If you actually want to go to Mars and beyond you need to fix that to:
Let's see NASA funnel money and contracts to help SpaceX build a reusable Falcon Heavy, long duration crew modules to attach to Dragon, etc.
NASA, Lockheed and Boeing, in their current form, simply aren't going to succeed in bending metal, building new launchers or probably designing anything usable. I think its open to debate if they have the fire in their belly necessary to do anything hard. As long as they get paid even when they fail, like on Ares I, why would they.
The NASA model also fails because of constant political interference by Congress. If engineering and design decisions are predicted on job creation instead of what is right they will continue to fail (i.e. requiring the use of Shuttle SRB's to placate Hatch in Utah where they are made). If the goals being set by Congress and the President are also continue to completey changed every four years they will also continue to fail.
SpaceX has to succeed eventually or they go under. SpaceX benefits greatly from government contracts but Musk designed SpaceX to diversify their revenue base so they aren't totally at the mercy of the bizarre and clueless whims of Congress and Presidents.
It is hypocrisy but the aerospace companies that have dominated U.S. space access are also defense contractors and the Republican's are completely in thrall to defense contractors. Lockheed and Boeing help run the Republican party alongside big banks, big pharma and big fossil fuels.
The American manned space program hasn't been about space exploration since Apollo ended. Its been about creating contracts for Lockheed and Boeing and creating jobs in the states of powerful Senators like Hatch in Utah, Shelby in Alabama, Hutchinson in Texas and Nelson in Florida(he is a Democrat).
You can tell Lockheed has bought out Congress and the DOD because they've received back to back gigantic contracts for fighter jets both of which are staggeringly expensive and neither of which work, the F-22 and the F-35. The U.S. is currently committed to spending over $1 trillion we don't have on F-35's which have proven to be deeply flawed and are entering production without even being half way through flight test. F-22's have such serious oxygen system issues pilots are refusing to fly them and have never been used in combat. When a pilot blacked out and crashed an F-22, the DOD and Lockheed somehow managed to blame the pilot even when they new the Oxygen system was failing which shows how morally contemptible they are.
Elon Musk's primary goal in founding SpaceX is to go to Mars and I would give him as good a chance of acheiving it as anyone.
The shuttle being decommisioned improves the odds of going to Mars, not reduces them. It was a money sink and it promoted the mind set of being stuck in LEO because it was stuck in LEO. It had also acquired so many restrictions for safety issues it was barely doing its vastly reduced mission. It had turned in to a pork barrell project to make jobs at NASA, Boeing and Lockheed, not do anything worthwhile in space (outside of servicing Hubble).
Intelsat signed the first commercial contract for Falcon Heavy yesterday and if SpaceX can successfully build and launch those, and even better recover and reuse them, they will be a far more valuable tool in leaving LEO and going to Mars than Shuttle every would be.
I personally dont think bone loss and eyesight are going to be show stopping issue for Mars. Radiation exposure in deep space and on the surface of Mars is the serious issue unless you can get a ship with enough shielding and propulsion to move the shielding.
Me personally and I'm sure lots of others would volunteer for a Mars mission even if it was a one way mission and life shortening. To me the ideal mission to Mars is a one way trip with a permenent stay, and a logistics train to support a permenent colony. The zero G issues are more a problem returning to 1G and earth than they would be staying in 1/3 G on Mars which isn't as bad as zero G. A one way trip also saves a long return trip in zero G to get back to Earth. Even if zero G is a problem you can build a larger ship and spin it enough to get 1/3 G. That is an engineering challenge, not a show stopping issue.
The underwriters usually have a 15% over allotment of the stock that they can manipulate to support the price if it breaks the syndicate bid. If Morgan Stanley did't have to buy more than that 15% of the issue to support the price on the day of the IPO then they might not have lost any thing.
Reference Greenshoe Green Shoe Manufacturing was the first IPO to have this allotment which is why its been called that ever since.
There is nothing "anecdotal" about the things I posted on vaccines. They are well known facts. Vaccines do in fact have down sides, the benefits generally out weigh the down side so they are usually worth the risk, but blindly ignoring the downside as seems to be your style is unnecessiarly wreckless. How do you explain the fact there is a Federal agency to compensate people who have adverse outcomes with vaccines?
I'll leave you to go on your tech utopian way, pretending that all tech is wonderful and nothing bad ever happens. I assume you must be employed in medicine or biotech so you have a vested career interest in altering reality in favor of your chosen fields.
"But saying "Nazis might use it against us" is not a downside, that's just insane."
At this point you aren't arguing, you are just engaging in abusive name calling.
Whether its racist national socialists or well intended eugenicists paving the road to hell, it is ENTIRELY possible. The entire first half of the twentieth century was full of eugenicists in the U.S., Britain and Germany trying to select out genetic flaws in humans, often using force. California and the Rockefeller foundation pioneered forced sterilization of people with genetic defects. The only reason eugenics died out was because the Germans gave it such a bad name.
Now that we have tools to actually study genes in detail, to manipulate them and really do eugenics its nearly inevitable its going to return in some form.
There is a hard right neo nazi regime in Hungary already, the hard right came in third in the last French election, and an antisemitic neo Nazi party gained seats in the last Greek election. With Europe on the verge of a major economic collapse its entirely plausible there will be more neonazis in power in Europe in the near future. Economic collapses breed national socialism and persucution of ethnic minorities who are scapegoated for the collapse.
P.S. The benefits of vaccines probably out weigh the risks but they have serious down sides too which just shows how biased you are. Some people have violent and dangerous reactions to some vaccines. There is a Federal agency that does nothing but compensate people for adverse reactions to vaccines, its called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
Polio vaccines were made with monkey tissue and some batches were contaminated with a dangerous simian virus that was a carcinogen, some people have also been infected with the disease by the oral vaccine. The mercury in Thimerisol was never proved safe which is why it was removed, but large numbers of people were injected with it. For diseases like chicken pox getting the disease and building natural immunity may be superior to vaccine immunity. People with immune system disorders can actually contract some diseases from vaccines.
