This really is a big problem for people who are trying to eat paleo or reduced carb. Unfortunately, the food that’s the worst for us tastes damn good.
Category Archives: Business
Perspective
Did the nation invest a hundred billion dollars in Colorado Springs? What will the effect be on foreign policy if it burns? Shouldn’t safety be the highest priority for our firefighters? Don’t their lives have infinite value? Why are we risking their lives in fighting this fire?
Finally, which would you rather do, and feel it more worth the fight in terms of your risk of life? Fight this fire, or ride a Dragon to the space station without a launch abort system?
Just asking.
A Commercial Space Powerhouse
MDA has purchased Space Systems Loral.
I think this means that the next generation of high-power comsats will be serviceable.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the press release from Loral.
[Update a while later]
Related thoughts from Clark Lindsey.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s more from Space News, who also thinks it’s about servicing satellites.
Outsourcing
Obama doesn’t know what it means:
Because the Obama campaign knows that one of its most important constituencies is economically illiterate yokels — a demographic to which the president himself apparently belongs — it is on the airwaves claiming “Romney’s never stood up to China — all he’s ever done is send them our jobs.’’ (Whose?) The Obama campaign cites a Washington Post story on the subject, and the Romney campaign has noted that the folks over at WaPo did not distinguish between outsourcing and offshoring (and, indeed, the story is not a very smart one — do read it and see). Obama responded thus: “Yesterday, his advisers tried to clear this up by telling us that there was a difference between ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ Seriously. You can’t make that up.” And indeed you wouldn’t have to make it up, because it is a real thing: different words with different meanings. (Seriously, can we get this guy a library card?)
To be fair, he’s ignorant about business and economics in general. And it shows in his policies.
Peak Oil
…is nowhere in sight.
The FDA
…is a mass-murdering bureaucracy. It’s not just drugs and medical devices — the food pyramid is a public-health disaster as well, and that’s just advisory.
The World’s Smallest Violin
That’s what I’m playing for people who can’t successfully prosecute idiotic and immoral anti-prostitution laws. Glenn has the right idea:
…why not just legalize prostitution. Legal prostitution is safer and healthier, and it’ll provide employment opportunities for some of those unemployed college grads.
It’s not like it goes away if you make it illegal.
Yeah, I know. I’m just being a crazy “right winger,” as usual.
NASA’s Strategic Direction
Check out the group of people determining it at the National Academies.
There are two problems, and they’re old ones. First is the lack of commercial industry participation. They’ve added former astronaut Bob Crippen who’s now at ATK, but that hardly counts. But the more fundamental issue (and reason for the first problem) is the assumption that NASA’s strategic direction should be established by the National Academies, with its own inherent assumption that it is about science and technology development, and not opening a frontier. This in turn may be another remnant of the agency’s beginning in the depth of the Cold War and the Space Act. But somehow, we can never have a serious national discussion about why we spend billions of dollars on human spaceflight, which will be necessary to get a new direction. And part of that discussion should be NASA’s role in the twenty-first century, and what other entities may be required as well.
Boeing’s Human Spaceflight Experience
In an LA Times interview with Ed Mango, he repeats a common fallacy in the aerospace industry:
Boeing has their design, which is also a capsule-type design, and is trying to work out the same kind of issues that Dragon has. The only difference is that they haven’t flown their stuff yet. But Boeing has 50 years of human spaceflight already. They have all the people who did Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the space shuttle. They have all the trips and falls that have been made over those 50 years.
As I’ve said for years, companies don’t have experience — people do (this is a fallacy that government evaluators subscribe to, because every proposal we put in to NASA or the Air Force always included the past experience of the organization, regardless of whether or not the people who would be actually working it had such experience). Most of the people who actually worked on the development of those programs are retired or dead. At this point, I would say that when it comes to building reliable cost-effective space hardware, SpaceX has the best team in the country, with the most recent experience (though they got help from some key people at NASA, such as John Muratore). That is not to say that the people working CST at Boeing aren’t good, but it’s really meaningless to tout their historical experience as having any relevance to the current team.
The EU
…cannot hold together. With France joining the rest of the PIIGs, it’s hard to see survival of the Euro, except perhaps in Germany and the Netherlands. They may reach a point at which it just makes sense to go back to the guilder and deutschemark.