Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Insightful

16 Comments

Here’s a car reviewer who is less than impressed with the new Honda Hybrid:

Much has been written about the Insight, Honda’s new low-priced hybrid. We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days.

So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.

So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.

It gets better.

Business, History, Political Commentary

How The Mighty Fall

4 Comments

What are the signs of incipient failure or collapse?

Great enterprises can become insulated by success; accumulated momentum can carry an enterprise forward for a while, even if its leaders make poor decisions or lose discipline. Stage 1 kicks in when people become arrogant, regarding success virtually as an entitlement, and they lose sight of the true underlying factors that created success in the first place. When the rhetoric of success (“We’re successful because we do these specific things”) replaces penetrating understanding and insight (“We’re successful because we understand why we do these specific things and under what conditions they would no longer work”), decline will very likely follow. Luck and chance play a role in many successful outcomes, and those who fail to acknowledge the role luck may have played in their success—and thereby overestimate their own merit and capabilities—have succumbed to hubris.

Might not be bad reading for the president.

Political Commentary, Space

Cost Should Be No Object

31 Comments

The title of this post should be the title of Tom Jones’ editorial over at the New York Post, in his defense of NASA’s current architecture and plans:

The shuttle’s successor, Orion, won’t fly until at least 2015. Some critics have called for NASA to scrap Orion’s new booster and go back to the drawing board. More worrisome, President Obama has left NASA leaderless since his inauguration, and proposes over the next four years to cut $3.1 billion from the Constellation program designed to develop Orion and its new Ares I booster. It’s hard to see how either approach will reduce the four-year “gap” between 2011 and 2015, when America will have no human launch capability, forcing our astronauts to ride Russian rockets to the space station.

The last sentence presumes that minimizing the gap should be NASA’s, and the nation’s highest priority in government-funded human spaceflight, to the exclusion of whether or not we get a good solution, or a cost-effective one. Obviously, anyone who has been reading me for long knows that I vehemently disagree.

Augustine said last week that his panel will also evaluate alternatives to the much-debated Ares I rocket booster. But Ares I has been in development for five years, with a first unmanned test flight scheduled for this fall. With adequate funding, I’m sure it can get Orion to orbit.

A review of NASA’s management and program execution is prudent, but also invites further delay in getting Orion flying. Building our first new manned spaceship in thirty-five years will be difficult, but NASA’s people are up to the challenge, just as they are proving with Hubble. If given the resources, I know they will launch Orion, and make it both safer and cheaper to operate than the shuttle. Its Ares boosters will be able to send its crews to the moon and beyond, to nearby asteroids.

The fact that Ares I has been in development for five years, but still hasn’t completed a Preliminary Design Review, should be a hint to Dr. Jones that there may be a problem with the program, or NASA’s management of it, and one that goes beyond a simple lack of funding. And there is little relationship between the supposedly upcoming “umanned test flight” and the actual vehicle design. Many program insiders have claimed that it is a Potemkin test, a public relations exercise to spectacularly demonstrate program “progress,” rather than one designed to give us much insight into actual Ares hardware performance.

There is no doubt in my mind that, given sufficient funding and time, NASA can launch something resembling Orion with something that may resemble Ares I. But it doesn’t follow that allowing them to do so would be a good idea. As I noted in my piece at PJM this past week, even ignoring all of the intrinsic technical issues with the Ares concept, even if it goes as NASA plans, it’s simply not worth the money. All it does is return us to the expensive days of Apollo, and is a huge step backward in capability.

For instance, we just saw the assembly of the ISS, and we are seeing the successful repair and upgrade of the Hubble as I type these words. I assume that Tom is aware that Ares/Orion would have no capability to do either of these things, despite a cost per flight comparable to, and perhaps even higher than that of the Shuttle, after amortizing development costs? (I should note that this is particularly amazing considering that Tom played a major role in that, with three ISS EVAs.)

We have built up a huge experience base of orbital operations over the past two decades, with satellite retrievals and repair, and the assembly of a huge structure in orbit. But NASA’s future plans completely abandon and ignore this capability, returning to the Apollo mentality of putting everything up in a single (or at most two) launches, and not preparing us at all, or at least long putting off the day for things like a Mars mission, for which it would simply be impractical, if not impossible, to stage without orbital assembly.

