Isn't the moon hallow anyway?

The Federal Reserve currently gives near 0% interest to those who wish to gamble... we give them near zero money to buy treasuries and create a ponzi scheme of tax payer rip off. Why fund government debt from treasuries and give wall street free money to make money for doing absolutely nothing? Here's the practical solution: instead of giving zero interest money to wall street, make them pay reasonable interest and it will force them into productive investment. Instead, give near 0% interest money to infrastructure! An extensive maglev system can easily be funded on near 0% money... also we could do the same thing with nuclear power and other stuff required to energize and power such a system... this would also solve the fresh water crisis as new fresh water can easily be made from nuclear powered desalination... so are you going to mod me down to protect the masters on wall street? Or mod me up so we can do something about this situation we're in...

I say we make them fully and 100% accountable, and seize their global assets to the point they reach bankruptcy if necessary. The supertanker suckup option still exists but we have to stop Obama from running cover for these slimeballs and have direct action. They look at it in terms of cost to them to clean it up... our government ought to look at the cost of NOT taking action then seize control of the situation (and later of BP).

the good people at larouchepac have compiled nice laundry list of crimes they've committed floating around out there... this is compiled from state and federal testimony.

good, they all signed their own retirement papers when we vote them out of office in november.

totally safe... they're modular based on the south african pebble bed technology.

absolutely agree... we could mass produce the components in the failed auto plants that are being eaten away by rust, and rehire all the machine tool engineers that were cut and given "early retirement"... china is already working on mass produced nuclear plants in the equivalent of autoplants... they hope to get it down to 2 years build time. we need a program like this here... and not the crap that obama is proposing ($8 billion won't get us very far). it's about time we stopped living according to monetary budgets and simply set goals based on physical requirements. we don't have gold or silver to ration our building, the idea that there's some external rationing force (be it precious metals or paper or bottle caps or whatever) to limit a nation's ability to construct infrastructure is laughable (and infuriating when people cling to their old belief systems keeping themselves and the rest of us prisoners to those who control the money supply).

real regulation bans gambling. investments only benefit everyone and expand economies, move ideas forward, and improve lives when the investments are in the physical economy. the way out is to ban the speculation and return to glass-steagall standards. this proposed regulation is not regulation at all... it's more of the same casino style gambling that will continue the hyperinflation and continue the collapse. wake the hell up.

you don't see how society will improve with a properly funded space program? you should thank kennedy and the equivalent in % of GDP funding of $100 billion per year for apollo for the computer you are typing on, and various other inventions spun off as a result... a properly funded space program will reinvigorate detroit. who do you think built the rockets? all of our environmental problems will be solved as well (specifically by developing he3 fusion). don't be so short sighted as to not realize the value of new discoveries. as the physical economy expands, the improvements to social security and medicare will easily follow. if you only fund that and screw the future, then society is doomed by its own lack of imagination.

another libertarian? :(

it's a terrible plan. there is no recovery and cutting spending in a time of collapse is suicide. all the while giving $23 trillion in bank bailouts, the banks were supposed to keep buying treasuries with our own money that was created into existence. this whole "peg the budget to what the bond market will allow" idea of political economy is ridiculous especially now. we need to get rid of the fed and create a national bank that can make national investments the way banks create loans... only new money created won't be used for gambling and speculation, it will be used for physical economic growth... that includes nasa.

It's greatly underfunded as % of GDP. Fund NASA like we fund the wars and we'll have fusion, He3 mining and refining, and bases on Mars studying alien bacterial organisms and observatories seeing further than ever before. Mars is far enough out and has a thin enough atmosphere to resolve planets around other stars in detail that is not possible on Earth. Heck, nuclear decay happens more slowly out there and we don't even fully know why. The returns and rewards will pay for the "costs" many times over, and all the environmental and energy problems we face on earth will be solved from the spin off of technology. The reindustrialization that will follow such a program will recreate the middle class and children will once again strive to do something greater, for the greater good of our species, and study science and engineering. There is no reason to not go do this.

hahaha you're hilarious. get the 4th gen reactors running, introduce the thorium fuel cycle, and we have millions of years of fuel. what the hell kind of zero growth steady state weirdness do you subscribe to?

the sun will eventually die out too. i can't believe people say things like that.

get to the moon, mine the He3 there, and upgrade our power facilities to fusion, it's much more efficient anyway. we can use the he3 fuel to get to the outer solar system that is the essentially the persian gulf of fusion fuel in the gas giants... then at that point we must leave the solar system, because as you pointed out, all things must eventually come to an end, and to protect our species from a system wide eradication such as a GRB we must expand outward.

it's about efficiency. nuclear has massive process heat that can be used for industrial activity, in addition to electricity generation, water desalination, hydrogen fuel production, etc. that type of energy density is only available as you move up the physics ladder, not down.

it's not high quality energy.... there's not enough power in renewables for industrial process. think you can refine aluminum with renewables? they're fine for houses, kinda. maybe. but try running industry on that, it's impossible. we NEED a nuclear economy if we're to get off fossil fuels. there's no other way around it. nuclear is the best, highest quality, and cheapest clean energy out there. get the 4th gen plants going that can run off the waste and that eliminates the hot stuff that takes eons to decay and you're left with stuff that's safe and fine after a few decades.