The Political Thread

[Pyroxian]

Colonising Mars is not about stabilising population growth, but more about having an off-site backup of the human race in case something really bad (Asteroid!) happens on Earth. Plus, the technological challenge of keeping people alive on Mars would give us technologies to solve some of our problems on Earth.

[TordelBack]

Yes, I know this, but i dare you to dip your toe into any of the InSight commentary. "Earth is a bust, but it's OK because we can go live on Mars". It's the Rapture for the pseudo-scientific. And about as bloody likely.

It's yet another meaningless excuse to do nothing about climate change, wealth inequality and population displacement, because they are planning to do a runner. Hence I posted on the Politics rather than the Science thread.

Reduction in consumption. Real money on renewables and sequestration. Immeduate planning changes for innundation areas. Massively increased spending on global aid programmes. Large scaie accommodation for refugees.

Not running away to space.

Focus, people.

[Professor Bear]

The idea that billionaires are in any way friends to humanity is laughable, and the "rich white savior of the space programme" thing is probably the one trope I'm most sick of in science fiction of late.
TB's talk of the economics of lifting materials into space is the nub - space access is a money racket, and guys like Richard Branson and Elon Musk are simply using the idea of space tourism/colonisation to distract from the fact that they're really trying to come up with multi-use rockets they can rent to NASA - in the same way the Russian government currently does - and get access to a multi-billion dollar chunk of public funding.  Just look at how Branson makes his money from Virgin Care - for all his talk of a better health service, he makes his money suing the NHS for not awarding him contracts and he'll do exactly the same thing once he gets his claws into NASA.

[TordelBack]

Tangential rant, but my dander is up:  I've said it before and no doubt I'll be saying it on my death bed: it is not possible for a privatised utility* to offer the same service as an efficiently managed public one for the same price, because the private sector has to make a profit for its shareholders.  That money inevitably comes from the taxpayer in the form of subventions and exclusions or directly from service users in addition to the actual cost of the service.

I accept that not all public services are run efficiently in terms of value to the consumer/taxpayer, but I completely reject the idea that all privatised ones are, and generally this is by design.  There is an incentive for companies to be inefficient from the very start, in order to drive up subventions to maintain services, and thus increase profits.  In this 'rival' companies frequently collude at the tender stage, and then go on to browbeat further profits through sustained claims and legal challenges.

I've seen this firsthand, repeatedly, and at length.  For just one example, work on one major national infrastructure programme I was involved with was deliberately done as inefficiently as possible during regular working hours, forcing the public client to authorise literally years of nightworks and weekend works to stay on schedule, which were themselves monumentally less efficient and vastly more lucrative for the contractors, with a culture of cash-in-hand working, fictional timesheets showing staff that were at home in bed, near-zero client monitoring (no budget for out-of-hours working for the client representatives), non-existant safety practices and backhanders to those responsible for doling out the overtimes. 

Machinery was hired from companies part-owned by managers on the job, and left sitting idle for weeks at a time at full hire rate. Entire methodolgies were dreamed up mid-project to justify expensive sub-contracts for relatives of managers. Injuries and accidents were magicked away as either surprise 'holidays to Disneyland' or fabricated and co-ordinated lies about the victims' personal culpability and/or 'slipping Jimmy' ways**. Serious sexual harassment was responded to by denials, and then at most transferring the offender to another part of the job. Staff from supervisory companies spent their inspection days in cafes chatting with the owners of contracting companies, then went home without seeing anything untowards - and then flatly contradicted fully-evidenced negative reports from others. And all this was in plain sight on the streets of  a capital city.

And then you get a publicity flourish at the end of "under budget and ahead of time", when the project wasn't finished at all and the budget was ludicrously inflated from the start.

No-one can convince me that the world of private supply of public projects isn't utterly corrupt top to bottom.

Space, too.




* And for argument's sake we'll view getting things into space as a utility/service.
**  I've seen accident statements from witnesses that were clearly dictated at the same company session - young lads who never put pen to paper in their lives writing the same phrase: "I then observed Ms. X acting in an unsafe manner deliberately putting herself at risk of injury, despite the repeated warnings of the Mr. Y not to do so".

