NASA To Continue Funding Canceled Ares Project Until March 229
wooferhound passes along this quote from the Orlando Sentinel:
"Thanks to congressional inaction, NASA must continue to fund its defunct Ares I rocket program until March — a requirement that will cost the agency nearly $500 million at a time when NASA is struggling with the expensive task of replacing the space shuttle. About one-third of that money — $165 million — will go to Alliant Techsystems, or ATK, which has a $2 billion contract to build the solid-rocket first stage for the Ares I, the rocket that was supposed to fill the shuttle's role of transporting astronauts to the International Space Station. ... The odd scenario, in which NASA is throwing money at a canceled rocket program but can't fund a modernization program, is because of several twists in the legislative process that started a year ago and came to a head this month. At the root of the problem is a 70-word sentence inserted into the 2010 budget — by lawmakers seeking to protect Ares I jobs in their home states — that bars NASA from shutting down the program until Congress passed a new budget a year later. That should have happened before the Oct. 1 start of the federal fiscal year. But Congress never passed a 2011 budget and instead voted this month to extend the 2010 budget until March — so NASA still must abide by the 2010 language."
NASA modernization program? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems odd that the US space agency needs a "modernization program". Obviously, it should be called something else since NASA still plans on using Russia's own antiquated hardware to keep the ISS going.
Anyhow, I don't understand why we should be so happy that NASA is funding a program that it's not planning on using---regardless of where the funding is coming from.
Well, it's only money. After all, it's not like they are taking your money, out of your wallet.
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Well, it's only money. After all, it's not like they are taking your money, out of your wallet.
Pork -- welfare for the rich. Will no one think of the rich children?
I'm fine with feeding and housing the poor, but most welfare in the US goes to the rich, who get the lion's share of everything government supplies.
Re:NASA modernization program? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:NASA modernization program? (Score:4, Interesting)
He's just bitching because the people who pay 90% of the taxes get a few breaks here and there. Apparently, if you're part of the small percentage of the population who actually keep the country running, you shouldn't get any special treatment. That's his idea of "fairness".
Re:NASA modernization program? (Score:4, Insightful)
If there wasn't a large wealth disparity in the US (Gini index for reference [wikipedia.org]), perhaps the majority of taxes wouldn't come from such minority of people.
Probably that wasn't the fix you were looking for though...
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Imagine that - a small subset of the population is better than the rest. The nerve of some people. How dare they stand out from the crowd? Clearly the communists had it right - we must force ALL people into standard-sized molds. I propose we start by making one-size-fits-all shoes.
Re:NASA modernization program? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly the problem with the rich. They genuinely believe that their wealth is evidence that they are part of a minority of people who work harder and are superior to the rest. Some people get lucky, and most people don't. I really have trouble believing that anybody, rich or otherwise, is working a million dollars harder than the average man.
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This is exactly why you'll never be rich.
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There was a recent study that showed that less than one-third of American millionaires inherited their wealth. How have the other two-thirds achieved this status by "luck"?
No, by inflation.
Seriously, when the lottery first came out, a million dollar payout of $20,000 per year for 50 years was an amazing amount - I could have retired at 21 years of age and lived off that indefinitely. Now, a million dollars cash in hand is barely enough to retire on at age 67.
Re:NASA modernization program? (Score:4, Informative)
There was a recent study that showed that less than one-third of American millionaires inherited their wealth. How have the other two-thirds achieved this status by "luck"?
Yes very much by luck. Being born into wealth gives people all kinds of opportunities that the average-born do not have. I should know since I grew up in exactly that kind of environment and I am one of those millionaires who did not inherit as I haven't taken a dime from my parents since college. I know plenty of people who are smarter and harder working than I am but just didn't have the good fortune of making the right connections. Plus, I say your numbers are skewed. My numbers [americanprogress.org] say that being born into the top quintile of wealth gives one a 22% chance of ending up in the top 5% - that leaves practically nothing for the other 80% of the population.
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There was a recent study that showed that less than one-third of American millionaires inherited their wealth. How have the other two-thirds achieved this status by "luck"?
