Again though, SpaceX is doing something that has been done HUNDREDS of times before.
No. It's doing that "HUNDREDS of times before" thing (which actually is about a dozen times, considering we're speaking of developing working commercial orbital launch) for far cheaper than it's been done before. That makes it a first time. There's a number of manufacture and operations innovations that SpaceX has employed as well (small launch teams, the friction stir-welded tank, new take on engine clustering, etc).
The point is Mars is a whole new beast. It isn't simply doing what someone else has done before. There is NO indication that any such thing as 10x cost savings can be achieved in such a project.
I already gave one such indication. SpaceX has control over development (and actual operations of a launch vehicle) costs that NASA can only envy. That's a factor of ten right there.
Once manned travel to Mars has been achieved to a degree that it is ALMOST routine then I would fully expect SpaceX to reproduce that technology for 1/10th of the initial cost and operate it at 500% discount, but not until then.
Why would you think that? It's worth noting here that, unlike NASA, SpaceX has a proven development team for launch vehicles and spacecraft and it is not the only one in the private world.
The problem is that the need for human labour is going down due to automation, and thus its market price - also known as wage - is also going down.
That hasn't been true in practice. There are far more people employed and at better wages than in the past. What has happened is that the premium which labor in the developed world could charge, just for being in the developed world, over the rest of the world has declined over recent decades.
Unless you have some particular advantage, such as relatively in demand skills, a rent-seeking situation, or are leveraging capital, you just aren't worth that much as a worker. That has nothing to do with automation, but rather with having to compete with someone who often works for a fraction of what you can legally earn.
but money creation is not being used for government funding
There's always inflation. Also, QE might have been used to fund some recent paybacks of federal loans. For example, GM somehow managed to pay off rather large loans in a suspiciously short period of time. That money ends up in the US's general fund.
Obama is also the guy who tried to kill NASA's manned spaceflight capabilities; first he killed the bi-partisan Constellation program, then he shut-down shuttle operations (and ripped-up the infrastructure and tore the guts out of the orbiters (they all now have fake engines, gutted OMS pods and gutted FRCS modules) so they could never fly again).
As others have noted, Bush ended the Shuttle not Obama. As to Constellation, it was unusually hostile to a US future in space with the Ares I, which competed with existing launch infrastructure (particularly, the Delta IV Heavy) for the benefit of ATK (Alliant Techsystems). And it was remarkably deceptive how the launch vehicle was chosen (the study that anointed the solid rocket motor first stage, built by ATK, was highly biased in favor of that choice with different standards for solid motors and the ignoring of various issues such as thrust oscillation and evacuation from a complete first stage failure).
the kind chase-the-quarter capitalism doesn't do very well
Ever wonder why there's so much chase-the-quarter capitalism? Because government is blowing so much money on R&D and other risky things that businesses used to do. Why do your own research and take your own risks, when the government can do that for you?
And we don't stand a chance of doing it again, not because there's a shortage of big technological problems, but because of the fact that there is a large segment of the population that believes that the government should not be involved in such technological advancements - the private sector should do it alone.
There's merit in that from the observation that the US government has done a shitty job in space exploration and R&D in general.
R&D really only works when someone's ass is on the line, such as the US President in a time of war. Then it has to work. Else, the theater is good enough. Frankly, we're fortunate that those who spend the public dollar bother to do as much constructive work as they do.
I know many people are rightly concerned about our national debt, but you have to spend money to make money.
Just wait until the current generation hits retirement age and has no retirement funds. You do realize that we are legally responsible to take care of those people, even if they have no money.
I missed the part where the legal responsibility actually exists. It's worth noting that with any such responsibility, even one that actually exists, one can still just not honor it via inflation.
Social Security could get to something like actual bank accounts where you save money over your employment lifetime.
What would be the point? We already have bank accounts and similar tools for both saving and investing. It's reinventing the wheel. Now, I suppose the novel part would be some sort of forced savings. But that sort of thing doesn't mix well with a democracy and never has.
