John Walker reviews John Mankins’ new book.
Category Archives: Business
Birth Control
If it’s not your boss’s business, why do you expect him to pay for it?
…the Hobby Lobby decision opens the door for closely held companies to deny coverage of all forms of birth control if they can plausibly argue that doing so would violate their conscience. The decision doesn’t apply to large, publicly held corporations, but even if it did, it is unlikely that many companies would go down that path. And even if they did, birth control would not be “banned” – employees simply would have to pay for it themselves. The notion that denying a subsidy for a product is equivalent to banning that product is one of the odder tenets of contemporary liberalism.
The cognitive dissonance required to be a leftist must be quite painful.
The EPA’s Empire Building
How it got in the way of its science.
It’s what happens to politicized bureaucracies.
Shelby’s Antics
The Houston Chronicle weighs in.
I don’t think this is quite correct, though:
Under the current Commercial Crew Development program, SpaceX contracts with NASA for a flat payment. If SpaceX comes in under cost, it gets to keep the profit. If it goes over budget, SpaceX has to make up the difference. This system gives SpaceX more flexibility to operate as it sees fit.
Shelby has inserted language in a Senate appropriations bill that would instead force SpaceX to work on NASA’s old cost-plus model. This would require the private company to track every step of its development, assign a cost to those steps and charge it to NASA, plus an additional fee. This stilted payment model forces engineers to be accountants and removes disincentives for bloated budgets.
Shelby isn’t forcing the company to cost plus. He’s doing something worse (and stupid), forcing them to account for it as though it were cost plus, but on a fixed-price contract.
Self-Driving Cars
Hyundai did a bad-ass stunt outside of Mojave.
[Update a few minutes later]
For those wondering (as I was) where that was, it’s on Hyundai’s test track northwest of town, according to Doug Messier.
Libertarians Are The New Communists
If you ignore all the stuff about the Hobby Lobby ruling, this is probably the nuttiest thing you’ll read today.
[Tuesday update]
The case for libertarian populism. There are a lot of good ideas there.
[Bumped]
Birth Control, Over The Counter
Yes, the Republicans should pass a bill to allow it.
Why Government Doesn’t Work
…and how to make it better.
Climate “Consensus”
Well, partially because it’s being dishonestly rammed down our throats to promote economically harmful policies.
The Huntsville Reality-Distortion Zone
This isn’t new, but I don’t think I linked it at the time. Eric Berger reports on the people working SLS:
May turns the cost issue around.
“My question would be, how could we afford not to do this?” May asked. “Great nations explore. Great nations push their boundaries. And this country has continued to the limits of what we know and learn for a generation, and I think we’ve got to continue to explore.”
And in the larger perspective, he argues, SLS does not cost that much. NASA spends about $1.6 billion a year building it, less than 9 percent of the space agency’s total budget, he said, which is itself less than one half of one percent of the federal budget.
“I think it’s a relatively small amount of money to set the leadership for the world in space exploration,” he says.
Count the number of logical fallacies in just those four grafs.