Unless they get employed doing something else. "Remaining jobs" need not decline and it's worth noting that they actually aren't declining at present.

The right wing doesn't have a monopoly on slick packaging.

The basic premise is wrong. Automation hasn't prevented new human jobs from being created. They just aren't being created in the developed world, which has for the most part turned into a shitty place to employ people. Check out this report. It states that 1.1 billion jobs have been created since 1980 and projects another 600 million created by 2030.

Maybe the developed world ought to think about how to get a piece of the action rather than muse whether a 4 day work week or a new Soylent Green recipe will help - it won't. If you want employment to have value, then you need to encourage it, not regulate, limit, and penalize it to death. No need to "modestly" speculate how to deal with the human excess of unemployed created by your shitty labor policies when that excess could be doing something useful instead.

Finally, we ought to think about why fake stories like this are so popular.

And also a democracy, if I recall correctly. One wonders why the electorate thought it a good idea to vote for those darn ravishers of near perfection.

It's worth remembering here that what's being paid for is a huge amount of corruption. That costs money too.

Why should that matter? Without some sort of financial discipline, it'd just be more money flushed down the drain.

You're the one making the "rightard" equivalence between lowering spending and raising taxes.

They could have always called his bluff, if they cared. The reality is that they were probably buying the senator's vote for other similarly useless spending by NASA.

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.