The problem with Social Security is that it has been spent as quickly as it came in, and the whole notion of a trust fund is a complete lie.
There's also some breathtaking yet legal accounting fraud.
Well, the idea goes that since the government is fueled by the economy (that is, it scrapes off a percentage of everyone's income and such), and economies take a long time to build up, if the government can keep the economy from crashing, then it's protecting it's own source of income, and can then afford to pay off that loan later.
I doubt most recessions risk crashing the economy. As is commonly noted, a mild recession actually helps an economy by weeding out weaker businesses. IMHO Keynesian spending actually hinders economic growth in that situation.
Furthermore, during an economic downturn, everyone simply has less money. What we thought was valuable, turns out not to be. Like bad stocks, properties no-one wants, or businesses that are no longer profitable. That's largely psychological.
The flaw comes in thinking that it's a good idea to return to the old valuation and expectations. In such situations, it often not only is a bad idea to try, but turns out to be impossible.
Just consider your example, there we devalue a currency so that the numerical price happens to remain the same. But here's the thing. Why is the destruction of the value of savings accounts and loans (here, a third!) worth avoiding deflation? And the goods in question are still worth just as much as they were.
Keep in mind that at some point even in the complete absence of any sort of inflationary monetary policy, deflation will end. Someone will buy stuff rather than hold onto their money for the rest of time.
This year's projected deficit is about $850 billion
It's worth noting that this is a projection early in the fiscal year. If they're still projecting that in May or June after about half a year of activity and most tax collection has occurred, then I'd take it more seriously. Past projections have undershot by a bit.
The alternative is letting our impoverished elderly (i.e. those who never had the ability to save for retirement) die of starvation or exposure
Or get a job. Remember that in the mid-30s when Social Security was introduced, there were, just there is now, massive institutional disincentive to employ people.
The regressiveness of the social security tax is not good, and maybe there is some way to reform social security that wouldn't be a disaster, but eliminating social security entirely would not be good.
Well, one could cut it back to a means-based system.
What is the point of the Keynesian strategy of increased government spending during a recession? From what I see, it's merely to lessen the extent of recessions and such. That looks to me to be a strategy for oh, saving votes of people who might otherwise lose something, say a job, rather than a strategy for building a better society.
For example, a common complaint about the private world is lack of foresight. Well, how much foresight do you really need in the presence of Keynesian spending? When things go bad, say due to your actions, then you can switch over to consuming a piece of Keynesian spending until the economy improves..
Keynesian spending also has the problem that when you stop spending, it stops working. That's not a problem in a lot of recessions of the past where the recession and its ill effects were over with rather quickly. But in a prolonged recession, one needs a lot of stimulus over long periods of time. That leads to big public debt increases and commitment to an ongoing economically inefficient churning of wealth. If it's a big enough churn, you might actually be holding back economic growth by a significant amount. That's an ugly trap to get caught in.
Whether "austerity" works or not, depends in large part on whether you want what it does. It's not a tool for getting out temporarily of a recession, but rather for a long term restructuring and improvement in an economy. If you don't really want a better economy in the long term, then you probably wouldn't consider austerity to work.
It's also worth considering why bubbles of the sort that led to the current bout of recessions happen over and over again.
You want us to cut in bad times which would surely help demand!
And why is that considered a good idea?
. Your extreme shortsightedness will doom us all. But that's what you and your republican buddies want right? Ruin America then blame it on the black guy.
I've noticed a number of pro-Keynesian people blaming it on the rich guy and those who are somewhat more responsible fiscally. But there are many countries who have gone where the EU and the US are going now. It doesn't work. You end up with high debt and crippled ability to provide anything, be it basic services or Keynesian spending.
I think Microsoft would want to use Office as a asset to get Surface in the enterprise.
Alternately, they could just drop Surface and probably make more in the process. I think going OS and hardware agnostic is probably the best for them long term. It'll mean that they have to acknowledge that they're going to take a big drop in profit though. That'll hurt their near future stock price more than pretending that they have a viable business model for the next ten years.
