Most scientists aren't idiots. On the other hand, "cellphones while driving!!11!!" is the latest bugaboo du jour. I always distrust reports that support the latest panic-fad....
So, basically you're saying that the top fraction of a percent of humanity that are already out there at the bleeding edge will want to be farther out there?
That's all well and good. Now provide some evidence that even a large minority of humans will be either interested in this or capable of taking advantage of it. Much less pretty much all of us.
Personally, I don't think "intelligence" is well enough understood to do meaningful work in the field. I also don't think you'll ever be able to find someone who can figure out what changes we really need to make to make people "smarter"...
More memory? Possible, but you don't need drugs to do that.
More reasoning ability? Possible, but training everyone in logic and rhetoric will go farther than any drug is likely to.
Faster thinking? Possible, but not really necessary unless you're a day trader or a fighter pilot.
Some other, totally unexpected thing? Not a chance. Face it, the guys doing the work will use as a fundamental assumption that what THEY think is the hallmark of high intelligence is what we need more of....
What makes you think the obstacle course WAS artificial? Or that subjects weren't allowed to drop the phone?
Well, the fact that I saw some TV footage of one of those tests a few months back? Orange cones in a parking lot marking out an obstacle course don't fit MY definition of "realistic"....
Well, the study I saw had people drive an obstacle course. One group had cell phone conversations, the other group had conversations with a passenger. No contest, cell phone talkers screwed up more often. In fact, they screwed up as much as people who were legally drunk do on the same types of courses. Believe what you like, the data shows that talking on a cell phone is VERY distracting.
And of course we all spend a certain amount of time in our daily drive going through the obstacle course while being forbidden to drop the phone. I'd like to see a study done using a "routine" drive (like your daily drive to work, or a trip from one city to the next) rather than a completely artificial one.
Personally, I always find talking to a passenger more distracting. I've never yet felt the urge to look my cellphone in the face while I'm talking to it, but I do that fairly regularly while talking to my wife sitting next to me in the car.
They are in the same environment you are, and if need be, can stop you from doing something stupid.
Since they are in the same environment as you they tend to lull the conversation when you are at a physical location(eg an intersection) where you need to concentrate on not dying.
This seems to assume that the person you are talking with is paying much more attention to what you are doing than you are.
If the person beside you is as engrossed in the conversation as you are, likely he'll not see that you're about to do something stupid either.
there would be motivation to keep getting smarter.
What motivation is that?
Sure, YOU might like to be smarter. I might like to be smarter too. But that doesn't translate to the species having any real use for more intelligence. We'd be much better served by providing First World educations to everyone in the Third World than we'd be if we developed a way to make you (or me) smarter.
Right now, with our species, we have people attempting to boost their effective intelligence through pharmaceuticals
People have been taking drugs to make themselves smarter for a very long time. Why do you think so many people like coffee? There's relatively little evidence that any of these new drugs actually raise your intelligence in ways that a double-espresso doesn't.
In a relatively short time, if we want to be more intelligent we'll design ourselves to be more intelligent.
I'll bite. What possible reason could there be for us to design ourselves to be more intelligent?
Better conversation at the water cooler at work?
More intellectually stimulating movies?
More imaginative sex? Okay, I'll grant you that one....
But seriously, there really isn't a burning need to be "more intelligent". Mostly because the people out on the bleeding edge are already more intelligent than the average guy. And we don't really have much use for more people on the bleeding edge....
Actually work tends to require much more intelligence than before, before doing manual labor was an typical way to make a living with hardly no education or intelligence. Most of that is gone, replaced by things like operating advanced tractors and lumber machines and whatnot.
While digging a ditch certainly doesn't require vast intelligence, it's fairly hard to demonstrate that someone who makes a chair with handtools is necessarily less intelligent than someone who runs the machine that makes chairs.
Note, by the way, that intelligence and education aren't especially related, in spite of people's efforts to conflate the two.
