What's the point of the question? If we, say, double the budget for NASA, congressional representatives will still decide what the money gets spent on. Congressional behavior can be changed just as NASA behavior can.

When NASA boosters complain about static/slowly declining funding, this is why it happens. This is well over 1% of the agency's annual budget squandered on something that everyone knew was useless. It's not even unusual. The entire manned space program has been useless for quite some time. That's over a quarter of the budget right there.

While the unmanned part of NASA is not quite as inefficient, it still prioritizes the spending of public funds (usually via development of new one-off projects) over the purposes for which those funds are allegedly spent (such as exploration of the Solar System or the study of Earth-side physical systems).

Between the two, that's a great majority of NASA's funding spent in terrible ways for at least four decades.

In that light, I think it reasonable to ask that before we increase NASA's budget, we insure that it spends its present, quite ample funding in a much more efficient way now. No more non sequiturs about how it's unfair that the big boys like the military or Medicare get to do that. Or terrible spin off arguments that totally ignore that most of NASA's spin offs would have happened anyway, the only meaningful difference being that NASA socialized the costs. Or terrible intangible benefit arguments that argue NASA does this really great but vague thing like international cooperation or inspiration, but nothing that we would spend our own money on.

Keep in mind that a few rolls also don't confirm that the dice are as loaded as you claim they are. A huge part of the problem is not that the dice are loaded, but a) nobody knows what unbiased dice roll like, and b) nobody has evidence to confirm that the current dice are as loaded as claimed.

I notice that once again, we're heavy on "narrative thinking" and light on actual evidence.

Right. Hurricane INTENSITY, let us note, is also primarily driven by short term WEATHER patterns. Which makes your observation completely pointless.

Pirate sites aren't in themselves illegal. It's the content, such as movies and such, that is illegal.

Exactly. He became the religious leader first, then the warlord, not the other way around.

Oh the drama. When something is so important that we're willing to pay well over its usual price, then it's a good thing we have do-gooders around to make sure we don't get it.

Not ever idiot with a gun takes Australians hostage. Else it would be an exciting time in Australia.

And what happens when, not if, actually crime happens because of law enforcement involvement or because the sting contributed in some significant way to the crime? We already have an example of the latter with the "Fast and Furious" operation by the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) contributing just over a couple thousand firearms (they assisted in getting those firearms smuggled over the US border to Mexico untraced and with who knows what else included in the package) to the Cartel wars in Mexico. Those firearms then showed up in numerous murder scenes (over 200 deaths by 2011, as I recall), including the death of a US border agent. The end result was that after two years, some minor characters in the smuggling operation were arrested, but not any important figures in a cartel.

The main problem here is that without the agency of the uncover agent, the crime might not have happened in the first place. But even when we know crime happens, the sting can actually make it worse in various ways (such as creating an easy, predictable route by which to commit additional crimes or enabling criminals to do worse than they could before).

You still have yet to ask why is it the job of law enforcement to offer the opportunity to engage in terrorism?

Might be referring to the numerous sting operations bordering on entrapment where the prime impetus for a group of would-be terrorists turns out to be an undercover federal agent encouraging them to cause trouble.

You know, most of that willful environmental destruction does something useful in the process. Meanwhile Greenpeace's "one" "mistake" is more of the entirely useless showboating they've done for decades.

Mathematics is not truth. It is in a sense logical consequences. If certain premises hold, then certain consequences follow. The premises need not be true in our reality in order for us to study them mathematically.

You still have to show that the premises (such as your hypotheses) hold. That is beyond the ability of mathematics and leads you into some variation of empiricism such as scientific observation.

The only way to sell such a car is as a lease where the car gets junked at the end of lease. Else you'll suffer a reputation hit from all the people who held onto the car past the cutoff - that would mean lower demand for your products. But a lot of the value in leasing is selling the vehicle at the end of the lease. So this means a substantial loss in return. So you need a vehicle that is sufficient quality that people are willing to pay you enough over its lifespan to profit off the vehicle yet you're junking the vehicle at the end of its lifespan.

I don't think the economics make sense unless the car market is far less competitive than it currently is.

It isn't risk that is the problem, it's leverage. But I'm sure there's some current investment scheme (possibly to be enabled by the current bill you refer to) combined with future law out there that eventually will let someone borrow gobs of money on minuscule amounts of equity. Then we'll get another financial crisis like the many previous ones.