Since the advent of widespread HFT, even well diversified funds can fluctuate 5% per day, get unlucky on entry and exit and you've lost 2 years of typical gains - similarly, get lucky on entry and exit and you've got an extra 10% in your pocket.
What nonsense. There's two simple procedures you can use here to eliminate the adversity of HFT. First, look at a trading graph. It gives you a far longer point of view than the latest price on the market. Second, use limit orders.
It's bizarre when one comes up with complaints that could be settled with say fifteen minutes of thought.
Further, if HFT really was kicking the price of your mutual funds around by that much, then you could easily and I do mean easily make a hell of a lot more than 5% a year on volatility. I can think of two strategies off the bad. First, just place a buy and sell 5% below and above the current average daily trade price. When an order triggers, then place new buy and sell orders 5% above and below that price. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If that's too much capital for you and the security has options attached to it, then you can always just make serial covered puts and calls. That volatility results in people offering to pay more for puts and calls.
Complaining that a stock wobbles too much, just means that you don't understand how to profit from such a situation or that the volatility wasn't the actual problem in the first place.
Bullshit. They skim the difference between what someone would be prepared to sell for and what someone is prepared to pay (ie an investor may be prepared to pay 1.25 for a share, but you are offering to sell for 1.20 -- instead of the investor paying only 1.20, the HFT jumps in, buys for 1.20 and sells for 1.25, pocketing the difference). This is not just HFTs screwing each other, it screws the normal investor (which includes, you know, funds investing your pension money).
How does the HFT magically know what you were willing to pay? It's really hard to have a reasoned debate when people are attributing ridiculous feats to HFT.
Plus one doesn't need to trade in the millisecond or faster range to exploit the spread. Most just do it by controlled the market that you actually trade on. Few traders actually trade on the stock exchanges. Usually they trade on someone's private market which may then trade on the regular stock exchange or on another private market to get the actual stock in question. And market makers (of which HFT is a subcategory) routinely do this sort of trading for centuries without drawing a lot of ire from the people they're generating liquidity for.
If you're willing to pay 1.25 for a stock, then you should be happy that you got the stock for the price you wanted. No one has the job of delivering a stock for less than what you are willing to pay for it. And if you didn't want to pay 1.25 for it, then don't. The market which you happen to be trading on might have some sort of obligation to give you a better deal than the deal you wanted, but nobody else does.
If you give someone a gun with the knowledge that they're going to use them in crimes, such as killing people. then that makes you an accessory to the crimes in question. One doesn't need to confuse oneself with ordinary gun control issues.
A key problem in the Fast and Furious case is that part way through there was clear evidence that a lot of firearms were getting to criminals who were using them to commit crimes and kill people. There was around 300 cases for 1600 lost weapons. At that point, the right thing to do would be to halt the program and try something new. Instead, they kept the program going for another six months until Brian Terry a border patrol agent died in a firefight in which two of these weapons were involved. That is accessory to murder right there.
At least that's what Republicans used to say when they want anyone to be able to buy a gun and people said they were going to Mexican drug cartels.
And how many people died so that you could be given this talking point?
You're an IT consultant on a team of IT consultants, due to cutbacks your team has dwindled to you and one other guy, and the company sold 40% of your networking hardware.
But the analogy is incomplete.
The company also knows that you've blown off a lot of work you had the resources to do. So why pay you to do anything when they already know that you have a pattern of not doing your work?
Keep in mind that this story is all about protecting Voth. Where's the testimony from whistleblowers in his department? Beware of any source that presents only one side as fact.
You're accusing Dave Voth, a former Marine, a man ATF named "outstanding law-enforcement employee of the year for dismantling two violent street gangs in Minneapolis", of being an accessory to the murder of a federal law enforcement officer.
Yes, I am with good cause. What I don't get is the indignation from you. We don't decide innocence or guilt based on whether someone was a former marine or possibly an outstanding law enforcement officer. We base it on what they have done. Here, it's time for an investigation of the ATF and specifically, Voth's contribution to murder and other crimes, not the bullshit we're getting where Voth and his associates get protected at the expense of justice.
