Spain's New S-80 Class Submarines Sink, But Won't Float 326
New submitter home-electro.com writes "In the era of total CAD and CAM, is it even possible to come up with a fundamentally flawed design ? Turns out, yes. This a fascinating engineering SNAFU. Spain's newly built submarine is 100 tons too heavy, which means it is unable to float. 'Unfortunately for the Spainards, Quartz reports that they have already sunk the equivalent of $680 million into the Isaac Peral, and a total of $3 billion into the entire quartet of S-80 class submarines. If Spain hopes to salvage its submarines, it must either find some weight that can be trimmed from the current design or lengthen the ship to accommodate the excess weight, The Local notes. Though the latter option is more feasible, it is expected to cost Spain an extra $9.7 million per meter.'"
I know... (Score:5, Funny)
Some screen doors will help lighten up the load. A lot thinner than regular doors.
Re: I know... (Score:5, Funny)
Whatever floats your boat dude
Re:I know... (Score:5, Funny)
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..The (Spanish?) president cancelled the submarine program, saying "Those funny black ships just sink anyway"
Was it designed by Lockheed Martin? (Score:2)
They can't create competent stuff either nowadays.
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They can't create competent stuff either nowadays.
no, it was a spanish company and spanish design.
but it might get redesigned by some american contractor. dunno why, there's perfectly competent shipbuilders(even subs) in europe. of course they're not as cheap as 'muricans.
Outsourced? (Score:2)
Perfect submarine - never above ... (Score:3, Funny)
Well, this is the perfect submarine - permanently under water.
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The spanish armada (Score:4, Funny)
...still sinking after all these years.
Re:The spanish armada (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The spanish armada (Score:4, Funny)
"sunken patrimony"
Fathers who died in shipwrecks?
Re:The spanish armada (Score:4, Informative)
You joke but just the other day on TVE (spanish tv) the news anchor mentioned that Spain was the country with the greatest "sunken patrimony" in the world. She seemed rather proud of that fact...
I wouldn't be so proud of the fact(given that most of Spain's "sunken patrimony" is just bullion that they were brutal enough to grind out of the backs of the locals in South America; but not competent enough to ship back to Europe); but it's probably true. The sheer scale of Spain's "Why don't we just ship every last troy ounce of precious metal we can get our hands on in the entire western hemisphere?" project was really pretty nuts. Unfortunately for them, of course, the kind of "wealth" that is shiny and looks good in treasure chests tends to be rather less useful than the mixture of human and technical capital that actual productive economies are built with(a comparison with what the relatively tiny Dutch were doing at the same time the Spanish Empire was considered something of a superpower is instructive)...
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Well played!
Government efficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Government efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is a great example of government "efficiency", underlining the fact for all those people who love to carry on about how vital "government spending" is.
Yeah, because private enterprise never screws up.
Re:Government efficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Government efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
Wall Street called; they need another trillion $ of bailout money. Unmarked 20s straight from the taxpayers' pockets please.
Superfund is another example that comes to mind.
sPh
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The concept of a "corporation" is a government-created entity. They even get their charter directly from government. But even if a corporation were some natural entity, the goverment granting them limited liability leads to stuff like superfund sites. When the government has sole authority to issue currency and grant charters to banks, it's hard to blame "private industry" for playing the game the way the government has set them up to play it.
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Unless of course they set the government up to set them up. As the Daily Show put it the other day, "The laws that allow for off-shore tax havens were not invented by poor people".
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Actually, they were. Off-shore tax havens don't happen because some Caribbean country set its tax rates lower than other countries'. They happen because a country raises its tax rates to where it's higher than offshore. Like water wants to flow downhill, people want to hang on to as much of their money as they can.
Then it becomes a game of whack-a-mole trying to plug up every way so
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The poor people helped elect the representatives that passed those laws. The rich in this country are vastly in the minority yet they control the government by manipulating the rest of us. They divide us into two sides, the left and right and then split issues between us for us to fight over. They care nothing for these issues such as gay marriage and abortion and affirmative action, they are above such stuff. All they care about is money and control. We fight each other and they control us and pick ou
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When private enterprise screws up it doesn't come out of your pocket. Unless of course you're a shareholder - but then again, you knew there was risk involved in buying shares. When government screws up it comes out of your pocket whether you agree or not.
