The question isn't whether NASA does good stuff. They do. The question is whether NASA would do a better or worse job with the same dollars than if private companies did it.
As for the ATC system, there's a crying need to privatize it. There's big bucks being lost because the FAA can't get their act together and fix it. A consortium of the major airliners (financed like C-SPAN) would ensure quick and safe reforms that would allow people to leave and arrive on time without favoring one company over another.
Oh, I'd guess that NASA is authorized under the same section that let Lewis and Clark scout out the Louisiana territory.
In other words, Thomas Jefferson fretted about this too but he sent them out anyway.
You can make a good case that they serve a good anciliary military function, doing basic research for the next war up above and thus fit into Art 1 Sect 8 para 12-13. Making the results public can be argued to promote the general welfare (para 1 same article) as well as para 8, promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.
Frankly, I get nervous about it too but I wouldn't say it's flat out unconstitutional for the reasons cited above.
Actually, Alan Greenspan is an Objectivist, a political species often allied with but distinctly separate from Republican. Besides, you are twisting what he said.
He has repeatedly said that the best thing would be to not spend it and just pay down the debt. The second best thing would be a tax cut giving back the surplus. The worst thing in the world would be to spend the surplus on new programs or increased funding on old.
Now outside of some Concord Coalition, Rudman-Perogt love fest, the realists all know that paying down the debt to $0 isn't going to happen unless the economy gets so big that the debt is an asterisk in the government books. This bad faith misrepresentation of Greenspan makes it pretty hard to take the rest of what you said anything other than a troll. On the off chance you actually believe what you wrote...
Bucko, *progress* isn't good for the environment. Unless you want to go back to cave dwellings, hunting and gathering, etc. Some environmental degradation is going to happen. The question is whether government funded progress in space is going to be cleaner or dirtier than privately funded progress. Take a look at current govt. environmental practice on military bases as a good example. Or maybe you want to look up the horror stories on the Hanford nuke facility. In short, if it wasn't for government immunity, they couldn't build enough prisons to handle the violations of law that the govt does to the environment.
The "or even each other" part leads me to believe you are trying to make some straw man that private entities in space means anarchy, the rules against murder, theft, sabotage, etc. will be suspended because... well you don't really say why, you leave it all as a nasty inference. In Microsoft, they make nasty jokes about Linus Torvalds and vice versa here at Slashdot. I think we can all live with that kind of behavior.
"Competition is no good for a research field" Then why are biotech stocks so well funded? Why are pharmaceutical firms raking in so much cash? This is such obvious bs, it's a wonder the lameness filter didn't trip.
Since muslims, christians, and jews all view Abraham as valid and worship the same God he did, any of the big monotheistic three gets you to the same door. The question is how loving, forgiving, vengeful, or wrathful he is. Pascal's wager still stands.
And to also get back on topic, I agree that we should privatize space exploration. The question is how do we do something about it? The US has legislation that gets us most of the way there (I think) but the money hasn't come in.
That would be great if they would get us there. I'm more hopeful that some dot.com billionaire is going to take this up as his project and set up a private space company to do it right.
I would guess that the requirements for this projects were something like this:
1. Get the public to harden their systems before the Chinese, or the Russians, or any of a dozen other countries with computer warfare military units, penetrates enough systems to make infowar a practical venture.
2. Get it adopted without a heck of a lot of vendor threats/handholding (probably why it's open source)
3. Greatest good for the greatest number of systems (Linux)
actually, you may have stumbled onto something here. Blood delivery through the normal gravity drip bags is just a non-starter. Could this be an aid to space medicine?
I think it's fair to blame W. Europe for being a bunch of immature idiots when it comes to energy policy. There are several articles at Stratfor (warning, the good stuff requires a paid subscription) on the subject.
W. Europe is mortgaging it's political indepenedence in favor of cheap gas transiting through Russia and causing the Russians (who don't have a lot of luck running a real economy) to shift towards cheap and dangerous nuclear designs like the RBMK. The alternatives are there, of course, but nobody seems to want to do the heavy lifting to manage non-russian energy alternatives. If the existing Baku-Supsa line were enlarged and the Constanta-Trieste line were built, you would have reasonable, non-russian transit while only having to tanker across the Black Sea (without having to go through that eyedropper called the Dardenelles).
Again, these people should know better than to push the Russian's into further RBMK deployment. And yet in the last few months, encouraging RBMK deployment by sucking up most of Russia's natural gas for shipment to the west is what they've done.
