If you have been working at McDonald's for 20-30 years and still are a grill cook, either you have some serious mental handicaps, are a total jackass that make you unpromotable, or you are deliberately sabotaging your career in other ways. I have no problems for the mentally challenged in this country being able to do something useful with their lives by being a grill cook either, but somebody who has the mental capacity to do more should over time.
At the very least, after 30 years of working at McDonald's you should be managing your own restaurant, if not being in a position of higher management. Opportunities even exist for somebody who is a career McDonald's employee like that to own their restaurant or at least be earning a very respectable salary. It takes hard work and dedication to the job, but not much more.
For folks who either have incredibly bad luck by getting hired by company after company who is closing down, or if you are such a lazy jerk that you don't bother showing up for work or do something equally stupid like picking a fist fight with your boss on a regular basis....of course you are going to struggle throughout your life and be incapable of holding down a steady job.
If you have the attitude to work hard and show some respect to your potential employer, you will usually be able to hold down a job for a reasonable length of time. You may end up quitting that job at McDonald's, but that is because you have a higher paying job. It may be a gamble to quit and move on to another employer, but that is a risk you take in life for any such career move.
This doesn't even cover those who may follow a more entrepreneurial route to achieve their life goals, but lazy people shouldn't be rewarded for being lazy.
what wealthy person ever made their fortune from working for a wage?
wealth is made by either inheritence, gambling (including stock investment), crime/corruption or innovation+personality (in the case of successful startups).
a large part is also luck.
anyone who says you make your own luck falls into the corruption category.
nobody's time is actually "worth" any amount that would lead to what the media would coin as "wealth" (millionaire+). those that are on rediculously high salaries have abused their influence or position of power to attain it, not hard work (so they also fall into the corruption category).
just because some forms of corruption are legal doesn't make them any less corrupt.
I can name several people who are quite wealthy that at some point or another in their life they started with very little money and needed to work for an hourly wage for a great many years before finally being able to get what would commonly be called "wealthy" by most standards. I also think you have a very warped view of what capitalism really is and what amounts to be a legitimate investment.
Gambling is attempting to play a "game of chance" where in advance the odds are stacked against you mathematically so you will not win in the long run over time. That is how plush casinos are able to stay in business because they can even predict what their daily "take" will be in the long run even if some occasional people may be temporarily lucky. A legitimate investment is almost always a "win/win" or "lose/lose" situation where the investor and the people you are working with will also profit with the investment or will also lose their shirt if you lose. There is no random chance involved at all, other than perhaps the general things that happen in life... which isn't really random chance either. A great many of those things can even be predicted to a small extent.
The point of the post you were responding to is largely correct: If you live in a 1st world country and are employed in ordinary jobs through a typical working career, you will have the equivalent of what is today a million dollars (adjusted for inflation in the future) in your working lifetime pass through your hands. Most people squander that money on frivolous things or become indentured servants to banks in a variety of ways, but that is your money you are throwing away and not somebody else's. That some people can through thrift or intelligence avoid squandering that money shouldn't be surprising either.
There are very ordinary people who by the time they reach retirement age have well over a million dollars that they have put aside for their "old age". That you may not be aware of them is largely due to your own age (if you are just starting your own working career) or the fact that they tend not to show off their wealth... part of the reason why they have been successful at saving up that kind of money. Not everybody who is wealthy lives like Donald Trump or MC Hammer.
That is as close to a commercial enterprise as I can imagine. That perhaps under the Soviet Union it wasn't a commercial enterprise is immaterial, they are very much a for-profit commercial enterprise at the moment and in fact are ramping up production of the Soyuz spacecraft and vehicles precisely because of the high demand for their vehicles. They are being cautious in a very Russian manner, but I don't see what the problem is for a company of that nature to sell their services in this manner.
It also doesn't help that NASA doesn't want to commit to any long term contract because the U.S. Congress keeps cutting funds toward future space missions with American astronauts on the Soyuz, so in this case Roscosmos and RKK Energia are being precisely treated like a commercial enterprise in this case. That the Russian government may have other plans for the Soyuz spacecraft is indeed something that needs to be addressed by Russian space policy, but in this case the competition between a private commercial enterprise (Space Adventures) and a foreign government buying the same product (NASA) shouldn't make any bit of difference.
Or would it make a difference if it was a paying customer from another government besides the USA?
That doesn't stop tourists stopping by McMurdo or even the Scott-Amundsen stations, or for that matter any of the other national laboratories.
Besides, in order to go to the ISS on a Soyuz spacecraft you need to go through a six month course that qualifies you to be a cosmonaut and capable of flying that vehicle, so the only other credential would be a PhD in some scientific field. Russia got into that whole credential business when the other "space tourists" went to the ISS, classifying those "others" as employees of RKK Energia and "guest cosmonauts".
The current SpaceX Dragon capsule even has life support equipment, because it is being berthed to the ISS and needs that life support equipment in order to support the astronauts which go inside. The only thing really missing is a seat for the astronauts, and the fact that the Falcon 9 v 1.0 that is currently flying simply can't support that much extra mass that an astronaut plus all of the extra baggage would require. The launch escape system is also going to add some additional payload penalty that a cargo version of the Dragon doesn't need as well.
The cool thing about the planned launch escape system that SpaceX is proposing though is that it will be an integrated system that can be used in other phases of the flight as well, including deorbit and landing situations (how SpaceX eventually plans on having the Dragon capsule land on a spaceport tarmac rather than in the ocean with a splashdown). They don't plan on jettisoning the launch escape system as is being planned by Boeing for the CST-100 and the Orion.
The Falcon 9 is getting an upgrade with new engines and larger tanks that are going to be able to support more payload mass in the Dragon, but neither the last flight nor the upcoming flight this next week would be able to fly astronauts even if a safety requirement were waived. I suppose a hammock with an astronaut in a scuba suit might seem romantic, but it takes a little more to send people into space.
Technically the Earth is not one of those objects because Kepler isn't even in orbit around the Earth, but rather in an Earth-Sun Lagrangian orbital position. That would be the trailing point, or L-5. Still, over the distances involved it might as well be the Earth.
