This author has a completely backward way at looking at things. Income is only half of the equation. What you can buy with that income is the other half. What things can you get with the work you do. Productivity increase is good because you can create more with less work. This means things get cheaper and you can earn less and live better. This is called deflation. The problem is the financial industry and politicians refuse to let deflation happen. They see it as an enemy that must be conquered. So they inflate the money supply and give that money to politicians to spend. So what ends up happening is productivity increases are given away and the citizens are never able to gain their benefit even though their income is lower.
I like to use StarTrek as an example. They have a replicator. Once you have a replicator you never HAVE to work again. Anything you want including another replicator can be made. Are the people all of a sudden poor? Technically yes since they no work for money. In fact they are flat broke. But are they living better? Of course.
I worked for years as a mechanical engineer in the automation industry. All we did was put people out of work by automating routine tasks. That is how we become more productive. Engineering is all about using your mind to improve the way things are done. This inevitably means putting some people out of work. The beauty of a free market system is that labor can move to where it is needed the most. For example.
I helped build a machine that assembled carburetors for Briggs and Stratton. Before there was an assembly line that ran 2 shifts with 12 people each shift. The machine allowed 2 technicians to build the same number of carburetors with less scrap in one shift. So 24 people were out of a job. How can this be good? Because it frees up those peoples labor so other things can be done. When someone first starts making something it usually isn't beneficial to automate because of the capital costs. But if the product is successful and the demand it there it makes sense to automate. Then free up the labor to go to where it is needed more.
That is the whole purpose of an industry standard. They are not written by some outside independent "expert". They are written by people that are direct competitors in order to promote their industry. I am a mechanical engineer. We have drafting standards from the ASME. This isn't some independent group. The members of the committee included people from Boeing, GM, Caterpillar, Raytheon, Thiokol, Ford, Lockeed, ect. All people that had a vested interest in coming up with a standard way to interpret drawings. The reason for the standard is so that drawings can be sent to subcontractors and they can be interpreted unambiguously. It didn't serve the industry well to have all different types of drawing standards. Also the standard only applies to the important things required to make hardware from drawings. It allows enough flexibility for companies to craft the standard to fit their way of working. This also helps the CAD software makers who can create software by giving them a start for a requirements document for the software. All of this helps the industry as a whole and isn't done to benefit one company over another.
I'll throw my 2 cents in here. I'm a mechanical engineer that also has a computer science degree. I work primarily in a CAD software called Pro/Engineer. But that is just a tool to design the finished product which is the machine or device. If my employer wanted to hire someone that new another CAD package they would be stupid to get a new hire and pay them more than me. They may know the software but they don't have 15 years of design and engineering experience.
The same is true with software. The product is what is important. The language or skill can be learned rather easily from an experienced software engineer. What the new hire is missing is all of the experience on how to get requirements from people that might not even know them themselves, how to divide the project up into logical portions, and everything else you learn by experience.
I used to try to card count in Atlantic City but I gave up because they used 8 deck shoes and shuffled half way through. The method I used a running total when you gave face cards and aces +1 and 2 through 6 -1. Then when the count became very positive you upped your bet. The problem is it only shifts the advantage a little bit. You need a big ass backroll to keep playing minimum bets through the times the deck isn't in your favor. If you have a team it's a bit easier since you can have someone standing behind the players watching and when the deck gets hot you can signal to someone else (big roller) to jump in. But the pit bosses are on the look out for this. With an 8 deck shoe the deck never got very hot and by the time it did they would reshuffle.
Your analogy to Wall St. as a Casino is correct. There are two sides. The speculator and the investor. The speculator is like the customer that has a plan on how they are going to enter the casino and win. They have betting patterns and card counting and other tricks. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it works for a long time. Eventually the odds catch up to most people and they lose. The Casino itself is the investor. They are willing to deal with short term gains and losses with the knowledge that overall their investment will return small steady gains.
It's the same with the stock market. Over the long term index funds do go up because companies become more valuable due to growth and inflation. If you day trade or even buy individual stocks you are speculating that you can beat the house. It is only for speculators that these market manipulations cause problems. If you are a long term investor like the Casino you don't even notice the small ups and downs.