That argument is nonsense. It is a standard talking point by the people waging this class warfare thing on the side of the rich.
Nearly everyone who works in this country pays payroll taxes which range from 10-12.5% since Regean jacked them in the 80's. Payroll taxes alone are nearly as high a percentage as the 15% rich people pay on capital gains.
Then there is sales tax, the lower classes spend most of their money, while the rich invest most of theirs so the poor once again pay a disproportionate burden of these which is why its called a regressive tax. The rich want even more sales taxes (aka Value Added Taxes(VAT's) because they regressively punish people who spend and give the rich a free pass
Payroll taxes used to be a couple percent before Reagan jacked them. Social security in particular started producing huge surpluses then that were used to fund Federal budget deficits for decades, in Reagans case to squander money on weapons that were never used. The so called "Trust fund" was completely squandered. To pay for social security and medicare now we either have to tax people some more, borrow it or slash benefits.
Most seniors who retired in before the 90's put almost nothing in to SS and Medicare and are getting windfall returns. People who started working in or after the 80's have been paying taxes through the nose for programs that will be bankrupt and probably gone by the time they retire. It has become a massively regressive tax on young working people to support often affluent seniors.
"not even the Rudd government would spend 1 grand per person"
The more obvious places you would use it would be to screen people entering elite organizations and the military (like the SS in Germany) or top echelons of a nationalist party or to screen prospective mates prior to marriage to flag genetic defects or undesirable racial history.
If you were sending someone to a concentration camp anyway, no I dont image you would spend 1K on them.
Most people don't know it but eugenics originated in the U.S. and Britain. Germany modeled got it form there and modeled their early eugenics programs, especially forced sterilization, on California's laws and program.
You are the one being naive my friend. It is simply good sense to explore the down sides of technologies instead of reveling purely in the up side, and have the down side bite you in the ass later.
I guess you are far enough removed from the early twentieth century that you are unaware how nasty eugenics movements were. Most people are vaguely familiar with them at their most horrific in Germany but the naive pretend that something that horrible can't happen again. Well it can. DNA sequencing is a dream come true for eugenics.
Its largely forgotten and brushed under the rug that there were thriving eugenics movements in the U.S. during the same era as Nazi Germany. It was being championed by a lot of rich, powerful, well known Americans and it was being put in to practice and inflicted on people against their will. It included forced sterilizations of people who had defects like retardation which was also a standard practice in Germany.
It is simple realism to recognize that most technologies are, in fact, double edged swords. You are being totally naive if you rush to embrace all the upside and choose to completely ignore the down side. It is human nature that some people will embrace and exploit the down side if they see a gain to be had there.
Cheap, wide spread DNA sequencing will no doubt yield amazing benefits like gene therapies, targeted drugs and maybe even near immortality. Those things should obviously be pursued with gusto.
It is also almost inevitably going to result in someone pursuing genetic engineering to enhance intelligence and physical abilities of humans, which may result in a genetic arms race where people who aren't enhanced are going to be relegated to a deeply inferior status, and those who are enhanced are going to seek to dominate civilization.
DNA sequencing is also almost certain to be used to discriminate against people with genetic defects, by insurance companies to set rates, by parents to abort fetuses, or on the extreme scale to sterilize people with undesirable genetic traits, or target people that are deemed inferior.
Computers are just as much a double edged sword. They bring a world of benefits but they are also enabling massive surveillance states in just about every country on the planet which are being used to target people with dissenting political views with an efficiency that wasn't previously possible.
At the same time they are spawning new tools for political dissent and freedom movements they are also supporting and enabling increasingly totalitarian states. With widespread biometric ID, pervasive CCTV and license scanners, facial recognition it will eventually be impossible for anyone to move, shop, read, eat, watch a movie, without the permission and authorization of a nation state.
Doc that is just silly and you know it, did you actually believe that when you wrote it? Every aspect of their doctrine was fixated on eugenics and race. Its something Americans choose to forget but eugenics was very well established in the U.S. during the same period especially with elements of America's upper class.
Nationalist can be defined several ways but the term applied to nationalist political parties usually centers around a fixation with a nations historically dominant race and protecting it from other races and their influence. Hence in Europe now most nationalist movements are targeting Muslims which have moved in to many European countries in large numbers taking low wage jobs, and becoming the target of the wrath of nationalist parties. The rising French, Hungarian and assorted other right wing nationalist parties are targetting Jews again as well. Apparently substantial numbers of Jews are emmigrating from France to Israel recently due to concerns about the rise of neo Nazi movements there.
Nationalism can also be referring to flag waving, patriotism, and the arrogant presumption that your nation is superior to all others which is presumably what you are referring to when you say the U.S. is nationalist, but its not exactly the same thing as nationalist parties that are focused on racial issues.
The U.S. is somewhat challenged in sustaining a true nationalist movement because it is so ethnically diverse, but it it does have its skinheads, KKK and assorted fringe groups. The U.S. was also pretty deeply antisemitic in its own right during the first half of the twentieth century and that was main stream especially in the upper class. More recently the fixation, especially by Republicans, on illegal immigrants(i.e. Hispanics) would be more like a nationalist political movement exploiting racial issues and tensions, exploitonh the tensions caused by the fact that whites will eventually be in a minority in the U.S. if current demographic trends continue.
Not sure how accurate it is but the rudimentary DNA testing National Geographic does appears to be quite good at spotting basic ethnicity, especially Ashkenazi Jews, and they do something far less than full sequencing.
My family tree includes a Cherokee Indian and it come up with a pretty big blank on that one, but there probably isn't a very big sampling base for that while there probably is a big sampling base for Ashkenazi.