My business locations are suburban Chicago and Bucharest Romania. California is of interest as a market for my outsource services, nothing more.
As for the cap, they just lifted it so somebody out there has taken eco 101 (but not the governor who protested it).
If I'm going to build my own infrastructure, I'll locate in Romania where I have a high density of geeks and for the same money, a much better lifestyle.
1. These generators are very hot (they double as water heaters)
2. They are reasonably big (refrigerator sized, put on a concrete pad outside your home).
I predict that stealing these generators will be about as popular as stealing central AC.
I didn't know about the price cap. Of course you are going to have shortages when you have price caps and market conditions call for higher than price cap prices. That's eco 101.
The good effects of fuel cells are not only going to be in power sales but in taking load off the public grid. If internet dependent businesses like mine are going to buy these cells to keep us up and running irrespective of the grid, we are going to essentially be going off-grid as far as the power company is concerned. Less demand equals fewer emergencies.
If normally, Cheyenne is feeding a factory 300 miles to the east and that factory is fed from the Montreal electricity instead, you have saved 600 miles of wire resistance, the 300 miles that the Montreal electricity would have had to cover to get to the Cheyenne plant on the way to Los Angeles and the 300 miles that the Cheyenne plant didn't have to push their electricity to the east.
My comment about a socialist dystopia wasn't about Arthur Scargill's strike. The strike endangered electrical production and you aren't even attempting to deny that. BTW: the strike isn't why I think the UK of the 70's was a dystopia, that came from Scargill's proposal at the time to legally limit emigration from the UK, which was and always will be the hallmark of a dystopia. But your claim that the UK's political system (which you term socialist) hasn't produced situations where power was endangered has been sufficiently punctured.
I'll just ignore the attempt to change the subject to the merits of the Thatcher crackdown on unions and let you wimper and whine your way back to the government teat from which you seem to have no desire to be weaned.
1. You don't understand, the current crop of politicians count the protesters as one of their core constituencies. Seriously enforcing the law would deprive them of votes and lead to a weakened political position in the next election.
2. The engineering problems with that are tremendous and the permits necessary to do such heavy modifications are mind-boggling. It isn't going to happen.
3. You are offering a false choice. The true choice in your situation is sporadic v. sporadic and history is on the side of local positioning of the company's servers being more reliable.
I think you are wrong about deregulation. Nobody wants to own a plant because while plant owners have enemies, brokers don't.
Environmentalists want no plants, soccer moms are afraid of ELF, zoning officials want a cut for approval of plans, it's a real pain in the neck to own a conventional plant and all of the cost is politically generated. The previous situation covered up these particular problems so well that California's politicians didn't even realize how badly half-deregulation would serve the state, not because they were moving in the wrong direction but because they weren't being bold enough to make the new system work.
Well, your mileage may vary due to what country you are posting from but I believe that the US has by federal law mandated that the power companies have to accept locally generated power and have set minimum floor prices for it. If you live in a jurisdiction where this is illegal, you could always pump your excess into a Tesla coil for fun...
B-)
Personally, I don't see a green ethic inconsistent with libertarianism as long as the green's don't wish to use the power of the state to compel me to use fewer computers (I'm currently using three).
The problem is that both power stations and transmission lines go through political processes. The scare mongering over ELF has caused an upsurge in resistance to new transmission lines and the green movement has been very successful in reducing power generation capacity (blowing up dams) and preventing new generation from being added (NIMBY slowdowns in the zoning and permit process).
And nobody is going to cut off your electricity? Before Thatcher came and pulled away from the socialist dystopia that the UK was becoming it nearly did happen in the '70s with Arthur Scargill's coal mining strikes bringing down the Heath government. AFAIK the UK at the time was mostly using coal burners for both electricity and heat. Had things turned out a bit differently, the UK would have been both in the dark, and frozen stiff (and people say American's know no history or international affairs).
One point which you seem to be overlooking is that these companies accepted under market rate cheap electricity in exchange for being cut off in time of shortage.
The number of plants down for maintenance has eliminated all safety margin and the shortages have arrived. Political resistance that has been rising for over a decade has gelded the ability to rapidly introduce new capacity or even increase the amount of importable electricity using "wheeling" (the practice of CA buying from faraway places like Quebec and Quebec shipping to intermediate places while the intermediate places actually ship their electricity to CA) to cut down on transmission losses.
1. here's the rub, building more powerplants is easy, when you don't have chanting demonstrators chaining themselves to your construction equipment.