No, by inflation. Seriously, when the lottery first came out, a million dollar payout of $20,000 per year for 50 years was an amazing amount - I could have retired at 21 years of age and lived off that indefinitely. Now, a million dollars cash in hand is barely enough to retire on at age 67.
If you're poor or middle class, inflation doesn't get you a million dollars unless you invest well and really long time (decades) passes. The point of the study was to show that most millionaires in America are self-made, whether through starting businesses, investing well, or working hard at a high-income job. Very little luck or inflation had anything to do with it.
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For support of this "get lucky" philosophy, I recommend N Taleb's book "Fooled By Randomness."
People get rich by working hard, yes. People get insanely rich by working hard and getting lucky. But they tend to over-attribute the outcome to working hard and discount the effect of chance. Lots of not-rich people work very very hard, but not everyone can be lucky.
Read the book.
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Imagine that - a small subset of the population is better than the rest. The nerve of some people. How dare they stand out from the crowd? Clearly the communists had it right - we must force ALL people into standard-sized molds.
Ah the old wealth gospel. I grew up in a life of privilege - attended the most expensive private boarding school in the state, rubbed shoulders with kids of rockstars, sports franchaise owners and all kinds of captains of industry. I know plenty of such families, and, without doubt, they are no "better" than the rest. There are just as many dumbasses and leachers among them as there are among any other broad group of society. For most, the only thing they are better at is being born into the modern aris
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but in the vast majority of cases, those who are pulling in significant salaries and paying into the highest tax brackets are doing so because they nourished some trade or talent that allows them to command a high price for their time and efforts.
That would be pure sophistry. Most of those who have "nourished some trade or talent" were only able to do so because they were rich enough and connected enough in the first place. The chance of a child from a low income family making it into the top 5% of earners is roughly 1% while kids born into the top 20% have a 22% chance of making it there. Intergenerational mobility in the USA is less than that of France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark - we're only ahead of the UK and then j
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...one-size-fits-all shoes
That would violate my constitutional rights which forbids cruel and unusual punishment.
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A) You make the flase assumption that more money = better people. It does not.
B) You make an argument to the extreme.
So your whole post is a one logical fallacy or another. And after reading your others post, there all almost entire logical fallacies. So basically you are a troll. I wish I had realized you where a attention starved troll before replying. Oh well, I guess years of being alone has allowed to to craft you troll tendencies to a fine art.
well done, you lonely bastard.
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The word "better" is subjective, I'm not taking anything to an extreme, and you obviously don't understand what a "logical fallacy" is. So basically you are a troll.
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"small percentage of the population who actually keep the country running"
Which is more likely to work, all workers and no capitalists or all capitalists and no workers? No, they do not keep the country running. They are a big part of the reason that the country is not running well at this point.
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Re: "capitalist" ..... you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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Capitalist fits perfectly in those sentences. Are you sure you know what the word means?
That doesn't make the claim correct (you'll produce more cars with all capital - a robot filled factory for example - than you will with all labor), but the "worker" and "capitalist" terms are used just fine.
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I would ask where the robots came from. Capital cannot produce them, workers do.
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Where they come from is irrelevant once they exist. And no workers do not produce them, a combination of workers and capital does.
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Referring to my above, could you get robots with all capital and no workers? No. You could with all workers and no capital. Workers make things, capital controls what is made, when it is made, by whom it is made, &c. But you *have* to have workers. Capital is optional, but usually controlling.
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Sure if the global population is 1,000,000* people capital is optional.
And "have to"? You know for a fact it is impossible to have a self sustaining automated system that produces stuff? The sun seems pretty much self sustaining (well over a reasonable time span in terms of humans) without any input from workers and yet produces heat and light just fine.
You really think it is a physical impossibility for machines to be built which maintain the existing machines and build new ones so that there is no human l
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"Sure if the global population is 1,000,000* people capital is optional."
It is optional at any level. I am not arguing that it is efficient, desirable, or any other such argument, only that it is, ultimately, optional.
