What's Getting Cut From Science Part of the Federal Budget 201
Kristina at Science News writes "As part of the announcement of its proposed fiscal year 2010 budget, the Obama administration released a summary (called 'Terminations, Reductions, and Savings: Budget of the US Government, Fiscal Year 2010') that includes which science-related programs are getting cut. Two big programs are the nuclear waste storage project at Yucca Mountain in Nevada and a second prototype airborne laser missile-defense weapon." Update: 05/07 23:03 GMT by T : On the other hand, reader Dusty writes, "The NASA budget for 2010 has been announced, up
5% on 2009. Human space flight plans to be reviewed."
A good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Every gun, bomber, particle weapon made, means less money for those who need to go to college to make better, smarter bombs.
Re:A good thing (Score:5, Informative)
STFU, you dumbass liberal wacko. It is those guns, bombers and soon particle weapons that allow you to be able to freely post things on sites like this. Every one LESS of those things is one more step towards a fascist, socialist slave future for all of us.
[snicker]
GPP was a take-off on a well-known quote:
"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
Who said that? Well, that would be that well-known dumbass liberal socialist fascist wacko, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Re:A good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
STFU, you dumbass liberal wacko. It is those guns, bombers and soon particle weapons that allow you to be able to freely post things on sites like this. Every one LESS of those things is one more step towards a fascist, socialist slave future for all of us.
[snicker]
GPP was a take-off on a well-known quote:
"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
Who said that? Well, that would be that well-known dumbass liberal socialist fascist wacko, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The same wacko who spit on the US Constitution and put In God We Trust and Under God on our currency and national anthem. Yea! That wacko is correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance [wikipedia.org] Then again the Christian Socialist who spit on the Constitution by having a Pledge of Allegiance made it clear the country was too ignorant to grasp the reasons the Founders insisted on a nation of Secular Law and how blind allegiance of many former nations eventually accelerated their demise.
Better start packing... (Score:2)
...'cause it doesn't look like you're going to get your way any time soon. Not after the individualist theocrats shit the economic bed.
Maybe if you prayed to your precious 'gods' a little more, or followed their rules a little better, things might change.
Seriously tho. Why so much anger? Why so much rage? There's more evidence for human-driven climate change than for your doomsday prophecies. I know you don't believe in human-driven climate change, so relax. Have a beer. It's on me. Did anyone ever
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Oh, yes, I remember that part of our national anthem.
I suppose you've never heard the 4th stanza to the anthem.
http://www.thenationalanthemproject.org/lyrics.html [thenationa...roject.org]
O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation!
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must when our cause it is just
And this be our motto: "In God is our Trust."
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
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After all, if you've pledged allegiance to a nation under God, and then it turns evil, it's not really under God any more, so you've got an escape clause.
This isn't D&D where an alignment change is obvious. Typically regimes or religious people that go corrupt or "evil" will still believe they have "God" on their side. Indeed, their belief of being "under God" can allow them to justify such acts.
Consider WW2, generally seen as a just war - do you think that the Germans and Japanese weren't praying to Go
I highly disagree with General Eisenhower (Score:2, Troll)
I highly disagree with this statement from General Eisenhower. While it may or may not have been debatable back then, I don't think there is any way you can claim this is true now, at least in the modern United States. According to IRS statistics, the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability. They pay no federal
Re:I highly disagree with General Eisenhower (Score:5, Informative)
According to IRS statistics, the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability. They pay no federal taxes. Zip, zero, nada. Yet the warships, guns, missiles, etc, are paid for with federal tax dollars.
*ahem*.
Except for all of the following:
1: Social Security Tax they pay.
1a: the SS tax their EMPLOYER pays on their behalf.
2: Transaction Fees
3: The FICA they pay out of EITC
4: The taxes that their EMPLOYER pays on the wealth this employee generates in excess of his wages.
So, yeah, aside from all those, the working poor pay no taxes.
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I think you misunderstood. Those working poor get all those taxes back at the end of the year because of deductions. I live in a poor area, and my neighbors do not pay taxes. Suppose they make $20k per year, pay 30% of that in taxes, then between their minimum deductions, child tax credits, etc. - they pay nothing. They probably don't even take much of anything out, since you can claim deductions on your W-2 form. And the companies sometimes get tax credits for employee such persons too.