Of course, especially in a democracy, we are all shareholders in the Government. We vote the people in charge in/out. If they continually screw up, it's our fault for keeping them in office. I don't have a definitive answer as to *why* we, "the people", keep doing this, and don't really think it boils down to something simple, but, in general terms, the phrases "narrow minded" and "short sighted" probably apply on the broader scale.
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"Too big to fail" is a government determination: not a private one.
Banks are a very poor example: they are only one-step away from government: merely a private extension of the Federal Reserve: a better reflection of poor legislative and financial policy than private lechery.
Don't confuse the free market with entites that live off public taxes and are first in line for public monetary distribution.
Re:Government efficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Government efficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
because the people who got pissed were labeled as right wing conspiracy nutjobs, or dirty lazy hippies. Everyone else either believed those labels, got paid out, or turned a blind eye to the possibility that their political spectrum could actually have a flaw.
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Fear.
The conservatives were more afraid of people losing jobs and their big money friends failing than actually being capitalists and letting those companies fail massively. personally I would rather have let them fail, by now we would be coming out of the real recession, instead of dragging along like we are. If you don't believe me look at the actual reports, at best 1-2% growth, with occasional slip to 0. Meanwhile wall street is moving along like it never happened and is shown the economy is growing
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Only because government ignored actual laws designed for those situations and decided to make it up as they went along. I have no idea why people let them get away with it.
Actually, a lot of it was because earlier in that decade our legislators foolishly repealed some laws that had been established during the Great Depression to prevent exactly this kind of thing.
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When private enterprise screws up, you as a taxpayer don't have to foot the bill...
Oh wait.. that's the theory. It doesn't quite work though as we saw in 2008
It never worked that way. Private enterprise has to charge you enough for their products and services to make a profit after all their inefficiencies and screwups.
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No, this is a specific example of military-industrial complex "efficiency" --- a particular order that combines the very worst of private monopolistic greed with unaccountable, secretive, wasteful spending. Governments tend to be rather efficient (much more than private markets) at supplying *public goods* like roads, healthcare, education, transportation, infrastructure, utilities, etc. --- things with clear public benefits easily evaluated by the public. Joe Citizen can tell when his roads have potholes,
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Government spending in the form of social safety nets and common (natural monopoly) infrastructure construction is vital ... everything else can be handled by taxation. Taxation is a dirty word in the modern world though, so debt it is the alternative ... and the advantage of debt is that it's mostly hidden from the voters, in the short term, so they are more likely to accept government waste/corruption.
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I simply can't believe that contracts are awarded without any sort of penalty clause that covers errors like this, delays in completion dates
What makes you think there aren't any penalties? You don't hear about it because the news only reports bad news...
:)
In fact, there usually is penalty clauses in such contracts, even in IT, but that doesn't mean both parties doesn't loose when something fails.
Yes, governments (well, democracy) is inefficient, but the alternatives are a lot worse
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We have this go on all the time in the US with defense spending.
SOP, whether working for a government or another company: bid low, and count on problems and changing requirements to make it profitable before it's done.
Narrow margins (Score:5, Interesting)
Weight and balance control is pretty much a requirement for any shipbuilding (both for controlling draft and controlling stability), but on submarines it's absolutely critical. The margins on a submarine are razor thin - much thinner than you might think. On my boat [wikipedia.org] a mere eight ton error (heavier than calculated) once caused us to lose control on diving.
That being said - a 100 ton error in design and construction is a screwup beyond any analogy or hyperbole.
Re:Narrow margins (Score:4, Interesting)
I have no idea how anyone can underestimate a sub's weight by 100 freaking tons. Other than forgetting to set the material in their CAD software, that is.
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Errors do become harder to spot as time goes, but weight estimates are relatively easy to make these days, as long as you're using CAD software instead of a drawing table.
100 tons screams of either gross engineering incompetence, management trying to sweep problems under the rug, or both. Not some honest little mistakes piling up.
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Re: Narrow margins (Score:3)
Honestly I think you have it backwards.
Old school engineers doing it by hand had to know what they were doing.
Noobs with enough experience to 'look good' can have their deficiencies glossed over by the powerful CAD/CAM software, letting them build inconsequential assemblies that individually would work nicely in isolation, but fail as a whole because they didn't understand (or consider) the engineering and physics at the higher level.