Even if its not entirely precise it will almost certainly be more precise than measuring facial features, or relying on genealogy like the Nazi's did.
One thing is a certainty that whatever race the next master race picks, the party leadership should probably get their own DNA sequenced first to make sure they are a member. It was fairly common for aspiring Nazi's to discover they had Jewish blood in their family trees.
P.S. If you do get your DNA sequenced, also remember you are making a decision for all of your relatives and descendents to expose their genetic history too.
"Cheap sequencing, on the other hand, is a very good news"
Not to mention the next time a nationalist socialist regime takes power they will have a really easy time identifying the people they want to put in the concentration camps.
If you get your DNA sequenced you should keep it in the back of your mind, what might someone with a racial superiority agenda do with it some day.
The way Johnson played power is exactly everything that is wrong with our government. It isn't any kind of a solution to anything. As soon as anyone starts playing that game you will end up just as corrupted as he did.
He is the person that used his power to lead the country in to its disasterous misadventure in Vietnam which started America's decline and lead us in to the inflationary spiral of the 1970's that wiped out the savings of ordinary Americans.
"but a large group of them successfully managed to block the Brooklyn bridge"
Uh, I dont live in NY so I wasnt there but the only OWS incident I remember on Brooklyn bridge the NYPD intentionally lead a protest on to the bridge so they could make a mass arrest, 700 as I recall. They herded them on the bridge so they could charge them and so no one could get away since they had both ends of the bridge blocked. Surest way to break the back of marginally committed protestors is to arrest them, give them a night in jail, court appearances, fines and a criminal record for life.
"Government is corrupt⦠Do you know how to fix it?"
Aleksei Navalny has taken an interesting approach in Russia where corruption is suffocating the country and speaking against it is a good way to get killed.
Iceland appears to be the one recent success story where people actually threw out their corrupt government and gave the finger to the bankers that crashed their economy. They suffered for a few years but they are rapidly recovering compared to places like Ireland which did what the bankers told them to do, paid off the corrupt bankers that crashed their country, and are unlikely to recover any time soon as a result. Iceland is a small place though, and the powers that be weren't entrenched to nearly the level they are in the U.S.
Americans are still largely complacent and as long as they have a job, a place to live, food to eat, a car, iPad, smartphone and/or TV I doubt they really care enough to change anything and sure aren't going to risk their well being, as tattered as it is, to stand up against a completely broken government. The one thing OWS did achieve last year was it did get the subject in to daily conversation. Now there is nothing again except a stupid horse race between two equally bad Presidential candidates.
Only way anything is likely to change in the U.S. is for another crash to occur and it for it to be so severe that it puts people out of work en masse and in to breadlines. With the nearly inevitable crash of Europe on the horizon it may not be that far off.
"The government is our servant"
Now who is being naive. Our government serves the people with the money and the power. Our founding fathers tried hard to give us a system that wouldn't go that way but they failed. Our two party system is totally broken and its only putting forward a choice between candidates who are all bad. Once you cast your meaningless vote every two years you are totally out of the loop. People vote for the person with the most money and the best attack ads, whomever the TV tells them to vote for. Any voter that bothers to become informed and vote for change is going to be disappeared by party line voters.
Me personally I would have loved to see Ron Paul win the President. He probably would have been a train wreck, but he would have caused a fire storm of change. The main stream media and his own party managed to destrot him with racism charges to make him largely disappear.
Getting rid of the Fed would be step 1 for fixing our totally corrupted economy and Paul is the only one like to attempt it.
So you are in the camp that its OK to massacre civilians as long as they "deserve" it and you are righteous about it. You do seem to have completely missed the point I've been trying to make.
Suppose Iran does get nukes and uses one on Israel. I'm assuming you would be in the camp it would be A-OK if the U.S. or Israel in turn nukes all of Irans major cities. Do you think it should be factored in that perhaps a large majority of the people in those cities hate their regime, would have thrown them out if they could and were completely opposed to their use of nukes.
Being all righteous when you go down the road where you justify killinb civilians is pretty messed up. Its why the Bible, the Koran, history of our species in general, is one long string of eye for an eye massacring of civilians, with each party doing the massacring claiming they deserved it and were righteous when they did it. This was borne out elsewhere here when there zre scores of posts claiming the other guys religion has massacred more people than the other guys religion has.
Excepting for the obvious fact that so far the Tea Party hasn't actually slowed spending or reduced corruption at all. They mostly seem to have just made Congress even more bitterly partisan, disfunctional and deadlocked than it already was and that was a real feat considering it was completely dysfunctional before they got there.
But I am actually as much a fan of the original Tea Party message, and their attempts to cut spending. as I am the OWS's. I think the two movements should acutally unite since they were attacking the same problem from opposite directions, unfortunately the two movements completely hate each other.
The big problem wi the tea party is their movement was co opted by a bunch of horrible, whacked out, politicians like Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint, and by a bunch of people who are obsessed with right wing social issues like abortion and gay marriage instead of the economic issues that matter.
At this point I am willing to wager they are or will be totally co opted in to the standard Republican causes of cutting taxes, especially on the wealthy, gutting social programs and busting unions, while they let the military squader unlimited amounts of money, shield tax subsidies and pork for big corporations, and generally let the deficit spiral out of control. I am actually all for cutting taxes, gutting social programs and busting unions but I want all the pet Republican pork beneficiaries to be gutted too and I doubt the Tea party will actually do it.
It takes talent to pack that much smuggness and condescension in that short a post. You work on Wall Street? If not you probably should consider it because you sound like you would be a perfect fit.
I was never making any suggestion that Japan didn't deserve to be embargoed. The point was that when the U.S. embargoed Japan it was an act of war as far as Japan was concerned so the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was anything but a surprise. As a result its disingenuous American to pretend like it was out of the blue or any kind of justification for nuking Japan later.