The one excepti
Re:I highly disagree with General Eisenhower (Score:5, Informative)
Citation please? The thing is, that as a graduate student I fall into that bottom 40% in income, and I most certainly do pay federal (and state) taxes. Other graduate students I've talked to on the issue pay taxes as well. Given the size of the standard deduction, I can't see how anyone without dependents who made much more than $10,000/yr could avoid paying some taxes (except in select cases, like running a home business in the red).
Re:I highly disagree with General Eisenhower (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't have a citation, but I do find the comment believable.
1) As a graduate student, you probably don't *really* know what poor is. Yeah, I know you probably eat nothing but Ramen noodles all week, but you aren't paying for them with food stamps.
2) "without dependents" - That's probably a big portion of the 40%. People who make 10k/year and have 4 children.
I bet somebody could whip out a calculator and a W-2 form and figure out what income level corresponds to 0 taxes.
Re:I highly disagree with General Eisenhower (Score:4, Informative)
Which, yours or mine? I've just said that I can state from personal experience that the statement, "the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability" is simply false (based on the US income distribution reported here [wikipedia.org]).
I never said anything about being poor, I only stated the objective fact that I fall below the 40th percentile of income.
Now if you look at a copy of the 1040 for 2008, you'll see that the standard deduction is $5,450 for those filing as single or married filing separately, $10,900 for those married filing jointly, and $8,000 for head of household. You get another deduction of $3,500 per exemption, which will be 1 (assuming no one can claim you as a dependent) plus the number of dependents. Obviously there are lots of possible permutations and there are there are various tax credits, the possibility of itemized deductions, etc., but it's clear from those numbers that plenty of people making less than the 40th percentile (about $35k/yr) will pay taxes. A single person with no dependents making over $9,000/yr can easily end up paying taxes, and a single parent (head of household plus one dependent) making more than $15,000/yr can end up paying tax.
So, it's clear that that factoid is bunk. I was legitimately curious where you got it from, because you're not the first person I've heard use it (or something similar). I even heard someone being interviewed on a news show say something similar.
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Well social welfare aside, it could be being spent on things which will provide jobs to some of those people, or education to their children so that their children don't end up the same way.
Leaving aside any issues regarding unfair wages and the rich living off the sweat of the working poor, there are two primary reasons for sopcial welfare systems. The first is to keep poor people from starving to death because as human beings at least some of us feel bad about letting them starve to death. You can agree o
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According to IRS statistics, the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability. They pay no federal taxes. Zip, zero, nada.
I see what you did there. But how does telling a blatant lie help advance your cause? All it does is undermine your credibility.
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"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
Who said that? Well, that would be that well-known dumbass liberal socialist fascist wacko, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The sound you hear is conservative heads a'splodin'. Next up, quotes from the bible that show Jesus was more of a socialist than a capitalist.
Re:A good thing (Score:5, Informative)
I was paraphrasing this guy:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953
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I'm not which point you were trying to make, but it was well said :-)
[ My car's odometer reads in pentaparsecs. My speedometer in parsecs/hour. ]
So you've got a fast far, but why do you measure distance in a unit of five parsecs? Is this the "Imperial Units" for the Federation of Planets?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Because eventually nuclear weapons will become sufficiently cheap and readily available that a single person will kill us all.
The only way to stop it is to remove the possibility of a person considering that course of action.
That, or provide a robust means of safety against nuclear warheads. As improbable as the first proposition is, stopping a couple dozen nukes from destroying all human life on earth is about as physically sound as me rolling a hundred pound boulder up Mount Everest.
World peace is at leas
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The only way to stop it is to remove the possibility of a person considering that course of action.
That, or provide a robust means of safety against nuclear warheads. As improbable as the first proposition is, stopping a couple dozen nukes from destroying all human life on earth is about as physically sound as me rolling a hundred pound boulder up Mount Everest.
I didn't get the point of the last sentence? Are you saying that it is hard or easy to prevent a few dozen nukes from destroying all human life? As I see it, it is easy. Just don't concentrate everyone in a few places and you have sure protection again a small number of nukes. Decentralization also should work for most other high death rate weapons (like disease, chemical weapons, etc).
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I'd view a few dozen as a very large number, given the yield.
What yield are you talking about? Current nukes are usually under one megaton. A few dozen of those aren't significant on a global scale. Sure, they might wipe out certain ethnic groups or small countries, but you aren't really talking about that much power. And if we speak of nuclear weapons used by "individuals", they would most like be dozens of kilotons at best.
Further, this would continue until someone could stop all violence on earth, or find a way to stop nuclear warheads from being so dangerous. I find the former more plausible than the latter is all.
