The year Apollo 11 put a man on the moon (1969) was the last year in U.S. history that the national debt actually DROPPED. It was somewhere around $300 billion then (about 38% of our GDP). Today the national debt is $11 trillion (about 70% of our GDP) and GROWING at a rate of about $1 trillion each year (and that doesn't even include staggering long-term entitlements like Social Security and Medicare that are coming up for the baby boomers, or the long-term medical and veterans benefits for the recent Iraq War each expected to run into multiple trillions of $).
The appeal now isn't about stopping world hunger. It's about stopping the U.S. government from going into bankruptcy (turning all those wonderful dollars you and I have in our bank account to worthless computer bits and colorful pieces of pretty paper).
NASA makes money for the government? Really? Because all the numbers I've seen say that the government has to GIVE them about $17 billion a year. I must have missed the part where NASA gave any of that money back.
Even if the entire atmosphere of the earth completely disappeared tomorrow, this planet would still be much more livable than any other planetary body in the solar system.
As for the "emigrate to other galaxies," I would counter only with the observation that you obviously have no conception of the distances we're talking to even travel to nearby solar systems, much less galaxies. It takes the fastest craft we have ever built about 9 years just to reach the Pluto. That's 9 years to travel just 38.5 AU. The distance to the NEAREST solar system (Proxima Centauri) from our own is 266,715 AU away. At that same speed, it would take us over 62,000 years to reach it. And that's the NEAREST solar system.
People repeat that old "we must go into space to survive" mantra without any real appreciation at all as to exactly how inhospitable and hard-to-reach space and all the other known planetary bodies in our solar system really are (and how almost-inconceivably vast the distance is to any other solar system). In short, as inhospitable as this planet would be after a comet collision or other major disaster, it would still be *much*, *much*, *much* more hospitable, reachable, and survivable than any other place that we could reasonably ever reach even with several orders of magnitude more technological advancement. Expending efforts to build colonies on the moon would be laughably more inefficient response to such a threat than building more innovative, sustainable, protected environs right here on Earth.
Space is a vast resource sink. The human desire to travel to and live there is based on dreams and wishful thinking, not on thoughtful reasoning.
NASA just added $750 million to the rapidly growing U.S. national debt to send up a repair mission for a purposeless low-orbit space station that we never needed and can't afford.
Now go ahead, mod me down, tell me about how space is our future, repeat some urban legends about NASA developing velcro, tell me how relatively small NASA's budget is, etc. It still won't change the facts that the U.S. government is headed at an increasingly rapid pace towards bankruptcy, each shuttle mission runs around $650-$750 million, the ISS has served little practical prupose, and that a very expensive low-orbit vehicle like the shuttle also serves little real purpose anymore, except to serve the aforementioned ISS.
The shuttle and the ISS are money-sinks. I'm sorry, but for a long tiem the U.S. government has been spending like a teenager with dad's credit card. If we're going to have any chance of getting the deficit under control before the dollar becomes worthless and we become a debtor nation, we have to stop deluding ourselves on these old science fiction dreams that just aren't practical in the real world that we live in. It's down to what we REALLY NEED at this point, not what we WANT.
Capitalism has no morality or conscience. It's only god is profit. Left unchecked by government regulation and oversight (and criminal laws), of course companies would engage in dirty business practices. Hell, they *already* do as much as they think they can get away with.
The bizarre thing is that showing rape in movies has become almost verboten in Hollywood. But, at the same time, showing men and women physically tortured and maimed in horrific ways is all the rage (as long as the women aren't raped).
I dropped out of the new Bond franchise about 20 minutes into Casino Royale. The over-the-top chase scene at the beginning was overdone enough, but it's a Bond film so I can cut it some slack for that. What REALLY ended it completely for me was the even more over-the-top Sony product placement. It's not that I think product placement is inherently bad, if it fits into the story or at least makes sense. But about the 50th time I saw the Sony logo in Casino Royale was when I realized that not only does Bond live in an alternate universe where humans can still run after jumping from 50 ft. cranes, but in said universe Sony is apparently the only electronics maker in existence. The most laughable moment came when he's looking around the country club security office and we see that they are recording all their feeds onto Sony blu-ray recorders (which didn't even EXIST at the time). And what kind of super-spy uses a regular old unencrypted Sony Ericsson cellphone?
Once again, I apologize for my home state. If it's any consolation, this is just one of MANY, MANY, MANY dumbass laws passed on a yearly basis there. I decided it was time to leave about the time they started looking at creationist laws. The Scoppes Monkey Trial taught them nothing.
His babyfaced looks have spoiled many a movie. The worst example is The Beach. Clearly the part he played was written for Ewan McGregor, but Boyle had to get a "big name" to get financing. The movie might have actually been passably okay if it weren't for the distracting sight of the lead being played by a guy who looked like he was about 13 years old. Sometimes looking a lot younger than you actually are works AGAINST you.
Unfortunately, you're the one who gets screwed because of pirates. 1% of the population who legitimately wants to make backups has to pay the price for the 99% that want to use "backing up" as a cover for pirating games. It's a shame, but I can't say that I blame the game companies for having to do it that way.
