The heel dragging was caused in part by Apollo itself. Apollo was not able to return any signficant economic value for the investment that was made. In effect, continuing Apollo was throwing good money after bad, and then the taste of a gargantuan space program was sour in the public's mouth. Hence the era of intense compromise in the Shuttle program.
And now, you want to throw another $100 billion in the same Apollonian spirit on a Mars program that will result in a similar set of highly questionable economic outcomes: rock and soil samples, endless dissertations, and tons of equipment rusting in the Florida sun.
Intelligent behavior probably includes the ability to recognize a mistake and to not repeat it.
Going to the Moon as it was done, was a mistake since there was no waypoint used in the trip. It was just a monstrous jump out of Earth's deep gravity well. Critical as I am about the ISS, we a waypoint now; hence, Lunar voyages are much more sensible.
And it's to Luna that we must go if reaching for Mars is to make any sense. Apollo's major failing was that it was unsustainable. Reaching for Mars from Earth's manufacturing base is even more unsustainable. Luna will provide that vital manufacturing presence, with all the oxygen, aluminum, iron and silicon it can provide as readily accessible pulverized ore in the Lunar regolith.
You will note that I have used the word "economics" many times in my posting here. This is my way of getting you to catch a clue. The days of blowing billions on space are over, and We The People now want a return on *our* investment. Like solar power satellites, beaming energy back to Earth; like a manufacturing moonbase, able to supply materials for structures in Earth orbit by way of a linear accelerators and mass catchers.
I'm tired of supplying geeks with expensive aerospace toys. Time to earn your keep; roll up your sleeves and do some real work for a change!
You must be American. Obviously you have no idea what a real armed revolt looks like.
Your sentiment is lost in the histories of WWII Stalingrad and the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, as well as your beloved government's military actions in the Middle East... why, going on right now. These histories amply demonstrate that your concept of overwhelming force is a fantasy.
Firstly, an armed populace a la the US Constitution should have whatever weapons the military has -- because the population WAS THE MILITARY. The modern Western forms of military (essentially degraded into mercenary forces) have broken with that. But, to an important degree, if the citizen solider can get his hands on an assault rifle, he can match the standard issue of the mercenary soldier (i.e. those "serving" in the US military today).
Secondly, if your concept of overwhelming force really functioned in Reality, then Vietnam would be America's 51st state, and Iraq would have been the 52nd by 1993. Those didn't happen, and that's because even the best equipped solider in the world can be shot in the neck at dusk in a mountain pass. Firebombing hardly dictates the outcome of a campaign.
Overwhelming force is the Big Lie that brought the British Empire their defeats in America... for who could stand against their endless lines of redcoats in the field? Answer: American militia shooting them from behind trees and walls of field stone.
The right to keep and bear arms is still fundamental to a free citizenry. And they can still use it to prosecute war against their own government, should it come to that. The gov can issue forth the tanks, planes and helicopters, but will find themselves torching houses with no inhabitants, while they get picked off by rifle and bazooka fire as they make their way back to base... and they dare not leave that base during the night, due to all the snipers.
The default attack of "the problem" has been to assume something's wrong with the geek. But if he's just showing up with "umcombed hair" and is catching flack for it, then it's obvious that it's an power game of might vs. right. And he doesn't have to accept it.
Tell him to stick to his guns. If people laugh at you for your hair, then they aren't worth knowing in the first place. He shouldn't start studying drinking, TV watching, fucking and all the other "popular" activities; instead, THEY should start studying science.
Disclaimer: I've been a gamer, and I'm planning to return to playing in a year or two.
Dungeons&Dragons and other such stereotypical fantasy role-playing games compose a very good activity if you want to pick one that merges intellectual and social demands.
The downside is that like anything else, it can be overdone. We are still developing the "Tragedy of the Gamer" from the early days of D&D (and later on, immersive video games). The victims of this kind of thing are still playing out their lost lives. The one thing that stands out about the Lost Gamer is extreme dependency... these folks tend to never grow up, can barely hold jobs, and remain a financial burden on families and friends. Of course, this could well be the characteristics of your average born loser, and gaming is a false correspondence.
Two Martians are sunning themselves on a dune when a crack is heard from the sky, and then the probe hurtles down to crash nearby in the dust. All is still for a second or two, leaving the Martians to muse. Then, several explosive bolts go off and the landing cushions attempt to inflate.
One Martian looks at the other, rolls his 3 eyes, and says "Well, that proves it. There's no intelligent life on Earth."
Roger that. Lawyers love insurance companies. Since said companies drag their feet intentionally just to make you and your claim "go away", lawyers must be brought into the insurance game by claimants and "force" the company to make the settlement they were morally and legally required to do in the first place.
