Iran in space

[Guest]

I see Iran has launched a earth watching orbiter maybe old Newt isnt far off from wanting to settle on the moon, think about it. Control on the moon you could control earth. Syfy, maybe

[Guest]

Exploration whether to the moon or deeper in our oceans is benefical because it creates new discplines evolving our species. Just think back on the ocupations that were and no longer exist and the occupations of today. Man has needed to explore from his beginning. It is the natural order of things. so Newt is right but too many progresives think in terms of entitlements and not banking for the future.

[Guest]

“If I had a business executive come to me and say I want to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, ‘You’re fired,’” said Romney, a former businessman

John McCain - "Let's send Newt to the moon".

[Guest]

Exploration whether to the moon or deeper in our oceans is benefical because it creates new discplines evolving our species. Just think back on the ocupations that were and no longer exist and the occupations of today. Man has needed to explore from his beginning. It is the natural order of things. so Newt is right but too many progresives think in terms of entitlements and not banking for the future.
:clap2:
“If I had a business executive come to me and say I want to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, ‘You’re fired,’” said Romney, a former businessman

John McCain - "Let's send Newt to the moon".I find this hard to believe, even if it is two RINO's saying it. With Trump endorsing Romney they're probably already planning for the first Mega Hotel, Casino and golf course on the Moon!

http://rlv.zcache.co.nz/to_the_moon_retro_space_rocket_photosculpture-p153712973239241290z71l7_125.jpg

[Guest]

When I heard Newt talk about a moon base, I immediately thought of Ralph Kramden.........

You wanna go to the moon, Alice?

[Guest]

Nobody mentions just WHY we might want to stake a claim to the moon.

Helium-3 - look it up.

It could literally be the next generation power source to solve a LOT of problems. It's used in fusion research at the moment - and as we solve the problems with maintaining a fusion reaction, Helium-3 could end up being the next "Texas Tea" or "Black Gold".

I, for one, would feel a lot better if *we* had the launch, mining and return capabilities when fusion becomes more practical.

[Guest]

1, We cannot afford any of this nonsense. Space exploration is NOT nonsense but thinking we can afford it purely is.

2. In the last week, President Obama who continues to support EXPANSION of the H-1B visa program once again said that we have a shortage of high tech engineers and thus we need to import lower paid hi tech engineers to this country. This despite employers openly admit that they use this program because the engineers come cheaper. Read a quote which is dated a few years ago from someone in India who referred to it as the "outsourcing visa". Either our President is out of touch or just doing the bidding of those who promise money and/or votes.


We then add the NYT article on the outsourcing by Apple to China and we are simply kidding ourselves.

We are NOT serious about any of this stuff. Our leaders, from the WH through congress just play games with words and we suck it up depending on who says it. This is NOT simply a critique of the President, although you would expect that the CHIEF executive would be better informed, BUT it is a critique of our congress who thinks on such a shallow plain thus how is this even in conversation.

[Guest]

The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2011

[Guest]

Nobody mentions just WHY we might want to stake a claim to the moon.

Helium-3 - look it up.

It could literally be the next generation power source to solve a LOT of problems. It's used in fusion research at the moment - and as we solve the problems with maintaining a fusion reaction, Helium-3 could end up being the next "Texas Tea" or "Black Gold".

I, for one, would feel a lot better if *we* had the launch, mining and return capabilities when fusion becomes more practical.:clap2: I think this makes at least twice you've stated something I agree with.
It's nice to see that we don't disagree on everything! :a040:

[Guest]

Not only does Newt want to establish a base on the moon, I think he wants a McDonalds up there too, ASAP.

:popcorn:

[Guest]

The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2011


YEP and pretty much approved by both parties across the board. Makes it easier to give the jobs away.

Why do we not have companies emulating our service academies.....pay for the education with a guarantee from the student that you must work for me for x number of years. I guess I am a simpleton on this but it seems like it would be a way to go.

[Guest]

YEP and pretty much approved by both parties across the board. Makes it easier to give the jobs away.

Why do we not have companies emulating our service academies.....pay for the education with a guarantee from the student that you must work for me for x number of years. I guess I am a simpleton on this but it seems like it would be a way to go.

Makes sense to me.

All we do is call people names...nobody discusses actual issues anymore. Maybe someone can clarify why this law expanding the immigration law is a good thing for this country.

[Guest]

The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2011, eliminates the per country numerical limitation on employment-based visas.

From what I gather, the argument seems to be that under present law, no more than 7% of H-1B visas, which are used for engineers and other highly skilled workers, may be issued to persons from the same country in any year. Supporters of this legislation believe this quota harms U.S. competitveness, because a small group of countries, including India and China, produce a disproportionate number of workers who would otherwise be eligible for such a visa.

Basically, they (the US Congress) wants to INCREASE the number of Indian and Chinese skilled workers.

[Guest]

The current administration has essentially gutted NASA and slowed to a crawl any benefits from the scientific research the agency has accomplished over the years.

Before we all agree that we can't afford NASA, we should know how much space exploration really costs us.

