2014 ndi 6ws-fitzmier, Lundberg, Abelkop Economy Disads Spending da
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- Ocean Exploration is massively expensive and unjustifiable in the modern deficit
- Ocean Exploration costs unpredictable-can cost as much as three time original requested funding
2NC UQ—2nd QuarterUS GDP on the rise- 2nd quarter shows econ recovery on the horizon(Hartman 6/25, Mitchell Hartman , senior reporter for Marketplace’s Entrepreneurship Desk ,“GDP fell, 6/25/14, and is rising again’, http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/gdp-fell-and-rising-again) U.S. gross domestic product fell 2.9 percent in the first quarter of 2014, according to the third revised estimate from the U.S. Commerce Department. Earlier preliminary estimates had reported a smaller decline in GDP. Contributing to this higher figure for GDP decline were downward revisions to health-care spending following the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act. Government economists initially predicted that newly-insured Americans (and those on new plans) would spend more on healthcare than they did in the first quarter. Most of the contraction in the first quarter is still attributed to severe winter weather across the country in early 2014 -- including the so-called Polar Vortex that spread across many northern states. It led consumers to go out, and spend, less. Businesses cut back on hiring, production, and investment. Other factors slowing the economy down included elimination of federal long-term unemployment benefits, and cuts to the federal food stamp program. “This is a terrible number,” said economist John Canally at brokerage company LPL Financial in Boston. Yet, he said the stock and bond markets mostly ignored the statistic, looking forward instead to economic performance in the second quarter, as well as anticipated growth for the rest of the year and into 2015. “The second quarter looks pretty strong,” said Canally, “with GDP tracking (positive) to between 4 percent and 5 percent. It would be the best run rate on the economy since well before the Great Recession.” Canally pointed out that consumer confidence is up and so is hiring by businesses. Unemployment claims are down, while the manufacturing sector has strengthened. There are also worrisome economic indicators on the horizon: rising consumer prices, especially for food and gasoline; stagnant wages for most workers; historically high levels of long-term unemployment; and international tensions in the Middle East, East Asia and Eastern Europe. Most economists don’t think there’s much danger of the U.S. slipping back into recession -- at least, not without a significant shock, such as a further spike in oil prices. MIT economist Jim Poterba is president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, which determines when the U.S. is officially in recession. He said the GDP reversal this past winter does teach us something about economic prediction. “What I think we learned from the Polar Vortex, and we could learn from a protected heat wave, is that there are closer links between extreme weather fluctuations and economic activity than we may recognize,” said Poterba. “Potentially, extreme heat can have similar kinds of effects -- extreme demands on the electricity grid, for example.” The National Weather Service predicts higher-than-normal temperatures in many regions of the U.S. this summer, including the West Coast, the Southern Great Plains, the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic States. ***Links***Link—GeneralOcean spending perceived as useless-ocean exploration are massively expensive an don’t appeal to the publicCarlyle 13( Ryan, BSChE, Subsea Hydraulics Engineer, 1/31/2013 @ 12:11PM , Forbes, “Why Don't We Spend More On Exploring The Oceans, Rather Than On Space Exploration?”,http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/01/31/why-dont-we-spend-more-on-exploring-the-oceans-rather-than-on-space-exploration/) So as someone whose job deals with exploring the ocean deeps — see my answer to Careers: What kinds of problems does a subsea hydraulics engineer solve? — I can tell you that the ocean is excruciatingly boring. The vast majority of the seafloor once you get >50 miles offshore is barren, featureless mud. On face, this is pretty similar to the empty expanses of outer space, but in space you can see all the way through the nothing, letting you identify targets for probes or telescopes. The goals of space exploration are visible from the Earth, so we can dream and imagine reaching into the heavens. But in the deep oceans, visibility is less than 100 feet and travel speed is measured in single-digit knots. A simple seafloor survey to run a 100 mile pipeline costs a cool $50 million. The oceans are vast, boring, and difficult/expensive to explore — so why bother? Sure, there are beautiful and interesting features like geothermal vents and coral reefs. But throughout most of the ocean these are few and far between. This is a pretty normal view from a subsea robot: Despite the difficulty, there is actually a lot of scientific exploration going on in the oceans. Here’s a pretty good public website for a science ROV mission offshore Oregon: 2009 Pacific Northwest Expedition To reinforce my point about it being