The signal to blow the hold down bolts and light the SRB are done only through timing. There is no check to see if both SRB's are lit before blowing the hold down bolts. So if you assume all the hold down bolts blow The stack would cart wheel either into the tower or away from the tower and kill everyone on board. If the hold down bolts didn't fire they are not strong enough to restrain the thrust from one SRB so the one that was light would rip off the pad (The skirt might give way too, I'm not sure which one is stronger). With the Other SRB clamped in it would most likely rupture the ET which connects the SRB's and one SRB would go flying away with part of the ET. The Orbiter would most likely rip off the remains of the ET and fall into the flame trench.
That is why there are lots of redundancies. It is also why spaceflight is so dangerous. There are a lot of critical systems that have to work.
Here are things the survey says are false and the percentage of Fox News viewers that believe it.
My comments are in parenthesis.Most questions are opinions or confusing definitions not facts. It is obvious that this people that made this survey intended it to show people don't agree with their interpretation of the facts.
91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs
(Opinion. We have lost jobs since the stimulus was passed no way to say whether the stimulus helped or hurt)
72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
(Opinion)
72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
(Opinion. Based on what measure?)
60 percent believe climate change is not occurring
(Opinion. At least this one has some scientific backing)
49 percent believe income taxes have gone up
(Confusing definition. People know the tax cuts are expiring and haven't been renewed)
63 percent believe the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts
(Confusing definition. Cuts to whom and how much)
56 percent believe Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout
(Confusing definition. Bailout happened during 2009. Bush may have started it but Obama didn't stop it.)
38 percent believe that most Republicans opposed TARP
(First somewhat good question. Could be phrased "Most Republican Congresspeople voted against TARP. You could actually verify this. Just saying Republicans doesn't mean elected politicians)
63 percent believe Obama was not born in the U.S. (or that it is unclear)
(Second good question. Documents have been produced that show he was born in the US)
In engineering we use laser scanners that use a laser as a rangefinder to find out how far from the camera each pixel is. You then shoot from different perspectives to build a 3D scene that you can move around in.
http://www.faro.com/3dimager/videos/
Of course you know the NASA space pen story is a myth. Fisher invented the pen on their own dime. Both NASA and the Russians used pencils before these pens were available. They went to these pens because broken graphite in zero G and pure oxygen can cause shorts in electronics and burn in a fire.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
I am against the entire intellectual "property" concept to begin with. The fact the have to precede a perfectly good word like property with a modifier just shows that it isn't property to begin with it's an idea. If you take my idea I don't lose the idea. One thing to remember is that fraud laws would work well to make sure that people couldn't copy products exactly. If you try to sell a DVD that you copied as a Disney DVD you would be committing fraud since Disney did not create that DVD. But if you sold it as a copy of a Disney movie you would be OK. There is a fine distinction there because it allows people to know if they are buying real or knockoff products. Just like you can't patent a watch design. Someone can make a Rolex knockoff and Call it Rolexx but if they put the Rolex name or Trademark on it they are committing fraud since they are claiming it is a Rolex product.
Usually the Measurement equipment is calibrated at 20C and that is what a standard note on the drawing would call out.
If it was a steel part the CTE is around 18 micrometer per (meter C). So for a 5 m part for every degree C you would have.09 mm change in length.
I am a mechanical engineer and sometimes you forget to check the tolerance on every dimension and the CAD standard applies. The problem with working for the government is the bid is based on the RFQ. In the real world the shop can call the engineer and ask if they really needed it that tight and usually it was something that was missed.
Did you ever notice how in Catholic South and Central America there are many people with Native American ancestor while in Protestant North America there is hardly any? That is because the backwards Catholic Church in Spain argued the principle that human rights exist for all people even the natives of the Americas. In reality it was difficult to police people half way around the world but facts speak for themselves. There are a lot more people with native american ancestry in the Catholic American countries.
