Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Border Fence

10 Comments

Rubio has already caved:

If you want to write a bill that won’t result in a fence being built, you will give discretion to the DHS as to “where” it should be built, in what form–and, implicitly, where it shouldn’t be built. You will require only a ”plan.”

If you want to write a bill that won’t result in a fence being built but that might con conservatives into thinking it will be, you will throw in lots of meaningless references to possible ”double layer fencing” even though DHS might not decide to build even a foot of that kind of fencing (and none is mandated).

That’s what Rubio and his gang have written. Does Krauthammer–who despairs of getting any actual “enforcement first” bill through Congress, given Dem opposition–think Rubio is now going to pull a 180 and decide to really mandate an actual fence, and that Schumer and the Democrats will go along?

This won’t help Rubio get the nomination in 2016, if he decides to run.

Business, Space

SpaceShipTwo’s First Powered Flight?

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A lot of rumors that it will be happening today. Jeff Foust has the story, with some broader context:

While Virgin may make a flight test of a crewed suborbital vehicle as soon as Monday, another company isn’t far behind. Just down the flightline from Virgin and Scaled at the Mojave airport, XCOR Aerospace is continuing work on its Lynx suborbital spaceplane, with plans to begin an incremental series of tests later this year.
“The concept design is done. I know what the approach is, I can put the numbers together,” Greason said of XCOR’s orbital vehicle plans.

“We’re not done yet,” said Jeff Greason, CEO of XCOR, said of Lynx in a presentation at the Space Access ’13 conference in Phoenix earlier this month. “It’s not because of any particular roadblock, but it’s just the usual 90-90 rule of project management: the first 90 percent takes the first 90 percent of the time, and the last 10 percent takes the other 90 percent of the time.”

While development of SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket motor is widely believed to have been the major cause of that vehicle’s delays, Greason said propulsion is not an issue for Lynx. “Propulsion-wise, we’re in great shape,” he said, saying that the four engines, powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene, are now integrated into the fuselage of the Lynx Mark I prototype.

Instead, Greason said, XCOR has been working on a variety of other issues with the Lynx, including tweaks to the vehicle’s aerodynamics, avionics, and landing gear, as well as the production of the vehicle’s wings and a second fuselage. Flight tests are slated to begin in the second half of this year.

It just occurs to me that while the biggest difference is that XCOR was funding-constrained while (as far as I know) Virgin Galactic was not, both have also been delayed for symmetrical problems. XCOR is a propulsion company trying to build an airplane, while Scaled was an aircraft company trying to develop a rocket engine. So it’s natural that both companies have their core competency well in hand, but are being held up by the problem that’s not so much in their wheelhouse.

[Update a while later]

The implication, of course, is that if they’d teamed up, there might have been a suborbital vehicle flying years ago. That they didn’t certainly wasn’t XCOR’s fault.

[Update a few minutes later]

Apparently it was a successful test, and they went supersonic.

This may be the first prediction that Sir Richard has ever made that met schedule.

[Afternoon update]

Clark Lindsey has a roundup of links, including the congratulatory press release from XCOR.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Climate Hearings On The Hill

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Judith Curry’s prepared testimony:

My written testimony summarizes the evidence for, and against, the hypothesis that humans are playing a dominant role in global warming. I’ll make no attempt to summarize this evidence in my brief comments this morning. I will state that there are major uncertainties in many of the key observational data sets, particularly before 1980. There are also major uncertainties in climate models, particularly with regards to the treatments of clouds and the multidecadal ocean oscillations.

The prospect of increased frequency or severity of extreme weather in a warmer climate is potentially the most serious near term impact of climate change. A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found limited observational evidence for worsening of most types of extreme weather events. Attempts to determine the role of global warming in extreme weather events is complicated by the rarity of these events and also by their dependence on natural weather and climate regimes that are simulated poorly by climate models.

Given these uncertainties, there would seem to be plenty of scope for disagreement among scientists. Nevertheless, the consensus about dangerous anthropogenic climate change is portrayed as nearly total among climate scientists. Further, the consensus has been endorsed by all of the relevant national and international science academies and scientific societies.

I have been trying to understand how there can be such a strong consensus given these uncertainties. How to reason about uncertainties in the complex climate system is neither simple nor obvious. Scientific debates involve controversies over the value and importance of particular classes of evidence, failure to account for indeterminacy and ignorance, as well as disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for assessing the evidence.

