Whether you want to blame NASA bureaucrats for covering their asses or Congresscritters for their warped priorities, this failure can be explained the same way. Government and its agencies are total strangers to the economic incentives of profit and loss. The only profits and losses they directly experience are the rise and fall of their bureaucratic clout. As a result, success and failure are defined on completely different terms versus a private endeavor.
For an operation like SpaceX, success is getting the customer into space with the greatest practical efficiency. For NASA, success is whatever curries favor with the people in Congress deciding next year's budget. Congressmen don't care about what goes into space or how. They care that federal money gets back to their clients at home.
The bickering in this thread over whether to blame NASA leadership or Congress misses the larger point: Both are culpable because of the incentives they operate under. This is just the economics of nationalized space exploration taking its inevitable course.
The first hurdle is the Western obsession with "objective" reporting. No such thing exists. But in the pursuit of the appearance of objectivity, you get slanted news constantly disguising itself as authoritative truth. Sometimes you get the same phenomenon on Wikipedia but at least there, interpretation of data is kept to a minimum.
There is so much to report on, and so much information to curate, one has to employ a particular world view to decide what part of the story is important to tell.
When it comes to news, there is no way to avoid ideological siloing. A single 'wikipedia of news" is not possible, but maybe several of them, each devoted to a certain way of understanding events, is possible.
...and the crime of unlicensed duct work.
People are taking money in exchange for giving car rides. Look, if the Toronto city government is willing to let any old moron DRIVE a car (and they are), I think those same people can be trusted to delegate to a hired driver without risking a carpocalypse.
I'm afraid the Republican Party has always been the party of empire. Recall that the first Republican President waged the country's bloodiest war to prevent the central government's domain from shrinking. The war turned a federation of sovereign states into a compulsory chain of provinces.
There is no "smaller government" party in the US, because Americans would never vote for one.
Interesting. How far did you dig into the philosophy and economics aspects of the ideology before discarding it? Bastiat and Hayek are pretty ironclad.
Usually once someone goes Rothbard they don't go back.
Oh, the hibris of politicians. Once self-sufficient space colonies exist, it is highly unlikely terrestrial governments will have any hold on them. There will be a solar system civilization, but the USG will not be a part of it for long.
People are very quick to blame the automotive lobby for buying the Michigan government, but there would be nothing to buy if the Michigan politicians weren't already whores.
He was wrong on IP back in the 1970s and he's wrong on economics now. Piketty didn't actually contribute much to economic understanding with his book, but he did contribute a verbose defense of the same redistributism that has failed over and over again.
Piketty is influenced greatly by Marx and Marxists, leaving out entirely the contributions of classical liberal economists like Bawerk, Menger and Mises who together have provided a deep understanding of the necessary process of capital accumulation, and private property rights. If one is to advance a theory that capital needs to be expropriated and redistributed by state action, one must be able to refute those theories, which Piketty simply fails to acknowledge.
The Open Source approach has worked so well because people are at complete liberty to build on existing ideas and existing work, *not* because users are supposed to audit the code they're running. Almost no one does that, but a few do, and sometimes they decide to take what does work and throw out what doesn't. In FLOSS this can happen faster and with greater frequency than with IP-encumbered code. Whether you have faith in it or not, it works.
There's a difference, you know, between conservatives, and the deeply Wilsonian liberal neocons.
Being a constitutionalist, I might get pigeonholed as a conservative, but it actually makes me a classical liberal: I want people to be free to live and work and trade however they see fit.
Regardless of what this study "proves" or "finds," it does not mean that Socialism (a product of the New Left) is anything but totalitarianism with a great big stoned flower-child grin.
This study is likely evidence of the brainwashing which has occurred at the GOP. In order to solidify their power, the neocons have waged a very intense war against the minds of their base.
The skeptics recognize that the global warming community has a vested interest in receiving vast sums of money in government handouts. If there is no crisis, there is no funding. This is the downfall of government-funded science. The status quo is also bad. Government subsidies to petroleum companies helps no one. Businesses should be profitable in their own right, or there's no sense building them.
