I'm not advocating anarchy here, but I think it would be possible for voluntary donations to fund a government. If "paying your fair share" is an amount you consider useful for operating the government, you would pay it. Doing that would also have the side effect of keeping the size of the government under control as they could only spend what people are willing to give them... and have the government even more interested in genuine economic prosperity as that would impact how much money they would receive.
Freeloaders exist in any society. At least those who don't make donations would be seen as the freeloaders they really are.
The presumption that the commentator on the link you provided makes is that the only possible form that a corporation can be incorporated in has an explicit clause which overrides all other clauses to "maximize profits and increase shareholder equity". It is a common clause in most corporate charters, but it is possible to incorporate without this clause.
I'd agree though that other corporate forms and charters ought to be encouraged as a matter of state law where earning a profit may not even be a major consideration. Those kind of corporations do exist after a fashion as "non-profit organizations", but a third way of allowing a company to make a profit (and paying taxes) but having social responsibilities as well could be encouraged too.
What are you going to cut? Medicare and social security that the rich don't pay taxes on? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Trump! You say "more to our genocidal government", did you notice that since Ford, no war has been started by a Democrat President, and every Republican President since then has started a war? Maybe if you don't like our "genocidal" government you might think about not voting for borrow-and-spend, anti-tax warmongers next time you're at the polls?
Carter invaded Iran, and Clinton not only invaded Yugoslavia, but also Haiti (at least sent troops against the will of those in control of the country). The only president who hasn't gone a warmongering is Obama... and that is because he was stuck in a war already. Oh.... he did send stuff into Libya and is considering going into Syria.... and if Kim Jong-Un goes real stupid he could even be embroiled in still another war.
You need to go back to Herbert Hoover to find a U.S. President that didn't get involved in a foreign war of some kind. I seriously doubt this is a Democrat vs. Republican thing to even bring up.
You may be happy to pay these taxes, but what about people who aren't? Do you insist that those who refuse should be compelled at gunpoint to pay these taxes, just like a common thug and highwayman from ancient times? Under other circumstances, you would be considered an accomplice to a felony for insisting that others have their money confiscated. You are just dressing this up in something nice and "legal" because your thugs are the "good guys" and some free lancing thugs are the "bad guys".
I have the option of eating at my state university's cafeteria, but I get charged for the privilege at least as much as the students do.
That is strictly because the university has chosen explicitly not to give you that extra benefit for whatever reason they have made that decision. It isn't universal though and may be something more unique to your current circumstances (even if it is a widespread practice at most universities). I'm not even suggesting that professors or staff at universities (I am presuming you hold some employment with the university based on context of the post) should get free meals as there may be some really good reasons to encourage cafeterias at such locations to charge everybody the same amount. Still, there is no reason why it can't be made into a "fringe benefit".
Most university cafeterias are usually a profit center for the university, thus when you eat there you are paying for the labor + utilities + food and other aspects involved in the preparation of that food you are eating and even giving a little bit extra to the university that will be spent elsewhere (including your salary). That isn't universal though, and it is common for cafeterias in public schools (K-12) to be heavily subsidized with government and even district funds.
to call this a Google problem is just looking for a reason to be bitchy at those who have more than you.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
It's generally accepted as true that great disparity of wealth in a society is harmful to the economy as a whole. When wealth is distributed unequally, there are in practice more poor people than wealthy people. When the poor make up too large a proportion of society, economic activity slows, which in turn creates more poor people, etc.
That being said, it's in everyone's best interest, both poor and rich alike, to keep the distribution of wealth reasonable. Not necessarily even across the board, but reasonable.
You assume that having disparity of wealth is a bad thing and harmful. Why is it bad that somebody who has come up with a unique idea or has worked harder and been responsible for how they spend their own money should be punished while people who are lazy and foolish with their money rewarded for their behavior?
Piling up money in a heap doesn't really matter, until it is spent. The other issues related to having piles of that money thus being able to do things that others without those piles of money can't do can be dealt with in other ways without confiscating those piles of money. Most essential is simply the granting of liberty so those who are poor have the opportunity to be wealthy if that is something they want to work for. Most of your complaints here about how the "poor" are powerless is because tyrants and those who would seek to destroy liberty are employing the instruments of government to restrict how you can live your life. Confiscating wealth ("rob from the rich to give to the poor") is just another way to destroy liberty.
Importantly, I disagree with your basic presumptions here, nor do I see that this is even a problem in the first place that there are income disparities. How that income disparity is employed is to me far more of an issue, especially when it destroys rights of others.
A single payer health care system would free employers from the burden of providing health care, allow entrepreneurs to pursue their own business goals without fear of losing health coverage, and provide massive cost savings by allowing everyone to receive preventative care rather than having the 50 million uninsured people end up in the ER once their condition has deteriorated to the point where they can no longer ignore their illness.
