Heads I win. Tails you lose.

You are the one making that argument, so it's your logic.

The friend paid $5 for a $3 share of the cost. That's where the "profit" comes from. And I wouldn't be surprised if the original poster agrees with your assertion that this isn't a profit.

Even if it were written in stone, we have the following:

Just written notice and one year later you are free of the entanglements of the treaty and it's just as written into stone as the rest of the treaty. That's why having Congress pass laws like this is interesting. It provides an easily attainable alternate framework to the original treaty.

If this particular branch of the NSF is involved in actual national security, or even just merely near it, then there's something very wrong. Like a teacher assuring you his classroom will be safe because he wears a condom.

Sometimes that statement turns out to be wrong. And when it does, you occasionally get some amazing stuff.

For a physics example, group theory turns out to have several remarkable applications. One can derive the elementary subatomic particles from it, for example, or determine the vibration modes of gases of molecules with symmetries.

Or geometry applied to dynamical systems helps study the existence and properties of chaotic behavior. For example, local divergence of solutions to a differential equation can be determined by the curvature of the solution space (it happens when the curvature is negative, meaning the space has a sort of "saddle" shape) and a bounded set of locally divergent solutions in a finite dimensional space exhibits chaotic behavior (well to my knowledge, I may be ignorant of important exceptions).

One of the powers of math is that when you have a mathematical theory or model, if the premises of the thing apply, then so do its consequences and conclusions - even if you are completely ignorant of the theory and the association with whatever system you're dealing with.

Some fields are particularly amenable to transplant into other areas. Information theory is one of these fields that transplants to a wide range of fields, though perhaps not easily. The reason is that a lot of scientific analysis boils down to extrapolating from a heavily transformed dependent observation the actual phenomena we wish to observe. Information theory provides a variety of tools for trying to find underlying phenomena for derived observations (such as interpreting what a seismograph network is observing deep underground from altered vibrations that originated with known small earthquakes throughout the world).

And there too is another feature of Dragon. The high usage rate will make them safer than the "safe" choice. Sure, that assurance won't help when you have clueless news reporters with mics. That's what a good PR department is for. Admittedly, Boeing's PR is better than SpaceX's.

300% of what? You're making the unwarranted assumption that the telescope would have cost less. I don't see that happening. I think it would have cost about the same amount either way. That's because that's how much money was available to be snagged.

From the article:

So we have background checks concerning membership in terrorist organizations for this? Seriously? I can see some degree of care is required for jobs that have national security relevance, but this is stupid. If she doesn't have felony convictions in the past seven years, then that's good enough for me. I don't see that the feds even should have the authority to ask about association with terrorist groups in a situation like this.

For people who complain that she lied, well, maybe she did. But the employer should have an responsibility to not create the opportunity for such things. If they hadn't asked her, she wouldn't have allegedly lied, served her two years, and life would move on without an excess of drama.

While bledri gave a sensible reply, there are a few things I think bear mentioning.

First, I doubt that you've never heard of some peoples' desire to colonize space. So your "no purpose" is merely a purpose that you choose not to back. It remains that manned spaceflight is a necessary precursor to colonization. You can't do colonization for a tenth or hundredth of the price using unmanned missions. And if you want to do such colonization sooner rather than later, then manned spaceflight needs to be sooner as well.

Second, space development not just about science (again as bledri noted). What bears mentioning here is that space science is only as useful as what we end up doing in space. If we have a lot of people living in space, then space science is very useful. If we don't then it's just another very expensive hobby.


Finally, there's the matter of how effective unmanned missions could be. The whole program is achingly slow to the point that scientist can and do die of old age before resolving unknown problems brought up in a previous unmanned mission. So sure, if your idea of doing things in space, are a few space probes (and I consider the 100 or so currently active NASA space science missions just a few), then it doesn't make sense to manned missions for scientific endeavors. A Mars rover putting around for half a decade does about as much research as two people in two days, but that's ok as long as all you want to do is check off a box ("doing Mars science?" "Check!").

Even if you don't have a human presence on site, having people a fraction of a light second away rather than a light hour really steps up that game.

And I haven't even touched on my main beef with unmanned efforts - completely ignoring powerful economies of scale (for example, making several probes at a time rather than a never ending series of one-off missions in order to spread development costs over more science-producing probes).

So to summarize, you aren't the only person with space-oriented purposes (and some of those other purposes do require manned spaceflight) and a manned presence, which necessarily means manned spaceflight, would really help space science, the thing you are interested in, both by enabling it to be more effective with a shorter command loop, and by providing a far stronger rationalization for the pursuance of space science than merely idle intellectual curiosity.

"Theory" also means scientifically a body of knowledge, like "information theory". It has multiple meanings in the scientific world too.

No, it's because it's a one-off mission with no incentive to cut costs beyond what money is available to consume. Even without human spaceflight, you could make this spacecraft cheaper per unit and more reliable, just by making more than one of them.

The topic I'm discussing is the unrealistic figures produced by people who call themselves economists (despite showing "almost no knowledge at all") with respect to energy projects as complained about by the post above.

I recall you didn't actually provide any such qualifier in the statement that kicked off this little thread. "As far as economists see it, it is free." That's a pretty broad brush. But now, you now claim you referred to "economists" who aren't actually economists, but whom you choose to call "economists".

The topic I'm discussing is the unrealistic figures produced by people who call themselves economists (despite showing "almost no knowledge at all") with respect to energy projects as complained about by the post above. The topic you appear to be discussing is about pretending that specific point is a general case so that you can build a large enough strawman in my name to be easy to attack.

Like those "economists" you never actually get around to naming? That sort of straw man? I wonder if my straw men are anything like your straw men.

Originally, I was thinking the most annoying rhetorical habit you had was the a priori ruling out of knowledge for frivolous reasons such as because it comes from "economists" with "tiny minds" or blowing off yet another of my posts because it has "baggage". But how could I have forgotten the brazen hypocrisy of accusing someone of some rhetorical and all too frequently imaginary foible while amply and heavy-handedly demonstrating its use in the same complaint?

More of the same. You know when I was complaining of "poo-flinging" this is the sort of thing I had in mind.

Sounds exactly like ignoring to me. So why are you "dumbing down" economics to "almost no knowledge at all"? Or are the pet economists of the pushers of large projects forcing you to dumb down your knowledge of economics?

And really the assertion makes no sense in other ways. For example, if I oversimplify the theory of gravity (say to support my assertion that the Earth is flat), that doesn't invalidate Newtonian mechanics or general relativity. So why should an oversimplified, or even merely terrible explanation of economics for personal gain, invalidate economics? Actual knowledge doesn't work that way.

So why are these "problems" bad enough that they justify fuel taxes? As to problem number 4, sure, the money could be used to pay down debt, but it probably won't.