We should be so lucky as to have those as outcomes. The reality is that once a hyper-partisan group manages to attain any amount of power, they use it to enforce their position onto others. They become convinced that their position is the absolute and correct one. They view those disagreeing as being in denial of reality and sometimes dangerous.
The problem with these kind of communities is that they become echo chambers, where some people start to get the strange notion that their beliefs and attitudes are in the majority when in fact it is an extreme fringe group.
One huge example that I've seen this year is the Ron Paul supporters in America, where they have some rather large numbers (in terms of absolute counts) and can even put together fairly large "rallies" thanks to social media. They have been able to show that they can raise millions of dollars through tactics like a "money bomb" and in some cases were even successful at capturing the apparatus of some state Republican party organizations. I would presume that the ability to chair and set the agenda of a state political party is an indication of "attaining any amount of political power" as you have suggested.
If you've paid any attention the the political winds this year on the internet, all you had to do was post some sort of "on line survey" and you would get it overwhelmed by votes for Ron Paul. There certainly seemed to be a very organized on-line and had active twitter feeds, discussion forums, Facebook pages, and otherwise a very active on-line presence where a mere mention that some survey was going on would result in a "Slashdot effect" descending upon that poll that included Ron Paul. Mind you, this sort of emphasizes my "echo chamber" effect I am talking about here because many of these rabid Ron Paul supporters started to believe these polls (obviously skewed) that seem to indicate that they were in the majority and that "everybody" thought about politics in the same way.
Unfortunately when they showed up to the national convention and had to show their actual numbers and face reality, they were shocked and surprised that they were a fringe group instead of being mainstream... and that they couldn't get their agenda passed or even considered.
Arguably I think the Republican Party is going to suffer (and Mitt Romney is going to lose the presidential election because of this) due to the "mainstream" Republicans treating the Ron Paul fan bois as a fringe group not worth engagement or even consideration, but at the same time I think the Ron Paul supporters have shot themselves in the foot as well by even dismissing the viewpoints of other Republicans and doing a scorched earth tactic as well. The number of Ron Paul supporters are small enough that they can in theory be ignored in general by the Republican Party, but they are large enough that they can make a huge difference in a tight political contest like seems to be the case this year.
I promise you that this post is going to get heavily moderated in a negative direction, as it will offend some Ron Paul supporter. If I posted this on a Ron Paul forum, I would be kicked from the forum with a permanent ban. I know as I've had it happen "for telling the truth" that may be uncomfortable for them to confront. Still, it gets back to my point that they are living in an echo chamber and are not paying attention to the larger world. I don't care right now, because I got karma to burn at the moment... this being Slashdot.
For myself, I find that I need to actively engage in conversations with people who have a decidedly different world view. It challenges my assumptions and sometimes even does change my mind on some key ideas. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be how most people look upon these on-line forums. I don't know if some of that is because I've had an on-line presence now for nearly 40 years in some form or another and I've seen these things come and go... while many of those (like Ron Paul fans I've mentioned) find on-line discussions to be something new that they've never seen before.
To note: I like Ron Paul as a person and as a politician. I am myself even a sort of fan, but I am under no delusion that this is a mainstream political position.
It is called the corporate charter. In terms of what the government thinks and how you pay taxes (the only thing the government cares about), these other corporate types are irrelevant.
The corporate charter is the contract that shareholders agree to when they purchase shares of the company. It can state any legal purpose for its existence, and making a profit certainly doesn't need to be the reason for its existence. The fact that making money is a strong reason for making a company and a typical reason doesn't matter other than it is a typical purpose.
That is also one of the reasons why attending shareholder meetings is important if you own shares of a company, especially if you own a substantial number of shares in that company. As long as you can get a majority of the shareholders (as determined by the number of shares... or by other voting mechanisms in the corporate charter that can even be one vote per shareholder regardless of the number of shares you own) to agree with your viewpoint, you can make changes to the charter or certainly hold up corporate officers to abide by the conditions of the charter.
That this isn't done as often for purposes other than making money is only something that just needs to be pointed out. These companies can be traded on major stock exchanges and still have a social purpose that goes beyond making money... even though most folks who are "institutional investors" on Wall Street only care about making money alone.
If an employee of the company buying the new invention idea decided to run off to another manufacturing company and "beat them to market", they would be in deep trouble over trade secret laws that would get their ass nailed, as would employment contract laws as well.
There certainly could be some slimy companies who would learn enough top level concepts about a device that they might be able to use it as a direction for their engineers to follow up on and toss the "garage inventor" under the bus. Oh.... that happens anyway today even if a patent has been issued so it really doesn't matter, does it? Companies who develop a reputation of tossing inventors under the bus (especially with some high profile lawsuits blaring that to everybody who comes in contact with the company) will simply not get good ideas coming their way as opposed to companies who have a history of helping budding inventors.
I'll also note that a garage tinkerer is not gong to necessarily have a "bullet-proof and well written patent backed by a well funded and experienced legal department". They are still out of luck as the only people who benefit from a patent are very well established organizations who can siphon off a small portion of their profits for a dozen or more lawyers, keeping the lawyer to engineer ratio at about even or more lawyers than engineers. Is that something which is desirable or even necessary for a proper functioning society?
Philo Farnsworth also ended up wasting most of his time in a courtroom instead of in a laboratory actually making stuff. It is to me one very strong example of how the patent system fails to deliver on its promises. Farnsworth invented not just television but also FM radio and even a nuclear fusion device that promises in the long run to really make a major difference in this world. If he had been working on that fusion reactor instead of piddling his time away in meetings with lawyers and fighting an ulcer given to him by David Sarnoff, this world would have been a much better place. That Sarnoff went after Farnsworth not only over television but also FM radio makes the Farnsworth story even more sad. Farnsworth simply died before he could perfect his fusor reactor.
I'll also note that his patent application for the dissector tube (his actual invention, which electronically records light by scanning a tube that later became the videcon tube in early television cameras) actually gives enough information to in theory recreate the device. It is one of a damn few that do such a thing, so I completely reject the notion that patents actually record the state of the technical arts in society for future generations. The patent system simply doesn't work as advertised and simply isn't used for the purpose of spreading knowledge about devices and concepts as it should be.
