It’s been doing so for decades. No one should take it seriously any more.
All posts by Rand Simberg
Classic Cars
My step-brother had a TR-4, but I’m surprised that you can pick up a TR-6 for that little money. Seems like a great deal. It may soon be the only way you can get a real stick shift.
Michelle’s School Lunch Program
The reign of terror is almost over. What’s not mentioned, though, is that even if the kids were eating the food, it’s not healthy for them. Low grains are only a little less terrible than refined ones, and low fat constitutes physical child abuse, because they need fat to grow their brains.
If You Lose Your Health Insurance
Are you really worse off?
The word “insurance” has lost all meaning when it comes to health care, and the continual confusion and conflation of the two lies at the root of much of the problem. Crazy idea: I want a health savings account to deal with normal medical expenses, and insurance for catastrophes. You know, the way insurance used to be until it got screwed up by wage controls during the war and union negotiators.
The Planetary Society
Entirely not unexpectedly, they have some terrible suggestions for Trump and NASA:
- Maintain the exploration of Mars as the organizing principle for NASA’s human spaceflight program
- Direct NASA to plan an executable, affordable path for sending humans to Mars orbit by 2033
- Expand NASA’s highly successful science portfolio
- Continue to grow and support the commercial space industry
- Initiate annual five percent increases to NASA’s budget for five years
The only good one is the fourth. Here are mine:
- Make the continuous reduction of the cost of space activities the organizing principle for NASA’s human spaceflight program
- Direct NASA to end development of its own launch systems and to start to procure propellant in LEO to enable trips beyond
- Expand NASA’s science portfolio with data purchases
- Continue to grow and support the commercial space industry
- Direct funding from SLS/Orion to support 1-4
Commercial Space Activities
Should they be “permissionless”? Marcia Smith reports on an interesting hearing on the Hill last week, which I attended.
Wasteful Spending
Trump is going to order a government-wide review of it.
If Trump really wants to review wasteful government spending, at NASA he can start with SLS/Orion: https://t.co/eR8yiprfgO
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) March 13, 2017
[Update a while later]
Congratulations to Altius Space Machines for their NASA SBIR Phase II win for cryo propellant transfer technology development. If we canceled SLS/Orion, we could found several thousand efforts like this.
Health Insurance
Its screwed-up history. Yes, it’s long past time to end the differential tax treatment for corporations and individuals.
The Trouble With Barry
Yes, he should be investigated:
There have been weak presidents, deluded presidents, and harmful presidents before him, but never has there been anyone as sinister or questionable as Obama, not excluding even the malefic Jimmy Carter or the sleazy Bill Clinton. What J. R. Dunn writing in American Thinker has said of Hillary, “the most repellent and corrupt American presidential candidate since Aaron Burr,” is equally true, in my estimation, of Barack Obama. Meanwhile, it is Trump who faces a barrage of threats, calls for impeachment and acts of disobedience that would have been more explicable if levied against Obama for his historic deceptions and malfeasances. Under the pestilential reign of Obama, and indeed years of Democratic incumbency, the shining city on the hill has become a murky city in the swamp.
The trouble with Barry is not only that he refuses to go away, materializing like Harry where he has no business being, or that he enjoys, à la Hitchcock, making cameo appearances in whatever political film he happens to be directing at the moment. All this would be perfectly acceptable, even agreeable, were he a benign presence or if he had Hitchcock’s talent for deadpan humor and high entertainment rather than a penchant for malice and misconduct.
He seems determined to outdo Jimmy Carter as our worst former President.
Fixing ObamaCare
Ted Cruz may have found a way.
I think we have to face the fact that, thanks to “progressives,” first with the 17th amendment, then ending the need for actual filibusters, and more recently the eviscerating of the filibuster for lower courts, the Senate has lost its original role of being (supposedly in George Washington’s words) the saucer into which the hot tea of the House was poured to cool. It’s a shame, because the Republicans are likely to pick up a number of Senate seats in 2018, due to the disparity between the two parties in how many are up for re-election.