Note the implicit but not necessarily valid assumption — that in order to do space activities, you have to launch from your own soil. For instance, I’d bet that Kodiak would be happy to lease some real estate to them for high-inclination launches.
Category Archives: Business
Printers
Lileks has a righteous rant on the subject. Buck-sucking fail boxes indeed.
Book Question
Has anyone actually ordered and received a copy yet?
[Friday-morning update]
Well, as you can see in comments, we have disparate results. One person has received it, one is going to next week, and one got a message that it’s a month away. So huh.
Drafting Docs
Whenever you declare something a positive “right,” it implies slavery on the part of someone else to fulfill it. If we continue on the current path with health care, forced conscription of doctors is inevitable.
[Update a few minutes later]
I liked this:
Another force at work here is the fact that government intervention in health care has for years been sending doctors out of general practice and into specializations that are far removed from Washington’s interference. Obamacare will almost certainly intensify that trend, producing a surplus of specialists such as cosmetic surgeons even as the nation experiences a shortage of primary-care physicians. The legacy of Democratic health-care reform very well may turn out to be cheaper boob jobs, a fitting comeuppance for the boobs who put this program in place and the boobs who elected them.
I think there may be a few fewer boobs next fall.
Job “Creation”
Both parties have misleading rhetoric about it.
Yes, the purpose of a business is not to create jobs. As he notes, a business that thinks it is is unlikely to succeed. Jobs are a fortuitous side effect of letting the economy grow in a free market.
Invoking “Consensus” To Shut Off Debate
…is unscientific:
It seems to make no difference that those challenging the doomsday narrative include some of the world’s most distinguished scientists, or that numerous experts in climatology and related earth sciences have repeatedly gone public with their critiques. To climate ideologues, they’re invisible. “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous,” President Obama tweeted in May.
Really? That’s not what the American Meteorological Society learned from a recent survey of its professional members. Only a bare majority, 52 percent, said that climate change is largely being driven by human activity. Scientists with a “liberal political orientation” were much more likely to regard global warming as human-caused and harmful, the survey’s authors found — in fact, as a predictor of respondents’ views on global warming, ideology outweighed greater expertise. “This would be strong evidence against the idea that expert scientists’ views on politically controversial topics can be completely objective,” the authors observe.
In that light, consider the findings of a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Of 117 global warming predictions generated by climate-model simulations, all but three “significantly” overestimated the actual amount of warming that occurred during the past 20 years. The models typically forecast that global surface temperature would rise by more than twice as much as it did.
Why would so many scientists have relied on models that turned out to be so wrong? The authors propose several plausible explanations — volcanic eruptions? solar irradiation? — but their bottom line is that climate science still has a long way to go: “Ultimately the causes of this inconsistency will only be understood after . . . waiting to see how global temperature responds over the coming decades.”
That understanding won’t be advanced one millimeter by ideologues who thunder that the “science is settled.” Perhaps all those climate models wouldn’t have been programmed to overpredict global warming if the pressure to conform to the alarmists’ view weren’t so pervasive.
Ya think?
[Update a while later]
Global warming “proof” is evaporating:
Mind you, the term “pause” is misleading in the extreme: Unless and until it resumes again, it’s just a “stop.” You don’t say a bullet-ridden body “paused” breathing.
Remarkably, that stoppage has practically been a state secret. Just five years ago, the head of the International Panel on Climate Change, the group most associated with “proving” that global warming is man-made and has horrific potential consequences, told Congress that Earth is running a “fever” that’s “apt to get much worse.” Yet he and IPCC knew the warming had stopped a decade earlier.
Those who pointed this out, including yours truly, were labeled “denialists.” Yet the IPCC itself finally admitted the “pause” in its latest report.
The single most damning aspect of the “pause” is that, because it has occurred when “greenhouse gases” have been pouring into the atmosphere at record levels, it shows at the very least that something natural is at play here. The warmists suggest that natural factors have “suppressed” the warming temporarily, but that’s just a guess: The fact is, they have nothing like the understanding of the climate that they claimed (and their many models that all showed future warming mean nothing, since they all used essentially the same false information).
This is junk science. I would note to Mr. Fumento, though, that educated people knew the earth was round centuries before Columbus.
Helicopter Parents
…have raised a generation of physically adult children.
I’ve had jobs since I was twelve years old.
SpaceX
An asteroid has just hit the aerospace dinosaurs, in Europe, China, Russia, and here.
The TSA
Time (way past time, really, it should never have been created) to abolish it.
[Wednesday-morning update]
More thoughts from Veronique de Rugy.
Safe Is Not An Option
I didn’t expect the book to be available for purchase at Amazon for another couple weeks. This is the first thing in this project that happened ahead of schedule.
Working on e-versions now.