I've seen similar suggestions for copyright as well. It is also much more easily done for copyrights as it generally is easy to establish who the "author" or "songwriter" is for copyright enforcement, and plagiarism (aka taking credit for somebody else's work) is easily dealt with in the court system and easy to prove.
The problem with patents is that the process of proving novelty, originality, and non-obviousness (what a patent examiner is paid to do) is not always easy and usually isn't cheap because of legitimate labor issues involved in trying to take time to go through the paperwork of a patent application to see that it is in order and that it isn't duplicating a previously issued patent or something else in the marketplace. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office certifies when the patent is issued that the review has been made and that the burden of proof that the patent is invalid rests strongly upon any potential defendant fighting the patent... with the presumption that you have violated the patent until you can legally prove otherwise. Essentially the cost of a patent needs to be by definition a few thousand dollars just for labor costs alone by the patent office. Add to that lawyer costs because doing that by yourself is usually a really bad idea, and it just gets even more complicated and expensive with theoretically no upper limit on the cost of even just filing a patent.
In contrast with a copyright, the most labor intensive thing that the Library of Congress (who takes care of copyright in America with similar agencies in other countries) is to have some clerk who assigns a card catalog number to the book (if it is non-fiction) and to find bookshelf space for the book or other material you are trying to register for copyright. BTW, I also happen to be a fan of formal copyright registration as well, but $50 (the current price for registration) really isn't that bad in comparison and can be done without a lawyer. It is even a silly thing to hire a lawyer for that purpose.
Show me a patent application that somebody "skilled in the profession" can reliably take the information in a patent application and be able to actually reproduce the supposed invention, and the trade secret argument may hold some water. As it is, knowledge that is supposedly being protected through patents simply isn't being preserved nor transmitted to the next generation... at least that knowledge which is important to be preserved.
This is a tired argument that simply doesn't work. I've had it argued that publication elsewhere is how you get the information about a patented invention... but then why is it even being patented. Besides, such publication is entirely optional, thus knowledge is lost even with the patent process.
While nice in theory, in general practice patents simply don't provide societal benefit as promised and really doesn't "promote the useful arts and science".
The argument against that is how the Soviet Union simply didn't have any sort of system in place to identify and find a suitable replacement. With 300 million people in the Soviet Union, it would seem that somebody somewhere should have had at least the aptitude to take the place of Korolov. The tragedy was that due to politics, war, pograms, and general corruption such an individual simply couldn't be found when it was needed.
There were also other reasons why "the USA won the Moon race" that had nothing to do with Korolov's death, and it should be noted that his company, now known as RKK Energia, is still in business in a capitalistic Russia with many of the ideas that Korolov pioneered and in fact sadly makes the only current vehicle that can reliably take anybody from the Earth into space at the moment. I haven't forgotten about the Shinzhou or Dragon vehicles either, but both are arguably still in a prototype state.
He is showing regret that he should have learned these lessons before he screwed himself out of this kind of money. I didn't see anything in that blog post that suggested he was "cheated out of the money" and indeed suggested that he really wasn't fit to be getting that kind of money... at least with the skill sets that he had at the time he was fired. In fact, he even goes so far as to express that if the him of here and now was in charge of the him of then and when, that he would have fired himself in nearly the same way (perhaps more diplomatically, but it would have still happened).
I've been in some of the same position more than a couple of times, where I made the wrong decision in my career where had I been able to take the skills I have today and have been in the position I was at elsewhen, I would have been a multi-millionaire myself. No real regrets, and I've learned those lessons over time. My hope is that other opportunities will arise that I can take advantage of and hopefully not screw up if it comes up again.
The purpose of a corporation can be for things other than to "maximize profits and increase shareholder equity" (a typical phrase in many corporate charters). A really good example of a corporate charter that has other purposes is Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, which explicitly put social progress and other corporate goals besides making a profit into its corporate charter.
If you are an investor and have not read a prospectus about the company and especially if you don't have a clue what the goals and corporate charter have to say about that company, you are being foolish in even investing into such a company.
I know of one particular company (I won't bother naming it because this was said informally) whose express purpose is to provide full employment for the citizens of South Dakota. Another company (Fortune 500 and traded on the NYSE) has in its corporate charter to act as a beneficiary to the development and welfare of a smallish Mid-western town in America. There are also a few corporations that have been established "to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ" or to promote science and other various purposes that have nothing to do with making a profit. Elon Musk, in the case of SpaceX, openly admits that the purpose of his company is to "make mankind a multi-planetary species". The "Newman's Own" company also has a strong charitable mission where none of the profits are even given to shareholders.
In some cases (like SpaceX) earning a profit is certainly very useful and helpful to the ultimate goal so it doesn't even hold that the company must be a "non-profit" company to have purposes other than maximizing profit. If a company fails to meet the overall purpose of the company, it could be argued that the fiduciary responsibility of the board of directors and the corporate officers has not been met, even if perhaps they are maximizing profits.
Do you think those in the Libertarian Party knew of his past when they gave him the nomination? My earlier point was that he is the one person who is most likely to appear as an alternative to the two major party candidates by virtue of the fact that he is on more state ballots than any other 3rd party candidate.
Who cares about what it took for him to get that particular political party's nomination, unless you happen to be a member of that party and have sour grapes hoping it would be somebody else. If you want to point out somebody else who happens to fit your own political leanings, why don't you mention him or her instead?
I did that once upon a time. As troll bait I simply gave out what looked like a plausible password that I never used before in my life and now will never use either.
At least that is better than the password "password", "12345678", or "changeme"
I've seen all of those used as passwords before is the sad thing.
I agree that uncalled for rounding when doing unit conversions in popular media articles is something that needs to be mentioned and criticized. The point is that the author is attempting to give a comparison for people unfamiliar with the other measurement unit into something they are familiar. They should stick with a couple digits of accuracy and get the correct order of magnitude.
Would they do the same thing if they were trying to convert the price of something in Yen and then try to explain how much it cost in Dollars? Sadly, that even happens, such as reporting what something costing a million Yen would be in Dollars.
