Dude, you missed the point. I didn't even pretend to say the U.S. is identical to China. I just pointed out that they aren't really as different as you are trying to paint them to be.
From 2000 to 2006 the Republican's very nearly did succeed in doing what you describe for all practical purposes. Their use of 9/11 fear mongering was so successful the Democrats and the U.S. media could just as well been in a camp, the outcome would have been the same. The Bush administration did manage to completely dismantle the constitution and established numerous precedents for unlimited power in the executive branch, with Democratic acquiescence. They just had to say we were at war, the President has absolute power in a war and the war would never end so we are for all practical purposes in a velvet gloved police state. They were most certainly planning on so thoroughly entrenching the Republican stranglehold on power that the Democrats and any media outside of Fox would have settled in to irrelevancy. If there is another 9/11 scale or greater attack this year it could still happen.
The only thing that really tripped them up was their incompetence and corruption was so massive and blatant they couldn't keep brushing it under the rug. Their handling of Katrina and Iraq in particular was so poor it turned everyone on them including there own party. It appears they were also fiddling while our economy burned so we are in the worst economic condition since the Great Depression, just like Hoover.
If a Chinese leader were to be so corrupt and incompetent everyone hated him, including his own party, he wrecked the economy, he took no action when hundreds of thousands were threatened by a natural disaster, the Communist party would throw him and his cronies out too. The process is just a bit different.
"But it seems likely that they are more contained by the US system than the Chinese one."
Maybe. I would mostly just say the two systems are different but both are pretty bad. One big difference is the U.S. maintains a greater illusion of freedom than China does. The U.S. does have a two party system, but most Americans will tell you that there isn't really a dimes bit of difference between the two on most issues. The two parties are extremely effective in snuffing out any chance of any any new party rising to challenge their hegemony and they have become so similar there is really very little choice when you go in to the voting booth without a viable third party. We have a system where the two parties collude to hold power and all the American people can do is ping pong between the two and very little really changes no matter which is in power. It maintains the illusion of choice when in fact there isn't really much. Congressional districts in the U.S. are so gerrymandered by the two parties the outcome is predetermined in the majority of districts. Corporate lobbyists are the constant and they have more influence than the people ever will. Take the war in Iraq. Doesn't really matter if McCain or Obama gets elected, they will probably both draw down the troops in Iraq and just ship them to Afghanistan instead. No real difference. Both parties seem to be eager to enable massive spying and stripping of our civil liberties through multiple version of the Patriot Act.
"They can be locked up, tortured or killed for criticizing the government without any process."
Based on a recent appeals court decision in the U.S., this is mostly OK in the U.S. too. The President just has to declare you an enemy combatant and all your rights are gone. People have in fact been locked up, tortured and killed without any process by the U.S. since 9/11. There have been attempts to prohibit torture but Bush, Cheney and Addington have skillfully insured the CIA at least still has a full license to torture. These practices are maybe not as widespread as in China, and the President probably couldn't be as blatant about just locking up people that piss him off, but all the precedents are there so he can. Congress, the courts and the executive keep trying to establish process to try enemy combatants but so far they are mostly kangaroo courts with the deck completely stacked against the defendants.
"Executed prisoners organs have been used for transplant."
It used to be common practice to do medical experiments on U.S. prisoners. From 1963 to 1973 prisoners in Washington were conned in to voluntarily having their testicles bombarded with radiation to study the effects. I recall the practice was resumed recently since big Pharma needs more people to test new drugs on and the dangers of this testing were vividly exposed when a drug test nearly killed a few of the participants. There are supposed to be rules to prevent abuse but when you have a captive population to experiment on you know there will be abuse.
In the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, illiterate black men were intentionally not treated for 40 years so U.S. doctors could study the long term ravages of the disease. They were told they had "bad blood" and given a $50 dollar burial benefit as their reward. The study ran 40 years and a number of spouses and children were infected and all the participants suffered horribly, especially sad once penicillin had became available and the disease was completely treatable.
"3) Business in China is very dominated by personal contacts or guanxi. Chinese people have told me that most companies hire a few party/army types as non working directors for protection"
Not really unique to China. Cronyism in the Bush administration has been rampant, the Democrats do it to. Sole source awards of huge contracts to Republican cronies have been rampant the last 8 years. There are rules against it but when the crooks control the Attorney General and the DOJ chances of the rules being enforced are slim.
It does if you order it that way. The three numbers on fertilizer bags are:
Nitrogen-Phosphorous-Potash(Potassium).
If the middle number is zero it doesn't have any Phosphorous. You can get a number of trace elements like Sulfur, Calcium, Magenesium, Iron and other assorted trace elements.
Properly educated farmers, gardner and landscapers certainly can reduce the problem by:
A. Getting their soil tested before they apply fertilizer and apply only what is indicated by the test. Using a lab is best if you are fertilizer some acreage, or you can make an educated guess using a home test kit.
B. Be careful when irrigating after applying fertilizer to avoid washing it off, sprinklers being much preferred over flood irrigation
Another factor that is probably reducing the Phosphorous pollution problem is its so expensive lately, along with Nitrogen and Potash, that farmers either can't afford it or are very careful when they do splurge on it.
"If the Air Force is in charge, then you've got the beginnings of a military state on your hands."
From what I've read recently the wheels have been falling off the Air Force for a while. That's a reason why Gates fired the Air Force Secretary and the Chief of Staff, the cililian and military chiefs of a service have never both been fired at once in history. They've had major breakdowns in controls on nuclear weapons, including flying a set of armed cruise missiles cross country by mistake and delivering secret warhead parts to Taiwan by accident. There was something about a corrupt $50 million dollar contract for some Thunderbirds shows that was thrown to a retired 4 star general through cronyism, etc. If you can't maintain discipline in controlling nuclear weapons it tends to indicate you can't maintain any discipline at all and this might be indicative of that.
They've also been accused of largely taking a pass on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the "War on Terror" in general at least since Shock and Awe ended. You get the impression the brunt of its fallen on the Army, Navy and Marines. I'm sure their are Air Force personnel serving honorably in those places but I gather they have been extremely resistant in adapting to the low intensity warfare which is most warfare these days. In particular Gates wanted them to put more resources in UAV's and to supporting troops on the ground with intelligence, like spotting people infiltrating borders of Afghanistan and Iraq for example. From Newsweek:
Getting more UAVs in theater, Gates said recently, has "been like pulling teeth."
Apparently the Air Force will only allow UAV's to be piloted by pilots and pilot availability is slowing deployment of UAV's to the war zones. As I recall the Army gave up in frustration and is developing its own UAV's now. I suspect Air Force pilots want to be in the cockpit of gold plated fighters and bombers(there is a next gen secret bomber under development apparently) and not sitting in a trailer someplace flying a UAV look for guerrillas. They are still arming and training to fight a Soviet Union that doesn't exist any more.
I've often wondered if they extent to which the Air Force Academy has been overrun by born again Christians hasn't had a negative influence on the officers ranks in the Air Force. You have to wonder if the officers are rising through the ranks based more on their willingness to pray the same as their fellow officers instead of on their qualifications and ability to their jobs. I wonder if officers who are spending all their time praying together are reluctant to discipline their fellow church members.
It could also be the corruption that seems to have been the hallmark of the Bush administration has infected the Air Force like every other branch of government under the control of the executive branch. America made a pretty serious mistake electing Bush and it remains to be seen if it proves to be a fatal mistake that it may not recover from.
"For education, there are countless grants, interest-free loans, and other incentives (like part-time military service) to help anyone go to school who wants to."
If that were the case why are so many students coming out of college with 6 figure debt from student loans that will be a ball and chain around their neck for most of their life. Military service is certainly an option, as I recall the Congress was trying to pass a new GI bill that insured vets a full college scholarship. John McCain and many Republicans actively opposed it because it was to generous and they didn't want to give the volunteer soldiers they are so short of in Iraq to have an incentive to leave the military to get their education. Instead they seem to favor stop loss so once you join the military its extremely difficult to get out when your enlistment is up. Being maimed or killed by an IED in Iraq is a pretty steep price to pay for an education.
Cuba's medical education is so good they train doctors many other countries in Central and South America. The U.S. can't even provide adequate general practitioners to its own rural areas. All the doctors flock to the cities and to specialties like plastic surgery because the payoff is higher. In the U.S. you do have Medicare but most doctors don't even want to take Medicare patients because they aren't profitable enough.
"Health and dental insurance is available to practically anyone who has a full time job, where the plan is paid for by the employer, and there are many other ways to get health insurance."
Dude you are seriously out of touch with reality. If that were the case why are their 40+ million uninsured Americans and the number is growing every day. Employers have been gutting their health insurance benefits because they have become prohibitively expensive, especially for lower paying jobs. On the news recently I saw a piece on a wealthy Brit who started a program where he would fly in doctor's, dentists and optometrist in to third world spots to give people free health care. Amazingly he did the same thing in the U.S., in Tennessee, and their services were swamped by thousands of uninsured American's in rural America who had no insurance and couldn't afford the most basic health care. If you think health care in the U.S. is so great I think you ought to go sit in the emergency room at a hospital that takes the uninsured, if you can find one.