The role of an emergency room as a health care center is there because they are required by law to not refuse treatment and that many people somehow figure out how to avoid paying for medical costs. It is skewing the way that people seek health care assistance when
The real "solution" is to simply let doctors be entrepreneurs and for them to charge reasonable professional rates for services rendered in an open competitive marketplace where the patients are the customers. All of the messes in the health care industry are precisely because this doesn't happen and the government trying to meddle into that client-practioner relationship.
Thank goodness engineers aren't paid by insurance companies and government agencies to build homes and businesses.... at least in most cases. Even more so, that such activity is seem as "essential to life" and deemed something that should be nationalized with all engineers encouraged to become government employees.
This is like companies furnishing a corporate vehicle and similar "benefits" including corporate housing.
So in your world would firefighters be required to pay for meals and housing while they stay at the fire station and have that reflected in their income tax statements?
When you attend a company Christmas party..... do you have the amount of money spent on that party (perhaps pro-rated per employee) added to your paycheck as "income" to be taxed? Why not?
That is what is being talked about here. This is a business expense where employees are receiving a benefit (perhaps a lavish Christmas party.... or just a free meal at company expense if just once in awhile or on a regular basis doesn't matter) and it isn't considered "income" on the part of the employee. What is being asked here is to make that considered a "taxable benefit" and for the cost of that party to show up on your W-2 statement at the end of the year.
This is a fair point. I presume that sales taxes are paid on behalf of the food used to prepare the meals, and that income taxes are paid on behalf of employees (with appropriate food handler permits and licensing fees as required by local health regulations) to serve these meals.
This sounds more like a local (to Google HQ) business group that is trying to force Google to use their services rather than having Google keep something like this in-house. If they were forced to use outside vendors, they would be paying taxes completely.
The real issue here then is the strange marginal "taxable income" fringe benefit on the 1040 form. If those who are calling for this "benefit" to be taxed, they need to eliminate all fringe benefit exemptions as well.... including healthcare benefits and other nonsense. Of course a more sensible thing to do would be to eliminate income taxes altogether and keep the government from meddling in private affairs in the first place by screwy tax laws like this where you can always find ways to hide income.
Getting to Saturn is much harder than getting to the Moon, and nothing has ever gone to Saturn and returned back to the Earth (other than a few photons in the form of radio telemetry). Good luck with that. The technology might be developed to do just that if there was a demand though. Are you sure it would be cheaper and easier getting it from Saturn?
Helium-3 does have value and can be sold here on the Earth... so price is not a major problem. Trying to extract He-3 from sources here on the Earth (currently obtained as a by-product of nuclear bomb development and perhaps extraction from natural gas extraction efforts) is surprisingly much more difficult, hence the high value placed upon this substance. I have no idea what the current global demand for He-3 is right now, but it does have value and a market as a commodity. A few kilograms might be enough to make the whole effort worthwhile and might just satisfy global demand as well.
Note, this mining of stuff on the Moon is not science fiction and has been proposed by people who have the money to pull it off.
General Charles Bolden is a Marine, not a soldier. There is a huge difference.
If you are going to be critical of the guy because of his military service (including his service after he left NASA as an astronaut and went back to the USMC earning his stars), at least get the branch of service he served in correct. While General Bolden would likely be polite to you if you got the two confused, don't try that at any bar full of Marines. You might not survive to see the morning.
Actually, taxes are the only way to pay back a 16 trillion dollar debt. After all, that's how the Federal Government gets its money. It will, of course take time. And taxes combined with spending cuts will cut the deficit.
The problem is two fold:
* We need to run a surplus to have any real hope of paying down the debt.
The current approach being done to pay off 16 trillion dollars in debt is to devalue the dollar so you can pay it off with a 1945 penny (melted down and sold for scrap metal prices of copper). Either that or paid off with Zimbabwe Dollars instead because they will have a more favorable exchange rate.
It doesn't have to be this way, and I would hope that your "solution" was used instead.... by trying to seek a balanced trade market for American goods and having the federal government only stick within its revenue stream. Unfortunately "discretionary spending" being cut 100% won't balance the federal budget... which is largely why most politicians don't even bother trying any more.
The point of Helium-3 is that it is the one resource found on the Moon that can be extracted at a profit with current launch costs for shipping equipment to the Moon and sending fuel from the Earth to power the launch vehicles from the surface of the Moon to return back to the Earth. Extracting oxygen (and potentially hydrogen) from the surface of the Moon would be an added bonus... but the business case can be made without that added cost savings.
Unfortunately the global demand for Helium-3 is currently rather small. Besides fusion research, it is also used as a refrigerant as it is the coldest isotope of any element that any substance can be and remain a gas. It has some uses (especially for superconductor cooling), so there is some value to it.
BTW, I agree with your general assessment, especially for fusion fuel sources. The leading element that many fusion researchers are hoping for now is Boron, due to the lack of neutrons flying around as a product (something that He-3 unfortunately produces with its fusion).