Personally, the stunts and special effects have gotten so over-the-top that they take me "out" of the movies now. Granted, fight and chase scenes in actions movies have always been over-the-top. But stunts and effects have gone so far in one-upmanship that these scenes have become less thrilling than comical. The average human fistfight now looks more intense than the fight between the two terminators in Terminator 2 (and those guys were super-strong and built of titanium alloys). And chase scenes routinely involve jumps and falls that no human being could withstand in anything more than lunar gravity.
The Die Hard movies are the perfect example. The Die Hard series started out as a incredibly unlikely, but nonetheless at least mildly plausible. But by the third film, the characters were taking 50-foot leaps off bridges and routinely taking beatings that would have required immediate hospitalization (if not embalming services) for anyone even vaguely mortal. The last entry was particularly egregious. There is a fight scene in that one that makes the Terminator 2 fight scene look modest by comparison. I expect that by the next one, John McClain will be catching bullets fired at him with his teeth and the fight scenes will involve people being punched through bank vault walls.
There are a shitload of women who want him to star in EVERYTHING. However, at the last moment someone apparently realized that women are probably the least likely demographic to go see Akira--no matter WHO'S in it.
Hollywood is greedy, stupid, and unoriginal. As with the videogame industry, any success is going to be followed immediately with a slew of wannabes and knock-offs.
The good news is that there are still great movies being made. But you're probably not going to find them among the "tentpole" pictures with $100 million budgets. Hollywood isn't going to take a risk with that kind of budget, they're going to play it safe. And right now, PG-13 comic book movies are as close a thing to a safe bet as the studios know of.
That's because the only people you have known from that earlier time were all older and humorless by the time you met them. Comedy has been around since the the dawn of civilization, when Ugg the caveman first discovered comedy after eliciting laughs with an accidental fart joke.
Seriously, I saw these guys in their prime on the "Ranting from Rome to Apulia" tour. Fucking hilarious stuff. They really took a turn for the worse when that pussy Constanine brought in Christianity, though. It was just never the same for comedians in the Empire with those holier-than-thou types in charge.
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The year Apollo 11 put a man on the moon (1969) was the last year in U.S. history that the national debt actually DROPPED. It was somewhere around $300 billion then (about 38% of our GDP). Today the national debt is $11 trillion (about 70% of our GDP) and GROWING at a rate of about $1 trillion each year (and that doesn't even include staggering long-term entitlements like Social Security and Medicare that are coming up for the baby boomers, or the long-term medical and veterans benefits for the recent Iraq War each expected to run into multiple trillions of $).
The appeal now isn't about stopping world hunger. It's about stopping the U.S. government from going into bankruptcy (turning all those wonderful dollars you and I have in our bank account to worthless computer bits and colorful pieces of pretty paper).
NASA makes money for the government? Really? Because all the numbers I've seen say that the government has to GIVE them about $17 billion a year. I must have missed the part where NASA gave any of that money back.
Even if the entire atmosphere of the earth completely disappeared tomorrow, this planet would still be much more livable than any other planetary body in the solar system.
As for the "emigrate to other galaxies," I would counter only with the observation that you obviously have no conception of the distances we're talking to even travel to nearby solar systems, much less galaxies. It takes the fastest craft we have ever built about 9 years just to reach the Pluto. That's 9 years to travel just 38.5 AU. The distance to the NEAREST solar system (Proxima Centauri) from our own is 266,715 AU away. At that same speed, it would take us over 62,000 years to reach it. And that's the NEAREST solar system.
Whoosh!
People repeat that old "we must go into space to survive" mantra without any real appreciation at all as to exactly how inhospitable and hard-to-reach space and all the other known planetary bodies in our solar system really are (and how almost-inconceivably vast the distance is to any other solar system). In short, as inhospitable as this planet would be after a comet collision or other major disaster, it would still be *much*, *much*, *much* more hospitable, reachable, and survivable than any other place that we could reasonably ever reach even with several orders of magnitude more technological advancement. Expending efforts to build colonies on the moon would be laughably more inefficient response to such a threat than building more innovative, sustainable, protected environs right here on Earth.
Space is a vast resource sink. The human desire to travel to and live there is based on dreams and wishful thinking, not on thoughtful reasoning.
NASA just added $750 million to the rapidly growing U.S. national debt to send up a repair mission for a purposeless low-orbit space station that we never needed and can't afford.
Now go ahead, mod me down, tell me about how space is our future, repeat some urban legends about NASA developing velcro, tell me how relatively small NASA's budget is, etc. It still won't change the facts that the U.S. government is headed at an increasingly rapid pace towards bankruptcy, each shuttle mission runs around $650-$750 million, the ISS has served little practical prupose, and that a very expensive low-orbit vehicle like the shuttle also serves little real purpose anymore, except to serve the aforementioned ISS.
