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Alistair said:

The point I was making wasn't about what I want. The point is we can go to MARS but we have too many people that want free money so it can't happen. If you want consumption and not investment, then that is what you get.

You want healthcare for the about to die or houses. Do you want retirement money or investment in infrastructure and going to MARS. I already know most people are politically messed up and can't even talk about it.

Almost every country on the planet is poor for a reason, they don't actually want to invest in themselves and they don't want to build. They want the government to give themselves power and money, and that's it. That's why they can't grow. Nobody can actually sit down and think "how do I invest this money to grow our productivity". And it's not just rich people. As I said almost half the Brazil budget at one time was just loans and interest and government pensions. No reason for it to be that way. That's why Brazil is still a poor country.

As for a green energy utopia, we have technological limitations so just because you spend a trillion doesn't mean you have cheap batteries for example. 1 Trillion per year can make a lot of windmills, but it can't make the energy and maintenance cheap. We've spent a trillion, it didn't cure AIDS either. I think we ALREADY have the technology to live on Mars which is why 1 trillion per year would probably accomplish the goal.

Several trillion dollars per year are spent on health care that doesn't put people back to work and money for retirement they don't need (it isn't even means tested). Up to us what we do. What we want.

Elon Musk president and people actually CHOOSE to forgo some consumption and we can go to MARS. What do we get instead? AOC has $100,000 car, and $1 million home, with a $200,000+ per year income and she intentionally doesn't pay off her student loan so she can complain about it. Government is about to give her $10,000 LMAO. That's how "people" want the government to spend half a trillion dollars. Wasted. So rich students can buy more stuff.

And most student loans are taken out by rich people or rich families because the terms are the best. The same way rich people get car loans even though they could just buy the car outright. I spent $100,000 on university tuition alone (living expenses ouch extra) to become a high school teacher which was silly. I could have worked as a teacher the year I graduated from high school. University is actually about stopping people from working, not about helping them learn so they can work. It's about keeping you out of the workforce.

The last thing government teachers want is for a bright kid out of high school to be allowed to work. No. You have to spend 5 years in university for undergraduate. Then 3 for masters. Then 2 more for "post degree" certification. 10 years later and you're poor and old and then you're allowed to work. It is messed up. I could have saved $200,000+ dollars and earned $500,000 in salary at least and been almost 1 million USD richer instead of wasting time in university proving that I could teach kids math. It isn't about making you a good teacher or helping the students. It is about providing lots of money to university educators and workers for 10 years that nobody would willingly pay if it wasn't subsidized.

lol fuck Elon Musk and his 93 children. If he wants to go to Mars so bad why doesn't he put 95% of his fortune into it right now to speed development along? Oh yeah because he wants to subsidized and have other people pay for it. All these Mars loving folks sure love the idea of Mars as long as they're not putting up the money for it or when it's not their retirement being cut but some one elses. 

And we have whittled a disease like AIDS down so that today almost anyone with HIV can live a full life instead of it being the death sentence it was 30 years ago so I'm not sure if that was a great example.

Mars is overrated. The obsession with going there is like the obsession of those people who are deeply unhappy with their lives and think climbing Mount Everest will give them some meaning. A bunch of those bozos end up getting themselves killed doing that because they don't even bother to properly learn how to climb and want to go straight to climbing Everest. 

It would be much smarter for now to focus on building space stations and space habitats that orbit the Earth which can be built up to have a reasonable level of comfort for an average person. Why try to wrestle so hard with a planet that wants to kill life every second of every day when we can create our own space environments, we should focus on that first (having artificial gravity for one sure would be nice, how about space stations with breathable air while we're at it?). 

Or at least try to build comfortable habitats on the moon, which would only cost a fraction of the money. Prove first you can do that easily.

Mars is more about vanity than practicality. Again it reminds me of a person who wants to get into fitness (fine, great) but doesn't want to learn the basic small steps of how to lift weights at a low weight because it's not sexy enough and doesn't make them feel like a bad ass. But what they don't understand is all those "massive muscle bound types!" at one point had to start from ground zero and learn the basics with low weights too. 

Lets first prove we can build far more comfortable, sustainable space stations in our space orbit and on the moon first, because we're really not even there yet. And you can do that without having to bankrupt the freaking planet. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 30 August 2022