Category Archives: Business

Meaningless Polling

I’ve long been saying that the “right track, wrong track” doesn’t really provide much insight into what voters will do, because there are multiple tracks. I’ve thought that the country has been on the wrong track all of my adult life, but that’s doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to vote for change, if it’s the kind of change we get from Democrats, who are largely responsible for putting us on the wrong track.

But there’s another stupid polling question: Has Biden accomplished a lot? Apparently many people think so (including me) but does that mean that they approve of his “accomplishments”? I sure as hell don’t. There was a “debate” on Fox this morning between a DNC flack and a Republican in which the flack touted Biden’s “accomplishments,” which he defined as the legislative atrocities that his handlers and the Democrats in Congress managed to cram through. The fact that Congress has the power to legislate doesn’t mean that any legislation is, by definition, an accomplishment, and the notion that it is is stupid. The quality of the legislation, and its effects on the Republic, are much more important measures than simply whether a bill was passed.

I notice that Robert Cahaly at Trafalgar is talking about the number of “submerged” voters (what Nixon would have called the “Silent Majority”), who don’t put up yard signs, or talk about their politics, partly as a result of all of the vilification of Republicans by Democrats, and how even he can’t poll them. But it likely means that the “red wave” will be a tsunami.

[Monday-morning update]

Operation Demoralize has failed.

On Starship Prices

The world has finally seen a launch system that can find out what the price-demand elasticity curve looks like. Elon wants to maximize flight rate and revenue, because he wants to drive costs down to make Mars more affordable.

Bill Nelson 2.0

First he called cost-plus contracts a “plague” on the agency, and now he’s praising SpaceX (while pretending that he wasn’t one of the “poo pooers” himself, who told Lori to “get her boy Elon in line”). And I love this:

When there was the beginning of the space cargo and crew [programs], the two serious bidders were SpaceX and Boeing, and everybody poo-pooed SpaceX and said, ‘Oh, Boeing is a legacy company,'” Nelson said. “Well, guess who is about to make its sixth flight after its first test flight with astronauts, and guess who’s still on the ground?”

That’s got to leave a mark.