The rape of Nanking and the Bataan death march on the other hand were pretty good reasons for retaliation.
"They don't have the right to say it in any way they want"
Well yes actually they do. I don't totally disagree that they may not have had the right to "squat" but they were trying very hard to camp in public spaces, and limit traffic disruptions, and I think that is different than intentionally "squatting" on private property.
You might not like it but if you are going to demonstrate and express your displeasure with your government it almost inevitably results in large numbers of people needing to be in the streets or parks near the seats of power which would be New York and Washington. If they have to get "permits" to do that from the very government they are criticizing, then the government just cuts off the permits and the message the government doesn't want anyone to hear disappears. Or you get things like the "free speech zones" of the Bush era, chain link cages that are conveniently placed so no one will see or hear any protestor foolish enough to get shoved in to one.
"the message of OWS was trite. The current US government sucks and banks got a sweet deal they didn't deserve? "
You probably should have listened more instead of being "bored", because the message is quite a bit more sophisticated than that. The message is Wall Street in particular, and also big defense, pharna and fossil fuel companies among others have, for all practical purposes, seized control of the U.S. government, to the detriment of the American people.
They did it by buying Congressmen with chump change in campain contributions, with lobbiest bribes, with big PAC donations for campaign ads and more importantly with revolving doors through which Congressmen, their staffs, generals and bureaucrats get lucrative jobs when they leave public service for favors, and in the other direction where people from Goldman Sachs join government to take over places like the Department of the Treasury and the White House. From there they steer trillions of dollars to bail out their former employers and hand out trillions in gifts to corporate interests off the backs of working Americans who still pay their taxes while most big corporations no longer do thanks to the loopholes they've bought.
You ever wonder why the SEC never prosecutes anyone important on Wall Street, because everyone who works at the SEC wants to work at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley and get a huge pay increase so they will NEVER do anything but slap their future employers on the wrist. The SEC spent 4 years investigating Lehman Brothers whose malefesance resulted in economic catastrophe, and last week announced no charges would be filed. The investigators will, no doubt, soon get lucrative new jobs on Wall Street.
Some more examples, a 90 billion a year windfall for pharma from Medicare D which was barred from negotiate drug prices. Billy Tauzin rammed through Medicare D and then took a job as a drug company lobbyist. There are massive tax breaks for an oil industry which is making staggering profits. There are hundreds of billions in pork laden contracts to defense and homeland security contractors.
Its called crony capitalism, its a trade mark of banana republics, thats what America has now, and the American people are being royally screwed by it. They have every right, in fact its their duty, to be in the streets of New York and Washington D.C. every week until its stopped and we get our Constitution back.
If you aren't familiar with the term princeling they are the children and grandchildren of the giants of the Communist party, the comrades of Mao back in the day, the marchers of the Long March, champions of the worker, who have now suddenly all become staggeringly rich, are driving around in Italian sports cars, and have lost touch with the prolateriat.
Israel practices ethnic cleansing because they are putting Palestinians in the West bank and Gaza in what are basically open air prisons. Apartheid in South Africa used the term Bantustan's or homelands when they did the same thing to blacks. In Europe when the practice was applied to Jews they were called ghetto's the most famous being the one in Warsaw which under German occupation has striking similarities to Gaza.
Israel is actively engaged in a long range plan to preserve a Jewish "democracy" by disenfranchising Palastinians which due to the demographics of a much higher birth rate will eventually hold the majority in Israel counting the occupied territories. When that occurs Israel will, for all practical purposes, be an apartheid state with a minority holding power through elections that are democratic in name only.
The fact that Israel is aggressively putting settlements in to occupied territories, which is a violation of international law, and are aggressively displacing Palastinian in the process is the icing on the ethnic cleansing cake.
As for why Nazi's were called right wing its because they practiced state capitalism and were radically anti union which placed them on the opposite side of the spectrum from leftists and communists which are in theory at least entirely for workers and unions. Right wing state capitalists make no pretense of being a workers paradise, workers work to serve the state and the party, and the well connected party members tend to be rich and powerful. In practice Nazi Germany and Stalinst Russia weren't really very different, but that's mostly because Stalin staged a counter revolution, hijacked the Russian revolution and when he did it became a Communist state in name only. China did the same transition from Communism to counter revolution and state capitalism when Mao died and the "Gang of Four" including Mao's widow were deposed. The party started "special economic zones" and slowly embracing state capitalism from 1978 on, so today it is for all practical purposed a Fascist state and Communist in name only.
Pearl Habor was no rationale at all for doing anything to Japan. The U.S., Britain and the Dutch had embargoed Japan's oil supplies in July 1941. Japan made it quite clear then that they considered that an act of war since it was going to completely strangle Japan militarily and economically. War was inevitable from that point and FDR and the U.S. military knew it. Japan had no choice but to seize the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) to restore their oil supply, and to do that they had to neutralize the U.S. Pacific fleet.
The specifics of when and where the Japanese would attack might have been a bit of a surprise but the U.S. knew full well it was coming. Its up to the conspiracy theorists to make the claim the U.S. intentionally let the Japanese maul Pearl Harbor because FDR needed a day of "infamy" to goad the American people in to entering World War II, something the very isolationist American people had been loathe to do up to that point. It did a great job of whipping Americans in to a war frenzy, and producing a gusher of volunteers for the military, something that simply wouldn't have happened if FDR had just declared war on Germany and Japan without a provocation.
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Good suggestions. Certainly better than spending another decade obsessing over zero G health issues while sitting in the ISS going no where.
I'm pretty sure the zero G biology issues have been inflated as concerns largely to justify the ISS since its one of the few things its good for.
If you actually want to go to Mars and beyond you need to fix that to:
Let's see NASA funnel money and contracts to help SpaceX build a reusable Falcon Heavy, long duration crew modules to attach to Dragon, etc.
