When Kennedy made his speech, the situation was very different:
The USSR was a superpower that was openly hostile to the USA.
The USSR had put a satellite in space before the USA.
The USSR had put a man in space before the USA.
Space was seen as an important strategic location in the Cold War (spy satellites and orbital weapons were expected to play a major part in any nuclear conflict).
Going to the moon was a bit of pointless dick waving. The real objective was control of LEO for deploying enough observation satellites to spot a Soviet launch, and ideally enough warheads to have both first and second strike capabilities that were impossible for the Russians to knock out. If the USSR got there first (as it looked as if they might) then they would have the ability to destroy all major population centres in the USA in a first strike and have a significant amount of advanced warning of any surviving second strike capability.
A President couldn't get up on the podium and say 'My fellow Americans, the USSR is currently handing us our asses and we're probably all going to die unless we spend a load of money on developing a space warfare capability'. It would be political suicide. Getting a man on the Moon, however, was something that people could understand and get behind and most of the related technology would be useful in a space-based conflict. More importantly, perhaps, it gave the USA a stronger negotiating position and meant that both sides could agree to ban the weaponisation of space without it looking as if they were handing the other a massive advantage.
Now, fast forward to the present. The other superpower is China, but they're not really interested in a nuclear war - they'd lose as much as you. A space-based deterrent is of little value, and if it were to become useful then the USAF can already deploy one quite easily. So the only reason for a manned space program would be the benefits coming from it directly. A base on the Moon? Well, the Moon is a good source of several isotopes that are good for fission, but there are two major problems with that: The first is the lack of a working fusion reactor. The second is that sea water is a cheaper source of these isotopes (they're less concentrated, but purifying a few thousand gallons of sea water is a lot easier than building a Moon base...). Aside from that? It's probably a good place to build telescopes, but not much better than Earth orbit, and there's no reason why a telescope needs to be manned. Other than flag waving, what is the point of a moon base?
This shift raises questions about how the new ownership will affect the company's ability to innovate and remain on the forefront of social media
Yes, that's exactly what I thought. Well, actually what I thought was 'I wonder how much money the investors in the Goldman Sachs Facebook fund will make out of this bubble,' but your version sounds better.
However, why should a large supermarket be open 24/7?
All of the ones near me (in the UK) are. I used to go shopping at about 9pm because then you could go around very quickly and not queue for anything, because the place would be completely empty. Now, however, they all deliver for a small fee. I pay £3.50 to have someone else do my supermarket shopping for me and deliver it to my door - well worth it.
It's based on what happened to British food when the country went bust after WW2
It started before that. When rationing came in in the second world war, most people didn't know how to cook anything with their ration allowance so the government launched a 'meat and two veg' campaign, telling you how to cook simple things in this formula that could be made with the ration allowance and telling you to substitute things (e.g. margarine for butter, even when totally inappropriate). Meanwhile, other countries in Europe just went back to their peasant recipes that had spent a thousand years developing things that were nice to eat when you had a shortage of raw ingredients.
The problem was largely due to the class system - no one wanted to eat lower-class food, they wanted to eat middle-class food, but without the ingredients they substituted things and got horrible results. People who learned to cook during the war and then the rationing afterwards learned these techniques and were never exposed to good food. It didn't really start to improve until trips to France became cheap in the '70s and British people realised what good food was meant to taste like and rediscovered the older recipes that went out of fashion in or before the '30s, plus a load of imported ideas.
The the price/value ratio is very very high. Higher than in most country.
A quick search gave me only numbers from 2000. Back then, France was ranked seventh in terms of amount spent on healthcare per capita, spending $2,349. The USA was ranked top, spending $4,631 - about twice as much. For reference, the highest in Europe was Switzerland at $3,222.00 (#2) and the highest in the EU was Germany at $2,748 (#3). So, in comparison with the rest of the EU, France spends quite a lot per person, but in comparison with the USA it doesn't spend all that much. In absolute terms, the price/value ratio might be low, but in comparison with the USA...
