Just Facts Daily

$125 Million Mishap

What was the root cause of NASA losing a $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999?

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NASA lost its $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) in 1999 because it mixed up metric and English units when coding the software for the mission. Per NASA’s report on the mishap, “the root cause for the loss of the MCO spacecraft was the failure to use metric units in the coding of a ground software file” that was actually “in English units.” This demonstrates that prestigious scholarly organizations can make this kind of simple human error and that virtually anyone can correct it before it causes harm. The lesson from this costly blunder — which has broad applications in many areas of life — is to verify your work and that of others before using it. A 6-minute video with notes on how to skillfully do this is provided at the second link below.

DocumentationNASA Mishap Report Video & Notes

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Comparing Inflation

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D–MA) claims that President Trump’s “economic agenda” has “failed” and “created” a “mess” because “prices” have risen “by 5.9%.”

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IN FACT, inflation has averaged 1.3 percentage points above the ideal with Trump as president and Republicans in control of congress, which is one-fourth of the 5.2 point overage when Biden was president and Democrats controlled congress. Here are the specifics:

The Federal Reserve and other central banks consider 2% to be the optimal annual inflation rate because this keeps price increases low while guarding against the risk of deflation, which can be very harmful to economies.
The average annual inflation rate during Trump’s second term with Republicans controlling both the House and Senate has been 3.3%, or 1.3 points above optimal.
The average annual inflation rate during Biden’s presidency while Democrats controlled the House and Senate was 7.2%, or 5.2 points above optimal, which is 4 times worse than under Trump and the Republicans.
As inflation escalated during the Democrat trifecta, Democrats repeatedly denied the threat, implications, and reality of inflation.
When inflation continued to soar and reached a peak of 9.0%, Warren, Biden, and other Democrats incessantly blamed it on “grocery chains,” other corporations, “greed” and “price gouging” — even though corporate profit margins had declined and the wholesale prices paid by corporations that Democrats vilified had risen by more than the retail prices they charged consumers.
Further belying Democrats’ claims, a study conducted by 3 Ph.D. economists at the San Francisco Fed analyzed the “inflation surge between early 2021 and mid-2022” and found that “price markups for goods and services” — aka, greed and price gouging — had “not been a main driver” of the inflation, and the root causes were actually “large” federal “fiscal transfers” like “increased unemployment benefits” and Federal Reserve policies like lowering “the federal funds rate target to essentially zero.”
Those big spending and easy money policies were enacted and supported by Democrats.
Trump and many Republicans also played a role in the spending, but Democrats voted for far more of it, and the Covid-19 lockdowns that prompted the spending and low federal funds rates were pushed with misinformation from the left and were stricter and longer in Democrat states.
For a prime example, Warren personally voted for at least five separate bills that became law and added $5 trillion of deficit spending while vocally and repeatedly supporting the lockdowns, calling them “necessary,” and asserting that they were “critical to stop the virus” — an unscientific and deadly assertion.
Warren and Biden also tried blaming the inflation on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even through inflation reached a 40-year high before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine even began.
In his manifesto, Adolph Hitler wrote that “effective propaganda” should exploit the “fact” that the “great masses” have an “enormous” “power of forgetting.”

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