The example I keep seeing used is self-driving vehicles, particularly trucks.
And the example that keeps getting ignored is farming. If out of work farmers and their descendants couldn't get new work, then we'd be around 80-90% unemployment.
Tech changes that just do existing work with less human labour do not expand wealth. The automated trucks drivers, administrative assistants, warehouse pickers, burger flippers, etc, etc, that are coming down the pipe do not increase demand - if anything, they decrease it, by reducing the amount of wages entering the economy.
Nonsense. The ex-truck drivers just do something else. Now, you have the wealth generated by the automated truck drivers and by the labor of the ex truck drivers. This is not only an expansion of wealth, it is an expansion of the rate of increase of wealth.
Sounds like Russell never heard of Jevons paradox. When you increase the efficiency of using or consuming a resource like labor, you increase the demand for that resource.
And Russell never thought about the overhead of employing people (for example, training costs). It is not sensible to employ two people to do the work of one person.
Finally, what happens to the unemployed half? They find new work that exists merely because there were people available to do it.
You mean the ones ending their nuclear power without an exit plan? Or who got their citizens to subsidize electricity for German industry in the name of green energy? Their reputation for rationality may be warranted, but I'm not seeing it myself.
Some observations. First, you've done absolutely nothing in your latest post to further your argument. But let's look at the viable parts in more detail.
I have a full fledged allergy to techno-determinism, and Slashdot being home for many many, many techno-determinists is causing my brain to sneaze, over and over again. Techno-determinism, which is a specific form of nonsense, truly challenges my brain, so much so that it may lead to involuntary brain farts.
But you obviously don't have an aversion to cargo cults. To paraphrase, we build a giant, eyepoppingly expensive obelisk that flies and jerbs fall out of the sky like manna. This is deep in tiger repellent rock territory as I already noted. You already said that
If we would allow ourselves to dream, to launch gigantic programs, for no reason other than that we can, I would be the first in line, but name me one concrete specific thing like a moonbase or such and I quickly find myself asking what is the point.
Which is a viewpoint so opposed to rational thought that I'm not surprised you have since abandoned the latter.
The price one pays to master a statistical grasp of the world, necessarily involves a break down in categorical thinking.
You keep believing that. It's simply a deeper level of thought and rationality.
As to point 3, it appears to be a philosophical analogue to mad cow disease with pointless diversions about language, poets, modern logician and ancient philosophers. Not interested unless you can some day make it relevant.
But you can't always kill more butterflies and try again. One butterfly made the difference. Which butterfly that was is irrelevant, but one cannot discern which butterfly was the one to make a difference. That's why you don't kill butterflies.
Let us note, you first assumed that the Apollo "butterfly" made things better. I've already enumerated most of my problems with that assertion, including my doubt that it actually helped. Diverting the efforts of hundreds of thousands of your best and brightest just to make a few very large rockets and land a few people on the Moon while vastly overpaying for the activity is not what I consider conducive to progress.
Now, because of the unsustainability of Apollo, we haven't done anything like it since. We still have people obsessed about giant pointless acts of status signalling (the Space Launch System being the latest NASA-related example). We have growing numbers of people convinced that the Moon landings were faked (because why would the US do something and then not only stop doing it, but utterly fail to show the capacity to do it). We have little to show for it except vague and empty talk about how things would have been worse if we hadn't done it.
Meanwhile we have massive evidence that technological advancement happened before, during, and after Apollo which was unrelated to Apollo.
I never questioned that even once.
The point is that this massive ongoing development, which had nothing to do with NASA, is the basis for my technodeterminism argument. When you have a vast sector of the US economy devoted to developing new technologies, then it is insulting to that legacy to divert responsibility to a minor perturbation from NASA spending.
I hear the rustling of leaves, where the salience of what was said just rushed past your ears, unheard. Not a difference which makes a difference, hence same difference, ie. indifference on your part. That's ok. It just makes me sad.
Comfort yourself with the delusion that I would disagree with you even if you had bothered to put forth a well reasoned and thought out argument. Just think of all the time you saved!
It might well be that global warming changed the situation from one where mismanagement was not disastrous to one where it was.
I think a compelling rebuttal is the rapid loss of control by the central government. The Syrian war went from one man setting himself on fire in Tunisia (on December 18, 2010, the triggering event for the Arab Spring) to loss of control over most of the country inside of a year. If this was due to climate change making things slightly worse and barely tipping Syria into an unstable civil war, then the decline would have been much more gradual.
Developed world countries routinely have huge protests, but those don't quickly devolve into civil wars. Developed world countries routinely have droughts and other extreme weather. Again, that doesn't quickly devolve into civil war.
Misattributing non-climate factors to global warming is a common bit of dishonest propaganda that one sees again and again in this area.
