Comment by TangoTrotFox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TangoTrotFox | Hacker News Reader

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It's politics.

The SLS is not about space. It's been referred to as the Senate Launch System for years now and that's very accurate. It started back in 2010 and still isn't going up anytime soon. For comparison the first time we sent anything into orbit (a probe) was 1958. The first time we put a man in orbit was 1961. In 1962 Kennedy would give his famous space speech. In 1968 we sent a man around the moon. In 1969 we put a man on the moon. Compare the timelines and it's simply pathetic.

But what the SLS does provide is an immense number of jobs, votes, and support for the congressmen that keep it funded.

The last chief of NASA, Charles Bolden, was the person you want on paper. A decorated and high ranking military officer who was an astronaut with a STEM education. What he was not was a political player, and I think NASA has suffered under him. The person that has replaced him is, at a glance, is the exact opposite of who you want. Jim Bridenstine is an MBA, career politician, and has no technical background whatsoever. But he does have a genuine interest in space which he has worked to support for years, and he is, for better or for worse, a political player.

And I have hopes and expectations that he will change the direction of NASA into the far more logical direction that you, and just about everybody, sees would be more productive. And I think we're already seeing this. Recently NASA released a scathing report against the SLS which said, without mincing many words, that they're not going anywhere anytime soon if they have to rely on the SLS. The lengthy report is here [1], here [2] is a random media report on it to give some sort of cliff notes. This is the sort of stuff that Bolden, for whatever reason, did not have the capability or will to push through. That report didn't say anything that everybody didn't already know, but actually stating those things was speaking what must not be spoken - and is now something that demands action.

[1] - https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-19-001.pdf

[2] - https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/278656-nasa-report-blame...

While I agree with you about NASA funding pork projects these days, there is another side. I don't think people realize how important pork might be (I'm speculating this isn't a firm belief for me). Without pork projects, we could have even more wealth disparity in the US. What would happen to Alabama if the NASA funded aerospace programs went away? What would happen to the low cost of living areas dominated by retired persons is social security payments went away?

I believe this is why the EU has had problems - they're all on the same currency but countries are not permitted to print their own money and they don't have international money redistribution programs. In such an environment any country with a trade deficit will eventually suffer - see Greece.

I'm not advocating such pork distributions but I think they may actually serve a purpose other than getting votes. OTOH some places get pork that really don't need it even for the reasons I outlined above.

Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek minister of finance during the height of the Greek debt crisis, believes that this type of redistribution (defense spending is a much larger amount) in the USA has allowed it to exist with a common currency without having the same level of problems that Europe has. There is no mechanism in Europe to move enough money to the poorer parts from the productive powerhouse, Germany. This is causing very large problems and a lot of people suffering in southern Europe. French and German banks got a bail out like US banks in 2008 to prevent an economic collapse, but the debts were not forgiven (more money was borrowed to pay the loans) and this problem come back again at some point.

> There is no mechanism in Europe to move enough money to the poorer parts from the productive powerhouse, Germany.

There are several mechanisms to move money [0], just the free movement of labor alone has transferred a lot of money from Germany further to eastern Europe for decades already.

I fail to see how military exports would be better than that, defense products are not "money", they serve no productive purpose at all in any country that's not at war.

It should also be noted that Germany is among the biggest weapons exporters on this planet [1] and quite a big chunk of Greece debt boiled down to liabilities for military hardware from other EU members [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade_areas_in_Europe

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2017/02/10-cou...

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/greece/912...

I don't think you quite understand what I was saying. Free trade is the problem, not the solution. Germany makes a lot of stuff and sells it to the southern countries, running huge trade surplus. The southern countries borrow to buy the stuff and eventually have debt problems. There is no mechanism to get money from Germany back to southern Europe in the amounts needed. Before monetary union, Italy or Greece would see their currencies go down and the trade deficit would start to balance out.

In the US the people in rich parts of the country pay more in taxes to the federal government than they get back. This is a good thing, not a problem like many people state. It is not about building weapons for export, it is that the US government spends $600 billion on defense spending, moving resources from rich parts of the country to the poorer parts (to pay for government bases and defense contractors that build weapons for the US government). I agree that there are better ways to do this redistribution of wealth, but it is the only one that seems acceptable to the Republican party. Building infrastructure could be another, but it has not happened since the building of the interstate system ended in the 1980's.

The EU supra-national government (very similar to the US federal government over the US states) has a very small budget (€143 billion for the year 2014, from Wikipedia) and no real ability to raise large amounts of money from taxes it can impose. Varoufakis believes that until the EU has such a mechanism, having a common currency is going to continue to build up financial problems that are like to break up the union in a bad way.

What I would wonder is how long of a staying power does this kind of relief have?

If I build a missile factory in Baghdad, Mississippi that runs for 20 years then is closed won't the same problem persist as before the missile factory was created?

I think your point that free trade is the problem is fairly evident in this kind of problem, however, I am not sure that spending on things such as military producers or even national infrastructure is a long-term solution. In the end the project always ends, the product stops being produced, and times change.

Is this just delaying the eventual wealth-death of a town/state or does this lead to a self-sufficient system?

Just nitpicking, but the EU is nothing like the federal government in the US. That also explains, to degree, the much smaller budget.

I should have stated the EU is like the early US and that it will probably have to grow federal power to succeed. Similar to how the US states found its articles of confederation did not give the federal government enough power to solve the problems it was expected to solve and 12 years later they were with the current US Constitution.

That's true. Pre-BREXIT I was no tagainst the EU, I simply thought that it was a tad too intrusive at times. So, yeah, I understood some of the reasons why the Brits wanted to leave.

Then, either the EU changed or I did or both, and my opinion changed. Trump definitely did his part to wake me up and see that BREXIT was less about the EU itself as I initially thought and more about populism and protectionism. Both are things I never liked. I still hope that BREXIT served as a overdue wake-up call for Brussels.

Now, I favor European integration and cooperation. I'm simply not sure where to draw the line yet. Defense politics and military cooperation are definetly over due and the EURO needs some kind of reform (no idea how exactly, but the last crisis showed the current system to be not stable enough).

Would I support a "United States of Europe"? Good question, maybe it's inevitable one day. The issue definetly will be that European nation states are much more different, culture, language, politics, history, than American states which share a common history starting with the first settlers. I for my part see the risk of loosing something.

Now that I think about it, that could be a reason for the rise of populist movements.

Thank you for making me think about all that!

Now imagine if we paid those people to do something productive instead of wasting so much time. Heck what if we just gave them the money and let them work on whatever they wanted. It would still have a better payoff.

The illusion of contributing value needs to be maintained or people will get angry at the freeloaders getting paid to do nothing. People building the US military machine are not doing nothing just because the output has no real value.

There would be pain and suffering in the space belt. There would also be colonies on Mars and a thriving space industry. I'll take that future please.

”and they don't have international money redistribution programs”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Regional_Development_...:

”The European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) is a fund allocated by the European Union. Its purpose is to transfer money from richer regions (not countries), and invest it in the infrastructure and services of underdeveloped regions”

https://www.welcomeurope.com/european-funds/erdf-1-european-...:

”Global budget: 183,3 billion euro (2014-2020)”

That’s 30-ish billion euro a year.

Lack of EU-wide social security payments may be a problem, though.

30 billion a year for an economy the size of the EU is a rounding error.

It isn’t for the EU. The EU budget for 2018 is €160 billion (https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-annual-budget...)

For comparison, the USA has a federal budget of about $4 trillion.

The problem is that “the EU” doesn’t have an economy, and still is mostly built from individual economies.

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