Posts Made By: Richard Wright

I understand people are upset. I am one if them. But at the end of the day, I don't think any of us have reason to believe the government by our current parties is going to fix this:

The Republicans put up $750 billion dollars to prop up banks that are already dead. Effect: no improvement. Maybe we didn't have runs on the banks as a result.

The Democrats put up another $780 billion for stimulus. Effect: Probably will be hard to see- I anticipate it will appear to do very little. It is possible we'll finally get something approximating a modern transport network as a result.

But the problem is bigger than these. The American consumer base was spending $10 trillion/year. There is no entity of any sort in this world capable of that level if spending. China and India's populations combined spend $2 trillion/ year. But that is what has stopped. 2/3 of our economy is consumer spending, and those people are tapped out.

OK, maybe if people had listened to Jimmy Carter and not used credit cards, this wouldn't have happened. Maybe if the Bushes or Clinton had the nerve to stand up to big money, this wouldn't have happened. It really doesn't matter at this point. The ship went on the rocks in 2007, the problem was ignored for a year, and now the bottom is ripped out and she's taking on water, fast.

Our decision is whether we try to fix the blame, or try to fix the problem. Only one of those two options will help. If there was someone standing around to blame and by doing so make this better, then we should do that. But there isn't. Sure, we can say stick it to anyone who bought a house and now can't afford it. Ok, they walk away, it goes back to a bank, it is insolvent so it dumps the house on the saturated market, all other house values drop, everyone's net worth drops, credit gets tougher to come by, people spend less, the economy falls. We've tried that one. Teaching someone who hoped to have a home a bitter life lesson is hurting all of us.

But I don't think the government has the resources to stop that. As big as we think of our government as being, it is actually a wee little thing next to the national economy. It's more like a cowboy with a lasso on a bull. Government let go of the lasso when everyone devised plans to lobby for having regulations eliminated.

If you aren't happy with what the government has come up with as an answer, suggest a new solution. Here's one: forgive all debts, public and private, as they stand at one moment on one day. The idea would be to reset the system. Money is an abstraction we invented. We should only be willing to put up with a certain amountbof inconvenience for its sake.

But blaming one president or another isn't going to help us. We can just hope 70 years from now this lesson isn't lost again.

We invented the UN so a hand other than ours could be seen as the final arbiter of international justice. Saying we are unhappy with it is like saying we are unhappy with the NYSE. The alternative is to give the power to someone we can't keep an eye on, or to be a global dictator like the British tried to be. Given that, we need to work past it's flaws.

-Rich

Paul McCarty said:

The UN is the least of our worries.

Don't be silly. We are not going to pay this as debt; we're just printing it. So lighten up. The finance crowd delighted in setting up what they thought was a perfect gordian knot of debt based profit, right up to the point where no one had enough money to fund it. Now AIG has been stupid enough to paint targets on themselves and implicate enough others to start a real feeding frenzy. They will get to watch their debt empire dissolve even as they are dragged on a tour if their own a--es. But don't worry- we aren't paying for it. Since the finance idiots managed to actually destroy most of the money in existence through their stupid schemes, we actually have to print our way out of having hyper-deflation. They did so much damage, we can't try to save money and pay off the debt without shutting everything down. I suggest you pop some corn and find a comfy seat to enjoy the show. I wonder if it is too late to start a debate on firing squads or impaling for them.

-Rich

Charlie Liggett said:

BO has transfered more wealth in the last 2 months than all the last presidents in our history. I agree Bush was a huge spender and I for one didn't like it, because it put him in the same family as the tax and spend liberals. I would have thought the liberals would have embraced him in all the spending he did. You realize if you took 100% of all the income from everyone who makes $75,000. a year and above and applied it to the BO spending spree, there would not be enough to pay the debt. The Republicans and Democrats need to quit passing all these bailout giveaways and enslaving our future generations. Liberals squawk about Big Corporations, but go right ahead and bail them out. Republicans squawk about Big Government and allow the government to entrench itself deeper and deeper into our lives. It is time for all the above to pull their heads out of their butts and do what is good for our future, not their cronies. Also BO wasn't put in office by the majority of the people. Look up the numbers of popular votes. This is a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy and that worked to his advantage this time. It worked to Bush's last time.

I wholeheartedly agree we need advanced research, but we need to be careful of some of the crackpot projects. Zero point energy is a good example. We aren't going to be able to violate conservation of energy. And propulsion isn't really the key issue it is presented as, and neither us launch cost. The key we are lacking is reasons for launches. Satisfying curiousity is nice. The benefits of trade is why fleets of ships got built. Right now, there is a telecom glut thanks to massive ammounts of optical cable, which has killed off a lot of space business. The market capitalization of the entire US aerospace sector combined is less than Google. We expect the aerospace sector to build machines able to leap off the ground and get to 22 times the speed of sound in 8 minutes reliably, but invest very little in it, leaving that sector in an environment of increased aspirations, but very little market for the products. In comparison, Google has been lavished with funds for showing usnpaid advertisements when we try to find something on the web. It will therefore be Google which can invest in basic reasearch and expanded technologies.