But there's no reproduction pressure, in fact the poorest and lowest educated (not necessarily the same as intelligence, but bright people don't usually end up that way) are the ones breeding the most.
Spare me the Idiocracy drivel. There's not really much evidence that the poorest and worst educated are especially dumber than the rest of us. Given that I know highly educated, technically sophisticated people who really truly believe (or believed, up till last year) that "housing priced don't go down", I think you'd have a hard row to hoe in that particular debate.
Note, by the way, that getting a good education is hard to do if you're poor. Even if you're moderately above average intelligence. So it doesn't always follow that bright people will find a way to overcome their upbringing.
Note also that your definition of "poorest and worst educated" is likely based on, say, American standards of such things. Rather than, say, Haitian standards or Rwandan standards.
This is incorrect. Three days warning for a Tunguska event would be extremely valuable even if you couldn't save any of the buildings or evacuate most of the people. You still can evacuate some people, organize logistics, and the rest can huddle in places that give them a better chance of survival.
Umm, no. You won't even be able to convince the people at Ground Zero that they're going to be pasted in three days, much less begin preparations for the event.
Note hurricane evacuations, as an example - everyone down here knows that it might happen. They're mostly prepared to do so when needed. They mostly have far more than three days warning. And still evacuations are a cluster-fuck of the first magnitude. Note Katrina as an example - the need for the evacuation (from a known and recognized danger) was clear more than three days in advance, the evacuation was done quite well (exceeding all expectations, actually), and yet people stayed behind in far greater numbers than I think most people believe to this day.
Most places don't have plans in place to evacuate at all, much less within three days. So most places couldn't even begin to make preparations for the disaster within three days.
Note also that logistics preparation are only possible if you know exactly where the rock is going to hit (wouldn't do to set up your logistics base at Ground Zero by accident), or if you set up well outside the possible impact area. In the latter case, it's too far out to be especially useful, and will have to be moved once the rock actually falls.
I note you said "evacuate some people". Presumably those people would be the government officials? And other "important" people, of course....
There's no reasonable explanation for why they would want to enslave us, or eat us, or otherwise exploit us.
They may have no interest at all in enslaving us, eating us, or exploiting us.
Which wouldn't stop them from deciding that they could make better use of Earth than we are (better from their point of view).
On the other hand, who's to say that your average ET is "reasonable" (by human standards)? Just because YOU can't think of a reason they might want to enslave us, exploit us, or eat us, doesn't mean that THEY can't think of a perfectly good reason for doing so.
If we do find them they're likely to be more intelligent than us, they may turn out to be hostile, and they may discover that we are tasty, or good speceship fuel, etc. They may be intelligent enough that we don't even appear sentient to them. I'm not sure I want us to find intelligent extraterrestrials.
You seem to share Hawking's delusion that more intelligence is an inevitable part of the progression of an intelligent species.
Alas, there really doesn't seem to be much evidence for that. Once you're intelligent enough, in general, to use the machines that your tiny fraction of geniuses comes up with, the impetus towards more intelligence pretty much evaporates. After all, how much intelligence does it really take to do 95+% of all the things required to make a technological civilization work?
That said, there's no particularly good reason that ET should be friendly, even if they're no more intelligent than we are. Or that they'd not find us just another tasty piece of livestock.
Note, of course, that the reverse is also true. I've heard reliable rumours that your average ET tastes like chicken....;)
It's not that simple. As I understand it, a Tunguska event happens about once a century and even with Earth's greater population, such impacts will not hit a populated area most of the time. So you're basically spending as much as you'd lose. Further, without some sort of asteroid deflection system, you're just providing early warning. You can save the people, but not the buildings.
Using the higher of those Katrina figures, we're talking about 1000 years worth of overwatch to save the cost of one devastated city.
Note, by the by, that Katrina did NOT destroy most of New Orleans. Or even a terribly large part of if, in spite what you may have heard to the contrary. A complete loss of the city would have been far more expensive that a paltry trillion dollars.