Socialism sucks in a lot of ways but it does seem to provide health care better than anything Capitalism can manage. Under free markets you can get exceptionally good health care if you have the money, but if you don't is sucks.
You should probably try getting out of your cocoon a little more often.
"There is absolutely zero hard evidence that the Republicans have stolen any elections."
There is a high probability Kennedy stole the 1960 election from Nixon. Stolen election do in fact happen, they happen all the time, they happen in the U.S. The methods for stealing them are many. The really good thieves do it in ways that lead to people saying "There is absolutely zero hard evidence" afterwards. If you value representative democracy it is extremely important for everyone be on their guard for the possibility to the point of being a bit paranoid. The complacent, the apologists and those in denial, like yourself, are for more a threat to representative democracy than those who are a little paranoid on the subject.
It is very much open to debate if the 2000 presidential election was stolen in Florida. Where you come down on the issue depends almost entirely on whether you a Republican or a Democrat, whether you like Bush(which is a pretty small group lately) or hate him. You can argue the election was stolen before it happened because one of the candidate's brother was the governor of Florida and ran the state election apparatus. The supervisor of the election was a Republican, Katherine Harris, who was apparently rewarded with a seat in Congress for steering the election to Bush. Its hard to say if there was any actual election rigging in Florida but there was certainly a brutal power struggle once it was incedibly close, and the Republicans were very successful in steering the outcome their way.
The Republicans under Jeb Bush were also pretty aggressive in intimidating minority voters, who vote Democrat, to not even show up. The Republican vote suppression campaign in Florida almost certainly changed the outcome of the election before it even happened. As some other posts have said in this thread its a REALLY bad thing about the U.S. system that the political parties in control in a given jurisdiction have vast influence over the electoral process that put them there and keeps them there.
The U.S. House has become so bitterly partisan, ineffective and dominated by incumbents precisely because state legislatures get to draw up precinct boundaries and gerrymandering is now so out of control most House seats are never even contested. When a new party gains control of the state legislature they get to seize control of future elections as Tom Delay did in Texas. Gerrymandering is probably the most blatant form of election rigging and its right out in the open, it just doesn't work on governors or senators, which happen to be the two seats in Georgia where this funny business may have occurred.
The U.S. attorney firing scandal appears to have centered around Karl Rove's attempt to misuse U.S. attorneys in an organized campaign to file voter fraud cases to suppress Democratic turnout, and to file political corruption cases in places like New Mexico right before an election to influence the outcome.
"You are a true moron if you think that all Iranians believe the west "satan". Honestly,"
Kind of a loaded statement since it is obviously true "all" Iranians don't believe that but a significant majority might and you have no clue how many do and don't. A LOT of older Iranians almost certainly believe that, enough of them believed it to stage a successful revolution to throw out the Shah, and the U.S. by proxy. The Shah had a powerful secret service apparatus designed to prevent rebellion so the fact they succeeded suggest there was a lot of popular support for Khomeni and against the Shah and the U.S.. I'm pretty sure a lot of older Iranians who suffered under the Shah believe the U.S. is the great Satan.
The Shah was a horrible ruler, so bad Khomeni apparently looked good by comparison to a lot of Iranians. Iran also has a lot of fundamentalist Shias to whom the Shah's secular, pro Western policies, did look positively satanic and heretical. The Iranian people rightly blamed the U.S. for every thing the Shah did which is why they coined the phrase "the great Satan" for the U.S. with some justification.
Now I wouldn't even hazard a guess at how the Iranian people view the U.S. today, especially the younger Iranians who didn't live under the Shah and now suffer under the petty tyrannies of the Revolutionary Guard. I doubt anyone really knows unless they live or have lived there which probably includes you. Depends on whether they believe the propaganda the Iranian government raises them on versus how much they hate and fear the Revolutionary Guard. Most people do believe what their government tells them during their formative years whether it be in Iran or the U.S. I wouldn't take it as a given that a majority in Iran, or elsewhere in the the Muslim world want a pro western, secular culture. Some people's religion runs really deep, especially when they are indoctrinated in it from birth, and they will in fact opt for a culture which is somewhat oppressive but which adheres to their religious principals.
I think Cuba had a massive dose of American "culture" in the '50's. It came in the form of a U.S. friendly, repressive dictator named Fulgencio Batista, the U.S. based Mafia that turned Havana in to the 1950's version of Las Vegas but worse, and large numbers of obnoxious Americans that flocked there to indulge all their vices, mainly gambling and prostitution. At the time Americans, being the puritanical prudes they tend to be, outlawed all these vices at home, so all their "weapons of cultural mass destruction" were focused like a laser beam on Cuba in the 50's. A lot of Cubans considered Castro and socialism an improvement at the time. Its not like Castro overthrew Batista single handed, he had a lot of support from the Cuban people.
Part of the problem with American cultural dissemination in the past is it was targeted at keeping America and American corporations on fat street so life was good in the U.S. In much of the rest of the world it was propping up brutal dictators as long as they were willing to be a bulwark against Socialism and Communism and were friendly to American multinationals which translated in to the American companies pillaging all the countries cheap labor and resources to fatten their bottom line while they left most of their host countries in abject poverty.
I certainly have no interest in living in Cuba. I hate governments who can't resist telling people how to live, or throwing their citizens in jail without cause, but that seems to happen in the U.S. now too. The U.S., especially under Bush has acquired some pretty scary Fascist tendencies and has been throwing people in secret prisons without trial and torturing them too.
If you can stay clear of the Cuban thought police I imagine life in Cuba isn't all that bad especially compared to what they had in the 50's. At least they do have really good health care and education for EVERYONE, not just the people rich enough to pay for it like the U.S. Its amazing they do as well as they do considering the strangling noose America's embargo has had around them for over 40 years. The U.S. kind of forces them in to a lot of their repression. They've have to be on constant guard against U.S. schemes to destabilize and overthrow their government for the last 40 plus years, which tends to lead to an excessive security apparatus, kind of like the one the U.S. created using 9/11 as an excuse.
I think my bottom line is both the U.S. and Cuba are deeply, deeply flawed so its a bit comical to watch them and the people in them try to contend one is god's gift and the other is Satan incarnate when they both suck about equally though in somewhat different ways.
"Or would you prefer to be still back in the Skylab days tech wise? Realize that you are being sentimental about equipment, not practical."
For return on investment I'm pretty sure I'd take Skylab any day. It took almost no time or money to do compared to ISS, it was a clever and quick redirection of Apollo resources that were left over when Apollo was cut short. In fact it is a testament to exactly the concept I was advocating, thinking outside the box and making use of stuff that would otherwise have been thrown away and wasted. The fact is Skylab and Mir were good enough for space stations, ISS was complete overkill. There just isn't enough interesting to do spinning around in LEO to justify the price tag and LEO space stations completely fail on the PR front because they bore everyone to tears which isn't wise if you want a budget and a nation to back your program.
Obviously ISS is technically superior to Skylab but it, along with the Shuttle, completely sucked the life out of NASA and have succeeded in turning the country that reveled in Apollo to one that could care less about the space program any more. ISS took decades to do, was engineered, reengineered an overengineered, cost over a $100 billion, or is it $200 billion by now, and its broken very little ground that wasn't already covered in Mir and Skylab. About the only ground its broken is the process of building it including the massive number of space walks required but it hasn't actually achieved much beyond just building it.
You didn't answer my question, do you work for NASA? You sound a lot like you do.....
You sound like you just want someone to give you another $100 billion to build ISS, Part II, reinvent everything from scratch and not do anything interesting for another 20 years, but you will have your job security.
Re:Awesome response posted on Washingtonpost.com
on
Send the ISS To the Moon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Do you work for NASA, you seem to have the can't do attitude that is prevalent there since Apollo.
Considering the ISS cost 100 billion by a conservative estimate your saying the engineering would cost 100 trillion dollars to do this? If you want to make a sound engineering argument you probably should use engineering principles, like not pluck numbers out of your ass and creat an insanely exaggerated argument to try to win your point.
I didn't really say it was a good idea but, you would have to do a bunch of painful engineering to do it, but I'm not so closed minded as to just write the idea off just because there are a couple daunting problems. Its a lot more useful and fun to think outside the box and see if you could solve the problems than just be a dick and see how negative you can be....like yourself.
Based on the ISS track record it almost certainly will take NASA more time and money than this country is willing to spend to build a lunar space or ground station of any size at all, from scratch.
I'm open minded enough to think about an interesting concept instead of just instantly shot it down because its a little off the wall. As much trouble as NASA is having developing a new launch vehicle it would be awesome if you could reuse all that stuff sitting up there mostly going to waste at the moment. Even if you didn't move the whole ISS the Russian core is a pretty good self contained space station if you could use lunar material to shield it.
