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Space-X's Falcon Heavy is none of that & as an expendable is already in the $150 Million dollar range....
And this just the cost for a non-man-rated launcher, with no provision for a human transport vehicle which can land and return. Thanks for demonstrating that that $150 million to send someone to the moon is laughable.
Thy only way to get a human to the moon for $150 million is to seal him/her in a can and crash it on the surface.
but there's no *practical* reason to go there
Helium-3. Well, once we figure out fusion, which is always just ten years off.
Naah. In the 1950s, with Project Sherwood, it was ten years off. By the 1970s it was 25 years off. Currently the earliest conceivable date for a prototype power plant (that actually produces electricity) is about 2047, twenty years after the Iter project is projected to start burning tritium (2027), so it is currently 33 years off. That the "time to the first fusion power plant" appears to be a monotonically increasing function of time is not encouraging.
... Well, that and you could make some badass telescopes on the dark side.
Despite what some progressive rock bands would have you believe there is no dark side of the Moon. There is however, a far side which gets no more darkness than the near side.
Arguably, social security @ 15% and Medicare, most states add in sales taxes @ 6%, local property taxes, fuel taxes; no 60% isn't that far fetched.
This is fantasy math. The 15% (roughly) payroll tax drops to zero on income above $113,000. If you are making so much that your effective Federal tax rate is close to 43% (only levied on income above $250,000) then your payroll tax percentage is very small. And sales tax is only levied on taxable purchases - a rich person uses little of their income in this way (mostly this money is 'invested'), unlike poor people where it is a large share. So, yes, 60% is extremely far fetched.
The actual overall tax burden of the rich is only about 33.0%, not much more than the average tax burden for Americans of 30.1%. The effective U.S. tax system overall is already nearly flat, with the income tax the only prgressive component to offset extremely regressive taxes (e.g. payroll and sales).
Very well put. You have nailed the issue precisely.
This same attempt to apply facile contrarian statistical analysis to real scientific issues led to the sad flame-out of Levitt and Dubner in Super Freakonomics. You need to understand when the analytic techniques you are applying work and when they don't, and don't draw over-broad conclusions for the sake of a headline and some clicks.
... In some of the more liberal northern states, they've found up to a quadrupling of homicide just two years after banning the death penalty; those states have tended to roll back those decisions....
Name them, and provide a link.
But you can't because you are just makin' stuff up. I notice you do that an awful lot in your posts.
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Latinos are the biggest racial group in California today...
"Latino" is not a racial group, it is an ethnic group pf multiple national origins and races. And even lumping all Latinos (regardless of historical national origin and race) into one group only brings the total up to 38.1% of the population on California. Only 28% of the population actually speaks Spanish, and only 31% of the population is of historical Mexican origin.
What a bizarre screed.
How much to write your name in Mars dust using the gripper? Or draw gripper drawings in the Mars dust. Or drive around and leave tracks that spell out a message in cursive...
I think you are on to something - a way to defray the cost of the next Mars lander mission. Equip it with a dual purpose spectroscopic analysis/engraving laser, and engrave people's names on Mars rocks as it goes by. People can pay to get the name of their choice engraved on Mars, good for the next billion years or so, and a photograph of said rock beamed back to Earth.
There is no way to avoid the war any longer. The invasion has happened.
You are oversimplifying to a dangerous degree.
There is at the moment no legitimate Ukrainian government. Putin is a vile authoritarian asshole, but he is right about one thing: Yanukovych's de facto removal from office was a coup.
The illegitimate government of the United States I suppose should dissolve itself and place itself under its rightful leadership of the Queen, until such as time she and the British Parliament deign to grant independence?
What can we say about gross abuse of office (theft of $35 billion?) and the use of security forces as assassins of Yanukovich's opponents? How could Yanukovich have been removed "legitimately" under such conditions?