And so the lawyers get about a third of the settlement, or at least their $150/hr fees.
It's an interesting dynamic. Insurance companies and lawyers are the major supporters of American government. It's too bad that all these shenanigans have to be paid for by the general public one way or another.
What are you talking about? We take raw materials on Earth and "produce" things all the time. The trusses forming the structure of a spaceship must be mined, processed, melted and then formed; all these things can be done at some shared arrangement from the Lunar surface to an orbit site.
How do YOU propose instead to manufacture a space infrastructure? Make every part complete (from truss to paint) on Earth, and then spend $10K per pound to loft them into orbit? I'll call your bullshit.
Face facts. People have to start living in the space environment in order to produce a sustainable infrastructure. This is the thing you have undoubtedly written off beneath all your blather.
The Moon would act as a great shield, true. But your baseline would only be the Lunar diameter. Making radio 'scopes and positioning them around Earth orbit would also be a worthwhile project.
Myself, I'm jonesing for placing a large optical scope at the solar focus position, which is about 3 times farther from the Sun as our farthest probe (Pioneer 11?). The massive amplification power at the focus (provided by the Sun's mass bending an enormous volume of light around itself) should provide incredible visible observations... perhaps resolution of individual planets in other systems. {pant, pant}
The best leadership is by example, and uses the methods of persuasion.
Like we joked in college in '91, is seems that Bush Sr. thought that a 500LB bomb should be called a "persuader" in the media. His tyrannical bastard of a son is only continuing the family philosophy.
If Glenn is thinking "will $5 billion get you a moonbase and Mars mission?", then he's right.
If Glenn is thinking "will $5 billion get you a Mars mission and sustained Human presence in space?", then he's dead wrong.
As I implied here in this current topic, you can't sustain operations just from the Earth. It's far too costly to haul everything you'd need and desire up that 1g gravity well and through that 40-mile blanket of air.
Earth's future as a long-term source for space operations will be small, specific cargoes like people, nuclear material, medicines, complicated equipment, etc. For bulk manufacturing, you'd have to make use of the Moon and asteroidal bodies (including comets, for their volatiles).
The Earth is very fortunate to have the Moon. The only better things for space manufacturing are asteroidal moons and even a rubble ring (like Saturn has).
A waystation is generally better served in an orbit, yes, but the Moon is a currently unparalleled manufacturing site for space development. It has only 1/6g; is abundant in sunlight, oxygen, aluminum, silicon and iron (with calcium, titanium and other traces); has no atmosphere; and is about a 3-day journey from the mother world.
The problems of the Lunar well are solved by mass drivers built on the surface. With no atmosphere to stop it, an iron bucket carrying cargo (usually basic materials mined from the Lunar regolith) can be flung off the Moon at Lunar escape velocity -- you just have to build the linear accelerator long enough. Then you have to have mass catchers in Cislunar space to capture and make use of said materials.
Really, reaching for Mars without first preparing a Lunar manufacturing site is such abominable stupidity that I can only predict the Mars Adventure will end as Apollo ended... memories, rocks, lost billions and finally piles of equipment rusting in the Florida sun. A "straight to Mars" mission is almost entirely political -- with the remaining portion being some scientific intent.
With a well established Lunar base, all other planetary tours can take place as a side-effect of Lunar manufacturing activity. And once asteroidal missions return a sufficient chunk of volatiles to Cislunar space, shipments from Earth can be reduced to personnel and other small, specific cargoes like medicine, special equipment, biologicals and trace elements.
Er... umm. I buy your reasoning, but can't support your numbers. If you're a working puke (not an executive), then your $100K will turn into $60K after all taxation is paid over the course of a year (income, sales, property, fees, etc.). Of that, you imply that this $100K job is found in an area where $20K can be lived on. I find that improbable. I'd have to say $30K is convincing. So, that $60K turns into $30K after that deduction, and viola!... out of a $100K yearly income, you are only looking at $30K saved. Let's say $40K to give you some benefit of the doubt about certain factors.
In 5 years, you'd have $200K. In the same area, that's over 6 years of living. If you truly did move to a $20K area, then that's 10 years.
Interest wise, at 3% return, saving $30K yearly means about $1000 extra income per year, every year. This means roughly that you might be able to work this hated job for 14(?) years before you could quit and live off the interest for the rest of your life... plus having the principal (~$600K) as a margin.