"Mr. Benson's proposal to simply connect engines to the ISS and launch it away from Earth and onto interplanetary trajectories completely ignores the fact that every source of propulsion he cites would impart accelerations, even small ones for certain scenarios, that the ISS structure, joints, and arrays simply cannot accommodate"
You wouldn't necessarily have to move it in one piece. You could break it down in to its original pieces and reassemble it in lunar orbit. I wager you could even land some of the modules on the moon if you had a transfer vehicle and a lander with the volume and power to handle them. All those pieces were designed to withstand a shuttle launch with multiple G's though you are correct assembled they weren't designed for that.
You would just need an orbital transfer vehicle with a cargo hold similar to the shuttles.
"For one thing, the shielding, wall thicknesses, and many other design aspects of the ISS were chosen to protect crews from the worst-case radiation environment known to exist throughout its present orbital environment."
You could in theory build bricks on the lunar surface, send them up to the ISS and bolt them on the outside of the habitable module. Someone with better math and physics skills than me would need to tell us how thick they would need to be to shield from the solar wind and cosmic rays.
It would be a major engineering challenge to design a way to bolt them on the ISS and there are probably all kind of corners where you couldn't bolt the necessary thickness of material without running in to things or covering over important items that need servicing. Also not sure how the structures and gyros would hold up to increasing the mass by a huge multiples. It would be an interesting exercise to solve the same shielding problems you will have going to Mars.
If you actually landed them on the surface you could bury them, which I assume they are going to do for the lunar station modules anyway though again reaching things that need service would be a problem if they were buried.
It would be a lot easier to lift the necessary shielding from the moon than it would be Earth.
It would make more sense to recycle the ISS instead of letting it burn up and having to lift new modules from Earth for a moon station. Certainly some engineering thought would be required on the numerous issues you would encounter. Another concern is how much life the components have left in them. Some of the pieces are designed to only last a few more years (2015? I forget). It sure would be nice to reuse those big solar arrays if nothing else.
You also need to remember that this bill influences executive branch powers. Obama is planning on being the executive branch in 6 months. It kind of follows that he doesn't really want to pass a law that will restrict HIS power in 6 months. The amount of damage Bush can do with this law in the next 6 months is kind of irrelevant compared to what he's already done. It is going to have its largest impact on either McCain or Obama in 6 months. Its extremely rare to find a politician who WANTS to give away power. People who run for office, whether they will admit it or not, do it because they want POWER.
Me personally I'm not happy about the government giving itself new powers to spy on us but, damn, what are we going to do to stop it, and we let the horse get out of the barn a long time ago. Note these spying laws apply only to U.S. citizens. The NSA has been spying on the entire rest of the world, with almost no restriction, for their entire history, so maybe its only fair U.S. citizens should suffer with the rest of the world until they are willing to dismantle these malevolent agencies and give the everyone a little more privacy. There would certainly be risks in completely dismantling the spying agencies, every country has them after all, but if you look at the track record of the CIA in particular its really open to debate if its done more damage and caused more harm to the U.S. in the last 50 years, than good.
For example, the government of Iran nationalized oil fields run by British companies in the 1950's. The CIA intervenes and overthrows a quite popular and really not so bad government and installs a ruthless dictator in the Shah of Iran. The Iranian people hate the shah and the U.S. and CIA for putting him in power. The Iranian people eventually topple the Shah and install Khomeni and now the current Iranian government is ten time worse than the Mosaddeq government the CIA overthrew.
The CIA backed the guerilla's fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It worked great because it so bloodied the U.S.S.R it collapsed. Unfortunately it also fueled the rise of Al Qaeda ending in 9/11.
Someone needs to total up all the accomplishments of the CIA and NSA versus all the damage they've done and debate whether we would be actually better off if we just shut them down. It is a certainty that a lot of hatred towards the U.S. around the world is directly the result of CIA meddling, in particular backing ruthless dictators that have inflicted untold misery on people around the world. The CIA/NSA are just a pinnacle of arrogance on the part of country that just needs to learn to get along in the world without trying to force everyone to dance to an American tune.
It could also be that being a rocket scientist at NASA or one of their contractors is a really, really terrible job so there aren't many talented people in the U.S. that are even interested in it. It is a program that peaked in 1969 and has been down hill on the excitement and tangible results scale ever since.
The space program and aerospace in general goes through constant boom and bust cycles and when its in a bust cycle you can't find work. Depending on whose president, the whims of Congress or whose NASA administrator the project you spend years on can be snuffed out over night.
NASA is a horrible bureaucracy. Most of the civil servants are contract monitors shuffling giant mounds of paper to hire contractors to do the cool work, and that job sucks. Contractors maybe do cool stuff sometimes but there are a lot less frustrating and more rewarding place to work than for a horrible bureaucracy or for the kinds of companies that doing government contract work.
It could also be the U.S. did about everything worth doing by about 1969 and realized it wasn't really worth it. Other countries are retracing the same ground to gain the prestige but they may well realize eventually its not really worth it too. When the U.S. decided to sink decades and over a hundred billion on ISS they didn't really think it through and completely killed off excitement for manned space exploration. ISS is an inherently extremely boring project. The Apollo veterans had already figured that out with Skylab. One of the space documentaries on Discovery recently had footage of an Apollo veteran saying exactly that, and that after the moon landings it drove them nuts to work on Skylab. Watching a tin can spin around the earth in LEO doing nothing interesting is BORING and so far it has yielded almost no useful return past the mere experience of building a big thing in LEO and living in it for a long time(ground Mir had already covered on a smaller scale). Its not clear landing the Moon again will generate that much excitement in the U.S. again. People were already bored with moon landings by about Apollo 12.
For space exploration, especially manned exploration to gain relevance again you need to either:
A. Move warfare in to space in a big way, and use your dominant position in space to dominate Earth. Fortunately we have mostly refrained from doing this. If it happens it will probably be really expensive and really ugly. I'm talking about putting serious weapons platforms in space, attacking your adversaries assets in space and on the ground from space. Right now ground launched ballistic missile and spy satellites seem sufficient and a lot cheaper and safer. If someone decides to finish what Reagan started and put lasers or other beam weapons in space and start a really weapons race..... shudder. It would spur the space program though...
B. Start doing something in space that actually yields tangible economic returns greater than the cost of doing it. We have done this to some extent with GPS, weather and communication satellites but this business is already saturated. I imagine fiber optics are making comm satellites somewhat obsolete. You would need to make the next big leap to asteroid mining, mining the moon for fusion reactor fuel or generating power in space in a big way. Until you make that difficult leap people are mostly going to way you are wasting money on it... though the U.S. has wasted hundreds of billions on Iraq to no good end too
C. Space tourism maybe, but its a little bit of a stretch because right now it a niche thing for rich people with a lot of money to burn. Its going to take a pretty huge leap to cut costs enough for ordinary people to get in orbit and live there for a week, and also for it to be safe enough to not kill people on a regular basis. We seem to be having trouble people just flying people in jets economically lately.
D. Make it to Mars and start a permanent colony there. This is a somewhat dubious undertaking since it would be hugely expe
But Wookie is such a fascinating language. You can communicate complex ideas with a couple of monotone syllables that translate in to whole sentences in English.
"There is such a notion as long-term vs. short-term."
Unfortunately thanks to the dot com bubble, computerized trading, cheap and easy sell orders, 24x7 financial news networks and low capital gains taxes... I think the U.S. markets, and global markets in general, have become incredibly skewed to a day trader mentality. The markets have turned more in to a giant casino than institutions for raising capital and for long term investments. In the old days people actually did buy stocks and hold them for long periods so the long term health of the company did matter. Now CxO's, and big share holders like Carl Icahn, just want to get in on the bottom end of a big merger because the company getting bought always gets a big pop.
Now its all about the big pop so shareholders can dump and rush to the next deal. People care a lot less than they used to about the long term health of the companies involved or if they end in a smoldering ruin. Its kind of why the U.S. economy is turning in to a.... smoldering ruin. There isn't much long view left.
I've worked at a couple companies where the execs did things that were strategically stupid in the long run, but were great for pumping up the stock price and suckering some bigger competitor in to buying them out. They just wanted the pop, cash out, buy a bigger mansion, and start on the next round, leaving this sucker that bought them out with a train wreck post merger. Shareholders love those kinds of managers and pay them multi-million dollar bonuses to walk in the door and pump up the stock so they can cash out too.
"Not to mention what it does to their technology."
Well in the case of Yahoo its open to debate if they have much "technology". They are failing miserably at online search and the ads next to it is where all the money is. They have a huge brand and market share for their portal but Google's killing them on the search technology and marketing which is where the money and is and why they are in the trouble they are in. If Microsoft is going to buy them bazillions of dollars for their share of the search market it leaves one to question Microsoft's business acumen.