NASA, Lockheed and Boeing, in their current form, simply aren't going to succeed in bending metal, building new launchers or probably designing anything usable. I think its open to debate if they have the fire in their belly necessary to do anything hard. As long as they get paid even when they fail, like on Ares I, why would they.
The NASA model also fails because of constant political interference by Congress. If engineering and design decisions are predicted on job creation instead of what is right they will continue to fail (i.e. requiring the use of Shuttle SRB's to placate Hatch in Utah where they are made). If the goals being set by Congress and the President are also continue to completey changed every four years they will also continue to fail.
SpaceX has to succeed eventually or they go under. SpaceX benefits greatly from government contracts but Musk designed SpaceX to diversify their revenue base so they aren't totally at the mercy of the bizarre and clueless whims of Congress and Presidents.
It is hypocrisy but the aerospace companies that have dominated U.S. space access are also defense contractors and the Republican's are completely in thrall to defense contractors. Lockheed and Boeing help run the Republican party alongside big banks, big pharma and big fossil fuels.
The American manned space program hasn't been about space exploration since Apollo ended. Its been about creating contracts for Lockheed and Boeing and creating jobs in the states of powerful Senators like Hatch in Utah, Shelby in Alabama, Hutchinson in Texas and Nelson in Florida(he is a Democrat).
You can tell Lockheed has bought out Congress and the DOD because they've received back to back gigantic contracts for fighter jets both of which are staggeringly expensive and neither of which work, the F-22 and the F-35. The U.S. is currently committed to spending over $1 trillion we don't have on F-35's which have proven to be deeply flawed and are entering production without even being half way through flight test. F-22's have such serious oxygen system issues pilots are refusing to fly them and have never been used in combat. When a pilot blacked out and crashed an F-22, the DOD and Lockheed somehow managed to blame the pilot even when they new the Oxygen system was failing which shows how morally contemptible they are.
Elon Musk's primary goal in founding SpaceX is to go to Mars and I would give him as good a chance of acheiving it as anyone.
The shuttle being decommisioned improves the odds of going to Mars, not reduces them. It was a money sink and it promoted the mind set of being stuck in LEO because it was stuck in LEO. It had also acquired so many restrictions for safety issues it was barely doing its vastly reduced mission. It had turned in to a pork barrell project to make jobs at NASA, Boeing and Lockheed, not do anything worthwhile in space (outside of servicing Hubble).
Intelsat signed the first commercial contract for Falcon Heavy yesterday and if SpaceX can successfully build and launch those, and even better recover and reuse them, they will be a far more valuable tool in leaving LEO and going to Mars than Shuttle every would be.
I personally dont think bone loss and eyesight are going to be show stopping issue for Mars. Radiation exposure in deep space and on the surface of Mars is the serious issue unless you can get a ship with enough shielding and propulsion to move the shielding.
Me personally and I'm sure lots of others would volunteer for a Mars mission even if it was a one way mission and life shortening. To me the ideal mission to Mars is a one way trip with a permenent stay, and a logistics train to support a permenent colony. The zero G issues are more a problem returning to 1G and earth than they would be staying in 1/3 G on Mars which isn't as bad as zero G. A one way trip also saves a long return trip in zero G to get back to Earth. Even if zero G is a problem you can build a larger ship and spin it enough to get 1/3 G. That is an engineering challenge, not a show stopping issue.
The underwriters usually have a 15% over allotment of the stock that they can manipulate to support the price if it breaks the syndicate bid. If Morgan Stanley did't have to buy more than that 15% of the issue to support the price on the day of the IPO then they might not have lost any thing.
Reference Greenshoe Green Shoe Manufacturing was the first IPO to have this allotment which is why its been called that ever since.
Am I a bad person to experience a Schadenfreude rush everytime Miguel, Facebook, Zynga or Groupon fails?
There is nothing "anecdotal" about the things I posted on vaccines. They are well known facts. Vaccines do in fact have down sides, the benefits generally out weigh the down side so they are usually worth the risk, but blindly ignoring the downside as seems to be your style is unnecessiarly wreckless. How do you explain the fact there is a Federal agency to compensate people who have adverse outcomes with vaccines?
I'll leave you to go on your tech utopian way, pretending that all tech is wonderful and nothing bad ever happens. I assume you must be employed in medicine or biotech so you have a vested career interest in altering reality in favor of your chosen fields.
"But saying "Nazis might use it against us" is not a downside, that's just insane."
At this point you aren't arguing, you are just engaging in abusive name calling.
Whether its racist national socialists or well intended eugenicists paving the road to hell, it is ENTIRELY possible. The entire first half of the twentieth century was full of eugenicists in the U.S., Britain and Germany trying to select out genetic flaws in humans, often using force. California and the Rockefeller foundation pioneered forced sterilization of people with genetic defects. The only reason eugenics died out was because the Germans gave it such a bad name.
Now that we have tools to actually study genes in detail, to manipulate them and really do eugenics its nearly inevitable its going to return in some form.
There is a hard right neo nazi regime in Hungary already, the hard right came in third in the last French election, and an antisemitic neo Nazi party gained seats in the last Greek election. With Europe on the verge of a major economic collapse its entirely plausible there will be more neonazis in power in Europe in the near future. Economic collapses breed national socialism and persucution of ethnic minorities who are scapegoated for the collapse.
P.S. The benefits of vaccines probably out weigh the risks but they have serious down sides too which just shows how biased you are. Some people have violent and dangerous reactions to some vaccines. There is a Federal agency that does nothing but compensate people for adverse reactions to vaccines, its called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
Polio vaccines were made with monkey tissue and some batches were contaminated with a dangerous simian virus that was a carcinogen, some people have also been infected with the disease by the oral vaccine. The mercury in Thimerisol was never proved safe which is why it was removed, but large numbers of people were injected with it. For diseases like chicken pox getting the disease and building natural immunity may be superior to vaccine immunity. People with immune system disorders can actually contract some diseases from vaccines.