Note also that while North America north of the Rio Grande (and Australia, of course) has a quite low population density, the rest of the land area of the world tends to be one big heavily populated target as far as a falling rock is concerned. Probably at least 10% of the Earth's surface is heavily enough populated that 1000 years worth of falling rocks would devastate something costing more than a trillion to replace.
Finally, note that I was assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that we'd have a means of deflecting the falling rocks. If we don't, then there's really not much reason to bother watching for them. Because sure as shooting we won't be able to develop a working asteroid deflector in the limited timeframe between detection and required deployment of same.
Remember that the current Chinese government are the ones that stopped years long bloody internal wars and the dieing of millions of Chinese.
While I agree, in general, with your statement, it should be pointed out that the current Chinese government is also responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese. While I personally think the Soviet Union still holds the title for Killing the Largest Number of Your Own People, the Chinese are running a close second.
yeah but her growth was because of the moon, I was wondering if there was an validity to it
As I said, a fairly standard scifi meme.
Alas, it'll be at least 30 years before we know for sure. It'll be at least that long before someone born on the moon has had time to grow up to age 12. And probably a great deal longer, since the odds of us getting past the ISS in the next 20 years is pretty slim.
Unless, of course, Bill Gates decides to aim his fortune at the Final Frontier. And that's none too likely....
One of the secondary characters was born on the moon, and she was 12y/o and was I guess about 6' tall. I was wondering if there was any truth to that?
Given that there is at least one 13 year old child who is over seven feet tall right now, there's no special reason to believe it can't happen on the moon.
In any case, it's a common scifi meme, so it's not terribly surprising that they went with it.
Out of curiosity, is that US total debt figure including or not including the portion owed to Social Security?
That figure is the external debt. Which does not include the "debt" to the Social Security Administration. I have read that the unfunded liability of the SSA (you know, the sort of thing that corporations get slammed for in court regularly) is on the order of $100 trillion.
See, there was a wonderful bait-and-switch pulled on the middle and working classes over the last 25 years or so that went like this:
1. Notice that Social Security will eventually be broke unless we do something about it. A commission led by Alan Greenspan is formed to figure out what to do about it.
2. The commission recommends raising FICA taxes to build up a surplus in the so-called Social Security Trust Fund, to reduce the risk of having to cut SS benefits. Congress follows the recommendations of the commission.
Which had already happened before that, and will happen again.
>3. Fast forward about a decade, and lo and behold government is running a surplus if you include the extra SS revenue (but a deficit if you don't). So when George W Bush gets into office, he says "We'll send everyone a $300 check as their portion of the surplus, and also use the surplus to justify a nice hefty tax cut for the top tax brackets."
But, but...it was the Clinton Administration that claimed that we had a surplus. Bush taking them at their word was disingenuous at best, but otherwise he'd have had to call them liars (and the lads on the left would have crucified him). Plus, of course, opposing his proposed income tax cut on the grounds that the "surplus" that Clinton had achieved wasn't REALLY a surplus would have made the Democrats and the Media look bad....
4. And lastly, since the SS Trust Fund "doesn't exist", the same people then argued that either benefits had to be cut, or the SS system privatized, because government couldn't afford it anymore.
Actually, they suggested privatizing it since the stock market was appreciating in value far faster than your "investment" in Social Security. They fell for the "but prices will NEVER go down" fallacy that infected so many people during that period.
Note: about five years ago, in discussing housing in Florida, I heard three well-educated, technically literate people assert that "housing prices could never go down". When I realized I was the only dissenter from that PoV, I went home, wrote my mortgage company a really big check, and have been the sole owner of my home since.
The effect of this is that over the last 20 years overall tax burden is shifted from the progressive income taxes to the regressive FICA taxes.
Yep, pretty much. And that process will continue. It can't help it, really. SSA is structured such that it MUST be paid from SS taxes. As the fraction of our population of SS age increases (as it has pretty much every year since it was instituted), the amount of SS taxes must increase.
