Category Archives: Business

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

SLS/Orion

16 Comments

NASA is thinking about putting up crew on its very first flight.

And yet they continue to delay commercial crew because “safety is the highest priority.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

[Update a couple minutes later]

A congressional staffer told me about this last week: A hearing on NASA’s past, past, past and present, no future.

[Update a few minutes later]

More from Eric Berger.

[Update a while later]

Joel Achenback weighs in.

[Update a while later]

[Update a while later, just before noon Pacific]

Thoughts from Keith Cowing. Yes, it’s a Hail Mary. And reckless, in my opinion. If it was to save the world, OK, but to save a bloated jobs program?

[Update early afternoon]

Here’s Marcia Smith’s take.

[Update a while later]

And here’s the story from the Chrises at NASA Spaceflight.

[Update a few minutes later]

And Jeff Foust’s take. Excellent point in comments:

If NASA agree[s] to this (putting astronauts on 1st flight of brand new rocket), they better not whine about SpaceX loading astronauts before fuel.

Indeed.

Business, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Window Shade

9 Comments

Reflections from Wayne Hale on the apparent new anti-social activity in airplanes: Looking out the window.

I have actually been requested to put my shade down on an occasion in which the sun was beaming right in the window. On my trip to Israel a couple years ago, the sun came up as we were approaching the French coast, but the plane remained dark. I had to crack the bottom if I wanted to see, as we crossed the French then Italian Alps and Monico, and then Italy and Greece. Last week on the way to DC I ended up with a window seat with no window (the seat in front of me had two). It was almost claustrophobic. When I hear about these new aircraft coming along without windows, I think “No way.”

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Risk In Human Spaceflight

2 Comments

I didn’t make it to the conference in time to hear him, but I was told a couple weeks ago that Bill Gerstenmeier would be talking about many of the themes of my book. He apparently did. I would note though, that “loss of crew” isn’t just probability of killing crew; it also includes causing a career-ending injury.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: With new types of launch systems, we’re discovering new causes of launch failure, even after almost sixty years of orbital spaceflight.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

AI

29 Comments

The huge economic issue that no one in Washington is talking about:

Driverless trucks delivering goods to fully automated warehouses and loading docks. Drones delivering everything from pizza to furniture. Offices will become almost fully automated as work is farmed out to smart machines. There’s even speculation that AI could take the place of reporters and editors, writing copy with more speed and less bias than humans.

Most of these innovations are not far off. What’s worse, our schools are stuck in a time warp, teaching kids as if it was the 1970s, sending them to college where they major in English Lit or Environmental Management. How many of these young people would be better off going to a trade school and learning a valuable skill that would be useful in the new economy?

What’s needed is a revolution. Not rage against the machines, but a clear-eyed recognition in society from top to bottom that we can’t go back. The days when you could graduate from high school and go to work for 40 years in the local plant, earning a good middle-class wage and being able to buy into the American dream, are gone forever. Donald Trump can’t bring them back. The Democrats can’t bring them back. The unions can’t bring them back.

Nope.

Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Federal Bureaucrats

5 Comments

…are disconsolate over the repeal of their regulations.

Good.

[Update a while later]

This is an amusing argument. And by “amusing,” I mean stupid:

Pizarchik is already working on ideas to write a new version of the stream rule under a future president, though he declined to share any details. He also hinted someone could mount a constitutional challenge to the review act itself, which critics have long argued tramples on the separation of powers.

“I believe there’s a good chance that, in a legal challenge, that a court will overturn Congress’ actions here as an unconstitutional usurpation of the executive branch’s powers,” he said.

So let me get this straight. He thinks that Congress repealing a rule arising from a law passed by Congress, per another law passed by Congress, is a usurpation of the executive branch’s powers? Hokay…

Do you know what’s a real usurpation of separation of powers? Unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats taking over the legislative function through rule making.

[Update a few minutes later]

As a (female) friend told me last week in DC, I bathe in and drink their tears every night:

“It’s almost a sense of dread, as in, what will happen to us,” said Gabrielle Martin, a trial lawyer and 30-year veteran at the Denver office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where colleagues now share daily, grim predictions about the fate of their jobs under Mr. Trump’s leadership.

“It’s like the movie music when the shark is coming,” Ms. Martin said, referring to “Jaws,” the 1975 thriller. “People are just wary — is the shark going to come up out of the water?”

Very soon, I hope.

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

“Liberals”

16 Comments

How they became the fascists they’ve always been warning us about.

#ProTip: They’ve always been, and are not now, and have never been, liberals.

Speaking of which, Bob Zubrin wants to start a new political party:

America needs a new Liberal Party because both major parties have abandoned liberalism. Neither adequately supports international free trade or the defense of the West — the two pillars of the liberal world order since 1945. Both lack commitment to constitutionally limited government, separation of powers, free enterprise, and human equality and liberty under law. Each supports its own Malthusian antihuman collectivist ideology: for Democrats, it is ecologism, for Republicans, it is nativism.

Largely, yes, but for the latter, that’s mostly because of Trump. Who is also no liberal.

[Afternoon update]

Related: No Republicans need apply:

One of the less understood criticisms of progressivism is that it is totalitarian, not in the sense that kale-eating Brooklynites want to build prison camps for political nonconformists (except for the ones who want to lock up global-warming skeptics) but in the sense that it assumes that there is no life outside of politics, that there is no separate sphere of private life, and that church, family, art, and much else properly resides within that sphere.

…The people who close their doors against those who simply see the world in a different way, who scream profanities at Betsy DeVos or chant ‘You should die!’ at Jewish musicians, are people who cannot rise far enough above their own pettiness to understand that the thing they fear is the thing they are.”

Yes. The Left a) has no sense of irony whatsoever, and b) continually engages in psychology projection of its own pathologies on others.

[Via Ed Driscoll]

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

When The Recession Started, And Why

11 Comments

I’d been thinking about writing a piece about this, but haven’t had the time to do the digging for it. People saying that the improved jobs numbers from the most recent report were “Obama’s” job numbers, but a president doesn’t have to be president yet for him to start to have an effect on the economy.

There was a palpable sense, even before the 2008 election, as a lot of business people realized that Obama was likely to win, that the economy was starting to contract, as they pulled in their horns and decided to wait out the storm. Similarly, many non-Democrats I know (and I) breathed a huge sigh of relief and felt as though a mighty weight had been lifted off us when we realized she wasn’t going to be the next president, and that, after a long decade, we were about to get one who at least promised to lift the jackboot of the federal government from the neck of the economy. I in fact think that those jobs numbers are Trump’s and, as FDR made the Depression Great, so did Barack Obama and the Democrats with the 2008 recession.

Business, Technology and Society

One More Night In DC

15 Comments

I took the Silver Line out to Wiehle, to get to the last mile to Dulles. I admittedly didn’t provide enough margin, but I could have made it if Uber hadn’t screwed me over. The driver was driving all around, showing close to me on my phone, but I couldn’t see him in a big parking lot. He kept wandering on my screen, and never called me to ask where I was. I couldn’t call him.

After the official five minutes, he canceled me, and I was screwed, missing the last flight of the day to LA. I had to rebook from DCA the next morning (no way was I going to try Dulles again), and had to use miles to avoid who knows how many hundreds of dollars in change fees and fare changes, plus a hundred bucks for another night’s stay.

And for this “service,” and to add insult to injury, Uber charged me five bucks for the driver that I didn’t cancel. And when they did so, they said if I had an issue, to go to a web site that had no information whatsoever as to how to deal with it.