Some of the things you name are great ideas. Decentralization, efficiency, self-sufficiency are all great goals. Unfortunately, what the global warming community most represents is arbitrary government force keeping us from energy independence, blockading the paths to efficiency and self-sufficiency whether it be more American drilling or more nuclear power plants.
Speaking for myself, it's not that I prefer the status quo of centralized petroleum power (there are successful tidal generators that produce free energy out of the ocean -- yet they are not emulated!), it's that the environmentalist's gaia-worship-by-force alternative is so very, very bad. One of the largest roadblocks to the third world getting the tools they need to fend off starvation and poverty is environmentalists. They want and need power plants for their communities to develop. Instead, the wealthy foreign environmentalists step in and all they can get their hands on are a few rickety solar panels. You can't build a city that way.
And yet your description of our freedom of speech betrays your unconscious acceptance of a subtler level of totalitarianism.
Constitutionally protected? If that is the case your freedom comes from the gracious allowance of that document. My liberty (of speech and action) comes standard with my humanity. I don't need a 200-year-old paper to grant it to me. The only trouble is that I live under a government and in a society that will do things I do not desire if I say or do certain things; I modify my behavior accordingly.
We would have been better off without a Bill of Rights. Since the first ten amendments are enumerations of things government CAN NOT do, government has plausible (but still wrong) ground to assume there are other powers it can take on because nothing says it can't. The Constitution was better as a document enumerating the things government CAN do, with the assumption being that all other powers are strictly excluded.
In essence, our precious bill of rights has doomed us to totalitarianism. The Constitution may have slowed the process, but that's where we're headed anyway.
Nevertheless, I do agree with you. It's ridiculous for anyone to say they "allowed" anyone to say anything on the Internet. I could just as easily say that I allow the sun to rise.
Something fundamental has changed in the thinking of Americans over the last hundred years. You can hear it in the media, in everyday conversation, and especially from the politicians.
We're totalitarians now. But we've been robbed of the language to understand that. Our thinking has become statist but has still retained terms like "liberty" and "freedom." Those words are pretty much myths at this point. The only reason anyone is free to point it out is because doing so will accomplish nothing. You can't explain that the sky is blue when the listener has no concept of color.
This used to be a country of individualists, entrepreneurs, INDEPENDENT PEOPLE. They didn't need government programs and plans to get by. They solved their own damn problems. A free market provided. Government sustained itself on tarriffs. Today we have far more oppressive taxes and excises upon the people. We get taxed for WORKING. And nobody thinks this is dangerously close to communism. America has become deeply militarist. Invading an unarmed sandbox to maintain economic hegemony gets stupidly equated with "defending our freedoms" and nobody chuckles. We had instituted a military draft and today it's just thought of as a political taboo instead of the first hint of totalitarianism. It's all sure as hell statism, and that is totalitarian by definition.
Ask an American what they think of totalitarianism. It's a Bad Thing(tm) right? Now ask them what they would sacrifice--TO THE GOVERNMENT--in order to stop totalitarian regimes. Would they give their income? Their privacy? Their rights? Their life? You've just met a totalitarian.
>Tv is always lambasted for it's (you mean "its") brain rotting properties but I tend to think that it has produced the most 'tuned in' human population ever.
Tuned in to what? Judge Judy? Or how about the elating intellectual magnificence that is Survivor? Wait, it must be the sitcoms.
Television is a realm of fiction and pseudo-events. Human attention is led around very easily by immediate sensory input. Our minds typically hop from one brief thought to another based on the current input much like a child playing in a sandbox with whatever toy happens to catch his eye. Television is designed to jerk your attention about to wherever the broadcaster wants to take it. Watching television is a surrender of your thought process to the control of the broadcaster. This isn't necessarily evil, but it is the price to pay for taking in TV programming.
The technology of literacy, however, is the tool for choosing and organizing one's thoughts. Through the technology of writing and reading we can move out of the child-playing-randomly-in-a-sandbox stage and start deliberately choosing our toys and using them deliberately.