According to two people present, the ATF presented detailed evidence, including the fact that their suspects had purchased almost 2,000 guns, and pushed for indictments.
I think it's worth noting at this point that is a different number. It tells us nothing about what happened to those weapons which the ATF supposedly was trying to keep out of circulation.
It just so happens that 2,000 guns is a number of guns that the ATF lost track of in Mexico, and which a large percent have already turned up at crime scenes in both Mexico and the US (which incidentally seems to be how these weapons are being recovered). If these numbers refer to the same weapons, then no effort of the ATF prevented those weapons from entering the hands of criminals. That in turn is a strong indication that no effort was made.
For that matter, the article is full of information about how many suspects had been purchasing how many guns by what dates.
It's not however full of information about how these weapons were used or who knew what when. For example, they take at face value that Voth was unaware of what was happening, basically, taking his word over a number of his employees who say differently.
We used to show returns in the form of transistors, lasers, stuff like that. Many of these items didn't actually find a profitable use until decades after their discovery.
Well, give an example of such research first before you make such assertions. I'll warn you though, when you actually try that exercise, you'll find it's harder than it first looks. For example, transistors had immediate financially profitable application since they could replace a much larger vacuum tube triode. And they served as a stepping stone to the first integrated circuits which also had near immediate profitable applicaiton.
And lasers started life as masers which served both as a frequency standard and low noise amplifiers. As lasers, the biggest application, fiber optics cables were quickly developed. For example, the first lasers, according to Wikipedia were active around the late 50s and early 60s (with solid state lasers developed in 1962). The first fiber optics cables were developed in 1966. They were first tried in telephone lines in the field in 1977.
Sure, it's not next quarter thinking, but it happened pretty damn fast, just the same.
Not all R&D is expensive boondoggles, and who the $#%# said "public funds?"
Pay attention to the thread. The title was "Money well spent." That money was for publicly funded fusion projects, ITER and NIF which can reasonably be considered boondoggles as well due to their high costs.
I glanced through the article in question and I must admit to being a bit puzzled. For an article about the "truth", it seems to have missed a few facts.
One of those facts is that two thousand firearms were smuggled into Mexico as a result of the program. Read through the article, you will see no mention of the number of firearms smuggled under the program. Another is that as of June 2010, a large number of those weapons had already turned up at crime scenes. Yet the program continued for another six months.
Last June, about nine months into the ATF operation known as "Fast and Furious," suspects had "purchased 1,608 firearms for over $1 million in cash transactions at various Phoenix-area gun shops," according to internal documents obtained by CBS News. The documents indicate ATF already knew that 179 of those very weapons had turned up at crime scenes in Mexico, and 130 in the U.S.
Another fact they missed is that the firearms had neither a means for being tracked (a previous program had RFID chips planted in the firearms). And they never informed the Mexican authorities. So the claim
Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
sounds like bullshit to me. The evidence that came out in June 2010 pretty much indicates that these weapons were directly arming criminals in Mexico and the US. A fifth of their "walked guns" quickly showed up at crime scenes.
Surveillance video in the interview shows straw purchasers leaving gun shops with boxes of weapons. Documents showed these guns were showing up at crime scenes in Mexico and ATF supervisors actually keeping track of this information. Agent Dodson and other senior agents confronted their supervisors over and over about this horrible operation.
Their answer? "If you're going to make an omlette, you've got to break some eggs."
Ms. Eban tries to downplay an email, now known as the "schism" email, sent by Mr. Voth to the team. While many say the email was about gunwalking Ms. Eban insists it was about everything but that. I'd like Mr. Voth to explain these parts (emphasis mine):
"Whether you care or not people of rank and authority at HQ are paying close attention to this case and they also believe we [Phoenix Group VII] are doing what they envisioned the Southwest Border Groups doing."
"We need to resolve our issues at this meeting. I will be damned if this case is going to suffer due to petty arguing, rumors, or other adolescent behavior."
