This looks like an interesting article, if I ever get around to reading it.
Is anticrastination doing something immediately?
Procrastination
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Category Archives: Business
Climate Change
We shouldn’t worry, we should just accept that this will happen and we should adapt to it and regard it as a business opportunity.
Its arrogant to assume that climate will remain static.
The whole language of climate change is designed to confuse the public and policy makers
Bob Carter says the IPCC has accomplished the inversion of the null hypothesis, where the onus is now on disproving dangerous anthropogenic climate change
We should focus on protecting people from natural hazards, and not worrying about what is causing them
It makes sense to encourage alternative energy and see what happens.
Bob Carter closed with this: no scientist can tell you whether it will be warmer or cooler in 2020, so we should prepare for both.
Yes. We don’t know much more than we do know.
And as she notes, the people speaking sensibly are independent or retired, not those receiving government funding.
Idiot Education Administrators
This time, it’s not a public school, but college.
And as Glenn Reynolds notes, these morons now outnumber faculty on campus:
I’d sue all of these people personally, and make their lives a living hell until they left or were fired. And they should have to go through a forced psychiatric evaluation, too, to look at their tendency to abuse power and trust.
Yes.
Blue Origin
This looks interesting. It seems to have both similarities and differences with Falcon/Dragon. Similarities: reusable first stage, vertical landing, pusher escape. Differences: Biconic capsule, hydrogen propulsion. Is the first stage hydrogen?
The EBook Is Out
For those who have been waiting for an electronic version, it is now available at Google Play, currently priced at about eight bucks. For those who don’t do Google, I’ll be getting it up for Nook and Kindle (and possible iTunes) as well in the next few days.
[Cross posted at Safe Is Not An Option]
South California
If this really happens, I’d definitely want to pull up stakes and head across the border to Orange County.
Heartbleed
What you need to do to protect yourself from the security breach.
The Washington Post
Some questions for its management, and its new owner:
Jeff Bezos, this is for you: I have no idea what your political views are, but I assume you are a Democrat, like most rich people. Maybe you knew, when you bought the Washington Post, that it is nothing but a corrupt mouthpiece for the Democratic Party. If so, nothing about the Post/Keystone scandal will surprise you; on the contrary, you will probably applaud the Post’s latest effort to fool its readers so as to promote the Democratic Party’s interests.
But on the off chance that you thought you were buying a real newspaper, you should be shocked to learn that the Post cannot respond to a simple question: does the Post coordinate its reporting with Congressional Democrats, or does it not? If the Post were an honest paper–a real newspaper, part of an actual free and independent press–that would be an easy question to answer. That the Post is unable to respond speaks volumes. If this isn’t what you thought you were buying, you should clean house.
Democrat operatives with bylines.
The Civil War On The Left
Couldn’t happen to a nastier political movement:
the better evidence of how the Democratic Party could come to blows comes from California, which right now rivals China for one-party control. Never mind the three Democratic state senators all heading for the hoosegow for corruption: the bigger story is how Democratic ethnic factions are viciously turning on one another.
So it’s a race war! What a surprise (not really, considering what racists these people are).
Plus, for lagniappe, there’s their war against tech, even when it’s leftie tech.
I guess some people tip cows, others tip cars. When they’re not p00ping on them.
Space Tourism
As I often point out, people who complain about “joy rides for the wealthy” shouldn’t watch media devices like Blu-Ray players, because they were once just “toys for the wealthy.” As were the computers on which they type such complaints. I do think that, that some people, and particularly Virgin, overhype point to point. And it’s not clear what Virgin’s path is to either that or orbit with their current vehicle design. It doesn’t scale well with velocity.
Rethinking Fat
Even NPR is starting to figure it out.
But note, that, as with climate “science,” dissenters have trouble getting published when they have actual science in opposition to the “settled” science in nutrition:
“Fat was really the villain,” says Walter Willett, who is chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. And, by default, people “had to load up on carbohydrates.”
But, by the mid-1990s, Willett says, there were already signs that the high-carb, low-fat approach might not lead to fewer heart attacks and strokes. He had a long-term study underway that was aimed at evaluating the effects of diet and lifestyle on health.
“We were finding that if people seemed to replace saturated fat — the kind of fat found in cheese, eggs, meat, butter — with carbohydrate, there was no reduction in heart disease,” Willett says.
Willett submitted his data to a top medical journal, but he says the editors would not publish his findings. His paper was turned down.
“There was a lot of resistance to anything that would question the low-fat guidelines,” Willett says, especially the guidelines on saturated fat.