What gets ignored here is that we can't magically reset climate to 1850. There is tremendous cost involved.with global warming mitigation. It makes no sense to assume the ambitious cutbacks of tomorrow will be low cost when current efforts are remarkably costly and counterproductive.
And we ignore that global warming mitigation also makes the worst problems we face, like overpopulation and poverty worse. Those in turn by a variety of means worsen the factors that made man-made global warming such a problem in the first place directly or by aggravating effects (such as habitat destruction making species extinction from global warming worse).
I think you should demonstrate that these proposed solutions will make things better rather than merely assume that they will.
We don't need to go any further. The cost of your home is dependent on the price of the land. The cost of everything you purchase locally is dependent to some degree on the price of the land, including most of the things you mentioned.
So you have this vague feeling I might be wrong somewhere.
Could you name me a computer industry?
In addition to dividing by country, you can divide by business or brand, by technological approach, by function or purpose, etc. Building IBM mainframes is a computer industry as is building hobby kit PC or memory cards in Taiwan. Just because you choose not to delineate further, doesn't mean I can't do so.
My point is actually rather simple: the technological advances that did occur in the wake of Apollo program, would not have happened without the Apollo project.
Which is just wrong. My point in this is that while there may have been some relatively novel ideas from the Apollo project, they aren't so novel that we wouldn't have thought of them otherwise. Computer and related industries are definitely not those relatively novel ideas. The computer industry had started the Moore's Law doubling before Apollo would become a factor. There was already massive innovation and technology development.
How can I know that?
You don't know anything here. You're wasting both our time with empty assertions. I at least can point to massive non-NASA related technology development happening before, during, and after NASA did its little thing. You're stuck with the NASA taint argument that a little funding from NASA mixed in with large amounts of funding from elsewhere was necessary to develop technologies.
butterflies
You can always kill more butterflies and change it again. But if we're trying to control a chaotic system rather than merely make random changes in it, the approach of Japan during the 50s to 70s was more effective than the approach of the US for the same time period.
And let's face it. NASA is a huge expense for a butterfly. Once again, we're stuck with the problem of large cost for small benefit.
But the inspiration and mass mobilization of millions of people, and the tremendous sums of money which flooded R&D in countless technologies occasioned a metric shitload of technological advancement which you and I are using right now to communicate with one another.
Again, no evidence for your assertion. Meanwhile we have massive evidence that technological advancement happened before, during, and after Apollo which was unrelated to Apollo.
A more nuanced understanding of causation understands that had I not slept with her(Mary), Tommy (you know the 6 year old red head) wouldn't be, I might have had a kid with Jill, but it could not have been Tommy.
But you would have a kid either way. And if we look at 300 million people rather than one person, we're still going to see people with the same distributions of personality and other features. They'll still have the same problems. They'll still come up with the sorts of fixes.
But yeah, you might just come back with "So what? same difference"
Oh, what sort of consensus (hint: climate change propaganda) could we be thinking of here with this peculiar number? This may well be an "equal" debate, if the 97% wasn't actually 97%.
How do we deal with habitat destruction, if it's due to a global cause?
By creating more habitat. It's worth noting here that far more habitat is lost to human day-to-day activities (like building a suburb or shopping mall) than due to climate change, human caused or not.
As to arable land, I had looked at that too. Google never worked for me on this, but some time back I calculated desertification due to soil depletion and compared it to a study which estimated loss of arable land from sea level rise and lower rainfall through to 2100 for a particular scenario of no mitigation of global warming. The former exceeded the land area of global warming related loss of arable land by two orders of magnitude. In other words, each year, we currently lose to human mismanagement about as much arable land as was forecast by that study to be lost to global warming through to the end of the century.
The Syrian problems are apparently partly due to food shortages. If climate change caused by global warming has hurt food production in the area, which seems plausible to me, then Syria fell apart partly due to global warming.
You miss the point. The Syrian problems happened solely due to land/water mismanagement and the political problems that come from a despot-led government. Global warming might have made it worse, but it wouldn't have happened at all, if it weren't for those two factors. It is dishonest to claim global warming is a contributing factor when the existence or absence of global warming doesn't change whether this disaster happens.
My point is that you're making an assertion without supporting it.
So what? It's true. We have people who do work in these departments posting on slashdot. We have people, including myself BTW, who have experience with the outcome of government agencies. I'm not going to pick up a deadend job with some bureaucracy just to win an argument on Slashdot.
The thing I've noticed is that there's plenty of stories out there of epic, government waste, fraud, and apathy that simply aren't mirrored in the private world. Where's the corresponding examples in the private world? The private world is several times larger than the public world. There should be plenty of billion dollar or larger scale waste out there. Where is it?