Oopsie, I forgot one other necessary cultural behavior for a sustainable middle class:
oMind your own business. If your neighbor howls with delight over the $60K he "made" on the stock market, you look at him, say "good for you, Frank" and continue raking your leaves -- not run into the house and try to out-daytrade him. It used to be that "nobody cared what anybody else made" (verbatim from an old neighbor of mine), but all that ended and now we have a constant push to keep up with the Joneses. To avoid the excesses of speculation, people should just mind their own damned business.
A fine posting. I'll attempt to do it justice despite tapping it out on my lunch hour.
At several levels, the middle class had to fight for its position. If they had to wait for the wealthy to say "by Jove, we need more middle class around here, let's bally well up their wages, what what?", then the middle class would have never existed to any important extent. Thus, the middle class has certain behavioral duties to perform:
oIncrease savings and reduce spending. Even if it's only a dollar a day; even if it means eating chicken when you can afford beef.
oReduce consumption. Too much of the economy has turned over into a monstrosity that depends on too many people spending money like they were 14-yr-old girls. Conspicuous consumption drives much of that. It's unsustainable -- very fickle and singularly lacking in economic merit. Some Sheryl Crow song lyric paraphrased it best: Don't get what you want; want what you've got. With a lifestyle based upon consumption, marked aberrations like "service economy" and "city dweller" arise.
oCultivate independence. For the middle class, wealth is best controlled directly and locally. If you are dependent upon anything, then those things will siphon your wealth away. The middle class should be remarkably independent... after all, they should be too wealthy for welfare, but too poor to live off investments. Every dollar is a precious thing and should be scrutinized highly.
oComplain. Confrontation does work, you just have to accept that that is the slow way of pain that will eventually fix the problem for a long time. (This is how diet and exercise work.) The silent majority have tolerated almost any crime. For each person, something is wrong. Each of those can be addressed. And of course, the first place to fix blame is at home; starting with yourself, then your family, then expanding outward to co-workers and neighbors, and finally butting up against larger populations like fellow city and state folk (primarily through the mechanisms of voting and political involvement (who was it that said?: "all politics is local")).
If the criminal underclass of the poor, combined with the criminal overclass of the wealthy, manage to convince us -- the middle class -- that we're doomed, then we're truly doomed and we'll be extinguished. Fighting for your rights is painful, but you have to keep your eyes on the prize... even if you'll not live to see it, others will benefit from your sacrifice. After all, the middle class in America is the beneficiary of a long line of folks who sacrificed their economic and physical lives to make America the land of plenty that it should be today.
"I am absolutely driven by people saying I can't do something."
Having seen it in action, tenacity is not just beneficial in the "business environment" -- it's necessary. Due to the combination of people attacking you while others fail to defend you, you have quite a battle on your hands.
This doesn't excuse McBride's choice of combat methodology, but it does explain why he isn't stopping.
I find your terminology disturbing. Stop "asking". Stop asking for "chances".
The people with their noses in the air are the ones dismissively telling us that "no one owes you a living". But this is America, the land of plenty, where you can drive from sea to shining sea over paved roads on essentially pocket money. This is the land of prosperity with hundreds of miles of waving grain. Why should anyone have to starve? Why should anyone find their household goods placed at the curb?
Don't ask; demand. Demand that we have the opportunity to earn a living. It used to be more than enough that the wealthy could have their large houses on the hill while the middle class had their picket-fenced homes down in the valley. That was a stable society that well merited the name "the best country on Earth". But now the homes on the hill are growing while the ones in the valley are being downsized. This is greed at its ugliest. It's a clear class war. And since it's war... goddammit, shoot back, you twit -- you're being shot at in the first place!
The people who are cashing out your factories and moving that wealth offshore are taking advantage of the American cultural stability to loot the nation. Stop them. When your local city council hands out tax abatements by the bucket load, vote them out and install the hard liners who recognize that all that wealth is OURS, not just the exclusive property of a miniscule elite. We are all in this together. That wealth could not have been attained unless we worked to make the stability under which it grew. We all have a stake in society.
Your sentiment is correct. If we want to talk about "caller ID for email", then you have to consider what happened to "caller ID for phones".
Caller ID started out being very promising. Even with the upcoming cellphones (which were mobile), the unchanging number would be a good identity check. The assurance of this system came from the fact that the phone system was centralized. You could rely on the telco to enforce caller ID.
Of course, that changed, since the telcos ditched the responsibility portion of caller ID, and went onto a revenue-increase model. In effect, they allowed an arms race to exist, and then sold to both sides. Now, instead of enforcing caller ID and selling a box/service to the receiver user, they simply sell checking and blocking options to all users... callers and receivers. The receivers pay to check on incoming calls, and callers pay to block being identified. The end products are user confusion and telco revenue.
W00t! Some telco exec gets another bonus.
