Andrew Klavan says to eat the crap sandwich.
It probably is the best we’re going to get with the current Senate, particularly given, as he points out, that when it comes to health care (as in much else), Trump is no small-government conservative.
Category Archives: Business
Another Successful Reflight, And Relanding
Eric Berger has the story. As he says, reusability isn’t a fad, we’ve finally gotten to the point at which it’s clearly the future.
There is a little tension because Elon announced shortly before the launch that this would be the most challenging entry yet (probably to downplay expectations). It landed, but not quite on the bullseye. But close enough. This was the first rocket to land on both the east- and west-coast ASDSs. We’re planning to go up to Vandenberg Sunday for the Iridium launch. It should be better weather than the last time, in January. If successful, it will be two launches for the company almost within forty-eight hours. They’re finally getting to the launch tempo they need to work down their backlog.
Seventy
…is the new sixty.
I’m glad that I don’t feel my age. I was having some new lower-back pain, probably sciatica, in the spring, that I was afraid was going to be a permanent feature of life, but it seems to have healed.
A 3-D Laser Printer
GE is building the world’s largest one:
The prototype Atlas printer, announced on Wednesday, can print objects up to one meter long using titanium, aluminum, and other metals instead of the plastics, resins, and filaments that many commercial and consumer 3D printers use. That means it could print an entire engine block for a car or truck, for example, replacing the specialized machines and tooling that are currently required to make those types of products in a factory.
GE said it plans to unveil the Atlas in November. The prototype can only print objects up to one meter in two directions, such as length and width, but once the production version is ready next year, it will be able to print objects up to one meter in any direction.
Seems like just the thing for cheap rocket engines.
Gwynneth Paltrow’s Latest Nuttiness
This is pretty funny. NASA calls BS on it.
The Senate Health Plan
It appears to be ObamaCare Lite:
At a fundamental level, the Senate plan accepts Obamacare’s premises about the nature of health insurance and the individual market. It works from the assumption that the only way to make expensive health insurance cheaper is to subsidize it through the federal government. It is a plan that subsidizes, and therefore disguises, unaffordability, rather than attempting to bring down costs directly.
Republicans are useless.
[Update a few minutes later]
Bob Zubrin has a more radical plan:
…the problem that we face is not that there are too many people who lack health insurance, but that there are too many people who have it. If we want to get health-care costs under control, we need a system where the majority of medical expenses are paid for by informed individuals who shop for value and are free to choose what they want to buy accordingly.
So what should Congress do? The most effective action the government could take would be to simply ban health insurance and enact transparency laws forcing medical providers to clearly advertise their prices for services rendered. This would crash health-care costs overnight.
Unfortunately, things are not so simple. Health-care costs differ from grocery costs in one key respect: They are unpredictable, which means that for most people catastrophic health insurance would still be warranted. What’s more, there would still be indigent Americans unable to pay for health care even at the greatly reduced rates such a system would provide. Such people, however, could be given medical stamps, analogous to food stamps, to help cover all or part of their medical bills.
The recently failed Trump-Ryan health-care bill was useless, because it simply perpetuated the current nonsensical system in slightly altered form. To truly fix health care, we would need to build a new system from scratch with two cornerstones: the free market and a safety net — the former to drive down costs, and the latter to protect the most vulnerable.
Yup. The whole system is a disaster, and has been for decades, ever since employee-insurance and union demands completely warped the very concept of health insurance.
[Mid-morning update]
Well, here’s a different opinion:
Finished reading the Senate HC bill. Put simply: If it passes, it’ll be the greatest policy achievement by a GOP Congress in my lifetime.
— Avik Roy (@Avik) June 22, 2017
Thirteen Years Of No Space Tourism
Today is the anniversary of the first spaceflight of SpaceShipOne. At the time, everyone expected its successor to be flying passengers before the decade was out. As we now know, that was over-optimistic, for a variety of reasons. But here are my blog posts from the event at the time.
Calexit 2
Now they want to negotiate a new deal:
The coalition filed a proposed constitutional amendment that would remove the word “inseparable” from the California Constitution’s declaration that the state is “an inseparable part of the United States of America.”
However, it should not be assumed the California Freedom Coalition wants total freedom. The proposed amendment holds out the possibility the state could be “sovereign and autonomous” without actually breaking away from the U.S.
Stephen Gonzales, the president of the California Freedom Coalition, told the Sacramento Bee the amendment would also open the door for negotiation. It would give the state’s governor the freedom to do a deal with Washington for the independence of California.
I guess they’re ignoring those pesky issues like needing the consent of Congress.
The #JourneyToMars
…seems to be pretty much dead.
#JourneyToMars was never alive.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) June 20, 2017
California’s Minimum Wage
It’s already devastating the restaurant industry, and it hasn’t even fully kicked in yet:
Christopher Thornberg, director of UC Riverside’s Center for Economic Forecasting and Development, told the San Bernardino Sun that politicians should have adopted a regional approach. He said it would been better to adapt minimum-wage levels to varying economies – something like the Oregon model, the nation’s first multi-tiered minimum-wage strategy.
Oregon’s minimum-wage law is phased, with increases over six years. By 2022, the minimum will be $14.75 an hour in Portland, $13.50 in midsize counties and $12.50 in rural areas.
“That makes sense,” Thornberg told the Sun. “That’s logical.”
California is even more varied economically than Oregon. Thornberg believes hiking wages in blanket fashion will spark layoffs and edge low-skilled workers out of the job market.
It’s not “logical.” It’s just slightly less insane. And this is why a federal minimum wage is even more insane.