"Bush should be prosecuted to the max for lying to the public"
Well you can't impeach Bush unless you impeach Cheney at the same time. If you were to successfully impeach and convict just Bush, Cheney would just take over, and no one wants that since Cheney is worse than Bush. Cheney and his right hand man Addington have been more responsible for shoving through most of the spying and torture initiatives of the Bush administration than anyone including Bush.
The other obvious problem is you would never get a conviction through the Senate, its takes a 2/3rds vote and no Republican would support it without substantially more malfeasance on the part of the Bush administration than has occurred. Nixon lost the support of his own party which is why he resigned before he faced impeachment since he might well have been convicted. I don't think Bush has done anything that would make his party want to suffer the humiliation of convicting him. Most of the Republicans, and quite a few Democrats seem to be in favor of giving the President sweeping new spying powers because they are still running scared from 9/11, and most of the Democrats seem to want to spy on everyone as much as the Republicans.
The impeachment of Clinton was an elaborate political show trail designed to damage the Democrats, and it worked quite well since it helped elect Bush in 2000. The Republican's didn't have any chance of convicting Clinton either. They just wanted to inflict as much damage as they could, and for that it did work quite well, since they did gain complete control of the government in its wake.
The Democrats are in some ways to be commended for not inflicting another pointless and crippling impeachment process on the nation, because they wouldn't succeed and it would just do more damage to the country and not accomplish anything. Its unfortunate we can't punish Bush and Cheney for their law breaking, at least while they are in office, but the 2/3rds vote required in the Senate makes the bar to high to achieve. Its hard to commend the Democrats for much but at least they aren't as petty as the Republicans were in using impeachment as a political weapon.
Unfortunately for the Republican's their corruption, incompetence and petty malevolence appears to have so soured America on the Republican brand they could well be pushed out of power again for a long, long time which is a form of punishment in and of itself. Not sure that is good because the Democrats can't be trusted with a stranglehold on power either.
"At that point in time, Colin Powell, Secretary of State and former General, had less sway in how the situation was handled than Ahmed Chalabi, Iraqi expatriot and Iranian spy."
Well that just proves once again multiple failures on his part.
A. He let the State Department be completely marginalized, or actually be completely rolled, and get locked out of a project that was at that point very much a diplomatic role
B. Once he had been completely marginalized he just quietly put up with it, didn't do anything and let the wheels fall off the most important diplomatic effort of his term at State.
So he should have defended his turf and he didn't. When he had been completely marginalized he didn't resign indicating he is weak. Resigning quietly would have been defensible. Resigning and publicly assailing the incompetence of the Bush administration would have been commendable, might have made a difference and might have saved the lives of some of those soldiers he says he cares for.
"False dilemma. The third option is that he, like most of Congress, was simply misled."
Well I didn't believe that B.S. case Powell made at the time so I'm not sure why anyone in Congress or Powell himself did. It was comical with the portable biological weapons and all. I assume it was they were just so afraid of looking weak on terrorism after 9/11 that they were willing to go along with anything.
"The interesting thing is that qualities that make Powell an good candidate (intelligent, honest, outsider) are the same qualities that Obama seems to posess."
I would maybe agree excepting for Powell's role in selling the Iraq war. Either he wasn't intelligent or he was dishonest. Either he was seriously dumb to buy the case for that war, or he was dishonest selling that case if he knew it was a fabrication. That war pitch to the U.N. with the vial of Anthrax was really contemptible. He was also completely walked over by the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense which suggests he can't compete in the shark tank that is Washington.
He was probably the ONLY insider in the Bush administration who had a slim chance and the motivation to derail the rush to war in Iraq and he failed miserably at it, since he ended up carrying the neocons water for it instead and got in front of the world at the UN and sold a lie. The U.S. paid dearly for his failure. Needless to say he had to do what his boss told him to do or resign, but if he had fought it tooth and nail, spoken out before the war and then resigned he might have derailed that whole misguided cluster fuck. He was also head of State during the time State could have salvaged Iraq but instead he let Bremmer and Rumsfeld completely screw the place up leading to a multi year insurgency. Allowing Bremmer to disband the Iraqi Army and de-Bathification were colossally stupid and practically created the insurgency that got thousands of Americans killed and maimed.
Were it not for that one giant blemish on his record I would support him for VP.
I'm also frequently flabbergasted that Condolezza Rice is often mentioned as both very popular and a leading VP candidate. Because she has also either been malevolent, incompetent or completely outmaneuvered by Cheney and Rumsfeld and was a disaster both at the NSC and State. She has apparently nearly wrecked the State department and she seems to never deliver tangible positive results on her major initiatives.
Get the NASA channel on satellite or cable. You will get all the coverage you need and more.
"The IIS gets no major media coverage"
Unfortunately nearly everything about the space station is as exciting as watching paint dry. The space walks and docking of new pieces are the only parts that are even remotely interesting and the Shuttle crew does that. The space station crew spends most of their time staring at computers and exercising which isn't any more interesting to watch in space than it is on the ground. Maybe if they had hot lady astronauts in tights at least the exercise part would be better.
On one of the NASA history series that are popular lately they had interviews with the Apollo people about their transition from Apollo to Skylab. The Moon shots were the epitome of exciting. Skylab was day after day after day of sheer boredom watching a tin can fly around the earth. They couldn't really cope with or stand the idea of following Apollo with a space station. It didn't help that with Apollo they were on cloud 9 so they had a really long way to fall. Even if they are important to do, space stations are a media disaster because they are horrendously boring.
You kind of have to face the fact that after Apollo 11, space exploration turned intensely boring to the average person, and two shuttle disasters seriously tarnished NASA's brand. Working in space is mostly overrated. The Apollo program hit the transient pinnacle it and has been all down hill from there. Unless we manage to land someone on Mars or the moons of Jupiter manned space flight just isn't worth it any more. Someone needs to figure out a business plan to actually do something worthwhile in space with a real payoff. The only things I can see are power generation, asteroid mining or establishing a viable permanent colony someplace, presumably Mars because its the only place close to hospitable for humans. Unfortunately all those take more resources than this planet is willing to invest. We would rather pour the money down a rat hole in Iraq.
What is the evidence pro and con that Mars and Earth are the ones that actually collided, creating the Moon, and then they went spinning away from each other to settle in their current orbits.
Or maybe something big hit an earth which was bigger at the time and made three big pieces, Mars, Moon and Earth.
The composition of the three bodies are quite different so maybe that speaks against the possibility....
I don't hold a particular grudge against or envy for the toy collectors. Especially if they have the disposable income to pay for them. I mostly just feel sorry for the people who don't have the money and have borrowed themselves in to a hole to buy crap they can't afford and often don't really need. Me I would rather have a nice nest egg stashed away instead of an overpriced car that will be worthless in a few years.
Out of control borrowing, and shipping wealth to other countries in trade deficit has unfortunately become such a massive epidemic in the U.S. it is almost inevitably going to completely crash the economy, in fact it appears that is exactly what is happening right now. I'm not really cheering on the downfall of this particular culture primarily because that downfall will probably be accompanied by a devastating economic crash like the great depression which followed the roaring 20's which was another toy collecting decade to learn lessons from. A serious crash will deeply hurt a lot of people and it will probably hurt the people on the bottom rungs of the ladder a lot worse than it will the rich people with the most toys. On the other hand a devastating crash is probably the tonic needed to force Americans to remember they do in fact need to have a productive, functioning, economy and the world isn't going to hand America everything on a silver platter any more.
If you take cars as a particularly good example of the flawed reasoning behind modern culture.....
I would take mass transit in urban areas any day, the only problem is the Rockefellers and their oil monopoly bought out nearly every urban mass transit system in the U.S. to force everyone in to complete dependence on freeways, cars and gasoline so we have a culture completely dependent on cars. Doesn't seem like such a great idea now that oil costs $130+ a barrel and the Chinese and Indians are buying cars trying to emulate this culture precisely at the time the world is running out of oil.
Any car that isn't a collectors item is a relatively horrible investment. They are quite expensive and they depreciate so fast they are nearly worthless in a few years. At least their quality is somewhat better than it was a few years thanks to competition from Asia. There was a time American made cars would be falling apart right after the warranty ran out. I think they called it planned obsolescence because they want you to spend a years salary buying a new car every three to four years to drain as much of your disposable income as they possible could for a worthless investment.
"The modern man is what he owns. He who dies with the most toys wins."
Or at least that is how modern man has been brainwashed by all the corporations that want him to buy their crap, car companies in particular. They've also conditioned modern man to get 10-20 credit cards and a subprime ARM mortgage, so he can get massively in debt to pay for their crap and pay userous interest rates to them until he is wiped out.
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Dude, you missed the point. I didn't even pretend to say the U.S. is identical to China. I just pointed out that they aren't really as different as you are trying to paint them to be.
