New Mars Forums

The Republican one would use entirely off-the-shelf shuttle components but constantly refer to the Saturn V for comparison. It would be launched into space with insufficient crew to carry out the mission.

The Democrat one would be labeled as "Shuttle derived" but would in fact be an entirely new design using outdated components that never really worked in the first place. It would be grossly over-budget but hailed as eco-friendly for its use of hydrogen fuel.

Hopelessly outnumbered and fighting on two fronts. Relishing every minute of it too.  :twisted:

A projected surplus to be precise. I'm skeptical of figures put out by the government, they're so often flagrantly wrong.

Moving on, Cindy may have a point. Personally I see no real problem with ripping each others skulls out in here then collaborating elsewhere, but maybe it does get a little counterproductive.

But I'm sure there's still a shred or two of meat on that horse carcass and by God we're gonna find it. 

For many days and nights did the faithful revel and engage in all manner of drunken debauchery and all that follows from it, bringing the promise of a new generation to carry on the faith and expand the dominion of life. And when at last the taps did run dry and the spirits did cease to flow, the Prophet did say unto them "My brethren, for too long have we dwelt in darkness, hidden away from the heathens. Laboring beneath our impenetrable fortresses waiting for the day when we may walk openly upon the land and breathe the air without choking on the toxins and the blithering of infidels."

"Screw that," the Prophet sayeth "for the day hath come when we shall claim this world in the name of free and faithful people everywhere." And the people did listen intently. "When the sun doth rise tomorrow we shall set out upon the plains and make our way to Hellas, already populated by survey teams and loyal crusaders. There, on the shores of the Hellas Sea we did create as the Most High did command, we shall establish a righteous city. A thriving beachfront community welcoming all who seek entry, provided they abide by a few simple rules."

And the people did rejoice for the day of days had come, and they did make preparations to go forth into the world to build a shining city, a beacon of hope and progress for all, and live in peaceful brotherhood with all who would have it. And liberate the rest should the need arise. And they did prepare offerings of peace for those they might encounter, a side of barbecued rabbit and a miniature bottle of Martian vodka.

Should just let it go, but to answer in a straightforward and civil manner seems so much more productive.

Consumers are overall indifferent to the real costs of healthcare because they aren't paying for it in their minds. Consequently drug companies, hospitals and individual doctors do what anyone trying to make a buck would do and increase charges, which insurance companies pass on to their clients. As this goes on, some people get priced out of the market. Enter government, which infuses money into the system to "help" and thereby setting up another cycle of inflating costs because. . . "I'm not paying for it".

So in a way, you're right about profit being part of the problem but it's not the part that can be easily fixed. Markets have a way of bringing costs down shortly after a new innovation hits the market, yet in the medical field we deliberately short-circuit that and sit around wondering why it's so expensive.

Children are the responsibility of their parents and would remain so under what I suggest. If that responsibility is not met there are already measures in place to correct it. Children are placed in foster care all the time for this sort of thing. Fact is, most parents are fully capable of providing for the medical costs of their children.

Forcing you to pay for that is also wrong. Our entire tax system is wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right.

At least in this case.  :twisted:

I think you know full well that I'm not talking about copays and deductibles. By "minor expenses" I mean anything that isn't a major medical problem. A cold, the flu,a physical; there's no reason for medical insurance to cover these things that patients can pay for themselves and doing so drives up costs for everyone.

Only because we're all locked into the same screwed up system. Look at it a little deeper and it makes no economic sense to run healthcare as we currently do.

Moving on to racial profiling in terrorism screenings. Just going after "Arab looking" guys won't catch every terrorist and will quite possibly cause more harm than good. At the same time doing random searches is the height of stupidity.

In the case of airports, the first thing we need to do is disband the TSA, which at present are essentially undertrained, underpaid Thugs Standing Around carrying out an asinine policy. Get private contractors back in there but this time make sure they have the training and the equipment to do the job and make sure the rules make sense.

Just a hint, confiscating nail clippers from pilots (who have an axe and [i]controls for the plane[i] in the cockpit) doesn't make sense. "Searching" middle-aged white women while looking for terrorists generally doesn't make sense. In fact, trying to screen out everything that could conceivably be used as a weapon doesn't make a shred of sense.

Finally, as flaky as it will be at times, the only sensible approach to screening is to have well-trained personnel on site and leave who to search at their discretion. That "gut feeling" coupled with training and experience is a far better gage of who to check out than some PC random search nonsense.

Among other things. What our current system does is deny people a true understanding of how much healthcare really costs and allows those costs to expand unrealistically because no one thinks they're paying for it. It fosters a sense of dependence. "I need my insurance, because it pays for my healthcare, I need Medicaid to pay for my healthcare." Bah! Most people don't think of it as pooling resources but as "my insurance paying for it". The reality is that we pay for it regardless, only under the current system we spread it around to disguise that fact and give everyone else a reason to meddle in our own affairs.

Of course! All the economic problems in Africa are the direct result of freedom of choice and responsibility in the population and capitalism in healthcare!

C'mon, you can do better than that.

You are demonstrating the very kind of thinking that feeds the problem. If they let the flu go they'll get really sick and we'll pay more, so we better pay for the flu too Great. But hey, we should also make sure they don't eat anything unhealthy because it will lead to greater expenses later. Not only does it assume that the people are fools incapable of running their own lives but it further assumes everyone needs to be involved in the lives of others. Make no mistake, pooling resources always comes with strings attached. It's the plank holding up all much of he nanny-state laws we're seeing now.

The present system is inherently destructive to individual freedom.

