The Economist suggests that sending a woman to the moon would have a more positive impact on the economy than building high-speed rail. Certainly, a trip to The erection faced by a person after having this medicine is hard and firm and so the use discount viagra sales of Sildenafil Citrate is more in these pills. Key ingredients viagra for sale uk cute-n-tiny.com are Nirgundi, Dalchini, Kapur, Sona Patha, Tulsi, Jawadi Kasturi, Samudra Phal, Javitri, Ashwagandha, Bulelylu oil and Jaiphal. This particular medicine helps in transforming the complex procedure of erection the effortless one. cute-n-tiny.com buy levitra The cGMP causes the smooth muscles cialis price of the penis. the moon would use more modern technology as the first high-speed rail line was built in 1964 but we didn’t send a man to the moon until 1969.
To the Moon, Alice
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For that matter automobiles have been around since the 1760’s.
True, but not the modern materials they use now. High strength steel alloys, aluminum (not mass produced until the 1890’s), Synthetic rubbers. Carbon fiber, magnesium. The automobile gets largely better each generation. It improves in terms of safety, fuel economy, practicality and versatility.
Criticizing HSR because the perceived purpose is “the desire to make a grand project happen,” is an astute observation of many political pet projects.
But… “My own recommendation would be to spend £34bn on sending the first woman to the moon, instead of doing high-speed rail now. After all, it would satisfy the animal spirits argument. Furthermore, it would revive British space efforts – no need to make an economic argument there. And it would be an investment in British manufacturing and science, creating high quality jobs for British engineers and scientists rather than for less-threatened bankers and contractors.”
So the Antiplanner is arguing that big government, big subsidy, big brother picking winners and losers is a pill he can swallow as long as trains aren’t involved? Ohhhh how the mighty have sold out!
Bennett,
I am merely quoting the Economist, not endorsing everything it says.
Space food would drastically improve if we sent women to the moon. We must put Rachael Ray on the moon.
…Seriously. By big science, one means big government science. We see stories saying that other countries have more scientists than we do or are cranking out more PHD’s. I’m skeptical that the vast sum of these people are substantially trained. Just because China is cranking out huge numbers of scientists doesn’t mean that sector is growing. I’ve seen several other stories where Chinese scientists were struggling to actually find work with just two openings out of hundreds of applicants. Last I check it’s been several Americans taking home Nobel prizes. It’s quality over quantity. While the purpose of going to the moon had nothing to do with generating profit, the argument that government spending creates jobs is void. It’s a job program which is not centralized but sprawled all across the country for reasons of job security so that no single laboratory or group or institute could ever get the axe. And much of the technology used in the Apollo mission for example was already being developed by the private sector but on a small scale. We didn’t have personal computers in the 60’s so the first microprocessors had no real use to a vast majority of Americans when the first CPU’s were put in the spacecraft and still they were rather primitive and NASA was very reluctant to trust it’s navigation solely to the guidance computer; NASA simply relayed telemetry to the astronauts. The private sector built all of the Apollo hardware. NASA encouraged it’s engineers to get the very first laptop computers in the 80’s whose limited capacity while useful to them was never profitable to the company that made it except to the government that put out over 2 thousand dollars a piece for each one. All of which quickly went away when better laptops came out in the 90’s. When Dwight Eisenhower gave his ending speech, keep in mind he led the largest mobilization of armed men in human history (the guy who spearheaded NASA), despite this he was weary of the idea of a vast majority of America’s scientists and scientific institutions (namely universities ) being amalgamated into a few government think tanks (NASA, NOAA, DARPA, DOE, etc). I love science, I hate the fact that much of the scientific workforce has been absorbed by bureaucracies with bias or prejudice. Who’s to say global warming isn’t a good thing, most scientists say that would be terrible (even if they’re not climatologists). But a new rush of climatologists say otherwise; arguing the effects would be negligible over the ensuing decades and some are touting the benefits of a slight increase in temperature. Michio Kaku is a smart guy, but I’m not trusting him with climate research because he’s never done any, he;s a physicist. Don’t ask him whether that thing on your back looks benign either because he’s not a physician, again he’s a physicist. Ask him what stars are made of or why black holes suck…..But don’t ask him about climate, medicine or anything else he wasn’t trained to do. You don’t hire a roofer to fix your sink or a plumber to fix your roof. And don’t let government turn science into a political tool.
High Speed Rail goes back a lot further than 1964. During the early 20th century, UK train companies tried to boost their popularity with the general public by trying to take the speed records. Of course, they had to be careful – in one case, they forgot about the tight curve ahead …
bennett said: So the Autoplanner is arguing that big government, big subsidy, big brother picking winners and losers is a pill he can swallow as long as trains aren’t involved?
THWM: Bennett, that’s exactly it. O’Toole is only against rail, because it’s rail.
“I am merely quoting the Economist, not endorsing everything it says.”
Okay, your hands are clean… but your mind is dirty 😉