bit of a think before you post?
Well, let's go over what I actually posted:
How about developing a new line of orbital launch vehicles. which SpaceX did, for less than a factor of ten that NASA would have payed for it (at least in the initial contract, it'd go up with cost overruns)? Some NASA people examined SpaceX's accounting books and reached that particular conclusion. Exploration (and more important things like development) of space will be helped along by this new generation of cheap access to space.
Did I say that SpaceX was directly exploring anything? No, I merely pointed that they were in the process of greatly reducing the cost of all space exploration, which I think is more important, and you should as well. Let's see some more examples:
Well, that just goes to show that you don't know what exploration is. "Been there. Done that." is useless as a principle of exploration because eventually you'll get to the point where it's too expensive to "Be there. Do that." You have to have affordable infrastructure, not merely a smattering of moderately adventurous activities.
That's what SpaceX (and in time others) will provide. Infrastructure for space exploration and other things. And rather than speak of the things we do in the past tense, we'll be speaking of them in the future tense.
And later:
All such trips whether exploration or other activities, must to some extent come from Earth. SpaceX makes all such trips cheaper whether it be another oh-so-boring trip to the Moon or a trip to someplace that would be "new" by your definition.
It's worth noting that even if we accept your analogy, it is possible for someone to buy a cheap plane ticket from Delta and explore (no "scare quotes" needed) NYC. Even if they've been to NYC before. It's a big place and not everyone has been everywhere there. So Delta and its cheaper air fares is indeed enabling new exploration of NYC as we speak.
And:
Not at the moment though Elon Musk has indicated plans down the road. But they are more important to long term space exploration now than NASA is because they attack the core obstacle to space exploration, namely cost of access to space.
Time and time again, I make the important point that SpaceX is doing more for space exploration than NASA is because it is making space exploration greatly cheaper and doing so at a cost an order of magnitude less than NASA could muster. There's no moving the goalposts since my argument has never changed. This is NEW, a game changer that will make future space exploration whether it be by NASA, SpaceX, or anyone else much cheaper.
I'm tired of how people think the token efforts that NASA does now are somehow more important than huge improvements in the economics of those projects which would radically increase what we could be doing in space with respect to exploration.
If they worked for Batista, or benefited from his ill gotten gains
Even in 1980, a couple of decades later? For example, 125,000 people left Cuba in 1980 when Fidel Castro allowed exile for a brief time. That's long after any Batista allies would have been purged from Cuba.
Of course it does. It has NASA and it has private sources.
Also, they are not, as has been pointed out many times, exploring anything.
Not at the moment though Elon Musk has indicated plans down the road. But they are more important to long term space exploration now than NASA is because they attack the core obstacle to space exploration, namely cost of access to space.
and that's the very lowest end of estimates
I'm willing to lowball those ridiculously optimistic guesses. We need to keep in mind that NASA is grossly inefficient with its funding. You take at least an order of magnitude hit in cost from having NASA handle the project.
And the research focuses on economic stimulus? That assumes that economic stimulus works, namely, that stimulating economic activity is better than not. I just see it as another example of the broken window fallacy. The money that went to generating economic activity came from people who were going to generate economic prosperity - either now or in the future. I think it is a net loss both due to the net loss of wealth and because it encourages moral hazard, that of only thinking in the short term.
And once the stimulus goes away, so does any benefits from the economic activity. We are all poorer for such games.
As to the spin off angle, there's been a lot of notoriously outrageous claims as to what NASA has done over the years, such as computers and solar cells. What is ignored is that these developments would have occurred anyway.
Most of the time, NASA's role has merely been to sign checks for work that would have been done anyway, and might even have been more efficiently done in its absence due to the interference of pointless government makework and other distractions that NASA funding entails.
So what am I supposed to say to your blatant straw man? Why are libertarian societies going to be any more likely to have problems here than anyone else who has the same cooperation problems?
Each person is only concerned with his own profit and his own survival.
Why would that be the case? Are you only concerned about your profit and survival? What makes you so different from the libertarian?
My favorite example is from the media. The scene in the original Total Recall movie where Cohaagan turns off the air machines because they belong to him.
You do know that's fiction and didn't really happen, don't you?
Your ridiculous "Doing it again only cheaper counts!" is pointless.
Pointless compared to what? There is nothing that NASA does which would stick around, if the funding got cut off. The ISS would have to be deorbited, the space probes ignored (and eventually run out of juice), etc. That's because none of it generates a return in any concrete way that could continue to fund the activity.