There still is a delay of some sort, even if you aren't noticing it. The deal with the "delay" was usually due to sending signals to geosynchronous orbit satellites. At 35,000 kilometers, the time to send a signal to those satellites and have it return is sufficient that somebody with a stopwatch controlled by people is enough to even measure.
In fact a really interesting experiment used to be performed where you could take something like a State of the Union address, and for those stations that used satellite transmission could be compared to stations that used microwave relay stations, and the time interval from when something was seen on one station compared to the other (assuming no tape delay issues) could be used to measure the speed of light.
What you are noticing here is that the digital traffic signals and even phone conversations don't use satellite links any more, but rather fiber optic cables that are either buried or placed at the bottom of oceans. Either way, signals only going a couple megameters as opposed to over 70 megameters in distance adds up to a significant change in perception of delay due to the speed of light.
You do know people have free will, right? We can make choices and stuff.
One choice you simply don't have is to communicate information faster than light. Who or why that is the case may be due to God, which is sort of the point being made by the GP. There is no negative proof of this idea, but there isn't a positive proof either. Stephen Hawking has spent some time discussing what God may or may not have done in terms of setting up the universe as we know it, but there certainly seems at the moment to be some arbitrariness to some aspects of the universe as we see it. One of those is how the speed of light was established and why that particular speed is what we see it to be. Ditto for the Plank constant and a few other interesting aspects of the universe.
I'd rather that NASA become much more like how the NACA (the predecessor agency to NASA) operated: They performed R&D to develop concepts and ideas, then turned those ideas over to private industry to make them into practical products. This happened in the aviation industry and it has benefited not just America (with a very strong aviation industry that is still around), but also everybody else in the world as well.
The James Webb Space Telescope simply needs to be cancelled though. It is an albatross around the neck of the robotic missions to deep space and doesn't even replace the Hubble that it supposedly is being built for. Mismanagement is horrible and it would be by far cheaper simply to dump the whole thing, restart the whole project over again from scratch if necessary, and get a whole new management team in charge or even evaluate if the project is even needed any more. It really is killing what is left of NASA at the moment, together with the SLS system that is sucking up whatever dollars are left. So many projects have already been cut to keep JWST alive, and it will only get worse until it is finally killed.
The problem isn't really the manned spaceflight program, but simply using what they have in a responsible manner. I'd agree that putting out a replacement to Kepler (essentially a Kepler 2.0 or however you define that perhaps even pointing at constellations other than Cygnus) and more missions to deep space as well. Ambitious projects like a balloon to Venus (a cloud-top observatory) and sending vehicles into the part of the solar system beyond Pluto would be awesome. Manned spaceflight should be in the mix, but they need to be reasonable and take advantage of the commercial spaceflight options that are now available instead of dismissing them.
NAUTLUS-X needs to be built, and it is a crying shame that won't happen. Genuine spaceships need to be built (as opposed to mere spacecraft). It could be built for the cost of the future SLS budget (consider what has already been spent as sunk costs) and be moving around the Solar System within five years.
I apologize on behalf of the American people. It is unfortunate that a bunch of stupid politicians got their way with reforming a perfectly good security system at airports that existed prior to September 11th, 2001 and made it much worse than it needed to be. I'm not saying that airports needed to return to a complete lack of security except for a rent-a-cop sleeping in the corner and wearing a faux uniform and "airport security" on his shoulder, but we didn't need to get this horrible agency that was created instead.
I for one would not mind if the TSA was completely disbanded as an agency, and wouldn't mind pushing for that to happen. Once you get past that bullshit agency that also equally harasses its own citizens America isn't so bad. Travel within America doesn't require you to be anally probed like it does for people passing through the borders or going into airports.
About the only excuse I can see for this agencies existence at the moment is to remind Americans that they are no longer citizens, but rather serfs who are being taxed at higher rates than medieval kings could get away with hundreds of years ago.
In defense of NASA (and I'm a huge NASA critic), they seem to do better than most other government agencies in terms of returning value for tax dollars spent. At the very least the manned spaceflight missions provided some amazing entertainment and thousands of hours of programming for the major television networks at modest prices that would be comparable to Hollywood budgets.
I think using the "scientific inquiry" argument is about as lame as it gets and that doesn't even remotely touch what NASA actually accomplished.
The manned spaceflight program in particular has almost nothing to do with science, and that is mostly an afterthought. That is especially telling as the first scientist to go to the Moon was also the last one in the 20th Century to step onto the lunar surface. What you might say is that Apollo was an exercise in stretching engineering limits and pushing boundaries to see what could be done. That is what you get when you do things that have never been done before.
As for what NASA is currently doing, in particular the James Webb Space Telescope and the "Senate Launch System" that are currently in development, they are boldly going where thousands have gone before. I really don't see anything they are currently doing which even comes close to the boundary pushing NASA was doing in the 1960's when things were really happening. Almost all of that is now happening in private commercial spaceflight endeavors who are starting to get into space and get things done with NASA begging to come along for the ride.