I don't see the need for pessimism. First, as I mentioned decentralizing infrastructure and hardening it reduces greatly the effectiveness of nu
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I don't understand why people still hold this hope for manumission.
We have had slaves since the beginning of time and to think differently is foolish.
If we didn't have slaves we would not have built up what we have today.
Why can't more people just accept the way things are and see the beauty in it?
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Because without that hope, we might as well curl up and die. If we do not fight to make the world a better place, to overcome the weakness and foolishness of our predecessors, and to create a future world where, perhaps for the first time, mankind can live without murdering one another for food and land and petty revenge, then we are complicit with that violence and ignorance, we continue it, and we are no better than it. It may be a hopeless fight against overwhelming odds with (virtually) no chance of win
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Let me guess, the only battleground you have been near is a video game, right?
Yucca Mountain (Score:5, Informative)
They found a fault runs right under Yucca Mountain anyway.. isn't exactly a good site for storage anymore anyway.
"n September 2007, it was discovered that the Bow Ridge fault line ran underneath the facility, hundreds of feet east of where it was originally thought to be located, beneath a storage pad where spent radioactive fuel canisters would be cooled before being sealed in a maze of tunnels. The discovery required several structures to be moved several hundred feet further to the east, and drew criticism from Robert R. Loux, head of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, who argues that Yucca administrators should have known about the fault line's location years prior, and called the movement of the structures "just-in-time engineering."[8][9]
In June 2008, a major nuclear equipment supplier, Holtec International, criticized the Department of Energy's safety plan for handling containers of radioactive waste before they are buried at the proposed Yucca Mountain dump. The concern is that, in an earthquake, the unanchored casks of nuclear waste material awaiting burial at Yucca Mountain could be sent into a "chaotic melee of bouncing and rolling juggernauts"."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_mountain#Earthquakes [wikipedia.org]
Re:Yucca Mountain (Score:4, Insightful)
Yucca always struck me as pure NIMBY anyway. The location wasn't chosen because it made sense from a logistic or safety standpoint; it was chosen because it was safely out of everyone else's backyard.
Re:Yucca Mountain (Score:5, Interesting)
Next time you go to Las Vegas (if ever) you should go on a tour of the Nevada Test Range- it's really cool. Just don't have kids afterward.
They take reservations several months in advance (I think it was through the DOE). Basically you'll find yourself on a bus, packed with senior citizens too old to fear radiation, darting from crater to crater past big scary RADIOACTIVE signs poking up from tall weeds. You'll also meet a lot of right wing types during the day.
They don't allow cameras, which is a damn shame. Go before Ernie the tour guide dies, so you can hear firsthand accounts of all the nuclear tests that went awry. Ernie is big on nuclear power but he probably glows in the dark.
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That's the thing though, the fact that it was out of everyone else's backyard is what made it reasonably safe. Put it in a far removed location and you minimize the risk of a) it interfering with the current population and b) a future population stumbling across it by accident.
I'm sure that Larry Niven [larryniven.org] would probably agree with you.
Re:Yucca Mountain (Score:5, Funny)
Your quoted section there makes me laugh. As if locating a nuclear waste storage facility "several hundred feet" from a fault line is completely safe.
Bob: "This looks like a good place, doesn't it Jim?"
Jim, checks map: "No, it says there's a fault right through here."
Bob, walks several hundred feet away, shouts: "How about here?"
Jim: "Perfect!"
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NO one said that, but there are a lot more effects on the line itself.
for example : a fault slip will move down along a fault, so being on the fault can create effects greater then the Rictor number.
Not that it's a very active fault anyways.
Yucca mountain is safe, the only people tnat seem to have a problem are people who don't know anything about how nuclear waste is handled, what it actually or how it's stored, or aren't making money from where it was located.
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I dunno. Have you ever seen the famous photo of the fence that ran directly across a fault line that slipped in an earthquake? It was split into two segments, whose ends were several feet apart.
Being right on top of a fault means that the facility won't just be shaken; different parts of it will move in different directions. Over thousands of years that could add up.
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This [dailyillini.com] is a start in the right direction.
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Yucca Mountain Fault. (Score:3, Informative)
The "Fault" in Yucca is a joke. Nearly every place in the USA has a fault near it in some way. The "Fault" at Yucca is just another anti-industrial age strawman cooked up by a bunch of environmentalists. I ran Yucca mountain through the same earthquake simulations used by insurance companies all over the world, and the premiums were pretty damned low.