And you got this little factoid from where? My guess is that such a figure is a calculated by taking the sum of appropriations earmarked by congress for NASA during the 1960's. My problem with this kind of economics 101 is that it totally misses what happened. And what happened is this: millions of high paying skilled jobs were created, millions got free(government funded) higher education, thousands of companies were created. This mass mobilization led to an incredible pace of technological advancement. Now was all of this specifically dedicated to the Apollo program, of course not, the "need" to murder millions of Vietnamese(thanks cold war, thanks capitalism vs. communism) also propelled military technologies, just as the need to crack WWII german encryption, and the need for calculations related to the making the first atomic bomb propelled the development of the first computers. Most of the high tech companies which came into existence during this time developed technologies which ended up being used by NASA and the military, and only much later general commercial markets(ie. consumer oriented technologies). Boeing engineers when building their rockets, were not divided between two groups one for NASA and one for the defense department, advances in one led to advances in the other.
So what? My point is that we would have a vast amount of job creation anyway. In fact, it might have been worse due to NASA misdirection of so much of US productivity during that time.
Wrong. First off their is no "fallacy of improbability" at work in what I stated.
This is why I quoted the problem section in question. The computer industry and fiberglass insulation don't need "a myriad of factors happening to fall into place at the right time in the right way". There are a variety of ways to get a computer industry and fiberglass insulation. There's plenty of room for error.
Counter arguing that someone, somewhere else would have done it eventually is simply sophomoric.
Why did I use the word sophmoric? Because you cannot make such an argument convincingly.
So what? Your assertion is a variation of the tiger repellent rock. It's very hard to prove something would have happened anyway. That requires a control group. We don't have that luxury.
I certainly won't argue that point. Just to put the record straight, the only value any space program has to me, personally, is measured in terms of that program's ability to inspire and mobilize large numbers of people working towards a common goal. Which is why in my estimation Elon Musk etc. are interesting but ineffectual. And frankly without such large scale inspiration and mobilization I am not sure what a space program is supposed to mean to me, other than the pretty pictures. I do not work in the aerospace industry, hence the only benefit I gain from such is tertiary technological advances, most of which I probably won't be aware of. However inspiring and mobilizing masses towards common goals, when not directed at annihilation of others, or self-annihilation, does indeed fascinate me. I guess I am not a space nutter, nor a science nutter, traveling through space(planets, stars, etc.), and the knowledge thereof, have no inherent value in my eyes. And frankly I am no longer convinced that any expenditure on NASA or such is warranted. If we would allow ourselves to dream, to launch gigantic programs, for no reason other than that we can, I would be the first in line, but name me one concrete specific thing like a moonbase or such and I quickly find myself asking what is the point.
Burn as much money as you can. Just don't do anything useful with it!
Do you believe the government would have just spent the cash on randomly developing this stuff, or private industry research would have?
Yes. This is a significant point to make here. NASA by funding this research for their own peculiar needs may have actually delayed the research by taking resources and staff away from more productive approaches!
So, which agency did you work for, where you have such extensive first-hand experience knowing how government agencies work?
I don't need it. Basically anything outside of the DOD is that way (the US military has a meritocracy approach that seems to work moderately well though it still has some trouble making fighting generals) and to get back on topic, NASA is that way.
NASA took huge risks during the sixties. They strapped men into tiny capsules atop repurposed intercontinental ballistic missiles and shot them into space, after they subjected men to experiments in g-force, vacuum, microgravity, rapid acceleration, rapid deceleration, and all sorts of other things. Apollo astronauts could not even qualify for life insurance, this stuff was so risky. Three astronauts died on the ground in what was retroactively named Apollo I in their honor.
Too bad the 60s didn't stick around. We have since had the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and are halfway through yet another decade.
they said lets make something useful to planetary scientists working in the solar system, and come back again when we need to do something applicable to exoplanets.
So no, they didn't.
No, the vast majority of the butthurt was because Pluto was no longer a planet, and had nothing to do whether it was scientific or not to call Pluto a planet. You could have had the most elegant, scientific definition ever, but if it changed the status of Pluto, the vast majority of the people would be bitching the same, because they didn't even care about the details of the actual definition.
But we didn't have the most elegant, scientific definition ever. We had a kluge passed at the eleventh hour.
Also, it is really annoying to present an irrational argument or decision and then claim, completely without justification, that disagreement would be unabated by actual reason or logic. Why don't you try it first?
But we haven't had anything like that in 30 to 40 years.
And Apollo contributed to that failure in a big way. For example, preserving the infrastructure of Apollo during the funding ramp down following the end of Apollo become more important than doing stuff in space.