Consider the difference between software engineering and programming. An a
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I think that his point is that, with CAD, even a trained monkey can tell the software "Just iterate through all the pretty little pictures we drew, multiply their volume by their density, and then add it all up" and arrive at a final weight.
It's definitely the case that myopic-design-by-CAD allows people to fuck up in ways that the days of Heroic Engineering and designers who had to be just-that-good in order to design anything didn't; but a CAD system, unless the software is a ghastly morass of nightmarish
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How does someone in 2013 miscalculate the displacement of seawater?
Re:Where were the checks and balances? (Score:5, Funny)
Global Warming!
As the oceans get warmer, the heat gets transferred to the submarine, making it larger. Larger things are heavier and then poof too heavy. It sinks.
Really easy when you understand the physics.
Re:Where were the checks and balances? (Score:5, Insightful)
How does someone in 2013 miscalculate the displacement of seawater?
Probably to 15 decimal places on a workstation with more transistors than the entire world possessed in 1980, along with an entire PPT deck full of pretty renders, and a basic sanity check skipped early in the process...
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How does someone in 2013 miscalculate the displacement of seawater?
In the old days, they would have constructed a scale model before construction even started to measure displacement, drag, etc.
Now that the computer can calculate the exact displacement and model the hydrodynamics of the sub, there's no need to build a model since the computer is always correct.
I bet back then, some engineer with a sliderule would have noticed the discrepancy.
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That's... wow. I could see a miscalculation of the weight based on systematic rounding errors piling up across a huge number of individually inconsequential items, for example (although getting to 100T error would be impressive). But displacement? That's just absurd. For a sub, displacement is just the volume of the sub (something extremely easy to calculate) and byouancy (what I suspect the AC above me meant) is displacement multiplied by the density of the displaced water (this number varies a bit based o
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Maximum buoyancy being 100T too low is a collossal cock-up of a design error.
Ah, I think it was just a sign error. The buoyancy should of course have been 100T and not -100T.
lithium (Score:2)
Easy solution: just substitute all the iron with lithium: the submarine will float... and it will solve itself (really!).
Re:lithium (Score:4, Funny)
At this point (Score:5, Funny)
WWII is over (Score:2)
What kind of war does Spain anticipate fighting in which a submarine would play a useful role?
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What kind of war does Spain anticipate fighting in which a submarine would play a useful role?
Any war involving significant naval action is likely to involve submarines. You build the subs ahead of time because you don't really want to wait until the war starts to begin you defense procurement. (What war? I don't know, nor does anyone else, but with the sorts of long lead times involved you really can't wait for exactitude on that sort of thing.)
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to begin your defense procurement
Meh. I did look at the preview, honest!
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"We've always been at war with Eastasia"
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Doesn't have to be a war, submarines were involved in the Libyan no-fly zone enforcement (which Spain provide aircraft for).
Where's the problem? (Score:3)
That's only a quarter of a million dollars per inch... I'm sure lots of billionaires would find that an irresistible deal!
comment at the source (Score:5, Insightful)
These are very biased news and in fact they are wrong. For starters, only the first submarine has a floatability problem. The other submarines in the series are larger, therefore they have no problem. Now, why has the fist submarine (the original design) a floatability problem? Because the Navy asked for more equipment (electronic equipment, weapons, etc) and more comfortable cabins for the sailors than originally planned. It is not a design problem but a modifications problem and this is very very very frequent in large projects, especially if military. The changes have been taken into account in the design for the second and subsequent submarines (S81, S82, etc). The first submarine (S80) will be fixed by making it a bit longer and adding some floating aids. Source: I work in this project. Next time you want to say stupid things about very serious projects, please warn us you are drunk.
J D Exposito
Scope Creep? (Score:2)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/J_D_Exposito/spain-submarine-s-81-isaac-peral-cant-float_n_3328683_256066767.html [huffingtonpost.com]
These are very biased news and in fact they are wrong.
For starters, only the first submarine has a floatability problem. The other submarines in the series are larger, therefore they have no problem.
Now, why has the fist submarine (the original design) a floatability problem? Because the Navy asked for more equipment (electronic equipment, weapons, etc) and more comfortable cabins for the sailors than originally planned.
It is not a design problem but a modifications problem and this is very very very frequent in large projects, especially if military.
The changes have been taken into account in the design for the second and subsequent submarines (S81, S82, etc). The first submarine (S80) will be fixed by making it a bit longer and adding some floating aids.
