Category Archives: Business

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

Charles Koch

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…and the Republic of Science.

There are few people in public life so misunderstood and/or mischaracterized as the brothers Koch.

[Update a few minutes later

Check out this amusing bit of projection:

“We really see higher education as the first cog in their political machine,” said Kalin Jordan, a co-founder of UnKochMyCampus. “They see themselves as creating the next generation [of libertarian thinkers] and in creating a next generation, they’re really pushing out any other thought on campus. They’re not interested in creating diversity of thoughts.”

Translation: “They’re fighting back against our successful decades-long fight to push out any thoughts on campus that aren’t leftist.”

Business, Economics, Philosophy, Space, Technology and Society

Bezos Versus Musk

65 Comments

They are both trying to open up space to humanity, but they have fundamentally different philosophies:

“Let me assure you, this is the best planet. We need to protect it, and the way we will is by going out into space,” [Bezos] told Recode Editor at large Walt Mossberg. “You don’t want to live in a retrograde world where we have to freeze population growth.”

Bezos says tasks that require lots of energy shouldn’t be handled on Earth. Instead, we should perform them in space, and that will happen within the next few hundred years.

“Energy is limited here. In at least a few hundred years … all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet,” Bezos added. “Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial. You shouldn’t be doing heavy energy on earth. We can build gigantic chip factories in space.”

Solar energy, for instance, is more practical for factories in space, he said.

“We don’t have to actually build them here,” he said. “The Earth shades itself, [whereas] in space you can get solar power 24/7. … The problem with other planets … people will visit Mars, and we will settle Mars, and people should because it’s cool, but for heavy industry, I would actually put it in space.”

This is the O’Neillian vision (which drove the founders of XCOR, and I continue to share, after all these decades. Mars isn’t the goal; allowing people to go wherever they want, including Mars, should be the goal. Elon’s vision (and that of the Apollo to Mars contingent) is actually quite blinkered. He is a romantic, and a planetary chauvinist (who, by the way, opposes space solar power, or at least thinks it won’t work).

But I’m happy to see them both pursue their visions. Competition is good.

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

The Disappointing Libertarian Ticket

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I agree with Tim Carney; they seem to be running against conservatives more than in favor of liberty:

Weld and Johnson held their first post-nomination joint interview on Tuesday, on liberal network MSNBC. “We’ve never bought into this anti-choice, anti-gay…sense of the Republican Party,” Weld said, as his first comment to the national television audience.

The message was clear: We don’t need those backward Christian Right bozos as much we need as you MSNBCers.

Johnson has sent similar signals, suggesting that his love of liberty is second to his revulsion to religion. In January, for instance, Johnson said he would make it a federal crime for women to wear the Burqa, the full-body covering worn by women in certain strains of Islam. Johnson recanted a day later, while continuing his warnings about the threat of Sharia — Islamic law — in the U.S.

This spring, Johnson pushed aside freedom of conscience. When asked in an Oregon about laws and lawsuits requiring caterers to participate in gay weddings, Johnson took the big-government side — for coerced baking in the name of gay rights. When later asked about this anti-liberty view, Johnson made the standard liberal conflation between selling off-the-shelf cupcakes to a gay customer (which is straight-up discrimination against a person) and refusal to participate in a ceremony (which is a freedom of conscience issue, a freedom of association issue, and often a free speech issue).

The dress-code libertarianism and bake-me-a-cake libertarianism Johnson has embraced isn’t libertarianism at all — it’s left-wing social engineering enforced at gunpoint. Coming from Johnson and Weld, it reeks of raw identity politics. The only consistent theme is that religious people are bad.

Yes. It’s disgusting. This sort of thing is why I’ve never been a Libertarian, despite the fact that I’m generally libertarian.

Business, Space, Technology and Society

XCOR Update

Jeff Foust has the latest official story.

I had seen XCOR on the NSRC program last week, but haven’t checked it since then. I’ll be flying to Denver myself for the conference later this morning.

I don’t know whom XCOR would have sent for that panel, but Krysti Papadopolous (the company’s former payload integrator, who was one of Friday’s casualties) told me in email that she’s still planning to attend, so if it was her, it will be to network for a new job, rather than provide an update. With Blue Origin flying now, and Firefly and others hiring, I’m sure she’ll have no trouble finding new opportunities.

[Update a while later]

What does this mean for Midland? Despite the brave face, they have to be disappointed. They went to a lot of trouble to get their spaceport license.

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

The Era Of The Expert

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When it comes to putting them in charge of our lives, it’s the era of the expert failure:

The additional power that is being granted to experts under the Obama administration is indeed striking. The administration has appointed “czars” to bring expertise to bear outside of the traditional cabinet positions. Congress has enacted sweeping legislation in health care and finance, and Democratic leaders have equally ambitious agendas that envision placing greater trust in experts to manage energy and the environment, education and human capital, and transportation and communications infrastructure.

However, equally striking is the failure of such experts. They failed to prevent the financial crisis, they failed to stimulate the economy to create jobs, they have failed in Massachusetts to hold down the cost of health care, and sometimes they have failed to prevent terrorist attacks that instead had to be thwarted by ordinary civilians.

Ironically, whenever government experts fail, their instinctive reaction is to ask for more power and more resources. Instead, we need to step back and recognize that what we are seeing is not the vindication of Keynes, but the vindication of Hayek. That is, decentralized knowledge is becoming increasingly important, and that in turn makes centralized power increasingly anomalous.

Insufficient opportunities for graft in that.