We need a "wow" project to recapture people's imagination and get them interested in science again. Show them what science can do and people will want to be part of it. When the Apollo project was going strong there wasn't a problem finding people who wanted to become scientists and engineers. Today science and engineering has gone into the background and people take it for granted. It's become the plumbing that keeps our civilization progressing but not many people are interested in becoming plumbers. We need to make people think of science as the musicians of society.
I have a suggestion. Repeat Apollo for a small fraction of the cost. Develop the Falcon Heavy. Use it to do Apollo-like unmanned space probe swarms and manned sortie missions for a few hundred million dollars each in current dollars (about a factor of ten or less than Apollo did). Then start building some lunar infrastructure (moon bases, factories, etc).
You could completely fund significant lunar activities on what they're squandering on the Space Launch System.
Making the definition specific to our solar system was on purpose,
So what? My argument is still valid. They could have just kicked the can down the road.
Nonetheless, easy to define proposals don't hurt too much to accept if they can be changed later if the need arises. Of course changing such things seems to create a lot of butthurt on the internet, but that isn't a priority concern among astronomers when defining jargon.
It caused a lot of "butthurt" because the definition was unscientific and unwarranted.
If someone comes up with an actual meaningful need for a different categorization
Even in 2006, over a hundred exoplanets had already been discovered. That is the meaningful need which was already present for a definition that only applied to Solar System objects.
Another reason the prior formula fails is that it includes data dependent on the observer. Suddenly, it matters when you made the observation, which is an absurd thing to do.
I like the proposed definition because it is dependent on relatively easy to determine observables of an exoplanet and its star.
And the obvious rebuttal is that these things would have happened anyway. I also notice that in the second link, they're appropriating GPS from the US military. The spinoff argument also completely ignores the cost associated with these slight contributions.
I wonder how people would take it, if I post a list of US military spinoffs (which are far more considerable than NASA's contributions) the next time someone complains about US military endeavors? "Sure, we bombed 100k brown people we don't like for enough money to keep Microsoft in business for 200 years, but we got GPS out of it!" I'm sure it would go over well.
Here's a little clue for you: the moneys spent on the Apollo program over it's lifespan exceeded that of the the GDP of the US when John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Not at all. The peak spending was a few years later (1966, if I recall), and it was around 2% of GDP. And that $150-200 billion is in current 2015 dollars rather than 1961 dollars (somewhere around $19-24 billion by CPI inflation which is near the GDP deflator-based inflation rate).
On what planet do you live? In the real world technological advances are not deterministically inevitable, they are by their nature contingent, dependent on a myriad of factors happening to fall into place at the right time in the right way
This is based on the fallacy of improbability. There is not one particular set of "myriad factors" that results in a computer industry or fiberglass insulation any more than there is one particular set of "myriad factors" that results in a car with a license plate in a parking space. Here's a quote from Richard Feynman that illustrates this fallacy in full:
You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!
The other error with your assertions to this point is your complete ignorance of opportunity cost. Even if all we ever wanted to do was put people on the Moon, we could have put a lot more people on the Moon for $150-200 billion than we actually did. We could also still be using that infrastructure now (rather than just a few mirrors on the Moon!), if someone had bothered to plan something more sustainable and useful than the Saturn V or the follow on Space Shuttle (which over its lifespan has sunk a similar amount of money to the Apollo program).
You see the paltry benefits, but you don't see the costs. $150-200 billion is a lot of cost.
Just because a little bit of the research in these areas came from NASA doesn't mean that NASA is responsible for them. I call it the NASA taint. By now, everything is probably due to NASA.
How can companies that must make profits "take risks", while the government can not?
I'll just point out that the profit motive does encourage a degree of risk taking due to two factors, the risk premium which comes about as a result of varying risk tolerance among private parties some which are very conservative and some which routinely take lots of chances. As a result, there are less parties willing to engage in risky activities and hence, a premium builds up where the risky activity, even when accounting for the risk has a somewhat greater return on investment than a less risky activity. This premium actually runs counter to the community's tolerance for risk since a very conservative community would eschew risk more than a risk seeking community. Thus, there is an incentive to take risks which increases in private communities that are risk adverse.
Second, risk taking tends to be a competitive advantage in the long run (assuming you avoid gambler's ruin) and relatively conservative organizations in a competitive market have to worry about losing market share and such.
Meanwhile government bureaucracies don't have these mechanisms. For example, in a lot of the US agencies, an employee who keeps their head down and doesn't rock the boat probably will have a job for many decades even if they aren't particularly competent at it even if their department is a negative sum money sink. This tends to create a huge risk adverse culture which seeks to avoid things that get one fired, but not have much else for ambitions.
Slashdot Mirror
The example I keep seeing used is self-driving vehicles, particularly trucks.
