Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.
The truth is diverting money to space exploration is not that popular.
We only got the moon because we were in a battle with the Soviet Union about capitalism vs. communism. It was never about space or science. The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets.
So while I’m not a fan of the circumstances, I need some way for money to go to space exploration and I’m riding this like people rode the Cold War as an excuse to build a moon rocket.
The instant we beat the Soviet Union to the moon we reduced NASA's projects and budgets. That's why the Space Shuttle was such a ridiculous kludge.
The original shuttle designs were much, much better. I remember reading tech specs and looking at schematics in Discover and Popular Science years before the final design. Maybe Omni too.
Then it ended up in committee, politicians got involved, and funding was cut in parallel (even before the wall came down, it was clear the Soviets were done). The design was a shadow of what it could have been.
I remeber being sad as a kid.
Also, my drive down nastologia avenue made me realise, I really miss science magazines. The publishing date of the three I mentioned seemed to be staggered a bit. So I always had a bit of science news, and I really miss the format.
Phones aren't the same, tiny, tablets are unwieldy and smaller than a magazine, they were distraction free, and I really liked it just being all in one package.
I even liked the ads! Typically for some computer peripheral, or a new calculator, or some scientific apparatus. The ad just sat there too, it didn't bounce around or scream at you or cover an article's text.
Or the worst modern scourge, popups while you're reading, I mean !'?"#+#-#/ off I'm reading here!
Odyssey was published by the same person who operated Astronomy magazine, and in my tweens and early teens I gobbled up the stories about the space shuttle and the images coming back from various missions such as Voyager.
I don’t remember if I saw it in the school library and asked my parents to subscribe or they subscribed for me, but it really helped to maintain a lifelong interest in space flight and astronomy (along with whatever science fiction I could get my hands on).
> one of the few that can even afford to pay it. Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.
That's not accurate at all. They could always afford to pay it, and so can other companies. What changed is that they stopped counting as "online sales tax" so they didn't care about those laws anymore.
If they could get out of sale tax, they very much would still want to. If they could get rid of sales tax for everyone, they would be for it. Sales tax isn't benefiting them by acting as a gatekeeping force.
(RCA is a bad swap-in in this example but I'm struggling to think of an apt analogy for this era.)
Space flight is a typical "tragedy of the commons" scenario. Like radio waves (especially on HF), space orbits are a finite resource... and not just problematic for other satellites, because ground-based space observation gets more and more impeded by satellites.
If your business model relies on spewing litter everywhere, complaining about gatekeeping when someone makes you pay to clean it up isn’t even disingenuous, it’s transparently manipulative.
The public is tired of privatized profits, socialized costs. Space seems like a great place to draw that line: if you can’t afford to clean up your mess, you don’t get to make the mess. Sorry.
They impose compliance costs or costs to skirt the regulations.
CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes, quite the opposite they keep increasing and will continue to do so for a long time before even thinking about coming down. In large part because production was moved off shore to countries which have less regulation and higher emission intensity of production, which actually has the opposite effect.
Workers rights were not solved, the abuses were just off-shored to countries that still enslave people and abuse workers and allow child labor.
Tax evasion has not been solved, it's just permitted under complicated legal structures.
All these things are a godsend for bloated multinational corporations who can pay the compliance costs without blinking, and have little to worry about organic competition.
Space regulation and taxes won't solve anything. If the government had any kind of track record you might be a little open minded about it, but at this point the burden of proof would be on the people claiming that this time, taxes won't be used for corruption and graft. If there is money to be had in it, the government will take their cut and in exchange allow multinational corporations to offshore the problem to other countries.
It's a lot harder to stop a very, very large group of people from doing something that they've been doing for generations. It's much easier to stop a much smaller group of people from starting something new.
But because of that original sin we see exactly what you describe — a system with too much inertia to change easily.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
All the?
We barely regulate CO2 at all.
If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.
And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.
All the.
> We barely regulate CO2 at all.
Not sure who the "we" is, but many jurisdictions do regulate CO2 heavily. Not only immediate direct taxes, but subsidies to competitors, increased regulatory impositions and effective moratoriums on approvals, sovereign risk factors with many countries legislating and committing to CO2 phase out.
> If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.
Again not sure which we you are talking about, but lots of places have carbon taxes. They do make massive changes when they are priced to do so -- see, the EU. That was the point of my comment. I didn't argue markets don't respond to economic incentives, I clearly was agreeing they do. The effect has not been to solve climate change, it has been to move production offshore to markets that have much higher carbon emission intensity of production!
> And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.
And the fact that these not-hard-to-stop loopholes are not stopped still doesn't make you stop to think? The taxes aren't going to solve problems or pay for externalities, they are funding graft and corruption and stifling competition.
If you don't believe in a role for government in regulating access to space despite (despite it having that role since the development of the technological means to access it) than can you suggest a solution to the negative externalities that we unfolding this very moment?
This reads like a parody of libertarians.
[1] I’m not really mourning the loss of Napster, but rather rolling my eyes at the way YouTube has made having more than 6 seconds of any song a death sentence for the video, killing fair use dead, since demonetization directly halts distribution of a video.