Category Archives: Business

A Veneer Of Certainty

How dependable is climate science?

Not enough to base energy policy on.

[Update a few minutes later]

A vigorous fisking of what Judith Curry calls “the stupidest [peer-reviewed] paper ever written.” With all respect to Professor Curry, that’s a pretty high bar, even in this field.

[Update a couple minutes later]

OK, I slightly misquoted her.

[Update a while later]

Link is fixed, sorry!

GIMP (Again)

Is there a doctor in the house? I’m trying to paste a transparent layer in, and all I’m seeing is an outline of it. Anchoring it does nothing. This may be related: It pastes into the canvas in the upper left corner, but that isn’t part of the image I’m trying to put in into, and I don’t know how to get rid of the dead space above. This is the most infuriatingly non-obvious user interface I’ve ever seen.

[Update a couple minutes later]

OK, I got rid of the extra canvas, but I still see nothing when I paste the new layer in.

[Update a while later]

OK, finally figured it out. I had to “Select All” before copying.

“Rape Culture”

Almost a decade ago, I wrote a post on my long-standing theory about why Hollywood depicts businesspeople as evil:

…it only makes sense that if your only employment experience with business, big or otherwise, is working for the entertainment industry or the ad business, you’re not going to have much appreciation for how a real business, where you have to actually develop and manufacture things that people go out and willingly buy, and has to be run by people with a talent for business (not murder and skullduggery), actually works. It’s actually quite similar to the reason that life in the military is rarely depicted accurately. They have no real-life experience.

This morning, Glenn made a related observation on the current pervruption in media and politics:

…it’s easy to see why lefties think “rape culture” is everywhere. In their world and institutions, it is.

It’s also part of general projection of the Left.

The Russian Space Program

Its woes continue, with another Soyuz launch failure, because the Fregat fired in the wrong direction. Now probably Atlantic-stationary orbit.

Here’s the story from Doug Messier.

[Afternoon update]

Meanwhile, back in the USA, NASA (and the ASAP) is still stupidly obsessing over safety.

This is nuts. Soyuz capsules aren’t armored to that MMOD requirement. As I just emailed a high-level NASA official, why don’t we just quit flying?

The SLS Mess

Jason Davis has a good rundown on it, and the implications for Europa Clipper. I don’t know how he knows this, though:

Any other rocket besides SLS—including SpaceX’s upcoming Falcon Heavy—lacks the power to blast Clipper directly from Earth to Jupiter. A conventional rocket would rely on three gravity assists from Earth and one from Venus, increasing the transit time from about 2.7 years to 7.5 years.

How does he know that? Has he run the numbers, or is he just taking NASA’s word for it? He’s also not considering the possibility of New Glenn, New Armstrong, Vulcan/ACES with a distributed launch, or BFR, all of which could be ready by 2022.

Android And SCP

So I’m trying to move some files from my Linux desktop to my tablet. I suppose the easiest way to do it would be via USB, but it would be nice if I could do a file transfer over the wireless network. I set up the Android with a linux shell, and I’m able to ssh into my desktop with it. But when I use the Android app “andFTP,” which everyone seems to praise, to scp files, it won’t authenticate. Anyone have any idea what the issue could be?

Roy Moore, And The Media

Many in the media are lamenting the fact that Moore’s support continues in the face of credible allegations of sexual misconduct against him. They’d like to paint this as acceptance of such misconduct, because the alternative (and real reason) is that many people either don’t believe the allegations or (and this is related) have rightly come to find the media hypocritical and despicable, and this is a way of flipping them the bird.

Michael Walsh lays out the reasons:

The media, in the form of the Baby Boomers who have reached its highest echelons and have controlled it for the past quarter century, sold its soul to the Democrat party — first to George McGovern, then (briefly) to Jimmy Carter, and finally and fatally to Bill (but not Hillary) Clinton and Barack Obama. Whereas old-school reporters and editors abjured involvement in politics, they embraced it. Whereas once a reporter left to become a public-relations flack or, worse, to work for a politician, he was finished as a journalist, the Boomers celebrated such experience as a resume builder. In short order, a revolving door appeared, connecting the newsrooms of Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the television networks to the corridors of political power.

David Axelrod, for example, worked at the Chicago Tribune, as the City Hall bureau chief, before moving on to managing campaigns. Several of my Time magazine colleagues segued into Democratic administrations, including Jay Carney (press secretary) and Rick Stengel (State Dept.). In the other direction, Clinton administration hacks and henchmen such as James Carville and George Stephanopoulos smoothly transitioned into plum media gigs. So why should anyone trust the press any more?

Why indeed? As Richard Fernandez has noted, they put the torpedoes in the water to hit Trump, and they’re circling back around toward them. I hope they hit below the water line.