And caller ID is useless. It is now impossible to properly ID incoming calls to avoid the ones of your choosing. The old method (call-screening with an answering machine) is the only thing that works 100% to stop bothersome calls.
You have a point, but it only goes so far. One perfectly valid motivation for saying "tax the rich fairly" is that The Rest Of Us {tm} have noticed that tax loopholes are so outrageous that the wealthier one gets, the less proportionate tax one pays.
I'm so personally disgusted by the elitism implied by tax laws, that I'm entirely willing to shoulder a 10% flat tax... which applies to everybody without exception. At this point, a particular needs to be shouted: WITHOUT EXCEPTION. If a man makes $100 during the year, he owes ten bucks (and not one cent less) regardless of his hardship. And the man raking in $200 million (a la Grasso) had better cough up twenty mill -- and not a dollar less.
The Democrats want tax loopholes to justify welfare for the poor, and the Republicans want them so the wealthy can dodge taxation. This will never be fixed; we will never have a real flat tax. And if a consumption tax is installed instead of an income tax, then we will see the wealthy banding together under the cover of exempted "wholesale clubs" or "foreign importers" to take advantage of some loophole that allows them (leaving the lower- and middle-classes to shoulder the tax burden at local stores -- a non-exempt activity).
Given a matching environment, you are correct. Lie.
If we're talking about losing your job in the American Midwest, then the solution is to make a fraudulent resume that papers over the holes.
Because, if you don't, you'll find out that employers deal with employment holes by simply tossing your resume into the reject pile. There are always plenty more bodies where yours came from.
Free Clue {tm} for employers: If you don't want to be lied to, don't try killing people with your whims.
Firstly, why not continue having your father take care of your taxes? Pay him for his services, Mr. New Adult.
Secondly, see if the IRS still runs its VITA program... Volunteer Income Tax Assistance. You are trained by the IRS to help other citizens complete their tax forms. I was in it in the 80s.
Yes. The job of a modern CEO is to cheat, steal, lie, and avoid the whole truth... all to support the stock price. This is the modern business environment.
And you all wanted it this way, since you are all so in love with your stock portfolios. Enjoy it while it lasts.
The entire nature of the orginal argument revolves around a specific trust that we cannot dispute unless we cross a cultural line.
This trust says "a better product is produced when it is contracted and paid for", and also contains the implied "a bad product is the result of volunteer work".
I'm willing to cross that line. To start, when addressing the original argument, I'd have to ask "why do you trust a product more when it has a price tag, or when it was produced by an entity with overhead costs"?
Perhaps it's an issue of civil contract laws... but essentially you will only get your money back, as every piece of commercial software has a disclaimer against fitness of purpose.
Perhaps it's an issue of business reputation... but Microsoft's reputation isn't supported by its documented bugs.
I support open source, but come on guys, would you really want Linux supporting your nuclear arsonal?
Yes, I would, if the US government decided to ditch its programmer employees and instead buy the Microsoft {tm} Warzone {R} suite of programs for managing their nuclear sites and deployment. Government programmers at least have duty to country over them, but Microsoft's employees are too motivated by monetary compensation.
And on top of all this, why not try OSS for mangement of weapon systems? CSS relies on security by obscurity, which fails in time, while the OSS code is out there for all the hacking you can do with it, which leads to bullet-proofing.
If I were the program manager for government weapons system integration and management, I'd make unarmed and nonfueled test systems with the same infrastructure, and I'd deploy them first for some time in real environments with big red signs saying "PLEASE HACK ME". By the time Al Qaeda got around to attacking these systems for real, they'll be hacked and patched enough to foil them.
"
A manned reach for Mars, without first establishing a manufacturing base upon Luna, will only repeat the mistake of the Apollo Program.
Apollo's mistake was characterized by unsustainable infrastructure. The Moon was only reached by a very waste-intensive launch system that could not deliver much to its destination. To correct that, Apollo should have followed a sensible station program, which would have come first to establish a modest "space station" in Earth orbit. That would have served as a necessary waystation.
Luna is the minimum waystation for a sustainable infrastructure for Mars; and it can be even more than a waystation with our ability to manufacture structures from the aluminum, oxygen, silicon and iron in the Lunar regolith. Without the Lunar manufacturing base, we will launch expensive loads from Earth and will not have any way to amortize that investment over other missions; in effect, the return on that type of investment in Mars will be too intangible. Eventually the intangibles will pile up, the adventure will be viewed as a bad investment, and the entire enterprise will be abandoned.
Learn from Apollo or be condemned to repeat that grand mistake.