And the example that keeps getting ignored is farming. If out of work farmers and their descendants couldn't get new work, then we'd be around 80-90% unemployment.
Tech changes that just do existing work with less human labour do not expand wealth. The automated trucks drivers, administrative assistants, warehouse pickers, burger flippers, etc, etc, that are coming down the pipe do not increase demand - if anything, they decrease it, by reducing the amount of wages entering the economy.
Nonsense. The ex-truck drivers just do something else. Now, you have the wealth generated by the automated truck drivers and by the labor of the ex truck drivers. This is not only an expansion of wealth, it is an expansion of the rate of increase of wealth.
Sounds like Russell never heard of Jevons paradox. When you increase the efficiency of using or consuming a resource like labor, you increase the demand for that resource.
And Russell never thought about the overhead of employing people (for example, training costs). It is not sensible to employ two people to do the work of one person.
Finally, what happens to the unemployed half? They find new work that exists merely because there were people available to do it.
Happened to me a few months back. He was looking for drunk people. Since I wasn't one, I went on my way.
You mean the ones ending their nuclear power without an exit plan? Or who got their citizens to subsidize electricity for German industry in the name of green energy? Their reputation for rationality may be warranted, but I'm not seeing it myself.
I have a full fledged allergy to techno-determinism, and Slashdot being home for many many, many techno-determinists is causing my brain to sneaze, over and over again. Techno-determinism, which is a specific form of nonsense, truly challenges my brain, so much so that it may lead to involuntary brain farts.
But you obviously don't have an aversion to cargo cults. To paraphrase, we build a giant, eyepoppingly expensive obelisk that flies and jerbs fall out of the sky like manna. This is deep in tiger repellent rock territory as I already noted. You already said that
If we would allow ourselves to dream, to launch gigantic programs, for no reason other than that we can, I would be the first in line, but name me one concrete specific thing like a moonbase or such and I quickly find myself asking what is the point.
Which is a viewpoint so opposed to rational thought that I'm not surprised you have since abandoned the latter.
The price one pays to master a statistical grasp of the world, necessarily involves a break down in categorical thinking.
You keep believing that. It's simply a deeper level of thought and rationality. As to point 3, it appears to be a philosophical analogue to mad cow disease with pointless diversions about language, poets, modern logician and ancient philosophers. Not interested unless you can some day make it relevant.
But you can't always kill more butterflies and try again. One butterfly made the difference. Which butterfly that was is irrelevant, but one cannot discern which butterfly was the one to make a difference. That's why you don't kill butterflies.
Let us note, you first assumed that the Apollo "butterfly" made things better. I've already enumerated most of my problems with that assertion, including my doubt that it actually helped. Diverting the efforts of hundreds of thousands of your best and brightest just to make a few very large rockets and land a few people on the Moon while vastly overpaying for the activity is not what I consider conducive to progress.
Now, because of the unsustainability of Apollo, we haven't done anything like it since. We still have people obsessed about giant pointless acts of status signalling (the Space Launch System being the latest NASA-related example). We have growing numbers of people convinced that the Moon landings were faked (because why would the US do something and then not only stop doing it, but utterly fail to show the capacity to do it). We have little to show for it except vague and empty talk about how things would have been worse if we hadn't done it.
Meanwhile we have massive evidence that technological advancement happened before, during, and after Apollo which was unrelated to Apollo.
I never questioned that even once.
The point is that this massive ongoing development, which had nothing to do with NASA, is the basis for my technodeterminism argument. When you have a vast sector of the US economy devoted to developing new technologies, then it is insulting to that legacy to divert responsibility to a minor perturbation from NASA spending.
I hear the rustling of leaves, where the salience of what was said just rushed past your ears, unheard. Not a difference which makes a difference, hence same difference, ie. indifference on your part. That's ok. It just makes me sad.
Comfort yourself with the delusion that I would disagree with you even if you had bothered to put forth a well reasoned and thought out argument. Just think of all the time you saved!
It might well be that global warming changed the situation from one where mismanagement was not disastrous to one where it was.
I think a compelling rebuttal is the rapid loss of control by the central government. The Syrian war went from one man setting himself on fire in Tunisia (on December 18, 2010, the triggering event for the Arab Spring) to loss of control over most of the country inside of a year. If this was due to climate change making things slightly worse and barely tipping Syria into an unstable civil war, then the decline would have been much more gradual.
Developed world countries routinely have huge protests, but those don't quickly devolve into civil wars. Developed world countries routinely have droughts and other extreme weather. Again, that doesn't quickly devolve into civil war.
Misattributing non-climate factors to global warming is a common bit of dishonest propaganda that one sees again and again in this area.
