Yes, that's true (and in fact the current NASA plan involves capturing an asteroid and putting it in orbit around the moon). But if you are putting together space policy that is publicly funded and dependent on public support, a goal of reaching Ceres is not going to cut it. If you think that Ceres would be a logical step, then you wrap it up as a stepping stone to Mars.
You can advance the art of keeping people alive in deep space with a station around the moon, or on the moon, or in geosynchronous orbit. In fact, those would be great intermediate steps.
As it happens, that is exactly what NASA is proposing. Run the space station until 2024, at which point it would either be handed over to commercial interests or scrapped. Between 2018 and 2030, run long-term cislunar missions to prove out the Mars deep space technology.
Only after that would they venture out to Mars.
I doubt you would accept those odds for a trip to Britain.
With the family? True. I probably would have balked at the odds of a successful crossing in the 15th century as well. For my part, I'd happily hop on a Mars-bound ship if the basic technologies had all been proven out as in the plan.
Nah, look at his daughter next to him... she starts beaming as soon as he finishes the first sentence because she knows his joking affect. She's not reacting to the joke, she's reacting to the joke she knows is being delivered. Prior to that she is stone-faced.
He's very prone to opening his mouth when he has nothing to add, but in this case he's clearly having fun. The man has enough serious faults that we don't need to invent controversy.
It's not useless if one of your goals is to advance the art of keeping people alive in deep space. Is that a useless goal? Sure. But so is practically every other human endeavor not directly related to survival. We spend money on art and on making our neighborhoods pretty. I just came back from a vacation where I packed my whole family into an aluminum tube with wings and we flew to England just to see shit that we haven't seen before. Utterly useless, but hey, it was fun. Just for fun, I make little projects with my kids - model rockets, little robots, an arcade cabinet. Useless, but fun.
Mars is kind of like that - it's the next easiest hop from the moon, and we've been reading and writing (useless!) stories about it since it's discovery. For people like myself, the question is "How can you not want to go there?"
I know I'm from the Northeast and so have relatively decent sarcasm detection, but this is not even an edge case - he's got a huge "I just made a funny" grin on his face, and everyone in the room is laughing.
Minor quibble - or maybe not minor - but how do you know that the universe is finite? It would be a strange coincidence if the entirety of the universe happened to be the part that we can observe...
People are being trendy. Old farts have decided to do a "digital detox" for a while. In ten years it will have as much meaning as their Atkins diet. In the end, we all try to limit our unproductive time - but reading is reading, and cutting out your reading just because it is on a "screen" is straight-up retarded. Or trendy. Whatever, I need a smoothy cleanse.
I have to laugh at this. Of course he does, through force of law. You essentially rent the land through property taxes, and you have to abide by zoning rules and ordinances. You have to meet certain standards with your construction, and the house must be serviced by certain kinds of utilities to be rated habitable. And if you want to enter the commercial sphere you have to follow the rules of the market.
None of what I said is even remotely controversial or new, and if you disagree with that it is you who are the special snowflake.
Your understanding of "salary" is probably not in line with law, though it depends on your industry and state. It's very complicated (you can make a good living specializing in it as a lawyer). Here is a 5-minute rundown.
For most people in most industries, their "salary" is the minimum amount they can expect to receive from their employer each week, no matter how much they work. If this situation does not apply to you, then you become a non-exempt employee and are subject to all the hourly rules like overtime. This is the part that probably trips you up, as it leads to a lot of misunderstanding:
However, whether an employee is paid on a salary basis is a "fact," and thus specific evaluation of particular circumstances is necessary. Whether an employee is paid on a salary basis is not affected by whether pay is expressed in hourly terms (as this is a fairly common requirement of many payroll computer programs), but whether the employee in fact has a "guaranteed minimum" amount of pay s/he can count on.
In other words, just because your payroll system requires you to fill out a timesheet with 80 hours and your check seems to agree does not mean that is anything more than an implementation detail.
my salaried position requires me to work 40 hours a week, or more if the company decides I need to
That's probably against your state's work rules, but calling them out on it will likely cause you more grief than it is worth. They don't get to dodge overtime rules without also accepting the loss of the ability to demand 40 hours.
They should not be using company resources for personal projects, but like the 40 hour rule this is also widely disregarded. You can fire people for any reason in most states, so as an employer why use hours when it can get you in trouble? Just make up whatever reason you want, so long as you can back it up.