"And "have to"? You know for a fact it is impossible to have a self sustaining automated system that produces stuff? The sun seems pretty much self sustaining (well over a reasonable time span in terms of humans) without any input from workers and yet produces heat and light just fine."
A, I t
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We can not feed 6 billion people by gathering food with our bare hands.
As soon as you give a farmer a hoe or a spade he is now a capitalist since he owns some capital. Or give him some land to use exclusively, he is now a capitalist again.
Unless you mean a system in which no one "owns" anything, though I would say that's the same as a system in which everything has shared ownership of everything and hence everyone is a capitalist as soon as one spade is built.
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"We can not feed 6 billion people by gathering food with our bare hands."
I don't recall saying we should try. I am not against tools, up to and including robots.
"As soon as you give a farmer a hoe or a spade he is now a capitalist since he owns some capital. Or give him some land to use exclusively, he is now a capitalist again."
You can make that argument, I am not disputing it. I would say that he/she/it is now both capitalist ( owner of means of production ) and worker ( worker ). I think it is good.
I
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Capitalist fits perfectly in those sentences. Are you sure you know what the word means?
Bullshit. In order for it to make any sense, you have to accept that workers can't be capitalists, and capitalists can't do work. Two assumptions for which no justification is provided. If you think what he said makes sense, you're either misreading it or you're as clueless as he is.
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No you don't. They are the standard labels in economics.
Capitalists own the capital and derive income for merely owning it. Workers work with the capital and exchange their labor for income.
That one person can be both a worker and a capitalist is irrelevant to the question of which role is more important in an economy.
Do you have trouble understanding anything that involves sets that may overlap? Does the existence of movies in which an actor does the direction mean you can't have a discussion about whether
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"Which is more likely to work, all workers and no capitalists or all capitalists and no workers?"
What a dumb argument you two are having. The question is meaningless. Both arrangements will work equally well, which is to say, not at all. It's impossible to produce goods without both capital and workers. If you had all workers, they would by default be the capitalists, as they would have to own their own capital (or sit idle, unable to produce). If you had all capitalists, they would also sit idle, unab
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That's not the argument we are having.
the argument we are having is "is capitalist a correct word to use in that context or does the statement imply that the person stating it doesn't know the meaning of the term".
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I think you know what I mean. That "small percentage that actually keep the country running". If I am in error about what you meant by the phrase, please educate me.
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It's a false dichotomy, and a stupid question. Labor has always existed, as long as there have been human beings. The difference in wealth and success between societies arises from how they organize that labor.
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I don't see it as a stupid question, but as a question to point out something. And of course labor has existed as long as people. What is the point of making that observation? And yes, how labor is organized is very important. Does any of the above mean that those who are fortunate or hard working enough to be wealthy should be able to do stupid things with my tax dollars?
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I don't see it as a stupid question, but as a question to point out something
What?
And of course labor has existed as long as people. What is the point of making that observation?
In order to address your false dichotomy.
Does any of the above mean that those who are fortunate or hard working enough to be wealthy should be able to do stupid things with my tax dollars?
It means they should be able to do stupid things with their tax dollars, but that's a completely different discussion, anyway.
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"I don't see it as a stupid question, but as a question to point out something
What?"
That it is not "a small percentage of the population" that keeps the country running. That capital doesn't keep anything running ( I would argue, currently, it is preventing things from running here ), workers do.
"And of course labor has existed as long as people. What is the point of making that observation?
In order to address your false dichotomy."
How is it a dichotomy and how is it false?
"Does any of the above mean that
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That is not what I said. I said given a choice in believing that something would be produced in two extreme situations, I would believe that all workers and no capital would produce products, and all capital and no workers would produce no products.
I believe that earned wealth is a great thing. I also believe that in earning that wealth, you probably didn't do it as much "by yourself" as you think you did.
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I think you mean
"Without capital there is no way to get resources and no incentive for the workers to work"
and not
"With capital there is no way to get resources and no incentive for the workers to work".
I think you are incorrect in this assumption. There are many who work for nothing. Called volunteers. There are many who work that they might possess the product of their work.