What gets ignored here is that we can't magically reset climate to 1850. There is tremendous cost involved.with global warming mitigation. It makes no sense to assume the ambitious cutbacks of tomorrow will be low cost when current efforts are remarkably costly and counterproductive.
And we ignore that global warming mitigation also makes the worst problems we face, like overpopulation and poverty worse. Those in turn by a variety of means worsen the factors that made man-made global warming such a problem in the first place directly or by aggravating effects (such as habitat destruction making species extinction from global warming worse).
I think you should demonstrate that these proposed solutions will make things better rather than merely assume that they will.
So what is cheaper? Land, and... what exactly?
We don't need to go any further. The cost of your home is dependent on the price of the land. The cost of everything you purchase locally is dependent to some degree on the price of the land, including most of the things you mentioned.
a city lifestyle
One pays quite the premium for that lifestyle.
Could you name me a computer industry?
In addition to dividing by country, you can divide by business or brand, by technological approach, by function or purpose, etc. Building IBM mainframes is a computer industry as is building hobby kit PC or memory cards in Taiwan. Just because you choose not to delineate further, doesn't mean I can't do so.
My point is actually rather simple: the technological advances that did occur in the wake of Apollo program, would not have happened without the Apollo project.
Which is just wrong. My point in this is that while there may have been some relatively novel ideas from the Apollo project, they aren't so novel that we wouldn't have thought of them otherwise. Computer and related industries are definitely not those relatively novel ideas. The computer industry had started the Moore's Law doubling before Apollo would become a factor. There was already massive innovation and technology development.
How can I know that?
You don't know anything here. You're wasting both our time with empty assertions. I at least can point to massive non-NASA related technology development happening before, during, and after NASA did its little thing. You're stuck with the NASA taint argument that a little funding from NASA mixed in with large amounts of funding from elsewhere was necessary to develop technologies.
butterflies
You can always kill more butterflies and change it again. But if we're trying to control a chaotic system rather than merely make random changes in it, the approach of Japan during the 50s to 70s was more effective than the approach of the US for the same time period.
And let's face it. NASA is a huge expense for a butterfly. Once again, we're stuck with the problem of large cost for small benefit.
But the inspiration and mass mobilization of millions of people, and the tremendous sums of money which flooded R&D in countless technologies occasioned a metric shitload of technological advancement which you and I are using right now to communicate with one another.
Again, no evidence for your assertion. Meanwhile we have massive evidence that technological advancement happened before, during, and after Apollo which was unrelated to Apollo.
A more nuanced understanding of causation understands that had I not slept with her(Mary), Tommy (you know the 6 year old red head) wouldn't be, I might have had a kid with Jill, but it could not have been Tommy.
But you would have a kid either way. And if we look at 300 million people rather than one person, we're still going to see people with the same distributions of personality and other features. They'll still have the same problems. They'll still come up with the sorts of fixes.
But yeah, you might just come back with "So what? same difference"
Which isn't my fault.
97% vs 3% is not an equal debate.
Oh, what sort of consensus (hint: climate change propaganda) could we be thinking of here with this peculiar number? This may well be an "equal" debate, if the 97% wasn't actually 97%.
How do we deal with habitat destruction, if it's due to a global cause?
By creating more habitat. It's worth noting here that far more habitat is lost to human day-to-day activities (like building a suburb or shopping mall) than due to climate change, human caused or not.
As to arable land, I had looked at that too. Google never worked for me on this, but some time back I calculated desertification due to soil depletion and compared it to a study which estimated loss of arable land from sea level rise and lower rainfall through to 2100 for a particular scenario of no mitigation of global warming. The former exceeded the land area of global warming related loss of arable land by two orders of magnitude. In other words, each year, we currently lose to human mismanagement about as much arable land as was forecast by that study to be lost to global warming through to the end of the century.
The Syrian problems are apparently partly due to food shortages. If climate change caused by global warming has hurt food production in the area, which seems plausible to me, then Syria fell apart partly due to global warming.
You miss the point. The Syrian problems happened solely due to land/water mismanagement and the political problems that come from a despot-led government. Global warming might have made it worse, but it wouldn't have happened at all, if it weren't for those two factors. It is dishonest to claim global warming is a contributing factor when the existence or absence of global warming doesn't change whether this disaster happens.
My point is that you're making an assertion without supporting it.
So what? It's true. We have people who do work in these departments posting on slashdot. We have people, including myself BTW, who have experience with the outcome of government agencies. I'm not going to pick up a deadend job with some bureaucracy just to win an argument on Slashdot.
The thing I've noticed is that there's plenty of stories out there of epic, government waste, fraud, and apathy that simply aren't mirrored in the private world. Where's the corresponding examples in the private world? The private world is several times larger than the public world. There should be plenty of billion dollar or larger scale waste out there. Where is it?