And if the kid can't read, he sure as hell can't write. Therefore, Mr. Technologist, give your kids books. Teach them to write. Even writing computer programs might be a good idea. But if they can't articulate themselves or organize their thoughts, you can rest assured they'll never really know what they think or want.
Moreover, writing is a technology. The ability to manage and manipulate language is not an art. It is a matter of technique and knowledge of available tools.
Immerse kids in technology as soon as you possibly can. Give them books. If you want your kids to ascend in the world, they need other people to think they are smart, and no one will think they are smart if their subjects and verbs never agree, they can't punctuate properly and don't know how to construct anything bigger than a sentence without losing their train of thought. Get them reading and teaching themselves to speak fluent English. God knows the public schools won't do it.
Those would be examples of words, spellings and punctuations designed to make reading more laborious and irritating. I kind of regretted throwing "emoticons" into that list since they belong nowhere in correct writing, but this *is* the Internet...
I disagree. When I read, I do endow what I see with expression and inflection based on the context and punctuation I see around it. Writing can come off very stark, but if you put yourself in the reader's shoes as you write and if you're a little choosy about your words, you can end up conveying the right emotion most of the time.
I do agree, though, that an emoticon here and there (at least in informal online messages) really helps.
I agree wholeheartedly. Perhaps the survey is correct anyway since the vast majority of people writing and sending these emails are semi-literate. A huge number of people graduate from college in the U.S. who have the reading and writing skills (and often manners) of a sixth grader.
There should be another study conducted among the literate.
This is why precise diction--speaking and writing clearly--is necessary. It is often just as much the fault of the writer as it is the reader when a message's tone is misinterpreted.
There are devices such as certain words, punctuations or even emoticons that can help you give your message the flavor of meaning that you want it to have, provided you know how to use them correctly.
The skill to write well is a thousand times more valuable today than most people give it credit for. In a time when so much of our worldwide communication is written, we have to know how to properly build a written message instead of simply writing what we would speak and assume the reader will "get" it. You never know when you might offend someone.
Morevoer, the individual control and decentralization available by the Internet and digital technology means that the censoring of content can be put in the hands of individuals by the creation of filters. There's a real problem with the media content we have flying around these days. Sex and lust messages are laced into radio, splattered on billboards, streaming through the TV constantly. This is skewing children and we have no way to control it. It is unfair and unconstitutional to censor to the necessary degree through a government agency. The Internet and the technologies that are involved in this new decentralized digital media can be used to censor on an individual basis. Parents can regain control again over what their children are exposed to, and we can maintain a free-speech society.
The FCC should be finding ways to make its existence irrelevant, but we all know that the real mission of government agencies is to perpetuate themselves.
We need more READING. It should be a crime to let someone graduate high school who still reads at a sixth grade level.
I run into people at COLLEGE who I think still read at a third grade level.
If you can't read well, you can't collect information and ideas well. If you can't do that, all you've got to form your worldview and reasoning is the vacuum between your ears. Pen sized computers aren't going to fix this. We need to abolish the "let's watch a video and talk about our feelings" curricula and have children READ!
And once they can read, teach them to write. Writing is the process of organizing your ideas. Without the ability to organize and coherently express your thoughts, how are you ever going to think clearly about different opinions? Formulate new ones? How are you ever going to be understood by anyone?
No, the biggest thing missing in education is not more technological toys. The thing education sorely needs is some actual education. Did you know first grade teachers are no longer allowed to correct students' spelling? Have you ever seen a first grader spell? Did you know there are still schools that don't teach basic phonics? This produces a generation of children who go through all of grade school but still cannot read. Oh, sure, technically they can "read," but they have no ability to sound out new words, cannot derive definitions from the syllables of new words, and sure as hell can't spell. The very building blocks of literacy I grew up with are now unheard of in public schools.