Once satisfied that our trajectory in space is correct, the President should dedicate the funds to meet those goals. In spending terms, NASA’s annual budget is miniscule: $18.3 billion next year, just one half of one percent of the $3.6 trillion federal outlay. Failing to correct NASA’s chronic budget shortfalls, on the other hand, will cede U.S. leadership in space even as we celebrate Apollo’s landmark achievements.

Yes, it’s a half of a percent, but that’s an artifact of the insane explosion of the federal budget this year, not because NASA is being particularly squeezed. In a normal budget, it would be about what it normally is, a percent or so.

But the problem isn’t the money. As I noted above, there seem to be two implicit assumptions in Tom’s piece — first, that reducing the gap is of paramount importance (though even there, he ignores the possibility of Falcon 9/Dragon), and that we should be willing to spend whatever it takes to not only make that happen, but to get back to the moon the way NASA proposes to do so.

Like the Constellation architecture itself, this was the mentality of Apollo. The program’s driving phrase was “waste anything but time.”

But it made sense then, because while space exploration was no more important then that it is now (i.e., not very), beating the Soviets to the moon was, as a key propaganda element of the Cold War, and it was justified to spend vast amounts of money to achieve that goal, despite the fact that it was so economically inefficient that we chose to no longer spend the money on that architecture once the goal was achieved.

We have to consider the possibility, which I hope Augustine will, that in fact the Ares concept is a poor use of taxpayer dollars if we want to have a cost-effective and mission-effective system. Tom’s editorial assumes a priori that there is no better way to go. But if there is, it’s certainly worth a year or three of additional gap. After all, we lived with a gap in the seventies while the Shuttle was under development, and the world didn’t come to an end. And if the private sector is sufficiently motivated, it is likely that it can solve the gap problem much faster than a fully funded Ares, particularly given that the confidence that it can hit the delayed 2015 date is so low.

I like Tom, but this is just NASA boosterism, and I don’t agree that it would be good policy, for either the taxpayers, or for those of us who want to see the US develop serious space capability.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Phil Plait has more boosterism at the Post. Again, it’s the typical plea for more money for NASA, on the assumption that money is all that is lacking, with no serious (or in this case, even unserious) thoughts as to how the money should be spent. And when he says that we need a “modern Apollo program,” it’s an indication to me that he doesn’t really understand what the Apollo program was all about.

What we need is a modern space policy, more attuned to the traditional national values of individualism and free enterprise than NASA has ever been.

Economics, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Parasites

18 Comments

Here’s another guest post, from “Douglas,” on the subject of carlessness.

Most of my oh-so-enlightened (all of them college drop outs like me) liberal-minded freaks of friends (no, they are freaks, social deviants) are in fact smart people, but they assume an intelligence that isn’t theirs based upon their defiance of social norms.

Most of them live in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago, and don’t own cars any more; they only update their driver’s licences so that they can defer portions of their taxes to Indiana rules rather than Illinois.

One of them, since he got rid of his car, hasn’t visited his mother once in almost ten years. Since then, he’s gotten married, had two kids, filed for bankruptcy, taken “loans” from his mother, who was there to visit her boy, but he has never found his way across the border for any reason other than pretending he’s an Indiana resident.

Same for some of the other friends, but to a lesser degree.

There is a selfishness to this “I don’t need to go anywhere I can’t walk” attitude. I lived in other countries, and was technically poor, but I still visited my mother, I still made my brother’s wedding, and if I was somewhere that there were roads that got me somewhere, I would get in my car and I would make it to important moments for my friends.

I drove from Chicago to Vegas for a one-night trip three times, so that I could be a part of my friends’ getting married. I got in my car and drove to Florida for the same reason, I made it to Kentucky twice for a cousin’s christening, and again for another cousin’s divorce. (the divorce one is a complicated story)

I drove from Chicago to Hammond, Louisiana four times, because I was the only one who could be counted on to help a friend move back to my area, in an escort, since my friend was so possessive of certain possessions, that he didn’t trust the mover.

It took four trips.

If I didn’t have a car, my friend in Louisiana would have been assed out, if I didn’t have a car, I wouldn’t have been able to be a part of those other very cherished (other than the divorce one, though there is a degree of satisfaction that I felt) events. If I hadn’t had a car.