I still keep working in the Aerospace sector, anyway. It was the reason I became an engineer.

-Rich

George Blahun said:

I mean this sincerely, I'd like researchers to give serious thought to dumping chemical rockets and start an intense search for alternative, futuristic propulsion systems. Warp Drive, Anti Gravity all the stuff which physicists now say is feasible given the current views of the universe and its most basic laws. I'm sure that some of this is now going on, but it would be nice to come up with a method for getting us to the stars without having to rely on time dilation and its myriad issues. In the book The Hunt For Zero Point by Nick Cook, he postulates some of this research is and has been going on. Unfortunately, it is in the Black Programs and is not out in the open with collaboration of ideas and results. If you aren't familiar with Nick Cook, he writes for Jane's, and is a well respected researcher. Chemical rockets are not going to get us where we really want to go, the stars and beyond. You might find it surprising that I voted for reducing funding for manned flight, but it's not because I want to see us stuck here on earth. I'd like for us to really have a chance to go somewhere interesting and to get there money is needed. Using chemical rockets to get us off the earth is like using a bicycle to get to the North Pole. It can be done, but unless you're doing it for the fun and exciting experience, it's not the most efficient way to travel.

Heh. I'd like to see the arguments that would start!

I hate to disagree, but isn't manned space exploration actually why we aren't on this planet?

:-D

-Rich

Luca Grella said:

I agree, this is a very great poll. I want to know what other people think on space exploration too.
An yes , in IMHO , manned space exploration is why we are on this planet.

Jeff,

Come on, you can't argue Bush is blameless after 8 years in office, claim whatever is bad from his era came from Clinton, and Obama has been a disaster after only 2 months in office. That's just silly. Bush spent his first 100 days in office on vacation then tapered off from there. His administration's only achievements were in undoing. They undid financial regulations. They undid environmental regulations. They undid constitutional protections of human rights. And they gleefully took money from Countrywide as their biggest contributor. If you have any if the dkepticismof great wealth you claim, this isn't the camp to throw in with.

I myself am wondering if this administration we have now is stable. They inherited one bailout, and added another, and I think they both were a bad idea. The banks went screaming off a cliff. And I'm starting to suspect the government isn't big enough to fix what they did, and no party we have in this country has a plan. The Democrats will try to keep people from starving. But the only historical prescedent for this sort of event comes as a very different proposition from what we are talking about. The British gave up manufacturing and outsourced everything. In their new service economy, they told themselves it was ok to give up what had made them great because financial services were lucrative. They had an infamous bank crash as people did what we have seen here. When it was all over, they had gone through WWI and were no longer an empire.

And that is what we are facing. Our current president has said 40% of the economic growth we thought we had in the last 20 years was just financial shell games. Well look at how much growth was forecast in the last 20 years and take away 40% and what do you see? The country has alternately stagnated and declined. Now tell me there is reason to be happy with anyone who has been running the country during this time.

-Rich

Jeffrey Counsil said:

Not hardly. And of all I said, this is the only "argument" you can come up with? Blame the private sector for all the Govt. spending? That is lame... Barney & Friends created this mess way back on the 90's. Just look at all those on the "Banking, and Finance Committees" and what they have done while being there. Yes, Barney has had his hands in the cookie jar since Clinton's time and has pretty much had "control" of everything related to it, and the housing industry (the lending part). Now take a look at who's getting all the money.. Yep, Barney's friends! But wait, it's not Barney's money he's giving to his friends, now is it? And when Bush, McCain, and a few others tried to get a handle on things, the Dems just threw a "Filibuster Party".. Or is your memory failing you? Are you so full of hatred of the free market system that you fail to see through the smoke -n- mirrors thrown up by these clowns? Do you hate the "rich" so much you want those that are not "of the party" to go down in flames? You don't seem to be touching on the fact that all your beloved "change" people are filthy rich! And the only thing that has changed is who is spending, and how much. The how much being in the trillions increase. The "Changers" have managed to outspend Bush's 8 years in only two months! Get a grip man! How much more are these jokers going to manage to spend in the remaining 3.7 years?

Jeff,

You've given this too much thought to end up parroting a political party's propaganda.

The assertions they make are absurd.