Re:Yucca Mountain Fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't much matter anyhow. Nuclear waste becomes no more toxic than a great many other industrial process after being stored for only 5 years or so. Leave it at the reactor site for 5 years, then move it (which is the actual plan in many places).
We're only storing old fuel because it's valuable, not because it's unusually dangerous. WHy should we care about "safe for 10000 years" storage? It's complete and utter nonsense.
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Yes. But other industrial processes don't emit powerful radiation that can turn innocent people into mutated, mindless, brain eating hyperzombies. It's basic science!
Re:Yucca Mountain Fault. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nearly every place in the USA has a fault near it in some way.
This is why people who aren't delusional or dishonest want to site any American nuclear waste repositories in salt domes, which are geologically stable structures that have lasted quite happily over tens of millions of years without earthquakes or water intrusions (the latter is so obvious that even the neo-puritan anti-nukes aren't stupid enough to argue against it.)
In Canada we are planning to bury nuclear waste in granite dykes in the Canadian Shield, which have been stable for something like three hundred million years.
There are plenty of places that are suited to burying waste. The neo-puritans got together with politicians and chose one that satisfied all parties by appearing to do something about the waste disposal problem while ensuring that nothing was actually done.
The real question is: why are Americans incapable of governing themselves? You guys do so many things so brilliantly, yet you can't put together a decent government for anything. I'm not talking about the crazy partisan things Bush did or Obama might be doing--I'm talking about things like Yucca Mountain, which lasted over multiple administrations and changes in power in both houses of Congress. It's failure is a failure of the entire US governmental system, a monument to the apparent inability of Americans to actually use their government to make modestly intelligent plans and carry them through to approximately timely completion.
Other people manage to do this kind of thing through their governments all the time. What is is about Americans that they cannot?
I'm deliberately putting this at the feet of Americans, rather than 'the American government', because I think at some point you have to hold people in a democracy up to ridicule when they continually elect such complete bozos (and I mean that in a bi-partisan manner.)
Re:Yucca Mountain Fault. (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe that American culture has been becoming increasingly less capable of self-sacrifice for a greater or national good. For example, despite the large and prominent pacifist movements prior to the World Wars, we still eventually got around to getting involved. We sacrificed for Meatless Mondays and war bonds. These days, there are so many examples of Americans assuming the attitude that unless something directly benefits me or requires me to lose any skin, I will filibuster, lobby, or litigate.
I'm not saying that all examples of obstruction are bad, but just that it feels like obstruction for selfish reasons takes overriding priority over the public interest -- very general examples being Yucca Mountain or the Land Mine Ban Treaty.
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The "Fault" in Yucca is a joke. Nearly every place in the USA has a fault near it in some way. The "Fault" at Yucca is just another anti-industrial age strawman cooked up by a bunch of environmentalists. I ran Yucca mountain through the same earthquake simulations used by insurance companies all over the world, and the premiums were pretty damned low.
You might enjoy a listen to Nassim Taleb [fora.tv]. His Black Swan concept seems to have a direct bearing on your argument.
Re:Yucca Mountain Fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of green is creating an Age of Less.
NO, the whole point of green is creating the Age of Sustainability, and anyone who wants less isn't green.
It's true that neo-puritans have glommed on to the environmental movement since the early '70's to the extent that they have dominated it until recently, but there are some actual green voices out there, clamouring to be heard amidst the neo-puritan lies.
The thing that should be stunningly obvious to everyone is: sacrifice is unsustainable. It requires more self-discipline than any large group of humans has ever managed, and in the absence of self-discipline it requires unsustainable (to say nothing of unethical) enforcement measures.
The neo-puritans are in particular trouble right now because green tech has reached industrial viability--wind farms, solar farms, biodiesel, etc. are all becoming viable industries, and in opposing them neo-puritans necessarily reveal that they don't love the environment, they hate industry. While genuine greens are out there making the world a better place, and making money on the way.
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The so called environmental movement has been and still is dominated by Communists. Or do you think it coincidence that the first Earth Day happened to also be Lenin's 100th Birthday?
You do realize that communists weren't exactly Green, do you?
It was a Russian scientist, Michurin, who said, "We cannot wait for favors from Nature. To take them from it -- that is our task". That catch phrase was used for pretty much all the history of the USSR - I remember hearing it repeatedly in school. And, when following it, environmental concerns weren't usually given much attention.
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Or do you think it coincidence that the first Earth Day happened to also be Lenin's 100th Birthday?
The word "coincidence" exists for a reason. And every day is somebody's birthday.