And you got this little factoid from where? My guess is that such a figure is a calculated by taking the sum of appropriations earmarked by congress for NASA during the 1960's. My problem with this kind of economics 101 is that it totally misses what happened. And what happened is this: millions of high paying skilled jobs were created, millions got free(government funded) higher education, thousands of companies were created. This mass mobilization led to an incredible pace of technological advancement. Now was all of this specifically dedicated to the Apollo program, of course not, the "need" to murder millions of Vietnamese(thanks cold war, thanks capitalism vs. communism) also propelled military technologies, just as the need to crack WWII german encryption, and the need for calculations related to the making the first atomic bomb propelled the development of the first computers. Most of the high tech companies which came into existence during this time developed technologies which ended up being used by NASA and the military, and only much later general commercial markets(ie. consumer oriented technologies). Boeing engineers when building their rockets, were not divided between two groups one for NASA and one for the defense department, advances in one led to advances in the other.
So what? My point is that we would have a vast amount of job creation anyway. In fact, it might have been worse due to NASA misdirection of so much of US productivity during that time.
Wrong. First off their is no "fallacy of improbability" at work in what I stated.
This is why I quoted the problem section in question. The computer industry and fiberglass insulation don't need "a myriad of factors happening to fall into place at the right time in the right way". There are a variety of ways to get a computer industry and fiberglass insulation. There's plenty of room for error.
Counter arguing that someone, somewhere else would have done it eventually is simply sophomoric.
Why did I use the word sophmoric? Because you cannot make such an argument convincingly.
So what? Your assertion is a variation of the tiger repellent rock. It's very hard to prove something would have happened anyway. That requires a control group. We don't have that luxury.
I certainly won't argue that point. Just to put the record straight, the only value any space program has to me, personally, is measured in terms of that program's ability to inspire and mobilize large numbers of people working towards a common goal. Which is why in my estimation Elon Musk etc. are interesting but ineffectual. And frankly without such large scale inspiration and mobilization I am not sure what a space program is supposed to mean to me, other than the pretty pictures. I do not work in the aerospace industry, hence the only benefit I gain from such is tertiary technological advances, most of which I probably won't be aware of. However inspiring and mobilizing masses towards common goals, when not directed at annihilation of others, or self-annihilation, does indeed fascinate me. I guess I am not a space nutter, nor a science nutter, traveling through space(planets, stars, etc.), and the knowledge thereof, have no inherent value in my eyes. And frankly I am no longer convinced that any expenditure on NASA or such is warranted. If we would allow ourselves to dream, to launch gigantic programs, for no reason other than that we can, I would be the first in line, but name me one concrete specific thing like a moonbase or such and I quickly find myself asking what is the point.
Burn as much money as you can. Just don't do anything useful with it!
Do you believe the government would have just spent the cash on randomly developing this stuff, or private industry research would have?
Yes. This is a significant point to make here. NASA by funding this research for their own peculiar needs may have actually delayed the research by taking resources and staff away from more productive approaches!
So, which agency did you work for, where you have such extensive first-hand experience knowing how government agencies work?
I don't need it. Basically anything outside of the DOD is that way (the US military has a meritocracy approach that seems to work moderately well though it still has some trouble making fighting generals) and to get back on topic, NASA is that way.
NASA took huge risks during the sixties. They strapped men into tiny capsules atop repurposed intercontinental ballistic missiles and shot them into space, after they subjected men to experiments in g-force, vacuum, microgravity, rapid acceleration, rapid deceleration, and all sorts of other things. Apollo astronauts could not even qualify for life insurance, this stuff was so risky. Three astronauts died on the ground in what was retroactively named Apollo I in their honor.
Too bad the 60s didn't stick around. We have since had the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and are halfway through yet another decade.
You can probably kickstart that assuming you get someone with a rep to back you.
they said lets make something useful to planetary scientists working in the solar system, and come back again when we need to do something applicable to exoplanets.
So no, they didn't.
No, the vast majority of the butthurt was because Pluto was no longer a planet, and had nothing to do whether it was scientific or not to call Pluto a planet. You could have had the most elegant, scientific definition ever, but if it changed the status of Pluto, the vast majority of the people would be bitching the same, because they didn't even care about the details of the actual definition.
But we didn't have the most elegant, scientific definition ever. We had a kluge passed at the eleventh hour.
Also, it is really annoying to present an irrational argument or decision and then claim, completely without justification, that disagreement would be unabated by actual reason or logic. Why don't you try it first?
What makes you think he's hiding?
But we haven't had anything like that in 30 to 40 years.
And Apollo contributed to that failure in a big way. For example, preserving the infrastructure of Apollo during the funding ramp down following the end of Apollo become more important than doing stuff in space.