It won't matter in twenty years what NASA does now aside from as a demonstration of technology (which incidentally could have been acquired for far less than the NASA price tag). All their work is inherently ephemeral.
Meanwhile SpaceX and many other commercial providers of space services, would be able to sell to private businesses and such. It would hurt to lose NASA since NASA is a significant source of business, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
SpaceX among other things is self-funding exploration. That's new.
Note the NEW part there, not going back again.
The point of space exploration is we expect people to live at some of those places some day. This stuff is as a result important, something it wouldn't otherwise be. As I indicated earlier, I think the "Been there. Done that." attitude is ridiculous. But the "Been there in order to be there again and stay." isn't.
Your definition makes me an explorer if I find a cheaper ticket to NYC than anyone else, which is patently absurd.
It just means you don't understand my argument at all. The Moon has only been visited directly by humans six times, all more than forty years ago. That would be the same as NYC being visited only six times in its entire history. Do you really think that a world with surface area about a quarter of the total land area of Earth has been "explored" by six short trips?
All such trips whether exploration or other activities, must to some extent come from Earth. SpaceX makes all such trips cheaper whether it be another oh-so-boring trip to the Moon or a trip to someplace that would be "new" by your definition.
It's worth noting that even if we accept your analogy, it is possible for someone to buy a cheap plane ticket from Delta and explore (no "scare quotes" needed) NYC. Even if they've been to NYC before. It's a big place and not everyone has been everywhere there. So Delta and its cheaper air fares is indeed enabling new exploration of NYC as we speak.
and you're doing the usual khallow trick of redefining ordinary terms to fit your argument instead of realizing that your argument is pathetic
I'm doing the ordinary "trick" of reason. You ought to try it some time. I promise I won't complain.
Exactly. They haven't done much except a few one off and very expensive missions. It's remarkable how low peoples' standards are when it comes to NASA missions and the $18 or so billion dollars they spend each year.
Aside from now being forced to follow the direction of the leaders of China.
If someone lived in NK and didn't like it, they could move to SK.
Unless they were prohibited from doing so by China which now controls the region. See where I'm going with this?
but your anti-China bias showing
Why shouldn't I have anti-China bias? We're not speaking of a mostly honest government like Switzerland. If we give them a free gift of power, then they will take it. That's just what'll happen.
And if my aunt were a man she'd be my uncle. This is a ridiculous statement. Grow up.
A lot of grown ups figure out how not to pay their taxes.
Libertarianism would never get us to the moon, would never cure a disease (treatment is much more profitable) and wouldn't do shit in the face of a Panzer division, but hell, let's keep flogging the dead horse that is this infantile religion.
That's not its job. It's to create a sustainable society which is capable of doing those things.
They've gone to some of the easier places cheaper. That's not exploration, that's just repetition.
Well, that just goes to show that you don't know what exploration is. "Been there. Done that." is useless as a principle of exploration because eventually you'll get to the point where it's too expensive to "Be there. Do that." You have to have affordable infrastructure, not merely a smattering of moderately adventurous activities.
That's what SpaceX (and in time others) will provide. Infrastructure for space exploration and other things. And rather than speak of the things we do in the past tense, we'll be speaking of them in the future tense.
We don't put Delta up with Columbus because both got from Europe to America, only Delta did it later and cheaper.
Columbus's most enduring discoveries wasn't in discovering the New World, but in discovering the dynamics of the trade winds, which provided a cheap way one could navigate around the globe going both east and west and cheap cross-ocean travel using just three small ships.
How about developing a new line of orbital launch vehicles. which SpaceX did, for less than a factor of ten that NASA would have payed for it (at least in the initial contract, it'd go up with cost overruns)? Some NASA people examined SpaceX's accounting books and reached that particular conclusion. Exploration (and more important things like development) of space will be helped along by this new generation of cheap access to space.
At the moment they're at least fifty years behind the front line.
What front line? NASA has done much on the manned front in the last 50 years.
I know it's painful for you, but you have to admit it was the government that got us into space, and the government that got us to the moon.
And what has the government (and really by this phrase I mean all governments not just the US) done lately? They haven't returned to the Moon in forty years. They haven't surpassed any new barriers in that time.
This ambiguity is why I avoid using the term "America" when referring to the US. It doesn't hurt that I also avoid insulting the residents of two continents.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also worth noting that they were selling food from on campus concessionary services. I think Brown University should be stripped completely of this power and control, but well, that's what they have.
Practicing to kill an animal for food...
Would you practice to drive a dangerous car by playing videogames? At some point, you have to practice with the device in question in order to operate safely with that device.
