Maybe, just maybe, if the USPS wasn't required to prepay the retirement benefits for employees who haven't even been born yet (and their children who may become postal workers), they'd be able to make a profit.
Not when those payments account for a fraction of their losses.
The same old left-wing talking points get so tiresome after a while.
And I'm pretty sure there's already plenty of material at hand with which to make clubs and shivs with minimal effort.
Rather pointless to worry about, since the Russians have a gun in every Soyuz. A Soyuz launch abort is likely to end up dumping you in a forest full of wolves and bears, not a beach in the Bahamas.
NASA also does a bunch of good stuff with Earth observing satellites.
And JWST is now more than a decade late, and several hundred percent overbudget, sucking up most of the money in the unmanned spaceflight budget.
We don't even have supersonic passenger flight right here on Earth, and that engineering was solved 40 years ago.
Well, duh. That's because governments banned supersonic overflights of their territory, and left few financially-viable routes that could be flown at high speed.
Supersonic airliners aren't an engineering problem, they're a political problem.
Tax money DOES go to SpaceX. 1.6 Billion for 12 flights to the ISS.
Yeah, and? I'm guessing the government pays Fedex and/or UPS to deliver stuff on Earth, too.
Last I looked, most of SpaceX's upcoming business was from private organizations, not governments.
They do when they're forced to pay for pensions for people not even born yet!
Pre-funding pensions and benefits only accounted for about a third of the losses, last I checked. They'd still be losing billions a year, regardless.
And the continual losses kind of reinforce the fact that it should be pre-funding pensions so the money will be there to fund them after it goes out of business.
They're saying that it won't break because that's not the purpose here. The description of the experiment is:
In addition to safely integrating into the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG), the 3D Print requirements include the production of a 3D multi-layer object(s) that generate data (operational parameters, dimensional control, mechanical properties) to enhance understanding of the 3D printing process in space. Thus, some of the prints were selected to provide information on the tensile, flexure, compressional, and torque strength of the printed materials and objects. Coupons to demonstrate tensile, flexure, and compressional strength were chosen from the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards. Multiple copies of these coupons are planned for printing to obtain knowledge of strength variance and the implications of feedstock age. Each printed part is compared to a duplicate part printed on Earth. These parts are compared in dimensions, layer thickness, layer adhesion, relative strength, and relative flexibility. Data obtained in the comparison of Earth- and space-based printing are used to refine Earth-based 3D printing technologies for terrestrial and space-based applications.
The description is not "Print out a wrench so that crew members can change a rusty lug bolt". And yes, also from the description page, they include direct metal printing as part of their list of ultimate goals with 3d printing in space research.
3d printing has tons of applications here on Earth. However, this does not include general-case home 3d printing. Unfortunately, that's what most people here on Slashdot want to judge it by.
Indeed. 3d printing is not going to be suitable for mass production, for keeping a whole colony supplied in bulk components.** But for small specialty parts, it seems like an obvious answer to that piece of the equation. As the tech advances, it's just going to get more and more capable. I'm personally looking much forward to seeing whether a 3d printer that works based on thermal spraying would work out - then your production material choice would be almost limitless, pretty much any powder or small fibers you can think of that can be made to merge with the substrate through any custom combination of either temperature or velocity, and your balance between deposition rate and precision could be chosen just by rotating through nozzles of different sizes, none of the feed mechanism or material storage or anything. Your same printer could even paint, coat, sandblast, or pretty much any other post treatment on its own.
** Concerning not being able to use 3d printing for mass manufacturing: That is, assuming 3d printing as we think of it today, printing a voxel at a time. However, if you made a custom programmable 3d *molder*, where it forms a cavity of a programmable shape, that could be a different story - then you're approaching true mass production potential. Custom programmable stamping tools and other manufacturing processes could also be developed.
A lot of the slashdot crowd still thinks of 3d printers in terms of Makerbots and the like, the low end consumer-level home 3d printers. They really have no clue what professional level hardware can achieve. They'd be singing a different tune had they ever ordered 3d-printed parts from a professional 3d printing service.
The thread is populated by leftists, whose entire ideology is based around the industrial revolution. They can't even conceive of a post-industrial world, because it would put them out of business.
And, yes, the transition to digital and home manufacturing will make the cost of living implode. If I don't need piles of DVDs and books, because it's all just bits on a hard drive, I don't need rooms to store them. If I can build most of the things I need on a 3D printer when I need them, I don't need to keep many things at all around when I'm not using them. I may not even need a house at all.
But, no, rather than deal with reality, the leftists fantasize about the GLORIOUS WORKERS RISING UP TO SEIZE THE ROBOT FACTORIES FROM THE EVIL 1%!
Which is why anyone of clue should just laugh at them. Who needs the Glorious People's Resource Allocation Committee telling them what to do when they have a 3D printer in their garage?
The real story here is automation putting leftists out of a job.
There's this thing called taxes, you might have heard of it.
And, uh, who's going to be paying the taxes, when no-one is working?
That is an article of faith, not fact.
Are you seriously claiming that humans won't be able to find anything useful to do that others will pay them for?
Take a look at documentaries from the 40s to 60s, at the peak of the making-humans-work-like-machines era, marvel at how much utterly monotonous work people used to be forced to do because we didn't have the technology to replace them with EVIL ROBOTS TAKING OUR JOBS! and then marvel again at how, despite replacing all those people with EVIL ROBOTS TAKING OUR JOBS!, most people who want to work can still find a job.
It's the people who claim that EVIL ROBOTS ARE TAKING OUR JOBS! who are basing their position on faith, not facts. It's just another tiresome leftist ploy to steal money from the productive to give to the unprductive.
Lowering or removing the minimum wage means that the poor will either starve or receive food stamps.
No, that's what happens when you raise the minimum wage while keeping interest rates so low that the cost of capital makes automation much cheaper than humans. Rather than pay people to do stuff, you just borrow money to install machines that do it, instead.
You and your comrades in government are effectively paying corporations to get rid of human employees, just so you can whine about it afterwards.
And the funds for this 'universal hourly wage' comes from....where, exactly?
You don't get it, you see. The leftists I know tell me that the factory owners won't be able to sell stuff if the rest of us don't have money, so they'll give money to the government to give to us, so we'll be able to buy their stuff and they'll get rich.
It's clearly insane, but it apparently makes perfect sense in Lefty Logic.
We have a equal opportunity Calculus class -- it's fully integrated.