2. adding generators to existing plants is possible up to a point, but I would guess that this has already been taken about as far as present technology can push it.
3. This is possible, but moving to a co-lo facility outside of CA is going to introduce network vulnerabilities that hit more often than power vulnerabilities have (to date at least).
Actually, the problem is that plants are unexpectedly dropping off the grid, lowering capacity. The most recent 500MW plant to drop out powers a heck of a lot of christmas lights.
The problem, fundamentally, isn't extra load, it's the political system that doesn't let new powerplants pop up as needed. NIMBY is alive and well and it will probably take localized, quiet fuel cell generators to fix this problem. NIMBY doesn't care about what it doesn't notice.
It just goes to show that if you partially deregulate, things can get worse instead of better. They have politically slowed down the construction of new electrical generation capacity so much that blackouts became an inevitability.
They need to make it easier to add capacity to the system so higher prices will generate new entrants to the market.
Maybe those powerplug (GE labelled) generators are going to save the day but first they have to get through this year without stupid legislation rolling California fully back to a command and control system
In the past, I have regularly argued that if you don't like anybody for the job, you should leave that ballot blank. It was a strategy of undervoting to undermine the legitimacy of the incumbent political bozos. I've heard people on the left and the right make the same argument so this isn't partisan but rather a backhanded way to achieve the option of none of the above.
Al Gore, by his equating these protest votes with votes stolen from him is doing a disservice to all those political protesters of which I have been a member on occassion. He is trying to steal our voices to say 'you are all bums and none of you deserves a vote'. That's sad and dangerous for our country.
The one point I fundamentally disagree with you is on the issue of recounts. Here, you are factually wrong. All counties in Florida, by law, had to do a recount (machine recount). They all complied with the law. But it didn't stop there. Of the three counties that wanted to go forward under the extension that the FSC gave, the actual results were that Palm Beach missed the deadline, Miami-Dade gave up and missed the deadline, and Broward completed on time. This is why GWB's margin shrank at the certification from over 900 to substantially less.
There's been enough false facts around that I like to correct mistakes when I can.
Slashdot Mirror
The question isn't whether NASA does good stuff. They do. The question is whether NASA would do a better or worse job with the same dollars than if private companies did it.
As for the ATC system, there's a crying need to privatize it. There's big bucks being lost because the FAA can't get their act together and fix it. A consortium of the major airliners (financed like C-SPAN) would ensure quick and safe reforms that would allow people to leave and arrive on time without favoring one company over another.
DB
Oh, I'd guess that NASA is authorized under the same section that let Lewis and Clark scout out the Louisiana territory.
In other words, Thomas Jefferson fretted about this too but he sent them out anyway.
You can make a good case that they serve a good anciliary military function, doing basic research for the next war up above and thus fit into Art 1 Sect 8 para 12-13. Making the results public can be argued to promote the general welfare (para 1 same article) as well as para 8, promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.
Frankly, I get nervous about it too but I wouldn't say it's flat out unconstitutional for the reasons cited above.
DB
Actually, Alan Greenspan is an Objectivist, a political species often allied with but distinctly separate from Republican. Besides, you are twisting what he said.
He has repeatedly said that the best thing would be to not spend it and just pay down the debt. The second best thing would be a tax cut giving back the surplus. The worst thing in the world would be to spend the surplus on new programs or increased funding on old.
Now outside of some Concord Coalition, Rudman-Perogt love fest, the realists all know that paying down the debt to $0 isn't going to happen unless the economy gets so big that the debt is an asterisk in the government books. This bad faith misrepresentation of Greenspan makes it pretty hard to take the rest of what you said anything other than a troll. On the off chance you actually believe what you wrote...
Bucko, *progress* isn't good for the environment. Unless you want to go back to cave dwellings, hunting and gathering, etc. Some environmental degradation is going to happen. The question is whether government funded progress in space is going to be cleaner or dirtier than privately funded progress. Take a look at current govt. environmental practice on military bases as a good example. Or maybe you want to look up the horror stories on the Hanford nuke facility. In short, if it wasn't for government immunity, they couldn't build enough prisons to handle the violations of law that the govt does to the environment.
The "or even each other" part leads me to believe you are trying to make some straw man that private entities in space means anarchy, the rules against murder, theft, sabotage, etc. will be suspended because... well you don't really say why, you leave it all as a nasty inference. In Microsoft, they make nasty jokes about Linus Torvalds and vice versa here at Slashdot. I think we can all live with that kind of behavior.