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Funny considering that a few IFRs would bea great way to burn up most of the "waste" we're storing now.
Given that, even considering building a waste dump to hold waste for thousands of years is a huge waste. The leftovers from reprocessing for an IFR last about 500 years max (and it's only somewhat dangerous for much of that time).
Re:Yucca Mountain Fault. (Score:5, Interesting)
It is worse than you think. I was at the APS meeting a few days ago and there was a nice talk about fission reactors and energy crisis. The upshot is that the reactors we do have will exceed their safe lifespans in several years (2014 ?) and should really be shut down or require maintenance. New reactors cost a lot of money to build because we lost the domestic industry. Old school nuclear engineers have retired, there are no new ones and we cannot even make large forgings - containment vessels need to be bought in Japan. Thus, at best, fission power could have an impact in 40-50 years, if we start building now.
The opinion of the presenter (which I consider sensible) is that Yucca was a wrong thing to do anyway. The "spent" fuel is not really spent - it has most of its energy in it, just needs to be reprocessed or deployed in reactors of different type. Reprocessing is expensive and, guess what, USA is spending all of its effort trying to catch up with Japan and France. Interestingly enough, the Japanese reprocessing plant turned out to be extremely expensive that suggests that we should really try an alternate approach.
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> It is worse than you think.
Nah, that is just defeatist talk. If we had the will we wouldn't have any insurmountable problems. But if you are looking for reasons to abandon a technology anyway there are always plenty of justifications to offer.
Who needs huge cast containment vessels? That only applies if you aren't going to build safer pebble bed reactors. Engineers in short supply? Solvable. One we have a lot of expertise in the Navy. They aren't currently very involved in the GWOT so their exper
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oh please, there are different fault with different levels of activity everywhere.
That fault it's a problem. It's just an NIMBY excuse.
People do knows that the nuclear waste from the Simpsons isn't what nuclear waste really is, right?
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I, for one, would welcome our new chaotic melee of bouncing and rolling juggernaut overlords if it came to that.
Not on the list? (Score:5, Funny)
Even though it doesn't appear on the list, I have it on good authority that they are also researching a communications network technology based on a series of tubes...
Disappointing! (Score:3, Interesting)
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Yeah, Obama's really turning into a disappointment on the outrage front, Dijongate notwithstanding. If only McCain had won! He would have croaked under the strain in the first week, and we would have had four solid years of Palinisms to make fun of!
It's just not fair.
At what COST? (Score:5, Funny)
Let's just pray that the Airborn Laser Missles don't come and attack Yucca Mountain. ... Again.
Lack focus (Score:3, Insightful)
News about government initiatives seem to revolve around the passing of a bill and the subsequent appointment of a blue ribbon panel or the filling of a key post. We rarely get news of how well the initiatives are doing unless there is a scandal, but I can't help but feel that given how undermanned some agencies are, (1/3 to 2/3 of government bureaucrats don't do noticeable amounts of useful work) most new programs and initiatives lack guidance, defined outcomes, and an effective means of targeting funds.
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"(1/3 to 2/3 of government bureaucrats don't do noticeable amounts of useful work) "
cite? no? of course not.
dumbass
ABL (Score:2)
The answer: nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
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Heh, your sig was too true this time. Then again, this Bloomberg article doesn't cite its source. "In 2008, then-President George W. Bush, working with a Democratic Congress, proposed ending or reducing 141 federal programs. Of those, 29 were terminated or trimmed for a savings of about $1.6 billion. "
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=a_DwtiY4MbpM&refer=home [bloomberg.com]
Either way, few cuts will happen as the only way to get anything done is to get along, and getting along in politics me
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It's not $17 billion in cuts, it's $17 billion in proposed cuts, 99% of which won't happen. For comparison, last year George W Bush proposed 434 billion in cuts, none of which happened.
And it's even worse than that... The supposed "savings" from stopping Yucca Mountain are imaginary! Yucca Mountain was funded by a special, sole-purpose tax on utilities to fund just such a place as a national waste repository - the Nuclear Waste Fund.
What we have is literally an illegal shifting of targeted taxation. The original source of funds to finish Yucca Mountain was this special tax, and it was to be spent on Yucca Mountain only. But I guess the Obama Administration decided that those dollars
what this has to do with science... (Score:5, Interesting)
-- annual farm-commodity payouts to no more than $250,000 per person and a phasing out of the direct payment of subsidies to farms with sales exceeding $500,000 per year. Savings: $143 million.
