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A comment on Astronaut Selection. Parent comment

Re:Astronaut Selection by mmcclellan on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @08:25AM (#10696156)
We always frame our arguments to support our claim; here you represent $17 billion as small compared to a $3.7 trillion bucket. If you were arguing the other way, you might have said we spend 3 times as much on NASA as we do homelessness [1].

[1] http://usich.gov/resources/uploads/asset_library/FY2015_Budg...

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Re:Astronaut Selection by andyjohnson0 on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @10:26AM (#10696863)
In fact I just copied/pasted the bit about the NASA's percentage of the overall US budget from the referenced Wikipedia page. It wasn't an attempt at editorialising.

Homelessness is certainly an important problem, but is it more important than (for example) tackling antibiotic resistance ($450 million budget in FY2014 [1])? For any deserving issue/problem it is possible to play this game all day, as illustrated by the Fallacy of relative privation [2].

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/os...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation

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