And as the amount of SS taxes increase, the fraction of our budget that is the SSA will increase. Note that the SSA is the largest single budget item today. And while you can cut the Defense Department, you can't cut SSA (paid for by SS taxes) and Medicare (paid for by Medicare taxes) (first and third largest items in the budget right now).
In order to actually balance the current budget, we'd have to eliminate the Defense Department, and reduce all other discretionary spending by ~70%.
Or, alternately, double income taxes across the board.
Frequently, the same folks who argue that the SS Trust Fund doesn't exist and therefor SS shouldn't exist also include the T-Bills owned by Social Security in the "Total US debt" figure as a way to argue for cuts to other programs.
I read somewhere the the most removed any two humans are from each other is 53rd cousins
First cousins have a common ancestor two generations back. So 53rd cousins should have a common ancestor 54 generations back.
54 generations ago, you had (theoretically) 2^54 ancestors (~180,000 trillion). Which means that statistically speaking, every human alive ~1200 years ago was about 200,000,000 of your ancestors.
In other words, such a number is pretty much meaningless....
If, for example, I build houses for a living, what happens if I build a subdivision and then don't manage to sell them before I die? Why should my family not be able to get the benefit of that work I did before my death?
Assuming your family inherits in the normal manner, they'll own all your interest in those houses you built. Which means they can then sell the ones that didn't sell during your lifetime (assuming, of course, that they can find buyers).
Anyone who has lived in a jurisdiction with corrupt officials will tell you that bribery occurs not because whatever you are being bribed to do is a bad idea, but because you have the power to withhold whatever the briber wants. Bribery is about power not goodness or badness of the behaviour you are being bribed to do.
Which makes the Democrats (the Party of the People) look even worse. You're not doing the work of "the People" when you require a bribe to do your job....
Note that this is not meant to imply that the Republicans don't take bribes. Though I don't recall a case where a Republican majority leader had to bribe his own guys to get them to vote for the Party's bill.
Doesn't mean it doesn't happen, just that I've never heard of it.
And they would have, if the Republicans had ever shown one bit of being willing to debate. When a major political party's response is "no, just no, I don't care what we said we'd say yes to, we're saying no even if you take our 2004 platform and make it your health care reform", there really isn't any debate to broadcast.
If that's all it was, they'd have been delighted to televise the debate, since it would have made the Republicans look really bad.
Personally, I believe they didn't televise the debate because they really didn't want to show the House and Senate leadership bribing their own side to vote for the bills. After all, if the Health Care Bills were so wonderful, why would you need to bribe guys in your own Party to vote for them?
for some reason astronaut Dr. Leroy Chiao thinks differently "Soyuz has a very special place in my heart. It is a robust, capable spacecraft and launcher. It has the best-demonstrated safety record of any manned spacecraft. And, it just feels hearty."
why could that be
Because he's never looked at the numbers? Because he's infatuated with Soyuz?
Certainly not the safety record of the two, since the Shuttle actually has a better one than Soyuz.
By the by, Shuttle has flown 134 orbital missions. Russia (Vostok, Voshkod, Soyuz) has flown 112. The USA has flown 20 other than Shuttle. China has flown one. Which means that Shuttle has flown more than every other spacecraft combined (134 to 133) - note that I'm not counting the several suborbital flights....
AND they still have a safety record that dwarfs NASA's.
No, they don't.
Shuttle has had 134 flights, two failures. About 1.6%.
Soyuz has had 104 flights, two failures. About 2%.
Note that in both cases, the "failures" were loss of crew accidents. If we also include failures that do not cause loss of crew, Soyuz looks even worse.
Maybe if it is a solid state rocket, but aren't most rockets liquid fuel now a days and isn't the liquid hydrogen and oxygen?
Yes and no, in that order. Most rockets are liquid fuel (but most of them have solid boosters in one form or another), but most don't use H2/O2. Try kerosene/O2.
Why not have two panels, one at ~.5AU and one near one of the poles of earth, both orbiting the sun. Panel one sends a large amount of energy to panel two which then transmits it to a station in a relatively unpopulated location.