On resources, how does one get them? You are thinking only in term of buying them. There are other ways one could get resources.
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He's just bitching because the people who pay 90% of the taxes get a few breaks here and there.
I really really wish people would stop confusing income tax rate to total tax burden. They are not the same thing. Not even close.
The total tax burden is higher on the lower end of the economic spectrum than the upper end. Why? Because the rich have whole set of tricks to keep their total burden lower (even though the rich control about 80% of the wealth in the country).
The people who keep this country running are those who ARE NOT millionaires. They're the ones actually providing services and producing goo
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In the part of ATK I worked for, all of our money came from the government, from taxes of course, and we squandered most of it. We were not keeping the country running, we were almost wholly parisitic.
Those are 'the rich' he was talking about, and those are the kind I've encountered in my life. If you've dealt with constructive, productive rich people, in your life as a non-American, then I'm happy for your experince. It doesn't make the other side of the picture unreal though.
Re:NASA modernization program? (Score:5, Interesting)
wow.. just.. wow.
The middle class pay most of the taxes, not the rich. And the rich pays nowhere near when the amount of wealth they have would justify.
slightly over 66% of all income tax is paid by people earning between about 34K and 353K.
Exxon made billions of dollars, didn't pay a cent to the US.
When talking about taxes, 'Fair' has to so with wealth distribution, not everyone paying the same percentage.
Of course, when talking about fair taxes, the only thing that should be considered is total taxes v. total income. As it stands, the middle class carries most of that burden as well.
You are being stupid. Stop being stupid, it's beneath you.
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He's just bitching because the people who pay 90% of the taxes get a few breaks here and there.
Actually, he was using it as a metaphor, but that's beside the point.
Apparently, if you're part of the small percentage of the population who actually keep the country running, you shouldn't get any special treatment. That's his idea of "fairness".
And this is the real issue of all of this...the word "fairness". What exactly does it mean to be fair? The fact of the matter is that while there are indeed many lazy people out there, the real point is that people are NOT equal. This is caused by a variety of reasons, but I think we can agree that a few people were born with certain abilities that are more "valuable" in the market. But, that does not mean they are harder workers or even n
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http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php [truthandpolitics.org]
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Given what people getting welfare and food stamps say where I can hear them, a lot of them do not actually need the money to live on. Not only are a lot of them getting most of their food for free, they think buying cigarettes and Four Loko is part of a sound strategy for becoming self-sufficient.
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"I'm not sure you meant to use the word "welfare"."
Re-read his post. Pork is "welfare" for the rich. A complete racket by which the rich maintain themselves on our tax dollars rather than going out and earning profits by making products people want to buy.
Re:NASA modernization program? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those LINK cards don't benefit the poor, they benefit the poor's employers -- WalMart, McDonald's, etc, who aren't forced to pay their employees a living wage, because Uncle Sam kicking in a stipend. Better thay should raise the minimum wage so that a man working 40 hours a week could feed his family.
Section eight housing helps landlords at the expense of the poor; the poor tenant is paying $200 a month rent for a house or apartment that might get $250 or $300 on the open market, while the landlord is collecting another $300 or $400 from the government. This drives up rents for everyone, the poor included, while the landlord gets twice to three times what he would get if it weren't for Section 8.
TIF financing that local governments pay to get industry in depressed areas also go to the rich.
Then there's the pork I originally mentioned -- money for a project that's been cancelled is nothing but welfare, and the rich get every penny of it.
The poor get very little at all from any level of government, the rich get damned near everything.
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Sure it does.
It gives the rich something to complain about. The rich use it like a club to keep unneeded projects alive so their companies can make money.
It's the government spending money in order to keep jobs going.Jobs in places owned by the rich, who make the profits from the labor.
5$ a month is a meal. So think about that next time your sipping your 5 dollar 'coffee'.