Source: I work in this project.
Next time you want to say stupid things about very serious projects, please warn us you are drunk.
J D Exposito
I could see scope creep being the cause of weight problem. However, wouldn't the weight calculations be redone to account for the changes? Or was the hull construction underway before the requirements were finalized?
It almost sounds to me like they decided to use rapid development and it turned around and bit them in the ass.
Re:comment at the source (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the context, it's a fair guess that the person who wrote that is Spanish. Was it really necessary to be nasty about their English?
Hah...the whole article is full of puns. (Score:2)
Why are they building a sub marine? (Score:2)
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Probably the same reason that Greece bought a billion dollars' worth of German submarines in 2010 ( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703636404575352991108208712.html [wsj.com] ). Italy cooperates with Germany on building subs, and they've been buying since 2008. Why? Military-industrial complex: there's sufficient vested interest, so wasteful projects will be pushed through legislatures and bureaucracies because the right people will be paid to support them. The continuation of the projects ensures that funds for corruption will be replenished, because corruption is remarkably self-sustaining (hence why it's so hard to root out).
Or maybe they realized that keeping good relations with an Ally that has the largest defense budget in the world means acting as a puppet for that Ally in a "you're either with us or against us" way, so they want their own defense force so they don't have so much military dependence on that Ally.
Well, to be fair... (Score:2)
Hey, what's 3ft.... :) (Score:2)
Greece also bought lots of tory for its army (Score:2)
It's all in how you look at it (Score:2)
Goes down but not up? I call that batting 500!
Um... Typo? (Score:2)
"Unfortunately for the Spainards..."
This is such an egregious typo that I have a hard time believing it wasn't deliberate.
What does Spain need with submarines? (Score:3)
Serious question.
How do Yo Sink The Spanish Navy? (Score:3)
Put it in water!
hahahah
sorry.
Scope creep (Score:3)
Sounds like a classic case of scope creep. See also the "Vasa".
Re:at least they're trying... (Score:5, Informative)
here in Canada we aren't in extreme debt too, not sure what Spain is doing even building these. Spain is having a rather significant financial crisis the last few years.
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here in Canada we aren't in extreme debt too, not sure what Spain is doing even building these. Spain is having a rather significant financial crisis the last few years.
What do you mean, "not sure"? You think this whole project was started yesterday? As opposed to, you know, the end of 1990's, being the time when the whole thing got approved?
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Actually the contract was signed 24 March 2004. http://elpais.com/diario/2004/04/02/espana/1080856821_850215.html [elpais.com] (Spanish)
The design started long before the contract was signed.
It is partially because of working ethos I guess...
Which is why the Americans have returned to the Moon already and the F-35s have been dominating the sky for years. Oh, wait...
Re: at least they're trying... (Score:3)
We havent been to the moon because right now there really isnt a great reason to go there again. We did make return voyages however.
Seen the shit we have been doing on mars though? Outstanding.
Why am I responding to an America hating troll... sigh
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here in Canada we aren't in extreme debt too, not sure what Spain is doing even building these. Spain is having a rather significant financial crisis the last few years.
According to our wiki overlords [wikipedia.org] this project (as is totally customary for military designs) has some tangled family history going back to the cold war, and the actual contract currently being fucked up was approved in 2003, signed in 2004, and was itself an iteration on a slightly different plan originating in the late 90s. Spain may well have been totally fucked in the early 00s; but it was still riding high on the 'nobody seems to have caught on yet' section of the bubble.
Now, in an ideal world, Spain wou
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here in Canada we aren't in extreme debt too, not sure what Spain is doing even building these. Spain is having a rather significant financial crisis the last few years.
well, their thing is to take in more debt so they can pay spanish workers some more to work on this stuff so they can pay taxes to pay off the debt.
brilliant, eh? they first used this on taking on debt to pay spanish workers to build more housing than there are people to buy them.
because they don't actually need the subs. if they did, they might just as well have bought them from germany. it's their money anyways, so better make them s(t)ink so they don't take them as collateral for the debts..
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Re:at least they're trying... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, politics has gotten complicated over the past 100 years or so. Most people have 1 thing they are good at... maybe 2. In order to fully comprehend what's going on in politics you need to commit a significant portion of your day to reading, weighing and digesting information on the subject because it's literally changing by the second. At least a programming language stays relatively the same over longer time periods. Lucky for us, computer geeks usually have jobs that allow them to surf the internet for large parts of the day and stay on top of things.