"I don't know what all the issues are but we are all adults, we are all professionals, and we have a (sp) exciting opportunity to use the biggest tool in our law enforcement tool box. If you don't think this is fun you're in the wrong line of work -- period!"
Mr. Voth also needs to explain why they let go of their top suspect when they had him in custody. This is the man who purchased the guns found at Agent Terry's death scene. The guns that have been recovered have been ones found at crime scenes. 1,400 guns are still missing. Mr. Voth and the ATF never made an effort to interdict the weapons. None. The t
And it didn't help that a Republican-controlled Congress cut their funding to the point where the DoJ was damned near useless.
Even with funding, the DoJ would be pretty useless. I'll just trot out the current Republican talking points about Fast and Furious since they'll illustrate a good reason why the Republicans wouldn't be inclined to fund the Department of Justice.
Here, you have a pretty much cut and dry case. ATF agents allowed roughly two thousand fairly high quality guns to pass to Mexican drug cartels with no attempt made to track those weapons. Since those weapons have turned up at many crime scenes, including the murder of a US border agent (which is what finally shut down Fast and Furious). Further, the ATF agents involved knew for a few months before that final murder that these weapons were turning up at crime scenes, including murders. So a prosecutor has a pretty good case that someone committed a bunch of acts of accessory to murder (with reckless disregard for human life) and other crimes, plus the murder of a federal law enforcement officer. So what is the Department of Justice doing with this case? Hiding the agents involved in Washington DC. When will they investigate this?
This is why the "more funding" argument doesn't work. If the Department of Justice isn't going to do its job, then it doesn't really matter how much they're paid so might as well make it a little rather than a lot. The SEC is particularly notorious for providing the illusion of security for novice investors, or in other words, helping keep the marks from getting scared off before they can be fleeced.
The reason it is `considerably cheaper' is simply due to the fact Boeing couldn't milk the teet any longer while stretching the time line out.
Ever thought about why Boeing couldn't "milk the teat" any longer? I don't think it's a coincidence that Boeing got out of the space launch business when SpaceX announced it was getting in. In economics, it goes by the simple label of "competition".
That's what private enterprise and competition brings to this activity. One ca no longer "milk the teat" forever.
What I don't like is the fact that space is becoming increasingly privatised.
Well, why shouldn't it be? Most endeavors in the US are handled privately.
Then Musk came along and said, "Hey, I've got rich from founding the world's worst consumer bank, how about I give you the first few hits for free?" and hired a few experienced people.
Libertarians rode the back of this and shouted about how much better it would be to privatise space. But in fact we're just right (*) here again, with SpaceX substituted for Boeing.
And a considerably cheaper launch vehicle compared to the Delta IV (which Boeing put in the United Launch Alliance rather than continue to fly it themselves). I can't argue with results.
I like the unintentional "it's far worse than you think" vibe I get off this description.
Basically a government fixed-price request is a very vague description of an idea. The fixed-price bid is a very vague description of a project and associated budget. Whether or not the budget then balloons to eclipse the specified price is irrelevant to the bureaucracy on either side.
The more profit the private side gets, then the more money for bureaucracies on either side either directly through profit or indirectly through bribes and the revolving door. Such things are illegal only if you get caught. This is a built in incentive to balloon costs of projects.
Ever wonder why Congress keeps coming up with cost plus schemes for funding big rockets which use ATK solid rocket motors? Because ATK knows which bureaucracies to bribe.
You're obviously stuck back in the mid 20th Century when every research project didn't have to show immediate quarterly payback. We don't do that anymore. It's not "efficient".
Well what sort of "return" has been shown? Looks like we have a rather expensive fusion bomb simulator and not much else. I really tire of people who just don't get that any expenditure of public funds should be accountable. If you don't like the accountability issue, then find another way to fund the research. Don't just belittle it as short sighted thinking, especially, when ignoring accountability is the real short-sighted thinking here.