We need a "wow" project to recapture people's imagination and get them interested in science again. Show them what science can do and people will want to be part of it. When the Apollo project was going strong there wasn't a problem finding people who wanted to become scientists and engineers. Today science and engineering has gone into the background and people take it for granted. It's become the plumbing that keeps our civilization progressing but not many people are interested in becoming plumbers. We need to make people think of science as the musicians of society.
I have a suggestion. Repeat Apollo for a small fraction of the cost. Develop the Falcon Heavy. Use it to do Apollo-like unmanned space probe swarms and manned sortie missions for a few hundred million dollars each in current dollars (about a factor of ten or less than Apollo did). Then start building some lunar infrastructure (moon bases, factories, etc).
You could completely fund significant lunar activities on what they're squandering on the Space Launch System.
Making the definition specific to our solar system was on purpose,
So what? My argument is still valid. They could have just kicked the can down the road.
Nonetheless, easy to define proposals don't hurt too much to accept if they can be changed later if the need arises. Of course changing such things seems to create a lot of butthurt on the internet, but that isn't a priority concern among astronomers when defining jargon.
It caused a lot of "butthurt" because the definition was unscientific and unwarranted.
If someone comes up with an actual meaningful need for a different categorization
Even in 2006, over a hundred exoplanets had already been discovered. That is the meaningful need which was already present for a definition that only applied to Solar System objects.
Another reason the prior formula fails is that it includes data dependent on the observer. Suddenly, it matters when you made the observation, which is an absurd thing to do.
I like the proposed definition because it is dependent on relatively easy to determine observables of an exoplanet and its star.
Our socialist program was better than their socialist program because we used cost plus contracting.
And the obvious rebuttal is that these things would have happened anyway. I also notice that in the second link, they're appropriating GPS from the US military. The spinoff argument also completely ignores the cost associated with these slight contributions.
I wonder how people would take it, if I post a list of US military spinoffs (which are far more considerable than NASA's contributions) the next time someone complains about US military endeavors? "Sure, we bombed 100k brown people we don't like for enough money to keep Microsoft in business for 200 years, but we got GPS out of it!" I'm sure it would go over well.
Here's a little clue for you: the moneys spent on the Apollo program over it's lifespan exceeded that of the the GDP of the US when John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Not at all. The peak spending was a few years later (1966, if I recall), and it was around 2% of GDP. And that $150-200 billion is in current 2015 dollars rather than 1961 dollars (somewhere around $19-24 billion by CPI inflation which is near the GDP deflator-based inflation rate).
On what planet do you live? In the real world technological advances are not deterministically inevitable, they are by their nature contingent, dependent on a myriad of factors happening to fall into place at the right time in the right way
This is based on the fallacy of improbability. There is not one particular set of "myriad factors" that results in a computer industry or fiberglass insulation any more than there is one particular set of "myriad factors" that results in a car with a license plate in a parking space. Here's a quote from Richard Feynman that illustrates this fallacy in full:
You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!
The other error with your assertions to this point is your complete ignorance of opportunity cost. Even if all we ever wanted to do was put people on the Moon, we could have put a lot more people on the Moon for $150-200 billion than we actually did. We could also still be using that infrastructure now (rather than just a few mirrors on the Moon!), if someone had bothered to plan something more sustainable and useful than the Saturn V or the follow on Space Shuttle (which over its lifespan has sunk a similar amount of money to the Apollo program).
You see the paltry benefits, but you don't see the costs. $150-200 billion is a lot of cost.
Just because a little bit of the research in these areas came from NASA doesn't mean that NASA is responsible for them. I call it the NASA taint. By now, everything is probably due to NASA.
How can companies that must make profits "take risks", while the government can not?
I'll just point out that the profit motive does encourage a degree of risk taking due to two factors, the risk premium which comes about as a result of varying risk tolerance among private parties some which are very conservative and some which routinely take lots of chances. As a result, there are less parties willing to engage in risky activities and hence, a premium builds up where the risky activity, even when accounting for the risk has a somewhat greater return on investment than a less risky activity. This premium actually runs counter to the community's tolerance for risk since a very conservative community would eschew risk more than a risk seeking community. Thus, there is an incentive to take risks which increases in private communities that are risk adverse.
Second, risk taking tends to be a competitive advantage in the long run (assuming you avoid gambler's ruin) and relatively conservative organizations in a competitive market have to worry about losing market share and such.
Meanwhile government bureaucracies don't have these mechanisms. For example, in a lot of the US agencies, an employee who keeps their head down and doesn't rock the boat probably will have a job for many decades even if they aren't particularly competent at it even if their department is a negative sum money sink. This tends to create a huge risk adverse culture which seeks to avoid things that get one fired, but not have much else for ambitions.