Go down to the local welfare agency and look at how many back breaking jobs are posted at, or below, minimum wage and then tell me the ri
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Can you back up that claim? Look at who actually pays income tax...it is the rich. Who supplies the jobs? The rich. Who uses the public school system more, the firefighters, police, roads, utilities, naitonal parks, social security, food stamps, unemployment, medicare/medicaid? Definitely not the rich.
Who uses pork more? Look at your local congressmen and see what "pork" they got. I guarantee you benefit from some of those earmarks.
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They employ people if and only if they can skim off of their labor.
I think what you mean is, an employer only hires someone if hiring that person earns more than they cost. I'm awed by your "insight".
That's called making a profit, not "skimming off their labor", and it's a fundamental component of economics. I challenge you to show how any employer could stay in business despite paying employees more than the employer earns from their employment, or even paying the same as what their employment earns -- non-profits don't count (the economy wouldn't work very well if *eve
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Porkfare -- subsidies for the rich.
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Well look on the bright side, we could be saving $200 million!
http://www.theonion.com/articles/nasa-announces-plan-to-launch-700-million-into-spa,1950/ [theonion.com]
(kudos to Soulskill on the memerrific taglines lately)
What if they just don't? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Are you asking what the penalties are for breaking the law?
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No they don't, and that's the problem.
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You mean, like, checking your prostate gland, or doing a PAP smear, or checking for mammory lumps? That sort of thing? Doctors (and TSA agents) aren't penalized for doing their job, their penalized for taking advantage of their job to personally use their position of authority to commit an actual assault. Checking for a payload of PETN in your boxers is, unfortunately, now part of the job - just like it's the doctor's job to actually hold your
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You knew exactly what I meant here and when you were pretending you didn't understand what I meant above.
What is this bullshit of defending government agencies even when they break their own laws in obvious and disgusting ways? Do you think they have droit de seigneur? Divine right of fucking kings where the rulers don't have to obey the same laws as the rest of us? Magna Carta and then the US Constitution w
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A typo is a typo, and yours was not.
The TSA isn't breaking any laws - that was the entire point I was trying to get across to you, and you're still failing to understand. If you'd stop and think for a minute, you'd realize that your expanded definition of "groping" would criminalize all sorts of things, from ballet and cheer-leading to doctors and gynecologists. Initially I called you an idiot because I figured you were being intentionally oblivious - now that it's become obvious that you're actually too
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How bad would the penalties be?
I don't know, but upsetting the people who write your budget is generally not a good idea. Looked at it that way, $160 mill is cheap insurance to keep funds flowing.
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The penalties can range from no action at all to impeachment and removal of the president. It's pretty much at the
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How bad would the penalties be?
ATK would sue, and a federal judge would direct the government to pay up, plus whatever penalties the judge felt were appropriate.
Well, they were busy (Score:2)
It's not like Congress hasn't been busy recently [lexisnexis.com], and presumably NASA and its subcontractors aren't just taking the money and throwing it in a shredder. It takes time and money to properly mothball a project of that size, and in the meanwhile maybe they can make a little progress toward their goals.
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What goals? Design another new shuttle replacement that will in turn be cancelled before being completed?
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We need to learn from the pragmatists. Shuttles don't work.
The buran was mothballed after 1 successful, UNMANNED!!!!, re-entry. CLUE BAT MEET NASA.
I'm actually incredibly proud of our nation's ability to get shit into space without NASA.
My father in law works for one of these companies, guess what, they care about budgets and maximizing profit and still get to space on a schedule.
Nasa was something to behold when we threw hundreds of billions at it to develop technologies nobody was sure about. It's plac
Hubris! (Score:2)
This is good money thrown into the trashbin! Or better yet, simply shredded! There will be no finished product, no technical or scientific achievement as a result of this money. And while I might show my ignorance about the details of the Ares program, why the heck are they even developing solid fuel rockets? This is supposedly a manned program, no?
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Ignoring your ignorance of rockets, it's not Hubris. No one is saying they are better then some god.
The word you are looking for is 'pork'.
And most, if not all, of those states are... (Score:3)
red. You know, the people that want to 'cut taxes' and 'have a smaller government'.