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Slashdot Mirror
The heel dragging was caused in part by Apollo itself. Apollo was not able to return any signficant economic value for the investment that was made. In effect, continuing Apollo was throwing good money after bad, and then the taste of a gargantuan space program was sour in the public's mouth. Hence the era of intense compromise in the Shuttle program.
And now, you want to throw another $100 billion in the same Apollonian spirit on a Mars program that will result in a similar set of highly questionable economic outcomes: rock and soil samples, endless dissertations, and tons of equipment rusting in the Florida sun.
Intelligent behavior probably includes the ability to recognize a mistake and to not repeat it.
Going to the Moon as it was done, was a mistake since there was no waypoint used in the trip. It was just a monstrous jump out of Earth's deep gravity well. Critical as I am about the ISS, we a waypoint now; hence, Lunar voyages are much more sensible.
And it's to Luna that we must go if reaching for Mars is to make any sense. Apollo's major failing was that it was unsustainable. Reaching for Mars from Earth's manufacturing base is even more unsustainable. Luna will provide that vital manufacturing presence, with all the oxygen, aluminum, iron and silicon it can provide as readily accessible pulverized ore in the Lunar regolith.
You will note that I have used the word "economics" many times in my posting here. This is my way of getting you to catch a clue. The days of blowing billions on space are over, and We The People now want a return on *our* investment. Like solar power satellites, beaming energy back to Earth; like a manufacturing moonbase, able to supply materials for structures in Earth orbit by way of a linear accelerators and mass catchers.
I'm tired of supplying geeks with expensive aerospace toys. Time to earn your keep; roll up your sleeves and do some real work for a change!
You must be American. Obviously you have no idea what a real armed revolt looks like.
... why, going on right now. These histories amply demonstrate that your concept of overwhelming force is a fantasy.
... for who could stand against their endless lines of redcoats in the field? Answer: American militia shooting them from behind trees and walls of field stone.
... and they dare not leave that base during the night, due to all the snipers.
Your sentiment is lost in the histories of WWII Stalingrad and the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, as well as your beloved government's military actions in the Middle East
Firstly, an armed populace a la the US Constitution should have whatever weapons the military has -- because the population WAS THE MILITARY. The modern Western forms of military (essentially degraded into mercenary forces) have broken with that. But, to an important degree, if the citizen solider can get his hands on an assault rifle, he can match the standard issue of the mercenary soldier (i.e. those "serving" in the US military today).
Secondly, if your concept of overwhelming force really functioned in Reality, then Vietnam would be America's 51st state, and Iraq would have been the 52nd by 1993. Those didn't happen, and that's because even the best equipped solider in the world can be shot in the neck at dusk in a mountain pass. Firebombing hardly dictates the outcome of a campaign.
Overwhelming force is the Big Lie that brought the British Empire their defeats in America
The right to keep and bear arms is still fundamental to a free citizenry. And they can still use it to prosecute war against their own government, should it come to that. The gov can issue forth the tanks, planes and helicopters, but will find themselves torching houses with no inhabitants, while they get picked off by rifle and bazooka fire as they make their way back to base
Amen.
The default attack of "the problem" has been to assume something's wrong with the geek. But if he's just showing up with "umcombed hair" and is catching flack for it, then it's obvious that it's an power game of might vs. right. And he doesn't have to accept it.
Tell him to stick to his guns. If people laugh at you for your hair, then they aren't worth knowing in the first place. He shouldn't start studying drinking, TV watching, fucking and all the other "popular" activities; instead, THEY should start studying science.
Disclaimer: I've been a gamer, and I'm planning to return to playing in a year or two.
... these folks tend to never grow up, can barely hold jobs, and remain a financial burden on families and friends. Of course, this could well be the characteristics of your average born loser, and gaming is a false correspondence.
Dungeons&Dragons and other such stereotypical fantasy role-playing games compose a very good activity if you want to pick one that merges intellectual and social demands.
The downside is that like anything else, it can be overdone. We are still developing the "Tragedy of the Gamer" from the early days of D&D (and later on, immersive video games). The victims of this kind of thing are still playing out their lost lives. The one thing that stands out about the Lost Gamer is extreme dependency
Two Martians are sunning themselves on a dune when a crack is heard from the sky, and then the probe hurtles down to crash nearby in the dust. All is still for a second or two, leaving the Martians to muse. Then, several explosive bolts go off and the landing cushions attempt to inflate.
One Martian looks at the other, rolls his 3 eyes, and says "Well, that proves it. There's no intelligent life on Earth."
Roger that. Lawyers love insurance companies. Since said companies drag their feet intentionally just to make you and your claim "go away", lawyers must be brought into the insurance game by claimants and "force" the company to make the settlement they were morally and legally required to do in the first place.