From 2000 to 2006 the Republican's very nearly did succeed in doing what you describe for all practical purposes. Their use of 9/11 fear mongering was so successful the Democrats and the U.S. media could just as well been in a camp, the outcome would have been the same. The Bush administration did manage to completely dismantle the constitution and established numerous precedents for unlimited power in the executive branch, with Democratic acquiescence. They just had to say we were at war, the President has absolute power in a war and the war would never end so we are for all practical purposes in a velvet gloved police state. They were most certainly planning on so thoroughly entrenching the Republican stranglehold on power that the Democrats and any media outside of Fox would have settled in to irrelevancy. If there is another 9/11 scale or greater attack this year it could still happen.
The only thing that really tripped them up was their incompetence and corruption was so massive and blatant they couldn't keep brushing it under the rug. Their handling of Katrina and Iraq in particular was so poor it turned everyone on them including there own party. It appears they were also fiddling while our economy burned so we are in the worst economic condition since the Great Depression, just like Hoover.
If a Chinese leader were to be so corrupt and incompetent everyone hated him, including his own party, he wrecked the economy, he took no action when hundreds of thousands were threatened by a natural disaster, the Communist party would throw him and his cronies out too. The process is just a bit different.
"But it seems likely that they are more contained by the US system than the Chinese one."
Maybe. I would mostly just say the two systems are different but both are pretty bad. One big difference is the U.S. maintains a greater illusion of freedom than China does. The U.S. does have a two party system, but most Americans will tell you that there isn't really a dimes bit of difference between the two on most issues. The two parties are extremely effective in snuffing out any chance of any any new party rising to challenge their hegemony and they have become so similar there is really very little choice when you go in to the voting booth without a viable third party. We have a system where the two parties collude to hold power and all the American people can do is ping pong between the two and very little really changes no matter which is in power. It maintains the illusion of choice when in fact there isn't really much. Congressional districts in the U.S. are so gerrymandered by the two parties the outcome is predetermined in the majority of districts. Corporate lobbyists are the constant and they have more influence than the people ever will. Take the war in Iraq. Doesn't really matter if McCain or Obama gets elected, they will probably both draw down the troops in Iraq and just ship them to Afghanistan instead. No real difference. Both parties seem to be eager to enable massive spying and stripping of our civil liberties through multiple version of the Patriot Act.
"They can be locked up, tortured or killed for criticizing the government without any process."
Based on a recent appeals court decision in the U.S., this is mostly OK in the U.S. too. The President just has to declare you an enemy combatant and all your rights are gone. People have in fact been locked up, tortured and killed without any process by the U.S. since 9/11. There have been attempts to prohibit torture but Bush, Cheney and Addington have skillfully insured the CIA at least still has a full license to torture. These practices are maybe not as widespread as in China, and the President probably couldn't be as blatant about just locking up people that piss him off, but all the precedents are there so he can. Congress, the courts and the executive keep trying to establish process to try enemy combatants but so far they are mostly kangaroo courts with the deck completely stacked against the defendants.
"Executed prisoners organs have been used for transplant."
It used to be common practice to do medical experiments on U.S. prisoners. From 1963 to 1973 prisoners in Washington were conned in to voluntarily having their testicles bombarded with radiation to study the effects. I recall the practice was resumed recently since big Pharma needs more people to test new drugs on and the dangers of this testing were vividly exposed when a drug test nearly killed a few of the participants. There are supposed to be rules to prevent abuse but when you have a captive population to experiment on you know there will be abuse.
In the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, illiterate black men were intentionally not treated for 40 years so U.S. doctors could study the long term ravages of the disease. They were told they had "bad blood" and given a $50 dollar burial benefit as their reward. The study ran 40 years and a number of spouses and children were infected and all the participants suffered horribly, especially sad once penicillin had became available and the disease was completely treatable.
"3) Business in China is very dominated by personal contacts or guanxi. Chinese people have told me that most companies hire a few party/army types as non working directors for protection"
Not really unique to China. Cronyism in the Bush administration has been rampant, the Democrats do it to. Sole source awards of huge contracts to Republican cronies have been rampant the last 8 years. There are rules against it but when the crooks control the Attorney General and the DOJ chances of the rules being enforced are slim.
"Is/does fertilizer always contain phosphorus?"
It does if you order it that way. The three numbers on fertilizer bags are:
Nitrogen-Phosphorous-Potash(Potassium).
If the middle number is zero it doesn't have any Phosphorous. You can get a number of trace elements like Sulfur, Calcium, Magenesium, Iron and other assorted trace elements.
Properly educated farmers, gardner and landscapers certainly can reduce the problem by:
A. Getting their soil tested before they apply fertilizer and apply only what is indicated by the test. Using a lab is best if you are fertilizer some acreage, or you can make an educated guess using a home test kit.
B. Be careful when irrigating after applying fertilizer to avoid washing it off, sprinklers being much preferred over flood irrigation
Another factor that is probably reducing the Phosphorous pollution problem is its so expensive lately, along with Nitrogen and Potash, that farmers either can't afford it or are very careful when they do splurge on it.
"If the Air Force is in charge, then you've got the beginnings of a military state on your hands."
From what I've read recently the wheels have been falling off the Air Force for a while. That's a reason why Gates fired the Air Force Secretary and the Chief of Staff, the cililian and military chiefs of a service have never both been fired at once in history. They've had major breakdowns in controls on nuclear weapons, including flying a set of armed cruise missiles cross country by mistake and delivering secret warhead parts to Taiwan by accident. There was something about a corrupt $50 million dollar contract for some Thunderbirds shows that was thrown to a retired 4 star general through cronyism, etc. If you can't maintain discipline in controlling nuclear weapons it tends to indicate you can't maintain any discipline at all and this might be indicative of that.
They've also been accused of largely taking a pass on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the "War on Terror" in general at least since Shock and Awe ended. You get the impression the brunt of its fallen on the Army, Navy and Marines. I'm sure their are Air Force personnel serving honorably in those places but I gather they have been extremely resistant in adapting to the low intensity warfare which is most warfare these days. In particular Gates wanted them to put more resources in UAV's and to supporting troops on the ground with intelligence, like spotting people infiltrating borders of Afghanistan and Iraq for example. From Newsweek:
Getting more UAVs in theater, Gates said recently, has "been like pulling teeth."
Apparently the Air Force will only allow UAV's to be piloted by pilots and pilot availability is slowing deployment of UAV's to the war zones. As I recall the Army gave up in frustration and is developing its own UAV's now. I suspect Air Force pilots want to be in the cockpit of gold plated fighters and bombers(there is a next gen secret bomber under development apparently) and not sitting in a trailer someplace flying a UAV look for guerrillas. They are still arming and training to fight a Soviet Union that doesn't exist any more.
I've often wondered if they extent to which the Air Force Academy has been overrun by born again Christians hasn't had a negative influence on the officers ranks in the Air Force. You have to wonder if the officers are rising through the ranks based more on their willingness to pray the same as their fellow officers instead of on their qualifications and ability to their jobs. I wonder if officers who are spending all their time praying together are reluctant to discipline their fellow church members.
It could also be the corruption that seems to have been the hallmark of the Bush administration has infected the Air Force like every other branch of government under the control of the executive branch. America made a pretty serious mistake electing Bush and it remains to be seen if it proves to be a fatal mistake that it may not recover from.
"For education, there are countless grants, interest-free loans, and other incentives (like part-time military service) to help anyone go to school who wants to."
If that were the case why are so many students coming out of college with 6 figure debt from student loans that will be a ball and chain around their neck for most of their life. Military service is certainly an option, as I recall the Congress was trying to pass a new GI bill that insured vets a full college scholarship. John McCain and many Republicans actively opposed it because it was to generous and they didn't want to give the volunteer soldiers they are so short of in Iraq to have an incentive to leave the military to get their education. Instead they seem to favor stop loss so once you join the military its extremely difficult to get out when your enlistment is up. Being maimed or killed by an IED in Iraq is a pretty steep price to pay for an education.
Cuba's medical education is so good they train doctors many other countries in Central and South America. The U.S. can't even provide adequate general practitioners to its own rural areas. All the doctors flock to the cities and to specialties like plastic surgery because the payoff is higher. In the U.S. you do have Medicare but most doctors don't even want to take Medicare patients because they aren't profitable enough.
"Health and dental insurance is available to practically anyone who has a full time job, where the plan is paid for by the employer, and there are many other ways to get health insurance."
Dude you are seriously out of touch with reality. If that were the case why are their 40+ million uninsured Americans and the number is growing every day. Employers have been gutting their health insurance benefits because they have become prohibitively expensive, especially for lower paying jobs. On the news recently I saw a piece on a wealthy Brit who started a program where he would fly in doctor's, dentists and optometrist in to third world spots to give people free health care. Amazingly he did the same thing in the U.S., in Tennessee, and their services were swamped by thousands of uninsured American's in rural America who had no insurance and couldn't afford the most basic health care. If you think health care in the U.S. is so great I think you ought to go sit in the emergency room at a hospital that takes the uninsured, if you can find one.
Socialism sucks in a lot of ways but it does seem to provide health care better than anything Capitalism can manage. Under free markets you can get exceptionally good health care if you have the money, but if you don't is sucks.
