Most drug use may be cannabis, but those other drugs are horrendous. Not to mention that when most people are cured from a disease, they usually don't feel the urge to reinfect themselves. Hard drug users can represent people who have behaviors that make them frequent flyers for health care. Fix them up, and they are frequently back in later, having fucked themselves up again. That may not be a problem for pot, but it sure is for a lot of other drugs.
Also, smoking pot is *smoking* and most people smoke joints when they're doing pot. Smoking is pretty shitty for you. Having it be pot instead of tobacco doesn't change that.
The effective ingredient of pot may well be more or less harmless, but the ingestion method can be very hazardous.
Getting 100,000 people who want to go to Mars would take about the amount of effort it takes to put an ad in the proverbial paper. You don't need to convince people to go with a conspiracy, they already want to.
I'll grant that if everything is perfect on Earth, people might find less interest in going, but honestly, most people don't want to leave to get away from Earth, they want to go so they can go to Mars.
You may have a point, but you know, if law enforcement isn't having to bust as many small-time perps, maybe they will have some time to deal with the bigger fish.
After all, we need cops to deal with domestic disturbances and robberies and such. If you could simply reassign some of the units busting those crimes to something else, you might see it affect the enforcement of other laws as well. Most cops aren't in the business to crack heads. They can get jumpy and shooty because they feel in danger or become jaded and view small timers as their immediate threat, but I'm sure most cops would want to be in on taking down a kingpin. They wouldn't stop doing the job because small time crime was declining.
However, I don't see how this affects the cops. Someone still has to act on the information. Presumably that will be law enforcement agents. Perhaps not ones with weapons or hand-cuffs, but you wouldn't necessarily spend less money on a program like this.
The answer to that question would be complicated. It would probably be ultimately based on how sincere the elected official was, and how able they were to navigate between the interests of their people and what it takes to get anything done in the government.
The simple fact is that getting elected to any major office can have a major corrupting or at least compromising influence on you. Any human tends to view only a few dozen people as their immediate group. If they grew up in the projects, then they'd certainly start out as sympathetic to the projects, but a lot of that is because the people there are part of their immediate group.
As time goes on, however, their immediate group changes to those they work with. That's why long term Congress people tend to all start acting like each other. Representatives, lobbyists, government bureaucrats are now their day-to-day immediate group. They will be influenced by those people even without realizing it. Of course, they'll certainly try to hold on to their roots, and more certainly, they'll do their best to shore up their power base by throwing things the way of their constituents, but they won't be "of that group" any more.
That does not mean that they will be worse for it. There are a lot of groups that have narrow, parochial interests which would not serve the country as a whole. Sometimes getting out of the local scene is a good thing for people expected to run the Federal government.
Still, it almost always comes with some alienation from individuals as people. To be elected above any local office, voters are no longer people you knock on doors to talk to, they're voting blocs that you have to satisfy. Some blocs need to be courted, some are impossible to get, and others are so safe that you can actually ignore them aside from rhetoric and some bones tossed their way.
I don't know what you specifically went through, but bullying doesn't have to necessarily meet that standard to be bullying. I admit to feeling like there is a bit of over-sensitivity these days, but it is also true that people react to things differently and where you or I might need to be beaten up (for example) to feel bullied, some other person might be vulnerable through social interaction alone.
As an action in the midst of other attacks, an unfriending could certainly be a clear (to you), but deniable (to others) sign of hostility. Classic bully behavior. In today's world, unfriending could be one of many means by which you could be bullied.
For instance, you think everything is fine and then one day everyone is laughing at you and suddenly your friend or friends all unfriend you on FB while you are reeling in a bullying pile-on. Its clear that it is meant to send you a message. So, a lot depends on the context in which an action is taken.
I agree that unfriending is an easy action that is usually pretty content free, but that's often because our "friends" on FB aren't really much more than acquaintances. That is not always the case though.