And so the lawyers get about a third of the settlement, or at least their $150/hr fees.
It's an interesting dynamic. Insurance companies and lawyers are the major supporters of American government. It's too bad that all these shenanigans have to be paid for by the general public one way or another.
What are you talking about? We take raw materials on Earth and "produce" things all the time. The trusses forming the structure of a spaceship must be mined, processed, melted and then formed; all these things can be done at some shared arrangement from the Lunar surface to an orbit site.
How do YOU propose instead to manufacture a space infrastructure? Make every part complete (from truss to paint) on Earth, and then spend $10K per pound to loft them into orbit? I'll call your bullshit.
Face facts. People have to start living in the space environment in order to produce a sustainable infrastructure. This is the thing you have undoubtedly written off beneath all your blather.
The Moon would act as a great shield, true. But your baseline would only be the Lunar diameter. Making radio 'scopes and positioning them around Earth orbit would also be a worthwhile project.
... perhaps resolution of individual planets in other systems. {pant, pant}
Myself, I'm jonesing for placing a large optical scope at the solar focus position, which is about 3 times farther from the Sun as our farthest probe (Pioneer 11?). The massive amplification power at the focus (provided by the Sun's mass bending an enormous volume of light around itself) should provide incredible visible observations
The best leadership is by example, and uses the methods of persuasion.
Like we joked in college in '91, is seems that Bush Sr. thought that a 500LB bomb should be called a "persuader" in the media. His tyrannical bastard of a son is only continuing the family philosophy.
If Glenn is thinking "will $5 billion get you a moonbase and Mars mission?", then he's right.
If Glenn is thinking "will $5 billion get you a Mars mission and sustained Human presence in space?", then he's dead wrong.
As I implied here in this current topic, you can't sustain operations just from the Earth. It's far too costly to haul everything you'd need and desire up that 1g gravity well and through that 40-mile blanket of air.
Earth's future as a long-term source for space operations will be small, specific cargoes like people, nuclear material, medicines, complicated equipment, etc. For bulk manufacturing, you'd have to make use of the Moon and asteroidal bodies (including comets, for their volatiles).
The Earth is very fortunate to have the Moon. The only better things for space manufacturing are asteroidal moons and even a rubble ring (like Saturn has).
... memories, rocks, lost billions and finally piles of equipment rusting in the Florida sun. A "straight to Mars" mission is almost entirely political -- with the remaining portion being some scientific intent.
A waystation is generally better served in an orbit, yes, but the Moon is a currently unparalleled manufacturing site for space development. It has only 1/6g; is abundant in sunlight, oxygen, aluminum, silicon and iron (with calcium, titanium and other traces); has no atmosphere; and is about a 3-day journey from the mother world.
The problems of the Lunar well are solved by mass drivers built on the surface. With no atmosphere to stop it, an iron bucket carrying cargo (usually basic materials mined from the Lunar regolith) can be flung off the Moon at Lunar escape velocity -- you just have to build the linear accelerator long enough. Then you have to have mass catchers in Cislunar space to capture and make use of said materials.
Really, reaching for Mars without first preparing a Lunar manufacturing site is such abominable stupidity that I can only predict the Mars Adventure will end as Apollo ended
With a well established Lunar base, all other planetary tours can take place as a side-effect of Lunar manufacturing activity. And once asteroidal missions return a sufficient chunk of volatiles to Cislunar space, shipments from Earth can be reduced to personnel and other small, specific cargoes like medicine, special equipment, biologicals and trace elements.
Er ... umm. I buy your reasoning, but can't support your numbers. If you're a working puke (not an executive), then your $100K will turn into $60K after all taxation is paid over the course of a year (income, sales, property, fees, etc.). Of that, you imply that this $100K job is found in an area where $20K can be lived on. I find that improbable. I'd have to say $30K is convincing. So, that $60K turns into $30K after that deduction, and viola! ... out of a $100K yearly income, you are only looking at $30K saved. Let's say $40K to give you some benefit of the doubt about certain factors.
... plus having the principal (~$600K) as a margin.
In 5 years, you'd have $200K. In the same area, that's over 6 years of living. If you truly did move to a $20K area, then that's 10 years.
Interest wise, at 3% return, saving $30K yearly means about $1000 extra income per year, every year. This means roughly that you might be able to work this hated job for 14(?) years before you could quit and live off the interest for the rest of your life
Oopsie, I forgot one other necessary cultural behavior for a sustainable middle class:
o Mind your own business. If your neighbor howls with delight over the $60K he "made" on the stock market, you look at him, say "good for you, Frank" and continue raking your leaves -- not run into the house and try to out-daytrade him. It used to be that "nobody cared what anybody else made" (verbatim from an old neighbor of mine), but all that ended and now we have a constant push to keep up with the Joneses. To avoid the excesses of speculation, people should just mind their own damned business.
