That college students are unable to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy court wasn't an accident of "poorly intended educational policy", but a deliberate request by Wall Street to Congress screw over society's future investments in young people.
No, I strongly disagree. Sure, Wall Street got what it wanted out of this, but that's because they're way better at this game than the affordable education people. Basically, some not very bright people wanted education for everyone, and we ended up with this mess.
If the government had any business sense whatsoever, it would banish the predatory banks from the student loan market and make past student loans eligible for refinancing at lower interest rates.
Oh, yes. Instead, the US government created that situation. It's worth noting here that the language of the poster I originally replied to, ("since an education is an investment in the future") was used to justify (mostly sincerely I think) the subsidy of student loans (and subsequent inflation of educational costs). Then the less responsible or relatively unlucky students started going through bankruptcy court and suddenly this huge program was exposed as the massive liability it was.
Elevating US student loans to their current state of being near impossible to discharge or refinance in bankruptcy is folly, but one that naturally follows from the original uncritical assertion that an education is an investment. Another remarkable folly is how those loans have driven up the cost of education substantially more than the rate of inflation. Should we be surprised in this situation that there are banks who wish to milk? Wall street lobbyists?
There's always been greed. There's long been elites profiting from opportunities in a society. Even banks have been around for a while. We shouldn't be surprised when we create enormous opportunities for profit via poorly intended educational policy, that a vast industry of exploitation springs up around it. It is better to just not create the situation in the first place.
Private student loans have higher interest rates than federal student loans because the banks want to milk their borrowers for every dime that they can legally get.
No, it's because the federal government has the business sense of a lump of clay.
Student loans should be cheaper than housing loans since an education is an investment in the future.
Investments are intended to have a positive return. Allowing someone to borrow money so they can party for a few years isn't an investment in the future.
Most scientists are in fields where there is little, if any, net reward for unethical work. When you look at fields where there are such rewards, like climatology, economics, or pharmaceuticals, then the behavior changes.
The problem here is that with continuous voting you get continuous decisions which can fail badly when the decision is discrete.
For example, if a irreversible change requires 75% of the vote, then someone might be able to lock that in with a manufactured crisis and a highly popular impassioned plea. Even if enough people change their mind the next morning, it's still a done deal.
Or voting on the distribution of funds in a public pension may fluctuate around an important voting threshold. So when the vote is above the threshold, the fund managers have to invest one, and when it is below the threshold they have to invest a different way. It may even be worth the fund managers' while to encourage this state, say if they get fees for any sales of fund assets they generate.
So continuous decisions work best when the choice is similarly continuous. I don't see a lot of opportunity for that at the government level.
Well, there's math. It doesn't inherently explain anything. But if you can match up the preconditions of some bit of math with reality then the consequences follow.
If you object so strongly to a rectal probe that you call it "rape", I don't understand why you won't allow imaging methods where nobody touches you.
I'm going out on a limb here, but maybe anal penetration isn't the only reason to object to intrusive and privacy destroying tyranny. There could be other downsides too./sarc
To some extent. But I recall you asked what corporations created the internet as opposed to what taxpayers did. If we go that route as our determination for "creation", we'll find that every corporation which ever paid taxes in the period of time in question helped create the internet.
Remind me again what corporations created the Internet and the world wide web.
Glancing through the Wikipedia discussion of ARPANET, I see MIT, RAND Corporation, BBN Technologies, System Development Corporation, UC at Berkeley, Honeywell, Stanford Research Institute International, UC Santa Barbara, University of Utah, DEC, and Scientific Data Systems.
After the commercialization of the internet and the advent of the world wide web, almost every active business and non profit corporation has been a contributor in various ways through buying bandwidth, providing services or information online, or more substantially through providing important infrastructure or inventing new uses, etc.
Where is the "opposition" here? Trump has yet to win a single primary and from what I hear current polling has him doing poorly in the first few primary states.
Further, the no fly list is not a new thing. This sort of thing has been going on for years.
I don't buy your argument in the least. I think this is just a transparent attempt to whine about Trump.
In my opinion such a landing add an unnecessary complexity. The Shuttle program showed that it is impractical.
I think it is just one more attempt to do it differently, not with a parachute, not as it was done originally in 1957 and 1961. Kind of its own, an US way..