And some assclown thinks pen-sized computers are going to help. Teach the kids how to use a real pen first, then the pen computer might be of some use.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether you want to blame NASA bureaucrats for covering their asses or Congresscritters for their warped priorities, this failure can be explained the same way. Government and its agencies are total strangers to the economic incentives of profit and loss. The only profits and losses they directly experience are the rise and fall of their bureaucratic clout. As a result, success and failure are defined on completely different terms versus a private endeavor. For an operation like SpaceX, success is getting the customer into space with the greatest practical efficiency. For NASA, success is whatever curries favor with the people in Congress deciding next year's budget. Congressmen don't care about what goes into space or how. They care that federal money gets back to their clients at home. The bickering in this thread over whether to blame NASA leadership or Congress misses the larger point: Both are culpable because of the incentives they operate under. This is just the economics of nationalized space exploration taking its inevitable course.
The first hurdle is the Western obsession with "objective" reporting. No such thing exists. But in the pursuit of the appearance of objectivity, you get slanted news constantly disguising itself as authoritative truth. Sometimes you get the same phenomenon on Wikipedia but at least there, interpretation of data is kept to a minimum. There is so much to report on, and so much information to curate, one has to employ a particular world view to decide what part of the story is important to tell. When it comes to news, there is no way to avoid ideological siloing. A single 'wikipedia of news" is not possible, but maybe several of them, each devoted to a certain way of understanding events, is possible.
...and the crime of unlicensed duct work. People are taking money in exchange for giving car rides. Look, if the Toronto city government is willing to let any old moron DRIVE a car (and they are), I think those same people can be trusted to delegate to a hired driver without risking a carpocalypse.
I'm afraid the Republican Party has always been the party of empire. Recall that the first Republican President waged the country's bloodiest war to prevent the central government's domain from shrinking. The war turned a federation of sovereign states into a compulsory chain of provinces. There is no "smaller government" party in the US, because Americans would never vote for one.
Interesting. How far did you dig into the philosophy and economics aspects of the ideology before discarding it? Bastiat and Hayek are pretty ironclad. Usually once someone goes Rothbard they don't go back.
Oh, the hibris of politicians. Once self-sufficient space colonies exist, it is highly unlikely terrestrial governments will have any hold on them. There will be a solar system civilization, but the USG will not be a part of it for long.
People are very quick to blame the automotive lobby for buying the Michigan government, but there would be nothing to buy if the Michigan politicians weren't already whores.
He was wrong on IP back in the 1970s and he's wrong on economics now. Piketty didn't actually contribute much to economic understanding with his book, but he did contribute a verbose defense of the same redistributism that has failed over and over again. Piketty is influenced greatly by Marx and Marxists, leaving out entirely the contributions of classical liberal economists like Bawerk, Menger and Mises who together have provided a deep understanding of the necessary process of capital accumulation, and private property rights. If one is to advance a theory that capital needs to be expropriated and redistributed by state action, one must be able to refute those theories, which Piketty simply fails to acknowledge.
The Open Source approach has worked so well because people are at complete liberty to build on existing ideas and existing work, *not* because users are supposed to audit the code they're running. Almost no one does that, but a few do, and sometimes they decide to take what does work and throw out what doesn't. In FLOSS this can happen faster and with greater frequency than with IP-encumbered code. Whether you have faith in it or not, it works.
It's going to take more PR than this to gloss over the forced abortions, religious persecution, torture, and the slaughter of the homeless.
There's a difference, you know, between conservatives, and the deeply Wilsonian liberal neocons.
Being a constitutionalist, I might get pigeonholed as a conservative, but it actually makes me a classical liberal: I want people to be free to live and work and trade however they see fit.
Regardless of what this study "proves" or "finds," it does not mean that Socialism (a product of the New Left) is anything but totalitarianism with a great big stoned flower-child grin.
This study is likely evidence of the brainwashing which has occurred at the GOP. In order to solidify their power, the neocons have waged a very intense war against the minds of their base.
The skeptics recognize that the global warming community has a vested interest in receiving vast sums of money in government handouts. If there is no crisis, there is no funding. This is the downfall of government-funded science. The status quo is also bad. Government subsidies to petroleum companies helps no one. Businesses should be profitable in their own right, or there's no sense building them.