A fine posting. I'll attempt to do it justice despite tapping it out on my lunch hour.
... after all, they should be too wealthy for welfare, but too poor to live off investments. Every dollar is a precious thing and should be scrutinized highly.
... even if you'll not live to see it, others will benefit from your sacrifice. After all, the middle class in America is the beneficiary of a long line of folks who sacrificed their economic and physical lives to make America the land of plenty that it should be today.
At several levels, the middle class had to fight for its position. If they had to wait for the wealthy to say "by Jove, we need more middle class around here, let's bally well up their wages, what what?", then the middle class would have never existed to any important extent. Thus, the middle class has certain behavioral duties to perform:
o Increase savings and reduce spending. Even if it's only a dollar a day; even if it means eating chicken when you can afford beef.
o Reduce consumption. Too much of the economy has turned over into a monstrosity that depends on too many people spending money like they were 14-yr-old girls. Conspicuous consumption drives much of that. It's unsustainable -- very fickle and singularly lacking in economic merit. Some Sheryl Crow song lyric paraphrased it best: Don't get what you want; want what you've got. With a lifestyle based upon consumption, marked aberrations like "service economy" and "city dweller" arise.
o Cultivate independence. For the middle class, wealth is best controlled directly and locally. If you are dependent upon anything, then those things will siphon your wealth away. The middle class should be remarkably independent
o Complain. Confrontation does work, you just have to accept that that is the slow way of pain that will eventually fix the problem for a long time. (This is how diet and exercise work.) The silent majority have tolerated almost any crime. For each person, something is wrong. Each of those can be addressed. And of course, the first place to fix blame is at home; starting with yourself, then your family, then expanding outward to co-workers and neighbors, and finally butting up against larger populations like fellow city and state folk (primarily through the mechanisms of voting and political involvement (who was it that said?: "all politics is local")).
If the criminal underclass of the poor, combined with the criminal overclass of the wealthy, manage to convince us -- the middle class -- that we're doomed, then we're truly doomed and we'll be extinguished. Fighting for your rights is painful, but you have to keep your eyes on the prize
"I am absolutely driven by people saying I can't do something."
Having seen it in action, tenacity is not just beneficial in the "business environment" -- it's necessary. Due to the combination of people attacking you while others fail to defend you, you have quite a battle on your hands.
This doesn't excuse McBride's choice of combat methodology, but it does explain why he isn't stopping.
I find your terminology disturbing. Stop "asking". Stop asking for "chances".
... goddammit, shoot back, you twit -- you're being shot at in the first place!
The people with their noses in the air are the ones dismissively telling us that "no one owes you a living". But this is America, the land of plenty, where you can drive from sea to shining sea over paved roads on essentially pocket money. This is the land of prosperity with hundreds of miles of waving grain. Why should anyone have to starve? Why should anyone find their household goods placed at the curb?
Don't ask; demand. Demand that we have the opportunity to earn a living. It used to be more than enough that the wealthy could have their large houses on the hill while the middle class had their picket-fenced homes down in the valley. That was a stable society that well merited the name "the best country on Earth". But now the homes on the hill are growing while the ones in the valley are being downsized. This is greed at its ugliest. It's a clear class war. And since it's war
The people who are cashing out your factories and moving that wealth offshore are taking advantage of the American cultural stability to loot the nation. Stop them. When your local city council hands out tax abatements by the bucket load, vote them out and install the hard liners who recognize that all that wealth is OURS, not just the exclusive property of a miniscule elite. We are all in this together. That wealth could not have been attained unless we worked to make the stability under which it grew. We all have a stake in society.
This sentiment would make "Build Your Own Nuclear Weapon" a wee bit too expensive to buy.
Your sentiment is correct. If we want to talk about "caller ID for email", then you have to consider what happened to "caller ID for phones".
... callers and receivers. The receivers pay to check on incoming calls, and callers pay to block being identified. The end products are user confusion and telco revenue.
Caller ID started out being very promising. Even with the upcoming cellphones (which were mobile), the unchanging number would be a good identity check. The assurance of this system came from the fact that the phone system was centralized. You could rely on the telco to enforce caller ID.
Of course, that changed, since the telcos ditched the responsibility portion of caller ID, and went onto a revenue-increase model. In effect, they allowed an arms race to exist, and then sold to both sides. Now, instead of enforcing caller ID and selling a box/service to the receiver user, they simply sell checking and blocking options to all users
W00t! Some telco exec gets another bonus.