You should probably try getting out of your cocoon a little more often.
"There is absolutely zero hard evidence that the Republicans have stolen any elections."
There is a high probability Kennedy stole the 1960 election from Nixon. Stolen election do in fact happen, they happen all the time, they happen in the U.S. The methods for stealing them are many. The really good thieves do it in ways that lead to people saying "There is absolutely zero hard evidence" afterwards. If you value representative democracy it is extremely important for everyone be on their guard for the possibility to the point of being a bit paranoid. The complacent, the apologists and those in denial, like yourself, are for more a threat to representative democracy than those who are a little paranoid on the subject.
It is very much open to debate if the 2000 presidential election was stolen in Florida. Where you come down on the issue depends almost entirely on whether you a Republican or a Democrat, whether you like Bush(which is a pretty small group lately) or hate him. You can argue the election was stolen before it happened because one of the candidate's brother was the governor of Florida and ran the state election apparatus. The supervisor of the election was a Republican, Katherine Harris, who was apparently rewarded with a seat in Congress for steering the election to Bush. Its hard to say if there was any actual election rigging in Florida but there was certainly a brutal power struggle once it was incedibly close, and the Republicans were very successful in steering the outcome their way.
The Republicans under Jeb Bush were also pretty aggressive in intimidating minority voters, who vote Democrat, to not even show up. The Republican vote suppression campaign in Florida almost certainly changed the outcome of the election before it even happened. As some other posts have said in this thread its a REALLY bad thing about the U.S. system that the political parties in control in a given jurisdiction have vast influence over the electoral process that put them there and keeps them there.
The U.S. House has become so bitterly partisan, ineffective and dominated by incumbents precisely because state legislatures get to draw up precinct boundaries and gerrymandering is now so out of control most House seats are never even contested. When a new party gains control of the state legislature they get to seize control of future elections as Tom Delay did in Texas. Gerrymandering is probably the most blatant form of election rigging and its right out in the open, it just doesn't work on governors or senators, which happen to be the two seats in Georgia where this funny business may have occurred.
The U.S. attorney firing scandal appears to have centered around Karl Rove's attempt to misuse U.S. attorneys in an organized campaign to file voter fraud cases to suppress Democratic turnout, and to file political corruption cases in places like New Mexico right before an election to influence the outcome.
Politics isn't bean bag......
"You are a true moron if you think that all Iranians believe the west "satan". Honestly,"
Kind of a loaded statement since it is obviously true "all" Iranians don't believe that but a significant majority might and you have no clue how many do and don't. A LOT of older Iranians almost certainly believe that, enough of them believed it to stage a successful revolution to throw out the Shah, and the U.S. by proxy. The Shah had a powerful secret service apparatus designed to prevent rebellion so the fact they succeeded suggest there was a lot of popular support for Khomeni and against the Shah and the U.S.. I'm pretty sure a lot of older Iranians who suffered under the Shah believe the U.S. is the great Satan.
If you remember some history, the CIA ran a coup to topple a relatively moderate and popular, though somewhat Socialist leader, Mohammed Mossadegh. Reference TP-AJAX. Mossadegh made the mistake of nationalizing Britain's oilfields in Iran. Quick lesson in international relations, don't EVER mess with U.S. and British oil companies if you want to say in power. I'm kind of amazed Putin and Chavez have gotten away with it lately, I assume the U.S. is so preoccupied with Iraq it can't handle another coup attempt in Venezuela.
The Shah was a horrible ruler, so bad Khomeni apparently looked good by comparison to a lot of Iranians. Iran also has a lot of fundamentalist Shias to whom the Shah's secular, pro Western policies, did look positively satanic and heretical. The Iranian people rightly blamed the U.S. for every thing the Shah did which is why they coined the phrase "the great Satan" for the U.S. with some justification.
Now I wouldn't even hazard a guess at how the Iranian people view the U.S. today, especially the younger Iranians who didn't live under the Shah and now suffer under the petty tyrannies of the Revolutionary Guard. I doubt anyone really knows unless they live or have lived there which probably includes you. Depends on whether they believe the propaganda the Iranian government raises them on versus how much they hate and fear the Revolutionary Guard. Most people do believe what their government tells them during their formative years whether it be in Iran or the U.S. I wouldn't take it as a given that a majority in Iran, or elsewhere in the the Muslim world want a pro western, secular culture. Some people's religion runs really deep, especially when they are indoctrinated in it from birth, and they will in fact opt for a culture which is somewhat oppressive but which adheres to their religious principals.
"instead of sitting on your fat ass eating cheetohs and whining about how unfair it is on slashdot"
Isn't that what YOU are doing........
I think Cuba had a massive dose of American "culture" in the '50's. It came in the form of a U.S. friendly, repressive dictator named Fulgencio Batista, the U.S. based Mafia that turned Havana in to the 1950's version of Las Vegas but worse, and large numbers of obnoxious Americans that flocked there to indulge all their vices, mainly gambling and prostitution. At the time Americans, being the puritanical prudes they tend to be, outlawed all these vices at home, so all their "weapons of cultural mass destruction" were focused like a laser beam on Cuba in the 50's. A lot of Cubans considered Castro and socialism an improvement at the time. Its not like Castro overthrew Batista single handed, he had a lot of support from the Cuban people.
Part of the problem with American cultural dissemination in the past is it was targeted at keeping America and American corporations on fat street so life was good in the U.S. In much of the rest of the world it was propping up brutal dictators as long as they were willing to be a bulwark against Socialism and Communism and were friendly to American multinationals which translated in to the American companies pillaging all the countries cheap labor and resources to fatten their bottom line while they left most of their host countries in abject poverty.
I certainly have no interest in living in Cuba. I hate governments who can't resist telling people how to live, or throwing their citizens in jail without cause, but that seems to happen in the U.S. now too. The U.S., especially under Bush has acquired some pretty scary Fascist tendencies and has been throwing people in secret prisons without trial and torturing them too.
If you can stay clear of the Cuban thought police I imagine life in Cuba isn't all that bad especially compared to what they had in the 50's. At least they do have really good health care and education for EVERYONE, not just the people rich enough to pay for it like the U.S. Its amazing they do as well as they do considering the strangling noose America's embargo has had around them for over 40 years. The U.S. kind of forces them in to a lot of their repression. They've have to be on constant guard against U.S. schemes to destabilize and overthrow their government for the last 40 plus years, which tends to lead to an excessive security apparatus, kind of like the one the U.S. created using 9/11 as an excuse.
I think my bottom line is both the U.S. and Cuba are deeply, deeply flawed so its a bit comical to watch them and the people in them try to contend one is god's gift and the other is Satan incarnate when they both suck about equally though in somewhat different ways.
"Or would you prefer to be still back in the Skylab days tech wise? Realize that you are being sentimental about equipment, not practical."
For return on investment I'm pretty sure I'd take Skylab any day. It took almost no time or money to do compared to ISS, it was a clever and quick redirection of Apollo resources that were left over when Apollo was cut short. In fact it is a testament to exactly the concept I was advocating, thinking outside the box and making use of stuff that would otherwise have been thrown away and wasted. The fact is Skylab and Mir were good enough for space stations, ISS was complete overkill. There just isn't enough interesting to do spinning around in LEO to justify the price tag and LEO space stations completely fail on the PR front because they bore everyone to tears which isn't wise if you want a budget and a nation to back your program.
Obviously ISS is technically superior to Skylab but it, along with the Shuttle, completely sucked the life out of NASA and have succeeded in turning the country that reveled in Apollo to one that could care less about the space program any more. ISS took decades to do, was engineered, reengineered an overengineered, cost over a $100 billion, or is it $200 billion by now, and its broken very little ground that wasn't already covered in Mir and Skylab. About the only ground its broken is the process of building it including the massive number of space walks required but it hasn't actually achieved much beyond just building it.
You didn't answer my question, do you work for NASA? You sound a lot like you do.....
You sound like you just want someone to give you another $100 billion to build ISS, Part II, reinvent everything from scratch and not do anything interesting for another 20 years, but you will have your job security.
Do you work for NASA, you seem to have the can't do attitude that is prevalent there since Apollo.
Considering the ISS cost 100 billion by a conservative estimate your saying the engineering would cost 100 trillion dollars to do this? If you want to make a sound engineering argument you probably should use engineering principles, like not pluck numbers out of your ass and creat an insanely exaggerated argument to try to win your point.
I didn't really say it was a good idea but, you would have to do a bunch of painful engineering to do it, but I'm not so closed minded as to just write the idea off just because there are a couple daunting problems. Its a lot more useful and fun to think outside the box and see if you could solve the problems than just be a dick and see how negative you can be....like yourself.
Based on the ISS track record it almost certainly will take NASA more time and money than this country is willing to spend to build a lunar space or ground station of any size at all, from scratch.