Some of the things you name are great ideas. Decentralization, efficiency, self-sufficiency are all great goals. Unfortunately, what the global warming community most represents is arbitrary government force keeping us from energy independence, blockading the paths to efficiency and self-sufficiency whether it be more American drilling or more nuclear power plants.
Speaking for myself, it's not that I prefer the status quo of centralized petroleum power (there are successful tidal generators that produce free energy out of the ocean -- yet they are not emulated!), it's that the environmentalist's gaia-worship-by-force alternative is so very, very bad. One of the largest roadblocks to the third world getting the tools they need to fend off starvation and poverty is environmentalists. They want and need power plants for their communities to develop. Instead, the wealthy foreign environmentalists step in and all they can get their hands on are a few rickety solar panels. You can't build a city that way.
And yet your description of our freedom of speech betrays your unconscious acceptance of a subtler level of totalitarianism.
Constitutionally protected? If that is the case your freedom comes from the gracious allowance of that document. My liberty (of speech and action) comes standard with my humanity. I don't need a 200-year-old paper to grant it to me. The only trouble is that I live under a government and in a society that will do things I do not desire if I say or do certain things; I modify my behavior accordingly.
We would have been better off without a Bill of Rights. Since the first ten amendments are enumerations of things government CAN NOT do, government has plausible (but still wrong) ground to assume there are other powers it can take on because nothing says it can't. The Constitution was better as a document enumerating the things government CAN do, with the assumption being that all other powers are strictly excluded.
In essence, our precious bill of rights has doomed us to totalitarianism. The Constitution may have slowed the process, but that's where we're headed anyway.
Nevertheless, I do agree with you. It's ridiculous for anyone to say they "allowed" anyone to say anything on the Internet. I could just as easily say that I allow the sun to rise.
Something fundamental has changed in the thinking of Americans over the last hundred years. You can hear it in the media, in everyday conversation, and especially from the politicians.
We're totalitarians now. But we've been robbed of the language to understand that. Our thinking has become statist but has still retained terms like "liberty" and "freedom." Those words are pretty much myths at this point. The only reason anyone is free to point it out is because doing so will accomplish nothing. You can't explain that the sky is blue when the listener has no concept of color.
This used to be a country of individualists, entrepreneurs, INDEPENDENT PEOPLE. They didn't need government programs and plans to get by. They solved their own damn problems. A free market provided. Government sustained itself on tarriffs. Today we have far more oppressive taxes and excises upon the people. We get taxed for WORKING. And nobody thinks this is dangerously close to communism. America has become deeply militarist. Invading an unarmed sandbox to maintain economic hegemony gets stupidly equated with "defending our freedoms" and nobody chuckles. We had instituted a military draft and today it's just thought of as a political taboo instead of the first hint of totalitarianism. It's all sure as hell statism, and that is totalitarian by definition.
Ask an American what they think of totalitarianism. It's a Bad Thing(tm) right?
Now ask them what they would sacrifice--TO THE GOVERNMENT--in order to stop totalitarian regimes.
Would they give their income? Their privacy? Their rights? Their life?
You've just met a totalitarian.
Tuned in to what? Judge Judy? Or how about the elating intellectual magnificence that is Survivor? Wait, it must be the sitcoms.
Television is a realm of fiction and pseudo-events. Human attention is led around very easily by immediate sensory input. Our minds typically hop from one brief thought to another based on the current input much like a child playing in a sandbox with whatever toy happens to catch his eye. Television is designed to jerk your attention about to wherever the broadcaster wants to take it. Watching television is a surrender of your thought process to the control of the broadcaster. This isn't necessarily evil, but it is the price to pay for taking in TV programming.
The technology of literacy, however, is the tool for choosing and organizing one's thoughts. Through the technology of writing and reading we can move out of the child-playing-randomly-in-a-sandbox stage and start deliberately choosing our toys and using them deliberately.
And if the kid can't read, he sure as hell can't write. Therefore, Mr. Technologist, give your kids books. Teach them to write. Even writing computer programs might be a good idea. But if they can't articulate themselves or organize their thoughts, you can rest assured they'll never really know what they think or want.