And caller ID is useless. It is now impossible to properly ID incoming calls to avoid the ones of your choosing. The old method (call-screening with an answering machine) is the only thing that works 100% to stop bothersome calls.
You have a point, but it only goes so far. One perfectly valid motivation for saying "tax the rich fairly" is that The Rest Of Us {tm} have noticed that tax loopholes are so outrageous that the wealthier one gets, the less proportionate tax one pays.
... which applies to everybody without exception. At this point, a particular needs to be shouted: WITHOUT EXCEPTION. If a man makes $100 during the year, he owes ten bucks (and not one cent less) regardless of his hardship. And the man raking in $200 million (a la Grasso) had better cough up twenty mill -- and not a dollar less.
I'm so personally disgusted by the elitism implied by tax laws, that I'm entirely willing to shoulder a 10% flat tax
The Democrats want tax loopholes to justify welfare for the poor, and the Republicans want them so the wealthy can dodge taxation. This will never be fixed; we will never have a real flat tax. And if a consumption tax is installed instead of an income tax, then we will see the wealthy banding together under the cover of exempted "wholesale clubs" or "foreign importers" to take advantage of some loophole that allows them (leaving the lower- and middle-classes to shoulder the tax burden at local stores -- a non-exempt activity).
Given a matching environment, you are correct. Lie.
If we're talking about losing your job in the American Midwest, then the solution is to make a fraudulent resume that papers over the holes.
Because, if you don't, you'll find out that employers deal with employment holes by simply tossing your resume into the reject pile. There are always plenty more bodies where yours came from.
Free Clue {tm} for employers: If you don't want to be lied to, don't try killing people with your whims.
Firstly, why not continue having your father take care of your taxes? Pay him for his services, Mr. New Adult.
... Volunteer Income Tax Assistance. You are trained by the IRS to help other citizens complete their tax forms. I was in it in the 80s.
Secondly, see if the IRS still runs its VITA program
I imagine a CEO pretty much lies constantly.
... all to support the stock price. This is the modern business environment.
Yes. The job of a modern CEO is to cheat, steal, lie, and avoid the whole truth
And you all wanted it this way, since you are all so in love with your stock portfolios. Enjoy it while it lasts.
The entire nature of the orginal argument revolves around a specific trust that we cannot dispute unless we cross a cultural line.
... but essentially you will only get your money back, as every piece of commercial software has a disclaimer against fitness of purpose.
... but Microsoft's reputation isn't supported by its documented bugs.
This trust says "a better product is produced when it is contracted and paid for", and also contains the implied "a bad product is the result of volunteer work".
I'm willing to cross that line. To start, when addressing the original argument, I'd have to ask "why do you trust a product more when it has a price tag, or when it was produced by an entity with overhead costs"?
Perhaps it's an issue of civil contract laws
Perhaps it's an issue of business reputation
I support open source, but come on guys, would you really want Linux supporting your nuclear arsonal?
Yes, I would, if the US government decided to ditch its programmer employees and instead buy the Microsoft {tm} Warzone {R} suite of programs for managing their nuclear sites and deployment. Government programmers at least have duty to country over them, but Microsoft's employees are too motivated by monetary compensation.
And on top of all this, why not try OSS for mangement of weapon systems? CSS relies on security by obscurity, which fails in time, while the OSS code is out there for all the hacking you can do with it, which leads to bullet-proofing.
If I were the program manager for government weapons system integration and management, I'd make unarmed and nonfueled test systems with the same infrastructure, and I'd deploy them first for some time in real environments with big red signs saying "PLEASE HACK ME". By the time Al Qaeda got around to attacking these systems for real, they'll be hacked and patched enough to foil them.
Here's what I sent:
"
A manned reach for Mars, without first establishing a manufacturing base upon Luna, will only repeat the mistake of the Apollo Program.
Apollo's mistake was characterized by unsustainable infrastructure. The Moon was only reached by a very waste-intensive launch system that could not deliver much to its destination. To correct that, Apollo should have followed a sensible station program, which would have come first to establish a modest "space station" in Earth orbit. That would have served as a necessary waystation.
Luna is the minimum waystation for a sustainable infrastructure for Mars; and it can be even more than a waystation with our ability to manufacture structures from the aluminum, oxygen, silicon and iron in the Lunar regolith. Without the Lunar manufacturing base, we will launch expensive loads from Earth and will not have any way to amortize that investment over other missions; in effect, the return on that type of investment in Mars will be too intangible. Eventually the intangibles will pile up, the adventure will be viewed as a bad investment, and the entire enterprise will be abandoned.
Learn from Apollo or be condemned to repeat that grand mistake.
"