Category Archives: Business

Fighting LOST

So Don Rumsfeld testified against ratifying the Law of the Sea Treaty. This is a key point:

Rumsfeld called “an idea of enormous consequence” the fact that “anyone who finds a way to make use of such riches by applying their labor or their technology or their risk-taking are required to pay writ royalties of unknown amounts, potentially billions, possibly even tens of billions over an extended period, an ill-defined period of time, to the new International Seabed Authority for distribution to less developed countries.”

Saying that this principle has “no clear limits,” he mused that it could set a precedent for space exploration, too.

He shouldn’t just “muse.” It could be a disastrous precedent, completely undercutting the arguments we make against the Moon Treaty.

Elon And Charlie

I went over to SpaceX this morning to hear them speak, with the first Dragon to go into space (it was a repeat of their show in McGregor, Texas yesterday with the Dragon that flew the recent mission). There are a bunch of pictures at SpaceflightNow. I don’t think I’m in any of them. I was standing in the press area, just below the vantage point of most of the shots.

You might see some bulges on the side of the Dragon to the right rear. I asked Elon if those were the pods and thrusters for the abort/landing motors. He said they were, but that the design was still in flux. I also asked him if there were cosine losses, and he said yes, that they are unavoidable, since you can’t thrust straight down from the side of a cone.

Speaking of Elon, he’s giving the commencement address at Cal Tech tomorrow morning.

The Higher-Education Bubble

Why it will be worse than the housing bubble:

Once again government has created the conditions for wholesale failure, and failure is upon us.

From 1976 to 2010, the prices of all commodities rose 280 percent. The price of homes rose 400 percent. Private education? A whopping 1,000 percent.

In the end, this bubble will be worse than the last. Even when homeowners got hopelessly behind on their mortgages, two options helped. First, they could declare bankruptcy and free themselves of their crippling debt; second, they could sell their houses to pay down most of their loans.

Students don’t have either of these options. It’s illegal to absolve student loan debt through bankruptcy, and you can’t sell back an education.

I hope that it has a disproportionate effect on the academic left. In a sane world, the first thing to go would be diversity programs, with “studies” departments hard on their heels.

The Oatmeal

Don’t mess with it:

…not only is Inman not someone who is likely to back down, he is about infinitely times more creative than whatever drone is running FunnyJunk.com. He has reposted the letter, annotated it and illustrated it, and included an enormous list of links to pages on FunnyJunk.com where his work was even then being displayed without credit. (They have since taken those pages down, because they’re sneaky like that and also probably don’t know about the Wayback Machine.)

He also declared that rather than pay the drone and/or his lawyer $20,000, he would try to raise that much money through donations, “take a photo of the raised money” and “mail you that photo, along with this drawing of your mom seducing a Kodiak bear” before donating the money to charity.

As of today (Tuesday) at 2 pm Pacific time, he had raised $120,414.

These morons never learn.

We’re In Reach Of The Goal

We are less than two grand from the goal for the space-safety Kickstarter project. I have an offer from a potential donor to match the next thousand that comes in, which means that the rest of you only have to contribute a thousand on your own over the next two and a half days to get it home. Please, have at it.