Willett’s paper was eventually published by a British medical journal, the BMJ, in 1996.
And that was almost twenty years ago, and the junk-science FDA guidelines that probably killed my father in the seventies remain pretty much in place.
Sleep Deprivation
Does it partially explain the high failure rate of tech start ups?
SpaceX prides itself on its Silicon Valley culture. I hope they’re not driving people to the point at which they have an accident.
The Silicon Valley Bubble
Mozilla was almost certainly too insular to anticipate the firefox firestorm that may be about to hit them.
The Warm Mongers’ Con Game
It continues, but the marks aren’t falling for it any more.
Steve Goddard Explains
“Why I do this”:
I have been an active environmentalist for almost my entire life. At age 16 I testified before a Congressional hearing in support of a proposed wilderness area in Utah. I worked to get the Clean Air Act passed, and worked for two summers as a wilderness ranger in New Mexico. I do all of my local transport and shopping by bicycle, and buy almost exclusively organic and free range food.
The reason I blog is because catastrophic global warming is junk science, used by unscrupulous people for unscrupulous political and financial purposes. It keeps environmentalists from doing anything useful, and provides progressives an excuse to push toward totalitarianism.
The global warming scam needs to be stopped. It has spiraled completely out of control, and no longer has any pretense of science behind the lies.
Pretty much, yeah.
The GM Scandal
It may be worse than you think:
…does anyone believe that the Obama administration took as hard a look at GM as it did Toyota?
Because it was Government Motors, and a payoff to the president’s ally, the UAW, and a rip off of the taxpayer.
What Keeps Women Out Of STEM
Among other things, they don’t like the dating pool. I wonder if The Big Bang Theory helps, or hurts with that perception?
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems vaguely related: Redefining boyhood. As a disease to be treated.
I guess you could say it’s a pre-existing condition.
The Seven Million Bigots
But why stop there? According to Wikipedia, 7,001,084 people voted for Prop 8. Why do any of those people still have jobs? Shouldn’t they all be forced to resign? And why should they have the privilege of living in California at all? I say round them up and move them someplace where they won’t do any harm.
Oh, and let’s find every media figure, writer or actor or musician, who voted for Prop 8. Surely they’re a special danger. Someone should start an investigation — form a committee to investigate un-American activities like that, expose the malefactors, and make them identify anyone else they know who was involved. Let’s make it clear that differing on these opinions is unacceptable. Like Eich, they should be blacklisted and never allowed to work again.
Damn straight.
[Update a while later]
Glenn has a lot more. Apparently Mozilla is getting a lot of negative feedback, but as he points out, OK Cupid should be taking a lot of heat, too, particularly considering their hypocrisy.
[Update mid morning]
The “liberal” mob claims another scalp.
People who behave this way are many things, but liberal is not one of them.
[Early afternoon update]
“The Internet just cut off its nose to spite its Facebook.”
I would never defend a homophobe—but does “pure hate” homophobia include dedicating oneself to outreach to “marginalized” LGBT developers, as Eich did almost immediately? Does Mozilla further its cause-privacy uber alles and the free flow of information—by making its pioneers into pariahs in social media, while issuing blatantly hypocritical statements which claim to treasure “religious diversity” at Mozilla? (And did anyone flinch when Mark Zuckerberg held GOP fundraisers?) Is what we want ”politically correct web browsing” where the Twittersphere and “socially conscious corporations” determine whose ideas are disseminated? Is this the open internet, or shall the open-source web be verboten to those “on the wrong side of history”?
This is a very very ugly precedent.
[Update a while later]
Andrew Sullivan continues to fight the good fight on this issue:
There is not a scintilla of evidence that he has ever discriminated against a single gay person at Mozilla; he was dedicated to continuing Mozilla’s inclusive policies; he was prepared to prove that the accusations against him were unfair, and that his political views would not affect his performance as CEO. But this was not enough. He had to be publicly punished for supporting a Proposition that is no longer in effect. This is absolutely McCarthyism from an increasingly McCarthyite left.
The only problem the Left ever had with McCarthyism was that they were McCarthy’s target.
The Immigration Coalition
Cracks are forming in it.
Good.
Venezuela
It wants to spread the suffering:
As with the old lady and the fly, Venezuela’s government may be running out of encores. It can crack down on black-market activity, but that won’t make the shortages go away. It might redistribute the suffering a bit, but that’s not all it will do. The black market is often a sort of release valve for bad policy; shut it down, and you turn the formerly annoying into the totally intolerable.