The problem is you can't just build a big one - there's a lot of design and engineering and theory that needs to be developed to figure out what exactly we'd want to build, and whether that thing is likely to work (Polywell's have their own set of loss processes and competing issues which need to be balanced).
Indeed. I just wanted to point out that there's more than the top (by level of funding) two approaches.
Ordinary matter is full for all practical purposes. You're thinking of technical purposes.
As was the original poster. For practical rather than technical purposes, space is filled with all sorts of interest stuff (energy, matter, and of course, space) that we can make into even more interesting stuff.
There are at least three. The "Polywell" (which uses a form of inertial electrostatic confinement fusion) is yet another approach.
There's also some ways to generate extremely inefficient table top fusion (eg, the Farnsworth fusor). Some day we might figure out how to make those efficient enough to generate power.
Thanks to the NIF we now know exactly what ICF is and isn't capable of. I'd call that an excellent return on investment.
Nonsense. ROI only makes sense if you consider both the investment and the return. Some vague, fluffy statement that we "know" what ICF can do, isn't a return. And you just blissfully ignored that at least $7 billion dollars was spent so you could blather about ROI on the internet.
The law courts are government. Just because they're a relatively independent branch of government (who pays for their staff and infrastructure? who appoints the committee which appoints judges?) doesn't mean that one has removed the government from the process.
What does Xerox Parc (company funded), the european autodidact scientific pioneers of old (self funded or funded by weathy patrons) and NASA (government funded) have in common? They are environments that let smart people "play" with few constraints.
And it's interesting that none of those environments have that now, much less have it in common. And NASA, the only government agency on that list, never really did have that environment.
If you were the father of this child, I'd say this could very easily insight terrible actions of violence.
That's what the law is for. To punish you when you do "terrible things" which happen to be against the law. It's worth noting here that no one had to be offended. It wasn't directed to the victim's family, that is, not harassment.
Freedom to get one's point across is one thing. Freedom to hurt another while doing so (or while not even conveying anything meaningful) is another.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the advent of widespread HFT, even well diversified funds can fluctuate 5% per day, get unlucky on entry and exit and you've lost 2 years of typical gains - similarly, get lucky on entry and exit and you've got an extra 10% in your pocket.
What nonsense. There's two simple procedures you can use here to eliminate the adversity of HFT. First, look at a trading graph. It gives you a far longer point of view than the latest price on the market. Second, use limit orders.
It's bizarre when one comes up with complaints that could be settled with say fifteen minutes of thought.
Further, if HFT really was kicking the price of your mutual funds around by that much, then you could easily and I do mean easily make a hell of a lot more than 5% a year on volatility. I can think of two strategies off the bad. First, just place a buy and sell 5% below and above the current average daily trade price. When an order triggers, then place new buy and sell orders 5% above and below that price. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If that's too much capital for you and the security has options attached to it, then you can always just make serial covered puts and calls. That volatility results in people offering to pay more for puts and calls.
Complaining that a stock wobbles too much, just means that you don't understand how to profit from such a situation or that the volatility wasn't the actual problem in the first place.
Bullshit. They skim the difference between what someone would be prepared to sell for and what someone is prepared to pay (ie an investor may be prepared to pay 1.25 for a share, but you are offering to sell for 1.20 -- instead of the investor paying only 1.20, the HFT jumps in, buys for 1.20 and sells for 1.25, pocketing the difference). This is not just HFTs screwing each other, it screws the normal investor (which includes, you know, funds investing your pension money).
How does the HFT magically know what you were willing to pay? It's really hard to have a reasoned debate when people are attributing ridiculous feats to HFT.
Plus one doesn't need to trade in the millisecond or faster range to exploit the spread. Most just do it by controlled the market that you actually trade on. Few traders actually trade on the stock exchanges. Usually they trade on someone's private market which may then trade on the regular stock exchange or on another private market to get the actual stock in question. And market makers (of which HFT is a subcategory) routinely do this sort of trading for centuries without drawing a lot of ire from the people they're generating liquidity for.