Because the panel at 0.5AU would be moving relative to Earth?
Because sometimes it would be behind the sun, and sometimes it would be 1.5 AU from the Earth? And most of the time it would be ~1 AU from Earth?
Because maintenance on something that far away would be anightmare?
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Most scientists aren't idiots. On the other hand, "cellphones while driving!!11!!" is the latest bugaboo du jour. I always distrust reports that support the latest panic-fad....
So, basically you're saying that the top fraction of a percent of humanity that are already out there at the bleeding edge will want to be farther out there?
That's all well and good. Now provide some evidence that even a large minority of humans will be either interested in this or capable of taking advantage of it. Much less pretty much all of us.
Personally, I don't think "intelligence" is well enough understood to do meaningful work in the field. I also don't think you'll ever be able to find someone who can figure out what changes we really need to make to make people "smarter"...
More memory? Possible, but you don't need drugs to do that.
More reasoning ability? Possible, but training everyone in logic and rhetoric will go farther than any drug is likely to.
Faster thinking? Possible, but not really necessary unless you're a day trader or a fighter pilot.
Some other, totally unexpected thing? Not a chance. Face it, the guys doing the work will use as a fundamental assumption that what THEY think is the hallmark of high intelligence is what we need more of....
Well, the fact that I saw some TV footage of one of those tests a few months back? Orange cones in a parking lot marking out an obstacle course don't fit MY definition of "realistic"....
And of course we all spend a certain amount of time in our daily drive going through the obstacle course while being forbidden to drop the phone. I'd like to see a study done using a "routine" drive (like your daily drive to work, or a trip from one city to the next) rather than a completely artificial one.
Personally, I always find talking to a passenger more distracting. I've never yet felt the urge to look my cellphone in the face while I'm talking to it, but I do that fairly regularly while talking to my wife sitting next to me in the car.
This seems to assume that the person you are talking with is paying much more attention to what you are doing than you are.
If the person beside you is as engrossed in the conversation as you are, likely he'll not see that you're about to do something stupid either.
What motivation is that?
Sure, YOU might like to be smarter. I might like to be smarter too. But that doesn't translate to the species having any real use for more intelligence. We'd be much better served by providing First World educations to everyone in the Third World than we'd be if we developed a way to make you (or me) smarter.
People have been taking drugs to make themselves smarter for a very long time. Why do you think so many people like coffee? There's relatively little evidence that any of these new drugs actually raise your intelligence in ways that a double-espresso doesn't.
I'll bite. What possible reason could there be for us to design ourselves to be more intelligent?
Better conversation at the water cooler at work?
More intellectually stimulating movies?
More imaginative sex? Okay, I'll grant you that one....
But seriously, there really isn't a burning need to be "more intelligent". Mostly because the people out on the bleeding edge are already more intelligent than the average guy. And we don't really have much use for more people on the bleeding edge....
While digging a ditch certainly doesn't require vast intelligence, it's fairly hard to demonstrate that someone who makes a chair with handtools is necessarily less intelligent than someone who runs the machine that makes chairs.
Note, by the way, that intelligence and education aren't especially related, in spite of people's efforts to conflate the two.
Spare me the Idiocracy drivel. There's not really much evidence that the poorest and worst educated are especially dumber than the rest of us. Given that I know highly educated, technically sophisticated people who really truly believe (or believed, up till last year) that "housing priced don't go down", I think you'd have a hard row to hoe in that particular debate.
Note, by the way, that getting a good education is hard to do if you're poor. Even if you're moderately above average intelligence. So it doesn't always follow that bright people will find a way to overcome their upbringing.
Note also that your definition of "poorest and worst educated" is likely based on, say, American standards of such things. Rather than, say, Haitian standards or Rwandan standards.
Umm, no. You won't even be able to convince the people at Ground Zero that they're going to be pasted in three days, much less begin preparations for the event.