There is, as Adam Smith once observed, “a lot of ruin in a nation.” President Nicolas Maduro seems determined to find out exactly how much Venezuela has left.
This is always how socialism ends. They’ve run out of other peoples’ money down there.
Those 7M “Sign Ups”
Why yesterday’s champagne-cork popping in the Rose Garden was meaningless propaganda.
[Update a few minutes later]
Want medical insurance? Get in line:
The first thing we thought of when we saw the pictures was the photos we’ve recently seen on Twitter of Venezuelans waiting in bread lines. Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes. Closer to home, one doubts even the Transportation Security Administration would be so tone-deaf as to advertise long airport lines as an indication it’s doing a great job.
So what in the world could the White House have been thinking? Here’s a guess: They look at the ObamaCare lines and think not of communist subjects queuing up for bread or toilet paper, or Americans for driver’s licenses, but something more like the lines of consumers eager to be the first to get the new iPhone or the latest Harry Potter book. Affluent people often wait in line for things about which they have a particular enthusiasm–or for special experiences, like an amusement park ride, concert or meal at a favorite restaurant.
One obvious difference is that whereas the iPhone and Harry Potter queuers are eager to get the new thing first, the ObamaCare ones are presumably anxious not to miss the deadline (even if it’s not rigorously enforced). ObamaCare lines might have been impressive if they’d begun to form in the last days of September. At the end of open enrollment, the White House boast is akin to the IRS’s citing a “surge” in filing of tax returns two weeks from now as evidence that the income tax system is popular and well designed.
Command economies under repressive regimes seems to be the goal.
Government Motors
It’s not that GM’s new owners didn’t care. It’s just that they cared more about their political backers: the UAW.
Spacecraft Tech Expo
OK, now that I have my health care squared away (just under the wire), I’m heading down to Long Beach. Not sure how much I’ll be able to blog from there, but I’ll take a laptop.
No, Mr. Tito
SLS/Orion is not only not a “spaceship to everywhere,” it’s really is a spaceship to nowhere.
I really don’t understand what he’s thinking.
The New Space Race
The Modern World
Yes. “The modern world is astonishing. But it has a price: sometimes the expectation of no communication is better than an expectation of communication that goes unfufilled.”
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related: Wifi is about to get faster.
Too bad it’s not about to get more reliable. I still have to reboot the router every time I want to watch Netflix.
Hipster Web Fonts
A righteous rant. As Glenn notes, a lot of web designers are young, with good eyesight, and monitors the size of a drive-in theater screen.
But now I’m thinking I should go look at my own style sheet.
Cosmos
Chad Orzell has some problems with the reboot. So do I and while it’s not his main concern, he puts his finger on it:
The bit where he called out young-Earth creationism for the impoverished scale of its vision was cute, too, though I’m not sure it was all that necessary or useful (in that the people who believe that won’t be watching, and wouldn’t be convinced), but then the show has clearly established a pattern of throwing red meat to the anti-religious from time to time.
Yes, if by “from time to time” he means every episode so far. I’m not traditionally religious, but I find it gratuitous and off putting. The writers and Tyson seem to get some sort of righteous satisfaction from putting a rhetorical thumb in the eyes of believers. It does not advance science, or their own secular religious cause.
Crowdfunding Is Not A Scam
It’s market research. She makes a good point, that it’s a quick, inexpensive way to identify products with no market, relative to actually putting them in the market. On the other hand, sometimes products that don’t do well in the market as their primary function find some other killer app that no one anticipated. If it dies in crowdfunding, no one would get the chance to discover that sort of thing.
The Democrats’ Scandals
They’re all rooted in the evil of unlimited government:
Adam Smith’s formula for prosperity — “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” — is the very modest ambition that conservatives aim for. Limited government is the tool by which government can be made to do good without necessarily being good, or being composed of good men.
The progressive state, on the other hand, is a state infused with moral purpose. If politics is to be a jihad, then the state must be invested with extraordinary power to achieve its moral mission. There is no way to invest the state with extraordinary power without also investing those powers in the men who hold its offices and staff its bureaucracies, which hold ever more nearly absolute power over our property and our lives. (And given that the Obama administration has made a policy of assassinating U.S. citizens without legal process, we might as well call that power “absolute.”) But if those elective offices and regulatory fortresses are to be staffed with men who are corrupt and corruptible, then the progressive vision of the morality-infused state must falter.
And they — we — are all corruptible.
Lord Acton was right, once again, about the power of power to corrupt.