Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Law, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Global Warming Movement

19 Comments

Is it on the verge of collapse?

We can only hope so.

[Afternoon update]

The latest climate conspiracy theory. Tough words from Professor Curry:

Get over it, your side lost. Changes of Presidential administrations occur every 4 or 8 years, often with changes in political parties.

Get busy and shore up your scientific arguments; I suspect that argument from consensus won’t sway many minds in the Trump administration.

Overt activism and climate policy advocacy by climate scientists will not help your ’cause’; leave such advocacy to the environmental groups.

Behave like a scientist, and don’t build elaborate conspiracy theories based on conflicting signals from the Trump administration. Stop embarrassing yourselves; wait for the evidence.

Be flexible; if funding priorities change, and you desire federal research funding, work on different problems. The days of needing to sell all research in terms of AGW are arguably over.

I repeat: We can only hope so. But “behave like a scientist” seems to be beyond many of them.

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

The New Attorney General

10 Comments

This is bad news:

Mr. Sessions has heavily influenced the makeup of the transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, these people said, with many of those appointed favoring greater emphasis on manned exploration missions to the moon and deeper into the solar system.

Candidates for NASA administrator also are being vetted, in part, by Mr. Sessions or his associates, while officials at Boeing Co. and other legacy aerospace giants increasingly believe Mr. Sessions will help temper possible changes inside NASA that would hurt existing, big-ticket projects to ultimately send astronauts to Mars.

Not coincidentally, such exploration would rely heavily on scientists, workers and rocket technology based in Alabama, at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. Mr. Sessions over the years has been a champion of the agency’s proposed heavy-lift rocket, dubbed Space Launch System, or SLS, and helped protect its roughly $2 billion-a-year price tag from cutbacks proposed by the Obama White House.

I like how Pasztor unironically talks about SLS/Orion as part of sending “astronauts to Mars,” when they’re almost completely irrelevant to it. This pork-mongering is part of the tragedy of Apollo.

This is the first time I’ve seen Doug Cooke’s name as a potential NASA administrator. He’d be as bad as, or worse than, a second stint by Mike Griffin.

[Update a while later]

Yes, Trump should focus on the government, not Boeing or Lockmart. They’re just doing what they’re incented to do.

And he should take a look at SLS.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Technology and Society, Weird

Where Is Trump Getting His Cabinet Picks?

24 Comments

Surprisingly (at least to me), he’s poaching Galt’s Gulch.

[Wednesday-morning update]

Robert Tracinski (who actually is an Objectivist) isn’t impressed:

The problem is that Hohmann is trying to fit the Rand angle into a narrative about the supreme awfulness of the supremely awful Trump administration. “The fact that all of these men, so late in life, are such fans of works that celebrate individuals who consistently put themselves before others is therefore deeply revealing. They will now run our government.” Are you frightened now? Because I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to be frightened.

Hohmann would have been better served by asking what these business leaders took from Rand as the message that inspired them. Again, there are a few hints. Puzder says that it’s about encouraging his kids to live “the kind of lives of achievement, integrity, and independence that Rand celebrated in her novels.” Congressman Mike Pompeo (referred to in the article) explained that Rand’s impact was because, “I spent my whole life working hard,” a virtue her novels promoted, and because, “I eat and breathe small government and freedom.”

Oh, no! Important figures in the new administration have been influenced by an author who advocated freedom. And integrity. Does that perhaps sound a little less frightening?

It does to people who hate those things.

Business, Economics, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Bootstrapping The Solar System

17 Comments

A new paper:

Advances in robotics and additive manufacturing have become game-changing for the prospects of space industry. It has become feasible to bootstrap a self-sustaining, self-expanding industry at reasonably low cost. Simple modeling was developed to identify the main parameters of successful bootstrapping. This indicates that bootstrapping can be achieved with as little as 12 metric tons (MT) landed on the Moon during a period of about 20 years. The equipment will be teleoperated and then transitioned to full autonomy so the industry can spread to the asteroid belt and beyond. The strategy begins with a sub-replicating system and evolves it toward full self-sustainability (full closure) via an in situ technology spiral. The industry grows exponentially due to the free real estate, energy, and material resources of space. The mass of industrial assets at the end of bootstrapping will be 156 MT with 60 humanoid robots, or as high as 40,000 MT with as many as 100,000 humanoid robots if faster manufacturing is supported by launching a total of 41 MT to the Moon. Within another few decades with no further investment, it can have millions of times the industrial capacity of the United States. Modeling over wide parameter ranges indicates this is reasonable, but further analysis is needed. This industry promises to revolutionize the human condition.