"Competition is no good for a research field" Then why are biotech stocks so well funded? Why are pharmaceutical firms raking in so much cash? This is such obvious bs, it's a wonder the lameness filter didn't trip.
DB
Since muslims, christians, and jews all view Abraham as valid and worship the same God he did, any of the big monotheistic three gets you to the same door. The question is how loving, forgiving, vengeful, or wrathful he is. Pascal's wager still stands.
And to also get back on topic, I agree that we should privatize space exploration. The question is how do we do something about it? The US has legislation that gets us most of the way there (I think) but the money hasn't come in.
Why is that?
That would be great if they would get us there. I'm more hopeful that some dot.com billionaire is going to take this up as his project and set up a private space company to do it right.
Maybe Larry Ellison could do it.
DB
I would guess that the requirements for this projects were something like this:
1. Get the public to harden their systems before the Chinese, or the Russians, or any of a dozen other countries with computer warfare military units, penetrates enough systems to make infowar a practical venture.
2. Get it adopted without a heck of a lot of vendor threats/handholding (probably why it's open source)
3. Greatest good for the greatest number of systems (Linux)
Sound good?
actually, you may have stumbled onto something here. Blood delivery through the normal gravity drip bags is just a non-starter. Could this be an aid to space medicine?
DB
W. Europe is mortgaging it's political indepenedence in favor of cheap gas transiting through Russia and causing the Russians (who don't have a lot of luck running a real economy) to shift towards cheap and dangerous nuclear designs like the RBMK. The alternatives are there, of course, but nobody seems to want to do the heavy lifting to manage non-russian energy alternatives. If the existing Baku-Supsa line were enlarged and the Constanta-Trieste line were built, you would have reasonable, non-russian transit while only having to tanker across the Black Sea (without having to go through that eyedropper called the Dardenelles).
Again, these people should know better than to push the Russian's into further RBMK deployment. And yet in the last few months, encouraging RBMK deployment by sucking up most of Russia's natural gas for shipment to the west is what they've done.
DB
My business locations are suburban Chicago and Bucharest Romania. California is of interest as a market for my outsource services, nothing more.
As for the cap, they just lifted it so somebody out there has taken eco 101 (but not the governor who protested it).
If I'm going to build my own infrastructure, I'll locate in Romania where I have a high density of geeks and for the same money, a much better lifestyle.
DB
1. These generators are very hot (they double as water heaters)
2. They are reasonably big (refrigerator sized, put on a concrete pad outside your home).
I predict that stealing these generators will be about as popular as stealing central AC.
DB
I didn't know about the price cap. Of course you are going to have shortages when you have price caps and market conditions call for higher than price cap prices. That's eco 101.
The good effects of fuel cells are not only going to be in power sales but in taking load off the public grid. If internet dependent businesses like mine are going to buy these cells to keep us up and running irrespective of the grid, we are going to essentially be going off-grid as far as the power company is concerned. Less demand equals fewer emergencies.
DB
If normally, Cheyenne is feeding a factory 300 miles to the east and that factory is fed from the Montreal electricity instead, you have saved 600 miles of wire resistance, the 300 miles that the Montreal electricity would have had to cover to get to the Cheyenne plant on the way to Los Angeles and the 300 miles that the Cheyenne plant didn't have to push their electricity to the east.
DB
My comment about a socialist dystopia wasn't about Arthur Scargill's strike. The strike endangered electrical production and you aren't even attempting to deny that. BTW: the strike isn't why I think the UK of the 70's was a dystopia, that came from Scargill's proposal at the time to legally limit emigration from the UK, which was and always will be the hallmark of a dystopia. But your claim that the UK's political system (which you term socialist) hasn't produced situations where power was endangered has been sufficiently punctured.
I'll just ignore the attempt to change the subject to the merits of the Thatcher crackdown on unions and let you wimper and whine your way back to the government teat from which you seem to have no desire to be weaned.
DB
1. You don't understand, the current crop of politicians count the protesters as one of their core constituencies. Seriously enforcing the law would deprive them of votes and lead to a weakened political position in the next election.
2. The engineering problems with that are tremendous and the permits necessary to do such heavy modifications are mind-boggling. It isn't going to happen.
3. You are offering a false choice. The true choice in your situation is sporadic v. sporadic and history is on the side of local positioning of the company's servers being more reliable.
DB
I think you are wrong about deregulation. Nobody wants to own a plant because while plant owners have enemies, brokers don't.