More like funded by NASA fans and not really lobbyists. The distinction is a bit important to note, although I'm sure some lobbyists were involved as well.
The U.S. military is allowed to advertise (heck, they have a NASCAR team they sponsor and have run Super Bowl ads). The U.S. Postal Service was the primary sponsor of Lance Armstrong for more than one Tour de France race. Just because they are a federal agency doesn't prohibit them from running promotional advertising, but NASA is explicitly prohibited by federal law from doing this kind of advertisement.
SpaceX currently owns the only man-rated spacecraft that are in active service from vehicles launched within America, not NASA. That says quite a bit. Orbital Science (another private company) is doing the same thing and will have that spacecraft launched some time next month (aka April). I'd say they are getting things done. Bigelow Aerospace has not one but two orbital spacecraft in orbit right now that are capable of sustaining people, and are right now only waiting for a paying customer and for the private launching companies to get their acts together before they fly their next space station into orbit. Bigelow is also on the flight manifest for a future flight on the Falcon 9... so they aren't just sitting on the sidelines either.
Stuff is being done, so you may just get your wish.
I'd agree that paper studies and power point presentations mean very little, but these companies are bending metal, performing test flights, and getting things done. I'll admit that they have a long way to go, but there is no reason to think the government has a monopoly on talent and a whole lot of reasons to think NASA is impeding progress for people getting into space at the moment. The government may have been able to put people on the Moon, but they have shown a singular lack of ability to even keep people in space. NASA is in retreat and certainly not an agency on the forefront of aerospace technology.
I really liked how Battlestar Galactica ended up with its reboot. Arguably it was better than the original series with Loren Greene, Richard Hatch, and Dirk Benedict. The reboot wasn't nearly the same as the original series, but it borrowed many of the same things and ultimately had a much better run (with much better spin-offs... I really love Caprica!)
If Firefly went through a similar kind of reboot with some new characters (even a whole new series "set" in the Firefly universe), I might even enjoy watching that kind of show. It would be different though and on that point you would be correct.
The franchise was long dead before the movie was even made. All that Serenity did was to give a beautiful eulogy to the series and wrap up story lines for the fans... and give a little bit of fun along the way.
Quite possibly something like Firefly will be remade, and I love watching the shows on Hulu or elsewhere when I can see them. It is quality science fiction and something that definitely has a fan base, but it will take a new series to make things happen where something original must be put together that is just as fresh as Firefly was when it originally came out.
I guess you've never heard of Golden Spike Company or Inspiration Mars? The first is a private effort to land people on the Moon, and the second one is trying to organize a private spaceflight attempt to send people to Mars. Both plan on having this happen in this decade (meaning some time before the year 2020).
You can debate if either of these companies, or the numerous space prospecting companies that are starting to show up will be successful at getting things done in space, but they are trying to kick the door down and make some real progress by sending people and spacecraft well beyond LEO.
We will be stuck in the Solar System for quite some time as interstellar travel is quite beyond our capability (the Voyager spacecraft not withstanding.... and they won't get near another star within human lifetimes, much less the lifetimes of any current human civilization). The Solar System is a big place though with literally thousands of worlds to explore and enough raw materials to expand human civilization several orders of magnitude in terms of population.... and to do that with style and comfort.
The big goal of private spaceflight at the moment is to cut the cost of getting up there to at least make the fuel being used to get there as a major cost component. Several companies are making some significant progress in doing that.
A U.S. invasion of China would likely happen through Russia anyway, both because you would need another major power as a substantial ally and also because that would give you the necessary ground support you are talking about.
Besides, what is there in China that America wants? It doesn't need workers as Mexico already provides that (in terms of low-skilled workers to fill in at the bottom of the economic ladder) and America has plenty of land available to do whatever it wants. More to the point, there isn't any reason for America to really go into China.
North Korea isn't needed as a buffer, which is the point I was making. That may have been useful when Chairman Mao was still running China and the Cold War was still going on, but circumstances and technology have made that sort of a moot issue.
Assuming that America was foolish enough to mount a ground invasion of China, it would also not hesitate to involve nuclear weapons as well and risk the consequences of such an act. As such, everything you might think about in terms of such invasions would have larger consequences and would be very different from other kinds of military engagements that have happened in the past. There have been all sorts of theories about how nuclear weapons might be used in a combined arms situation where nuclear weapons are one of the aspects of that action, but so far nobody has actually put such weapons into practice with the exception of the end of World War II. Even then, the nuclear weapons were merely alternatives to things like the carpet bombing and fire bombs, where the incendiary raid on Tokyo (much less Dresden) was far more destructive than the nukes were. Modern nuclear weapons simply haven't been used and experience in the Cold War means nothing as they were never used except for political purposes. They certainly have never been used by a general who might take advantage of those weapons.... or fail miserably like the artillery barrages that happened in World War I.