It depends, though. At least in most of the US (it varies by state), a salaried employee is supposedly being compensated for the job that they do, not the hours that they keep. If the job requires certain hours, then technically you should be using hourly employees. There are obviously fuzzy areas, and many, many businesses play fast and loose with the rules. Anyway, if the employee is salaried is doing what is asked of them, then they are still guilty of using company resources for a personal project. But that's a far lesser sin than "stealing" hours, which is what is implied in the question.
For coal, this doesn't really matter - it still loses. To pick up where renewables leave off, you want natural gas (or even petroleum) turbines that can quickly be brought on and off line. Coal and nuclear are not really suited to this.
There are also a lot of things that Tennessee receives that are not "taken into account". What makes you think that this would work out in Tennessee's favor vs California? It would be one thing if you produced some numbers to back up your argument, but you are just speculating out loud.
For instance the coast guard isn't protecting Tennessee
I'm usually polite on Facebook, but this comment is inane.
If CA were a separate country and had to support their own Coast Guard, there would just be another national border along the California border with the US, and you'd be patrolling that instead. It is indeed in Tennessee's best interests to help pay for the cost of patrolling national borders.
But the main reason this comment is so stupid is that Tennessee also depends on the Coast Guard, as they operate on the Mississippi River and other large bodies of water. Even if they did not, all that shipping up the Mississippi comes from somewhere, and the bulk of it isn't from elsewhere in Tennessee.
That's true - if the technology ever gets to the point where it is cheaper and as effective to use than having a person speak into a microphone. I'm not really concerned with how easy or hard it is to "break in" to Hollywood - it's already insanely hard. I'd suggest doing something more useful with your life, but now I sound like an asshole. Hopefully this asshole just saved someone from a barista job.
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Yes, that's true (and in fact the current NASA plan involves capturing an asteroid and putting it in orbit around the moon). But if you are putting together space policy that is publicly funded and dependent on public support, a goal of reaching Ceres is not going to cut it. If you think that Ceres would be a logical step, then you wrap it up as a stepping stone to Mars.
You can advance the art of keeping people alive in deep space with a station around the moon, or on the moon, or in geosynchronous orbit. In fact, those would be great intermediate steps.
As it happens, that is exactly what NASA is proposing. Run the space station until 2024, at which point it would either be handed over to commercial interests or scrapped. Between 2018 and 2030, run long-term cislunar missions to prove out the Mars deep space technology.
Only after that would they venture out to Mars.
I doubt you would accept those odds for a trip to Britain.
With the family? True. I probably would have balked at the odds of a successful crossing in the 15th century as well. For my part, I'd happily hop on a Mars-bound ship if the basic technologies had all been proven out as in the plan.
Nah, look at his daughter next to him... she starts beaming as soon as he finishes the first sentence because she knows his joking affect. She's not reacting to the joke, she's reacting to the joke she knows is being delivered. Prior to that she is stone-faced.
He's very prone to opening his mouth when he has nothing to add, but in this case he's clearly having fun. The man has enough serious faults that we don't need to invent controversy.
It's not useless if one of your goals is to advance the art of keeping people alive in deep space. Is that a useless goal? Sure. But so is practically every other human endeavor not directly related to survival. We spend money on art and on making our neighborhoods pretty. I just came back from a vacation where I packed my whole family into an aluminum tube with wings and we flew to England just to see shit that we haven't seen before. Utterly useless, but hey, it was fun. Just for fun, I make little projects with my kids - model rockets, little robots, an arcade cabinet. Useless, but fun.
Mars is kind of like that - it's the next easiest hop from the moon, and we've been reading and writing (useless!) stories about it since it's discovery. For people like myself, the question is "How can you not want to go there?"
What, you want like a guarantee or something? I can't even give you that for the moon, and that is demonstrably possible. You are moving the bar.
Here's a video.
I know I'm from the Northeast and so have relatively decent sarcasm detection, but this is not even an edge case - he's got a huge "I just made a funny" grin on his face, and everyone in the room is laughing.
I certainly won't defend many of the statements you list, but on this one, it sounds like dry New York City humor.
One proposal is to deflect the solar wind with a magnetic shield.
But will and money could get you to Mars.