Why that has something to do with science I'm not sure. But on another level, you don't have to be some big mega farmer to reach $500k on farm sales. We own about 600 acres that was inherited from my grandparents. We rent this out. The farmer that farms it is a family operation, father/son, and they farm about 1600 acres total. End of the year, they may bring home about $50- 60k each. Oh, and don't forget a rainy day fund incase a field floods, or a hurricane comes through and knocks the crap out of the yield.
They sell in excess of $1 Million worth a crops a year, but farming is expensive. A tractor will cost you $80 - 100k+, need a new combine, those are about $200k. Don't for get grain trucks, chemicals, seed, diesel to power the irrigation systems, repairs, etc..
It's gotten to the point where the son is debating whether or not to continue after his father gives it up after this year. He can make just about as much working a regular job without the risk. Kill their subsidy, and that is one less family in the farming business.
$500k isn't a lot when your talking about farming.
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It's very easy to claim that someone with half a million dollars in revenue a year shouldn't be needing precious tax payer dollars. Whether the profit margin is large enough to keep up with the market or, as you say, tide them over for rainy days is a story that these individuals probably don't care about. If it sounds good on paper, then it's probably good enough to pass up the chain.
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I think the terms are worded incorrectly. "Makes" is not the same as "profit". And that is one huge difference when you are self-employed and live at your place of business, like a farm. That point is one of the huge problems with starting higher tax rates for people "making" more than $250,000. If self-employed, they are like any other business. The margin is likely less than 10%. They might make $1,000,000, but have spent $900,000 to make it.
To put it another way, a self-employed $250,000 is not
Re:what this has to do with science... (Score:5, Interesting)
a new combine, those are about $200k. Don't for get grain trucks
I was under the impression that there were now independent companies offering these services on an as needed basis to farmers at competitive prices around harvest time. They come in with their combines, grain trucks, and other equipment which they pay to maintain, keep up to date, and run and in exchange for them coming in and harvesting all of your crops at harvest time they take their payment in the form of a cut of the harvest. The individual farmer does not benefit from the economies of scale and specialization enjoyed by the combine, grain truck, and equipment company which specializes in that area and servers many clients. So doesn't it make sense for the farmer to outsource certain "farm services" at competitive prices?
He can make just about as much working a regular job without the risk. Kill their subsidy, and that is one less family in the farming business.
Perhaps he should. The farm subsidies of the United States and the European Union are really at the root of a lot of pernicious problems in the world and especially the third world. The farming is mostly done by agribusiness these days anyway and for large scale non-farmers market crops that is probably as it should be. The mythical family farmer gets a lot of attention in Washington, but the continuation of farm subsidies is really quite indefensible from an economic and social policy perspective, it is purely a third-rail political issue not a practical one of ensuring that America has enough cheap food to eat (many of us are obese slobs who are eating ourselves to death on all of the cheap food anyway).
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yeah, well without a subsidy maybe the market prices will go up to covers costs.
It is odd that it is sales based.
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I rather liked the "miscellany" section of the article.
a prohibition on spending any money for outside contractors to create new seals or logos for the Department of Homeland Security
closure of a Department of Education office in Paris, saving $632,000 a year.
There's got to be some funny/sad stories behind those two.
"Terminations, Reductions, and Savings"? (Score:4, Insightful)
So first they splash out staggering amounts of money in a very hastily drawn up 'fiscal stimulus' package, and then they cut back on the basic, well thought out* spending in the budget? Am I the only one who thinks this doesn't make sense?
* compared to the fiscal stimulus package anyway
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Yes you are!
Yes we can!
(Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!)
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Even before the whole economic melt-down, Obama was promising to cut inefficient and dead-end government projects. These cuts and the stimulus package are unrelated. The money from the cut programs should be put to better use anyway, whether that be stimulus or something e
A better list (Score:2)
Seeing just what was cut doesn't tell us much. We'd really need to also look at what wasn't cut to see if our tax dollars are being spent intelligently or not. But, the fact that none of what was cut seemed like it was working anyway indicates that there must be tons more fluff that hasn't been cut yet.
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If you put 10 people in a room and try to find out the intelligent way to spend the money, you will get 12 different answers. Half of them will be an intelligent answer.
The Whole Budget? (Score:4, Funny)
Where can I view (in human-readable form) the whole fucking budget. All of it. I'll streamline that shit like a soft turd in a wind tunnel.
I'll do it for free, and in under a week, too.