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I'm not advocating anarchy here, but I think it would be possible for voluntary donations to fund a government. If "paying your fair share" is an amount you consider useful for operating the government, you would pay it. Doing that would also have the side effect of keeping the size of the government under control as they could only spend what people are willing to give them... and have the government even more interested in genuine economic prosperity as that would impact how much money they would receive.
Freeloaders exist in any society. At least those who don't make donations would be seen as the freeloaders they really are.
The presumption that the commentator on the link you provided makes is that the only possible form that a corporation can be incorporated in has an explicit clause which overrides all other clauses to "maximize profits and increase shareholder equity". It is a common clause in most corporate charters, but it is possible to incorporate without this clause.
I'd agree though that other corporate forms and charters ought to be encouraged as a matter of state law where earning a profit may not even be a major consideration. Those kind of corporations do exist after a fashion as "non-profit organizations", but a third way of allowing a company to make a profit (and paying taxes) but having social responsibilities as well could be encouraged too.
What are you going to cut? Medicare and social security that the rich don't pay taxes on? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Trump! You say "more to our genocidal government", did you notice that since Ford, no war has been started by a Democrat President, and every Republican President since then has started a war? Maybe if you don't like our "genocidal" government you might think about not voting for borrow-and-spend, anti-tax warmongers next time you're at the polls?
Carter invaded Iran, and Clinton not only invaded Yugoslavia, but also Haiti (at least sent troops against the will of those in control of the country). The only president who hasn't gone a warmongering is Obama... and that is because he was stuck in a war already. Oh.... he did send stuff into Libya and is considering going into Syria.... and if Kim Jong-Un goes real stupid he could even be embroiled in still another war.
You need to go back to Herbert Hoover to find a U.S. President that didn't get involved in a foreign war of some kind. I seriously doubt this is a Democrat vs. Republican thing to even bring up.
You may be happy to pay these taxes, but what about people who aren't? Do you insist that those who refuse should be compelled at gunpoint to pay these taxes, just like a common thug and highwayman from ancient times? Under other circumstances, you would be considered an accomplice to a felony for insisting that others have their money confiscated. You are just dressing this up in something nice and "legal" because your thugs are the "good guys" and some free lancing thugs are the "bad guys".
I have the option of eating at my state university's cafeteria, but I get charged for the privilege at least as much as the students do.
That is strictly because the university has chosen explicitly not to give you that extra benefit for whatever reason they have made that decision. It isn't universal though and may be something more unique to your current circumstances (even if it is a widespread practice at most universities). I'm not even suggesting that professors or staff at universities (I am presuming you hold some employment with the university based on context of the post) should get free meals as there may be some really good reasons to encourage cafeterias at such locations to charge everybody the same amount. Still, there is no reason why it can't be made into a "fringe benefit".
Most university cafeterias are usually a profit center for the university, thus when you eat there you are paying for the labor + utilities + food and other aspects involved in the preparation of that food you are eating and even giving a little bit extra to the university that will be spent elsewhere (including your salary). That isn't universal though, and it is common for cafeterias in public schools (K-12) to be heavily subsidized with government and even district funds.
to call this a Google problem is just looking for a reason to be bitchy at those who have more than you.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
It's generally accepted as true that great disparity of wealth in a society is harmful to the economy as a whole. When wealth is distributed unequally, there are in practice more poor people than wealthy people. When the poor make up too large a proportion of society, economic activity slows, which in turn creates more poor people, etc.
That being said, it's in everyone's best interest, both poor and rich alike, to keep the distribution of wealth reasonable. Not necessarily even across the board, but reasonable.
You assume that having disparity of wealth is a bad thing and harmful. Why is it bad that somebody who has come up with a unique idea or has worked harder and been responsible for how they spend their own money should be punished while people who are lazy and foolish with their money rewarded for their behavior?
Piling up money in a heap doesn't really matter, until it is spent. The other issues related to having piles of that money thus being able to do things that others without those piles of money can't do can be dealt with in other ways without confiscating those piles of money. Most essential is simply the granting of liberty so those who are poor have the opportunity to be wealthy if that is something they want to work for. Most of your complaints here about how the "poor" are powerless is because tyrants and those who would seek to destroy liberty are employing the instruments of government to restrict how you can live your life. Confiscating wealth ("rob from the rich to give to the poor") is just another way to destroy liberty.
Importantly, I disagree with your basic presumptions here, nor do I see that this is even a problem in the first place that there are income disparities. How that income disparity is employed is to me far more of an issue, especially when it destroys rights of others.
A single payer health care system would free employers from the burden of providing health care, allow entrepreneurs to pursue their own business goals without fear of losing health coverage, and provide massive cost savings by allowing everyone to receive preventative care rather than having the 50 million uninsured people end up in the ER once their condition has deteriorated to the point where they can no longer ignore their illness.