NASA's annual budgets for the past fifty years have amount in total to $471.23 billion dollars—an average of $9.06 billion per year. By way of comparison, total spending over this period by the National Science Foundation was roughly one-fourth of NASA's expenditures: $101.5 billion, or $2 billion a year. NASA's FY 2008 budget of $17.318 billion represented about 0.6% of the $2.9 trillion United States federal budget during the year, or about 35% of total spending on academic scientific research in the United States.

So before we conclude that we simply can't afford it, maybe we should compare how much we spend on NASA and what we benefit from those expenditures to other spending done by the government. Let's start with just a couple small examples...
The largest annual budget for NASA amounts to only about 1% of what we've spent fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

We spend more each year air-conditioning our facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan than the entire annual NASA budget.

The cost of only one month of the war in Afghanistan is more than the entire annual NASA budget.

We've already spent more than $11 billion building the Yucca Flats nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada. That's more than half the cost of an entire year of NASA's space program. And the Yucca Flats facility has never been used and will likely never be used because of political bickering. So before we conclude that "we can't afford NASA and the space program", we should think about where else we're spending money and whether we think those expenditures have produced as much as NASA.

[Guest]

The current administration has essentially gutted NASA and slowed to a crawl any benefits from the scientific research the agency has accomplished over the years.

Before we all agree that we can't afford NASA, we should know how much space exploration really costs us.

NASA's annual budgets for the past fifty years have amount in total to $471.23 billion dollars—an average of $9.06 billion per year. By way of comparison, total spending over this period by the National Science Foundation was roughly one-fourth of NASA's expenditures: $101.5 billion, or $2 billion a year. NASA's FY 2008 budget of $17.318 billion represented about 0.6% of the $2.9 trillion United States federal budget during the year, or about 35% of total spending on academic scientific research in the United States.

So before we conclude that we simply can't afford it, maybe we should compare how much we spend on NASA and what we benefit from those expenditures to other spending done by the government. Let's start with just a couple small examples...
The largest annual budget for NASA amounts to only about 1% of what we've spent fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

We spend more per year in air-conditioning our facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan each year than the entire NASA budget.

The cost of the war in Afghanistan for only one month is more than the entire annual NASA budget.

We've already spent more than $11 billion building the Yucca Flats nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada. That's more than half the cost of an entire year of NASA's space program. And the Yucca Flats facility has never been used and will likely never be used because of political bickering. So before we conclude that "we can't afford NASA and the space program", we should think about where else we're spending money and whether we think those expenditures have produced as much as NASA.

Comparing NASA budget to wars does not seem to address the point. While it would be great to have the money to afford a program as noted, it is a larger undertaking (moon colony) than anything ever attempted and while I have no idea of how to even estimate the costs it seems to me that the cost would far exceed anything from the past !

[Guest]

Comparing NASA budget to wars does not seem to address the point. While it would be great to have the money to afford a program as noted, it is a larger undertaking (moon colony) than anything ever attempted and while I have no idea of how to even estimate the costs it seems to me that the cost would far exceed anything from the past !I'm sorry, Bucco. If you thought I was endorsing Gingrich's looney-tunes idea of establishing a moon colony, I was not. What he was trying to do was appear "Kennedy-like", that was pretty apparent.

What I meant was that way too many of us simply go along with what our elected representatives say or do, based only on soundbites of information. Seldom do people think about some of the stuff that comes out of Washington by saying, "...wait a minute, does that make any sense?" In this case, that probably goes for both the decisions made to pretty much shut down NASA as well as fighting wars.

[Guest]

I'm sorry, Bucco. If you thought I was endorsing Gingrich's looney-tunes idea of establishing a moon colony, I was not. What he was trying to do was appear "Kennedy-like", that was pretty apparent.

What I meant was that way too many of us simply go along with what our elected representatives say or do, based only on soundbites of information. Seldom do people think about some of the stuff that comes out of Washington by saying, "...wait a minute, does that make any sense?" In this case, that probably goes for both the decisions made to pretty much shut down NASA as well as fighting wars.


Great....I can then agree with you :)

Not sure if you read my post.....but wondering what you think about the expansion by the entire congress of the H1-B visa program and also what you thought of my probably misguided suggestion that corporations should adopt the military academies approach...ie. pay for education of american citizens in areas we need the engineering expertise and insist on 5 years of service in return???

[Guest]

Pay for education by employers did happen in the early 70's. I had numerous girlfriends who were hired right out of high school, were given handsome salaries and free tuition, and attending and passing classes were encorporated into their work hours. One gal was an apprentice draftsman making an annual salary of $45,000.00 and got her college diplomaon the job...all due to her high GPA and her gender!

[Guest]

YEP and pretty much approved by both parties across the board. Makes it easier to give the jobs away.

Why do we not have companies emulating our service academies.....pay for the education with a guarantee from the student that you must work for me for x number of years. I guess I am a simpleton on this but it seems like it would be a way to go.