boring, here’OCes a blog entry from that team where they talk about how boring the sea floor is: 2009 Pacific Northwest Expedition What IS really interesting in the deep ocean is the exotic life. You see some crazy animals that are often not well-known to science. Something floats by the camera 5000 ft down, and you say “what the hell was that?” and no one knows. Usually it’s just some variety of jellyfish, but occasionally we find giant* isopods: Unfortunately, deep-sea creatures rarely survive the trip to surface. Their bodies are acclimated to the high pressures (hundreds of atmospheres), and the decompression is usually fatal. Our ability to understand these animals is very limited, and their only connection to the surface biosphere is through a few food chain connections (like sperm whales) that can survive diving to these depths. We’re fundamentally quite disconnected from deep ocean life. Also, there is no hope of ever establishing human habitation more than about 1000 ft deep. The pressures are too great, and no engineering or materials conceivable today would allow us to build livable-sized spaces on the deep sea floor. The two times humans have reached the deepest part of the ocean, it required a foot-thick flawless metal sphere with barely enough internal space to sit down. As far as I can tell, seafloor living is all but impossible — a habitable moon base would be vastly easier to engineer than a seafloor colony. See my answer to International Space Station: Given the actual space station ISS, would it be cheaper to build the equivalent at 3-4-5 miles deep underwater? Why? To recap: we don’t spend more time/money exploring the ocean because it’s expensive, difficult, and uninspiring. We stare up at the stars and dream of reaching them, but few people look off the side of a boat and wish they could go down there. Ocean Exploration is massively expensive and unjustifiable in the modern deficitConathan 13(Michael, director of Ocean Policy at American Progress and former staffer of ocean senate committee, “Rockets Top Submarines: Space Exploration Dollars Dwarf Ocean Spending”, American Progress, http://americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2013/06/18/66956/rockets-top-submarines-space-exploration-dollars-dwarf-ocean-spending/) In fiscal year 2013 NASA’s annual exploration budget was roughly $3.8 billion. That same year, total funding for everything NOAA does—fishery management, weather and climate forecasting, ocean research and management, among many other programs—was about $5 billion, and NOAA’s Office of Exploration and Research received just $23.7 million. Something is wrong with this picture. Space travel is certainly expensive. But as Cameron proved with his dive that cost approximately $8 million, deep-sea exploration is pricey as well. And that’s not the only similarity between space and ocean travel: Both are dark, cold, and completely inhospitable to human life. Yet space travel excites Americans’ imaginations in a way ocean exploration never has. To put this in terms Cameron may be familiar with, just think of how stories are told on screens both big and small: Space dominates, with “Star Trek,” “Star Wars,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” and “2001 A Space Odyssey.” Then there are B-movies such as “Plan Nine From Outer Space” and everything ever mocked on “Mystery Science Theater 2000.” There are even parodies: “Spaceballs,” “Galaxy Quest,” and “Mars Attacks!” And let’s not forget Cameron’s own contributions: “Aliens” and “Avatar.” When it comes to the ocean, we have “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “SpongeBob SquarePants,” and Cameron’s somewhat lesser-known film “The Abyss.” And that’s about it. This imbalance in pop culture is illustrative of what plays out in real life. We rejoiced along with the NASA mission-control room when the Mars rover landed on the red planet late last year. One particularly exuberant scientist, known as “Mohawk Guy” for his audacious hairdo, became a minor celebrity and even fielded his share of spontaneous marriage proposals. But when Cameron bottomed out in the Challenger Deep more than 36,000 feet below the surface of the sea, it was met with resounding indifference from all but the dorkiest of ocean nerds such as myself. Part of this incongruity comes from access. No matter where we live, we can go outside on a clear night, look up into the sky, and wonder about what’s out there. We’re presented with a spectacular vista of stars, planets, meteorites, and even the occasional comet or aurora. We have all been wishing on stars since we were children. Only the lucky few can gaze out at the ocean from their doorstep, and even those who do cannot see all that lies beneath the waves. As a result, the facts about ocean exploration are pretty bleak. Humans have laid eyes on less than 5 percent of the ocean, and we have better maps of the surface of Mars than we do of America’s exclusive economic zone—the undersea territory reaching out 200 miles from our shores. Sure, space is sexy. But the oceans are too. To those intrigued by the quest for alien life, consider this: Scientists estimate that we still have not discovered 91 percent of the species that live in our oceans. And some of them look pretty outlandish. Go ahead and Google the deepsea