It looks to Dan Rasky as though it’s literally about to erupt.
I do think it’s probably figuratively, though.
Category Archives: Business
Mojave
Heading up there in a few minutes for the day. Haven’t been in a while, want to see what’s going on. Posting will be light.
Annals Of Higher Education
This is what the past decades have wrought. The federal student loan program has been an unmitigated disaster for almost everyone, except (so far) the university administrators.
Iowa And Ethanol
To me, ethanol epitomizes the dysfunction of our national politics. It’s an awful policy, raising the price of both fuel and food, which hits the poor hardest, while damaging engines and stealing from the taxpayer. Everyone knows it but, because, by historical circumstance, Iowa is so politically prominent in presidential politics, too few are willing to say it (I’ll grant that Huckabee and Santorum may actually be economically ignorant enough to think it’s a good idea). So good for Cruz.
I wonder if there’s any possibility of a class-action suit against it, from both fuel consumers and food consumers? If not, there should be. It could fix a lot of awful welth-transfer laws.
Global Warming
It might be real, but the Left’s “solutions” to it are a fantasy.
The Delay In Spaceport Brownsville
Joe Pappalardo has the story. I wonder how much of it is due to environmental impact assessment, and if so, if it would be as hard if they were doing an airport instead? Back in 2004, we tried to extend the categorical exception that the aviation industry gets from the National Environmental Protection Act to space transportation, but the result was weak tea, leaving waivers up the discretion of the head of the EPA. Something I’d like to see in an amended version of the Commercial Space Launch Act would be to make it a clean extension, with no discretion from Gina (or any future administrator). It would be interesting to see if that made it veto bait for Obama, though.
The High Cost Of Space Access
Roger Launius has a brief history of the Shuttle, but this number is outdated:
The best expendable launch vehicles (ELV) still cost about $10,000 per pound from Earth to orbit.
As I commented over there (it’s awaiting moderation), Falcon 9 delivers ~30,000 lbs to LEO for ~$60M. That’s $2000/lb. Price, not cost. Falcon Heavy will roughly halve that. If they can reuse cores, they’ll drop the price further.
Immortality
No, Newsweek, that’s not what Silicon Valley billionaires are seeking. They’re seeking indefinite lifespan. Immortality, if achievable, could/would be a curse. People just want to live as long as they want to live.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, read it all the way through. The last graf shows a huge failure of imagination:
Perhaps the most worrying question that arises with the prospect of having millions (and even billions) of multi-centenarians running around on Earth is whether the planet can support this kind of growth. Current projections suggest that the world’s population will rise from 7 billion today to about 9 billion in 2050—at which point it will more or less level out. And abundant concerns have already been raised about what all these billions of people will do for work, not to mention where they will get safe drinking water and the food necessary to live healthily. But those forecasts don’t consider the possibility that we’ll stop dying. If we do, the next generation of innovative health-tech entrepreneurs will face perhaps an even greater challenge: redesigning the planet to accommodate its massive population of Humans 2.0.
Planet? Where we’re going, we don’t need “planets.”
SpaceX And Blue Origin
SpaceX was basically told that they’d lost this patent battle, but would win the war.
[Friday-morning update]
[Bumped]
My Site Improvements
For those curious about the differences between the out-of-the-box TwentyFourteen theme, and my child theme, I’ve done the following:
- Changed header and sidebar backgrounds from black to dark gray.
- Changed all instances of all caps to capitalized first letter.
- Switched from the sans serif typeface “Lato” to Georgia.
- Moved meta data from top to bottom of post.
- Added time stamp (without seconds) to the post date, and the word “by” in front of post author.
- Increased size of blog title.
Most of these involved style sheet changes, which will be preserved if I have to do a theme update, but a couple (adding time stamp and moving metadata) necessitated changes to the template and tag files in the parent theme. But they’re minor, and can be redone if needed.
One thing I’d still like to do, but have been unable to so far, is to change the color of the blog title from white to the same green as the search box. Not sure why a color change in the CSS won’t do it. I can change font size, but not color.