The constitution grants Congress the ability to grant exclusive rights to authors and inventors to promote science and art. I think we can say the current system does not promote science or art. One of the things to remember is that 200 years ago it took a while for information to travel and for a book or product to be rolled out. Today it happens almost instantly and patents and copyrights no longer serve any useful purpose. The only IP I think should exist is Trademarks. They are not a product but an identification. They allow a means for products to be associated with a company. To violate one is fraud because you are trying to pass off your product as that of an established company. The trademark does not exist except for this purpose.
I invented discovered Pi on my own in Middle School Geometry. I remember it well. We were doing perimeters and I thought to myself what happens to the perimeter as the number of sides approached infinity and you get near a circle. I came up with my own formula for calculating Pi. Now of course I didn't realize that Archimedes did it about 2500 years ago.
I work for NASA and sometimes I am responsible for those types of products. We get very special requests for equipment to work on the Space Shuttle. The first thing we do is try to find off the shelf solutions. If nothing suitable can be found we look for something close that can be modified. Only as a last resort do we actually design a tool from scratch. We have designed an built what was a $50,000 pair of vice grips. It had to produce a specific gripping force, be made of non sparking and non marring materials, be Liquid Oxygen compatible, and reach in at a certain angle. We looked all over for something that would work but we ended up having to make it ourselves. The alternative was to completely disassemble the Main Propulsion Line of an Orbiter which would have taken a year and cost tens of millions of dollars. So if someone wanted to make a big deal of it you could say we wasted $50,000 on a pair of pliers. In reality we saved tens of millions of dollars.
I work at KSC so I go to watch every launch in the VAB parking lot. It's one of those things that is almost impossible to convey. The experience can't be recreated with the current technology. The sound is so loud that from 3 miles away car alarms go off and loose clothing dances on your body. The light is so intense it's like watching someone weld with a gas torch. What you see on HD isn't even close because the TV can't put out that kind of brightness. After watching a launch the SRB exhaust flames are burned into your retinas for about an hour.
Companies always start lean and mean. That is how they get successful. But once Space X kills someone you can bet a layer of checks "bureaucracy" will sneak in. After 50 years you will have more managers and safety people than people doing the work to begin with. A private company might be able to last a little longer but as all the big banks show even they get sloppy and go under until they are bailed out by the taxpayers.
FALSE on your False.
The bill passed by Congress was an Authorization Bill not an Appropriations Bill. Just because they said what they want doesn't mean they will pay for it.
For a corporation is that 17% of profit or income?
If we aren't going to borrow any more money I would just default on the debt. That would make sure you can't borrow anymore because nobody would lend you the money.
I'd rather just tax corporations at 10% of revenue since they enjoy the limited liability that individuals don't get. And a 20% tariff on all goods entering the country. This would be easy to collect since you only have to collect at the ports of entry and companies. That lets individuals and S-corps operate tax free.
The people being laid off are not NASA employees. I should know because I am one. We don't get laid off. Contractors do. In fact that is what they are there for because you can't lay off government employees.
Second. The people working on shuttle knew it would end. That isn't a big deal. The big deal was the renaming of Constellation. We had an administrator a few years ago named Mike Griffen. He was under the impression that having two rockets and all of their infrastructure would be cheaper than 1 or using existing rockets.
Finally this bill sucks because it again has NASA owning and operating a rocket. That will eat up our budget forever. We cannot afford to have a rocket AND build something to launch on it. The only answer was to get NASA out of the rocket business and into the spacecraft business. Work with our DOD launchers Atlas V and Delta IV and other launchers like Falcon, Ariane 5, Proton, Soyuz. I do think the NASA should contract out the design and building of a deep space return capsule in parallel with the private sector until those are ready just as a backup. This way we can concentrate on spacecraft and the missions and not pay for an Army to keep the launchpads ready for 2 launches a year. The taxpayers have already paid for 2 great launchers and Elon is building a 3rd. In a few years DOD will start the design for the next generation of launchers and Congress should make sure they are man rated which too hard to do if you have the requirements from the start.
The Obama administration had it right on this one.