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HAHAHAHAHA.. ah, no you wont. Have you seen the budget? it's a monster. And you can't make it more accessible without watering it down.
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www.budget.gov, which has a link to
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/fy2010_new_era/A_New_Era_of_Responsibility2.pdf [whitehouse.gov]
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Where can I view (in human-readable form) the whole fucking budget. All of it. I'll streamline that shit like a soft turd in a wind tunnel.
I'll do it for free, and in under a week, too.
Give me a Fortune 500 company's total expenditures, and I'd make one heck of a profit-making machine out of it too!
I'll bet I could do that to any random piece of software too. I wouldn't even need to know the history of the project or what the users do with it.
I remember working on Star Wars at Boeing (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite frankly, other than the Hot Rocks project, we never really thought either the NEO or FEO space-borne lasers would work, or even the airframe-based lasers.
The logistics in a real time battlefield with countermeasures made them pretty unrealistic.
Hot Rocks is really just throwing pebbles (aka Brilliant Pebbles) or rocks (hence Hot Rocks) at a missile and hoping one of them hit - and had the highest probability of working in battlefield real life conditions.
Were I the pres, I would have killed both of these programs too.
Re:I remember working on Star Wars at Boeing (Score:5, Insightful)
The first ABL laser prototype worked out prety well, actually. The whole point was to bypass countermeasures by hitting the missile while it was still boosting, which is an unmistakable signature. It's somewhat questionable as an overall strategic defense, since you'd need the have a plane in the air somewhat close to the launch site, but for theater defense it would work great.
We don't seem to need to defend against the Russians right now, but a crazy dictator who managed to cobble together 1 working nuke warhead and 1 working long-range missile? That sounds like a likely scenario, and the sot of thing where said mad dictator would give us plaenty of warning time to get our defenses airborn near his country.
Missile defenses don't have to be viable vs a Russian saturation attack with modern countermeasures to be useful this century. Providing solid protection against a low-tech threat with just a few misiles is entirely worthwhile (especially if you live in the major US city closest to N Korea!).
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Yep, have the modified 747 doing lazy figure eights of the coast. The one really bad possibility then become fallout in Japan.
Anyone who thinks that the ABLs are for defending against Russia are lacking knowledge. The U.S.S.R and U.S.A both made some many missiles, with so many warheads, and then so many possible launch locations (air, sea, land; we got 'em all covered), that there was no way to complete a surprise attack and not be exterminated in retaliation. M.A.D. actually worked.
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If you planned for every crazy dictator scenario there isn't going to be any money left for anything else.
But you do need to do some sort of planning. It's not that unlikely any more that someone with the resources of a country cooks up a superweapon as a threat or defense. Maybe sinking a trillion dollars in an elaborate missile defense system (which incidentally would be partly effective against China, wouldn't it?) isn't such a great deal, but anti-missile systems that would be effective against a handful of ICBM missiles aren't going to cost that much.
This isn't science (Score:2)
This isn't basic research. It's engineering.
Regarding NASA (Score:5, Interesting)
"The NASA budget for 2010 has been announced, up 5% on 2009. Human space flight plans to be reviewed."
I'm quite glad to hear that this review of NASA's spaceflight plans is occurring, and from what I've read seems to be quite good at minimizing outside/political/industry influence and making sure that the recommendations will truly be the best ones possible. The only problem is that NASA and/or the administration might end up ignoring those recommendations for political reasons (e.g. making sure jobs remain in particular congressional districts).
Evidence has recently been leaked that the NASA's ESAS study which settled on the homebuilt Ares I (based on then-Administrator Mike Griffin's pet design) over the already-existing commercial EELV rockets was deeply flawed. Basically, the flawed 60-day ESAS study [hobbyspace.com] (often relied on by certain NASA officials to defend their plans) had a number of major problems:
(from Selenian Boondocks [selenianboondocks.com], with parts of the leaked study available on Wikileaks [wikileaks.org] )
As things currently stand, the Ares I has been running into major problems, many believe it to have fundamental design flaws, and projected development costs are running into the $30-$50 billion range. Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago a NASA-commissioned independent study confirmed [orlandosentinel.com] that the commercial EELVs would be able to fulfill NASA's needs of transporting NASA's orbital and lunar spacecraft, with estimated costs of a few billion dollars (about an order of magnitude less than the Ares program). That's to say nothing of SpaceX and COTS-D [spacex.com], which could do the job for around $1.5 billion dollars of development costs.