More seriously, take a look at this map. It only covers the more famous ones - there are a lot produced within about 40 miles of me that aren't on that map - but it does show that there's a lot more to British cheese than just cheddar. Unfortunately, most supermarkets tend to have quite a poor range and you need to go to a cheese shop to get a better selection.
Oh, and if the French stopped exporting cheese, I'd miss reblochon a lot more than roquefort. There are some nice bries and camemberts made in Somerset, so that's not a problem. There's even a decent mozzarella (approved by some of my Italian friends) made in Devon...
PC Gamer was the magazine for people that wanted to be gamers. PC Zone was the magazine for people who were gamers. It didn't suffer from the grade inflation that appeared in a lot of its competitors. I remember Lemmings 3D getting 9% in their review (I actually played it a few years later, and decided that they'd been quite generous there).
Wealth may not be an indicator of value, but the size of a company definitely does impact how newsworthy it is. If my local computer shop does something, then this is far less likely to be newsworthy than if, say HP does the same thing, simply because it will affect a lot more people.
In this case, it sounds like he's actually doing some good. Quite a few of his other donations have come with massive strings attached: i.e. we'll buy large quantities of drugs for your country if you sign an IP protection treaty with the USA. The justification is that the drug companies won't sell the drugs for export to a country that doesn't respect US patents. The fact that the treaties also happen to include things that directly benefit some of BG's other investments is just a happy side effect...
Sure, but for older papers that requires getting a copy sent from a copyright library (which is the only place likely to keep very old copies of journals - in my case I was interested in some of the first papers published in a particular topic). For older journals, you'll have to fill in the request, wait for it to be processed, and then wait for the paper to arrive at your library, which can take up to a month, at which point you can't take it with you and have to read it in the library. Quite a lot of effort compared to just downloading the scanned version, and probably not much cheaper...
They have subscriptions, but not to everything. Often the subscriptions only cover the last 1-2 years, so once a paper is more than 2 years old people have to pay for it. The way Elsevier bundles their subscriptions means that it's pretty common for someone to have access to the top-tier journals for free, but not to the second tier ones (which, for example, good PhD students will submit to).
I've been working freelance for the last couple of years. I actually have interviewed recently - at Google - and I didn't find them arrogant. Their interviews were a mixture of determining if I was technically competent and trying to persuade me that they were an interesting company, location, and team to work for. My experiences may be different from you - I live in the UK, and interviewed in Paris. I'm also not actively looking for a job, but they sent me an unsolicited invitation to an interview and it looks like it could be fun. That said, two of my interviewers were there on relatively short-term placements from the USA and would have been giving pretty similar interviews to people in leftpondia.
I've also not encountered much by way of arrogance from companies that I do freelance work for, several of which are based in the USA.
If everyone you talk to behaving in a certain way, then perhaps you should consider that the common factor is you...
The problem is defining the market rate. That's more or less the rule for H1Bs at the moment, but when you hire a 'software developer' the going rate includes an average of people with decades of experience writing C for embedded microcontrollers and fresh graduates writing PHP. If you're hiring someone in the first category, then the average wage that you'll be comparing the salary that you offer against will be a lot lower than the average within that subfield.
You're missing the point of journals. Any scientist can publish any insane idea. That's what technical reports are: things that are the result of research (or thought experiments, or random ramblings) but are not peer reviewed. These are trivial to publish and get DOIs assigned for. A journal paper or a conference paper that's in the proceedings is a bit more than that. It's something that (some subset of) the community has put their stamp of approval on. If you read the proceedings from the latest SIGPLAN, for example, then you will get an overview of the current state of the art in programming language design and implementation. If you read the proceedings of the latest SIGRAPH then you will get an overview of the current state of the art in computer graphics. You can be sure that anything that you read in these will be up to standard not just in terms of the research but in terms of citing things that it builds on and other related work (making it easy to get a broader overview).
Setting up the website is easy, even finding reviewers is probablly not that hard. The difficult bit is convinving people to chose your journal over the established one
That's why you need buy-in from a few established name. In most fields there are a dozen or so people that almost all of the community respects. If these people are the board for your new journal, then it is instantly credible. In the case of JOT, having Bertrand Meyer as the editor does this, and if you look at the board you'll see a list of names of people at the top of the field.