As others have noted, he received a much longer prison sentence than the heads of the drug smuggling ring did (one who actually got a reduced sentence by testifying against Anaya, the secret compartment maker). They made an example of him.
This is a good point. How can you have "betrayal" as the journalist in the interview claims in the absence of any sort of obligation?
You do know there are legitimate issues here? A head of a 5 employee business where everyone works in the same building or room is naturally going to have a harder time explaining why they didn't know their employees were engaged in illegal activities than a head of 1,000 or more employees dispersed over a continent or two.
It's worth noting here the Fast and Furious "gun walking" scandal. ATF personnel knew in the summer of 2010 that the straw weapon purchases (ultimately for about two thousand apparently high quality weapons) which they were allowing but deliberately not monitoring (allegedly as part of a plan to catch gun smugglers and their buyers) were going straight to Sinaloa cartel factions and being used to commit many hundreds of crimes such as murder. But they let that program continue another half a year until a border agent was killed in a shoot out involving two such weapons.
It's worth noting here that most of those straw purchases wouldn't have happened without ATF interference and we don't know what else might have been smuggled into Mexico in connection with those guns.
No one from the ATF has been prosecuted for assisting in these crimes. After all, they knew without a doubt in the summer of 2010 that crimes were being committed with those weapons, yet they did nothing for another half a year until someone too important to ignore died. In comparison, Alfred Anaya of the story is merely suspected to have known that his secret compartments were used for drug smuggling.
And none of Anaya's devices ever killed anyone while as of more than two years ago, F&F weapons turned up at over 200 murder scenes in both Mexico and the US.
And because the Obama administration is shielding the people involved, we don't know if the real purpose of the effort was to catch gun smugglers and complicit members of the Sinaloa Cartel or something sinister such as creating a false pretext for federal gun control laws or deliberately providing smuggling services for the Sinaloa Cartel.
And I'm tired of people who think that doing something again that was done fifty years ago counts as new exploration.
Well, as I noted, you can still be exploring even if someone else had done it first, such as using Delta airlines to explore NYC.
NASA has given us people on the moon, robots on mars, images of the cosmic microwave background, evidence that there might have been water on Mars, probes that have been to the outer planets, probes that have left the solar system, images of the deep field array increasing the known stellar population of the observable universe by a factor of 100 billion, provided bounds on the age of the universe according to the standard lambda-CDM model, contributed to the first actual space station, and found planets outside our solar system.
And that is remarkably poor ambition for someone who claims to care about things that haven't been done before. NASA has flushed more than a trillion dollars on such things.
We should have a lot more to show for what's been spent. Why don't we? Almost no infrastructure development. It's also worth noting that in the 80s and 90s, NASA actually was an obstacle to space development including exploration by opposing commercial activities in space. Prior to 1984, all things launched from the US had to be launched on the Space Shuttle by law. Now, most NASA payloads are launched on commercial launch vehicles. Imagine if NASA had encouraged commercial launch from the very beginning in the early 60s rather than be forced by law in the mid 80s through the early 90s.
It's made minor refinements on achievements NASA made fifty years ago
Major advances not minor refinements. The barriers to space exploration are mostly economic. In turn, lowering the cost of putting something in space is the largest such obstacle. A huge part of this debate is merely your failure to acknowledge the big problems.
Government funded space exploration is the only exploration with a track history, the only exploration which has done anything fundamentally new, and the only exploration that will take us to new places.
And has done for a monstrously inefficient price tag which I don't think you're even close to comprehending. As I've noted here, I think we're beginning to see that change with businesses like SpaceX to a far more powerful private enterprise ecosystem for development and exploration, driven by need to support valuable activities in space rather than national ego.
So are you going to link to where this has been genuinely debunked? All I see is a link to your opinion.
I imagine a lot of Indians are already dying of heart disease, cancer, and other developed world illnesses. And those numbers will grow as the diseases and parasites you mention are steadily eradicated.
" these developments would have occurred anyway."
Prove it.
What do you mean by "proof"? I mentioned solar cells and computers. I think the vast amounts of non-NASA-based funding for that research, is sufficient evidence. But maybe you have some other research in mind.
After all your moving of goalposts, all your redefinitions, you end up at the point I was at originally: Private Enterprise has yet to explore anything space related. Next time could you just have a bit of a think before you post?
Well, let's go over what I actually posted:
How about developing a new line of orbital launch vehicles. which SpaceX did, for less than a factor of ten that NASA would have payed for it (at least in the initial contract, it'd go up with cost overruns)? Some NASA people examined SpaceX's accounting books and reached that particular conclusion. Exploration (and more important things like development) of space will be helped along by this new generation of cheap access to space.