Environmentalists want no plants, soccer moms are afraid of ELF, zoning officials want a cut for approval of plans, it's a real pain in the neck to own a conventional plant and all of the cost is politically generated. The previous situation covered up these particular problems so well that California's politicians didn't even realize how badly half-deregulation would serve the state, not because they were moving in the wrong direction but because they weren't being bold enough to make the new system work.
DB
definition
NIMBY= Not In My BackYard
If you get into local politics, you'll hear a lot about NIMBY.
DB
Well, your mileage may vary due to what country you are posting from but I believe that the US has by federal law mandated that the power companies have to accept locally generated power and have set minimum floor prices for it. If you live in a jurisdiction where this is illegal, you could always pump your excess into a Tesla coil for fun...
B-)
Personally, I don't see a green ethic inconsistent with libertarianism as long as the green's don't wish to use the power of the state to compel me to use fewer computers (I'm currently using three).
DB
The problem is that both power stations and transmission lines go through political processes. The scare mongering over ELF has caused an upsurge in resistance to new transmission lines and the green movement has been very successful in reducing power generation capacity (blowing up dams) and preventing new generation from being added (NIMBY slowdowns in the zoning and permit process).
And nobody is going to cut off your electricity? Before Thatcher came and pulled away from the socialist dystopia that the UK was becoming it nearly did happen in the '70s with Arthur Scargill's coal mining strikes bringing down the Heath government. AFAIK the UK at the time was mostly using coal burners for both electricity and heat. Had things turned out a bit differently, the UK would have been both in the dark, and frozen stiff (and people say American's know no history or international affairs).
One point which you seem to be overlooking is that these companies accepted under market rate cheap electricity in exchange for being cut off in time of shortage.
The number of plants down for maintenance has eliminated all safety margin and the shortages have arrived. Political resistance that has been rising for over a decade has gelded the ability to rapidly introduce new capacity or even increase the amount of importable electricity using "wheeling" (the practice of CA buying from faraway places like Quebec and Quebec shipping to intermediate places while the intermediate places actually ship their electricity to CA) to cut down on transmission losses.
DB
1. here's the rub, building more powerplants is easy, when you don't have chanting demonstrators chaining themselves to your construction equipment.
2. adding generators to existing plants is possible up to a point, but I would guess that this has already been taken about as far as present technology can push it.
3. This is possible, but moving to a co-lo facility outside of CA is going to introduce network vulnerabilities that hit more often than power vulnerabilities have (to date at least).
DB
Actually, the problem is that plants are unexpectedly dropping off the grid, lowering capacity. The most recent 500MW plant to drop out powers a heck of a lot of christmas lights.
The problem, fundamentally, isn't extra load, it's the political system that doesn't let new powerplants pop up as needed. NIMBY is alive and well and it will probably take localized, quiet fuel cell generators to fix this problem. NIMBY doesn't care about what it doesn't notice.
DB
a booming market in UPS for CA companies.
DB
It just goes to show that if you partially deregulate, things can get worse instead of better. They have politically slowed down the construction of new electrical generation capacity so much that blackouts became an inevitability.
They need to make it easier to add capacity to the system so higher prices will generate new entrants to the market.
Maybe those powerplug (GE labelled) generators are going to save the day but first they have to get through this year without stupid legislation rolling California fully back to a command and control system
DB
My guess is that all computers equipped with this type of memory are going to have a hardware reset switch in case of crashes/freezes.
Looks like Apple was ahead of their time again B-)
DB
In the past, I have regularly argued that if you don't like anybody for the job, you should leave that ballot blank. It was a strategy of undervoting to undermine the legitimacy of the incumbent political bozos. I've heard people on the left and the right make the same argument so this isn't partisan but rather a backhanded way to achieve the option of none of the above.
Al Gore, by his equating these protest votes with votes stolen from him is doing a disservice to all those political protesters of which I have been a member on occassion. He is trying to steal our voices to say 'you are all bums and none of you deserves a vote'. That's sad and dangerous for our country.
DB
The one point I fundamentally disagree with you is on the issue of recounts. Here, you are factually wrong. All counties in Florida, by law, had to do a recount (machine recount). They all complied with the law. But it didn't stop there. Of the three counties that wanted to go forward under the extension that the FSC gave, the actual results were that Palm Beach missed the deadline, Miami-Dade gave up and missed the deadline, and Broward completed on time. This is why GWB's margin shrank at the certification from over 900 to substantially less.
There's been enough false facts around that I like to correct mistakes when I can.
DB