Oh and someone has to pay for your new journal (afaict reviewers do get paid even if it's only a nominal ammount) so if you are open access you will probablly have to charge authours to cover the cost of peer review
Reviewers are sometimes paid, but most of the time, for academics, this money just goes into their grant fund or, in some cases, into a general department fund. It's not really a motivating factor. I've never received money for reviews I've done for journals. Again, using JOT as an example, they don't pay reviewers, nor do they charge authors.
It's important to realise that individual academics and students within instituations don't directly pay for access to most papers from our budgets just like we don't directly pay for "core" software
That depends. If the journal is in one of the bundles that your institution subscribes to, then it is 'free' to the end user. If it isn't, then you pay $30 or so, and this comes out of your grant, which means filling in extra paperwork. I've been in exactly the situation that I outlined in another post: papers that I wanted to read were in an Elsevier journal and my institution only had the subscription for the latest few issues - if I wanted older papers I had to pay. As a PhD student, doing this meant getting approval from my supervisor, filling in a form, getting him to sign it, and so on. As a lazy PhD student, this meant just reading papers that cited the one I was interested in that were published in open access journals, and citing them instead...
Indeed. I did some reviews when I was a PhD student. Someone at a journal knows my PhD supervisor and says 'do you have anyone who knows a bit about this stuff?' He then nominates me, and I do a review. Typically the paper is reviewed by about 4 people in this way, and then a committee reads the reviews and decides whether or not to accept. You usually have to fill in a set of questions including how you'd rate your knowledge of the subject. I've had papers back from review where a reviewer rates his knowledge of the subject area as 1 out of 5 (although this usually doesn't stop them from listing a load of criticisms...)
There are several points to journals. The first is to have a fixed, published and immutable, snapshot of some research that people can refer to in the future. At the very least, this has to be hosted by someone other than the author (for obvious reasons), and it generally needs a DOI assigned so that it can be easily referenced and uniquely identified in the future.
The second, obviously, is peer review. Anyone can, for example, put a bit of research on their blog or on arxive.org. They can then get feedback immediately, which is useful for them, but people wanting to read about a subject want to have a filter - a set of papers that they can read that the community agrees are up to a certain standard.
The problem is that academics get all of those benefits from papers that people read and most importantly from ones that they cite. A research paper that is never cited does very little to an academic's reputation. Elsevier tries very hard to restrict access to their journals. Unless you buy a subscription to a load of them together you are likely to end up paying $10-30 or more for each paper that you might want to read. Most people, when they encounter this kind of paywall will just go elsewhere and read someone else's related work. And then they'll cite the paper that the other person wrote and it's as if yours doesn't exist.
If you have the support of the community, it's apparently not that hard to replace an established journal. In 2001, the Journal of Object-Oriented Programming was shut down by its new publisher. The Journal of Object Technology stepped into the gap, with the same set of reviewers, but no print publication just open access online-only publication. I'm a bit surprised that more fields haven't followed suit. If you've got a dozen respected researchers who are willing to do reviews, it's easy to start a new journal.
There actually is already a process in a lot of jurisdictions where you can void copyright claims. If you publish a claim in a publication of note (typically a national journal) and the copyright holder does not step forward, then you can accomplish this. Simply requiring copyright to be registered if someone wants to hold it for more than, say, 10 years would have a similar effect - you get 10 years automatically, and if you want another 10 then you have to explicitly claim it, at which point your contact details are available.
(1) He can veto, and veto, and veto again any budgets that increase spending. He can just sit tight until the Congress finally he gives him a balanced budget (or close to one).
Or until congress gets a 2/3 majority, at which point they can override him.
(2) As Commander-in-Chief he could end the slaughter of innocent men, women, and children in Afghanistan almost immediately. He's simply order them to withdraw and come home.
And that worked really so last time you did it, at the end of the Cold War...
(3) Also Ron Paul founded the Liberty Caucus in the Congress. It has about 100 members. All they need to do is swing a few Republicans and Democrats to join their cause, in order to get the 51% majority needed to pass laws. (Such as a repeal of the NDAA and Patriot Act.)