Any action that implies the loss of a relationship can have emotional meaning above and beyond the usual impact of such an action. If I had a girlfriend who suddenly unfriended me for no apparent reason, I'd be concerned, not because I couldn't see her FB posts any more, but because she does not want to associate with me any more in that forum. Depending on the context, that can be pretty confusing or hurtful.
Of course, simply disliking your co-worker, even openly, isn't a harassment or bullying situation. The difference is when the dislike is acted on in an unprofessional and aggravated manner.
Possibly, but Boehner tends to cry at the drop of a hat.
Certainly, there may have been a causal link between the pope's message and the timing of his resignation, but I'm guessing that its mostly cover so that he can resign with dignity before the imminent infighting in the Republican caucus caused him to get fired.
He did suggest that he was planning on resigning until Eric Cantor got beaten. I can believe that because Cantor's loss was a big upset and it was likely that Cantor would have been an immediate front runner for the Speaker job. Boehner could certainly have decided to ride it out after that in the interests of continuity. I'm just not sure that it ended up helping, but it may have given him some more time to get someone else lined up who isn't a Tea Partier.
I agree that having enough time taken to make a good product is a good thing.
However, there does need to be some accountability to business goals and the ability to actually get features to customers in a reasonable time frame.
Prioritization is important. There are times where something has to get done by a certain date, or you'd have been better off working on something else because you lost the customer who wanted the feature to the company who did produce it.
In some ways, I blame customer expectations. If they're always hunting to get the most features they can, for the cheapest possible price, they're pretty much accepting the bugs and design flaws that come from software houses that are fulfilling their criteria. And that's basically what happens. If customers did something like insist that bugs in the software would require significant financial penalties or credits as part of their contract, they'd get a better product, but they'd also pay through the nose for it, and probably also have to wait a substantial amount of time for it.
So, I think we're at an equilibrium. Customers hate shitty software, but as long as they pay for it, that's what they're going to get because they don't choose the quality software over the quick and cheap.
And until that changes, businesses need to be able to predict when their software is going to be more or less complete.
I agree that a manager may have not given the order, and it is certainly possible to keep a manager in the dark.
That said, managers should be implementing process controls to ensure that illegal or undesirable work does not occur. It is entirely possible that particularly clever engineers snuck it through the management checks, no manager or process is perfect, but it would be so much easier if the management was aware of this, at least at a low level.
I don't know for certain but I think there's a manager in here somewhere who is at least partially responsible. And mind you, managers exist, in part, to have responsibility for their teams. If my team fucked up royally, I'd need to show how they completely conspired to pull the wool over my eyes and evade the process or I'd be called on why I didn't supervise their work properly.
It is also likely a manager was involved because that manager probably at least communicated the displeasure of the higher ups at the engineering failure to meet EPA standards. Only a manager would know if the engineers' bonus checks were truly imperiled.
That doesn't mean the engineers would be blameless, but let's not go too far in blaming either managers or engineers. They both are likely to have had a hand in it.
Most of the effort probably *was* a debugger or some tool. What happened is that a smaller group "re-purposed" the functionality with a relatively minor bit of code to detect a condition and enable a certain mode.
Most of the hard work on the various modes may well have been done for very legitimate, non-conspiracy reasons.
That said, just about everything of any note should have had a requirement, a tracking number, and of course, QA testing. It should be find-able unless there was some sort of shadow process going on. And the existence of a shadow process like that would be as big a deal as the fact of this particular nefarious change. There are audits and certifications based on compliance with stated standards. If there was some idea that process was not being followed in the design of VW autos, the whole company is in for a world of hurt.
I'm guessing that the spec is there, with someone's name on it, and it was duly tested. Of course, I imagine the requirement language wasn't exactly "Trick the stupid Americans into Passing our Vehicle's emissions. Muhahaha."
Changing the radio station is not the same level of inattention as talking on a phone is, or texting. Yeah, it is increased inattention, but you're turning a dial. You can do that while watching the road just by either using your ear or these days, you have the presets and also the tuner simply lists the stations for you.
You can see people visibly driving slowly or erratically when they have that phone up to their ear. It is much better when they have handsfree operation, but they're still distracted somewhat.
