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On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Jonathan King wrote:
I would say that you are wrong about manned space flight and wars in
Asia only because such wars kill many thousands of good people and
manned space flights will only kill a few dozen people.
You are *so* wrong. In both cases, the answer to the question of how
many people needlessly die is hundreds of thousands or millions. Money
can be spent usefully to save lives and improve the world.
And that will happen when? After you say a magic word and snap your
fingers? Seriously -- tell me your plan for making this happen.
For probably 10 percent of what we're spending in Iraq, we could
probably finally irradicate every remaining "childhood" disease. For
another 10 percent or so, we could vastly upgrade the infrastructure for
providing clean drinking water.
Are you the first person to think of that? No? Then why hasn't it
happened already? Believe me, I'm surrounded (as you probably are) by
people who are very concerned about such things and there are millions
more like them. So why isn't the US government listening to people like
them, and like you, and spending money to save sick children instead of
spending it on warfare?
Wasting money on manned space projects is truly a perverse thing to do.
The direct kills of our course of action today is just a tiny proportion
of the correctly imputed cost. Opportunity costs are staggeringly huge.
Yes, but as I said before: **The same money is being spent in either
scenario!!** Buy bombs = Buy space program. But you claim...
The same money is being spent either way,
Only if there's a budget constraint. You may have noticed that, at least
recently, there isn't.
No. There is always some constraint on spending. There is always some
limit. Money is constantly being moved from one place to another place.
They don't *just* print more money every time they want to spend some!
Mike
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