This is what happens when the voters go for lines like 'cut taxes'. It's a stupid misdirection that leads t nowhere good. You can't generically cut taxes and reduce pork. You must go after specific pork.
But hey, everyones' for cutting pork until it's their job.
Shuttle Replacement (Score:2)
Just when you thought (Score:2)
Just when you thought Congress had run out of ways to waste money
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The soviets managed the first satellite, the manned lunar orbit, and the first robotic probe on the moon as well as plasma engine technology, and this was all done about 30 years ago.
Slavery gets shit done.
lottery (Score:2)
And the lucky lottery winner for 2011 is... ATK
OK, I know it's not a lottery -- it's on purpose (I'm sure someone intended this to happen). AND perhaps I shouldn't be picking on ATK since there's a lot of good people who work there -- I mean them no personal insult.
It looks like the bulk of the rest of the money goes to Lockheed for work on the Orion. That won't go to waste as it's likely Orion, or parts of it, will get used in some future system. It even appears Lockheed might try to put it to use
Negative competence (Score:3)
What choice is it when we only get to pick one loser or another, chosen by one of the two heads of the same monster? That's not a representative government anymore, not even close.
Meta-law? (Score:2)
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What if a law was passed invalidating all porkbarrelling clauses in federal legislation, including retroactively?
How do you know it hasn't passed already?
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What if a law was passed invalidating all porkbarrelling clauses in federal legislation, including retroactively?
It would probably be unenforceable due to vagueness: "porkbarrelling" is a subjective description applied to laws directing funds in a manner which the speaker feels does more to benefit the political interest of a legislator than the national interest.
Even if it wasn't unenforceable due to vagueness, and it wasn't a Constitutional amendment, any newer law specifically directing funds in a manner inconsistent with the "meta-law" would supercede the "meta-law" to the extent that they conflicted, as newer ena
NASA Jobs Program (Score:2)
I guess this is just so there can be some jobs in a few places in the country. We would do much better paying 1000 people to dig holes in random places and another 1000 to fill them in. Replicate that all over the country and we could have millions of government jobs and zero unemployment.
The jobs aren't coming back. The jobs were based on making stuff in the US which isn't financially responsible to do anymore. The jobs were also because more and more stuff was needed because people were spending money
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Dunno, but I'm sure those redundant, pointless jobs will be added under someone's "and he created X jobs in 2011..." political campaign slogans. After all jobs with no purpose outside the job itself is the whole point of government, unlike economic efficiency where the jobs actually have to contribute something society deems as worthwhile.
Now to find jobs that completely undo what little these new jobs do, hmmm maybe on the environmental side of things...
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Yup, it would waste less money to just send every worker a year's salary beyond their regular severance and send them home. At least then we don't have to pay to keep the lights on and churn through materials to build things we intend to throw away.
The magnitude of government waste amazes me sometimes...
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Dunno, but I'm sure those redundant, pointless jobs will be added under someone's "and he created X jobs in 2011..." political campaign slogans. After all jobs with no purpose outside the job itself is the whole point of government, unlike economic efficiency where the jobs actually have to contribute something society deems as worthwhile.
Now to find jobs that completely undo what little these new jobs do, hmmm maybe on the environmental side of things...
Umm let's go easy on the private-sector-is-nirvana please. Companies produce profit, yes. That requires being "efficient", at least with time and money, yes. Contributions to society? Not helpful to profitability. To public-relations, perhaps, so companies run ads saying "we are totally eco-everything!", true or not, and they're done with social-contribution-PR. Profitability, more often than not, leads to intense studies of how to sell the least expensive things, for the most money, as an illusion of
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Contributions to society? Not helpful to profitability.
I'm not an economist and all I know is what I learned in the standard macro/microeconomics college level courses, so it's not really my place to answer this.