Did I say that SpaceX was directly exploring anything? No, I merely pointed that they were in the process of greatly reducing the cost of all space exploration, which I think is more important, and you should as well. Let's see some more examples:
Well, that just goes to show that you don't know what exploration is. "Been there. Done that." is useless as a principle of exploration because eventually you'll get to the point where it's too expensive to "Be there. Do that." You have to have affordable infrastructure, not merely a smattering of moderately adventurous activities.
That's what SpaceX (and in time others) will provide. Infrastructure for space exploration and other things. And rather than speak of the things we do in the past tense, we'll be speaking of them in the future tense.
And later:
All such trips whether exploration or other activities, must to some extent come from Earth. SpaceX makes all such trips cheaper whether it be another oh-so-boring trip to the Moon or a trip to someplace that would be "new" by your definition.
It's worth noting that even if we accept your analogy, it is possible for someone to buy a cheap plane ticket from Delta and explore (no "scare quotes" needed) NYC. Even if they've been to NYC before. It's a big place and not everyone has been everywhere there. So Delta and its cheaper air fares is indeed enabling new exploration of NYC as we speak.
And:
Not at the moment though Elon Musk has indicated plans down the road. But they are more important to long term space exploration now than NASA is because they attack the core obstacle to space exploration, namely cost of access to space.
Time and time again, I make the important point that SpaceX is doing more for space exploration than NASA is because it is making space exploration greatly cheaper and doing so at a cost an order of magnitude less than NASA could muster. There's no moving the goalposts since my argument has never changed. This is NEW, a game changer that will make future space exploration whether it be by NASA, SpaceX, or anyone else much cheaper.
I'm tired of how people think the token efforts that NASA does now are somehow more important than huge improvements in the economics of those projects which would radically increase what we could be doing in space with respect to exploration.
Protip: it helps more if you can't.
If they worked for Batista, or benefited from his ill gotten gains
Even in 1980, a couple of decades later? For example, 125,000 people left Cuba in 1980 when Fidel Castro allowed exile for a brief time. That's long after any Batista allies would have been purged from Cuba.
Oh wait, would that be a double standard I hear?
For who? Certainly not for the Castros who seem to have no qualms about shooting people in cold blood.
I'd guess a slingshot around the sun was probably needed.
It's got to be something massive moving relative to the Sun, probably Mercury and/or Venus.
Er no, it's got external funding.
Of course it does. It has NASA and it has private sources.
Also, they are not, as has been pointed out many times, exploring anything.
Not at the moment though Elon Musk has indicated plans down the road. But they are more important to long term space exploration now than NASA is because they attack the core obstacle to space exploration, namely cost of access to space.
and that's the very lowest end of estimates
I'm willing to lowball those ridiculously optimistic guesses. We need to keep in mind that NASA is grossly inefficient with its funding. You take at least an order of magnitude hit in cost from having NASA handle the project.
And the research focuses on economic stimulus? That assumes that economic stimulus works, namely, that stimulating economic activity is better than not. I just see it as another example of the broken window fallacy. The money that went to generating economic activity came from people who were going to generate economic prosperity - either now or in the future. I think it is a net loss both due to the net loss of wealth and because it encourages moral hazard, that of only thinking in the short term.
And once the stimulus goes away, so does any benefits from the economic activity. We are all poorer for such games.
As to the spin off angle, there's been a lot of notoriously outrageous claims as to what NASA has done over the years, such as computers and solar cells. What is ignored is that these developments would have occurred anyway.
Most of the time, NASA's role has merely been to sign checks for work that would have been done anyway, and might even have been more efficiently done in its absence due to the interference of pointless government makework and other distractions that NASA funding entails.
Each person is only concerned with his own profit and his own survival.
Why would that be the case? Are you only concerned about your profit and survival? What makes you so different from the libertarian?
My favorite example is from the media. The scene in the original Total Recall movie where Cohaagan turns off the air machines because they belong to him. You do know that's fiction and didn't really happen, don't you?
Your ridiculous "Doing it again only cheaper counts!" is pointless.
Pointless compared to what? There is nothing that NASA does which would stick around, if the funding got cut off. The ISS would have to be deorbited, the space probes ignored (and eventually run out of juice), etc. That's because none of it generates a return in any concrete way that could continue to fund the activity.
It won't matter in twenty years what NASA does now aside from as a demonstration of technology (which incidentally could have been acquired for far less than the NASA price tag). All their work is inherently ephemeral.
