This argument comes up a lot, about whether a space program is “worth it” in some sense. One problem I’ve found is that these discussions often treat this in the abstract. And then we get into the nature of human endeavor, the economic benefits of that R&D, etc.
Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.
Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.
> And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Actually, we do. I just cancelled two of mine in the last hour, and I know many people who are serial join/cancel subscribers because they "talk a lot about whether the [monthly fee] is better used for other purposes".
NASA isn't expensive. The science parts and the job creation parts almost certainly return a significant economic multiplier. The spend is very good value for around 0.5% of the federal budget.
That doesn't mean Moon shots are the best possible use of that budget. There are strong arguments for creating more space stations first, and then using them as staging for other projects.
Mars and the Moon are ridiculously hostile environments. Hollywood (and Elon Musk) have sold a fantasy of land-unpack-build. There aren't enough words to describe how utterly unrealistic that is.
Current strategy is muddled, because it contains elements of patriotic Cold War PR fumes, contractor pork, and more than a hint of covert militarisation. Science and engineering are buried somewhere in the middle of that.
I would like to watch a new Moon landing, but in my opinion more useful would be to build a space station with artificial gravity.
At some point it may become cheaper to build a spacecraft on the Moon and launch it in interplanetary missions than to do it from Earth. It might also be useful to build some bigger telescopes on the Moon than it is practical to launch from Earth, because due to the pollution of the sky extraterrestrial telescopes become more and more necessary.
Despite the fact that there may be some uses for bases on the Moon, it is likely that those bases should be mostly automated and humans should stay in such bases only for a limited time, much like staying on the ISS. The reason is that it is very likely that the gravity of the Moon is still too low to avoid health deterioration. According to the experiments done on mice in the ISS, two thirds of the terrestrial gravity were required to avoid health issues and one third of the terrestrial gravity provided a partial mitigation.
So even the gravity of Mars is only barely enough to avoid the more severe health problems, but not sufficient.
For long term missions, there is no real alternative to the use of a rotating space station, to ensure adequate gravity.
While with underground bases on Moon or on Mars it would be much easier to provide radiation protection, there remains the problem of insufficient gravity. It may be necessary to also build a rotating underground base, at least for a part where humans spend most of the time.
That’s a very fair point. Frankly I don’t know enough about the Artemis mission and general path, and would like to learn more. I’m certainly open to the argument that NASA’s budget isn’t properly allocated to the right priorities. I was responding just to the classic argument of “why spend money on NASA when we could be spending on …”
Just comes off like a puffed-up pigeon strutting around the stage, trying to cover up his own insecurities. The true great military leaders dont act like this. Even Patton, who has that kind of reputation, was far more thoughtful. On the journey to invade North Africa, Patton took the time to study the Quran, to better understand the people of the land he was to fight over.
I doubt Hegseth even knows what it means to give quarter, probably just said it because he thought it sounded tough
That's not limited to "great military leaders". Even ordinary military leaders do not commit war crimes aloud, on their own web sites.
And trying to avoid complicity via "I'm not a criminal, I am merely ignorant of my job" is also not the mark of somebody with even faint pretensions to competence.
Voter ID is often touted as an important part of election security, but when you look at the threat model of elections it just doesn't do much. Think about how you would try to cheat at an election. The common methods are things like ballot stuffing, throwing out votes, discouraging people from voting, etc. Examples include spreading disinformation about what day voting is happening, seizing ballot boxes and replacing them with forged ballots that favor your candidate, or calling in bomb threats to polling places. These are not prevented by voter ID requirements.
The only thing voter ID prevents is voter impersonation. It prevents you from finding someone else's name and polling place, going there, pretending to be that person, and submitting a vote on their behalf. But that threat doesn't really scale. Even if you assume no one at the polling places notice you coming to vote over and over under different names, a single person could probably only do this a few dozen times on election day. To scale that you would need more people; and every person you add to the scheme increases the odds of someone slipping up or getting caught. But the real issue is if any of the people you are impersonating try to vote! While election officials don't record what people voted for, they do record who voted, and the ballot counting process will automatically note that people voted multiple times. So you would have to figure out some way to gather a database of a large number of people you know aren't going to vote, and get a bunch of people to turn up at a bunch of polling places under those names. It's just not practical to do, when elections are decided by thousands or tens of thousands of votes.