And there's just no way to text safely in motion.
In the olden days, when someone was driving slow and erratically, I'd try to see if they had white hair. Now, I look for the phone being held up to their head and I am almost never wrong.
They could certainly say that their regulations make more sense, but I'm not sure that would be enough for them to evade them. If anything, they'd be like: "stupid American regulations. Let those Americans choke on their shitty performance."
There was a financial and marketing component to this. Their business plan was supposed to be "clean diesel" as opposed to electric or hybrid. What happens when "clean diesel" makes your cars underperform? You fake it to make it.
I don't think they care one way or another about our regulations except they needed to make those regulations to execute on their strategy. I think they have a business and marketing plan that their engineering couldn't deliver on. They could have clean, or they could have performance, but they couldn't get both.
I sincerely don't think Germans think that way. These are the people who turned off all their nuclear plants for solar. I disagree with that action, but I have a lot of trouble believing that they think that the regulations of the US, of all places, are ridiculous. Germans are not known for their dislike of regulations.
More likely, some engineers either were directed to do that, and preferred to not undermine their company, or they saw it as a challenge which they are proud of because they figured out how to beat emissions tests reliably.
Still does happen, but now there's the extra risk that the public cares about that data now more than ever. If that sales critter isn't careful he will not be able to prevent himself from being either the target of an actual breach or the fall guy for a breach. The game is now a lot more dangerous if you aren't as smart as you are unscrupulous.
It is standard policy to not bring home customer data or download it. Now, Morgan Stanley might have different rules than places I have worked, but chances are, they are the same. You can only access customer data from the corporate network, and you cannot download it, ever. Just breaking that rule would be enough to get him terminated immediately.
Criminal charges would then depend on what he did with the data, or if he failed to protect it. If he was the source of the breach, he violated company policy to do the download, and then there was a compromise of data, then any applicable laws would apply to the downloader. He knew the rules, he broke them.
Now, did his downloading of the files actually cause the breach? No idea.
People have this idea that it is still MS's fault anyway just because they didn't airgap the information in an Mission Impossible style vault. That's not realistic. They take steps to protect it, but data like that is used for legitimate purposes. Some people have to be able to access it. That is why there is a lot of policy wrapped around what authorized people are allowed to do with the date. He had a choice to break the policy, and if there was criminal liability, he's liable for it.
True, and all of that was necessary with 15th Century technology (or lack thereof).
Columbus was going somewhere that was much, much easier in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense, was somewhat comparable to a Mars trip.
You don't have to worry about hard radiation when you can die just as easily in a hurricane or have your crew be afflicted with illness or nutritional deficiencies, or deal with one of a a dozen lethal threats that we only make jokes about today.
And while having humans already at the destination could have been helpful, those humans were just as likely to attack you as help you. On Mars, no help, but also no restless natives. Magellan and Cook would probably have had a better time on a Mars trip than their voyages to already inhabited, but hostile places.
Re:Yes, we should give up because it is hard..
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Let's Not Go To Mars
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· Score: 1
There are practical reasons to go to Mars, but they are definitely significantly more long term than most of the issues we'd look at in an election.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised that the "Great Filter" that has prevented the galaxy from being filled up with alien colonies is actually the simple inability for civilizations to actually have a concept of very long term planning.
At some point, global warming or even species extinction will pale against the fact that Earth is doomed no matter what we do. We're scheduled for extinction no matter what if we remain on Earth. Sure, something like global warming would have to be surmounted first, but we know what is causing it, and we mostly know how to fix it. None of those solutions requires us to de-fund a space program.
I agree that the reality of a Mars trip is some distance off, barring some sort of techno-religious singularity event thingy, but that doesn't mean we stop the effort, it just means we write out a 100-year plan and then budget modestly to see that through. As long as we *commit* to one plan, and modestly, but *consistently* fund that plan, we will make it to Mars.
Re:Yes, we should give up because it is hard..
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Let's Not Go To Mars
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· Score: 1
I don't see how any of those will be stopped by the other.