If you're willing to pay 1.25 for a stock, then you should be happy that you got the stock for the price you wanted. No one has the job of delivering a stock for less than what you are willing to pay for it. And if you didn't want to pay 1.25 for it, then don't. The market which you happen to be trading on might have some sort of obligation to give you a better deal than the deal you wanted, but nobody else does.
A key problem in the Fast and Furious case is that part way through there was clear evidence that a lot of firearms were getting to criminals who were using them to commit crimes and kill people. There was around 300 cases for 1600 lost weapons. At that point, the right thing to do would be to halt the program and try something new. Instead, they kept the program going for another six months until Brian Terry a border patrol agent died in a firefight in which two of these weapons were involved. That is accessory to murder right there.
At least that's what Republicans used to say when they want anyone to be able to buy a gun and people said they were going to Mexican drug cartels.
And how many people died so that you could be given this talking point?
You're an IT consultant on a team of IT consultants, due to cutbacks your team has dwindled to you and one other guy, and the company sold 40% of your networking hardware.
But the analogy is incomplete.
The company also knows that you've blown off a lot of work you had the resources to do. So why pay you to do anything when they already know that you have a pattern of not doing your work?
You're accusing Dave Voth, a former Marine, a man ATF named "outstanding law-enforcement employee of the year for dismantling two violent street gangs in Minneapolis", of being an accessory to the murder of a federal law enforcement officer.
Yes, I am with good cause. What I don't get is the indignation from you. We don't decide innocence or guilt based on whether someone was a former marine or possibly an outstanding law enforcement officer. We base it on what they have done. Here, it's time for an investigation of the ATF and specifically, Voth's contribution to murder and other crimes, not the bullshit we're getting where Voth and his associates get protected at the expense of justice.
According to two people present, the ATF presented detailed evidence, including the fact that their suspects had purchased almost 2,000 guns, and pushed for indictments.
I think it's worth noting at this point that is a different number. It tells us nothing about what happened to those weapons which the ATF supposedly was trying to keep out of circulation.
It just so happens that 2,000 guns is a number of guns that the ATF lost track of in Mexico, and which a large percent have already turned up at crime scenes in both Mexico and the US (which incidentally seems to be how these weapons are being recovered). If these numbers refer to the same weapons, then no effort of the ATF prevented those weapons from entering the hands of criminals. That in turn is a strong indication that no effort was made.
For that matter, the article is full of information about how many suspects had been purchasing how many guns by what dates.
It's not however full of information about how these weapons were used or who knew what when. For example, they take at face value that Voth was unaware of what was happening, basically, taking his word over a number of his employees who say differently.
the rates can't really go below zero
Sure, they could. Quantitative easing is just a moderately controlled way of doing that.
We used to show returns in the form of transistors, lasers, stuff like that. Many of these items didn't actually find a profitable use until decades after their discovery.
Well, give an example of such research first before you make such assertions. I'll warn you though, when you actually try that exercise, you'll find it's harder than it first looks. For example, transistors had immediate financially profitable application since they could replace a much larger vacuum tube triode. And they served as a stepping stone to the first integrated circuits which also had near immediate profitable applicaiton.
And lasers started life as masers which served both as a frequency standard and low noise amplifiers. As lasers, the biggest application, fiber optics cables were quickly developed. For example, the first lasers, according to Wikipedia were active around the late 50s and early 60s (with solid state lasers developed in 1962). The first fiber optics cables were developed in 1966. They were first tried in telephone lines in the field in 1977.
Sure, it's not next quarter thinking, but it happened pretty damn fast, just the same.
Not all R&D is expensive boondoggles, and who the $#%# said "public funds?"
Pay attention to the thread. The title was "Money well spent." That money was for publicly funded fusion projects, ITER and NIF which can reasonably be considered boondoggles as well due to their high costs.
Whilst I do question there motives, there dosen't actually appear to be any way for them to generate revenue on that page.
They don't need to. In their business, any publicity results in increased contributions.
