A story on Dragon, CST and Dreamchaser at the Daily Mail.
Category Archives: Business
The National Climate “Assessment”
Judith Curry has the goods on this latest bout of junk science:
My main conclusion from reading the report is this: the phrase ‘climate change’ is now officially meaningless. The report effectively implies that there is no climate change other than what is caused by humans, and that extreme weather events are equivalent to climate change. Any increase in adverse impacts from extreme weather events or sea level rise is caused by humans. Possible scenarios of future climate change depend only on emissions scenarios that are translated into warming by climate models that produce far more warming than has recently been observed.
Roger Pielke approves.
Health-Care Spending
The notion that the ACA will reduce it is Obama’s biggest lie?
I don’t know. It’s got a lot of stiff competition.
FUD From NASA And CNES
They try to tell SpaceX how hard reusability is.
I’ve got to run some errands, but I’ll have some comments later. Briefly, though, Dumbacher’s comparison with the SSME is pretty much worthless.
Don’t Punish The Space Industry
Space News is concerned about collateral damage from Russian sanctions.
Technology Law
…will soon be reshaped by people who don’t use email:
as Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Parker Higgins convincingly argues, it’s not the justices’ lack of personal experience with technology that’s the problem; it’s their tendency to not understand how people use it. Returning to Justice Roberts’s concerns about villains with two phones: if he is in fact unaware of how common that behavior is – he certainly didn’t watch Breaking Bad – then that suggests a major gap in his understanding of society.
This lack of basic understanding is alarming, because the supreme court is really the only branch of power poised to confront one of the great challenges of our time: catching up our laws to the pace of innovation, defending our privacy against the sprint of surveillance. The NSA is “training more cyberwarriors” as fast as it can, but our elected representatives move at a snail’s pace when it comes to the internet. The US Congress has proven itself unable to pass even the most uncontroversial proposals, let alone comprehensive NSA reforms: the legislative branch can’t even get its act together long enough to pass an update our primary email privacy law, which was written in 1986 – before the World Wide Web had been invented.
So the future of our privacy, of our technology – these problems land at the feet of a handful of tech-unsavvy judges.
Kind of scary.
The Deindustrialization Of California
Why both Nissan and Toyota left the no-longer Golden State.
I’ll bet if South California happens, they’d consider returning there.
In fact, that brings up a point that a lot of people miss when analyzing what the new states’ politics would be. They do so (as far as I know) by analyzing the current population of each region. But as I’ve said, if it really happened, I’d pull up stakes in LA County and head to Orange County. I’ll bet a lot of other people would as well. Which means that whatever sensible voters are currently in what would be West California would likely abandon it, making it even more socialist, and accelerating its fiscal collapse.
[Update a few minutes later]
I hadn’t read the whole piece when I posted the above, but this is an interesting point, in terms of why Nissan and Toyota were there in the first place:
As did the oil industry, the auto industry, and, particularly, its Asian contingent, came to Southern California for good reasons. Some had to do with proximity to the largest port complex in North America, as well as the cultural comfort associated with the large Asian communities here. Back in the 1980s, the expansion of firms like Honda, Toyota and Nissan seemed to epitomize the unique appeal of the L.A. region – and California – to Asian companies. Today, only Honda retains its headquarters in Los Angeles (Nissan left in 2005), while Korean carmakers Hyundai and Kia make their U.S. homes in Orange County.
First, note that the Koreans wouldn’t have to move — they’d already be in the new state. Also, the port is just a few miles north of the Orange County line. That is, just a few miles north of the new state line. So it would make a world of sense for the Japanese companies to move back to South California, and for Honda to head a few miles south. Particularly if the new state had no state income tax…
McDonalds Fries
Now that we know that saturated fat is actually the best kind for us, it would make a world of sense for them to go back to cooking them in tallow. It would be healthier, it was what made them taste great in the old days, and it would save them money given how it would just be a bi-product of the beef that they already mass produce.
“So”
So, I was reading this article about how people shouldn’t start a response to a question with the word, “so.”
I’ve noticed this trend for the past few years, and it seems to be on the increase.
I have been known to do that in blog posts, but a new blog post actually is a change of subject.
Stop doing it when publicly responding to questions. Just stop.
Falcon-9R
…just flew to over 3000 feet and back in Texas.
It looks as though it could be CGI, but it’s a rocket taking off and landing as God and Bob Heinlein intended. Don’t know how much higher they can go at that site before they have to start flying out of Spaceport America to expand the envelope.