I guess I understand this but why do people with kids get tax breaks. I mean kids are the ones that go to school that taxes pay for. Shouldn’t they pay more? Am I crazy?
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Most knives are sharp. You all know this, and if you don’t, let me be the one to fill you in: most knives are sharp. Anyway, a couple Saturdays ago, I bought some darts, and they were packaged in such a way (zip tied together) that something sharp was needed to free them. Well, I am sure you can see where this is headed: The knife cut the plastic zip-tie a lot faster than I thought possible and I punctured the index finger on my left hand. Usually, no big deal, right? I have cut myself many times with many different things. This time, though, the knife seems to have severed a nerve, so now I have no feeling in the tip of my finger.
This might seem cool because now I can touch hot things without any negative repercussions, but I am having problems using things like the remote and the computer keyboard because I can not tell if my finger is on the button or not. The doctor tells me that eventually I will get feeling back but I might experience hot flash type things where the nerve sends the wrong message to my brain. Karma’s a bitch, eh Leigh?
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I love space, and I do not mean large closets or the size of my trunk. I mean the Final Frontier. I have no problem with our government using my tax money to send probes to the other planets in our solar system. What I do have a problem with, however, is spending money to look at what might be planets in other galaxies. I can not stress enough how insane this is.
Recently, they found what they think is a planet orbiting around a distant sun. They can’t see it but they can tell from how the sun moves that there is something pulling it. It is 35,000 light years away. Let me say this another way: If we invented a space craft that traveled at the speed of light, it still would take 35,000 years to get there. Let me put it still another way: The image that we are looking at happened 35,000 years ago. This planet that we can’t see might not even be there anymore. Shouldn’t we use this telescope time to find giant rocks that may be coming right at us?
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This might sound pretty socialistic or communist, but my idea to help further along our country is mandatory community service. I think that everyone who is between the ages of 22 and 35 should have to do five hours of community service per year. Five hours per year is really not that much and just think of how much better everything would be. I know this would never happen but that does not make it a bad idea.
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Let me preface this and say that I just got my first cell phone (within the last year, anyway). Well, I have taken another step into modernity by getting an iPod nano. Let me first say that the thing is small. Most of you know this because you are probably on your second or third one. Secondly, right out of the box, it was broken. At first I thought it was just my big dumb fingers that could not manipulate the sensitive controls, but after people with much more delicate fingers then I tried to navigate into the various menu options met the same results, my fears were realized. Apple hates me.
11 Comments
karma’s a bitch?
what happened? - did you stab leigh in the finger a little while back or something?
Someday when you get the wonderful experience of trying to keep up with all the various expenses of feeding, clothing and housing your children, I doubt you will question the logic of giving those of us in the middle of that pleasure a break on our taxes.
Having children means completely supporting a person who brings in zero income for at least 13-14 years…that’s an incredible amount of money! Parents should absolutely get a tax break, since this is one of the only (and most efficient ways) to ease their financial burden.
I like the community service idea though.
This post gets my vote for best of ‘06! Good stuff, man.
or you can put your kid to work as soon as you can.
I have a 3 year old who can pick up toys, make a mess, and able to put dishes in sink or dishwasher, anyone want to hire her? They just raised the min. wage…she’ll work for cheaper!
YEAH CHILD_SLAVE LABOR!
:-)
Wow, Justin, Karma indeed. But It would be a lot better if I had brandished the knife.
How much money are we spending on space? What about people dying of curable diseases? or potable water? We got a couple of bucks for that stuff? or is that stupid?
5 hours a year is nothing. A lot of people in this city could stand to learn how to clean anyway. Especially the fat middle and high school kids that litter because it’s “Gangsta”.
My ipod stopped working suddenly after two years. I didn’t drop it or misuse it. I only brought it to the gym with me. But one day I went to turn it on and it was dead. Those things cost a lot of money…that’s the last one I’m buying. Fuckers.
We are spending billions in space, its kinda like having a war in Iraq. I have no problem with this just that looking at planets not in our neck of the woods seems like a waste.
If people knew they would have to clean or repair something in their city town whatever they might be a little less hesitant to make a mess. I bet there are 20,000 people in lynn between those ages that is 100,000 hours a year or 1900 hours a weekend. Imagine what could be done, also the less amount of crap the public works people had to do freeing them up to smoke more buts and sit around.
I got my replacment nano up and working today seems cool although I have stolen all my music from limewire.
I don’t know where I stand on the space issue. I can understand wanting to spend that money on more immediately beneficial things (i.e., textbooks, not tanks), but at the same time, I can get on board with the notion that part of what makes us human is the desire to know what’s going on “out there.” I mentioned spending money on textbooks, but unless we also spend money on looking at stars that are 35,000 light years away, we’ll have nothing to put in those textbooks.
Then there’s the notion that we have no idea what will come out of the space program. There’s an episode of West Wing where one of Rob Lowe’s old science teachers needs his help to get Congressional funding for a super-conducting super collider (SCSC), and there’s a congressman who is blocking the vote. Rob Lowe says he needs to be able to paint the congressman as being against something, whether its jobs or apple pie, and he asks what are the benefits of the SCSC, and the scientist responds, “We don’t know.” They talk a little more, but at the end of the episode, Rob Lowe realizes that the SCSC is for discovery. We won’t know what we’ll get out of it until we build the damn thing.
There’s a section on NASA’s website that talks about the practical benefits of the space program. Included in that section are cordless powertools, which Apollo astronauts needed to drill into the surface of the earth. Working with Black & Decker, NASA came up with the technological breakthrough that was needed for a power drill to work on a battery. It wasn’t just a matter of replacing a cord with a battery, but of coming up with a computer program that made the drill’s motor turn with as little power as possible. B&D took that technology and now they sell about $400 million worth of cordless products. Other products include smoke detectors (they didn’t exist before NASA needed them to put in its Skylab space station), and ion filtration devices for water (needed to provide sterile water to astronauts). For a list of 79 different benefits, check out this page on the Ethical Atheist website.
Going back to the idea that spending money on space programs is the equivalent of spending money on exploration, the question we have to ask ourselves is whether we’re satisfied with what we know, whether we are willing to turn our back on the unknown and say, “Enough is enough.” I can see both sides of that argument, but my gut says turning our back on the unknown is nothing but a first step towards death.
Listen I have no problem sending billion dollar spacecrafts to every single planet, moon and large rocky out crop from pluto to mercury. I just think spending time looking at things that are so far away that we could never go there seems wastefull. On a side note ever see the waiting list for scope time at the big telescopes its like years and you only get a small amount of time to do their search.
It’s not really a question of “going there.” While Mars seems like a possibility, I doubt that humans will ever be able to step foot on Jupiter (though possibly on some of its moons, if the monolith says it’s okay), and there’s no way we’ll step foot on Mercury (you know, the whole “made of gas” thing; would we fall right through?). But it’s not even about that. It’s about discovery, making known the unknown; it’s about intellectual progress, which often translated into more tangible forms of progress (thinking microscopically as opposed to macroscopically, see the uses of the electron for an example).
Now, if you don’t think we should be spending money on discovery, I think that’s perfectly valid. Perhaps utilizing a massive amount of our resources on “discovery” reveals a value system that is a little out of whack, i.e. those resources may be better utilized in areas of medicine, poverty, hunger, and education. Perhaps the resources of earthlings should serve the earth, and not so much the heavens.
Perhaps.
Mercury is not made of gas but its wicked hot being the closest planet to the sun. NASA has something going there and will be there in 2011.