The role of an emergency room as a health care center is there because they are required by law to not refuse treatment and that many people somehow figure out how to avoid paying for medical costs. It is skewing the way that people seek health care assistance when
The real "solution" is to simply let doctors be entrepreneurs and for them to charge reasonable professional rates for services rendered in an open competitive marketplace where the patients are the customers. All of the messes in the health care industry are precisely because this doesn't happen and the government trying to meddle into that client-practioner relationship.
Thank goodness engineers aren't paid by insurance companies and government agencies to build homes and businesses.... at least in most cases. Even more so, that such activity is seem as "essential to life" and deemed something that should be nationalized with all engineers encouraged to become government employees.
This is like companies furnishing a corporate vehicle and similar "benefits" including corporate housing.
So in your world would firefighters be required to pay for meals and housing while they stay at the fire station and have that reflected in their income tax statements?
When you attend a company Christmas party..... do you have the amount of money spent on that party (perhaps pro-rated per employee) added to your paycheck as "income" to be taxed? Why not?
That is what is being talked about here. This is a business expense where employees are receiving a benefit (perhaps a lavish Christmas party.... or just a free meal at company expense if just once in awhile or on a regular basis doesn't matter) and it isn't considered "income" on the part of the employee. What is being asked here is to make that considered a "taxable benefit" and for the cost of that party to show up on your W-2 statement at the end of the year.
This is a fair point. I presume that sales taxes are paid on behalf of the food used to prepare the meals, and that income taxes are paid on behalf of employees (with appropriate food handler permits and licensing fees as required by local health regulations) to serve these meals.
This sounds more like a local (to Google HQ) business group that is trying to force Google to use their services rather than having Google keep something like this in-house. If they were forced to use outside vendors, they would be paying taxes completely.
The real issue here then is the strange marginal "taxable income" fringe benefit on the 1040 form. If those who are calling for this "benefit" to be taxed, they need to eliminate all fringe benefit exemptions as well.... including healthcare benefits and other nonsense. Of course a more sensible thing to do would be to eliminate income taxes altogether and keep the government from meddling in private affairs in the first place by screwy tax laws like this where you can always find ways to hide income.
Getting to Saturn is much harder than getting to the Moon, and nothing has ever gone to Saturn and returned back to the Earth (other than a few photons in the form of radio telemetry). Good luck with that. The technology might be developed to do just that if there was a demand though. Are you sure it would be cheaper and easier getting it from Saturn?
Helium-3 does have value and can be sold here on the Earth... so price is not a major problem. Trying to extract He-3 from sources here on the Earth (currently obtained as a by-product of nuclear bomb development and perhaps extraction from natural gas extraction efforts) is surprisingly much more difficult, hence the high value placed upon this substance. I have no idea what the current global demand for He-3 is right now, but it does have value and a market as a commodity. A few kilograms might be enough to make the whole effort worthwhile and might just satisfy global demand as well.
Note, this mining of stuff on the Moon is not science fiction and has been proposed by people who have the money to pull it off.
Nope, he's a retired army man.
General Charles Bolden is a Marine, not a soldier. There is a huge difference.
If you are going to be critical of the guy because of his military service (including his service after he left NASA as an astronaut and went back to the USMC earning his stars), at least get the branch of service he served in correct. While General Bolden would likely be polite to you if you got the two confused, don't try that at any bar full of Marines. You might not survive to see the morning.
Actually, taxes are the only way to pay back a 16 trillion dollar debt. After all, that's how the Federal Government gets its money. It will, of course take time. And taxes combined with spending cuts will cut the deficit.
The problem is two fold:
* We need to run a surplus to have any real hope of paying down the debt.
The current approach being done to pay off 16 trillion dollars in debt is to devalue the dollar so you can pay it off with a 1945 penny (melted down and sold for scrap metal prices of copper). Either that or paid off with Zimbabwe Dollars instead because they will have a more favorable exchange rate.
It doesn't have to be this way, and I would hope that your "solution" was used instead.... by trying to seek a balanced trade market for American goods and having the federal government only stick within its revenue stream. Unfortunately "discretionary spending" being cut 100% won't balance the federal budget... which is largely why most politicians don't even bother trying any more.
The point of Helium-3 is that it is the one resource found on the Moon that can be extracted at a profit with current launch costs for shipping equipment to the Moon and sending fuel from the Earth to power the launch vehicles from the surface of the Moon to return back to the Earth. Extracting oxygen (and potentially hydrogen) from the surface of the Moon would be an added bonus... but the business case can be made without that added cost savings.
Unfortunately the global demand for Helium-3 is currently rather small. Besides fusion research, it is also used as a refrigerant as it is the coldest isotope of any element that any substance can be and remain a gas. It has some uses (especially for superconductor cooling), so there is some value to it.
BTW, I agree with your general assessment, especially for fusion fuel sources. The leading element that many fusion researchers are hoping for now is Boron, due to the lack of neutrons flying around as a product (something that He-3 unfortunately produces with its fusion).