51% means 218 Representatives and 51 Senators. So, if it has 100 members and they are proportionally distributed between the two houses then it needs the agreement from 169 others to get to that 51%. I'm not sure where you get the 'about 100' from, the only membership list I found lists 22.
So far this thread you've demonstrated ignorance of politics, economics, history, and mathematics. What's next on your list?
The official inflation rate in the USA is 3.5%. The actual inflation rate depends how you measure it, but it at least 3.5% and possibly over 5%. So, an increase of 2% in dollars in one year is a decrease in real terms of about 1.5%. But you knew that, right?
It reminds me a bit of The New Statesman: the economy is crap and neither of the parties wants to win the next election or they'll end up taking the blame when it gets worse. They're both hoping that the other one will win, be staggeringly unpopular for the next four years, and then guarantee that they won't be elected again for several terms...
Unlike the pie-in-the 'investments' of the current administration (that were payoffs for campaign kickbacks), the space program has a proven record of spinoffs that have been good for the country and of all humanity.
Really?
The computers you are reading this on,
Nope, they were developed by and for private industry, although some big defence contracts (for modelling nuclear explosions and code breaking, not for NASA) did help kickstart the industry in the '50s.
the satellites that move countless terabytes of information,
There were already satellites in space before Kennedy even considered the moon. They had clear military uses, so were going to be funded with or without the big 'lets' show the Russians we have big dicks' Apollo projects. Commercial satellites were a result of the obvious benefits from those military projects, not from someone planting a flag on a lump of rock.
even the fuel cells that might power the next generation of MacBooks all had their genesis from NASA research.
The first fuel cells were developed long before NASA came along. GE developed the next generation and then sold them to NASA - the ones used by NASA were the result of development partially funded by NASA, but it was an existing research project at GE. In fact, if you look at the history of fuel cell developments, you'll see a lot of commercial R&D and a tiny bit of government R&D. Not a great example.
Not to mention that the BEST place to get experience with a serious Mars trip is our own moon
That's true, they have the same sort of rotational period, the same sort of atmosphere, and similar gravity and terrain. Oh, wait. None of those is actually true. In fact, you will get a more Mars-like experience in Antarctica than on the moon...
Slashdot Mirror
Going to the moon was a bit of pointless dick waving. The real objective was control of LEO for deploying enough observation satellites to spot a Soviet launch, and ideally enough warheads to have both first and second strike capabilities that were impossible for the Russians to knock out. If the USSR got there first (as it looked as if they might) then they would have the ability to destroy all major population centres in the USA in a first strike and have a significant amount of advanced warning of any surviving second strike capability.
A President couldn't get up on the podium and say 'My fellow Americans, the USSR is currently handing us our asses and we're probably all going to die unless we spend a load of money on developing a space warfare capability'. It would be political suicide. Getting a man on the Moon, however, was something that people could understand and get behind and most of the related technology would be useful in a space-based conflict. More importantly, perhaps, it gave the USA a stronger negotiating position and meant that both sides could agree to ban the weaponisation of space without it looking as if they were handing the other a massive advantage.
Now, fast forward to the present. The other superpower is China, but they're not really interested in a nuclear war - they'd lose as much as you. A space-based deterrent is of little value, and if it were to become useful then the USAF can already deploy one quite easily. So the only reason for a manned space program would be the benefits coming from it directly. A base on the Moon? Well, the Moon is a good source of several isotopes that are good for fission, but there are two major problems with that: The first is the lack of a working fusion reactor. The second is that sea water is a cheaper source of these isotopes (they're less concentrated, but purifying a few thousand gallons of sea water is a lot easier than building a Moon base...). Aside from that? It's probably a good place to build telescopes, but not much better than Earth orbit, and there's no reason why a telescope needs to be manned. Other than flag waving, what is the point of a moon base?
Facebook does quite a lot of research in data mining. You probably don't see it because you're their product, not their customer.