Titan is the only other place in the Solar System that we know of with an active hydrological system of rivers, channels, rain, and active erosion from that liquid. While not a perfect analogy to the Earth, the mere fact that some other place in the universe that we can also get to with existing technology exists is plenty of reason for going there alone. That a second hydrological system can be used for comparison enables all sorts of scientific theories to be tested simply because it allows for comparison and contrasts, and for a data set that is greater than one data point.
So much of what we think happens on the Earth is based upon the premise that what we see is the only way it can happen. If we can compare to other places and see what is happening there, it can certainly broaden our understanding of these kind of systems.
Mars apparently used to have some active rivers, which is one of the things that the Curiosity rover is checking out right now. The problem is that those rivers are no longer present, so it is like finding a dry river in a desert and trying to understand characteristics of that stream after it has dried up. Venus and the Moon (as well as Mars and the Earth) also have some "channels" where lava flowed giving some additional data points for hydrological systems. The lava flows on Venus are particularly interesting because they are quite long and seem to be long-lived as well. Still, it will be much easier to send a probe to Titan than to design something which will try to not only survive on the surface of Venus but attempt to take samples from molten rock as it flows by. That is hard enough to do in Hawaii, much less on another planet.
Icebergs exist because of a property of water that is somewhat unique, where the solid form has a lower density than the liquid form. That is exaggerated even further with water because the "solid" water (Arctic ice sheets as well as calving from glaciers) is generally free of salt but the salt concentration in liquid water tends to have an even higher density than ordinary fresh water... giving additional buoyancy thus letting those "icebergs" float in the liquid of the oceans on the Earth.
That we live in a world where the temperatures on this planet hover near the freezing point of water makes this a common experience as well, or at least something routine to be seeing in everyday life or when you drink a glass of "ice water", lemonade, or Coca-Cola.
Somehow I doubt that Titan will have anything like that, as I don't think frozen Ethane is going to be a problem on Titan. If there are Ethane glaciers though, it would certainly be an interesting experience.
BTW, I love the joke though, if the proposal was for something larger than a rowboat that would be traveling at speeds greater than about 5-10 knots.
If you don't like Gary Johnson and think that he somehow duped the Libertarian Party (as an organization... it doesn't matter if you think they have lost their way or not) into nominating him with their ballot drive initiatives that have put that part on the ballot of 47 states, he is their nominee regardless of your feelings.
Besides, as I pointed out there are many others who you can vote for as well. Or do you dispute he is that party's nominee?
There are hundreds of other candidates, none of which are will likely even have a remote shot of actually winning the election.
One person that is likely going to at least appear on a number of ballots throughout America is Gary Johnson, the current Libertarian Party candidate. If you really can't stomach either Romney nor Obama, that is at least one person to cast that kind of dissenting vote against both political parties. There are currently a total of five presidential candidates that in theory could win the presidency by virtue of the fact that they are officially on enough ballots in enough states with enough electoral votes that something really drastic happening between now and November could open a way for one of those other candidates to actually win. Outside of those five candidates, everybody else really is a fringe candidate and doesn't even have a theoretical chance of winning.
I'm still undecided in terms of who I will vote for this November, and Gary Johnson is looking pretty nice right now. I'm under no illusion that he even has a remote shot of winning, but it at least gives me somebody to look at other than those other two major party candidates.
So the boss is fine as long as it's just his minions and/or dupes doing the murdering, raping, pillaging and burning?
Strangely, yes it is fine... at least from a legal point of view. Just look at Al Capone and what the law was and was not able to actually do to the guy. The only thing he could be nailed on was tax evasion because Capone wouldn't admit to the source of income for millions of dollars that somehow showed up in his bank accounts.
I'm not saying that I support a guy like this personally, and he may be a ruthless bastard and otherwise deplorable in terms of his ethics. If you can't directly link the actions of somebody to what others are doing, it may be impossible to charge them with crimes that may even be carried out in their name. BTW, I don't mind tax dollars being used to take down such a ruthless bastard either, but it often isn't easy even if you have a whole team of detectives and prosecutors trying to find the links of such a crime boss to what his minions are doing.
I was merely pointing out that the federal government at the beginning of the 20th Century did a pretty good job of governing the whole country and arguably was also a hugely productive period in American history in terms of what people did with personal liberties. If you compare America in 1900 to 1950, and then compare 1950 to 2000, there is a remarkable contrast that can be seen in terms of the fact that America didn't get comparably better economically and even socially in that same period of time. I'll admit that the 2nd half of the 20th Century was largely trying to fix the problems that came up in the 1st half, but was the way that those problems were solved necessarily the best way for them to be solved?
Rolling this back to NASA and space policy, many of those who were shaping space policy in the 1950's and 1960's had seen some remarkable changes to America, and many of those in Congress remembered the first time as adults when they saw an automobile, airplane, radio, or even television... things they didn't even have as children. To them, going to the Moon was a logical next step since so much had been accomplished earlier. 10 year old computers running the same operating system and the same application software were simply unheard of as the rate of change was so tremendous that it wouldn't even be considered... that was something that only started to happen in the 1990's.
Technological progress has been severely hampered in the 20th Century, and I'd even dare say that a regression is happening today where technologies and capabilities are even being lost in America. America certainly is incapable of sending somebody to the Moon right now, as it would take another Apollo project type system to get there that would cost considerably more today to accomplish, even with inflation adjusted dollars. That is even assuming it could be done. Some continued progression is happening, but it isn't uniform and I certainly doubt that the America of the 1940's that was able to defeat the Third Reich and Japanese Empire through sheer manufacturing out production could do the same thing today against other countries.
A major reason for that is a significant erosion of liberties in America. Liberties are being eroded because of the size of the government in almost all areas of life. While you may point out a few choice agencies you wouldn't mind seeing eliminated, I don't think you could find 500 random people (aka sitting members of Congress) that would be able to agree upon the same agencies and have popular support to get that done. Well, the TSA is one of those unpopular agencies that would likely be eliminated if members of congress actually listened to their constituents, but that is a rare exception.
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If you have been working at McDonald's for 20-30 years and still are a grill cook, either you have some serious mental handicaps, are a total jackass that make you unpromotable, or you are deliberately sabotaging your career in other ways. I have no problems for the mentally challenged in this country being able to do something useful with their lives by being a grill cook either, but somebody who has the mental capacity to do more should over time.