Looks interesting. I remember talks like this at the Princeton conferences 35 years ago. It’s technology is finally starting to evolve to allow it to happen.

Related: Carlos Entrena Utrilla has started a series of descriptions of the coming cislunar economy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sorry for missing link on Carlos’s piece, fixed now.

Business, Economics, Technology and Society

Wi Fi

6 Comments

A new technique that reduces power consumption by five orders of magnitude.

This is the only down side:

Aside from saving battery life on today’s devices, wireless communication that uses almost no power will help enable an “Internet of Things” reality where household devices and wearable sensors can communicate using Wi-Fi without worrying about power.

Just what we need: More devices to become a part of DDOS botnets.

Business, Economics, Health, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Repeal, Delay, Replace

12 Comments

That’s the Republicans’ plan to undo the legislative atrocity that is ObamaCare.

[Update a few minutes later]

Democrats plan a fight to save ObamaCare. I agree with Stephen Green:

If you — or GOP lawmakers — aren’t mentally prepared for the howls, the accusations of racism/sexism/etc, the tales of woe, and the panic-mongering, then you don’t understand how Democrats play this game.

The ugliness hasn’t even begun to begin.

Sadly true.

Business, Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Sugar

1 Comment

Is it killing us?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that some 75 million Americans now suffer from metabolic syndrome. If sugar consumption is the trigger, as 50 years of research suggests, then it might be as much of a direct cause of diabetes as smoking cigarettes is of lung cancer. Without sugar in our diets, diabetes might be an exceedingly rare disease—as it appears once to have been.

When Yudkin and others suggested as much in the 1970s, the consensus opinion among nutritionists and physicians was that dietary fat was the primary dietary evil; they considered sugar relatively benign. We have been living with the consequences ever since.

It’s worth noting this in the context that lifespan has fallen for the first time in decades: “If you like your longevity, you can keep your longevity“:

In story after story, we read about demographers and medical experts puzzling over what’s gone wrong. They point to heart disease, obesity, drug use, stroke, Alzheimer’s, suicide. The USA Today article notes that since World War II, it’s been rare to see a rise in U.S. mortality rates, and such spikes have usually been linked to highly specific events such as the spread of AIDS in the early 1990s, or a “nasty flu season” in 1980. By contrast, what we’re seeing now are rising mortality rates involving a broad range of causes, especially among middle-aged Americans.

Missing from all these accounts is a single word that ought to command unblinking attention: Obamacare.

While I agree that wrecking the medical-insurance industry is part of the problem, and may account for the most recent decline, it’s compounded by criminally awful nutrition advice from the FDA. One way or another, federal policies are killing us by the millions.

[Update early afternoon]

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

Draining The DC Swamp

7 Comments

…by moving its denizens out into the real country:

here’s my plan: During the next four years, the Trump Administration — and Congress — should plan to move at least 25% of the federal workforce located in the Washington, D.C. metro area to other locations around the country: Places that are economically suffering (which will have the advantage of making federal workers’ salaries go farther) and that need the business. Should Trump get another four years, he should do it all over again.

What’s interesting is that Vox (of all places) has a similar proposal, from Matt Yglesias:

The poorest places in the United States have been poor for a very long time and lack the basic infrastructure of prosperity. But that’s not true in the Midwest, where cities were thriving two generations ago and where an enormous amount of infrastructure is in place. Midwestern states have acclaimed public university systems, airports that are large enough to serve as major hubs, and cities whose cultural legacies include major league pro sports teams, acclaimed museums, symphonies, theaters, and other amenities of big-city living.

But industrial decline has left these cities overbuilt, with shrunken populations that struggle to support the legacy infrastructure, and the infrastructure’s decline tends to only beget further regional decline.

At the same time, America’s major coastal cities are overcrowded. They suffer from endemic housing scarcity, massive traffic congestion, and a profound small-c political conservatism that prevents them from making the kind of regulatory changes that would allow them to build the new housing and infrastructure they need. Excess population that can’t be absorbed by the coasts tends to bounce to the growth-friendly cities of the Sunbelt that need to build anew what Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland already have in terms of infrastructure and amenities.

A sensible approach would be for the federal government to take the lead in rebalancing America’s allocation of population and resources by taking a good hard look at whether so much federal activity needs to be concentrated in Washington, DC, and its suburbs. Moving agencies out of the DC area to the Midwest would obviously cause some short-term disruptions. But in the long run, relocated agencies’ employees would enjoy cheaper houses, shorter commutes, and a higher standard of living, while Midwestern communities would see their population and tax base stabilized and gain new opportunities for complementary industries to grow.