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This author has a completely backward way at looking at things. Income is only half of the equation. What you can buy with that income is the other half. What things can you get with the work you do. Productivity increase is good because you can create more with less work. This means things get cheaper and you can earn less and live better. This is called deflation. The problem is the financial industry and politicians refuse to let deflation happen. They see it as an enemy that must be conquered. So they inflate the money supply and give that money to politicians to spend. So what ends up happening is productivity increases are given away and the citizens are never able to gain their benefit even though their income is lower.
I like to use StarTrek as an example. They have a replicator. Once you have a replicator you never HAVE to work again. Anything you want including another replicator can be made. Are the people all of a sudden poor? Technically yes since they no work for money. In fact they are flat broke. But are they living better? Of course.
I worked for years as a mechanical engineer in the automation industry. All we did was put people out of work by automating routine tasks. That is how we become more productive. Engineering is all about using your mind to improve the way things are done. This inevitably means putting some people out of work. The beauty of a free market system is that labor can move to where it is needed the most. For example.
I helped build a machine that assembled carburetors for Briggs and Stratton. Before there was an assembly line that ran 2 shifts with 12 people each shift. The machine allowed 2 technicians to build the same number of carburetors with less scrap in one shift. So 24 people were out of a job. How can this be good? Because it frees up those peoples labor so other things can be done. When someone first starts making something it usually isn't beneficial to automate because of the capital costs. But if the product is successful and the demand it there it makes sense to automate. Then free up the labor to go to where it is needed more.
That is the whole purpose of an industry standard. They are not written by some outside independent "expert". They are written by people that are direct competitors in order to promote their industry. I am a mechanical engineer. We have drafting standards from the ASME. This isn't some independent group. The members of the committee included people from Boeing, GM, Caterpillar, Raytheon, Thiokol, Ford, Lockeed, ect. All people that had a vested interest in coming up with a standard way to interpret drawings. The reason for the standard is so that drawings can be sent to subcontractors and they can be interpreted unambiguously. It didn't serve the industry well to have all different types of drawing standards. Also the standard only applies to the important things required to make hardware from drawings. It allows enough flexibility for companies to craft the standard to fit their way of working. This also helps the CAD software makers who can create software by giving them a start for a requirements document for the software. All of this helps the industry as a whole and isn't done to benefit one company over another.
I'll throw my 2 cents in here. I'm a mechanical engineer that also has a computer science degree. I work primarily in a CAD software called Pro/Engineer. But that is just a tool to design the finished product which is the machine or device. If my employer wanted to hire someone that new another CAD package they would be stupid to get a new hire and pay them more than me. They may know the software but they don't have 15 years of design and engineering experience.
The same is true with software. The product is what is important. The language or skill can be learned rather easily from an experienced software engineer. What the new hire is missing is all of the experience on how to get requirements from people that might not even know them themselves, how to divide the project up into logical portions, and everything else you learn by experience.
I used to try to card count in Atlantic City but I gave up because they used 8 deck shoes and shuffled half way through. The method I used a running total when you gave face cards and aces +1 and 2 through 6 -1. Then when the count became very positive you upped your bet. The problem is it only shifts the advantage a little bit. You need a big ass backroll to keep playing minimum bets through the times the deck isn't in your favor. If you have a team it's a bit easier since you can have someone standing behind the players watching and when the deck gets hot you can signal to someone else (big roller) to jump in. But the pit bosses are on the look out for this. With an 8 deck shoe the deck never got very hot and by the time it did they would reshuffle.
Your analogy to Wall St. as a Casino is correct. There are two sides. The speculator and the investor. The speculator is like the customer that has a plan on how they are going to enter the casino and win. They have betting patterns and card counting and other tricks. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it works for a long time. Eventually the odds catch up to most people and they lose. The Casino itself is the investor. They are willing to deal with short term gains and losses with the knowledge that overall their investment will return small steady gains. It's the same with the stock market. Over the long term index funds do go up because companies become more valuable due to growth and inflation. If you day trade or even buy individual stocks you are speculating that you can beat the house. It is only for speculators that these market manipulations cause problems. If you are a long term investor like the Casino you don't even notice the small ups and downs.