I'm open minded enough to think about an interesting concept instead of just instantly shot it down because its a little off the wall. As much trouble as NASA is having developing a new launch vehicle it would be awesome if you could reuse all that stuff sitting up there mostly going to waste at the moment. Even if you didn't move the whole ISS the Russian core is a pretty good self contained space station if you could use lunar material to shield it.
"Mr. Benson's proposal to simply connect engines to the ISS and launch it away from Earth and onto interplanetary trajectories completely ignores the fact that every source of propulsion he cites would impart accelerations, even small ones for certain scenarios, that the ISS structure, joints, and arrays simply cannot accommodate"
You wouldn't necessarily have to move it in one piece. You could break it down in to its original pieces and reassemble it in lunar orbit. I wager you could even land some of the modules on the moon if you had a transfer vehicle and a lander with the volume and power to handle them. All those pieces were designed to withstand a shuttle launch with multiple G's though you are correct assembled they weren't designed for that.
You would just need an orbital transfer vehicle with a cargo hold similar to the shuttles.
"For one thing, the shielding, wall thicknesses, and many other design aspects of the ISS were chosen to protect crews from the worst-case radiation environment known to exist throughout its present orbital environment."
You could in theory build bricks on the lunar surface, send them up to the ISS and bolt them on the outside of the habitable module. Someone with better math and physics skills than me would need to tell us how thick they would need to be to shield from the solar wind and cosmic rays.
It would be a major engineering challenge to design a way to bolt them on the ISS and there are probably all kind of corners where you couldn't bolt the necessary thickness of material without running in to things or covering over important items that need servicing. Also not sure how the structures and gyros would hold up to increasing the mass by a huge multiples. It would be an interesting exercise to solve the same shielding problems you will have going to Mars.
If you actually landed them on the surface you could bury them, which I assume they are going to do for the lunar station modules anyway though again reaching things that need service would be a problem if they were buried.
It would be a lot easier to lift the necessary shielding from the moon than it would be Earth.
It would make more sense to recycle the ISS instead of letting it burn up and having to lift new modules from Earth for a moon station. Certainly some engineering thought would be required on the numerous issues you would encounter. Another concern is how much life the components have left in them. Some of the pieces are designed to only last a few more years (2015? I forget). It sure would be nice to reuse those big solar arrays if nothing else.
Wow, nice way to drive traffic to hothardware.com. Is HotHardware paying Slashdot for the traffic or are Slashdot editors just not so bright.
You also need to remember that this bill influences executive branch powers. Obama is planning on being the executive branch in 6 months. It kind of follows that he doesn't really want to pass a law that will restrict HIS power in 6 months. The amount of damage Bush can do with this law in the next 6 months is kind of irrelevant compared to what he's already done. It is going to have its largest impact on either McCain or Obama in 6 months. Its extremely rare to find a politician who WANTS to give away power. People who run for office, whether they will admit it or not, do it because they want POWER.
Me personally I'm not happy about the government giving itself new powers to spy on us but, damn, what are we going to do to stop it, and we let the horse get out of the barn a long time ago. Note these spying laws apply only to U.S. citizens. The NSA has been spying on the entire rest of the world, with almost no restriction, for their entire history, so maybe its only fair U.S. citizens should suffer with the rest of the world until they are willing to dismantle these malevolent agencies and give the everyone a little more privacy. There would certainly be risks in completely dismantling the spying agencies, every country has them after all, but if you look at the track record of the CIA in particular its really open to debate if its done more damage and caused more harm to the U.S. in the last 50 years, than good.
For example, the government of Iran nationalized oil fields run by British companies in the 1950's. The CIA intervenes and overthrows a quite popular and really not so bad government and installs a ruthless dictator in the Shah of Iran. The Iranian people hate the shah and the U.S. and CIA for putting him in power. The Iranian people eventually topple the Shah and install Khomeni and now the current Iranian government is ten time worse than the Mosaddeq government the CIA overthrew.
The CIA backed the guerilla's fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It worked great because it so bloodied the U.S.S.R it collapsed. Unfortunately it also fueled the rise of Al Qaeda ending in 9/11.
Someone needs to total up all the accomplishments of the CIA and NSA versus all the damage they've done and debate whether we would be actually better off if we just shut them down. It is a certainty that a lot of hatred towards the U.S. around the world is directly the result of CIA meddling, in particular backing ruthless dictators that have inflicted untold misery on people around the world. The CIA/NSA are just a pinnacle of arrogance on the part of country that just needs to learn to get along in the world without trying to force everyone to dance to an American tune.
It could also be that being a rocket scientist at NASA or one of their contractors is a really, really terrible job so there aren't many talented people in the U.S. that are even interested in it. It is a program that peaked in 1969 and has been down hill on the excitement and tangible results scale ever since.
The space program and aerospace in general goes through constant boom and bust cycles and when its in a bust cycle you can't find work. Depending on whose president, the whims of Congress or whose NASA administrator the project you spend years on can be snuffed out over night.
NASA is a horrible bureaucracy. Most of the civil servants are contract monitors shuffling giant mounds of paper to hire contractors to do the cool work, and that job sucks. Contractors maybe do cool stuff sometimes but there are a lot less frustrating and more rewarding place to work than for a horrible bureaucracy or for the kinds of companies that doing government contract work.
It could also be the U.S. did about everything worth doing by about 1969 and realized it wasn't really worth it. Other countries are retracing the same ground to gain the prestige but they may well realize eventually its not really worth it too. When the U.S. decided to sink decades and over a hundred billion on ISS they didn't really think it through and completely killed off excitement for manned space exploration. ISS is an inherently extremely boring project. The Apollo veterans had already figured that out with Skylab. One of the space documentaries on Discovery recently had footage of an Apollo veteran saying exactly that, and that after the moon landings it drove them nuts to work on Skylab. Watching a tin can spin around the earth in LEO doing nothing interesting is BORING and so far it has yielded almost no useful return past the mere experience of building a big thing in LEO and living in it for a long time(ground Mir had already covered on a smaller scale). Its not clear landing the Moon again will generate that much excitement in the U.S. again. People were already bored with moon landings by about Apollo 12.
For space exploration, especially manned exploration to gain relevance again you need to either:
A. Move warfare in to space in a big way, and use your dominant position in space to dominate Earth. Fortunately we have mostly refrained from doing this. If it happens it will probably be really expensive and really ugly. I'm talking about putting serious weapons platforms in space, attacking your adversaries assets in space and on the ground from space. Right now ground launched ballistic missile and spy satellites seem sufficient and a lot cheaper and safer. If someone decides to finish what Reagan started and put lasers or other beam weapons in space and start a really weapons race..... shudder. It would spur the space program though...
B. Start doing something in space that actually yields tangible economic returns greater than the cost of doing it. We have done this to some extent with GPS, weather and communication satellites but this business is already saturated. I imagine fiber optics are making comm satellites somewhat obsolete. You would need to make the next big leap to asteroid mining, mining the moon for fusion reactor fuel or generating power in space in a big way. Until you make that difficult leap people are mostly going to way you are wasting money on it... though the U.S. has wasted hundreds of billions on Iraq to no good end too
C. Space tourism maybe, but its a little bit of a stretch because right now it a niche thing for rich people with a lot of money to burn. Its going to take a pretty huge leap to cut costs enough for ordinary people to get in orbit and live there for a week, and also for it to be safe enough to not kill people on a regular basis. We seem to be having trouble people just flying people in jets economically lately.
D. Make it to Mars and start a permanent colony there. This is a somewhat dubious undertaking since it would be hugely expe
"Don't waste your time learning Wookie"
But Wookie is such a fascinating language. You can communicate complex ideas with a couple of monotone syllables that translate in to whole sentences in English.
"There is such a notion as long-term vs. short-term."
Unfortunately thanks to the dot com bubble, computerized trading, cheap and easy sell orders, 24x7 financial news networks and low capital gains taxes... I think the U.S. markets, and global markets in general, have become incredibly skewed to a day trader mentality. The markets have turned more in to a giant casino than institutions for raising capital and for long term investments. In the old days people actually did buy stocks and hold them for long periods so the long term health of the company did matter. Now CxO's, and big share holders like Carl Icahn, just want to get in on the bottom end of a big merger because the company getting bought always gets a big pop.
Now its all about the big pop so shareholders can dump and rush to the next deal. People care a lot less than they used to about the long term health of the companies involved or if they end in a smoldering ruin. Its kind of why the U.S. economy is turning in to a .... smoldering ruin. There isn't much long view left.
I've worked at a couple companies where the execs did things that were strategically stupid in the long run, but were great for pumping up the stock price and suckering some bigger competitor in to buying them out. They just wanted the pop, cash out, buy a bigger mansion, and start on the next round, leaving this sucker that bought them out with a train wreck post merger. Shareholders love those kinds of managers and pay them multi-million dollar bonuses to walk in the door and pump up the stock so they can cash out too.
"Not to mention what it does to their technology."