One of those facts is that two thousand firearms were smuggled into Mexico as a result of the program. Read through the article, you will see no mention of the number of firearms smuggled under the program. Another is that as of June 2010, a large number of those weapons had already turned up at crime scenes. Yet the program continued for another six months.
Last June, about nine months into the ATF operation known as "Fast and Furious," suspects had "purchased 1,608 firearms for over $1 million in cash transactions at various Phoenix-area gun shops," according to internal documents obtained by CBS News. The documents indicate ATF already knew that 179 of those very weapons had turned up at crime scenes in Mexico, and 130 in the U.S.
Another fact they missed is that the firearms had neither a means for being tracked (a previous program had RFID chips planted in the firearms). And they never informed the Mexican authorities. So the claim
Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
sounds like bullshit to me. The evidence that came out in June 2010 pretty much indicates that these weapons were directly arming criminals in Mexico and the US. A fifth of their "walked guns" quickly showed up at crime scenes.
And it looks like I'm not alone.
Surveillance video in the interview shows straw purchasers leaving gun shops with boxes of weapons. Documents showed these guns were showing up at crime scenes in Mexico and ATF supervisors actually keeping track of this information. Agent Dodson and other senior agents confronted their supervisors over and over about this horrible operation.
Their answer? "If you're going to make an omlette, you've got to break some eggs."
Ms. Eban tries to downplay an email, now known as the "schism" email, sent by Mr. Voth to the team. While many say the email was about gunwalking Ms. Eban insists it was about everything but that. I'd like Mr. Voth to explain these parts (emphasis mine):
"Whether you care or not people of rank and authority at HQ are paying close attention to this case and they also believe we [Phoenix Group VII] are doing what they envisioned the Southwest Border Groups doing."
"We need to resolve our issues at this meeting. I will be damned if this case is going to suffer due to petty arguing, rumors, or other adolescent behavior."
"I don't know what all the issues are but we are all adults, we are all professionals, and we have a (sp) exciting opportunity to use the biggest tool in our law enforcement tool box. If you don't think this is fun you're in the wrong line of work -- period!"
Mr. Voth also needs to explain why they let go of their top suspect when they had him in custody. This is the man who purchased the guns found at Agent Terry's death scene. The guns that have been recovered have been ones found at crime scenes. 1,400 guns are still missing. Mr. Voth and the ATF never made an effort to interdict the weapons. None. The t
Let us not forget that the cause is "get money for PETA".
And it didn't help that a Republican-controlled Congress cut their funding to the point where the DoJ was damned near useless.
Even with funding, the DoJ would be pretty useless. I'll just trot out the current Republican talking points about Fast and Furious since they'll illustrate a good reason why the Republicans wouldn't be inclined to fund the Department of Justice.
Here, you have a pretty much cut and dry case. ATF agents allowed roughly two thousand fairly high quality guns to pass to Mexican drug cartels with no attempt made to track those weapons. Since those weapons have turned up at many crime scenes, including the murder of a US border agent (which is what finally shut down Fast and Furious). Further, the ATF agents involved knew for a few months before that final murder that these weapons were turning up at crime scenes, including murders. So a prosecutor has a pretty good case that someone committed a bunch of acts of accessory to murder (with reckless disregard for human life) and other crimes, plus the murder of a federal law enforcement officer. So what is the Department of Justice doing with this case? Hiding the agents involved in Washington DC. When will they investigate this?
This is why the "more funding" argument doesn't work. If the Department of Justice isn't going to do its job, then it doesn't really matter how much they're paid so might as well make it a little rather than a lot. The SEC is particularly notorious for providing the illusion of security for novice investors, or in other words, helping keep the marks from getting scared off before they can be fleeced.
The reason it is `considerably cheaper' is simply due to the fact Boeing couldn't milk the teet any longer while stretching the time line out.
Ever thought about why Boeing couldn't "milk the teat" any longer? I don't think it's a coincidence that Boeing got out of the space launch business when SpaceX announced it was getting in. In economics, it goes by the simple label of "competition".
That's what private enterprise and competition brings to this activity. One ca no longer "milk the teat" forever.