You miss the point of my reference to things like SpaceX. They got to orbit fairly cheaply because 95% of the work was done already and could simply be applied. Sunk cost indeed, but the point is if you measured the TOTAL cost of going to orbit reliably and relatively cheaply by what SpaceX spent then you would underestimate the total investmeny by a factor of 20 (at least, I'm pulling that number, it is probably much higher). Thus any argument that by analogy if NASA needs $1 trillion to go to Mars that SpaceX needs only say $100 billion to do the same thing is fatally flawed because it is not an analogous situation (IE NASA has been to orbit already, but not to Mars). As for sending men to Mars there are no sunk costs, 95% or more of the cost required is ahead of us, so it makes perfectly good sense to consider whether we should spend those funds.
It's worth noting here that a NASA group got access to SpaceX financial numbers and estimated that SpaceX developed the Falcon 1 and 9, three engine designs, and half a dozen launches on about ten times less than NASA would have contracted the bid for.
So instead of a factor of 20 or whatever, divide that by ten.
My opinion is that we can drop two orders of magnitude off your cost estimate for a Mars mission, if a) we don't use a national space program, and b) we don't have "international cooperation". Each of those factors adds a zero to the cost of doing things. Ten billion dollars is still a bit too much for a single manned mission to Mars so I think we'll have to wait till it's a bit cheaper than that.
We COULD do it, but it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to do it now vs building up to it over at least a few more decades.
While I disagree strongly with parts of your argument (such as the claim that cost corresponds to difficulty). I don't fundamentally disagree with your prediction here. I too consider a Mars mission to be something that can happen many decades from now, but perhaps much earlier, if a large drop in cost to orbit (the oft desired "cheap access to space") happens over the next couple of decades.
It is worth noting that while the optimists have been thwarted, so have the worst of the pessimists. Even excluding the effects of SpaceX (which even in the absence of substantial launches has encouraged competitors to drop their prices), orbital launch has steadily declined in price while simultaneously increased in capability. It's just doing so slower than we would like.
But if negative regulation can "trash" your society, then it probably wouldn't have amounted to much anyway.
First you think regulation can destroy our society, now you're claiming it's weak.
"It" refers to the society in my quote. Of course, if a society is weak enough to be destroyed by regulation which constrains moderate actions by its citizens, then there's a huge space of other, more harmful regulation that would do it in.
Then stop using negative regulation to trash my society,
That hasn't happened yet. But if negative regulation can "trash" your society, then it probably wouldn't have amounted to much anyway.
Internet people are amazing. They repeat the same things over and over again, even when oblivious to context, and assume it somehow makes them profound.
Philosophically, it's no different than copypasta.
Well, given your concerns, it was an appropriate answer. Some problems really just need a little thought.
It's also basic game theory that a voting bloc that has enough power to throw an election and actually does on occasion, gets more attention than one which votes consistently for the lesser evil.
Ever hear of this saying? "Your freedom ends at the tip of my nose." If you want to live in a society that curbs my freedom, then I'm ok with you being unable to do that, even by moving.
Actually hardness corresponds EXACTLY to cost in engineering.
There is no such correspondence. To build a single blue LED requires a vast amount of knowledge and infrastructure. But an actual blue LED costs a lot less than the oh, trillions to tens of trillions of dollars of infrastructure and knowledge required to make it.
Plus, I think the cost of a Mars mission is vastly overstated despite its difficulty. Apollo is not a good choice for a comparison because it was a rushed, prestige project (unless of course, a Mars mission becomes a rushed, prestige project as well). There was almost no interest in controlling costs till by the first manned landing in 1969 (by which most of the money had been spent).
Slashdot Mirror
Again though, SpaceX is doing something that has been done HUNDREDS of times before.
