Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

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Sputnik did not bring us GPS or Apollo 11, unless you believe NASA stole their tech from the soviets. Sputnik led to the Russian rocket that exploded on the launchpad killing the core of Russian space science/engineering team housed under it (due to lack of funds and manufacturing expertise to make the tele-communication equipment necessary for off-site control). Sputnik led to GLONASS, a soviet "GPS" analog that rapidly fell out of disrepair as soon as it was finished in the early 1990's.

As much as I wish there were/are more competition in space-faring, and the soviet space program gave NASA some competition in the Cold War years, the soviet space program was quite disasterous to the soviet people . . . just like the rest of their state command economy. Space exploration would have been carried out much more efficient by private competitors, for profit motives.

Some -ism's are actually good . . . such as "volunteerism," "humanitarianism." Even "liberalism" is a good thing if it means the right and power to free individuals. "Communism," "Nazism," and "Fascism" are more or less the same thing in practice: Statism and Collectivism are the true names of the creed.

On the topic of education, and what government subsidy has done to it, here is a good article from Mike Shedlo (who used to post on these forums) published in the last 24hrs:

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/03/debt-for-diploma-schemes-and-cookie.html

Thank you for your advice on condensing my thoughts. Facts in real life are not simple. We construct simplified models when form short descriptions. Such simplified models are often biased, and at variance from facts. That's why we go through those boom-and-bust cycles: the simplified models that some of us form in our heads become so far removed from reality over the compounding effect of time that they are falling apart when checked by reality (just like Ponzi Schemes; most erroneous models are in reality Ponzi Schemes when the qualifying details attached to that high return that exist in real life such as "limited supply of stamps" are omitted in the modeling process). Stocks and houses do not always go up, contrary to previously commonly assumed simplified models. A thorough grasp of reality is a good thing under normal circumstances but not always crucial to survival . . . however it becomes an especially brutal necessity when economic down turn crashes previous happy dreams.

Some models are wrong to begin with. New knowledge and new technology makes previously accepted models out of date all the time. The human propensity for modeling error is the fundamental reason why a society built around individualism is superior to a society built around collectivism. The collective is also prone to modeling errors . . . and it takes much longer time and incurs far greater cost to correct modeling errors in a collectivist society.