Business is in the business of doing business (making $$, making shareholders happy) - not paying for a kid's education. Just because a kid is a college grad., it doesn't necessarily follow you want him/her working for you for x number of years.

[Guest]

...Not sure if you read my post.....but wondering what you think about the expansion by the entire congress of the H1-B visa program and also what you thought of my probably misguided suggestion that corporations should adopt the military academies approach...ie. pay for education of american citizens in areas we need the engineering expertise and insist on 5 years of service in return???I think I'd be in favor of both ideas. Much has been made of employers, particularly those in high tech, simply not being able to get enough highly qualified people to man the facilities they'd like to have here in the U.S. I can recall Bill Gates saying that they definitely wanted to build or expand a Microsoft facility in the Pacific Northwest, but found they had to place the new facility less than 200 miles north in Canada because they could get the highly educated people they needed there. The people they hired there weren't necessarily all Canadians but Canada has a much more liberal visa policy, thereby permitting many of the foreign students who had come to North America to be educated to stay and work in Canada.

One of the most logical suggestions I ever heard came from Tom Friedman in one of his New York Times columns a year or so ago. He noted that at his daughter's graduation from Cornell, virtually every single doctoral graduate in math and the sciences were foreign students. (I've noticed the same thing when my sons graduated from the University of Michigan.) He suggested that the Immigration Service have a representative at the commencement ceremonies of all the top U.S. engineering and science schools, who would simply hand all those new Phd's either a permanent visa or a passport accepting them as U.S. citizens when they came down the stairs with their new technical doctoral degrees. He suggested that the "brain drain" so long a complaint of U.S. companies, could be solved permanently and very quickly with that approach.

As far as companies using a "military academy" approach, educating and then employing students, I don't see much wrong with that either. It sure works for our military. The military has both the service academies as well as the ROTC programs, which pay for all or a big part of the education of future officers. I was an Army ROTC officer and I couldn't have made it through college without that monthly check from the Army. In order to complete my degree in Industrial Engineering, I was happy with the trade off of a couple years of active duty and another six years of weekly meetings and two-week summer encampments in the active reserve.

That doesn't mean employers would offer an education-for-future employment deal to everyone, any more than our military does. Both the service academies as well as the ROTC programs are pretty doggone selective with the academic credentials they require for those they accept into those programs. The same could be true for companies seeking engineers, scientists, mathemeticians, etc. Hire the brightest, pay to educate them, and then give them a good job when they've completed their education. A good deal for them as well as the employers.

If you think about it, the G.I. Bill worked awfully well in educating a whole generation of people who accomplished some pretty fantastic things. So much so that they're now called "the greatest generation". Does anyone have an expectation that our current younger generation will ever be so respected as to be called something like that?

[Guest]

I'll talk about NASA in another post.

Let me offer an example of myself concerning training.

I got my first job in my industry (software engineering) at the age of 14 in a work-study program. It was 1976. Because of my 'knack' for computers, I was able to make a career of it. For a while, I could practically write my own ticket (in the mid to late 1980s).

I sat on my laurels a bit much and when 2004 roleld around, disaster struck. I was laid off and my skill set was a bit out of touch.

Once I realized I wasn't going to immediately find work, I looked at some training - one ad in particular looked like it was for a job that offerred training. I was a little off in my reading of the ad, but I signed up for the 3 months program anyway. They offerred financing of the $18,000 tuition. It was a risk, but I took it. They apparently had a verison of the training that said you would get free tuition but you had to work at whatever job they assigned you to for 2 years (they would basically be acting as a contracing house) but they clearly didn't want to operated that way. I don't know how many people were there under that arrangement.

I updated my skills, went to job fairs and they even had job placement skill help - teaching you how to write a resume and how to interview if you didn't know how.

Working against me was the fact that I had to commute to their campus - and they were in New Jersey while I lived in New Hampshire. I ended up renting a room in a house and commuting weekly. Because of this, when the training was over, it was still difficult to find work. It took almost another year before I found a contract.

When I *did* get back to work, I parleyed my training with my 'legacy' experience and that contract led to another one which lasted over a year and led to a third - with my rate increasing each time. When my 3rd contract was cut, I had another contract within 48 hours - thanks to my re-training and usage of those skills. That contract was eventually converted to the full-time position I have now.

I financed this myself. If there were more employers who could operated programs like I described above - training in exchange for a contract to work - we would be doing ourselves a great favor. Think of it like baseball - the major league teams bring someone up from the minors (training) and they have 'control' over that player for 4 years at which time the player has earned free-agency.

There should be programs that allow this sort of thing because not everyone has the resources that I had to take out the loan for the tuition, room and board. Paying it back in kind with employment serves several purposes - paying back the investment while the 'student' gains experience in the field.

But that would take thinking of nature lasting more than just the next fiscal quarter. It would take long-term INVESTMENT-style thinking.

EDIT: I should clarify - by "financed this myself", I should specify that I went out and got an education loan that I have since paid back when I refinanced my house.

[Guest]

He who controls the moon controls.....oh never mind. :a040: