Yet another great smarter every day video:
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Ah, NASA, or how to waste billions of taxpayers hard earned on something that is at worst a lie, and at best useless for any practical application of people facing real world problems here on earth.
Should we fix the healthcare system? Nah letâs get rocks from space. Education? Rocks from space. Roads and infrastructure? Rocks from space. What about inflation and the rising costs of living, donât people need that money to buy essentials? Rocks from space.
Dumber everyday.
If anything, a small cut to the military budget could fund many of those things and we would still have the worldâs largest militany. 
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you would save way more money on your military than nasa. nasa has such a small budget lately.
plus for many of the nasa programs you earn multiple dollars back for 1 dollar invested.
e.g. for saturn+apollo it was 7 dollars gained in GDP for 1 dollar invested.
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on that subject
The amount of trickle down effect of the NASA research that helps in everyday things is amazing. More so without royalty issues.
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Most of those problems are not solved by throwing more money at the problem, true for the US and for most of the world as well. A lot of them have inefficient systems or systemic problems that need fixing from the ground up, and a few billion for NASA isnât going to change any of that.
US already spends more public money on healthcare than any other country in the world, but that means nothing if everything is absurdly expensive, companies make people addicted on sugars since young (Coca-Cola paying schools to have vending machines there), pharma and insurance companies do their usual business etc.
As g-man said, NASA R&D has brought a lot of tech to the hands of the people, tech that even you use today, so you should rethink your statement imo.
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NASA budget for 2024 is $24.874 billion (source). Compare with US spending on pet food of $143.6 billion (source) or the $430 billion on cosmetics (source).
Thatâs before we even get to the $858 billion spent on defence in the US (source).
Oh, roads? The spending was $386.0 billion in 2020, while the education spend was $870 billion for elementary and secondary education.
Perhaps you ought to look at some facts first, before posting.
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The ratio cosmetics/defense cracks me up. Next war and they send the Kardashians(*) to seduce the enemy.
(*) Because KK has an armor regimentâs worth of make-up on her at all times.
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Could we please not turn this into a flame war over politics?
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Sure, but there is no need for a trickle down effect if you could instead put that money directly to the place you want it to end up.
Would much rather a few billion thrown at fixing systems than fixing rockets. Eg. You mention coca cola. Well, the healthcare system could be improved greatly by stricter measures about what is and isnât allowed in the food supply.
Those numbers donât negate my point in any way at all. Just because other departments are already getting billions, doesnât mean the 25 billion for NASA is well spent.
Iâll say no more, but open discussions invite a range of opinions, which is not necessarily unhealthy.
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and
Letâs talk about ontological commitments, shall we. In the first quotation, you intimate NASA is lying about something, though you donât say what. In the second, you imply that NASA ill-spends the money that it receives.
In other words, you are making ontological commitments, and it is the person who makes the commitment that bears the burden. So, would you care to tell us what NASA is lying about, and why their money is ill-spend, with evidential backing of course.
I suspect that this isnât about politicsâŚ
The conversation made me go back to some of the pictures that were taken by astronauts on the moon. NASA has a nice gallery of moon images.
To bring it even further back to photography, many of these were taken with Hasselblad 500EL cameras (Apollo 11 had three onboard).
I wish people explored our oceans more. I mean, look at this:
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