Just come out and say the people are idiots and need to be ruled and we can talk straight, otherwise the wheels continue to spew mud with no traction.

Nice trick, but without substance. There's a similarity between what we have and what I advocate, therefore the point is moot? Silly. By the same token you have no grounds for complaint.

It drives the creation of the means by which that misery is alleviated.

What seems more likely to you, a few thousand people giving a few dollars each to help the sick or one or two good-natured souls giving millions of dollars to develop and test a new medical treatment?

The second one may come along from time to time but they are few and far between. Progress will be excruciatingly slow.

Good for them. Bravo. But real medical advances don't often come about by a few doctors working with a few patients. Someone has to foot that hefty R&D budget, someone has to deal with the FDA (unless you propose we abolish it), someone has to have a reason to go through all this and all too often a "desire to help" isn't enough.

We both know he most certainly will not. No one currently in Washington will.

But some in the lower echelons of the Republican Party would consider it, I've been working on them.  :twisted:

And I've got time.

Muahahahahaha!

Which comes back to what I was saying, the present health insurance paradigm needs to be dumped in its entirety.

The problem you describe is a direct result of centralized healthcare and in a roundabout way, of socialist-style thinking.

Churchill, like Lincoln is another statesman about whom I have mixed impressions.

But we've strayed from the topic enough already. 

Guns of the South, with Robert E. Lee holding an AK-47 on the cover. Yep, that was pretty good, despite my usual loathing of time travel stories.

Read that too, years ago. It's much better in the three separate books it was originally published as, skimming through the compiled reprint it dropped some stuff. Some interesting concepts in there.

I always thought it would make a great miniseries, I just don't know who could air it.

Incidentally, I once saw a t-shirt some guy at a concert was wearing, black with white lettering, that said "Draka piss me off." No one else had a clue why I thought that was funny.

I didn't color, I painted. 

Yep, you hit on it pretty close Grypd. What we had pre-war was a federation of sorts but with very rigidly defined federal powers, a Union of several sovereign states bound together for mutual interest and by language, history and culture. Some of the Southern states, as sovereign entities, believed (rightly in many repsects) that they were legally and morally justified in leaving the Union when the federal entity overstepped its authority.

Which leads me to this: I have very strong and very mixed feelings about our 16th President. I firmly believe that shattering the Union would have been a great tragedy. An experiment undertaken with such hope and promise torn apart. I admire that Abraham Lincoln did not compromise his principles and did what he felt was necessary to preserve that Union. But I damn him for destroying the very thing he sought to defend. Which requires perhaps more explanation.

"United States of America". Plural. At least at one time. Through the civil war not only were the secessionist states not permitted to leave the Union, but the Union ceased to be and was instead forged into a single nation, not a federation at all. States are no longer sovereign and the federal government grossly overextends itself beyond the confines the Constitution set for it. In that respect, the Confederacy was truer to the spirit and the letter of the US Constitution. Chunks of which Lincoln threw out.  Imposing an income tax, illegal militia calls (fed using one state's troops to subdue another) ordering the arrest of a Supreme Court justice for ruling the prior unconstitutional, suspension of habeus corpus, et al.

Whatever the case, the Union no longer exists, just a centralized nation in its place. Perhaps it's for the best, I don't claim to know what lies down the path of "might have been," but the United States of our forefathers is long passed as a direct result of the Civil War.

On a related note, it is interesting to wonder whether and how slavery would have persisted. Would the agrarian South have eventually abandoned it as industrialization made large numbers of field hand slaves inefficient? Or would slavery have been adapted to an industrial society, slaves in textile mills and factories instead of the near-slaves that did the work? Likely any outcome of the Civil War would have led to vile outcomes, but that doesn't change our vile outcome.

This is really new? I have some prior recollection of this idea.

That is indeed the question. It would seem that a commander of Lee's caliber wouldn't assume everything in such a precise operation would fall into place when the stakes were so high.

One can argue that, from a legal perspective, the South was right. Whatever the case, the pre-war Union was most certainly destroyed. With Federal supremacy established by force we embarked on a path to become a very different country from that envisioned by our founders.

I certainly have no love for the Confederacy nor do I condone slavery, but I sometimes have to wonder if just maybe Johnny Reb was on to something.

Just a few comments.

I get the impression this would be covering a very long span of time. Journey to Mars, flashacks among the crew, all in addition to what actually happens on Mars, children of these people hooking up, etc. As clark mentioned, a page of a screenplay is roughly a minute of screen time. Showing all this will likely result in a Tolkienesque brick that while having some very interesting concepts is boring through large chunks and if produced would be. . . ever seen David Lynch's Dune?

Might I suggest not only focusing on a small group of characters but implying much of their background rather than showing it. A common screenwriting maxim is "show, don't tell" but taking that even further, sometimes leaving enough hints for the audience to figure things out for themselves is more effective than showing it, and it saves valuable time. 

In short, while a movie can say all kinds of things about Mars the audience will only be absorbed by it if they care about the characters. They have to relate to them and throwing too much stuff in hinders that. Beware the artsy, a little goes a long way.

That said, it's an interesting idea and very much worthy of pursuing, at least from the writing standpoint.

Incidentally, at the last Mars Society conference in Chicago Sam Burbank (he's done some documentary work for the Mars Society among other things) announced with Bob Zubrin that they are going to produce a "truly realistic" movie about a mission to Mars. I talked with Sam and the effects guy (who's name slips my mind) about it after the announcement and it sounds very promising. They've decided to shoot on 35mm film instead of 4:4:4 HD video, but nobody's perfect.