At the very least, after 30 years of working at McDonald's you should be managing your own restaurant, if not being in a position of higher management. Opportunities even exist for somebody who is a career McDonald's employee like that to own their restaurant or at least be earning a very respectable salary. It takes hard work and dedication to the job, but not much more.
For folks who either have incredibly bad luck by getting hired by company after company who is closing down, or if you are such a lazy jerk that you don't bother showing up for work or do something equally stupid like picking a fist fight with your boss on a regular basis....of course you are going to struggle throughout your life and be incapable of holding down a steady job.
If you have the attitude to work hard and show some respect to your potential employer, you will usually be able to hold down a job for a reasonable length of time. You may end up quitting that job at McDonald's, but that is because you have a higher paying job. It may be a gamble to quit and move on to another employer, but that is a risk you take in life for any such career move.
This doesn't even cover those who may follow a more entrepreneurial route to achieve their life goals, but lazy people shouldn't be rewarded for being lazy.
what wealthy person ever made their fortune from working for a wage?
wealth is made by either inheritence, gambling (including stock investment), crime/corruption or innovation+personality (in the case of successful startups).
a large part is also luck.
anyone who says you make your own luck falls into the corruption category.
nobody's time is actually "worth" any amount that would lead to what the media would coin as "wealth" (millionaire+). those that are on rediculously high salaries have abused their influence or position of power to attain it, not hard work (so they also fall into the corruption category).
just because some forms of corruption are legal doesn't make them any less corrupt.
I can name several people who are quite wealthy that at some point or another in their life they started with very little money and needed to work for an hourly wage for a great many years before finally being able to get what would commonly be called "wealthy" by most standards. I also think you have a very warped view of what capitalism really is and what amounts to be a legitimate investment.
Gambling is attempting to play a "game of chance" where in advance the odds are stacked against you mathematically so you will not win in the long run over time. That is how plush casinos are able to stay in business because they can even predict what their daily "take" will be in the long run even if some occasional people may be temporarily lucky. A legitimate investment is almost always a "win/win" or "lose/lose" situation where the investor and the people you are working with will also profit with the investment or will also lose their shirt if you lose. There is no random chance involved at all, other than perhaps the general things that happen in life... which isn't really random chance either. A great many of those things can even be predicted to a small extent.
The point of the post you were responding to is largely correct: If you live in a 1st world country and are employed in ordinary jobs through a typical working career, you will have the equivalent of what is today a million dollars (adjusted for inflation in the future) in your working lifetime pass through your hands. Most people squander that money on frivolous things or become indentured servants to banks in a variety of ways, but that is your money you are throwing away and not somebody else's. That some people can through thrift or intelligence avoid squandering that money shouldn't be surprising either.
There are very ordinary people who by the time they reach retirement age have well over a million dollars that they have put aside for their "old age". That you may not be aware of them is largely due to your own age (if you are just starting your own working career) or the fact that they tend not to show off their wealth... part of the reason why they have been successful at saving up that kind of money. Not everybody who is wealthy lives like Donald Trump or MC Hammer.
What isn't a commercial enterprise? RKK Energia?
That is as close to a commercial enterprise as I can imagine. That perhaps under the Soviet Union it wasn't a commercial enterprise is immaterial, they are very much a for-profit commercial enterprise at the moment and in fact are ramping up production of the Soyuz spacecraft and vehicles precisely because of the high demand for their vehicles. They are being cautious in a very Russian manner, but I don't see what the problem is for a company of that nature to sell their services in this manner.
It also doesn't help that NASA doesn't want to commit to any long term contract because the U.S. Congress keeps cutting funds toward future space missions with American astronauts on the Soyuz, so in this case Roscosmos and RKK Energia are being precisely treated like a commercial enterprise in this case. That the Russian government may have other plans for the Soyuz spacecraft is indeed something that needs to be addressed by Russian space policy, but in this case the competition between a private commercial enterprise (Space Adventures) and a foreign government buying the same product (NASA) shouldn't make any bit of difference.
Or would it make a difference if it was a paying customer from another government besides the USA?
That doesn't stop tourists stopping by McMurdo or even the Scott-Amundsen stations, or for that matter any of the other national laboratories.
Besides, in order to go to the ISS on a Soyuz spacecraft you need to go through a six month course that qualifies you to be a cosmonaut and capable of flying that vehicle, so the only other credential would be a PhD in some scientific field. Russia got into that whole credential business when the other "space tourists" went to the ISS, classifying those "others" as employees of RKK Energia and "guest cosmonauts".
The current SpaceX Dragon capsule even has life support equipment, because it is being berthed to the ISS and needs that life support equipment in order to support the astronauts which go inside. The only thing really missing is a seat for the astronauts, and the fact that the Falcon 9 v 1.0 that is currently flying simply can't support that much extra mass that an astronaut plus all of the extra baggage would require. The launch escape system is also going to add some additional payload penalty that a cargo version of the Dragon doesn't need as well.
The cool thing about the planned launch escape system that SpaceX is proposing though is that it will be an integrated system that can be used in other phases of the flight as well, including deorbit and landing situations (how SpaceX eventually plans on having the Dragon capsule land on a spaceport tarmac rather than in the ocean with a splashdown). They don't plan on jettisoning the launch escape system as is being planned by Boeing for the CST-100 and the Orion.
The Falcon 9 is getting an upgrade with new engines and larger tanks that are going to be able to support more payload mass in the Dragon, but neither the last flight nor the upcoming flight this next week would be able to fly astronauts even if a safety requirement were waived. I suppose a hammock with an astronaut in a scuba suit might seem romantic, but it takes a little more to send people into space.
Technically the Earth is not one of those objects because Kepler isn't even in orbit around the Earth, but rather in an Earth-Sun Lagrangian orbital position. That would be the trailing point, or L-5. Still, over the distances involved it might as well be the Earth.
We should be so lucky as to have those as outcomes. The reality is that once a hyper-partisan group manages to attain any amount of power, they use it to enforce their position onto others. They become convinced that their position is the absolute and correct one. They view those disagreeing as being in denial of reality and sometimes dangerous.