It used to be that news papers and TV would figure out what information was relevent, set it up in such a way that readers could come to a few rather clear conclusions and then decided for themselves. Abortion is either about the Rights of the mother, or murdering babies... you pick. Well, the media in mid century suddenly became a lot more biased. The activism of the 50s and 60s lead a lot of kids into the field with the single minded goal of shifting public opinion. They did well, you can find dozens of studies that show most media, in most countries around the world are left leaning. In the past decade however we've seen the Right catch up, and we have Fox, al jazeera. etc... and while the majority of leftist reporters were "left leaning" in their work, these new entities are outright blaintent about their goals? The result? We now have very left wing reporting as well. I don't watch either, I think it's shameful what's going on in the news media today.
So what's your average person supposed to do? They're caught up in black and white issues, which likely aren't black and white at all if you study them. And often they aren't even the issues those people would be most interested in. I can't say a lot about the Canadian financial problems, I live in the USA... but if they are similar to ours then:
1. We need a simplified tax code. There should be 3 lines on your tax forms, how much you make, the percentage of that you have to pay in taxes, and your signature. No more subsidies, loopholes, nothing. The government should not be attempting to manipulate private citizens into spending a certain way. Every such program in history has ended in disaster. (The dust-bowl is a good example)
2. We need to FEWER taxes. I don't mean less, I mean fewer. The current system of "Tax everything" is directly and intentionally designed to obfuscate how much you are actually paying in. You pay taxes on what you earn, when you spend, on the roads you drive, the gas you buy, to register your car... that all needs to die. There should be a national sales tax. That's it, nothing else. You should not be charged for earning, saving or investing money.
3. We need to drastically cut spending. The vast majority of what the government spends money on its out right insane. Specifically in the US, our military spending borders on full retard levels. I know in Canada you have a large subsidie to the logging industry you'll likely regret later. We can all identify silly crap the government should not be involved in.
4. We need temporary tax increases until we get out of debt. Then we need to make it illegal for our governments to borrow money except in times of war.
5. The government needs to get out of and stay out of the economy. It would be one thing if there were financial wizards trying to manipulate the economy, but it's not, it's politicians.
Times of war... (Score:3)
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There should be a national sales tax. That's it, nothing else. You should not be charged for earning, saving or investing money.
Yeah, that's a great way to increase the tax burden on the poorest while offloading it off the richest AND enticing them to not spend money. Do you even think about the second or third layer effects of any of your decisions?
Some debt is fine. Key word is "some" (Score:5, Informative)
There should be 3 lines on your tax forms, how much you make, the percentage of that you have to pay in taxes, and your signature. No more subsidies, loopholes, nothing.
Agreed in principle. In practice what you are proposing is absurd and unworkable. Why? Because defining income is actually rather complicated. (Hint, it's more than just the salary you get from your job) While we could do a lot (and should) to reduce the complexity of taxes by removing a bunch of needless cruft, an income tax will NEVER be anywhere close to as simple as you propose. The problem just isn't that simple.
The government should not be attempting to manipulate private citizens into spending a certain way. Every such program in history has ended in disaster.
The job of the government is to govern. That by definition involves manipulation of private citizens. Tax policy is just a tool. I'd agree it's a clumsy and overused tool but there is nothing fundamentally wrong with judicious use of it. And your hyperbole about every program ending in disaster is demonstrably untrue. You had a fair point up until there.
You pay taxes on what you earn, when you spend, on the roads you drive, the gas you buy, to register your car... that all needs to die. There should be a national sales tax. That's it, nothing else. You should not be charged for earning, saving or investing money.
I think you may not have thought through the consequences of your proposal. Sales taxes are rather volatile forms of taxation by themselves much like income tax. They also are a regressive form of taxation (hurts the poor more than the rich). A diversified set of tax streams is (or at least can be) good policy. As an example, a lot of local municipalities get most of their tax revenue from property taxes and not much else. Works fine until you have a housing bubble burst like in 2008-09. Diversification isn't just for personal stock portfolios. Furthermore is is also good policy to match tax revenues with the expenditures whenever possible. Taxing gasoline to fund road construction makes sense because the two are linked. If we use the roads more taxes will automatically rise to match. Reverse if the roads get used less. Now taxing gas to fund something like schools makes less sense because there is little direct relationship between the two.