If you don’t have a car, if you don’t have freedom of independent movement, you are a parasite, and must depend on people who DO have cars, or on people who are taxed to pay for inefficient buses and trains to get you where you need to go.

This “walking” society is a lie. They will walk a few blocks, they won’t walk the miles that the working class did at the turn of the century to get to where they needed to go, instead, they parasitically demand that they have a right to go from one place to another, and everyone else that is not them pay for it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Perfect Energy Source

39 Comments

I have commenters who refuse to start their own blogs, so I’ll have to create my own guest-blog posts for them. Here’s Carl Pham:

I wouldn’t say I’m enthusiastic about sequestration, aside from the aesthetic pleasure I get from acres of active sequesterers, particular those in genus Sequoia, but it sure beats the hell out of (1) deindustrialization and refeudalization (I know who wants to be my feudal lord), or (2) flinging irrecoverable resources down the rabbit hole of “alternative energy” sources.

I mean, it amazes me that people think because it’s possible to formulate a sentence like we must search for alternative energy sources that they must exist, whereas a few moments informed thought would tell you this is a sentence like we must search for Atlantis or we must search for a new element with stable isotopes, and coming perilously close to we must search for a perpetual motion machine.

The way I see it, there are four forces. Gravity gives us waterfalls and windpower, tech known since the 8th century, thoroughly exploited. The strong force gives us fission and fusion, also well understood. Fission has been ruled out because we’re stupid. Fusion is tough because of that staggering activation barrier, the size of the match you need to light the fire. The weak force gives us radioactivity, but if you’re going to use that you might as well use fission, so that’s that.

What’s left? The EM force, which gives us solar energy and chemistry. Direct solar power is futile, because the power density at the Earth’s surface is too low, so you’ve got to have some collection and storage system, which inevitably brings us to chemistry, that being the way you store electromagnetic energy (barring the invention of stupendous capacitors).

Problem is, the Earth is a closed system, and it’s had 4 billion years to come to equilibrium. There aren’t many chemical reactions left that (1) have plentiful fuel lying around, but (2) magically enough, have failed to already run sometime over the past million millenia.

Except for one. That would be combustion. And the reason is simple, because we live in a giant photosynthesizing hothouse, a mad biosphere that soaks up gigartons of CO2, reduces it to carbohydrates for storage and transport, and then oxidizes it again for energy and movement. It’s a nice, neat, closed cycle, and has been running stably for millions of years. Humble logic suggests the obvious thing to do is tap into this cycle for our own needs, peel off 0.1% of the carbon for our own purposes.

Which we do — but only on the oxidation side. So logic suggests, once again, that we enlist our chlorophylled neighbors to help us out there by reducing the carbon we so merrily oxidize, balancing the books. And, amazingly enough, just as we’re aware of the problem, we discover the tools necessary: our ability to directly manipulate the genome, so that we can tailor plants and bugs to reduce CO2 just the way we want.

I mean, heck, if only combustion and the carbon cycle had just been discovered, it would be the coolest, most clever, greenest tech, and Obama would be wanting to pour billions into it. But, you know, since the tech is as old as pencils, we sit around thinking No, that can’t make sense. Make marks with a piece of charcoal encased in wood? They did that in the 16th century, back when people were stupid and uneducated. There MUST be a better way.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

In Defense of Speaker Pelosi

3 Comments

It’s all part of a vast, nonpartisan conspiracy:

Poor Nancy Pelosi. For more than two years, our beloved House Speaker has been fighting for the public interest, toiling to restore “integrity and civility” to the Capitol’s lower chamber, and striving to shape the most ethical Congress in world history. And what is her reward for this selfless service? The cruel wrath of a vicious, widespread, nonpartisan conspiracy—designed to convince the American public that she is lying and playing politics with national security. This cabal is especially insidious because it involves so many disparate, and seemingly unrelated, players. Further still, its nefarious and remarkably prescient architects had the foresight to begin crafting the phony case against Pelosi years ago, fabricating evidence and coordinating lies as far back as 2002. These people must be exposed and thwarted to preserve Mme. Pelosi’s honor.

That’s just the beginning.