Note hurricane evacuations, as an example - everyone down here knows that it might happen. They're mostly prepared to do so when needed. They mostly have far more than three days warning. And still evacuations are a cluster-fuck of the first magnitude. Note Katrina as an example - the need for the evacuation (from a known and recognized danger) was clear more than three days in advance, the evacuation was done quite well (exceeding all expectations, actually), and yet people stayed behind in far greater numbers than I think most people believe to this day.
Most places don't have plans in place to evacuate at all, much less within three days. So most places couldn't even begin to make preparations for the disaster within three days.
Note also that logistics preparation are only possible if you know exactly where the rock is going to hit (wouldn't do to set up your logistics base at Ground Zero by accident), or if you set up well outside the possible impact area. In the latter case, it's too far out to be especially useful, and will have to be moved once the rock actually falls.
I note you said "evacuate some people". Presumably those people would be the government officials? And other "important" people, of course....
They may have no interest at all in enslaving us, eating us, or exploiting us.
Which wouldn't stop them from deciding that they could make better use of Earth than we are (better from their point of view).
On the other hand, who's to say that your average ET is "reasonable" (by human standards)? Just because YOU can't think of a reason they might want to enslave us, exploit us, or eat us, doesn't mean that THEY can't think of a perfectly good reason for doing so.
You seem to share Hawking's delusion that more intelligence is an inevitable part of the progression of an intelligent species.
Alas, there really doesn't seem to be much evidence for that. Once you're intelligent enough, in general, to use the machines that your tiny fraction of geniuses comes up with, the impetus towards more intelligence pretty much evaporates. After all, how much intelligence does it really take to do 95+% of all the things required to make a technological civilization work?
That said, there's no particularly good reason that ET should be friendly, even if they're no more intelligent than we are. Or that they'd not find us just another tasty piece of livestock.
Note, of course, that the reverse is also true. I've heard reliable rumours that your average ET tastes like chicken....;)
Using the higher of those Katrina figures, we're talking about 1000 years worth of overwatch to save the cost of one devastated city.
Note, by the by, that Katrina did NOT destroy most of New Orleans. Or even a terribly large part of if, in spite what you may have heard to the contrary. A complete loss of the city would have been far more expensive that a paltry trillion dollars.
Note also that while North America north of the Rio Grande (and Australia, of course) has a quite low population density, the rest of the land area of the world tends to be one big heavily populated target as far as a falling rock is concerned. Probably at least 10% of the Earth's surface is heavily enough populated that 1000 years worth of falling rocks would devastate something costing more than a trillion to replace.
Finally, note that I was assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that we'd have a means of deflecting the falling rocks. If we don't, then there's really not much reason to bother watching for them. Because sure as shooting we won't be able to develop a working asteroid deflector in the limited timeframe between detection and required deployment of same.
While I agree, in general, with your statement, it should be pointed out that the current Chinese government is also responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese. While I personally think the Soviet Union still holds the title for Killing the Largest Number of Your Own People, the Chinese are running a close second.
As I said, a fairly standard scifi meme.
Alas, it'll be at least 30 years before we know for sure. It'll be at least that long before someone born on the moon has had time to grow up to age 12. And probably a great deal longer, since the odds of us getting past the ISS in the next 20 years is pretty slim.
Unless, of course, Bill Gates decides to aim his fortune at the Final Frontier. And that's none too likely....
Let's see. Katrina cost about $200 billion to $1 trillion, depending on whose figures you like the most.
So $1 billion per year would be a bargain to prevent an impact that would do AT LEAST as much damage as Katrina.
Note also that it's about 0.05% of the federal budget. Chump change, in other words.
Given that there is at least one 13 year old child who is over seven feet tall right now, there's no special reason to believe it can't happen on the moon.
In any case, it's a common scifi meme, so it's not terribly surprising that they went with it.
That figure is the external debt. Which does not include the "debt" to the Social Security Administration. I have read that the unfunded liability of the SSA (you know, the sort of thing that corporations get slammed for in court regularly) is on the order of $100 trillion.