So how would the Shuttle show that a different way is impractical? Isn't part of the point of the SpaceX approach being different so that they aren't repeating the economic failure of the Space Shuttle?
The purpose seems to be to save several million dollars per launch. We'll see if they can do that in the long run, but if they can, then that sounds practical to me even with the extra complexity of the system.
This year there were something like 378 terrorist plots in France, of which 377 were successfully detected and disrupted.
Sure, there were. Since there were at least two success terrorist plots which weren't disrupted (remember the Charlie Hebdo shooting) and a third attempt which failed only because there happened to be right there combat-trained people willing to stop it. So right there, we know there were three terrorist plots which weren't detected and disrupted by the security apparatus this year.
Let me give an important example of how economies of scale are being ignored. A few years back, a slashdotter, spoke of the evolution of Mars rover exploration.
[tlhIngan:] It's a step in the evolution of exploration on Mars.
First was Sojourner, which was just shoebox sized - all it had to do was land and explore a bit to ensure things actually worked.
Then came Spirit and Opportunity - which are much bigger rovers - think washing-macine or so sized. Again its purpose was to explore Mars and prove that things could work.
Curiouslity is the largest of the lot (think SUV), and the old landing system wouldn't work anymore, but with all the science and knowledge gained from Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, NASA's reasonably confident that it'll be more successful than if we just sent Curiousity to begin with.
Again, just a small stepping stone, but enough has been learned from Mars that something like Curiousity and its complexities could be built and have a reasonable chance of success. It still needs to be tested thoroughly (its mission will be far longer than 90 days), but we know what to expect now.
It sounds straightforward, NASA develops three generations of vehicles and conducts four successful missions on Mars. One thing that is ignored here that those four missions span a period of 14 years. NASA was doing a lot of rover vehicle development, but not a lot of exploring. Later down the thread, I made this observation in response to a different poster:
[JamesP:] Of course, that's why they're testing Curiosity to death. No one wants to see it fail. But there's so much you can do with an existing vehicle. Maybe they could launch 8 MERs with different instruments, but it's probably more work than it's worth. Less risky, sure, but maybe not so scientifically groundbreaking.
[khallow:] I see that you completely miss the point. Existing vehicles need less testing. So sure, there's less you need to do with them! As to scientific output, I think observing eight locations on Mars at the same time would be more valuable scientifically than somewhat more study of one location. At this point, you aren't going to improve significantly the science from one location until you have sample return missions.
We also ignore that the MER missions could have happened years ago. Once you landed the two rovers and drove them for a little bit, that was enough data to launch the next group.
Looking at the timeline, they launched the MERs in June and July 2003. Then the rovers landed on Mars in January 2004. They could have made whatever changes were necessary to launch the next wave of MERs in 2004 and early 2005 and have them on Mars by 2006, six years ahead of MSL. So not only do we sacrifice reliability, coverage of the Martian surface, and scientific output, we also take a considerable hit due to the long pipeline for developing new missions.
Now, MSL may be a stepping stone to a sample return mission which I think should be a priority for NASA. It's a good weight for a first time sample return mission. But I don't believe NASA knows or cares about the loss of scientific output that comes from its emphasis on technology development over science and exploration.
Now let's look at what actually happened. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), Curiosity arrived on Mars in 2012 for a cost of $2.5 billion (which would be more than enough for 8 Mars Exploration Rovers, including launch). If we had launched two MERs every launch window (every two years) after Spirit and Opportunity had landed, we could have all eight additional rovers on Mars by the time Curiosity landed on Mars. And instead of having explored 4 locations over this period of time since Sojourner, we could have explored up to 11 locations.
Any individual vehicle wouldn't have the capability of an MSL, but you would
Yes the pictures are pretty, but they do not diminish the value of the scientific data acquired. It may not be relevant to you but you do not get to speak for 'us'.
Very well. What is this relevance of which you speak? In my next part, I'll explain why I think this is a hobby.
Its a bit more than a hobby, but I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise.