The problem with these kind of communities is that they become echo chambers, where some people start to get the strange notion that their beliefs and attitudes are in the majority when in fact it is an extreme fringe group.
One huge example that I've seen this year is the Ron Paul supporters in America, where they have some rather large numbers (in terms of absolute counts) and can even put together fairly large "rallies" thanks to social media. They have been able to show that they can raise millions of dollars through tactics like a "money bomb" and in some cases were even successful at capturing the apparatus of some state Republican party organizations. I would presume that the ability to chair and set the agenda of a state political party is an indication of "attaining any amount of political power" as you have suggested.
If you've paid any attention the the political winds this year on the internet, all you had to do was post some sort of "on line survey" and you would get it overwhelmed by votes for Ron Paul. There certainly seemed to be a very organized on-line and had active twitter feeds, discussion forums, Facebook pages, and otherwise a very active on-line presence where a mere mention that some survey was going on would result in a "Slashdot effect" descending upon that poll that included Ron Paul. Mind you, this sort of emphasizes my "echo chamber" effect I am talking about here because many of these rabid Ron Paul supporters started to believe these polls (obviously skewed) that seem to indicate that they were in the majority and that "everybody" thought about politics in the same way.
Unfortunately when they showed up to the national convention and had to show their actual numbers and face reality, they were shocked and surprised that they were a fringe group instead of being mainstream... and that they couldn't get their agenda passed or even considered.
Arguably I think the Republican Party is going to suffer (and Mitt Romney is going to lose the presidential election because of this) due to the "mainstream" Republicans treating the Ron Paul fan bois as a fringe group not worth engagement or even consideration, but at the same time I think the Ron Paul supporters have shot themselves in the foot as well by even dismissing the viewpoints of other Republicans and doing a scorched earth tactic as well. The number of Ron Paul supporters are small enough that they can in theory be ignored in general by the Republican Party, but they are large enough that they can make a huge difference in a tight political contest like seems to be the case this year.
I promise you that this post is going to get heavily moderated in a negative direction, as it will offend some Ron Paul supporter. If I posted this on a Ron Paul forum, I would be kicked from the forum with a permanent ban. I know as I've had it happen "for telling the truth" that may be uncomfortable for them to confront. Still, it gets back to my point that they are living in an echo chamber and are not paying attention to the larger world. I don't care right now, because I got karma to burn at the moment... this being Slashdot.
For myself, I find that I need to actively engage in conversations with people who have a decidedly different world view. It challenges my assumptions and sometimes even does change my mind on some key ideas. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be how most people look upon these on-line forums. I don't know if some of that is because I've had an on-line presence now for nearly 40 years in some form or another and I've seen these things come and go... while many of those (like Ron Paul fans I've mentioned) find on-line discussions to be something new that they've never seen before.
To note: I like Ron Paul as a person and as a politician. I am myself even a sort of fan, but I am under no delusion that this is a mainstream political position.
It is called the corporate charter. In terms of what the government thinks and how you pay taxes (the only thing the government cares about), these other corporate types are irrelevant.
The corporate charter is the contract that shareholders agree to when they purchase shares of the company. It can state any legal purpose for its existence, and making a profit certainly doesn't need to be the reason for its existence. The fact that making money is a strong reason for making a company and a typical reason doesn't matter other than it is a typical purpose.
That is also one of the reasons why attending shareholder meetings is important if you own shares of a company, especially if you own a substantial number of shares in that company. As long as you can get a majority of the shareholders (as determined by the number of shares... or by other voting mechanisms in the corporate charter that can even be one vote per shareholder regardless of the number of shares you own) to agree with your viewpoint, you can make changes to the charter or certainly hold up corporate officers to abide by the conditions of the charter.
That this isn't done as often for purposes other than making money is only something that just needs to be pointed out. These companies can be traded on major stock exchanges and still have a social purpose that goes beyond making money... even though most folks who are "institutional investors" on Wall Street only care about making money alone.
If an employee of the company buying the new invention idea decided to run off to another manufacturing company and "beat them to market", they would be in deep trouble over trade secret laws that would get their ass nailed, as would employment contract laws as well.
There certainly could be some slimy companies who would learn enough top level concepts about a device that they might be able to use it as a direction for their engineers to follow up on and toss the "garage inventor" under the bus. Oh.... that happens anyway today even if a patent has been issued so it really doesn't matter, does it? Companies who develop a reputation of tossing inventors under the bus (especially with some high profile lawsuits blaring that to everybody who comes in contact with the company) will simply not get good ideas coming their way as opposed to companies who have a history of helping budding inventors.
I'll also note that a garage tinkerer is not gong to necessarily have a "bullet-proof and well written patent backed by a well funded and experienced legal department". They are still out of luck as the only people who benefit from a patent are very well established organizations who can siphon off a small portion of their profits for a dozen or more lawyers, keeping the lawyer to engineer ratio at about even or more lawyers than engineers. Is that something which is desirable or even necessary for a proper functioning society?
Philo Farnsworth also ended up wasting most of his time in a courtroom instead of in a laboratory actually making stuff. It is to me one very strong example of how the patent system fails to deliver on its promises. Farnsworth invented not just television but also FM radio and even a nuclear fusion device that promises in the long run to really make a major difference in this world. If he had been working on that fusion reactor instead of piddling his time away in meetings with lawyers and fighting an ulcer given to him by David Sarnoff, this world would have been a much better place. That Sarnoff went after Farnsworth not only over television but also FM radio makes the Farnsworth story even more sad. Farnsworth simply died before he could perfect his fusor reactor.
I'll also note that his patent application for the dissector tube (his actual invention, which electronically records light by scanning a tube that later became the videcon tube in early television cameras) actually gives enough information to in theory recreate the device. It is one of a damn few that do such a thing, so I completely reject the notion that patents actually record the state of the technical arts in society for future generations. The patent system simply doesn't work as advertised and simply isn't used for the purpose of spreading knowledge about devices and concepts as it should be.