Which had already happened before that, and will happen again.
But, but...it was the Clinton Administration that claimed that we had a surplus. Bush taking them at their word was disingenuous at best, but otherwise he'd have had to call them liars (and the lads on the left would have crucified him). Plus, of course, opposing his proposed income tax cut on the grounds that the "surplus" that Clinton had achieved wasn't REALLY a surplus would have made the Democrats and the Media look bad....
Actually, they suggested privatizing it since the stock market was appreciating in value far faster than your "investment" in Social Security. They fell for the "but prices will NEVER go down" fallacy that infected so many people during that period.
Note: about five years ago, in discussing housing in Florida, I heard three well-educated, technically literate people assert that "housing prices could never go down". When I realized I was the only dissenter from that PoV, I went home, wrote my mortgage company a really big check, and have been the sole owner of my home since.
Yep, pretty much. And that process will continue. It can't help it, really. SSA is structured such that it MUST be paid from SS taxes. As the fraction of our population of SS age increases (as it has pretty much every year since it was instituted), the amount of SS taxes must increase.
And as the amount of SS taxes increase, the fraction of our budget that is the SSA will increase. Note that the SSA is the largest single budget item today. And while you can cut the Defense Department, you can't cut SSA (paid for by SS taxes) and Medicare (paid for by Medicare taxes) (first and third largest items in the budget right now).
In order to actually balance the current budget, we'd have to eliminate the Defense Department, and reduce all other discretionary spending by ~70%.
Or, alternately, double income taxes across the board.
It doesn't exi
First cousins have a common ancestor two generations back. So 53rd cousins should have a common ancestor 54 generations back.
54 generations ago, you had (theoretically) 2^54 ancestors (~180,000 trillion). Which means that statistically speaking, every human alive ~1200 years ago was about 200,000,000 of your ancestors.
In other words, such a number is pretty much meaningless....
Assuming your family inherits in the normal manner, they'll own all your interest in those houses you built. Which means they can then sell the ones that didn't sell during your lifetime (assuming, of course, that they can find buyers).
In other words, very bad example.
Which makes the Democrats (the Party of the People) look even worse. You're not doing the work of "the People" when you require a bribe to do your job....
Note that this is not meant to imply that the Republicans don't take bribes. Though I don't recall a case where a Republican majority leader had to bribe his own guys to get them to vote for the Party's bill.
Doesn't mean it doesn't happen, just that I've never heard of it.
If that's all it was, they'd have been delighted to televise the debate, since it would have made the Republicans look really bad.
Personally, I believe they didn't televise the debate because they really didn't want to show the House and Senate leadership bribing their own side to vote for the bills. After all, if the Health Care Bills were so wonderful, why would you need to bribe guys in your own Party to vote for them?
Because he's never looked at the numbers? Because he's infatuated with Soyuz?
Certainly not the safety record of the two, since the Shuttle actually has a better one than Soyuz.
By the by, Shuttle has flown 134 orbital missions. Russia (Vostok, Voshkod, Soyuz) has flown 112. The USA has flown 20 other than Shuttle. China has flown one. Which means that Shuttle has flown more than every other spacecraft combined (134 to 133) - note that I'm not counting the several suborbital flights....
No, they don't.
Shuttle has had 134 flights, two failures. About 1.6%.
Soyuz has had 104 flights, two failures. About 2%.
Note that in both cases, the "failures" were loss of crew accidents. If we also include failures that do not cause loss of crew, Soyuz looks even worse.
Yes and no, in that order. Most rockets are liquid fuel (but most of them have solid boosters in one form or another), but most don't use H2/O2. Try kerosene/O2.
Because the panel at 0.5AU would be moving relative to Earth?
Because sometimes it would be behind the sun, and sometimes it would be 1.5 AU from the Earth? And most of the time it would be ~1 AU from Earth?
Because maintenance on something that far away would be anightmare?
And because it's completely unnecessary?