> how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections)
The devil is in the details. I don't trust that the groups drafting Voter ID legislation are doing so in good faith. For example, North Dakota passed a voter ID law years ago. It stated that you needed a valid state-issued ID that included a street address. Sounds fine, right? The problem is that most homes on Native American reservations don't actually have street addresses. Tribal members use P.O. boxes for mail, and that P.O. box is on their driver's licenses. This was brought up when the law was proposed, but it passed anyway. The Spirit Lake Nation and the Standing Rock Sioux tribes had to sue in federal court. They were eventually successful, but it took years, and in the meantime the 2018 midterms were held with many Native Americans literally unable to vote.
The entire enterprise of AI for medical advice reminds me a lot of the early 20th century. When X-rays and radioactivity were first discovered, industry rushed to commercialize it. You could get an X-ray in a shoe store to see how your shoe fits! People were putting radium in water and selling it as some sort of curative. Radium was put in paint to make things glow in the dark. Thorium was put into toothpaste. All in this endless rush to commercialize a technology that had captured the public interest without any particular concern for its efficacy.
I'm not saying AI causes cancer, but this rush to sell something in the medical space before proper testing and evaluation really feels similar. And the common refrain I hear is "this so much cheaper than going to a doctor, this will help give access to medicine to those who cannot afford it." Which actually makes it more concerning in my mind. At this point AI is a multi-trillion dollar industry. For-profit companies providing unregulated, under-studied services, targetting people who might not be able to afford standard medical care, doesn't come off as altruistic; it comes off as predatory.
Ummm, is it a good idea to use AI for malware analysis? I know this is just a proof of concept, but if you have actual malware, it doesn’t seem safe to hand that to AI. Given the lengths of anti-debugging that goes in existing malware, making something to prompt inject, or trick AI to execute something, seems easier.
> An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible.
I think you misunderstand soft power if you think the belt and road initiative is better. The belt and road initiative largely builds infrastructure to aid Chinese interests and locks countries into loans, while providing minimal employment to the locals.
Go to any Sub-Saharan African country, for example, that have benefited from the belt and road initiative and poll them on their opinions of the United States and China. It's not even a competition.
> So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network.
Those programs have saved millions of lives. Hell, PEPFAR alone (Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Millions of vaccines have been delivered, millions of children provided childhood nutrition.
> Another problem is the US is broke.
USAID cost next to nothing compared to everything else in the budget, these arguments about tightening our belt is disingenuous at best. The USAID budget was less than $45B a year. If we paid for that with a flat tax distributed evenly across all US taxpayers (the least fair way to do it!), that would come out to ... $24.50/month/taxpayer.
I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective. The justification outlined for USAID is that it was "softpower". While this is true, we have to admit it's limitations. As you said, it was only 45B. You don't shape the world with such small amount of money. So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID.
> I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective
By what metric does the Belt and Road Initiative provide more soft power than USAID? Do you have any evidence of this?
> So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID
That’s offensive to the men and women who worked hard as part of USAID and other foreign aid programs to help others. My wife didn’t spend 2 years in the middle of nowhere in Zambia teaching children to spy on them. My friends didn’t spend 4 years in Mongolia to spy on them.
It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.
The Belt and Road Initiative is reputed to be 7 times bigger than the Marshall plan in today's dollar. It's getting hard for the US to compete with that.
> It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.
So you find an organization filled with aid workers who are dedicating themselves to saving lives, with some instances of CIA infiltration. And the Trump administration, which is fully in charge of both the CIA and USAID, decides the right thing to do is ... get rid of the aid workers?
