The rent-seeking green-energy scam continues its collapse.
[Update a few minutes later]
I love this: “‘It seemed so safe,’ he said recently. ‘It was a government guarantee.'”
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Nobody Needs An AK-47
The American Energy Boom
…booms on:
As Daniel Yergin puts it, “the shale-energy revolution [provides] a new source of resilience for the US and enhances America’s position in the world.”
It’s the one bright spot in the American economy, and it’s happening despite, not because of, “progressive” policies. Of course, they’ll take credit for it, though.
And the Left just hates it. I’d like to see to what degree the anti-frackers and anti-Keystone people are being funded by the Saudis.
Hollywood’s Fault
No, this isn’t about the culture wars. It really is a Hollywood Fault, that may prevent Garcetti’s gang of cronies from blotting out the sun of Hollywood and West Hollywood residents.
It’s interesting to note that the Red Line subway runs along it, down Hollywood Boulevard. That line was built a couple decades ago, and it’s not clear that they knew they were building it along a rupture fault. From the map, though, it appears to run a block or two south of it, so even if it did go, it wouldn’t necessarily break the tunnel. But it could leave a crack so deep that you could see all the way down to where the people who run Hollywood live.
Crony Light Bulbs
How a coalition of environmentalists and big business took away the light bulbs that people like.
Contract Termination Liability
Space News says kill this bill.
It’s a very foolish (and probably unconstitutional) piece of legislation, whose only purpose is to protect high-cost pork projects that hold us back from space accomplishment.
The New School
An interview with Instapundit on his new book
[Update a few minutes later]
Yes, Academia, winter is still coming for you:
…a lot of people would like to be research professors: no boring students, job security, lots of conferences, prestige, research! (This is what the profession looks like to 22 year olds who have spent all their lives in school environments and have been trained to see professors as authority figures and mentors.) Sprinkle in student loan programs, the natural ambition of colleges to become universities and small universities to become big ones, and there are a lot of forces pushing academia to expand. The result is one of the more cruel and exploitative workplaces in the United States today. While the lot of day laborers and poultry plant employees is worse still, they at least haven’t spent a decade of their lives preparing for jobs that they are then denied.
This system is now coming undone. There aren’t many jobs for entry level doctoral grads, and even fewer for tenure track. Oversupply pushes wages down and keeps desperate hangers-on thronging around looking for adjunct positions. Older professors who were once obliged to retire at 65 now keep teaching. The result is a huge jobs crush.
To resolve the oversupply, we’re going to have to close down many PhD-generating graduate programs and shrink most others. The result will be that demand for professors in the affected field will shrink even more. With fewer grad students to teach, most schools will not need the large tenured faculties they have today, and tenure positions will shrink more still. That in turn should lead to another round of grad school shrinking—even fewer openings as more universities cut department size to adjust to the shrinkage of grad school programs—until at some point the process reaches an equilibrium.
And that point could come sooner than later.
I’d also like to see more lawsuits like this. As that report on the nation’s educational system said almost a third of a century ago, if a foreign power had imposed it on us, we’d consider it an act of war, but we did it to ourselves. Finally, it’s starting to come undone.
The Key To Reusable Launch
To me, the biggest advantage to this approach (as with Stratolaunch) is single-orbit rendezvous.
A Space-Exploration Program
As I point out in the book, one of the reasons space policy is such a mess is because we don’t have a national consensus on that question.
Space Mining
A good overview of the companies going after lunar and asteroidal resources. Expect to hear a lot more nonsense like this as the industry evolves, though:
Space exploration researcher Alice Gorman is based at Flinders University, Australia, and is an internationally recognised leader in the emerging field of space archaeology. Passionate about space, she believes both industry and academia underestimate the emotional investment people have in the night sky.
‘There is the view that it’s just unethical to destroy another celestial body… but then [people] also question if it is right for a profit-making company to make massive profits from this,’ she says. ‘Nobody doubts the investment will be monumental and some argue that those willing to take these risks deserve all the rewards as this isn’t for the faint-hearted.’
But, as Gorman also highlights, the world already has unequal distributions of wealth and some wonder if space-based industries could drive these disparities further apart. As she asks, could Earth one day comprise a terrestrial-based underclass looking up at the off-world wealthy.
We wasted six bucks Saturday night to watch Elysium on pay per view. It’s based on the same stupid socialistic fantasy premise.