The discussion we are trying to have here is about what do we do, now. And it's a serious topic. One liners about Clinton or absurd revisionist claims about the last 8 years aren't going to help. There ain't no place to stash the blame to fix the problem. Again, if heaping blame on someone would help, then this ought to have been cleared up long ago. A lot of people have blamed Clinton for a lot of things. Folks have blamed Bush for a lot more. None of that has done one bit to keep jobs on-shore, has it?

Clinton pandered to public opinion in a lot of ways. And in the end, his biggest achievement was presiding over the dotcom bubble. No fixed health care. No fixed anti-American jihad building in Pakistan. Plenty of rosy feeling for no good reason, though. But it has been a while since he was in office. A lot of other water has come under the bridge.

Bush wasn't doing some secret good works his first days in office. It's an open book now, so the claim he was doing important things we just don't know about is DOA. There was no planning to get Al Queda before they hit us. There was no planning to prepare for national emergencies. There wasn't even a conversation on simplifying the tax code. It's true, we don't know what he was doing in those precious days at the beginning of 2001 when there was a chance to stave off a stack of disasters; we only know he wasn't preparing to meet ordinary crises like hurricanes, he wasn't preparing to meet enemies who had already attacked us, and he wasn't doing much of anything besides thinking of ways for diverting funds to his cronies.

So great, they both were lousy. Exactly how does that help us, now? I can't envision saying either of them did a bang up job with where things have wound up. We're mired two wars, our economy is collapsing, we have thrown away the industries which made us great, and two generations of Americans are getting used to the idea they won't do as well as their parents.

Neither party has clean hands at this point. And I haven't heard a way that can help us.

So can we back off the inflammatory rhetoric and talk about the subject? The government has already started printing money to pay the debt.

-Rich

Jeffrey Counsil said:

I said nothing about Bush being absolutely "blameless". And the first "bailout" was voted in by both parties. The Dems had control of Congress for the last 2 years of Bush's term. So the sorry excuse of "inherited" has no basis. But this all started way before Bush even ran for President. But the attempts by the Bush administration to thwart the oncoming financial crisis was stifled by the Dems (mostly) and the special interest groups. There were no "constitutional" protections of human rights violated. If the stupid Obama clowns would just get the hell out of the way and stop this idiotic spending spree, the people could heal themselves. But it's not just the Obama camp, it's the top-heavy Government as a whole. It's just that the current crop of clowns have no clue what they are doing. Omama has no clue what to say without a teleprompter. At least Bush, as bad as he was, was intelligent enough to answer questions without making up some excuse. And Bush wasn't on a "vacation" the 1st 100 days. Just because you don't know what he was doing doesn't mean he was doing "nothing".
It's so easy for people to use the catch phrase "we inherited", so are you saying there weren't any problems inherited from Clinton? Clinton tore down many of the regulations put in place by Reagan and Bush Sr. Many of which got the ball rolling in the downfall that is currently troubling us. You can't claim that all this happened just because of "Bush and the GOP" when it's so obvious that Barney & Friends screwed up and were helping their friends get rich. But again, it's not all on Barney's shoulders.

Had enough "change" yet?

My Dad was career Army, and has been in the exact same situation.

I don't know if the government is in the position to make any promises, actually. I went to an event recently which had Air Force, Marine, and Army aircraft at it. And since I'm an engineer, I tend to notice details most folks wouldn't. But no critical eye was needed to see these were the most worn active aircraft I had ever seen with US markings on them. The A-10 pilot I talked to had already been on three combat deployments.

We need to look up and notice our country is in two wars. We can't throw whatever resources anyone can think to name at health care. It costs almost as much as the entire government does. We are seeing our infrastructure falling apart, our own states failing, and our military overtaxed to defend us while we hemmorage resources into a health care system delivering the same results as Turkey's.

We know how many people will get any disease or other ailment in any given year, and we know what it takes to get everyone a checkup. It really ought to be possible to figure this out. Even the French outlive us and spend less to do it.

And we really are in two wars. It's time to start acting like it, and realize we can't entertain every whim of every citizen and still defeat the enemy. As a nation, we haven't come to grips with that. We really need to. The Army needs weapons. The Navy needs ships. The Air Force needs airplanes. Roads need to be paved. Schools need to educate our kids. It's going to cost money. And part of the price might be skipping having everyone else pay to buy your pills for restless leg syndrome.

-Rich

Dean Glace said:

My military coverage is through Humana Health. In order to cover all costs, I have to buy a supplemental policy. The Humana Plan does not cover all the costs. This is not a government health plan. It is a private plan paid for by the government. When I went into the service I was promised "full" health care when I retired. As you can see, what the government promises is not what you get!!

CAPT Dean Glace, USN-Ret

Guy Pirro said:


But I'll bet refractors end up with more votes than all others types combined.

You and your stuffy classical music. But yes, Maksutovs are cool. I can't really decide a single scope is best. It's why I have 9 of them at the moment.