Comments on: No Skyscraper Stagnation

By: The Anonymouse

The Anonymouse — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 19:26:17 +0000

Of course it got cut. Where’s the excitement in doing something we managed 45 years ago with technology inferior to that in my cell phone?

Mars is where it’s at. There’s just nothing sexier than manned spaceflight, and not just to some dinky lab closer to me than the next big city down the interstate. Robots might be able to do pure science better than people, but when you’re fighting for dollars that could be going “for the children,” you need a powerful draw.

Proposal: one-way to Mars! Reduce costs by nixing the return trip. Send settlers. I suggest Mormons. Good, stable folk, industrious, with folkways that celebrate hard work, sacrifice, and pioneer spirit. Hell, you could name the first ship “Handcart I.” Let the first words out of the mission commander’s mouth be, “This is the place.”

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 19:10:00 +0000

As I said in the previous thread, NASA spent 2004-2009 trying to recreate the Saturn I. This project was canceled not (just) because spectacular goal of the moon was still 10 years away, but because they were over budget and behind schedule. This is not (just) a matter of surviving budget cuts but definite failure. They cannot accurately predict how much time and money it will take to redo a 50 year old project.

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By: Nornagest

Nornagest — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 18:28:43 +0000

I think you can trust NASA’s announcements insofar as an announcement means NASA’s almost certainly spending money on the project, and very likely doing useful things towards it. However, moon landing-scale projects take so much money that they become attractive targets for cuts, and they take enough time that they have to survive several budget cycles. They’re unlikely to make it unless their completion becomes a matter of national prestige; there just isn’t enough political will locked up in spaceflight anymore. (Note however that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing: look at the F-35 program for an example of what happens when a big aerospace project runs into serious problems but can’t be killed.)

On the other hand, smaller, cheaper, and above all shorter projects are much more reliable.

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By: Nornagest

Nornagest — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 20:48:15 +0000

I think it’s safe to say that the age of the housing project has come and gone, too. This is the age of… well, twenty years ago the shopping mall would have been appropriate, but Amazon’s kicked their asses quite thoroughly. I’d say the subdivision, but that’s not truly recent and lacks the monumental character I’m looking for.

We really don’t build many garish monuments to our civilization’s values anymore, do we? Not even utterly banal ones.

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By: Joseph Hertzlinger

Joseph Hertzlinger — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 20:19:14 +0000

From someone in the 1940–1970 period: “The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project.”—Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead

Come to think of it, “Howl” was also written in that period. It looks like Moloch hates skyscrapers.

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By: B

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 14:20:03 +0000

I understand the business case.

Paying a lot if money for the reinvention of vacuous bullshit because a lot of people desire vacuous bullshit may be a good business decision – which I don’t doubt – but it is not a good sign about a civilization.

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By: B

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 14:16:58 +0000

The latter. A civilization that incentivizes hardly anything as much as the trivial reinvention of texting for the umpteenth time, as opposed to actual marvels of technology, is not in a good way.

“But that’s what the people want!” – exactly.

The problem is that central planning is invariably a debacle, but markets only provide good things if many people desire them. Advance and expansion are problems of virtue and there are no shortcuts.

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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 16:40:13 +0000

@Alexander Stanislaw

You have an astounding ability to move the goal post, kick the ball into it and call it a goal.

First, you went on about how some human populations have a higher propensity for violence due to dysgenics. When Multiheaded challenged you on this, because of course you hadn’t provided any actual data that supports this claim, and because this claim is rather dubious and difficult to prove, and because there are socioeconomic reasons that can explain the differences in the level of violence between various populations to a surprisingly high degree, instead of proving your rather dubious claim that it is dysgenics that’s causing differences in the levels of violence among different populations, you adapted Douglas Knight’s statement that, ’causes don’t matter when deciding policy, and all that matters is how things are and how things will be’, and went on to f*ck the immigrants. On top of that, you have the audacity to accuse Multiheaded on distorting what you’re saying.

Having said that, I’d be pretty suspicious of Germans if I were you. Historically they have been pretty violent.

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By: Matthew

Matthew — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 02:01:23 +0000

Last I heard, the total number of journalists on the labor beat in the United States now is 3. (As opposed to the business beat, which is rather better covered.) You’re going to have a tough time making comparisons, in part because few in the media take labor rights seriously any more.

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By: suntzuanime

suntzuanime — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 01:47:13 +0000

That hypothesis was not really a commie hypothesis – it’s the general conservative position, that greedy labor unions stuff their pockets at the expense of anyone who wants to get anything done. The commie position is that things will never get better for the worker until we murder everyone that isn’t the worker, and any appearances to the contrary are false consciousness. In general, under our system, political victories are not something you admit to, they’re something you accuse your enemies of.

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