The shuttle and the ISS are money-sinks. I'm sorry, but for a long tiem the U.S. government has been spending like a teenager with dad's credit card. If we're going to have any chance of getting the deficit under control before the dollar becomes worthless and we become a debtor nation, we have to stop deluding ourselves on these old science fiction dreams that just aren't practical in the real world that we live in. It's down to what we REALLY NEED at this point, not what we WANT.
I doubt the Chinese journalist now sitting in prison because Yahoo ratted him out to the government would view Jerry as a nice guy.
That just gave me an idea for a new Apple slogan: "Apple; a stylish, more elegant evil"
Exactly, unless I get to sell each of my shares 10 times instead of just one, this argument is hogwash.
Capitalism has no morality or conscience. It's only god is profit. Left unchecked by government regulation and oversight (and criminal laws), of course companies would engage in dirty business practices. Hell, they *already* do as much as they think they can get away with.
This isn't a guy who built the railroads here. This is a guy who stole our secrets!
The bizarre thing is that showing rape in movies has become almost verboten in Hollywood. But, at the same time, showing men and women physically tortured and maimed in horrific ways is all the rage (as long as the women aren't raped).
I dropped out of the new Bond franchise about 20 minutes into Casino Royale. The over-the-top chase scene at the beginning was overdone enough, but it's a Bond film so I can cut it some slack for that. What REALLY ended it completely for me was the even more over-the-top Sony product placement. It's not that I think product placement is inherently bad, if it fits into the story or at least makes sense. But about the 50th time I saw the Sony logo in Casino Royale was when I realized that not only does Bond live in an alternate universe where humans can still run after jumping from 50 ft. cranes, but in said universe Sony is apparently the only electronics maker in existence. The most laughable moment came when he's looking around the country club security office and we see that they are recording all their feeds onto Sony blu-ray recorders (which didn't even EXIST at the time). And what kind of super-spy uses a regular old unencrypted Sony Ericsson cellphone?
Once again, I apologize for my home state. If it's any consolation, this is just one of MANY, MANY, MANY dumbass laws passed on a yearly basis there. I decided it was time to leave about the time they started looking at creationist laws. The Scoppes Monkey Trial taught them nothing.
His babyfaced looks have spoiled many a movie. The worst example is The Beach. Clearly the part he played was written for Ewan McGregor, but Boyle had to get a "big name" to get financing. The movie might have actually been passably okay if it weren't for the distracting sight of the lead being played by a guy who looked like he was about 13 years old. Sometimes looking a lot younger than you actually are works AGAINST you.
Unfortunately, you're the one who gets screwed because of pirates. 1% of the population who legitimately wants to make backups has to pay the price for the 99% that want to use "backing up" as a cover for pirating games. It's a shame, but I can't say that I blame the game companies for having to do it that way.
Personally, the stunts and special effects have gotten so over-the-top that they take me "out" of the movies now. Granted, fight and chase scenes in actions movies have always been over-the-top. But stunts and effects have gone so far in one-upmanship that these scenes have become less thrilling than comical. The average human fistfight now looks more intense than the fight between the two terminators in Terminator 2 (and those guys were super-strong and built of titanium alloys). And chase scenes routinely involve jumps and falls that no human being could withstand in anything more than lunar gravity.
The Die Hard movies are the perfect example. The Die Hard series started out as a incredibly unlikely, but nonetheless at least mildly plausible. But by the third film, the characters were taking 50-foot leaps off bridges and routinely taking beatings that would have required immediate hospitalization (if not embalming services) for anyone even vaguely mortal. The last entry was particularly egregious. There is a fight scene in that one that makes the Terminator 2 fight scene look modest by comparison. I expect that by the next one, John McClain will be catching bullets fired at him with his teeth and the fight scenes will involve people being punched through bank vault walls.
There are a shitload of women who want him to star in EVERYTHING. However, at the last moment someone apparently realized that women are probably the least likely demographic to go see Akira--no matter WHO'S in it.
I wonder if they'll still have the old man and the Winnebago.
Hollywood is greedy, stupid, and unoriginal. As with the videogame industry, any success is going to be followed immediately with a slew of wannabes and knock-offs.
The good news is that there are still great movies being made. But you're probably not going to find them among the "tentpole" pictures with $100 million budgets. Hollywood isn't going to take a risk with that kind of budget, they're going to play it safe. And right now, PG-13 comic book movies are as close a thing to a safe bet as the studios know of.
What if I told you the slave were nailed to a crucifix? That's kind of like a perch.
That's because the only people you have known from that earlier time were all older and humorless by the time you met them. Comedy has been around since the the dawn of civilization, when Ugg the caveman first discovered comedy after eliciting laughs with an accidental fart joke.
With you eyes, of course.
You can read more of their jokes at Google Books.
Seriously, I saw these guys in their prime on the "Ranting from Rome to Apulia" tour. Fucking hilarious stuff. They really took a turn for the worse when that pussy Constanine brought in Christianity, though. It was just never the same for comedians in the Empire with those holier-than-thou types in charge.
We're jealous of your lax marijuana laws, and still angry that you sent us Celine Dion.