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i really think its strange that nobody else thinks NASA is a huge waste of money and should be a private company. rather then fixing the problem of what to do with deadly nuclear waste we'd rather the billions of dollars in space flight? its not like it has done us any good, why not fund to send the nuclear waste into space... theres nobody up there and never will be. other than that i really dont see a reason to be doing so, unless pissing away tax dollars is a concern, in that case GO NASA =P
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That's one (rather short-sighted) opinion. On the other hand, there's many of us who think that NASA is quite possibly one of the most important parts of the US government in the long-term.
That's Not Science (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, storing nuke waste and a big laser weapon require science. But they're not science. They're giant contractor employment programmes, both spawned by the Pentagon.
Giving the money directly to science programmes is better for science.
News From Nasa (Score:5, Interesting)
I just caught a local PBS show [houstonpbs.org] in which someone from NASA (I didn't catch his name, as I came into the program right after his
introduction) shared the following bit of bad news that comes with the new Federal Budget:
"The Shuttle is 30 years old. We've been flying this machine for thirty years. Over the last year and a half, we've been transitioning to a new Constellation program and developing a new launch vehicle as well as the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle to take us back to the moon. That's the goal.
When that shuttle retires, there's going to be a serious change in workforce.
What are we going to do with all the engineers that were performing sustaining engineering on that shuttle program?
The idea was to take them and move them over into the part of the Constellation program that develops the Altair, which is a Lunar Lander going back to the moon.
Today, when President Obama rolled out his detail budget on space, he pulled the Altair and pushed it out three to five years.
So that's a real concern.
If you had asked me this morning at 8:00 if there was going to be a problem with the space industry with engineers and moving forward, I would have said no. This afternoon we've got a real concern
about that and how we're going to fill the gap with those employees.
And we've still got time. We've got a couple of years to try to convince the present Obama administration to continue to go back to the moon."
Yay for science (Score:2)
I just heard through the grapevine that $100+ million in stimulus funds might go for development of the ATST.
(Yeah I know - watch out for Ewoks.)
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17 billion here, 17 billion there ... oh, hell, I'm not going to say it.
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Hahaha that's the funnest thing I've seen all day.
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Because that's all that's keeping the Bigfoot population in check. Don't you know what kind of furry, cannibalistic hell would descend on America if we didn't regularly spray for cryptozoa?
Re:Congressional Districts (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? what logic is that?
Other questions:
Do you know what the different grades of waste are?
do you know how it's contained?
Do you know if it's a solid?
if you can't answer those question accurately and in detail, STFU.
I am so sick of people that don't know jack driving policy and decisions about scientific decisions.
I got news for those people:
"Your opinion does not matter."
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Don't want it in your back yard?
I think his point was that you don't even know what "it" is; nor have you the expertise to judge how hazardous "it" is to transport.
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most people who make it to 75 aren't the expensive people. it's 40-60.
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Huh? Actually, lifelong medical expenses for healthy people are higher [go.com] than for people who die younger.
Hmm, cancer is expensive (Score:2)
The problem with smokers is that they die of lung cancer and lung cancer treatment is expensive. We spend a million bucks per lung cancer patient, and, all that money doesn't improve their survival odds [usnews.com]
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Fortunately, the sharks are still in the budget.
Of course, the sharks are still in the budget; who do you think drew up the budget? Tim S
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Because nuclear power is a workable way to reduce Green house gases; but Democrats want nothing to do with real solutions; they just want reasons to tax and tax and tax.
Nuclear is a workable solution, but it's not the only one, and it's not problem free. Power companies won't invest in new plants without massive government subsidies, it produces waste that we have no workable solution to deal with (and that many companies basically expect the taxpayers to deal with), and it suffers from massive NIMBY-ism problems. Throwing more money down a hole can help with the first two, but it won't get you past that last one.
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So, I am guessing that in your opinion Global Warming is not a major problem.
And I am guessing you either have incredibly poor reading comprehension skills, a truly tragic and delusional level of confirmation bias, or just a that pathetic, partisan mindset that lumps everyone who disagrees with you on any point as all being just the same on every point, since I never said anything about global warming one way or the other.
The waste storage solution that the Man in the White House decided to stop funding was an valid medium term solution.
Yucca Mountain is a combination of both being a victim of the very NIMBY-ism I mentioned earlier and also turning out to be a faulty solution (pun intended [latimes.com]). Read
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NOTE: The president if he really thought GW was a major can solve the NIMBY issue without a lot of effort.
That would truly be an impressive use of a magic wand.