No. It's doing that "HUNDREDS of times before" thing (which actually is about a dozen times, considering we're speaking of developing working commercial orbital launch) for far cheaper than it's been done before. That makes it a first time. There's a number of manufacture and operations innovations that SpaceX has employed as well (small launch teams, the friction stir-welded tank, new take on engine clustering, etc).
The point is Mars is a whole new beast. It isn't simply doing what someone else has done before. There is NO indication that any such thing as 10x cost savings can be achieved in such a project.
I already gave one such indication. SpaceX has control over development (and actual operations of a launch vehicle) costs that NASA can only envy. That's a factor of ten right there.
Once manned travel to Mars has been achieved to a degree that it is ALMOST routine then I would fully expect SpaceX to reproduce that technology for 1/10th of the initial cost and operate it at 500% discount, but not until then.
Why would you think that? It's worth noting here that, unlike NASA, SpaceX has a proven development team for launch vehicles and spacecraft and it is not the only one in the private world.
The problem is that the need for human labour is going down due to automation, and thus its market price - also known as wage - is also going down.
That hasn't been true in practice. There are far more people employed and at better wages than in the past. What has happened is that the premium which labor in the developed world could charge, just for being in the developed world, over the rest of the world has declined over recent decades.
Unless you have some particular advantage, such as relatively in demand skills, a rent-seeking situation, or are leveraging capital, you just aren't worth that much as a worker. That has nothing to do with automation, but rather with having to compete with someone who often works for a fraction of what you can legally earn.
but money creation is not being used for government funding
There's always inflation. Also, QE might have been used to fund some recent paybacks of federal loans. For example, GM somehow managed to pay off rather large loans in a suspiciously short period of time. That money ends up in the US's general fund.
Start using money creation for funding government instead of giving private banks exclusive use of it
Government has a wide variety of tools for creating money, both using leverage as the banks do, or merely printing it. There is no exclusivity here.
Obama is also the guy who tried to kill NASA's manned spaceflight capabilities; first he killed the bi-partisan Constellation program, then he shut-down shuttle operations (and ripped-up the infrastructure and tore the guts out of the orbiters (they all now have fake engines, gutted OMS pods and gutted FRCS modules) so they could never fly again).
As others have noted, Bush ended the Shuttle not Obama. As to Constellation, it was unusually hostile to a US future in space with the Ares I, which competed with existing launch infrastructure (particularly, the Delta IV Heavy) for the benefit of ATK (Alliant Techsystems). And it was remarkably deceptive how the launch vehicle was chosen (the study that anointed the solid rocket motor first stage, built by ATK, was highly biased in favor of that choice with different standards for solid motors and the ignoring of various issues such as thrust oscillation and evacuation from a complete first stage failure).
Constellation needed to die.
the kind chase-the-quarter capitalism doesn't do very well
Ever wonder why there's so much chase-the-quarter capitalism? Because government is blowing so much money on R&D and other risky things that businesses used to do. Why do your own research and take your own risks, when the government can do that for you?
And we don't stand a chance of doing it again, not because there's a shortage of big technological problems, but because of the fact that there is a large segment of the population that believes that the government should not be involved in such technological advancements - the private sector should do it alone.
There's merit in that from the observation that the US government has done a shitty job in space exploration and R&D in general.
R&D really only works when someone's ass is on the line, such as the US President in a time of war. Then it has to work. Else, the theater is good enough. Frankly, we're fortunate that those who spend the public dollar bother to do as much constructive work as they do.
I know many people are rightly concerned about our national debt, but you have to spend money to make money.
You also have to spend money to lose money.
Just wait until the current generation hits retirement age and has no retirement funds. You do realize that we are legally responsible to take care of those people, even if they have no money.
I missed the part where the legal responsibility actually exists. It's worth noting that with any such responsibility, even one that actually exists, one can still just not honor it via inflation.
Actually, given how the market is recovering which may lead to more tax receipts
They're probably already expecting those capital gains.
Social Security could get to something like actual bank accounts where you save money over your employment lifetime.