Eliminating carbon emissions has almost nothing to do with the amount of money used for an expedition. In fact, it's mostly a political and economic issue.
And peace in the Middle East is even more about diplomacy.
Unless you're suggesting that we'll be using up our precious stockpiles of diplomacy and politics for a Mars mission, I don't see how they even interact.
I don't disagree with most of what you said, but this isn't a zero sum game. We can do both, and there is no reason to not try.
Population isn't going to decrease because we didn't launch a Mars expedition. We're not going to get any more resources if we don't launch a Mars expedition, except for the trifling amount that will go into the mission.
Going to Mars isn't going to require a mountain of resources, it may require a hill of money, but that money will be spent on jobs too. And those are jobs in fields that we'd still want to have to maintain our leadership aside from bullshit tariffs and populism.
Most of man's problems right now aren't due to a lack of resources, they're due to a lack of people viewing others over themselves. If anything, I'd encourage a Mars expedition for the simple reason that it shows people that we can do big things and if we can go to Mars, we can feed people at home. Being able to go to the moon has elevated the conversation. We do get to say, "if we went to the Moon, we can certainly 'x'." It was almost worth the whole Lunar program just to be able to say that.
Staying on Earth is fine, but it keeps our mindset parochial and inward-looking. The same problems with the same broken solutions. We don't need to re-prioritize ourselves to look at internal issues. We've been *doing* that. It doesn't help.
Just another in the long line of abject failures that define Carly Fiorina's career.
I think she did extremely well in regard to her career goals. She made a shitload of money.
Now, she may not have actually done anything for HP, but you know, it certainly doesn't look like she feels all that bad about it. And having a positive attitude despite your failures is a good way to go through life.
And, despite her current polling, I believe she's soon going to have yet another failure to be able to be positive about.
I will say this for her. Losing past elections certainly doesn't seem to have broken her confidence any. Who needs a Senate seat anyway? Go big or go home!
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Most drug use may be cannabis, but those other drugs are horrendous. Not to mention that when most people are cured from a disease, they usually don't feel the urge to reinfect themselves. Hard drug users can represent people who have behaviors that make them frequent flyers for health care. Fix them up, and they are frequently back in later, having fucked themselves up again. That may not be a problem for pot, but it sure is for a lot of other drugs.
Also, smoking pot is *smoking* and most people smoke joints when they're doing pot. Smoking is pretty shitty for you. Having it be pot instead of tobacco doesn't change that.
The effective ingredient of pot may well be more or less harmless, but the ingestion method can be very hazardous.
Getting 100,000 people who want to go to Mars would take about the amount of effort it takes to put an ad in the proverbial paper. You don't need to convince people to go with a conspiracy, they already want to.
I'll grant that if everything is perfect on Earth, people might find less interest in going, but honestly, most people don't want to leave to get away from Earth, they want to go so they can go to Mars.
You may have a point, but you know, if law enforcement isn't having to bust as many small-time perps, maybe they will have some time to deal with the bigger fish.
After all, we need cops to deal with domestic disturbances and robberies and such. If you could simply reassign some of the units busting those crimes to something else, you might see it affect the enforcement of other laws as well. Most cops aren't in the business to crack heads. They can get jumpy and shooty because they feel in danger or become jaded and view small timers as their immediate threat, but I'm sure most cops would want to be in on taking down a kingpin. They wouldn't stop doing the job because small time crime was declining.
Incarceration business? Perhaps not.
However, I don't see how this affects the cops. Someone still has to act on the information. Presumably that will be law enforcement agents. Perhaps not ones with weapons or hand-cuffs, but you wouldn't necessarily spend less money on a program like this.
The answer to that question would be complicated. It would probably be ultimately based on how sincere the elected official was, and how able they were to navigate between the interests of their people and what it takes to get anything done in the government.
The simple fact is that getting elected to any major office can have a major corrupting or at least compromising influence on you. Any human tends to view only a few dozen people as their immediate group. If they grew up in the projects, then they'd certainly start out as sympathetic to the projects, but a lot of that is because the people there are part of their immediate group.