[TordelBack]

So now all Leave voters knew that the UK would be worse off after Brexit. So the relentless campaign of lies about the money extorted by Europe, and what the UK could spend the surplus cash on, was completely ignored in their decision making.

And the promise of amazing instant trade deals with the Commonwealth and the rest of the world that would be so much better than EU markets was also untrue,  but apparently Leavers didn't believe that either. Even the ones that spent the last two years proclaiming the wonders of the WTO.

So basically the Brexit vote was really about ending FoM at whatever cost, despite the UK government never implementing the immigration controls it already has at its disposal. Or to put it another simpler way, good old irrational xenophobia. Twist ending or what!

Buy shares in tear gas,  that's my expert economic forecast.

[IndigoPrime]

Brexit is gaslighting on a national level. And:

So basically the Brexit vote was really about ending FoM at whatever cost, despite the UK government never implementing the immigration controls it already has at its disposal. Or to put it another simpler way, good old irrational xenophobia.

Well, quite. And I'm getting sick of the Remain pundits like Femi who keep banging the "we could have been shitter to migrants but weren't" drum. Migration controls would have cost the UK money, which is why they were never implemented. And it enabled EU citizens to be a convenient stick to beat EU membership with, despite EU nationals being vital to this country's well-being, in a whole raft of ways.

Still, I'm sure Leave voters will be thrilled at the collapse of the economy and hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, if it means slightly fewer Polish people in places they don't even live in.

Gah.

[TordelBack]

Sure,  I'm not suggesting tighter immigration controls should should have been implemented,  just that if that was the only goal of those voting for Brexit (which due to their uncanny foresight and ability to see through the lies of the Leave campaign it apparently was) it would have been a lot less painful to try out that route, despite its obvious problems.

But where's the political capital in not blaming Brussels for everything.

It's almost as if the real motivation here was career grandstanding and deregulation of everything. Imagine my surprise!

[IndigoPrime]

Exactly. Xenophobic arseholes are going to be xenophobic arseholes and fans of deregulation and making money off of everyone's misfortune are going to want to deregulate and make money off of everyone's misfortune.

The democratic deficit in this country is colossal right now.

[TordelBack]

It's bleak all over.  We haven't had a significant opposition party here for almost 8 years, everything's been run by an essentially collegiate centre-right gravy train. The current justification for this is Brexit,  BTW.

Even so we do seem to have got the hang of referendums, so much so that we like to forget that in 2004 80% of us voted to remove the right of citizenship of children born here to foreign parents - while still extending citizenship to people with a single Irish grandparent (no offence intended,  you're all very welcome, more the merrier! ) regardless of where they live, or if they've ever even seen the place.

And I'm sure this disparity has nothing to do with the fact that our diaspora is overwhelmingly white and Christian and largely Catholic.

And it's just a coincidence that our direct provision system for asylum seekers (generally not white nor Catholic) is as shit as anything Trump cogged off the telly.

Democracy. Inclusivity. Humanity. Who needs it.

[Professor Bear]

"Oh no, Bear, guillotines are a terrible idea, all that mess blah blah blah"

[TordelBack]

It's your inevitable monopoly on their supply and operation I object to, not the executions themselves. Not even the offer of complimentary locally-sourced Tom Baker scarves and wooly hats can sway my conviction that the revolution should respect grass-roots traditions of community-based artisanal justice rather than sanitised spectacle.

[Frank]

[Proudhuff]

Colonising Mars is not about stabilising population growth, but more about having an off-site backup of the human race in case something really bad (Asteroid!) happens on Earth. Plus, the technological challenge of keeping people alive on Mars would give us technologies to solve some of our problems on Earth.

Potatoes. I've seen a documentary about it.

[The Legendary Shark]

My shed is creaking in the wind. So am I, to be frank.

[The Legendary Shark]

Oops - wrong thread.