This shift raises questions about how the new ownership will affect the company's ability to innovate and remain on the forefront of social media
Yes, that's exactly what I thought. Well, actually what I thought was 'I wonder how much money the investors in the Goldman Sachs Facebook fund will make out of this bubble,' but your version sounds better.
However, why should a large supermarket be open 24/7?
All of the ones near me (in the UK) are. I used to go shopping at about 9pm because then you could go around very quickly and not queue for anything, because the place would be completely empty. Now, however, they all deliver for a small fee. I pay £3.50 to have someone else do my supermarket shopping for me and deliver it to my door - well worth it.
It's based on what happened to British food when the country went bust after WW2
It started before that. When rationing came in in the second world war, most people didn't know how to cook anything with their ration allowance so the government launched a 'meat and two veg' campaign, telling you how to cook simple things in this formula that could be made with the ration allowance and telling you to substitute things (e.g. margarine for butter, even when totally inappropriate). Meanwhile, other countries in Europe just went back to their peasant recipes that had spent a thousand years developing things that were nice to eat when you had a shortage of raw ingredients.
The problem was largely due to the class system - no one wanted to eat lower-class food, they wanted to eat middle-class food, but without the ingredients they substituted things and got horrible results. People who learned to cook during the war and then the rationing afterwards learned these techniques and were never exposed to good food. It didn't really start to improve until trips to France became cheap in the '70s and British people realised what good food was meant to taste like and rediscovered the older recipes that went out of fashion in or before the '30s, plus a load of imported ideas.
The the price/value ratio is very very high. Higher than in most country.
A quick search gave me only numbers from 2000. Back then, France was ranked seventh in terms of amount spent on healthcare per capita, spending $2,349. The USA was ranked top, spending $4,631 - about twice as much. For reference, the highest in Europe was Switzerland at $3,222.00 (#2) and the highest in the EU was Germany at $2,748 (#3). So, in comparison with the rest of the EU, France spends quite a lot per person, but in comparison with the USA it doesn't spend all that much. In absolute terms, the price/value ratio might be low, but in comparison with the USA...
Oh, and if the French stopped exporting cheese, I'd miss reblochon a lot more than roquefort. There are some nice bries and camemberts made in Somerset, so that's not a problem. There's even a decent mozzarella (approved by some of my Italian friends) made in Devon...
PC Gamer was the magazine for people that wanted to be gamers. PC Zone was the magazine for people who were gamers. It didn't suffer from the grade inflation that appeared in a lot of its competitors. I remember Lemmings 3D getting 9% in their review (I actually played it a few years later, and decided that they'd been quite generous there).
Wealth may not be an indicator of value, but the size of a company definitely does impact how newsworthy it is. If my local computer shop does something, then this is far less likely to be newsworthy than if, say HP does the same thing, simply because it will affect a lot more people.
In this case, it sounds like he's actually doing some good. Quite a few of his other donations have come with massive strings attached: i.e. we'll buy large quantities of drugs for your country if you sign an IP protection treaty with the USA. The justification is that the drug companies won't sell the drugs for export to a country that doesn't respect US patents. The fact that the treaties also happen to include things that directly benefit some of BG's other investments is just a happy side effect...
Sure, but for older papers that requires getting a copy sent from a copyright library (which is the only place likely to keep very old copies of journals - in my case I was interested in some of the first papers published in a particular topic). For older journals, you'll have to fill in the request, wait for it to be processed, and then wait for the paper to arrive at your library, which can take up to a month, at which point you can't take it with you and have to read it in the library. Quite a lot of effort compared to just downloading the scanned version, and probably not much cheaper...
They have subscriptions, but not to everything. Often the subscriptions only cover the last 1-2 years, so once a paper is more than 2 years old people have to pay for it. The way Elsevier bundles their subscriptions means that it's pretty common for someone to have access to the top-tier journals for free, but not to the second tier ones (which, for example, good PhD students will submit to).