hatchetfish, frill shark, or Bathynomus giganteus. In a time of shrinking budgets and increased scrutiny on the return for our investments, we should be taking a long, hard look at how we are prioritizing our exploration dollars. If the goal of government spending is to spur growth in the private sector, entrepreneurs are far more likely to find inspiration down in the depths of the ocean than up in the heavens. The ocean already provides us with about half the oxygen we breathe, our single largest source of protein, a wealth of mineral resources, key ingredients for pharmaceuticals, and marine biotechnology. Ocean Exploration costs unpredictable-can cost as much as three time original requested fundingBroad 8(Wiliam, a science journalist and senior writer at The New York Times. He shared two Pulitzer Prizes, “New Sphere in Exploring the Abyss”, The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/science/26alvi.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) The United States used to have several submersibles — tiny submarines that dive extraordinarily deep. Alvin is the only one left, and after more than four decades of probing the sea’s depths it is to be retired. Its replacement, costing some $50 million, is to go deeper, move faster, stay down longer, cut the dark better, carry more scientific gear and maybe — just maybe — open a new era of exploration. Its architects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod describe it as “the most capable deep-sea research vehicle in the world.” Alvin can transport a pilot and two scientists down 2.8 miles, providing access to 62 percent of the dark seabed. The new vehicle is expected to descend more than four miles, opening 99 percent of the ocean floor to inquiry. But the greater depth means that the vehicle’s personnel sphere and its many other systems will face added tons of crushing pressure. “Technologically, it’s quite challenging,” Robert S. Detrick Jr., a senior scientist and vice president for marine facilities and operations at Woods Hole, said of forging the new personnel sphere. “It’s also something that hasn’t been done for a long time in the United States.” To better resist the sea’s pressure, the wall of the new personnel sphere is to be nearly three inches thick, up from Alvin’s two inches. Deep explorers always use spheres to make crew compartments because that geometry best resists the crushing force. “We have confidence it can be done,” Dr. Detrick said in January of the sphere’s forging. “But we don’t have a lot of margin for error. If the first forging is bad, it would be quite expensive to redo it.” Just when the replacement Alvin will join the world’s small fleet of submersibles has become uncertain. Like many federal projects, it faces cost overruns and financing troubles. When first proposed in 2004, the anticipated bill ran to $21.6 million. But delays set in and the price of materials, planning and contracting ran higher than expected. Officials say titanium alone has seen a fivefold price increase. The National Science Foundation, the federal agency that sponsors the project, has too many competing needs to meet the new estimated cost of about $50 million. So officials at Woods Hole came up with a phased approach that promises to lower the immediate expense. In an Aug. 8 letter, Susan K. Avery, the president of Woods Hole, outlined the plan to Deborah Kelley, a University of Washington oceanographer and chairwoman of the Deep Submergence Science Committee, a team of researchers that advises the government on abyssal exploration. The new personnel sphere, she said, might first be fitted onto Alvin’s body, giving the old submersible a life extension and a capability boost. Alvin would also get new batteries, new electronics, better lights, cameras and video systems. But the hybrid would be limited to Alvin’s depth of 2.8 miles. The second phase, Dr. Avery said, would build a new submersible body that would let the replacement vehicle dive to the full intended depth of four miles. How soon? The original schedule of 2004 foresaw the replacement vehicle as ready in 2008. Early this year, amid growing uncertainty, the keepers of the schedule put the date at 2010. Now, the soonest the upgraded Alvin might hit the water is estimated to be 2011. And the full replacement, according to Woods Hole officials, might not materialize until 2015. “Phase 2 is about finding additional resources,” Dr. Detrick said. “It’s a matter of money.” Officials talk about a $25 million shortfall and hopes that a private donor might materialize who could close the gap and ensure the speedy debut of the new submersible and its program of deep inquiry. Directory: wp-content -> uploads -> 2014 2014 -> For want of a nail 2014 -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 2014 -> Ihbb asian Championships 2014 middle school bowl Round 4 First Quarter 2014 -> Ihbb european Championships 2014 Bowl Round 4 First Quarter 2014 -> International History Bee and Bowl 2013-14 Asian Division Question Set Bowl Round Six 2014 -> United states patent and trademark office 2014 -> Coffs harbour eisteddfod vocal syllabus 2014 -> Listen News Programs Schedule pledge now 2014 -> Slow club announce third album complete surrender Download 0.74 Mb. 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