There still is a delay of some sort, even if you aren't noticing it. The deal with the "delay" was usually due to sending signals to geosynchronous orbit satellites. At 35,000 kilometers, the time to send a signal to those satellites and have it return is sufficient that somebody with a stopwatch controlled by people is enough to even measure.
In fact a really interesting experiment used to be performed where you could take something like a State of the Union address, and for those stations that used satellite transmission could be compared to stations that used microwave relay stations, and the time interval from when something was seen on one station compared to the other (assuming no tape delay issues) could be used to measure the speed of light.
What you are noticing here is that the digital traffic signals and even phone conversations don't use satellite links any more, but rather fiber optic cables that are either buried or placed at the bottom of oceans. Either way, signals only going a couple megameters as opposed to over 70 megameters in distance adds up to a significant change in perception of delay due to the speed of light.
You do know people have free will, right? We can make choices and stuff.
One choice you simply don't have is to communicate information faster than light. Who or why that is the case may be due to God, which is sort of the point being made by the GP. There is no negative proof of this idea, but there isn't a positive proof either. Stephen Hawking has spent some time discussing what God may or may not have done in terms of setting up the universe as we know it, but there certainly seems at the moment to be some arbitrariness to some aspects of the universe as we see it. One of those is how the speed of light was established and why that particular speed is what we see it to be. Ditto for the Plank constant and a few other interesting aspects of the universe.
I'd rather that NASA become much more like how the NACA (the predecessor agency to NASA) operated: They performed R&D to develop concepts and ideas, then turned those ideas over to private industry to make them into practical products. This happened in the aviation industry and it has benefited not just America (with a very strong aviation industry that is still around), but also everybody else in the world as well.
The James Webb Space Telescope simply needs to be cancelled though. It is an albatross around the neck of the robotic missions to deep space and doesn't even replace the Hubble that it supposedly is being built for. Mismanagement is horrible and it would be by far cheaper simply to dump the whole thing, restart the whole project over again from scratch if necessary, and get a whole new management team in charge or even evaluate if the project is even needed any more. It really is killing what is left of NASA at the moment, together with the SLS system that is sucking up whatever dollars are left. So many projects have already been cut to keep JWST alive, and it will only get worse until it is finally killed.
The problem isn't really the manned spaceflight program, but simply using what they have in a responsible manner. I'd agree that putting out a replacement to Kepler (essentially a Kepler 2.0 or however you define that perhaps even pointing at constellations other than Cygnus) and more missions to deep space as well. Ambitious projects like a balloon to Venus (a cloud-top observatory) and sending vehicles into the part of the solar system beyond Pluto would be awesome. Manned spaceflight should be in the mix, but they need to be reasonable and take advantage of the commercial spaceflight options that are now available instead of dismissing them.
NAUTLUS-X needs to be built, and it is a crying shame that won't happen. Genuine spaceships need to be built (as opposed to mere spacecraft). It could be built for the cost of the future SLS budget (consider what has already been spent as sunk costs) and be moving around the Solar System within five years.
I apologize on behalf of the American people. It is unfortunate that a bunch of stupid politicians got their way with reforming a perfectly good security system at airports that existed prior to September 11th, 2001 and made it much worse than it needed to be. I'm not saying that airports needed to return to a complete lack of security except for a rent-a-cop sleeping in the corner and wearing a faux uniform and "airport security" on his shoulder, but we didn't need to get this horrible agency that was created instead.
I for one would not mind if the TSA was completely disbanded as an agency, and wouldn't mind pushing for that to happen. Once you get past that bullshit agency that also equally harasses its own citizens America isn't so bad. Travel within America doesn't require you to be anally probed like it does for people passing through the borders or going into airports.
About the only excuse I can see for this agencies existence at the moment is to remind Americans that they are no longer citizens, but rather serfs who are being taxed at higher rates than medieval kings could get away with hundreds of years ago.
In defense of NASA (and I'm a huge NASA critic), they seem to do better than most other government agencies in terms of returning value for tax dollars spent. At the very least the manned spaceflight missions provided some amazing entertainment and thousands of hours of programming for the major television networks at modest prices that would be comparable to Hollywood budgets.
I think using the "scientific inquiry" argument is about as lame as it gets and that doesn't even remotely touch what NASA actually accomplished.
The manned spaceflight program in particular has almost nothing to do with science, and that is mostly an afterthought. That is especially telling as the first scientist to go to the Moon was also the last one in the 20th Century to step onto the lunar surface. What you might say is that Apollo was an exercise in stretching engineering limits and pushing boundaries to see what could be done. That is what you get when you do things that have never been done before.
As for what NASA is currently doing, in particular the James Webb Space Telescope and the "Senate Launch System" that are currently in development, they are boldly going where thousands have gone before. I really don't see anything they are currently doing which even comes close to the boundary pushing NASA was doing in the 1960's when things were really happening. Almost all of that is now happening in private commercial spaceflight endeavors who are starting to get into space and get things done with NASA begging to come along for the ride.