Well in the case of Yahoo its open to debate if they have much "technology". They are failing miserably at online search and the ads next to it is where all the money is. They have a huge brand and market share for their portal but Google's killing them on the search technology and marketing which is where the money and is and why they are in the trouble they are in. If Microsoft is going to buy them bazillions of dollars for their share of the search market it leaves one to question Microsoft's business acumen.
"Bush should be prosecuted to the max for lying to the public"
Well you can't impeach Bush unless you impeach Cheney at the same time. If you were to successfully impeach and convict just Bush, Cheney would just take over, and no one wants that since Cheney is worse than Bush. Cheney and his right hand man Addington have been more responsible for shoving through most of the spying and torture initiatives of the Bush administration than anyone including Bush.
The other obvious problem is you would never get a conviction through the Senate, its takes a 2/3rds vote and no Republican would support it without substantially more malfeasance on the part of the Bush administration than has occurred. Nixon lost the support of his own party which is why he resigned before he faced impeachment since he might well have been convicted. I don't think Bush has done anything that would make his party want to suffer the humiliation of convicting him. Most of the Republicans, and quite a few Democrats seem to be in favor of giving the President sweeping new spying powers because they are still running scared from 9/11, and most of the Democrats seem to want to spy on everyone as much as the Republicans.
The impeachment of Clinton was an elaborate political show trail designed to damage the Democrats, and it worked quite well since it helped elect Bush in 2000. The Republican's didn't have any chance of convicting Clinton either. They just wanted to inflict as much damage as they could, and for that it did work quite well, since they did gain complete control of the government in its wake.
The Democrats are in some ways to be commended for not inflicting another pointless and crippling impeachment process on the nation, because they wouldn't succeed and it would just do more damage to the country and not accomplish anything. Its unfortunate we can't punish Bush and Cheney for their law breaking, at least while they are in office, but the 2/3rds vote required in the Senate makes the bar to high to achieve. Its hard to commend the Democrats for much but at least they aren't as petty as the Republicans were in using impeachment as a political weapon.
Unfortunately for the Republican's their corruption, incompetence and petty malevolence appears to have so soured America on the Republican brand they could well be pushed out of power again for a long, long time which is a form of punishment in and of itself. Not sure that is good because the Democrats can't be trusted with a stranglehold on power either.
"At that point in time, Colin Powell, Secretary of State and former General, had less sway in how the situation was handled than Ahmed Chalabi, Iraqi expatriot and Iranian spy."
Well that just proves once again multiple failures on his part.
A. He let the State Department be completely marginalized, or actually be completely rolled, and get locked out of a project that was at that point very much a diplomatic role
B. Once he had been completely marginalized he just quietly put up with it, didn't do anything and let the wheels fall off the most important diplomatic effort of his term at State.
So he should have defended his turf and he didn't. When he had been completely marginalized he didn't resign indicating he is weak. Resigning quietly would have been defensible. Resigning and publicly assailing the incompetence of the Bush administration would have been commendable, might have made a difference and might have saved the lives of some of those soldiers he says he cares for.
"False dilemma. The third option is that he, like most of Congress, was simply misled."
Well I didn't believe that B.S. case Powell made at the time so I'm not sure why anyone in Congress or Powell himself did. It was comical with the portable biological weapons and all. I assume it was they were just so afraid of looking weak on terrorism after 9/11 that they were willing to go along with anything.
"The interesting thing is that qualities that make Powell an good candidate (intelligent, honest, outsider) are the same qualities that Obama seems to posess."
I would maybe agree excepting for Powell's role in selling the Iraq war. Either he wasn't intelligent or he was dishonest. Either he was seriously dumb to buy the case for that war, or he was dishonest selling that case if he knew it was a fabrication. That war pitch to the U.N. with the vial of Anthrax was really contemptible. He was also completely walked over by the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense which suggests he can't compete in the shark tank that is Washington.
He was probably the ONLY insider in the Bush administration who had a slim chance and the motivation to derail the rush to war in Iraq and he failed miserably at it, since he ended up carrying the neocons water for it instead and got in front of the world at the UN and sold a lie. The U.S. paid dearly for his failure. Needless to say he had to do what his boss told him to do or resign, but if he had fought it tooth and nail, spoken out before the war and then resigned he might have derailed that whole misguided cluster fuck. He was also head of State during the time State could have salvaged Iraq but instead he let Bremmer and Rumsfeld completely screw the place up leading to a multi year insurgency. Allowing Bremmer to disband the Iraqi Army and de-Bathification were colossally stupid and practically created the insurgency that got thousands of Americans killed and maimed.
Were it not for that one giant blemish on his record I would support him for VP.
I'm also frequently flabbergasted that Condolezza Rice is often mentioned as both very popular and a leading VP candidate. Because she has also either been malevolent, incompetent or completely outmaneuvered by Cheney and Rumsfeld and was a disaster both at the NSC and State. She has apparently nearly wrecked the State department and she seems to never deliver tangible positive results on her major initiatives.
Get the NASA channel on satellite or cable. You will get all the coverage you need and more.
"The IIS gets no major media coverage"
Unfortunately nearly everything about the space station is as exciting as watching paint dry. The space walks and docking of new pieces are the only parts that are even remotely interesting and the Shuttle crew does that. The space station crew spends most of their time staring at computers and exercising which isn't any more interesting to watch in space than it is on the ground. Maybe if they had hot lady astronauts in tights at least the exercise part would be better.
On one of the NASA history series that are popular lately they had interviews with the Apollo people about their transition from Apollo to Skylab. The Moon shots were the epitome of exciting. Skylab was day after day after day of sheer boredom watching a tin can fly around the earth. They couldn't really cope with or stand the idea of following Apollo with a space station. It didn't help that with Apollo they were on cloud 9 so they had a really long way to fall. Even if they are important to do, space stations are a media disaster because they are horrendously boring.
You kind of have to face the fact that after Apollo 11, space exploration turned intensely boring to the average person, and two shuttle disasters seriously tarnished NASA's brand. Working in space is mostly overrated. The Apollo program hit the transient pinnacle it and has been all down hill from there. Unless we manage to land someone on Mars or the moons of Jupiter manned space flight just isn't worth it any more. Someone needs to figure out a business plan to actually do something worthwhile in space with a real payoff. The only things I can see are power generation, asteroid mining or establishing a viable permanent colony someplace, presumably Mars because its the only place close to hospitable for humans. Unfortunately all those take more resources than this planet is willing to invest. We would rather pour the money down a rat hole in Iraq.
What is the evidence pro and con that Mars and Earth are the ones that actually collided, creating the Moon, and then they went spinning away from each other to settle in their current orbits.
Or maybe something big hit an earth which was bigger at the time and made three big pieces, Mars, Moon and Earth.
The composition of the three bodies are quite different so maybe that speaks against the possibility....
I don't hold a particular grudge against or envy for the toy collectors. Especially if they have the disposable income to pay for them. I mostly just feel sorry for the people who don't have the money and have borrowed themselves in to a hole to buy crap they can't afford and often don't really need. Me I would rather have a nice nest egg stashed away instead of an overpriced car that will be worthless in a few years.
Out of control borrowing, and shipping wealth to other countries in trade deficit has unfortunately become such a massive epidemic in the U.S. it is almost inevitably going to completely crash the economy, in fact it appears that is exactly what is happening right now. I'm not really cheering on the downfall of this particular culture primarily because that downfall will probably be accompanied by a devastating economic crash like the great depression which followed the roaring 20's which was another toy collecting decade to learn lessons from. A serious crash will deeply hurt a lot of people and it will probably hurt the people on the bottom rungs of the ladder a lot worse than it will the rich people with the most toys. On the other hand a devastating crash is probably the tonic needed to force Americans to remember they do in fact need to have a productive, functioning, economy and the world isn't going to hand America everything on a silver platter any more.
If you take cars as a particularly good example of the flawed reasoning behind modern culture.....
I would take mass transit in urban areas any day, the only problem is the Rockefellers and their oil monopoly bought out nearly every urban mass transit system in the U.S. to force everyone in to complete dependence on freeways, cars and gasoline so we have a culture completely dependent on cars. Doesn't seem like such a great idea now that oil costs $130+ a barrel and the Chinese and Indians are buying cars trying to emulate this culture precisely at the time the world is running out of oil.
Any car that isn't a collectors item is a relatively horrible investment. They are quite expensive and they depreciate so fast they are nearly worthless in a few years. At least their quality is somewhat better than it was a few years thanks to competition from Asia. There was a time American made cars would be falling apart right after the warranty ran out. I think they called it planned obsolescence because they want you to spend a years salary buying a new car every three to four years to drain as much of your disposable income as they possible could for a worthless investment.
"The modern man is what he owns. He who dies with the most toys wins."
Or at least that is how modern man has been brainwashed by all the corporations that want him to buy their crap, car companies in particular. They've also conditioned modern man to get 10-20 credit cards and a subprime ARM mortgage, so he can get massively in debt to pay for their crap and pay userous interest rates to them until he is wiped out.