What would be the point? We already have bank accounts and similar tools for both saving and investing. It's reinventing the wheel. Now, I suppose the novel part would be some sort of forced savings. But that sort of thing doesn't mix well with a democracy and never has.
The problem with Social Security is that it has been spent as quickly as it came in, and the whole notion of a trust fund is a complete lie.
There's also some breathtaking yet legal accounting fraud.
Well, the idea goes that since the government is fueled by the economy (that is, it scrapes off a percentage of everyone's income and such), and economies take a long time to build up, if the government can keep the economy from crashing, then it's protecting it's own source of income, and can then afford to pay off that loan later.
I doubt most recessions risk crashing the economy. As is commonly noted, a mild recession actually helps an economy by weeding out weaker businesses. IMHO Keynesian spending actually hinders economic growth in that situation.
Furthermore, during an economic downturn, everyone simply has less money. What we thought was valuable, turns out not to be. Like bad stocks, properties no-one wants, or businesses that are no longer profitable. That's largely psychological.
The flaw comes in thinking that it's a good idea to return to the old valuation and expectations. In such situations, it often not only is a bad idea to try, but turns out to be impossible.
Just consider your example, there we devalue a currency so that the numerical price happens to remain the same. But here's the thing. Why is the destruction of the value of savings accounts and loans (here, a third!) worth avoiding deflation? And the goods in question are still worth just as much as they were.
Keep in mind that at some point even in the complete absence of any sort of inflationary monetary policy, deflation will end. Someone will buy stuff rather than hold onto their money for the rest of time.
This year's projected deficit is about $850 billion
It's worth noting that this is a projection early in the fiscal year. If they're still projecting that in May or June after about half a year of activity and most tax collection has occurred, then I'd take it more seriously. Past projections have undershot by a bit.
The alternative is letting our impoverished elderly (i.e. those who never had the ability to save for retirement) die of starvation or exposure
Or get a job. Remember that in the mid-30s when Social Security was introduced, there were, just there is now, massive institutional disincentive to employ people.
The regressiveness of the social security tax is not good, and maybe there is some way to reform social security that wouldn't be a disaster, but eliminating social security entirely would not be good.
Well, one could cut it back to a means-based system.
For example, a common complaint about the private world is lack of foresight. Well, how much foresight do you really need in the presence of Keynesian spending? When things go bad, say due to your actions, then you can switch over to consuming a piece of Keynesian spending until the economy improves..
Keynesian spending also has the problem that when you stop spending, it stops working. That's not a problem in a lot of recessions of the past where the recession and its ill effects were over with rather quickly. But in a prolonged recession, one needs a lot of stimulus over long periods of time. That leads to big public debt increases and commitment to an ongoing economically inefficient churning of wealth. If it's a big enough churn, you might actually be holding back economic growth by a significant amount. That's an ugly trap to get caught in.
Whether "austerity" works or not, depends in large part on whether you want what it does. It's not a tool for getting out temporarily of a recession, but rather for a long term restructuring and improvement in an economy. If you don't really want a better economy in the long term, then you probably wouldn't consider austerity to work.
It's also worth considering why bubbles of the sort that led to the current bout of recessions happen over and over again.
You want us to cut in bad times which would surely help demand!
And why is that considered a good idea?
. Your extreme shortsightedness will doom us all. But that's what you and your republican buddies want right? Ruin America then blame it on the black guy.
I've noticed a number of pro-Keynesian people blaming it on the rich guy and those who are somewhat more responsible fiscally. But there are many countries who have gone where the EU and the US are going now. It doesn't work. You end up with high debt and crippled ability to provide anything, be it basic services or Keynesian spending.
I think Microsoft would want to use Office as a asset to get Surface in the enterprise.
Alternately, they could just drop Surface and probably make more in the process. I think going OS and hardware agnostic is probably the best for them long term. It'll mean that they have to acknowledge that they're going to take a big drop in profit though. That'll hurt their near future stock price more than pretending that they have a viable business model for the next ten years.
"Prejudge" means that you judge before you have obtained necessary information or deliberation for the judgment.
