pdonis

47 ms·

841.
by pdonis 2y ago
> I believe a dog values freedom more than its immediate personal safety. Why do you believe that? Bear in mind that our domesticated dogs of today are very different from their wild ancestors (or from wolves, their closest wild relati
842.
by pdonis 2y ago
Is there any evidence that dogs can perform mental reflection?
843.
by pdonis 2y ago
> Many of those you mentioned are still part of the goal of getting a human on the moon. Some of them were for getting more detailed information about the Moon prior to sending the Apollo missions there. But most of them were general s
844.
by pdonis 2y ago
NASA was doing plenty of unmanned missions during the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo years: the Explorer, Pioneer, Echo, Ranger, Telstar, Mariner, Lunar Explorer, and Surveyor programs all had multiple missions in that time period. So no, I don&#x27
845.
by pdonis 2y ago
High competence in unmanned missions. But not in manned missions.
846.
by pdonis 2y ago
The combined Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs cost around $30 billion in then year dollars, which equates to about $300 billion in today's dollars. That's an average of about $25 billion a year over 12 years. That's about
847.
by pdonis 2y ago
No, people look at what NASA was able to accomplish during the 1960s and compare it to now, and wonder how the level of competence can be so drastically lower now vs. then. NASA was not infallible during the 1960s, but the level of engineer
848.
by pdonis 2y ago
> Except for those true things that are contradictory with other true things. Like quantum mechanics and Newtonian physics. Neither of these things are true. Both are models. As the saying goes, all models are wrong but some are useful
849.
by pdonis 2y ago
> Do experience and rationality not count here? Bear in mind that the title question actually has (as the article makes clear) a crucial qualifier: the question is why people believe true things "beyond their immediate material an
850.
by pdonis 2y ago
> other conspiracy theorists The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is not a "conspiracy theory", it's a fact. The events leading up to it are not a matter of serious dispute as far as I know. Of course the government and the F
851.
by pdonis 2y ago
The government did not create airlines, aircraft makers, cars, etc. It created the Fed through Federal law, as I responded elsewhere in this discussion.
852.
by pdonis 2y ago
> As far as I understand the federal reserve is not technically part of the government but a private institution. It's established by Federal law; its Chairman is appointed by the President. It walks like a duck and quacks like a
853.
by pdonis 2y ago
> 12 years in military multiple tours of various warzones. How recently? I'm guessing, recently enough that the military you served in is the dysfunctional military described in the article, which suffers from a severe lack of lea
854.
by pdonis 2y ago
> The vast majority of money that is in the economy is created by banks with credit creation That's the way it's described, but banks in this respect are only acting as agents of the government. They can only "create&quo
855.
by pdonis 2y ago
> I think that the executive proposes the budget The budgeting process is a huge hairball of political Rube Goldberg contraptions, and who "proposes" the budget on paper has very little to do with the actual political maneuve
856.
by pdonis 2y ago
Characterizing the problem as "debt" is misleading. The real problem is the government printing money. What we call the "national debt" is just government printed money where whoever "has" it can only draw on a
857.
by pdonis 2y ago
No, but you were implicitly assuming undisciplined aggression, when what the military actually needs and tries to train for is disciplined aggression--aggression against only the right targets at the right time and place. Undisciplined
858.
by pdonis 2y ago
> If you squint a little, these are essentially the same. So are all the "shades of gray" in between. Every source of journalism we have is funded by someone who wants to further their own agenda. We have no source of j
859.
by pdonis 2y ago
> There needs to be publicly funded journalism - who else is going to report on stories that would threaten the status quo of rich & powerful? The way to enable stories that threaten the status quo of the rich and powerful is to en
860.
by pdonis 2y ago
> cost varying inversely with how compelled someone feels to say something. How compelled someone feels to say something has little or nothing to do with how reliable what they are saying is. > The additional 45M in my example Whe
861.
by pdonis 2y ago
> Publishing static content is extraordinarily cheap. The main cost of reliable journalism isn't publishing the content. It's getting reliable content to publish.
862.
by pdonis 2y ago
> State funding has risks but may be the most effective option. State funding doesn't solve the problem of getting good journalism. It just means journalism is biased in favor of the state, instead of biased in favor of whatever i
863.
by pdonis 2y ago
> What should we tax instead? My proposal (in the GP of the post you responded to) was to tax consumption, i.e., a national sales tax or something like it. > Capital seems to me a viable choice. What would count as "capital&q
864.
by pdonis 2y ago
> It wasn't cheap software. It was cheap enough for me to afford Turbo Pascal and later Delphi when I wasn't a business professional, just a hobbyist programmer.
865.
by pdonis 2y ago
> I get that you want some division between system and user Which, as others have pointed out, means various system services running as other users (since you don't want them running as your user, and you also don't want the
866.
by pdonis 2y ago
I think this is at least partly driven by the locality (city or county) wanting more property taxes from the new homes. In a city near me, there have been five new subdivisions approved in the past few years, all of which have not only HOAs
867.
by pdonis 2y ago
What you are calling "unearned income" can still represent production indirectly, since it is income from passive investments, which are supposed to give returns based on creating wealth. It is true that that isn't always the
868.
by pdonis 2y ago
The GP said that income should be taxed as little as possible. That doesn't necessarily mean taxes, period, should be as little as possible. One could just tax things other than income. From an economic standpoint, it makes sense no
869.
by pdonis 2y ago
> Cosmology rests on the principal that physics is the same in all directions, over all translations, and over time translation. That the laws of physics are the same. That doesn't mean the geometry of spacetime is the same or
870.
by pdonis 2y ago
> Perhaps we need some outside groups to take a look at this to see if either group is making systematic errors in their analyses. I agree this would be a good thing.

More ›