That argument is nonsense. It is a standard talking point by the people waging this class warfare thing on the side of the rich.
Nearly everyone who works in this country pays payroll taxes which range from 10-12.5% since Regean jacked them in the 80's. Payroll taxes alone are nearly as high a percentage as the 15% rich people pay on capital gains.
Then there is sales tax, the lower classes spend most of their money, while the rich invest most of theirs so the poor once again pay a disproportionate burden of these which is why its called a regressive tax. The rich want even more sales taxes (aka Value Added Taxes(VAT's) because they regressively punish people who spend and give the rich a free pass
Payroll taxes used to be a couple percent before Reagan jacked them. Social security in particular started producing huge surpluses then that were used to fund Federal budget deficits for decades, in Reagans case to squander money on weapons that were never used. The so called "Trust fund" was completely squandered. To pay for social security and medicare now we either have to tax people some more, borrow it or slash benefits.
Most seniors who retired in before the 90's put almost nothing in to SS and Medicare and are getting windfall returns. People who started working in or after the 80's have been paying taxes through the nose for programs that will be bankrupt and probably gone by the time they retire. It has become a massively regressive tax on young working people to support often affluent seniors.
"not even the Rudd government would spend 1 grand per person"
The more obvious places you would use it would be to screen people entering elite organizations and the military (like the SS in Germany) or top echelons of a nationalist party or to screen prospective mates prior to marriage to flag genetic defects or undesirable racial history.
If you were sending someone to a concentration camp anyway, no I dont image you would spend 1K on them.
Most people don't know it but eugenics originated in the U.S. and Britain. Germany modeled got it form there and modeled their early eugenics programs, especially forced sterilization, on California's laws and program.
The Rockefeller foundation helped fund the eugenics programs in Germany before the war.
You are the one being naive my friend. It is simply good sense to explore the down sides of technologies instead of reveling purely in the up side, and have the down side bite you in the ass later.
I guess you are far enough removed from the early twentieth century that you are unaware how nasty eugenics movements were. Most people are vaguely familiar with them at their most horrific in Germany but the naive pretend that something that horrible can't happen again. Well it can. DNA sequencing is a dream come true for eugenics.
Its largely forgotten and brushed under the rug that there were thriving eugenics movements in the U.S. during the same era as Nazi Germany. It was being championed by a lot of rich, powerful, well known Americans and it was being put in to practice and inflicted on people against their will. It included forced sterilizations of people who had defects like retardation which was also a standard practice in Germany.
It is simple realism to recognize that most technologies are, in fact, double edged swords. You are being totally naive if you rush to embrace all the upside and choose to completely ignore the down side. It is human nature that some people will embrace and exploit the down side if they see a gain to be had there.
Cheap, wide spread DNA sequencing will no doubt yield amazing benefits like gene therapies, targeted drugs and maybe even near immortality. Those things should obviously be pursued with gusto.
It is also almost inevitably going to result in someone pursuing genetic engineering to enhance intelligence and physical abilities of humans, which may result in a genetic arms race where people who aren't enhanced are going to be relegated to a deeply inferior status, and those who are enhanced are going to seek to dominate civilization.
DNA sequencing is also almost certain to be used to discriminate against people with genetic defects, by insurance companies to set rates, by parents to abort fetuses, or on the extreme scale to sterilize people with undesirable genetic traits, or target people that are deemed inferior.
Computers are just as much a double edged sword. They bring a world of benefits but they are also enabling massive surveillance states in just about every country on the planet which are being used to target people with dissenting political views with an efficiency that wasn't previously possible.
At the same time they are spawning new tools for political dissent and freedom movements they are also supporting and enabling increasingly totalitarian states. With widespread biometric ID, pervasive CCTV and license scanners, facial recognition it will eventually be impossible for anyone to move, shop, read, eat, watch a movie, without the permission and authorization of a nation state.
"Nazis don't care about the genetics"
Doc that is just silly and you know it, did you actually believe that when you wrote it? Every aspect of their doctrine was fixated on eugenics and race. Its something Americans choose to forget but eugenics was very well established in the U.S. during the same period especially with elements of America's upper class.
Nationalist can be defined several ways but the term applied to nationalist political parties usually centers around a fixation with a nations historically dominant race and protecting it from other races and their influence. Hence in Europe now most nationalist movements are targeting Muslims which have moved in to many European countries in large numbers taking low wage jobs, and becoming the target of the wrath of nationalist parties. The rising French, Hungarian and assorted other right wing nationalist parties are targetting Jews again as well. Apparently substantial numbers of Jews are emmigrating from France to Israel recently due to concerns about the rise of neo Nazi movements there.
Nationalism can also be referring to flag waving, patriotism, and the arrogant presumption that your nation is superior to all others which is presumably what you are referring to when you say the U.S. is nationalist, but its not exactly the same thing as nationalist parties that are focused on racial issues.
The U.S. is somewhat challenged in sustaining a true nationalist movement because it is so ethnically diverse, but it it does have its skinheads, KKK and assorted fringe groups. The U.S. was also pretty deeply antisemitic in its own right during the first half of the twentieth century and that was main stream especially in the upper class. More recently the fixation, especially by Republicans, on illegal immigrants(i.e. Hispanics) would be more like a nationalist political movement exploiting racial issues and tensions, exploitonh the tensions caused by the fact that whites will eventually be in a minority in the U.S. if current demographic trends continue.
"We don't need a DNA profile, you cretin."
Obviously, since my cretinism is due to a dietary deficiency and not a genetic defect you insensitve clod.
Not sure how accurate it is but the rudimentary DNA testing National Geographic does appears to be quite good at spotting basic ethnicity, especially Ashkenazi Jews, and they do something far less than full sequencing.
My family tree includes a Cherokee Indian and it come up with a pretty big blank on that one, but there probably isn't a very big sampling base for that while there probably is a big sampling base for Ashkenazi.
Even if its not entirely precise it will almost certainly be more precise than measuring facial features, or relying on genealogy like the Nazi's did.
One thing is a certainty that whatever race the next master race picks, the party leadership should probably get their own DNA sequenced first to make sure they are a member. It was fairly common for aspiring Nazi's to discover they had Jewish blood in their family trees.
P.S. If you do get your DNA sequenced, also remember you are making a decision for all of your relatives and descendents to expose their genetic history too.
"Cheap sequencing, on the other hand, is a very good news"
Not to mention the next time a nationalist socialist regime takes power they will have a really easy time identifying the people they want to put in the concentration camps.
If you get your DNA sequenced you should keep it in the back of your mind, what might someone with a racial superiority agenda do with it some day.
And snap, back to the smug condescension.
The way Johnson played power is exactly everything that is wrong with our government. It isn't any kind of a solution to anything. As soon as anyone starts playing that game you will end up just as corrupted as he did.
He is the person that used his power to lead the country in to its disasterous misadventure in Vietnam which started America's decline and lead us in to the inflationary spiral of the 1970's that wiped out the savings of ordinary Americans.
"but a large group of them successfully managed to block the Brooklyn bridge"
Uh, I dont live in NY so I wasnt there but the only OWS incident I remember on Brooklyn bridge the NYPD intentionally lead a protest on to the bridge so they could make a mass arrest, 700 as I recall. They herded them on the bridge so they could charge them and so no one could get away since they had both ends of the bridge blocked. Surest way to break the back of marginally committed protestors is to arrest them, give them a night in jail, court appearances, fines and a criminal record for life.
"Government is corrupt⦠Do you know how to fix it?"
Aleksei Navalny has taken an interesting approach in Russia where corruption is suffocating the country and speaking against it is a good way to get killed.
Iceland appears to be the one recent success story where people actually threw out their corrupt government and gave the finger to the bankers that crashed their economy. They suffered for a few years but they are rapidly recovering compared to places like Ireland which did what the bankers told them to do, paid off the corrupt bankers that crashed their country, and are unlikely to recover any time soon as a result. Iceland is a small place though, and the powers that be weren't entrenched to nearly the level they are in the U.S.
Americans are still largely complacent and as long as they have a job, a place to live, food to eat, a car, iPad, smartphone and/or TV I doubt they really care enough to change anything and sure aren't going to risk their well being, as tattered as it is, to stand up against a completely broken government. The one thing OWS did achieve last year was it did get the subject in to daily conversation. Now there is nothing again except a stupid horse race between two equally bad Presidential candidates.
Only way anything is likely to change in the U.S. is for another crash to occur and it for it to be so severe that it puts people out of work en masse and in to breadlines. With the nearly inevitable crash of Europe on the horizon it may not be that far off.
"The government is our servant"
Now who is being naive. Our government serves the people with the money and the power. Our founding fathers tried hard to give us a system that wouldn't go that way but they failed. Our two party system is totally broken and its only putting forward a choice between candidates who are all bad. Once you cast your meaningless vote every two years you are totally out of the loop. People vote for the person with the most money and the best attack ads, whomever the TV tells them to vote for. Any voter that bothers to become informed and vote for change is going to be disappeared by party line voters.
Me personally I would have loved to see Ron Paul win the President. He probably would have been a train wreck, but he would have caused a fire storm of change. The main stream media and his own party managed to destrot him with racism charges to make him largely disappear.
Getting rid of the Fed would be step 1 for fixing our totally corrupted economy and Paul is the only one like to attempt it.
So you are in the camp that its OK to massacre civilians as long as they "deserve" it and you are righteous about it. You do seem to have completely missed the point I've been trying to make.
Suppose Iran does get nukes and uses one on Israel. I'm assuming you would be in the camp it would be A-OK if the U.S. or Israel in turn nukes all of Irans major cities. Do you think it should be factored in that perhaps a large majority of the people in those cities hate their regime, would have thrown them out if they could and were completely opposed to their use of nukes.
Being all righteous when you go down the road where you justify killinb civilians is pretty messed up. Its why the Bible, the Koran, history of our species in general, is one long string of eye for an eye massacring of civilians, with each party doing the massacring claiming they deserved it and were righteous when they did it. This was borne out elsewhere here when there zre scores of posts claiming the other guys religion has massacred more people than the other guys religion has.
Excepting for the obvious fact that so far the Tea Party hasn't actually slowed spending or reduced corruption at all. They mostly seem to have just made Congress even more bitterly partisan, disfunctional and deadlocked than it already was and that was a real feat considering it was completely dysfunctional before they got there.
But I am actually as much a fan of the original Tea Party message, and their attempts to cut spending. as I am the OWS's. I think the two movements should acutally unite since they were attacking the same problem from opposite directions, unfortunately the two movements completely hate each other.
The big problem wi the tea party is their movement was co opted by a bunch of horrible, whacked out, politicians like Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint, and by a bunch of people who are obsessed with right wing social issues like abortion and gay marriage instead of the economic issues that matter.
At this point I am willing to wager they are or will be totally co opted in to the standard Republican causes of cutting taxes, especially on the wealthy, gutting social programs and busting unions, while they let the military squader unlimited amounts of money, shield tax subsidies and pork for big corporations, and generally let the deficit spiral out of control. I am actually all for cutting taxes, gutting social programs and busting unions but I want all the pet Republican pork beneficiaries to be gutted too and I doubt the Tea party will actually do it.
It takes talent to pack that much smuggness and condescension in that short a post. You work on Wall Street? If not you probably should consider it because you sound like you would be a perfect fit.