I genuinely don't get it. I just don't understand how billionaires think.
Everyone knows why he bought the Washington Post: it was for clout and prestige. Just like how the titans of industry built opera houses and libraries in centuries past. You aren't buying it to make a profit. You take care of something valued by society, and you win some respect from society. Conversely, if you burn that thing to the ground, society will hate you.
So why is the profitability of the Washington Post such a concern all of a sudden? Sure, they lost $100M in 2024, but Bezos didn't buy the Post to make money! And it's not like money is tight. Bezos is worth over $250B; in the last few days alone the jump in AMZN stock increased his net worth by over $5B. If he were to hand that $5B over to the Washington Post, they could keep on losing money at that rate for another half of a century! The article makes this exact point in the last few paragraphs.
If Bezos was genuinely concerned about alienating Trump or whatever, why not just sell the Post? Why try to undermine it like this? You are pissing off the people who like the Post, and I don't think the people who hate the Post are really going to care.
What is your point? I could burn $400 in my fireplace every year for 2,500 years before exhausting my current wealth. That doesn't mean it's not stupid.
Is he going to login to etrade to market sell 100 mil of Amazon stock every year? 20% cap gains and then whatever additional tax the gross amount incurs? That will also lower the price.
I’m just saying this is kind of an absurd amount for a mediocre newspaper with ok reach.
In principle, Bezos could be in this because he values journalism and wants to promote it. There is no reason why this couldn't be a patronage system where one of the richest people in the world spends their money on something good for society.
What he's really buying is power. Even your example of opera houses vs libraries accomplishes two different goals.
Opera houses are places for elites to gather and experience "culture". It means is you own a club for other rich people and create a form of soft power by controlling who gets invited to and can hang out at your club - and maybe put on some shows that everyone can buy tickets to as your "philanthropic contribution to society"
A library is more of a common use. At least in the modern day. Maybe 100 years ago libraries were similar to opera houses - mostly frequented by elite/educated and created a club for them to hang out at. Similar to donating to universities. But they're free for the public, so I'd argue this is quite a boon to common society.
But buying a media company is straight power. You are buying influence over how the public receives information. This is why Musk bought twitter. This is why Murdoch bought Fox news. This is why a billionaire conglomerate forced TikTok to sell itself to them. At this point, more money provides diminishing returns on power, so they buy influence in other ways.
I don’t know much about chemistry, but is there a reason why they are using CO2 as the gas medium instead of something else? I was thinking ambient air would be readily available, and you don’t have to worry about suffocating people if it ruptures. Is CO2 particularly efficient to compress?
Frankly, it’s not a lack of arenas that is holding Go back. It’s the fact that, in 2025, we have a language with a runtime that is neither generational nor compacting. I can’t trust the runtime to perform well, especially in memory-conscious, long-running programs.
Pretty much. Someone on our team put out a code review for some new feature and then bounced for a 2 week vacation. One of our junior engineers approved it. Despite the fact that it was in a section of dead code that wasn’t supposed to even be enabled yet, it managed to break our test environment. Took senior engineers a day to figure out how that was even possible before reverting. We had another couple engineers take a look to see what needs to be done to fix the bug. All of them came away with the conclusion that it was 1,000 lines of pure AI-generated slop with no redeemable value. Trying to fix it would take more work than just re-implenting from scratch.
pretty sure the process I've seen most places is more like: one junior approves, one senior approves, then the owner manually merges.
so your process seems inadequate to me, agents or not.
also, was it tagged as generated? that seems like an obvious safety feature. As a junior, I might be thinking: 'my senior colleague sure knows lots of this stuff', but all it would take to dispel my illusion is an agent tag on the PR.
> pretty sure the process I've seen most places is more like: one junior approves, one senior approves, then the owner manually merges.
Yeah that’s what I think we need to enforce. To answer your question, it was not tagged as AI generated. Frankly, I think we should ban AI-generated code outright, though labeling it as such would be a good compromise.
Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.
Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.
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