I've been working freelance for the last couple of years. I actually have interviewed recently - at Google - and I didn't find them arrogant. Their interviews were a mixture of determining if I was technically competent and trying to persuade me that they were an interesting company, location, and team to work for. My experiences may be different from you - I live in the UK, and interviewed in Paris. I'm also not actively looking for a job, but they sent me an unsolicited invitation to an interview and it looks like it could be fun. That said, two of my interviewers were there on relatively short-term placements from the USA and would have been giving pretty similar interviews to people in leftpondia.
I've also not encountered much by way of arrogance from companies that I do freelance work for, several of which are based in the USA.
If everyone you talk to behaving in a certain way, then perhaps you should consider that the common factor is you...
The problem is defining the market rate. That's more or less the rule for H1Bs at the moment, but when you hire a 'software developer' the going rate includes an average of people with decades of experience writing C for embedded microcontrollers and fresh graduates writing PHP. If you're hiring someone in the first category, then the average wage that you'll be comparing the salary that you offer against will be a lot lower than the average within that subfield.
You're missing the point of journals. Any scientist can publish any insane idea. That's what technical reports are: things that are the result of research (or thought experiments, or random ramblings) but are not peer reviewed. These are trivial to publish and get DOIs assigned for. A journal paper or a conference paper that's in the proceedings is a bit more than that. It's something that (some subset of) the community has put their stamp of approval on. If you read the proceedings from the latest SIGPLAN, for example, then you will get an overview of the current state of the art in programming language design and implementation. If you read the proceedings of the latest SIGRAPH then you will get an overview of the current state of the art in computer graphics. You can be sure that anything that you read in these will be up to standard not just in terms of the research but in terms of citing things that it builds on and other related work (making it easy to get a broader overview).
Setting up the website is easy, even finding reviewers is probablly not that hard. The difficult bit is convinving people to chose your journal over the established one
That's why you need buy-in from a few established name. In most fields there are a dozen or so people that almost all of the community respects. If these people are the board for your new journal, then it is instantly credible. In the case of JOT, having Bertrand Meyer as the editor does this, and if you look at the board you'll see a list of names of people at the top of the field.
Oh and someone has to pay for your new journal (afaict reviewers do get paid even if it's only a nominal ammount) so if you are open access you will probablly have to charge authours to cover the cost of peer review
Reviewers are sometimes paid, but most of the time, for academics, this money just goes into their grant fund or, in some cases, into a general department fund. It's not really a motivating factor. I've never received money for reviews I've done for journals. Again, using JOT as an example, they don't pay reviewers, nor do they charge authors.
It's important to realise that individual academics and students within instituations don't directly pay for access to most papers from our budgets just like we don't directly pay for "core" software
That depends. If the journal is in one of the bundles that your institution subscribes to, then it is 'free' to the end user. If it isn't, then you pay $30 or so, and this comes out of your grant, which means filling in extra paperwork. I've been in exactly the situation that I outlined in another post: papers that I wanted to read were in an Elsevier journal and my institution only had the subscription for the latest few issues - if I wanted older papers I had to pay. As a PhD student, doing this meant getting approval from my supervisor, filling in a form, getting him to sign it, and so on. As a lazy PhD student, this meant just reading papers that cited the one I was interested in that were published in open access journals, and citing them instead...
Indeed. I did some reviews when I was a PhD student. Someone at a journal knows my PhD supervisor and says 'do you have anyone who knows a bit about this stuff?' He then nominates me, and I do a review. Typically the paper is reviewed by about 4 people in this way, and then a committee reads the reviews and decides whether or not to accept. You usually have to fill in a set of questions including how you'd rate your knowledge of the subject. I've had papers back from review where a reviewer rates his knowledge of the subject area as 1 out of 5 (although this usually doesn't stop them from listing a load of criticisms...)
There are several points to journals. The first is to have a fixed, published and immutable, snapshot of some research that people can refer to in the future. At the very least, this has to be hosted by someone other than the author (for obvious reasons), and it generally needs a DOI assigned so that it can be easily referenced and uniquely identified in the future.
The second, obviously, is peer review. Anyone can, for example, put a bit of research on their blog or on arxive.org. They can then get feedback immediately, which is useful for them, but people wanting to read about a subject want to have a filter - a set of papers that they can read that the community agrees are up to a certain standard.