I was never making any suggestion that Japan didn't deserve to be embargoed. The point was that when the U.S. embargoed Japan it was an act of war as far as Japan was concerned so the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was anything but a surprise. As a result its disingenuous American to pretend like it was out of the blue or any kind of justification for nuking Japan later.
The rape of Nanking and the Bataan death march on the other hand were pretty good reasons for retaliation.
"They don't have the right to say it in any way they want"
Well yes actually they do. I don't totally disagree that they may not have had the right to "squat" but they were trying very hard to camp in public spaces, and limit traffic disruptions, and I think that is different than intentionally "squatting" on private property.
You might not like it but if you are going to demonstrate and express your displeasure with your government it almost inevitably results in large numbers of people needing to be in the streets or parks near the seats of power which would be New York and Washington. If they have to get "permits" to do that from the very government they are criticizing, then the government just cuts off the permits and the message the government doesn't want anyone to hear disappears. Or you get things like the "free speech zones" of the Bush era, chain link cages that are conveniently placed so no one will see or hear any protestor foolish enough to get shoved in to one.
"the message of OWS was trite. The current US government sucks and banks got a sweet deal they didn't deserve? "
You probably should have listened more instead of being "bored", because the message is quite a bit more sophisticated than that. The message is Wall Street in particular, and also big defense, pharna and fossil fuel companies among others have, for all practical purposes, seized control of the U.S. government, to the detriment of the American people.
They did it by buying Congressmen with chump change in campain contributions, with lobbiest bribes, with big PAC donations for campaign ads and more importantly with revolving doors through which Congressmen, their staffs, generals and bureaucrats get lucrative jobs when they leave public service for favors, and in the other direction where people from Goldman Sachs join government to take over places like the Department of the Treasury and the White House. From there they steer trillions of dollars to bail out their former employers and hand out trillions in gifts to corporate interests off the backs of working Americans who still pay their taxes while most big corporations no longer do thanks to the loopholes they've bought.
You ever wonder why the SEC never prosecutes anyone important on Wall Street, because everyone who works at the SEC wants to work at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley and get a huge pay increase so they will NEVER do anything but slap their future employers on the wrist. The SEC spent 4 years investigating Lehman Brothers whose malefesance resulted in economic catastrophe, and last week announced no charges would be filed. The investigators will, no doubt, soon get lucrative new jobs on Wall Street.
Some more examples, a 90 billion a year windfall for pharma from Medicare D which was barred from negotiate drug prices. Billy Tauzin rammed through Medicare D and then took a job as a drug company lobbyist. There are massive tax breaks for an oil industry which is making staggering profits. There are hundreds of billions in pork laden contracts to defense and homeland security contractors.
Its called crony capitalism, its a trade mark of banana republics, thats what America has now, and the American people are being royally screwed by it. They have every right, in fact its their duty, to be in the streets of New York and Washington D.C. every week until its stopped and we get our Constitution back.
Nope its not a stereotype, its well established that the Audi A6 is the semi official car of choice of the Chinese Communist party official.
The mistresses and princelings apparently favor Ferrari's.
If you aren't familiar with the term princeling they are the children and grandchildren of the giants of the Communist party, the comrades of Mao back in the day, the marchers of the Long March, champions of the worker, who have now suddenly all become staggeringly rich, are driving around in Italian sports cars, and have lost touch with the prolateriat.
Israel practices ethnic cleansing because they are putting Palestinians in the West bank and Gaza in what are basically open air prisons. Apartheid in South Africa used the term Bantustan's or homelands when they did the same thing to blacks. In Europe when the practice was applied to Jews they were called ghetto's the most famous being the one in Warsaw which under German occupation has striking similarities to Gaza.
Israel is actively engaged in a long range plan to preserve a Jewish "democracy" by disenfranchising Palastinians which due to the demographics of a much higher birth rate will eventually hold the majority in Israel counting the occupied territories. When that occurs Israel will, for all practical purposes, be an apartheid state with a minority holding power through elections that are democratic in name only.
The fact that Israel is aggressively putting settlements in to occupied territories, which is a violation of international law, and are aggressively displacing Palastinian in the process is the icing on the ethnic cleansing cake.
As for why Nazi's were called right wing its because they practiced state capitalism and were radically anti union which placed them on the opposite side of the spectrum from leftists and communists which are in theory at least entirely for workers and unions. Right wing state capitalists make no pretense of being a workers paradise, workers work to serve the state and the party, and the well connected party members tend to be rich and powerful. In practice Nazi Germany and Stalinst Russia weren't really very different, but that's mostly because Stalin staged a counter revolution, hijacked the Russian revolution and when he did it became a Communist state in name only. China did the same transition from Communism to counter revolution and state capitalism when Mao died and the "Gang of Four" including Mao's widow were deposed. The party started "special economic zones" and slowly embracing state capitalism from 1978 on, so today it is for all practical purposed a Fascist state and Communist in name only.
Pearl Habor was no rationale at all for doing anything to Japan. The U.S., Britain and the Dutch had embargoed Japan's oil supplies in July 1941. Japan made it quite clear then that they considered that an act of war since it was going to completely strangle Japan militarily and economically. War was inevitable from that point and FDR and the U.S. military knew it. Japan had no choice but to seize the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) to restore their oil supply, and to do that they had to neutralize the U.S. Pacific fleet.
The specifics of when and where the Japanese would attack might have been a bit of a surprise but the U.S. knew full well it was coming. Its up to the conspiracy theorists to make the claim the U.S. intentionally let the Japanese maul Pearl Harbor because FDR needed a day of "infamy" to goad the American people in to entering World War II, something the very isolationist American people had been loathe to do up to that point. It did a great job of whipping Americans in to a war frenzy, and producing a gusher of volunteers for the military, something that simply wouldn't have happened if FDR had just declared war on Germany and Japan without a provocation.