If it's more than a hobby, then why do we almost never see anyone exploit economies of scale? For example, the Europa mission that was recently partly funded by US Congress, could be deployed to hundreds of similar targets to Europa (eg, Ceres, other Jovian moons, Enceladus and some of the other small moons of Saturn, Jovian Trojan asteroids). Once they build and launch the first one, they'll have both coughed up most of the development costs of any new probes of the same design to other bodies, and have an active test platform with which to improve the design for future missions. It also reduces the risk of loss of spacecraft because one can repurpose a mission to a lower priority target to try again at a higher value target for which an existing spacecraft failed.
Instead, one of the dirty secrets of planetary science (and many other scientific fields in a similar situation) is that most of the money is spent on dead end technology development (rarely reused, because the next mission is another one-off mission) not on actual acquisition of science. In turn, the actual science is a remarkably plodding affair which can consume most of a would-be scientist's life with waiting for the next mission to execute. The whole thing is enormously wasteful of peoples' lives and public funds.
This is why I term this a hobby instead of science. It is also a solid demonstration that we don't actually value planetary science that much. We could buy a lot more science than we do. I believe this blithe ignorance of simple means to get more bang for the buck (and more research out of the planetary scientist) is solid evidence of the near complete absence of relevance and value of almost all space science to us on Earth.
Literally, when I see it's you posting, I ignore it. Sorry I didn't check before answering this time. You're the worst persistent troll on/. You malignantly anddeliberately engage in pretending to be genuinely confused and pretending to genuinely misunderstand the conversation just to antagonize your opponent in a debate. You're a broken person and I will not spend any time in conversation with you.
That's too bad. I don't believe you gave my arguments and discourse the same courtesy I gave yours.
No - I do not. And that's a mighty fine false dichotomy you make there. If thes fine places paid at some determined level that would enable them to live on their own, it wouldn't cause much harm at all to The company. Yes, prices would go up some, but if you believe Government is inefficient, it would be a net gain.
And if you believed that employing people was better than letting them starve, then you'd also end up in this same place.
Tl;DR. We've heard this all before. From Trickle down to job creators. You need a new line, the old ones are old.
There has to be a reason to change my opinion first. Throwing away parts of the economy and punishing employers has been a thing since well before Reagan. And how has the developed world benefited from the half century of this little exercise?
Running science experiments on Mars provides us with scientific data which is relevant to people on Earth, regardless of anyone living on Mars.
That's irrelevant boilerplate. Sure, this scientific data and the pretty pictures generate page views for NASA and sell coffee table books, but sorry, they aren't relevant to us.
Obviously you are not a scientist.
Obviously, I'm not someone with a stake in the next hobby project being sent to Mars.
And wouldn't it be nice if McDonald's and Walmart payed their employees enough so they didn't have to go with section 8 housing and food stamps?
Those companies have actually - in the name of capitalism, enabled the rest of us, in an exact socialist manner, to pay their employees living expenses. Seriously, what the hell?
You do realize that we would rather McDonald's and Walmart employ their employees at current wages than not at all. Sure, the public benefits given to employees of these companies is often, erroneously termed a subsidy for the employer. But so what if it were. Isn't the whole point of subsidies to encourage behavior we want?
We've gotten so far out of kilter with this sort of thing, where trying to enact a living wage is somehow considered socialism
What makes you think it isn't? The welfare state is a common implementation of socialism.
and demanding that the Government make up for wages the corporation doesn't want to pay is considered Capitalism
I don't have this particular bit of hypocrisy.
Wouldn't you agree that it would make more sense for a person to be able to pay their own bills instead of having the convoluted business of dealing with the government for them?
You have yet to mention a policy that helps here. Minimum wage is notorious, for example, for throwing into unemployment the very people it's supposed to help.
But in that case, why worry about whether a hypothetical colony is going to be independent or not, when we agree it isn't going to happen for the foreseeable future?
Page views. It's sexier to talk about just about anything on Mars than say, trying it out in an internet game for orders of magnitude less.
Look at all the challenges and obstacles you just blithely handwave away with non-existent technology. 3D printing has failed to demonstrate even a shred of the hype around it.
I suppose that's one way to describe. But it's also answering simple problems with simple solutions. As to the 3-D printer, we could do most of the same stuff with a simple machine shop.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like no H2S is involved. The smell comes from the odorant they stick in to natural gas so you know it's leaking.
That college students are unable to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy court wasn't an accident of "poorly intended educational policy", but a deliberate request by Wall Street to Congress screw over society's future investments in young people.