More like funded by NASA fans and not really lobbyists. The distinction is a bit important to note, although I'm sure some lobbyists were involved as well.
The U.S. military is allowed to advertise (heck, they have a NASCAR team they sponsor and have run Super Bowl ads). The U.S. Postal Service was the primary sponsor of Lance Armstrong for more than one Tour de France race. Just because they are a federal agency doesn't prohibit them from running promotional advertising, but NASA is explicitly prohibited by federal law from doing this kind of advertisement.
SpaceX currently owns the only man-rated spacecraft that are in active service from vehicles launched within America, not NASA. That says quite a bit. Orbital Science (another private company) is doing the same thing and will have that spacecraft launched some time next month (aka April). I'd say they are getting things done. Bigelow Aerospace has not one but two orbital spacecraft in orbit right now that are capable of sustaining people, and are right now only waiting for a paying customer and for the private launching companies to get their acts together before they fly their next space station into orbit. Bigelow is also on the flight manifest for a future flight on the Falcon 9... so they aren't just sitting on the sidelines either.
Stuff is being done, so you may just get your wish.
I'd agree that paper studies and power point presentations mean very little, but these companies are bending metal, performing test flights, and getting things done. I'll admit that they have a long way to go, but there is no reason to think the government has a monopoly on talent and a whole lot of reasons to think NASA is impeding progress for people getting into space at the moment. The government may have been able to put people on the Moon, but they have shown a singular lack of ability to even keep people in space. NASA is in retreat and certainly not an agency on the forefront of aerospace technology.
I really liked how Battlestar Galactica ended up with its reboot. Arguably it was better than the original series with Loren Greene, Richard Hatch, and Dirk Benedict. The reboot wasn't nearly the same as the original series, but it borrowed many of the same things and ultimately had a much better run (with much better spin-offs... I really love Caprica!)
If Firefly went through a similar kind of reboot with some new characters (even a whole new series "set" in the Firefly universe), I might even enjoy watching that kind of show. It would be different though and on that point you would be correct.
The franchise was long dead before the movie was even made. All that Serenity did was to give a beautiful eulogy to the series and wrap up story lines for the fans... and give a little bit of fun along the way.
Quite possibly something like Firefly will be remade, and I love watching the shows on Hulu or elsewhere when I can see them. It is quality science fiction and something that definitely has a fan base, but it will take a new series to make things happen where something original must be put together that is just as fresh as Firefly was when it originally came out.
I guess you've never heard of Golden Spike Company or Inspiration Mars? The first is a private effort to land people on the Moon, and the second one is trying to organize a private spaceflight attempt to send people to Mars. Both plan on having this happen in this decade (meaning some time before the year 2020).
You can debate if either of these companies, or the numerous space prospecting companies that are starting to show up will be successful at getting things done in space, but they are trying to kick the door down and make some real progress by sending people and spacecraft well beyond LEO.
We will be stuck in the Solar System for quite some time as interstellar travel is quite beyond our capability (the Voyager spacecraft not withstanding.... and they won't get near another star within human lifetimes, much less the lifetimes of any current human civilization). The Solar System is a big place though with literally thousands of worlds to explore and enough raw materials to expand human civilization several orders of magnitude in terms of population.... and to do that with style and comfort.
The big goal of private spaceflight at the moment is to cut the cost of getting up there to at least make the fuel being used to get there as a major cost component. Several companies are making some significant progress in doing that.
A U.S. invasion of China would likely happen through Russia anyway, both because you would need another major power as a substantial ally and also because that would give you the necessary ground support you are talking about.
Besides, what is there in China that America wants? It doesn't need workers as Mexico already provides that (in terms of low-skilled workers to fill in at the bottom of the economic ladder) and America has plenty of land available to do whatever it wants. More to the point, there isn't any reason for America to really go into China.
North Korea isn't needed as a buffer, which is the point I was making. That may have been useful when Chairman Mao was still running China and the Cold War was still going on, but circumstances and technology have made that sort of a moot issue.
Assuming that America was foolish enough to mount a ground invasion of China, it would also not hesitate to involve nuclear weapons as well and risk the consequences of such an act. As such, everything you might think about in terms of such invasions would have larger consequences and would be very different from other kinds of military engagements that have happened in the past. There have been all sorts of theories about how nuclear weapons might be used in a combined arms situation where nuclear weapons are one of the aspects of that action, but so far nobody has actually put such weapons into practice with the exception of the end of World War II. Even then, the nuclear weapons were merely alternatives to things like the carpet bombing and fire bombs, where the incendiary raid on Tokyo (much less Dresden) was far more destructive than the nukes were. Modern nuclear weapons simply haven't been used and experience in the Cold War means nothing as they were never used except for political purposes. They certainly have never been used by a general who might take advantage of those weapons.... or fail miserably like the artillery barrages that happened in World War I.