Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Post-Bankruptcy San Bernardino

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It’s not a pretty picture:

…as part of a plan to reduce the state prison population, nearly 4,000 criminals who would once have been sent to state prison have been put in the custody of San Bernardino County law enforcement authorities. Some have been released, putting more low-level criminals back on the streets of San Bernardino, Chief Hardy said, and adding to the challenges already faced by the police.

“All of our crime is up, and the city has a very high crime rate per capita anyway,” Chief Handy said. “I can’t police the city with much less than this. We’re dangerously close as it is.”

As lawyers wrangle in court over San Bernardino’s plan to cut $26 million from its budget and defer some of its pension payments, city officials say there is little more they can do to turn back the rising tide of violence.

No, but there is something that Sacramento could do, but won’t. It could roll back California’s draconian gun laws that have made places like San Berdoo (and Watts and Willowbrook, and other places) into the Wild West, except that no one is armed except the criminals.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The President’s “Default”

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There’s no reason to default, even without an increase in the debt ceiling:

Failing to cut Social Security checks does not constitute “default.” Neither does withholding checks intended for bureaucrats, veterans, or contractors. In the context of the federal government, “default” means a failure to make good on your debt-service payments. Our interest payments run about $30 billion a month, easily paid out of the roughly $3 trillion (or $250 billion a month) in revenue the federal government is expected to collect this year. You can do rather a lot with $3 trillion a year, but not as much as you can do with $3 trillion a year and a limitless line of credit. There certainly is no reason to default on $360 billion in interest payments when you have $3 trillion in revenue.

What can you do with $3 trillion a year? You can have Social Security ($880 billion), Medicare/Medicaid/HHS ($940 billion), Department of Defense and additional war spending ($672 billion), Veterans’ Affairs ($140 billion), NASA ($18 billion), Homeland Security ($55 billion), Transportation ($99 billion), Commerce ($9 billion), the Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works ($8 billion), Interior ($13 billion), State and international aid ($59 billion), Justice ($36 billion), the Small Business Administration ($1.4 billion), the EPA ($9 billion), the National Science Foundation ($7.5 billion), the Department of Energy ($33 billion), and the FDA ($4.5 billion) — and still have enough money to triple the budget at the National Park Service, because people love Yogi Bear and Booboo. Yeah, you’d have to close down the Department of Education, which does not one useful thing, and downsize the Treasury Department, perhaps even to the radical extent of shutting down its Healthy Food Financing Initiative (my apologies to the first lady), sell off the housing projects and close down HUD, and a few other things. I know, I know: radical austerity.

Rather, you could do all of that on $3 trillion — if you didn’t have $360 billion in payments on interest from past spending weighing down the budget. But since you do, take away the State Department and international relations, Homeland Security, Energy, Justice, NASA, DOT, Interior, Commerce, Civil Works, EPA, NSF, and SBA, say goodbye to the national parks and the guys who maintain our nuclear arsenal — all to finance past spending excesses.

Put another way, $3 trillion a year in revenue gets you federal spending at 2008 levels plus a small surplus. Not savage austerity, not the Hobbesian state of nature, not Somalia. That is what we are talking about in the debt-ceiling debate. Republicans are being criticized because they are demanding some modest spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. But refusing to raise it at all would simply necessitate balancing the budget at pre-Obama levels of spending. Of course, the deficits we have run since then mean that about $100 billion more of that spending will have to go toward debt service in 2013 than in 2008. We are spending on spending.

And as the president used to claim to believe, before he doubled down on the spending, it’s “unpatriotic.”

Business, Philosophy, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Too Little, Too Late

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Wayne Hale continues to recall the events of a decade ago, when Columbia was lost, here, and here. And as I suspected at the time, they took the attitude that Gene Kranz did in the movie:

Jon Harpold was the Director of Mission Operations, my supreme boss as a Flight Director. He had spent his early career in shuttle entry analysis. He knew more about shuttle entry than anybody; the guidance, the navigation, the flight control, the thermal environments and how to control them. After one of the MMTs when possible damage to the orbiter was discussed, he gave me his opinion: “You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS. If it has been damaged it’s probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don’t you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?”

I was hard pressed to disagree. That mindset was widespread. Astronauts agreed. So don’t blame an individual; looks for the organizational factors that lead to that kind of a mindset. Don’t let them in your organization.

As I wrote:

…you’re asked to make an assessment, in the absence of any data except a launch video showing some insulation hitting the vehicle, as to whether or not the damage could be catastrophic. Others around you, whom you respect, are saying that it won’t be. You have a bad feeling, but you can’t prove anything with the available data.

What do you do? What’s the benefit, given that there’s no action that can be taken to alleviate the problem, in fighting to get people to recognize that we may have a serious problem?

Moreover, suppose that we do believe that there’s a problem.

Do we tell the crew? What can they do, other than make peace with their God and say goodbye to their families?

Add to that the fact that it would disrupt the mission, perhaps for nothing, and sadly, deliberate ignorance looks appealing.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Affirmative Action

The sad irony:

The biggest change since Grutter, though, has nothing to do with Court membership. It is the mounting empirical evidence that race preferences are doing more harm than good — even for their supposed beneficiaries. If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. We have fewer college professors and lawyers, too. Put more bluntly, affirmative action has backfired.

As do many “progressive” policies. And it’s sometimes not clear what the real intentions were.