I guess that makes it a minor quibble after all :)
Minor quibble - or maybe not minor - but how do you know that the universe is finite? It would be a strange coincidence if the entirety of the universe happened to be the part that we can observe...
People are being trendy. Old farts have decided to do a "digital detox" for a while. In ten years it will have as much meaning as their Atkins diet. In the end, we all try to limit our unproductive time - but reading is reading, and cutting out your reading just because it is on a "screen" is straight-up retarded. Or trendy. Whatever, I need a smoothy cleanse.
actually it was the collectivist/Marxist special snowflakes that pushed
You have an interesting read on history. That is, you haven't read it. Zoning did not arise from Marxists.
Those laws are unconstitutional
Actually, zoning, property taxes, and even eminent domain have all been tested in court. They are constitutional.
Agreed - social convention is a 40 hour work week.
You don't have a right to my property.
I have to laugh at this. Of course he does, through force of law. You essentially rent the land through property taxes, and you have to abide by zoning rules and ordinances. You have to meet certain standards with your construction, and the house must be serviced by certain kinds of utilities to be rated habitable. And if you want to enter the commercial sphere you have to follow the rules of the market.
None of what I said is even remotely controversial or new, and if you disagree with that it is you who are the special snowflake.
Your understanding of "salary" is probably not in line with law, though it depends on your industry and state. It's very complicated (you can make a good living specializing in it as a lawyer). Here is a 5-minute rundown.
For most people in most industries, their "salary" is the minimum amount they can expect to receive from their employer each week, no matter how much they work. If this situation does not apply to you, then you become a non-exempt employee and are subject to all the hourly rules like overtime. This is the part that probably trips you up, as it leads to a lot of misunderstanding:
In other words, just because your payroll system requires you to fill out a timesheet with 80 hours and your check seems to agree does not mean that is anything more than an implementation detail.
my salaried position requires me to work 40 hours a week, or more if the company decides I need to
That's probably against your state's work rules, but calling them out on it will likely cause you more grief than it is worth. They don't get to dodge overtime rules without also accepting the loss of the ability to demand 40 hours.
They should not be using company resources for personal projects, but like the 40 hour rule this is also widely disregarded. You can fire people for any reason in most states, so as an employer why use hours when it can get you in trouble? Just make up whatever reason you want, so long as you can back it up.
It depends, though. At least in most of the US (it varies by state), a salaried employee is supposedly being compensated for the job that they do, not the hours that they keep. If the job requires certain hours, then technically you should be using hourly employees. There are obviously fuzzy areas, and many, many businesses play fast and loose with the rules. Anyway, if the employee is salaried is doing what is asked of them, then they are still guilty of using company resources for a personal project. But that's a far lesser sin than "stealing" hours, which is what is implied in the question.
Natural gas is cheap but, as stated above, it's not the best candidate for peak load generation.
Some coal-fired plants have been converted over to gas as their fuel source... fracking!
For coal, this doesn't really matter - it still loses. To pick up where renewables leave off, you want natural gas (or even petroleum) turbines that can quickly be brought on and off line. Coal and nuclear are not really suited to this.
There are also a lot of things that Tennessee receives that are not "taken into account". What makes you think that this would work out in Tennessee's favor vs California? It would be one thing if you produced some numbers to back up your argument, but you are just speculating out loud.
I'd love to know how you calculate the "real" cost. LOL.
For instance the coast guard isn't protecting Tennessee
I'm usually polite on Facebook, but this comment is inane.
If CA were a separate country and had to support their own Coast Guard, there would just be another national border along the California border with the US, and you'd be patrolling that instead. It is indeed in Tennessee's best interests to help pay for the cost of patrolling national borders.
But the main reason this comment is so stupid is that Tennessee also depends on the Coast Guard, as they operate on the Mississippi River and other large bodies of water. Even if they did not, all that shipping up the Mississippi comes from somewhere, and the bulk of it isn't from elsewhere in Tennessee.
That's true - if the technology ever gets to the point where it is cheaper and as effective to use than having a person speak into a microphone. I'm not really concerned with how easy or hard it is to "break in" to Hollywood - it's already insanely hard. I'd suggest doing something more useful with your life, but now I sound like an asshole. Hopefully this asshole just saved someone from a barista job.
Credit is one thing (she was uncredited in Austin Powers, for instance) - do you think that Carrie Fisher received no money?