We need temporary tax increases until we get out of debt.
Our government has been out of debt precisely once in 230+ years, during the Andrew Jackson's administration if my memory serves. SOME debt is fine and actually is quite useful and not at all harmful to the economy. Essentially all governments have some amount of debt and that is actually a good thing. But just like having a credit card you can have too much debt if you aren't careful.
Then we need to make it illegal for our governments to borrow money except in times of war.
Again, you are proposing something that would actually hurt the economy badly. The ability to control the money supply is critically important. The way we control the money supply is by selling debt or buying it back. Without the ability to borrow we cannot adjust the money supply which makes it very difficult to combat inflation, encourage (or discourage) lending, or deal with volatile tax revenues. SOME borrowing is fine and even beneficial.
Personally I like the idea that Warren Buffet proposed. If we are not in a declared war and the US debt exceeds 10% of GDP then all members of congress and the senate should be ineligible for re-election until such time as the debt is brought back to an appropriate level.
Gold standard = flawed idea (Score:3)
The ability to control the money supply (either directly, or indirectly through the Fed) is a weapon with no good uses.
My eyes are rolling so hard I think I just got a good look at my brain stem. If you're going to make bold assertions that seem unsupported by actual facts, you need to back them up.
It's the reason that the dollar is worth less than 2% of what it was worth 100 years ago.
$1 in 2013 was worth a little over $0.04 in 1913 if you adjust for inflation using the CPI and our ability to acquire dollars has increased at an even faster rate than inflation. The fact that inflation takes place doesn't mean much by itself. What matters is prices relative to the value of cash AND the amount of cash held. I
Re:at least they're trying... (Score:4, Insightful)
Taxes are the extortion I pay not to be jailed or killed by people legally empowered to use guns against the innocent.
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So you're saying that a flat 30% tax on sales would benefit the rich? How is that?
Currently the rich way less, as a percentage, of their income in taxes than many of the poor, due to all the nonsense that's in the tax code.
When the government manipulates the economy for social good, the rich manipulate the government for profit. Want to stop the rich from manipulating the government? Want to stop them from bribing positions and getting involved in elections? Then stop giving them a financial incentive to do
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Re:at least they're trying... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Learn about the Laffer Curve. It's theoretically valid and verified by experience.
You mean someone has actually managed to put more than two numbers on a Laffer curve (0% and 100%) ? Do tell.
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Minor nitpick.
Not all politicians lie. Some are just deluded into believing what they are saying or saying what they have been brainwashed into believing only to find that reality is a different game altogether. Some are just inexperienced and incompetent to understand the truth from a lie that has been passed on to them.
Someone being wrong is not someone telling a lie. There is a note of having to know and understand what
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The problem is that people ask too much of government. It is not capable of running all the things that is asked to do. Wiping the noses and asses of millions of people is just too much.
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The problem is that people ask too much of government.
I live in Spain and I don't recall asking them to build a new submarine fleet in the middle of a financial crisis.
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Considering the junk the British Military are still using, the old junk they're selling to you must be bad! You probably want to look for holes filled in with newspaper and Polyfiller.
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Or batteries that catch fire when you try to use them. Major power cables run at the lowest point of the vessel, etc.
Re:at least they're trying... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because when Canada does design a ship it costs 100 times that of any other nation.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2013/05/02/pol-milewski-shipbuilding-design-mystery.html [www.cbc.ca]
The design of a ship is costing canada $250 million, when similar vessels designed in Norway were designed for $20 million and built for $80 million
So go ahead and buy the UK and USA scraps it is cheaper.
Re:at least they're trying... (Score:4, Funny)
You really think they cost that much? How much do you think it costs Canadians to fund conspiracies like a massive Maple Syrup Shortage, or the Hockey deficiency in Asia, eh?
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"or lengthen the ship to accommodate the excess weight" didn't give that away? You still had to make an assumption?
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At most, it's 4.1% overweight according to TFA. Maybe this isn't that difficult a problem to solve. Also it's not weight that keeps it from floating, it's buoyancy. They could make it 10X heavier, as long as they made it enclose enough volume to balance that they'd be fine. I can only assume that what they really mean is that given its current volume it has too much weight.
lenghtening it costs several million per metre..
Re:Spain should have... (Score:4, Funny)
They should have kept their mouths shut and sold the finished product to North Korea.
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