Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

Golden Spike

10 Comments

It’s a half hour until the press conference. They’ve put up this promotional video:

Here‘s the Twitter feed.

[Update a few minutes before the conference is due to begin]

Charlie Martin has a scoop interview with Alan Stern.

[Update at 2 PM EST]

Adam Mann has more over at Wired.

[Via Brian Doherty]

[Update a couple minutes later]

Joel Achenbach has the story at the WaPo as well.

[Update a few minutes in]

Jeff Foust is tweeting from the press conference. So is Alan Boyle.

[Update a while later]

Looks like the company web site has finally gone live.

[Update a while later]

OK, party seems to be over, with a lot of questions remaining. Impressive board, technical architecture described, potential customer interest, but they need to raise billions of dollars.

I personally know almost everyone on the board, FWIW.

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

Rachel Maddow’s Blind Deference To Government

17 Comments

It’s the typical socialist mindset:

This question continues to be a puzzle until you realize that when Maddow says “America,” she means not individual Americans or society but government. And now her fallacy is clear. Frédéric Bastiat identified it in 1850. In his classic, The Law, Bastiat wrote that the “socialist” confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education… We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

I can see Maddow saying that. One need not be a state socialist, however, to commit this fallacy. It’s done all the time all along the political spectrum. But Maddow offers us a particularly good example.

It’s basically a totalitarian mindset.