Moreover, writing is a technology. The ability to manage and manipulate language is not an art. It is a matter of technique and knowledge of available tools.
Immerse kids in technology as soon as you possibly can. Give them books. If you want your kids to ascend in the world, they need other people to think they are smart, and no one will think they are smart if their subjects and verbs never agree, they can't punctuate properly and don't know how to construct anything bigger than a sentence without losing their train of thought. Get them reading and teaching themselves to speak fluent English. God knows the public schools won't do it.
That sounds accurate. And while I try to find the personality in the text I'm reading, maybe I'm not always spot-on.
THANK YOU.
I've now read the book and I see many things a little more clearly.
I knew "emoticons" would get mocked.
They don't belong in formal communication of any kind, but I've seen them help indicate mood in informal Internet conversations.
Those would be examples of words, spellings and punctuations designed to make reading more laborious and irritating. I kind of regretted throwing "emoticons" into that list since they belong nowhere in correct writing, but this *is* the Internet...
I disagree. When I read, I do endow what I see with expression and inflection based on the context and punctuation I see around it. Writing can come off very stark, but if you put yourself in the reader's shoes as you write and if you're a little choosy about your words, you can end up conveying the right emotion most of the time.
I do agree, though, that an emoticon here and there (at least in informal online messages) really helps.
I agree wholeheartedly. Perhaps the survey is correct anyway since the vast majority of people writing and sending these emails are semi-literate. A huge number of people graduate from college in the U.S. who have the reading and writing skills (and often manners) of a sixth grader. There should be another study conducted among the literate.
This is why precise diction--speaking and writing clearly--is necessary. It is often just as much the fault of the writer as it is the reader when a message's tone is misinterpreted.
There are devices such as certain words, punctuations or even emoticons that can help you give your message the flavor of meaning that you want it to have, provided you know how to use them correctly.
The skill to write well is a thousand times more valuable today than most people give it credit for. In a time when so much of our worldwide communication is written, we have to know how to properly build a written message instead of simply writing what we would speak and assume the reader will "get" it. You never know when you might offend someone.
Morevoer, the individual control and decentralization available by the Internet and digital technology means that the censoring of content can be put in the hands of individuals by the creation of filters. There's a real problem with the media content we have flying around these days. Sex and lust messages are laced into radio, splattered on billboards, streaming through the TV constantly. This is skewing children and we have no way to control it. It is unfair and unconstitutional to censor to the necessary degree through a government agency. The Internet and the technologies that are involved in this new decentralized digital media can be used to censor on an individual basis. Parents can regain control again over what their children are exposed to, and we can maintain a free-speech society.
The FCC should be finding ways to make its existence irrelevant, but we all know that the real mission of government agencies is to perpetuate themselves.
We need more READING. It should be a crime to let someone graduate high school who still reads at a sixth grade level.
I run into people at COLLEGE who I think still read at a third grade level.
If you can't read well, you can't collect information and ideas well. If you can't do that, all you've got to form your worldview and reasoning is the vacuum between your ears. Pen sized computers aren't going to fix this. We need to abolish the "let's watch a video and talk about our feelings" curricula and have children READ!
And once they can read, teach them to write. Writing is the process of organizing your ideas. Without the ability to organize and coherently express your thoughts, how are you ever going to think clearly about different opinions? Formulate new ones? How are you ever going to be understood by anyone?
No, the biggest thing missing in education is not more technological toys. The thing education sorely needs is some actual education. Did you know first grade teachers are no longer allowed to correct students' spelling? Have you ever seen a first grader spell? Did you know there are still schools that don't teach basic phonics? This produces a generation of children who go through all of grade school but still cannot read. Oh, sure, technically they can "read," but they have no ability to sound out new words, cannot derive definitions from the syllables of new words, and sure as hell can't spell. The very building blocks of literacy I grew up with are now unheard of in public schools.
And some assclown thinks pen-sized computers are going to help. Teach the kids how to use a real pen first, then the pen computer might be of some use.