Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is a difficult argument to argue with because it doesn’t have any constraints.

Instead of doing X why don’t we do any of the Y other things we could do?

Surely, at least some subset of Y is more important than X, right?

…but, is it?

Are we better off, specifically with spending slightly more money on proving people with water, than having weather forecasts that can help thousands of farmer provide better yields and grow more food?

Could we not say, spend a little bit less on building guns and use that money to do it instead? There’s loads more money in guns than space and hell, and wtf are the people crying for us to stop doing that?

My observation has been, that people who want space funding redirected are not familiar with the benefits it provides, and fail to understand that the funding is, actually, insignificant.

There’s a good write up of this here: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget

What wrong with investing in science?

:(

I'm not arguing that no one should focus on space and I'm certainly not arguing that no one should focus on science..it's the opposite in fact. It just seems to me that going to space is sort of a solved problem, and that now we're just trying to figure out how to do it a little bit better and in a way that generates revenue. But since there are problems that remain unsolved, you'd think that people who are bright enough to tackle admittedly difficult problems like going to space better than we already do would want to tackle really hard problems, rather than just sort of iterating on an existing design.

Right now we have a new space race, it's just between companies instead of countries.

>Are we better off, specifically with spending slightly more money on proving people with water, than having weather forecasts that can help thousands of farmer provide better yields and grow more food?

And, with the crumbling infrastructure, declining middle class, poverty stricken working class, and so on, how's that worked out for us?

So the middle class is poor because a tiny part of the budget is invested in space?

I don't understand what argument you are trying to make.

>So the middle class is poor because a tiny part of the budget is invested in space?

No, it's poor because the same logic that invests that "tiny part of the budget" in space (and prints billions of money to fund the likes of Musk, Bezos, and so on), also runs the other investments and public policy decisions.

> and prints billions of money to fund the likes of Musk, Bezos, and so on

That's not how monetary policy works but ok ...

> also runs the other investments and public policy decisions

So you don't like some things the government does and therefore anything the government does is bad and we can have no argument about what spending is good and what is bad?

>That's not how monetary policy works but ok ...

Modern QE, for example, is not traditional monetary policy anyway, but ok. Nor is playing with such a huge percentage of the GDP, or facilitating lending to the already rich, to use to stock their fireplaces, VC bets, and in general, getting richer on a cheap supply of money...

>So you don't like some things the government does and therefore anything the government does is bad and we can have no argument about what spending is good and what is bad?

On the contrary, I like government. I just with it did things as a government of/for the people, as opposed as a lackey to oligarchs. You know, reigning on them, instead of high fiving them and being in their pockets. Or printing money to keep the bubble alive, so they can play with their phallic rockets.

> Modern QE, for example, is not traditional monetary policy anyway, but ok.

Nonsense, QE was done already 100 years ago and more.

> Nor is playing with such a huge percentage of the GDP

Not that new in history of money and bad measure anyway.

Your understanding of monetary policy is fundamentally flawed. Your idea that if the central bank just collapsed nominal spenidng to 'destroy' the 'bubble' is about the worst possible thing you could do. That is literally how we totally unnecessary had the Great Depression. Congratulation 'Bubble Burst'.

But I guess you have bought into some of the leftists conspiracy and nonsense propaganda about central banks so there is like not much to talk you out of it.

> phallic rockets.

Ask yourself who is actually obsessed with thinking about phallics.

We've been _under_ investing in scientific research, especially in regards to space, for decades.

What spending we do have is usually focused on militaristic applications.

How does this reflect poorly on space travel research? If you're using the current status quo to argue that spending priorities are broken, you're not arguing against NASA funding. You're arguing against the military-industrial complex.

If important research is done through public agencies, the public reaps the benefits of this research. If private industry is allowed to take the reins, corporate interests and shareholders are the ones who benefit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com