The problem is that academics get all of those benefits from papers that people read and most importantly from ones that they cite. A research paper that is never cited does very little to an academic's reputation. Elsevier tries very hard to restrict access to their journals. Unless you buy a subscription to a load of them together you are likely to end up paying $10-30 or more for each paper that you might want to read. Most people, when they encounter this kind of paywall will just go elsewhere and read someone else's related work. And then they'll cite the paper that the other person wrote and it's as if yours doesn't exist.
If you have the support of the community, it's apparently not that hard to replace an established journal. In 2001, the Journal of Object-Oriented Programming was shut down by its new publisher. The Journal of Object Technology stepped into the gap, with the same set of reviewers, but no print publication just open access online-only publication. I'm a bit surprised that more fields haven't followed suit. If you've got a dozen respected researchers who are willing to do reviews, it's easy to start a new journal.
There actually is already a process in a lot of jurisdictions where you can void copyright claims. If you publish a claim in a publication of note (typically a national journal) and the copyright holder does not step forward, then you can accomplish this. Simply requiring copyright to be registered if someone wants to hold it for more than, say, 10 years would have a similar effect - you get 10 years automatically, and if you want another 10 then you have to explicitly claim it, at which point your contact details are available.
(1) He can veto, and veto, and veto again any budgets that increase spending. He can just sit tight until the Congress finally he gives him a balanced budget (or close to one).
Or until congress gets a 2/3 majority, at which point they can override him.
(2) As Commander-in-Chief he could end the slaughter of innocent men, women, and children in Afghanistan almost immediately. He's simply order them to withdraw and come home.
And that worked really so last time you did it, at the end of the Cold War...
(3) Also Ron Paul founded the Liberty Caucus in the Congress. It has about 100 members. All they need to do is swing a few Republicans and Democrats to join their cause, in order to get the 51% majority needed to pass laws. (Such as a repeal of the NDAA and Patriot Act.)
51% means 218 Representatives and 51 Senators. So, if it has 100 members and they are proportionally distributed between the two houses then it needs the agreement from 169 others to get to that 51%. I'm not sure where you get the 'about 100' from, the only membership list I found lists 22.
So far this thread you've demonstrated ignorance of politics, economics, history, and mathematics. What's next on your list?
The official inflation rate in the USA is 3.5%. The actual inflation rate depends how you measure it, but it at least 3.5% and possibly over 5%. So, an increase of 2% in dollars in one year is a decrease in real terms of about 1.5%. But you knew that, right?
It reminds me a bit of The New Statesman: the economy is crap and neither of the parties wants to win the next election or they'll end up taking the blame when it gets worse. They're both hoping that the other one will win, be staggeringly unpopular for the next four years, and then guarantee that they won't be elected again for several terms...
Unlike the pie-in-the 'investments' of the current administration (that were payoffs for campaign kickbacks), the space program has a proven record of spinoffs that have been good for the country and of all humanity.
Really?
The computers you are reading this on,
Nope, they were developed by and for private industry, although some big defence contracts (for modelling nuclear explosions and code breaking, not for NASA) did help kickstart the industry in the '50s.
the satellites that move countless terabytes of information,
There were already satellites in space before Kennedy even considered the moon. They had clear military uses, so were going to be funded with or without the big 'lets' show the Russians we have big dicks' Apollo projects. Commercial satellites were a result of the obvious benefits from those military projects, not from someone planting a flag on a lump of rock.
even the fuel cells that might power the next generation of MacBooks all had their genesis from NASA research.
The first fuel cells were developed long before NASA came along. GE developed the next generation and then sold them to NASA - the ones used by NASA were the result of development partially funded by NASA, but it was an existing research project at GE. In fact, if you look at the history of fuel cell developments, you'll see a lot of commercial R&D and a tiny bit of government R&D. Not a great example.
Not to mention that the BEST place to get experience with a serious Mars trip is our own moon
That's true, they have the same sort of rotational period, the same sort of atmosphere, and similar gravity and terrain. Oh, wait. None of those is actually true. In fact, you will get a more Mars-like experience in Antarctica than on the moon...