Meanwhile SpaceX and many other commercial providers of space services, would be able to sell to private businesses and such. It would hurt to lose NASA since NASA is a significant source of business, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
SpaceX among other things is self-funding exploration. That's new.
Note the NEW part there, not going back again.
The point of space exploration is we expect people to live at some of those places some day. This stuff is as a result important, something it wouldn't otherwise be. As I indicated earlier, I think the "Been there. Done that." attitude is ridiculous. But the "Been there in order to be there again and stay." isn't.
Your definition makes me an explorer if I find a cheaper ticket to NYC than anyone else, which is patently absurd.
It just means you don't understand my argument at all. The Moon has only been visited directly by humans six times, all more than forty years ago. That would be the same as NYC being visited only six times in its entire history. Do you really think that a world with surface area about a quarter of the total land area of Earth has been "explored" by six short trips?
All such trips whether exploration or other activities, must to some extent come from Earth. SpaceX makes all such trips cheaper whether it be another oh-so-boring trip to the Moon or a trip to someplace that would be "new" by your definition.
It's worth noting that even if we accept your analogy, it is possible for someone to buy a cheap plane ticket from Delta and explore (no "scare quotes" needed) NYC. Even if they've been to NYC before. It's a big place and not everyone has been everywhere there. So Delta and its cheaper air fares is indeed enabling new exploration of NYC as we speak.
and you're doing the usual khallow trick of redefining ordinary terms to fit your argument instead of realizing that your argument is pathetic
I'm doing the ordinary "trick" of reason. You ought to try it some time. I promise I won't complain.
Exactly. They haven't done much except a few one off and very expensive missions. It's remarkable how low peoples' standards are when it comes to NASA missions and the $18 or so billion dollars they spend each year.
And has no negative effects on South Korea,
Aside from now being forced to follow the direction of the leaders of China.
If someone lived in NK and didn't like it, they could move to SK.
Unless they were prohibited from doing so by China which now controls the region. See where I'm going with this?
but your anti-China bias showing
Why shouldn't I have anti-China bias? We're not speaking of a mostly honest government like Switzerland. If we give them a free gift of power, then they will take it. That's just what'll happen.
And if my aunt were a man she'd be my uncle. This is a ridiculous statement. Grow up.
A lot of grown ups figure out how not to pay their taxes.
Libertarianism would never get us to the moon, would never cure a disease (treatment is much more profitable) and wouldn't do shit in the face of a Panzer division, but hell, let's keep flogging the dead horse that is this infantile religion.
That's not its job. It's to create a sustainable society which is capable of doing those things.
They've gone to some of the easier places cheaper. That's not exploration, that's just repetition.
Well, that just goes to show that you don't know what exploration is. "Been there. Done that." is useless as a principle of exploration because eventually you'll get to the point where it's too expensive to "Be there. Do that." You have to have affordable infrastructure, not merely a smattering of moderately adventurous activities.
That's what SpaceX (and in time others) will provide. Infrastructure for space exploration and other things. And rather than speak of the things we do in the past tense, we'll be speaking of them in the future tense.
We don't put Delta up with Columbus because both got from Europe to America, only Delta did it later and cheaper.
Columbus's most enduring discoveries wasn't in discovering the New World, but in discovering the dynamics of the trade winds, which provided a cheap way one could navigate around the globe going both east and west and cheap cross-ocean travel using just three small ships.
1. It isn't your capital, it's the taxes that an elected legislature empowered by the Constitution collects.
And if I find a way to avoid paying those taxes legally or illegally, it remains my capital. Funny how that works.
2. Don't wreck a perfectly good economic system with Libertarian nonsense.
The US system has been circling the drain for decades. No doubt due to the Libertarian nonsense which has never been implemented in practice.
I'd love to be wrong about this
How about developing a new line of orbital launch vehicles. which SpaceX did, for less than a factor of ten that NASA would have payed for it (at least in the initial contract, it'd go up with cost overruns)? Some NASA people examined SpaceX's accounting books and reached that particular conclusion. Exploration (and more important things like development) of space will be helped along by this new generation of cheap access to space.
Don't you love being wrong?
At the moment they're at least fifty years behind the front line.
What front line? NASA has done much on the manned front in the last 50 years.
I know it's painful for you, but you have to admit it was the government that got us into space, and the government that got us to the moon.
And what has the government (and really by this phrase I mean all governments not just the US) done lately? They haven't returned to the Moon in forty years. They haven't surpassed any new barriers in that time.
This ambiguity is why I avoid using the term "America" when referring to the US. It doesn't hurt that I also avoid insulting the residents of two continents.