I've seen similar suggestions for copyright as well. It is also much more easily done for copyrights as it generally is easy to establish who the "author" or "songwriter" is for copyright enforcement, and plagiarism (aka taking credit for somebody else's work) is easily dealt with in the court system and easy to prove.
The problem with patents is that the process of proving novelty, originality, and non-obviousness (what a patent examiner is paid to do) is not always easy and usually isn't cheap because of legitimate labor issues involved in trying to take time to go through the paperwork of a patent application to see that it is in order and that it isn't duplicating a previously issued patent or something else in the marketplace. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office certifies when the patent is issued that the review has been made and that the burden of proof that the patent is invalid rests strongly upon any potential defendant fighting the patent... with the presumption that you have violated the patent until you can legally prove otherwise. Essentially the cost of a patent needs to be by definition a few thousand dollars just for labor costs alone by the patent office. Add to that lawyer costs because doing that by yourself is usually a really bad idea, and it just gets even more complicated and expensive with theoretically no upper limit on the cost of even just filing a patent.
In contrast with a copyright, the most labor intensive thing that the Library of Congress (who takes care of copyright in America with similar agencies in other countries) is to have some clerk who assigns a card catalog number to the book (if it is non-fiction) and to find bookshelf space for the book or other material you are trying to register for copyright. BTW, I also happen to be a fan of formal copyright registration as well, but $50 (the current price for registration) really isn't that bad in comparison and can be done without a lawyer. It is even a silly thing to hire a lawyer for that purpose.
Show me a patent application that somebody "skilled in the profession" can reliably take the information in a patent application and be able to actually reproduce the supposed invention, and the trade secret argument may hold some water. As it is, knowledge that is supposedly being protected through patents simply isn't being preserved nor transmitted to the next generation... at least that knowledge which is important to be preserved.
This is a tired argument that simply doesn't work. I've had it argued that publication elsewhere is how you get the information about a patented invention... but then why is it even being patented. Besides, such publication is entirely optional, thus knowledge is lost even with the patent process.
While nice in theory, in general practice patents simply don't provide societal benefit as promised and really doesn't "promote the useful arts and science".
The argument against that is how the Soviet Union simply didn't have any sort of system in place to identify and find a suitable replacement. With 300 million people in the Soviet Union, it would seem that somebody somewhere should have had at least the aptitude to take the place of Korolov. The tragedy was that due to politics, war, pograms, and general corruption such an individual simply couldn't be found when it was needed.
There were also other reasons why "the USA won the Moon race" that had nothing to do with Korolov's death, and it should be noted that his company, now known as RKK Energia, is still in business in a capitalistic Russia with many of the ideas that Korolov pioneered and in fact sadly makes the only current vehicle that can reliably take anybody from the Earth into space at the moment. I haven't forgotten about the Shinzhou or Dragon vehicles either, but both are arguably still in a prototype state.
He is showing regret that he should have learned these lessons before he screwed himself out of this kind of money. I didn't see anything in that blog post that suggested he was "cheated out of the money" and indeed suggested that he really wasn't fit to be getting that kind of money... at least with the skill sets that he had at the time he was fired. In fact, he even goes so far as to express that if the him of here and now was in charge of the him of then and when, that he would have fired himself in nearly the same way (perhaps more diplomatically, but it would have still happened).
I've been in some of the same position more than a couple of times, where I made the wrong decision in my career where had I been able to take the skills I have today and have been in the position I was at elsewhen, I would have been a multi-millionaire myself. No real regrets, and I've learned those lessons over time. My hope is that other opportunities will arise that I can take advantage of and hopefully not screw up if it comes up again.
The purpose of a corporation can be for things other than to "maximize profits and increase shareholder equity" (a typical phrase in many corporate charters). A really good example of a corporate charter that has other purposes is Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, which explicitly put social progress and other corporate goals besides making a profit into its corporate charter.
If you are an investor and have not read a prospectus about the company and especially if you don't have a clue what the goals and corporate charter have to say about that company, you are being foolish in even investing into such a company.
I know of one particular company (I won't bother naming it because this was said informally) whose express purpose is to provide full employment for the citizens of South Dakota. Another company (Fortune 500 and traded on the NYSE) has in its corporate charter to act as a beneficiary to the development and welfare of a smallish Mid-western town in America. There are also a few corporations that have been established "to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ" or to promote science and other various purposes that have nothing to do with making a profit. Elon Musk, in the case of SpaceX, openly admits that the purpose of his company is to "make mankind a multi-planetary species". The "Newman's Own" company also has a strong charitable mission where none of the profits are even given to shareholders.
In some cases (like SpaceX) earning a profit is certainly very useful and helpful to the ultimate goal so it doesn't even hold that the company must be a "non-profit" company to have purposes other than maximizing profit. If a company fails to meet the overall purpose of the company, it could be argued that the fiduciary responsibility of the board of directors and the corporate officers has not been met, even if perhaps they are maximizing profits.
Do you think those in the Libertarian Party knew of his past when they gave him the nomination? My earlier point was that he is the one person who is most likely to appear as an alternative to the two major party candidates by virtue of the fact that he is on more state ballots than any other 3rd party candidate.
Who cares about what it took for him to get that particular political party's nomination, unless you happen to be a member of that party and have sour grapes hoping it would be somebody else. If you want to point out somebody else who happens to fit your own political leanings, why don't you mention him or her instead?
Because if you make an offensive video about Jews, they wil form mobs and burn down your embassy.
In of course the dozens of countries that they form the majority of the population.
Of course what happens if you make an offensive video about Buddha? I suppose some monk will set themselves on fire if they really want to protest.
I did that once upon a time. As troll bait I simply gave out what looked like a plausible password that I never used before in my life and now will never use either.
At least that is better than the password "password", "12345678", or "changeme"
I've seen all of those used as passwords before is the sad thing.
100 kilograms == 220 pounds.... give or take.
I agree that uncalled for rounding when doing unit conversions in popular media articles is something that needs to be mentioned and criticized. The point is that the author is attempting to give a comparison for people unfamiliar with the other measurement unit into something they are familiar. They should stick with a couple digits of accuracy and get the correct order of magnitude.