The signal to blow the hold down bolts and light the SRB are done only through timing. There is no check to see if both SRB's are lit before blowing the hold down bolts. So if you assume all the hold down bolts blow The stack would cart wheel either into the tower or away from the tower and kill everyone on board. If the hold down bolts didn't fire they are not strong enough to restrain the thrust from one SRB so the one that was light would rip off the pad (The skirt might give way too, I'm not sure which one is stronger). With the Other SRB clamped in it would most likely rupture the ET which connects the SRB's and one SRB would go flying away with part of the ET. The Orbiter would most likely rip off the remains of the ET and fall into the flame trench. That is why there are lots of redundancies. It is also why spaceflight is so dangerous. There are a lot of critical systems that have to work.
Here are things the survey says are false and the percentage of Fox News viewers that believe it. My comments are in parenthesis.Most questions are opinions or confusing definitions not facts. It is obvious that this people that made this survey intended it to show people don't agree with their interpretation of the facts.
91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs (Opinion. We have lost jobs since the stimulus was passed no way to say whether the stimulus helped or hurt)
72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit (Opinion)
72 percent believe the economy is getting worse (Opinion. Based on what measure?)
60 percent believe climate change is not occurring (Opinion. At least this one has some scientific backing)
49 percent believe income taxes have gone up (Confusing definition. People know the tax cuts are expiring and haven't been renewed)
63 percent believe the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (Confusing definition. Cuts to whom and how much)
56 percent believe Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout (Confusing definition. Bailout happened during 2009. Bush may have started it but Obama didn't stop it.)
38 percent believe that most Republicans opposed TARP (First somewhat good question. Could be phrased "Most Republican Congresspeople voted against TARP. You could actually verify this. Just saying Republicans doesn't mean elected politicians)
63 percent believe Obama was not born in the U.S. (or that it is unclear) (Second good question. Documents have been produced that show he was born in the US)
Crap. Sorry wrong link. http://www.faro.com/focus/us/videos
In engineering we use laser scanners that use a laser as a rangefinder to find out how far from the camera each pixel is. You then shoot from different perspectives to build a 3D scene that you can move around in. http://www.faro.com/3dimager/videos/
Of course you know the NASA space pen story is a myth. Fisher invented the pen on their own dime. Both NASA and the Russians used pencils before these pens were available. They went to these pens because broken graphite in zero G and pure oxygen can cause shorts in electronics and burn in a fire. http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
It's the 2010 External tank that is leaking not the 1970's Orbiter.
I am against the entire intellectual "property" concept to begin with. The fact the have to precede a perfectly good word like property with a modifier just shows that it isn't property to begin with it's an idea. If you take my idea I don't lose the idea. One thing to remember is that fraud laws would work well to make sure that people couldn't copy products exactly. If you try to sell a DVD that you copied as a Disney DVD you would be committing fraud since Disney did not create that DVD. But if you sold it as a copy of a Disney movie you would be OK. There is a fine distinction there because it allows people to know if they are buying real or knockoff products. Just like you can't patent a watch design. Someone can make a Rolex knockoff and Call it Rolexx but if they put the Rolex name or Trademark on it they are committing fraud since they are claiming it is a Rolex product.
Usually the Measurement equipment is calibrated at 20C and that is what a standard note on the drawing would call out. If it was a steel part the CTE is around 18 micrometer per (meter C). So for a 5 m part for every degree C you would have .09 mm change in length.
I am a mechanical engineer and sometimes you forget to check the tolerance on every dimension and the CAD standard applies. The problem with working for the government is the bid is based on the RFQ. In the real world the shop can call the engineer and ask if they really needed it that tight and usually it was something that was missed.
And Keynes was the last economic magician.
Did you ever notice how in Catholic South and Central America there are many people with Native American ancestor while in Protestant North America there is hardly any? That is because the backwards Catholic Church in Spain argued the principle that human rights exist for all people even the natives of the Americas. In reality it was difficult to police people half way around the world but facts speak for themselves. There are a lot more people with native american ancestry in the Catholic American countries.