As time goes on, however, their immediate group changes to those they work with. That's why long term Congress people tend to all start acting like each other. Representatives, lobbyists, government bureaucrats are now their day-to-day immediate group. They will be influenced by those people even without realizing it. Of course, they'll certainly try to hold on to their roots, and more certainly, they'll do their best to shore up their power base by throwing things the way of their constituents, but they won't be "of that group" any more.
That does not mean that they will be worse for it. There are a lot of groups that have narrow, parochial interests which would not serve the country as a whole. Sometimes getting out of the local scene is a good thing for people expected to run the Federal government.
Still, it almost always comes with some alienation from individuals as people. To be elected above any local office, voters are no longer people you knock on doors to talk to, they're voting blocs that you have to satisfy. Some blocs need to be courted, some are impossible to get, and others are so safe that you can actually ignore them aside from rhetoric and some bones tossed their way.
Get more clicks with this one weird trick?
I don't know what you specifically went through, but bullying doesn't have to necessarily meet that standard to be bullying. I admit to feeling like there is a bit of over-sensitivity these days, but it is also true that people react to things differently and where you or I might need to be beaten up (for example) to feel bullied, some other person might be vulnerable through social interaction alone.
As an action in the midst of other attacks, an unfriending could certainly be a clear (to you), but deniable (to others) sign of hostility. Classic bully behavior. In today's world, unfriending could be one of many means by which you could be bullied.
For instance, you think everything is fine and then one day everyone is laughing at you and suddenly your friend or friends all unfriend you on FB while you are reeling in a bullying pile-on. Its clear that it is meant to send you a message. So, a lot depends on the context in which an action is taken.
I agree that unfriending is an easy action that is usually pretty content free, but that's often because our "friends" on FB aren't really much more than acquaintances. That is not always the case though.
Any action that implies the loss of a relationship can have emotional meaning above and beyond the usual impact of such an action. If I had a girlfriend who suddenly unfriended me for no apparent reason, I'd be concerned, not because I couldn't see her FB posts any more, but because she does not want to associate with me any more in that forum. Depending on the context, that can be pretty confusing or hurtful.
Of course, simply disliking your co-worker, even openly, isn't a harassment or bullying situation. The difference is when the dislike is acted on in an unprofessional and aggravated manner.
Possibly, but Boehner tends to cry at the drop of a hat.
Certainly, there may have been a causal link between the pope's message and the timing of his resignation, but I'm guessing that its mostly cover so that he can resign with dignity before the imminent infighting in the Republican caucus caused him to get fired.
He did suggest that he was planning on resigning until Eric Cantor got beaten. I can believe that because Cantor's loss was a big upset and it was likely that Cantor would have been an immediate front runner for the Speaker job. Boehner could certainly have decided to ride it out after that in the interests of continuity. I'm just not sure that it ended up helping, but it may have given him some more time to get someone else lined up who isn't a Tea Partier.
Tea Partiers grinding their gears really grinds my gears.
That would be perfect if Congress didn't have to vote once or twice a year for the government to stay open.
Unfortunately, they seem incapable of that even.
I agree that having enough time taken to make a good product is a good thing.
However, there does need to be some accountability to business goals and the ability to actually get features to customers in a reasonable time frame.
Prioritization is important. There are times where something has to get done by a certain date, or you'd have been better off working on something else because you lost the customer who wanted the feature to the company who did produce it.
In some ways, I blame customer expectations. If they're always hunting to get the most features they can, for the cheapest possible price, they're pretty much accepting the bugs and design flaws that come from software houses that are fulfilling their criteria. And that's basically what happens. If customers did something like insist that bugs in the software would require significant financial penalties or credits as part of their contract, they'd get a better product, but they'd also pay through the nose for it, and probably also have to wait a substantial amount of time for it.
So, I think we're at an equilibrium. Customers hate shitty software, but as long as they pay for it, that's what they're going to get because they don't choose the quality software over the quick and cheap.
And until that changes, businesses need to be able to predict when their software is going to be more or less complete.