In this context, it’s worth noting that LBJ treated NASA as a sort of “Marshall Plan” for the south, which persisted in its poverty after the Civil War. Only the Cape is really geographically needed; the other centers could have been elsewhere.

Of course, the down side for this proposal (for DC-area residents) would be a plunge in housing prices.

Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Trump’s Federalist Revival

15 Comments

I hope that Kim Strassel is right:

President Obama never held much with laws, because he failed at making them. After his first two years in office, he never could convince the Congress to pass another signature initiative. His response—and the enduring theme of his presidency—was therefore to ignore Congress and statutes, go around the partnership framework, and give his agencies authority to dictate policy from Washington. The states were demoted from partners to indentured servants. So too were any rival federal agencies that got in the EPA’s way. Example: The EPA’s pre-emptive veto of Alaska’s proposed Pebble Mine, in which it usurped Army Corps of Engineers authority.

One revealing illustration from EPA world. Under the Clean Air Act, states are allowed to craft their own implementation plans. If the EPA disapproves of a state plan, it is empowered to impose a federal one—one of the most aggressive actions the agency can take against a state, since it is the equivalent of a seizure of authority. In the entirety of the presidencies of George H.W. Bush,Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the EPA imposed five federal implementation plans on states. By last count, the Obama administration has imposed at least 56.

Much of Mr. Pruitt’s tenure as Oklahoma’s AG was about trying to stuff federal agencies back into their legal boxes. Most of the press either never understood this, or never wanted to. When the media wrote about state lawsuits against ObamaCare or the Clean Power Plan or the Water of the United States rule, the suggestion usually was that this litigation was ideologically motivated, and a naked attempt to do what a Republican Congress could not—tank the president’s agenda.

The basis of nearly every one of these lawsuits was in fact violations of states’ constitutional and statutory rights—and it is why so many of the cases were successful. It was all a valiant attempt to force the federal government to follow the law. And it has been a singular Pruitt pursuit.

It will be refreshing to have someone rein in the EPA by running it, instead of having to continually take it to court.

[Update a while later]

Will Trump finally provide an opportunity to sell “progressives” on the virtues of federalism?

“Turnabout is fair play” is a deeply human sentiment. In politics, it’s both tedious and fun, because while reciprocity is satisfying, hypocrisy is annoying.

For instance, when Republicans take control of the Senate, Democrats instantly become sticklers for procedure, precedent, and constitutionalism. When Republicans lose the Senate, it’s “Democrats, start your steamrollers.”

While “You did it, so now we can too” is a perfectly natural attitude, it encourages cynicism precisely because it renders principles into arguments of convenience. When President Obama was testing — and exceeding — the limits of his constitutional powers, liberals grabbed their pom-poms and cheered. Now that Donald Trump is in power, they’re rediscovering that constitutional safeguards are there for everybody.

When Obama grew the deficit, Republicans and tea partiers insisted there was a debt crisis. Now, the president-elect says we must “prime the pump” with up to $1 trillion in deficit spending, and the former deficit hawks slumber in their nests. Regardless, that excerpt from A Man for All Seasons is not intended to imply that Trump is the devil — or that Obama is. Suffice it to say that one partisan’s devil is another partisan’s angel. I’m more interested in breaking the cycle and seizing an opportunity.

I’m looking forward to it. Who knows, maybe even Trump can be convinced.

[Update a while later]

Trump is putting together the most business-friendly cabinet in decades:

Conservatives had expressed considerable reservations about Trump’s professions of conservatism, during both the primary and general-election campaigns. In the days after the election, Trump’s meetings with Obama on the ACA and with Al Gore on climate change prompted renewed concerns about Trump’s true direction. Even while the first few nominations got announced, some wondered whether they reflected vice-president-elect Mike Pence more than Trump, and when other shoes would begin to drop.

So far, though, Trump seems intent on creating the most conservative and business-oriented Cabinet in decades. If Horowitz was correct and “personnel is policy,” then conservatives should find themselves pleasantly surprised and encouraged thus far with a 180-degree change of direction these key appointments promise. The inauguration on January 20th marks the date in which conservatives might find their own version of hope and change.

Unfortunately, what we really need is a market-friendly one.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Trump’s selections indicate that massive deregulation moves are coming. Well, we need it, after all the unconstitutional and unlawful overreach of the past eight years.

[Update a while later]

Getting back to the original post topic, Trump has nominated a powerful defender of states rights.