No, I strongly disagree. Sure, Wall Street got what it wanted out of this, but that's because they're way better at this game than the affordable education people. Basically, some not very bright people wanted education for everyone, and we ended up with this mess.
If the government had any business sense whatsoever, it would banish the predatory banks from the student loan market and make past student loans eligible for refinancing at lower interest rates.
Oh, yes. Instead, the US government created that situation. It's worth noting here that the language of the poster I originally replied to, ("since an education is an investment in the future") was used to justify (mostly sincerely I think) the subsidy of student loans (and subsequent inflation of educational costs). Then the less responsible or relatively unlucky students started going through bankruptcy court and suddenly this huge program was exposed as the massive liability it was.
Elevating US student loans to their current state of being near impossible to discharge or refinance in bankruptcy is folly, but one that naturally follows from the original uncritical assertion that an education is an investment. Another remarkable folly is how those loans have driven up the cost of education substantially more than the rate of inflation. Should we be surprised in this situation that there are banks who wish to milk? Wall street lobbyists?
There's always been greed. There's long been elites profiting from opportunities in a society. Even banks have been around for a while. We shouldn't be surprised when we create enormous opportunities for profit via poorly intended educational policy, that a vast industry of exploitation springs up around it. It is better to just not create the situation in the first place.
Private student loans have higher interest rates than federal student loans because the banks want to milk their borrowers for every dime that they can legally get.
No, it's because the federal government has the business sense of a lump of clay.
Student loans should be cheaper than housing loans since an education is an investment in the future.
Investments are intended to have a positive return. Allowing someone to borrow money so they can party for a few years isn't an investment in the future.
Most scientists are in fields where there is little, if any, net reward for unethical work. When you look at fields where there are such rewards, like climatology, economics, or pharmaceuticals, then the behavior changes.
The problem here is that with continuous voting you get continuous decisions which can fail badly when the decision is discrete.
For example, if a irreversible change requires 75% of the vote, then someone might be able to lock that in with a manufactured crisis and a highly popular impassioned plea. Even if enough people change their mind the next morning, it's still a done deal.
Or voting on the distribution of funds in a public pension may fluctuate around an important voting threshold. So when the vote is above the threshold, the fund managers have to invest one, and when it is below the threshold they have to invest a different way. It may even be worth the fund managers' while to encourage this state, say if they get fees for any sales of fund assets they generate.
So continuous decisions work best when the choice is similarly continuous. I don't see a lot of opportunity for that at the government level.
Well, there's math. It doesn't inherently explain anything. But if you can match up the preconditions of some bit of math with reality then the consequences follow.
If you object so strongly to a rectal probe that you call it "rape", I don't understand why you won't allow imaging methods where nobody touches you.
I'm going out on a limb here, but maybe anal penetration isn't the only reason to object to intrusive and privacy destroying tyranny. There could be other downsides too. /sarc
I don't know about the original AC's ideas, but we have a court system for this.
To some extent. But I recall you asked what corporations created the internet as opposed to what taxpayers did. If we go that route as our determination for "creation", we'll find that every corporation which ever paid taxes in the period of time in question helped create the internet.
Remind me again what corporations created the Internet and the world wide web.
Glancing through the Wikipedia discussion of ARPANET, I see MIT, RAND Corporation, BBN Technologies, System Development Corporation, UC at Berkeley, Honeywell, Stanford Research Institute International, UC Santa Barbara, University of Utah, DEC, and Scientific Data Systems.
After the commercialization of the internet and the advent of the world wide web, almost every active business and non profit corporation has been a contributor in various ways through buying bandwidth, providing services or information online, or more substantially through providing important infrastructure or inventing new uses, etc.
Where is the "opposition" here? Trump has yet to win a single primary and from what I hear current polling has him doing poorly in the first few primary states.
Further, the no fly list is not a new thing. This sort of thing has been going on for years.
I don't buy your argument in the least. I think this is just a transparent attempt to whine about Trump.
A week or so ago a nutbag running for president decides to promote a fascist border control policy.
Unless Trump has a time machine and is enforcing said border policy from some point in the future as US president, then this is completely irrelevant.
In my opinion such a landing add an unnecessary complexity. The Shuttle program showed that it is impractical.