I agree that a manager may have not given the order, and it is certainly possible to keep a manager in the dark.
That said, managers should be implementing process controls to ensure that illegal or undesirable work does not occur. It is entirely possible that particularly clever engineers snuck it through the management checks, no manager or process is perfect, but it would be so much easier if the management was aware of this, at least at a low level.
I don't know for certain but I think there's a manager in here somewhere who is at least partially responsible. And mind you, managers exist, in part, to have responsibility for their teams. If my team fucked up royally, I'd need to show how they completely conspired to pull the wool over my eyes and evade the process or I'd be called on why I didn't supervise their work properly.
It is also likely a manager was involved because that manager probably at least communicated the displeasure of the higher ups at the engineering failure to meet EPA standards. Only a manager would know if the engineers' bonus checks were truly imperiled.
That doesn't mean the engineers would be blameless, but let's not go too far in blaming either managers or engineers. They both are likely to have had a hand in it.
Most of the effort probably *was* a debugger or some tool. What happened is that a smaller group "re-purposed" the functionality with a relatively minor bit of code to detect a condition and enable a certain mode.
Most of the hard work on the various modes may well have been done for very legitimate, non-conspiracy reasons.
That said, just about everything of any note should have had a requirement, a tracking number, and of course, QA testing. It should be find-able unless there was some sort of shadow process going on. And the existence of a shadow process like that would be as big a deal as the fact of this particular nefarious change. There are audits and certifications based on compliance with stated standards. If there was some idea that process was not being followed in the design of VW autos, the whole company is in for a world of hurt.
I'm guessing that the spec is there, with someone's name on it, and it was duly tested. Of course, I imagine the requirement language wasn't exactly "Trick the stupid Americans into Passing our Vehicle's emissions. Muhahaha."
Changing the radio station is not the same level of inattention as talking on a phone is, or texting. Yeah, it is increased inattention, but you're turning a dial. You can do that while watching the road just by either using your ear or these days, you have the presets and also the tuner simply lists the stations for you.
You can see people visibly driving slowly or erratically when they have that phone up to their ear. It is much better when they have handsfree operation, but they're still distracted somewhat.
And there's just no way to text safely in motion.
In the olden days, when someone was driving slow and erratically, I'd try to see if they had white hair. Now, I look for the phone being held up to their head and I am almost never wrong.
They could certainly say that their regulations make more sense, but I'm not sure that would be enough for them to evade them. If anything, they'd be like: "stupid American regulations. Let those Americans choke on their shitty performance."
There was a financial and marketing component to this. Their business plan was supposed to be "clean diesel" as opposed to electric or hybrid. What happens when "clean diesel" makes your cars underperform? You fake it to make it.
I don't think they care one way or another about our regulations except they needed to make those regulations to execute on their strategy. I think they have a business and marketing plan that their engineering couldn't deliver on. They could have clean, or they could have performance, but they couldn't get both.
Looks like they failed at that. If the CEO has to step down, you can be sure that people down the line will have their heads handed to them too.
I'm not sure about #3. They were certainly competent enough in their engineering when it came to evading the inspections.
I sincerely don't think Germans think that way. These are the people who turned off all their nuclear plants for solar. I disagree with that action, but I have a lot of trouble believing that they think that the regulations of the US, of all places, are ridiculous. Germans are not known for their dislike of regulations.
More likely, some engineers either were directed to do that, and preferred to not undermine their company, or they saw it as a challenge which they are proud of because they figured out how to beat emissions tests reliably.
Still does happen, but now there's the extra risk that the public cares about that data now more than ever. If that sales critter isn't careful he will not be able to prevent himself from being either the target of an actual breach or the fall guy for a breach. The game is now a lot more dangerous if you aren't as smart as you are unscrupulous.
It is standard policy to not bring home customer data or download it. Now, Morgan Stanley might have different rules than places I have worked, but chances are, they are the same. You can only access customer data from the corporate network, and you cannot download it, ever. Just breaking that rule would be enough to get him terminated immediately.