Would they do the same thing if they were trying to convert the price of something in Yen and then try to explain how much it cost in Dollars? Sadly, that even happens, such as reporting what something costing a million Yen would be in Dollars.
Titan is the only other place in the Solar System that we know of with an active hydrological system of rivers, channels, rain, and active erosion from that liquid. While not a perfect analogy to the Earth, the mere fact that some other place in the universe that we can also get to with existing technology exists is plenty of reason for going there alone. That a second hydrological system can be used for comparison enables all sorts of scientific theories to be tested simply because it allows for comparison and contrasts, and for a data set that is greater than one data point.
So much of what we think happens on the Earth is based upon the premise that what we see is the only way it can happen. If we can compare to other places and see what is happening there, it can certainly broaden our understanding of these kind of systems.
Mars apparently used to have some active rivers, which is one of the things that the Curiosity rover is checking out right now. The problem is that those rivers are no longer present, so it is like finding a dry river in a desert and trying to understand characteristics of that stream after it has dried up. Venus and the Moon (as well as Mars and the Earth) also have some "channels" where lava flowed giving some additional data points for hydrological systems. The lava flows on Venus are particularly interesting because they are quite long and seem to be long-lived as well. Still, it will be much easier to send a probe to Titan than to design something which will try to not only survive on the surface of Venus but attempt to take samples from molten rock as it flows by. That is hard enough to do in Hawaii, much less on another planet.
Icebergs exist because of a property of water that is somewhat unique, where the solid form has a lower density than the liquid form. That is exaggerated even further with water because the "solid" water (Arctic ice sheets as well as calving from glaciers) is generally free of salt but the salt concentration in liquid water tends to have an even higher density than ordinary fresh water... giving additional buoyancy thus letting those "icebergs" float in the liquid of the oceans on the Earth.
That we live in a world where the temperatures on this planet hover near the freezing point of water makes this a common experience as well, or at least something routine to be seeing in everyday life or when you drink a glass of "ice water", lemonade, or Coca-Cola.
Somehow I doubt that Titan will have anything like that, as I don't think frozen Ethane is going to be a problem on Titan. If there are Ethane glaciers though, it would certainly be an interesting experience.
BTW, I love the joke though, if the proposal was for something larger than a rowboat that would be traveling at speeds greater than about 5-10 knots.
If you don't like Gary Johnson and think that he somehow duped the Libertarian Party (as an organization... it doesn't matter if you think they have lost their way or not) into nominating him with their ballot drive initiatives that have put that part on the ballot of 47 states, he is their nominee regardless of your feelings.
Besides, as I pointed out there are many others who you can vote for as well. Or do you dispute he is that party's nominee?
There are hundreds of other candidates, none of which are will likely even have a remote shot of actually winning the election.
One person that is likely going to at least appear on a number of ballots throughout America is Gary Johnson, the current Libertarian Party candidate. If you really can't stomach either Romney nor Obama, that is at least one person to cast that kind of dissenting vote against both political parties. There are currently a total of five presidential candidates that in theory could win the presidency by virtue of the fact that they are officially on enough ballots in enough states with enough electoral votes that something really drastic happening between now and November could open a way for one of those other candidates to actually win. Outside of those five candidates, everybody else really is a fringe candidate and doesn't even have a theoretical chance of winning.
I'm still undecided in terms of who I will vote for this November, and Gary Johnson is looking pretty nice right now. I'm under no illusion that he even has a remote shot of winning, but it at least gives me somebody to look at other than those other two major party candidates.
So the boss is fine as long as it's just his minions and/or dupes doing the murdering, raping, pillaging and burning?
Strangely, yes it is fine... at least from a legal point of view. Just look at Al Capone and what the law was and was not able to actually do to the guy. The only thing he could be nailed on was tax evasion because Capone wouldn't admit to the source of income for millions of dollars that somehow showed up in his bank accounts.
I'm not saying that I support a guy like this personally, and he may be a ruthless bastard and otherwise deplorable in terms of his ethics. If you can't directly link the actions of somebody to what others are doing, it may be impossible to charge them with crimes that may even be carried out in their name. BTW, I don't mind tax dollars being used to take down such a ruthless bastard either, but it often isn't easy even if you have a whole team of detectives and prosecutors trying to find the links of such a crime boss to what his minions are doing.
I was merely pointing out that the federal government at the beginning of the 20th Century did a pretty good job of governing the whole country and arguably was also a hugely productive period in American history in terms of what people did with personal liberties. If you compare America in 1900 to 1950, and then compare 1950 to 2000, there is a remarkable contrast that can be seen in terms of the fact that America didn't get comparably better economically and even socially in that same period of time. I'll admit that the 2nd half of the 20th Century was largely trying to fix the problems that came up in the 1st half, but was the way that those problems were solved necessarily the best way for them to be solved?
Rolling this back to NASA and space policy, many of those who were shaping space policy in the 1950's and 1960's had seen some remarkable changes to America, and many of those in Congress remembered the first time as adults when they saw an automobile, airplane, radio, or even television... things they didn't even have as children. To them, going to the Moon was a logical next step since so much had been accomplished earlier. 10 year old computers running the same operating system and the same application software were simply unheard of as the rate of change was so tremendous that it wouldn't even be considered... that was something that only started to happen in the 1990's.
Technological progress has been severely hampered in the 20th Century, and I'd even dare say that a regression is happening today where technologies and capabilities are even being lost in America. America certainly is incapable of sending somebody to the Moon right now, as it would take another Apollo project type system to get there that would cost considerably more today to accomplish, even with inflation adjusted dollars. That is even assuming it could be done. Some continued progression is happening, but it isn't uniform and I certainly doubt that the America of the 1940's that was able to defeat the Third Reich and Japanese Empire through sheer manufacturing out production could do the same thing today against other countries.
A major reason for that is a significant erosion of liberties in America. Liberties are being eroded because of the size of the government in almost all areas of life. While you may point out a few choice agencies you wouldn't mind seeing eliminated, I don't think you could find 500 random people (aka sitting members of Congress) that would be able to agree upon the same agencies and have popular support to get that done. Well, the TSA is one of those unpopular agencies that would likely be eliminated if members of congress actually listened to their constituents, but that is a rare exception.