.
I think it is just one more attempt to do it differently, not with a parachute, not as it was done originally in 1957 and 1961. Kind of its own, an US way.
So how would the Shuttle show that a different way is impractical? Isn't part of the point of the SpaceX approach being different so that they aren't repeating the economic failure of the Space Shuttle?
The purpose seems to be to save several million dollars per launch. We'll see if they can do that in the long run, but if they can, then that sounds practical to me even with the extra complexity of the system.
One more step closer to running away from our problems.
This can be an effective solution when the former group that you were part of didn't have an interest in solving those problems.
This year there were something like 378 terrorist plots in France, of which 377 were successfully detected and disrupted.
Sure, there were. Since there were at least two success terrorist plots which weren't disrupted (remember the Charlie Hebdo shooting) and a third attempt which failed only because there happened to be right there combat-trained people willing to stop it. So right there, we know there were three terrorist plots which weren't detected and disrupted by the security apparatus this year.
[tlhIngan:] It's a step in the evolution of exploration on Mars.
First was Sojourner, which was just shoebox sized - all it had to do was land and explore a bit to ensure things actually worked.
Then came Spirit and Opportunity - which are much bigger rovers - think washing-macine or so sized. Again its purpose was to explore Mars and prove that things could work.
Curiouslity is the largest of the lot (think SUV), and the old landing system wouldn't work anymore, but with all the science and knowledge gained from Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, NASA's reasonably confident that it'll be more successful than if we just sent Curiousity to begin with.
Again, just a small stepping stone, but enough has been learned from Mars that something like Curiousity and its complexities could be built and have a reasonable chance of success. It still needs to be tested thoroughly (its mission will be far longer than 90 days), but we know what to expect now.
It sounds straightforward, NASA develops three generations of vehicles and conducts four successful missions on Mars. One thing that is ignored here that those four missions span a period of 14 years. NASA was doing a lot of rover vehicle development, but not a lot of exploring. Later down the thread, I made this observation in response to a different poster:
[JamesP:] Of course, that's why they're testing Curiosity to death. No one wants to see it fail. But there's so much you can do with an existing vehicle. Maybe they could launch 8 MERs with different instruments, but it's probably more work than it's worth. Less risky, sure, but maybe not so scientifically groundbreaking.
[khallow:] I see that you completely miss the point. Existing vehicles need less testing. So sure, there's less you need to do with them! As to scientific output, I think observing eight locations on Mars at the same time would be more valuable scientifically than somewhat more study of one location. At this point, you aren't going to improve significantly the science from one location until you have sample return missions.
We also ignore that the MER missions could have happened years ago. Once you landed the two rovers and drove them for a little bit, that was enough data to launch the next group.
Looking at the timeline, they launched the MERs in June and July 2003. Then the rovers landed on Mars in January 2004. They could have made whatever changes were necessary to launch the next wave of MERs in 2004 and early 2005 and have them on Mars by 2006, six years ahead of MSL. So not only do we sacrifice reliability, coverage of the Martian surface, and scientific output, we also take a considerable hit due to the long pipeline for developing new missions.
Now, MSL may be a stepping stone to a sample return mission which I think should be a priority for NASA. It's a good weight for a first time sample return mission. But I don't believe NASA knows or cares about the loss of scientific output that comes from its emphasis on technology development over science and exploration.
Now let's look at what actually happened. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), Curiosity arrived on Mars in 2012 for a cost of $2.5 billion (which would be more than enough for 8 Mars Exploration Rovers, including launch). If we had launched two MERs every launch window (every two years) after Spirit and Opportunity had landed, we could have all eight additional rovers on Mars by the time Curiosity landed on Mars. And instead of having explored 4 locations over this period of time since Sojourner, we could have explored up to 11 locations.
Any individual vehicle wouldn't have the capability of an MSL, but you would
Morality is fine as long as it helps make the world a better place. When it doesn't as in this case, then it needs to be fixed.
Yes the pictures are pretty, but they do not diminish the value of the scientific data acquired. It may not be relevant to you but you do not get to speak for 'us'.
Very well. What is this relevance of which you speak? In my next part, I'll explain why I think this is a hobby.
Its a bit more than a hobby, but I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise.