As for "an existential fight in the west", it's doubtful that Putin wants to absorb all of Ukraine. Keep in mind that Ukraine is a synthetic state, based on the "Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic" set up by the USSR...which was created with a bunch of ethnic Russians exactly to keep Ukrainian nationalism in check. All in all, letting Crimea go back to Russia might be in everyone's best interest...but only if it's handled in a legitimate way. Right now, nothing happening over there has any legitimacy.
Ah, but the letter of the law does not count with Crimea, eh? Where is Russia's right of armed intervention enshrined in law? If Crimea wants to join Russia the let it hold a referendum under conditions of peace, and without Russian coercion. Where is the logic that disorder from Yanukovych's misrule should award Russia with Crimea?
One quarter of all the water used in California is used to grow Alfalfa. The total value of the annual alfalfa crop is about $750 million, compared to the state's entire agricultural industry of $45 billion (i.e. it is about 1.5% of the value produced), and the state's entire economy of $1800 billion (it contributes 0.04% of the state GDP) - cities run on water too.
The only reason that alfalfa growing is profitable is that taxpayers are paying for the growers water. The alfalfa plantations pay as little as 10% of the actual cost of delivery, and furthermore have guaranteed access to the water. This is under a 1902 law to encourage family farms and were limited to 160 acre farms - but over time lobbying drove that up to the un-small size of 960-acres, and today the subsidy is given to huge corporate farms that amalgamate holdings of scores of "farms" that exist only on paper, with no families to be seen.
As with mid-west farm subsidies, benefits once handed out long ago for reasons that became irrelevant generations ago just seem impossible to shut off.
The main question is: Where does the water California is watering its crops come from, and what will California do if the source is exhausted?
The water California is watering its crops with comes primarily from rivers. The rivers are watershed from rain which condensed out of water vapor in the atmosphere. Most of that water they use then evaporates and becomes water vapor in the atmosphere where it eventually condenses and falls as rain again and feeds the rivers.
It's the water cycle that you should have learned about in elementary school.
The only reason the rivers that are the source of the water would be exhausted is if it stops raining. If that happens, it won't be because we were raising too much alfalfa.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect on devastating display: those who are utterly clueless about a subject (water resource management) have no idea how ignorant they are and "lecture" in insufferable manner about utter irrelevancies.
No one is supposing that alfalfa growing is violating the conservation of mass or sending water into the fourth dimension never to be seen again. Of course any water lost to evaporation will eventually, somewhere, fall once again as rain.
The problem is that the amount that falls where California can use it is limited, and currently inadequate for the demands placed on it. If it evaporates that is lost to any other use, when it falls again somewhere in the world, it won't be in California.
They seem to have similar effects, but these things are notoriously hard to study objectively, so anecdotal evidence is not enough to establish that they have identical effects (and it would be really weird if they did. How should such different molecules get identical pharmacokinetics and pharmarkodynamics?).
Because the "such different molecules" actually have very similar shapes and active sites and thus very similar/identical mechanisms of action - just as with all the other drug classes (peptidoglycan synthesis inhibiting antibiotics, COX inhibiting anti-inflammatories, etc.).
In other words: high power density = propensity to explode.
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So to reiterate: I'm not arguing whether Global Warning exists or not, but rather that it's stupid that people only began saying it exists because that movie came out.
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I am tempted to say something is indeed stupid here, but it is not what you are claiming is stupid.
Three dates:
"People began saying it exists" well more than 15 years before "that movie came out", and it was a political hot topic in the U.S., frequently discussed, for a decade before the movie. Your notion that "that movie" somehow created this out of nothing is so profoundly ignorant that it leaves one gasping in awe.
My last experience buying something from Radio Shack on-line. I bought a model-specific cellphone battery, and after finally receiving it (shipping was slower than advertised), I discovered that they had sent me the wrong battery. I checked the order confirmation and I had ordered the correct one, they had simply shipped me the wrong one.
How to get this fixed? If I wanted to get the battery I really ordered, I would have to buy another one. And the useless one I had? I had to wait to get an RMA label mailed to me before I could return it for a credit card refund. Guess what? I never got the RMA label!
Service experiences like that teach customers to be former customers.
Have you reconsidered a computer career?