You miss the point of my reference to things like SpaceX. They got to orbit fairly cheaply because 95% of the work was done already and could simply be applied. Sunk cost indeed, but the point is if you measured the TOTAL cost of going to orbit reliably and relatively cheaply by what SpaceX spent then you would underestimate the total investmeny by a factor of 20 (at least, I'm pulling that number, it is probably much higher). Thus any argument that by analogy if NASA needs $1 trillion to go to Mars that SpaceX needs only say $100 billion to do the same thing is fatally flawed because it is not an analogous situation (IE NASA has been to orbit already, but not to Mars). As for sending men to Mars there are no sunk costs, 95% or more of the cost required is ahead of us, so it makes perfectly good sense to consider whether we should spend those funds.
It's worth noting here that a NASA group got access to SpaceX financial numbers and estimated that SpaceX developed the Falcon 1 and 9, three engine designs, and half a dozen launches on about ten times less than NASA would have contracted the bid for.
So instead of a factor of 20 or whatever, divide that by ten.
My opinion is that we can drop two orders of magnitude off your cost estimate for a Mars mission, if a) we don't use a national space program, and b) we don't have "international cooperation". Each of those factors adds a zero to the cost of doing things. Ten billion dollars is still a bit too much for a single manned mission to Mars so I think we'll have to wait till it's a bit cheaper than that.
We COULD do it, but it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to do it now vs building up to it over at least a few more decades.
While I disagree strongly with parts of your argument (such as the claim that cost corresponds to difficulty). I don't fundamentally disagree with your prediction here. I too consider a Mars mission to be something that can happen many decades from now, but perhaps much earlier, if a large drop in cost to orbit (the oft desired "cheap access to space") happens over the next couple of decades.
It is worth noting that while the optimists have been thwarted, so have the worst of the pessimists. Even excluding the effects of SpaceX (which even in the absence of substantial launches has encouraged competitors to drop their prices), orbital launch has steadily declined in price while simultaneously increased in capability. It's just doing so slower than we would like.
Also no reason to rail against the consensus.
Lack of data is a great reason to rail against consensus.
But if negative regulation can "trash" your society, then it probably wouldn't have amounted to much anyway.
First you think regulation can destroy our society, now you're claiming it's weak.
"It" refers to the society in my quote. Of course, if a society is weak enough to be destroyed by regulation which constrains moderate actions by its citizens, then there's a huge space of other, more harmful regulation that would do it in.
But a Mars mission is not an assembly line produced low-cost consumer item like a blue LED. There isn't even any analogy to be made there.
I don't expect millions of Mars missions at a time. But low mission frequency is a fundamental problem of all current space exploration.
Then stop using negative regulation to trash my society,
That hasn't happened yet. But if negative regulation can "trash" your society, then it probably wouldn't have amounted to much anyway.
Internet people are amazing. They repeat the same things over and over again, even when oblivious to context, and assume it somehow makes them profound.
Philosophically, it's no different than copypasta.
Well, given your concerns, it was an appropriate answer. Some problems really just need a little thought.
It's also basic game theory that a voting bloc that has enough power to throw an election and actually does on occasion, gets more attention than one which votes consistently for the lesser evil.
Ever hear of this saying? "Your freedom ends at the tip of my nose." If you want to live in a society that curbs my freedom, then I'm ok with you being unable to do that, even by moving.
Actually hardness corresponds EXACTLY to cost in engineering.
There is no such correspondence. To build a single blue LED requires a vast amount of knowledge and infrastructure. But an actual blue LED costs a lot less than the oh, trillions to tens of trillions of dollars of infrastructure and knowledge required to make it.
Plus, I think the cost of a Mars mission is vastly overstated despite its difficulty. Apollo is not a good choice for a comparison because it was a rushed, prestige project (unless of course, a Mars mission becomes a rushed, prestige project as well). There was almost no interest in controlling costs till by the first manned landing in 1969 (by which most of the money had been spent).