If it's more than a hobby, then why do we almost never see anyone exploit economies of scale? For example, the Europa mission that was recently partly funded by US Congress, could be deployed to hundreds of similar targets to Europa (eg, Ceres, other Jovian moons, Enceladus and some of the other small moons of Saturn, Jovian Trojan asteroids). Once they build and launch the first one, they'll have both coughed up most of the development costs of any new probes of the same design to other bodies, and have an active test platform with which to improve the design for future missions. It also reduces the risk of loss of spacecraft because one can repurpose a mission to a lower priority target to try again at a higher value target for which an existing spacecraft failed.
Instead, one of the dirty secrets of planetary science (and many other scientific fields in a similar situation) is that most of the money is spent on dead end technology development (rarely reused, because the next mission is another one-off mission) not on actual acquisition of science. In turn, the actual science is a remarkably plodding affair which can consume most of a would-be scientist's life with waiting for the next mission to execute. The whole thing is enormously wasteful of peoples' lives and public funds.
This is why I term this a hobby instead of science. It is also a solid demonstration that we don't actually value planetary science that much. We could buy a lot more science than we do. I believe this blithe ignorance of simple means to get more bang for the buck (and more research out of the planetary scientist) is solid evidence of the near complete absence of relevance and value of almost all space science to us on Earth.
Literally, when I see it's you posting, I ignore it. Sorry I didn't check before answering this time. You're the worst persistent troll on /. You malignantly anddeliberately engage in pretending to be genuinely confused and pretending to genuinely misunderstand the conversation just to antagonize your opponent in a debate. You're a broken person and I will not spend any time in conversation with you.
That's too bad. I don't believe you gave my arguments and discourse the same courtesy I gave yours.
No - I do not. And that's a mighty fine false dichotomy you make there. If thes fine places paid at some determined level that would enable them to live on their own, it wouldn't cause much harm at all to The company. Yes, prices would go up some, but if you believe Government is inefficient, it would be a net gain.
And if you believed that employing people was better than letting them starve, then you'd also end up in this same place.
Tl;DR. We've heard this all before. From Trickle down to job creators. You need a new line, the old ones are old.
There has to be a reason to change my opinion first. Throwing away parts of the economy and punishing employers has been a thing since well before Reagan. And how has the developed world benefited from the half century of this little exercise?
Running science experiments on Mars provides us with scientific data which is relevant to people on Earth, regardless of anyone living on Mars.
That's irrelevant boilerplate. Sure, this scientific data and the pretty pictures generate page views for NASA and sell coffee table books, but sorry, they aren't relevant to us.
Obviously you are not a scientist.
Obviously, I'm not someone with a stake in the next hobby project being sent to Mars.
And wouldn't it be nice if McDonald's and Walmart payed their employees enough so they didn't have to go with section 8 housing and food stamps?
Those companies have actually - in the name of capitalism, enabled the rest of us, in an exact socialist manner, to pay their employees living expenses. Seriously, what the hell?
You do realize that we would rather McDonald's and Walmart employ their employees at current wages than not at all. Sure, the public benefits given to employees of these companies is often, erroneously termed a subsidy for the employer. But so what if it were. Isn't the whole point of subsidies to encourage behavior we want?
We've gotten so far out of kilter with this sort of thing, where trying to enact a living wage is somehow considered socialism
What makes you think it isn't? The welfare state is a common implementation of socialism.
and demanding that the Government make up for wages the corporation doesn't want to pay is considered Capitalism
I don't have this particular bit of hypocrisy.
Wouldn't you agree that it would make more sense for a person to be able to pay their own bills instead of having the convoluted business of dealing with the government for them?
You have yet to mention a policy that helps here. Minimum wage is notorious, for example, for throwing into unemployment the very people it's supposed to help.
But in that case, why worry about whether a hypothetical colony is going to be independent or not, when we agree it isn't going to happen for the foreseeable future?
Page views. It's sexier to talk about just about anything on Mars than say, trying it out in an internet game for orders of magnitude less.
Look at all the challenges and obstacles you just blithely handwave away with non-existent technology. 3D printing has failed to demonstrate even a shred of the hype around it.
I suppose that's one way to describe. But it's also answering simple problems with simple solutions. As to the 3-D printer, we could do most of the same stuff with a simple machine shop.