The constitution grants Congress the ability to grant exclusive rights to authors and inventors to promote science and art. I think we can say the current system does not promote science or art. One of the things to remember is that 200 years ago it took a while for information to travel and for a book or product to be rolled out. Today it happens almost instantly and patents and copyrights no longer serve any useful purpose. The only IP I think should exist is Trademarks. They are not a product but an identification. They allow a means for products to be associated with a company. To violate one is fraud because you are trying to pass off your product as that of an established company. The trademark does not exist except for this purpose.
I invented discovered Pi on my own in Middle School Geometry. I remember it well. We were doing perimeters and I thought to myself what happens to the perimeter as the number of sides approached infinity and you get near a circle. I came up with my own formula for calculating Pi. Now of course I didn't realize that Archimedes did it about 2500 years ago.
I work for NASA and sometimes I am responsible for those types of products. We get very special requests for equipment to work on the Space Shuttle. The first thing we do is try to find off the shelf solutions. If nothing suitable can be found we look for something close that can be modified. Only as a last resort do we actually design a tool from scratch. We have designed an built what was a $50,000 pair of vice grips. It had to produce a specific gripping force, be made of non sparking and non marring materials, be Liquid Oxygen compatible, and reach in at a certain angle. We looked all over for something that would work but we ended up having to make it ourselves. The alternative was to completely disassemble the Main Propulsion Line of an Orbiter which would have taken a year and cost tens of millions of dollars. So if someone wanted to make a big deal of it you could say we wasted $50,000 on a pair of pliers. In reality we saved tens of millions of dollars.
I work at KSC so I go to watch every launch in the VAB parking lot. It's one of those things that is almost impossible to convey. The experience can't be recreated with the current technology. The sound is so loud that from 3 miles away car alarms go off and loose clothing dances on your body. The light is so intense it's like watching someone weld with a gas torch. What you see on HD isn't even close because the TV can't put out that kind of brightness. After watching a launch the SRB exhaust flames are burned into your retinas for about an hour.
Companies always start lean and mean. That is how they get successful. But once Space X kills someone you can bet a layer of checks "bureaucracy" will sneak in. After 50 years you will have more managers and safety people than people doing the work to begin with. A private company might be able to last a little longer but as all the big banks show even they get sloppy and go under until they are bailed out by the taxpayers.
I was kind of hoping the next one would have wings so we could land it on a runway in a civilized manner. Now we will drop them back into an ocean.
FALSE on your False. The bill passed by Congress was an Authorization Bill not an Appropriations Bill. Just because they said what they want doesn't mean they will pay for it.
For a corporation is that 17% of profit or income? If we aren't going to borrow any more money I would just default on the debt. That would make sure you can't borrow anymore because nobody would lend you the money. I'd rather just tax corporations at 10% of revenue since they enjoy the limited liability that individuals don't get. And a 20% tariff on all goods entering the country. This would be easy to collect since you only have to collect at the ports of entry and companies. That lets individuals and S-corps operate tax free.
The people being laid off are not NASA employees. I should know because I am one. We don't get laid off. Contractors do. In fact that is what they are there for because you can't lay off government employees.
Second. The people working on shuttle knew it would end. That isn't a big deal. The big deal was the renaming of Constellation. We had an administrator a few years ago named Mike Griffen. He was under the impression that having two rockets and all of their infrastructure would be cheaper than 1 or using existing rockets.
Finally this bill sucks because it again has NASA owning and operating a rocket. That will eat up our budget forever. We cannot afford to have a rocket AND build something to launch on it. The only answer was to get NASA out of the rocket business and into the spacecraft business. Work with our DOD launchers Atlas V and Delta IV and other launchers like Falcon, Ariane 5, Proton, Soyuz. I do think the NASA should contract out the design and building of a deep space return capsule in parallel with the private sector until those are ready just as a backup. This way we can concentrate on spacecraft and the missions and not pay for an Army to keep the launchpads ready for 2 launches a year. The taxpayers have already paid for 2 great launchers and Elon is building a 3rd. In a few years DOD will start the design for the next generation of launchers and Congress should make sure they are man rated which too hard to do if you have the requirements from the start. The Obama administration had it right on this one.