Criminal charges would then depend on what he did with the data, or if he failed to protect it. If he was the source of the breach, he violated company policy to do the download, and then there was a compromise of data, then any applicable laws would apply to the downloader. He knew the rules, he broke them.
Now, did his downloading of the files actually cause the breach? No idea.
People have this idea that it is still MS's fault anyway just because they didn't airgap the information in an Mission Impossible style vault. That's not realistic. They take steps to protect it, but data like that is used for legitimate purposes. Some people have to be able to access it. That is why there is a lot of policy wrapped around what authorized people are allowed to do with the date. He had a choice to break the policy, and if there was criminal liability, he's liable for it.
True, and all of that was necessary with 15th Century technology (or lack thereof).
Columbus was going somewhere that was much, much easier in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense, was somewhat comparable to a Mars trip.
You don't have to worry about hard radiation when you can die just as easily in a hurricane or have your crew be afflicted with illness or nutritional deficiencies, or deal with one of a a dozen lethal threats that we only make jokes about today.
And while having humans already at the destination could have been helpful, those humans were just as likely to attack you as help you. On Mars, no help, but also no restless natives. Magellan and Cook would probably have had a better time on a Mars trip than their voyages to already inhabited, but hostile places.
There are practical reasons to go to Mars, but they are definitely significantly more long term than most of the issues we'd look at in an election.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised that the "Great Filter" that has prevented the galaxy from being filled up with alien colonies is actually the simple inability for civilizations to actually have a concept of very long term planning.
At some point, global warming or even species extinction will pale against the fact that Earth is doomed no matter what we do. We're scheduled for extinction no matter what if we remain on Earth. Sure, something like global warming would have to be surmounted first, but we know what is causing it, and we mostly know how to fix it. None of those solutions requires us to de-fund a space program.
I agree that the reality of a Mars trip is some distance off, barring some sort of techno-religious singularity event thingy, but that doesn't mean we stop the effort, it just means we write out a 100-year plan and then budget modestly to see that through. As long as we *commit* to one plan, and modestly, but *consistently* fund that plan, we will make it to Mars.
I don't see how any of those will be stopped by the other.
Eliminating carbon emissions has almost nothing to do with the amount of money used for an expedition. In fact, it's mostly a political and economic issue.
And peace in the Middle East is even more about diplomacy.
Unless you're suggesting that we'll be using up our precious stockpiles of diplomacy and politics for a Mars mission, I don't see how they even interact.
I don't disagree with most of what you said, but this isn't a zero sum game. We can do both, and there is no reason to not try.
Population isn't going to decrease because we didn't launch a Mars expedition. We're not going to get any more resources if we don't launch a Mars expedition, except for the trifling amount that will go into the mission.
Going to Mars isn't going to require a mountain of resources, it may require a hill of money, but that money will be spent on jobs too. And those are jobs in fields that we'd still want to have to maintain our leadership aside from bullshit tariffs and populism.
Most of man's problems right now aren't due to a lack of resources, they're due to a lack of people viewing others over themselves. If anything, I'd encourage a Mars expedition for the simple reason that it shows people that we can do big things and if we can go to Mars, we can feed people at home. Being able to go to the moon has elevated the conversation. We do get to say, "if we went to the Moon, we can certainly 'x'." It was almost worth the whole Lunar program just to be able to say that.
Staying on Earth is fine, but it keeps our mindset parochial and inward-looking. The same problems with the same broken solutions. We don't need to re-prioritize ourselves to look at internal issues. We've been *doing* that. It doesn't help.
Just another in the long line of abject failures that define Carly Fiorina's career.
I think she did extremely well in regard to her career goals. She made a shitload of money.
Now, she may not have actually done anything for HP, but you know, it certainly doesn't look like she feels all that bad about it. And having a positive attitude despite your failures is a good way to go through life.
And, despite her current polling, I believe she's soon going to have yet another failure to be able to be positive about.
I will say this for her. Losing past elections certainly doesn't seem to have broken her confidence any. Who needs a Senate seat anyway? Go big or go home!