> Implying the DoD has any control over the FBI or IRS
All that is needed is a common entity controlling the three organizations, say like the President of the US and his staff.
What I don't like is the fact that space is becoming increasingly privatised.
Well, why shouldn't it be? Most endeavors in the US are handled privately.
Then Musk came along and said, "Hey, I've got rich from founding the world's worst consumer bank, how about I give you the first few hits for free?" and hired a few experienced people.
Libertarians rode the back of this and shouted about how much better it would be to privatise space. But in fact we're just right (*) here again, with SpaceX substituted for Boeing.
And a considerably cheaper launch vehicle compared to the Delta IV (which Boeing put in the United Launch Alliance rather than continue to fly it themselves). I can't argue with results.
Basically a government fixed-price request is a very vague description of an idea. The fixed-price bid is a very vague description of a project and associated budget. Whether or not the budget then balloons to eclipse the specified price is irrelevant to the bureaucracy on either side.
The more profit the private side gets, then the more money for bureaucracies on either side either directly through profit or indirectly through bribes and the revolving door. Such things are illegal only if you get caught. This is a built in incentive to balloon costs of projects.
Ever wonder why Congress keeps coming up with cost plus schemes for funding big rockets which use ATK solid rocket motors? Because ATK knows which bureaucracies to bribe.
You're obviously stuck back in the mid 20th Century when every research project didn't have to show immediate quarterly payback. We don't do that anymore. It's not "efficient".
Well what sort of "return" has been shown? Looks like we have a rather expensive fusion bomb simulator and not much else. I really tire of people who just don't get that any expenditure of public funds should be accountable. If you don't like the accountability issue, then find another way to fund the research. Don't just belittle it as short sighted thinking, especially, when ignoring accountability is the real short-sighted thinking here.
The problem is you can't just build a big one - there's a lot of design and engineering and theory that needs to be developed to figure out what exactly we'd want to build, and whether that thing is likely to work (Polywell's have their own set of loss processes and competing issues which need to be balanced).
Indeed. I just wanted to point out that there's more than the top (by level of funding) two approaches.
Ordinary matter is full for all practical purposes. You're thinking of technical purposes.
As was the original poster. For practical rather than technical purposes, space is filled with all sorts of interest stuff (energy, matter, and of course, space) that we can make into even more interesting stuff.
It's also worth noting that the Z-Machine apparently does ICF for lower cost than the NIC.
There are two proposed approaches
There are at least three. The "Polywell" (which uses a form of inertial electrostatic confinement fusion) is yet another approach.
There's also some ways to generate extremely inefficient table top fusion (eg, the Farnsworth fusor). Some day we might figure out how to make those efficient enough to generate power.
Thanks to the NIF we now know exactly what ICF is and isn't capable of. I'd call that an excellent return on investment.
Nonsense. ROI only makes sense if you consider both the investment and the return. Some vague, fluffy statement that we "know" what ICF can do, isn't a return. And you just blissfully ignored that at least $7 billion dollars was spent so you could blather about ROI on the internet.
The law courts are government. Just because they're a relatively independent branch of government (who pays for their staff and infrastructure? who appoints the committee which appoints judges?) doesn't mean that one has removed the government from the process.
What does Xerox Parc (company funded), the european autodidact scientific pioneers of old (self funded or funded by weathy patrons) and NASA (government funded) have in common? They are environments that let smart people "play" with few constraints.
And it's interesting that none of those environments have that now, much less have it in common. And NASA, the only government agency on that list, never really did have that environment.
If you were the father of this child, I'd say this could very easily insight terrible actions of violence.
That's what the law is for. To punish you when you do "terrible things" which happen to be against the law. It's worth noting here that no one had to be offended. It wasn't directed to the victim's family, that is, not harassment.
Freedom to get one's point across is one thing. Freedom to hurt another while doing so (or while not even conveying anything meaningful) is another.
You generally can't allow one without the other.
Or just for science the International Space Station. Every four years or so, they burn the equivalent of a NIF.