But I believe the whole idea is that 1) new ideas are "worth more" to people than the re-invention of the wheel and 2) people who individually manage their scarce resources will only spend money on things that they perceive have value. As an aggregate, thi
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>>>mostly republicans
Citation please. That would be a remarkable feat, considering the republicans were a super-minority completely and totally dominated by the Democrats (controlled ~60% of the Congress). Speaking as someone outside the power base (i.e. unelected libertarian), I consider myself an impartial observer of the Rep-Dem Duopoly. And I don't comprehend how the republicans can be blamed when it was the Democrats that held the power of Congress for four years. And another ~40 years fr
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Super minority?
They certainly had enough power to filibuster everything that was looked at. That doesn't make a super minority. The last century was a Democrat run congress?
Please leave the rock youve been hiding under.
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sadly Regan was in power long enough to irreversibly damage the fabric of your society.
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Only because the Democrat Congress (which had well over 60% majority) let him.
They could have easily blocked Reagan from doing anything.
Re:cvs blame or git-blame? (Score:5, Informative)
Here [orlandosentinel.com], you fucking retard. Yes, that is TFA.
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You have no idea how government works. Funding is handled by bipartisan committees. The minority party has a lot of sway on funding, especially the GOP because the Dems have so many consrevative members that they often need to reach across the aisle to get anything done.
The problem is that your corporatist press isn't mentioning names and uses the term "lawmakers" to cover the overly business friendly GOP. Funny how that works. I had to do a lot of digging to get this:
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You are not unbiased observer. IN fact, you state leaning means your bias is most likely 'everyone who makes a viewpoint is wrong' you are mostly likely a HORRIBLE observer.
Now, you seem to suffer from the delusion that a super minority has no power. 60 percent is not totally dominated. If you would have bothered tom pay attention over the last few years, you would see where the republicans filibusters almost everything, refused to vote on well over 100 of standard nominations. They have clearly done everyt
Re: (Score:2)
Re:cvs blame or git-blame? (Score:5, Informative)
It was Republican Richard Shelby bringing the pork back home. You know a member of the party of *snicker* fiscal responsbility:
The language that keeps Constellation going was inserted into the 2010 budget last year by [corrupt] U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who sought to protect the program and Ares jobs at Marshall Space Flight Center in his home state.
His office confirmed that the language was still in effect but did not respond to e-mails seeking details.
http://www.truthistreason.net/thanks-to-congress-inaction-500-million-goes-to-defunct-rocket-program-lockheed-martin [truthistreason.net]
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Strange, if I was the head of NASA I would jump to this and use that $500 million to do something productive. There is just no way that that could come back to bite me. Not when there are so many senators and other obvious targets for the news agencies to make fun of.
You must not have gotten the news that corporations and govt have merged. $500M is going to his friends, former and future coworkers / employers. Side effects such as producing a working vehicle are not relevant to the primary goal of transferring $500M, about half from Chinese bond holders and half from taxes, to his "family".
Now if the $500M when to the department of agriculture or something, he has no "family" there so he would complain.
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I'll bet the Chinese are now laughing so hard it hurts.
America is finished with nonsense like this.
Not really, the Chinese are not laughing, no. They are too busy copying everything America does to become exactly like it. Especially the waste. For example, getting rid of all their bicycles, and putting everyone to produce, buy and sell cars for themselves and everyone. Producing many more accidents. But they have no hospitals, and nobody cares. Too busy making money with cars. Sounds familiar, doesn't it.
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Not really. Opposition to socialism is usually the result of propaganda by the rich and the powerful who are trying to keep their privileges. Of course these people aren't opposed to being given even more money and power. A good example is Wal-Mart not paying its employees enough to live on,
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Anyway, I stuffed up and really mean the adjective as in "socialist organisation" which is a simpler concept to deal with with examples like the church group I mentioned above. I probably didn't put in enough for many people to be able to work out the context.
Community charity IS socialism. (Score:2)
giving food to the poor falls under the first definition you list.
Collective - the church (or any organization)
Giving out food - distribution of goods,
And for icing, the government funds it in the way of tax deductions and exemptions.
Anyone who claims to hate socialism, but doesn't act to remove tax exemptions from donation is a hypocrite.
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Not NASA, congress. If you haven't made an effort by contacting you Representative and urge for more funding for NASA, well then you also share in the blame.