For the past three years, I’ve been working towards understanding the dynamics of uncertainty at the climate science-policy interface. This research has led me to question whether these dynamics are operating in a manner that is healthy for either the science or the policy process.

No kidding. And emphasis mine. I’ve been trying to understand that, too. It increasingly appears to be driven by politics.

[Update a few minutes later]

This comment, from a post earlier today, seems apropos:

When I was young, I was taught history as a narrative of mistakes, errors of judgment, and closed minded attitudes which were subsequently found to be irrational. The motivations of those benighted souls who believed these things were effectively random ignorance and bias, with no logical basis or external impetus.

The implication to a naive, young mind was that, that was all in the past, and we had now monotonically converged upon an era of unprecedented enlightenment, and humans now were effectively immune from the foibles of the past. Adults knew everything that was needed to know, and only a small minority of troglodytes, who were invariably the butt of derision on evening sit-coms, had failed to keep up.

The “science” of the past was full of leeches, geocentricism, and arbitrary religious conviction. Today’s scientists were immune to bias, their conclusions based on objective, reproducible evidence, and infused with 20/20 foresight. Knowledge was the key. The more knowledge you had, the less vulnerable you were to irrationalism. But, knowledge and wisdom are not, in fact, synonymous.

Eventually, as I grew and gained knowledge, I realized that the people of the past were no different than those of today. That they made erroneous inferences based on pat answers which seemed “obvious” based on the knowledge base of the day, and that we were no more immune to mistakes of that sort than they were. But, today, a large portion of the average population remains in the arrested stage of my youth, in which “scientists” are authorities whose word is inviolable holy writ, and anyone who questions “science” is a troglodyte worthy of being made the butt of derision on evening TV.

It is not just bizarre and surreal, but utterly teeth gnashing to see these fools strut their faith and ignorance in smug certitude that they stand on unshifting, bedrock solid ground. They have no inkling that they are the believers in leechcraft and other folderal of today. And, they will carry us all into the abyss with unblinking faith that they are the righteous heirs of the enlightenment, whose ends justify whatever means necessary to rescue we troglodytes from ourselves.

Indeed. This isn’t about science — it is about the false faith of scientism.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Our Long-Term Unemployment Problem

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Is it caused by the government?

Yes. Next question?

I think that she underestimates the effects of regulatory uncertainty and the war on business that started rhetorically in 2008, and for real in 2009. I also think that she’s missing another problem — the huge mismatch between skills and employers’ needs, which are themselves a result of terrible government education policies.

[Update early afternoon]

One other point. We also have a labor mobility problem, due to the housing crisis, in which many are still unable to sell their homes and move to where the jobs are. That too was caused by government policies.

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

Germany’s Green Fail

9 Comments

They may have to start using shale to remain competitive with the U.S.

They worry that the country’s ambitious environmental goals are far less meaningful if the economy withers in achieving them.

You don’t say.

It would be a shame if they decided to start being economically sane.

[Update a while later]

More bad news for the warm-mongering econuts — scientists say that fracking is safe. And of course, they’ll believe it, because as they always tell us, we must follow the science.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Voice Pitch

11 Comments

It makes a difference:

A 2011 Canadian study also showed that people prefer political candidates with lower-pitched voices. That study used archival recordings of nine U.S. presidents going back to Harry Truman, and then manipulated the voices to create higher- and lower-pitched versions. Researchers then played the two versions for study subjects who were asked to rate them for qualities like trustworthiness, leadership and intelligence. The lower-pitched recordings got the highest ratings. According to a BBC report, Margaret Thatcher got vocal coaching to lower the pitch of her voice.

Not doing that herself was one of Sarah Palin’s biggest mistakes. I liked most of what she had to say, but her voice grated even on me, and most people probably couldn’t get past it (particularly combined with the accent, though that was less of a problem, at least for me).

[Update a while later]

Ruth Dudley Edwards remembers the Iron Lady:

A 1977 poll revealed that 54 per cent of British people thought Jack Jones, the head of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, was more powerful than Prime Minister Callaghan, who had Jones made a Companion of Honour, an elite order restricted to people with outstanding achievements in the arts, literature, music, science, politics, industry or religion. Jones deserves much of the credit for what became known as the “winter of discontent”, when bodies lay unburied, rats frolicked in uncollected rubbish and almost 30 million days were lost through strikes. I was not surprised when it emerged years later that he was selling Labour Party secrets to the Soviet Union.

I’m ashamed that – knowing what I knew – I didn’t vote for Mrs Thatcher in 1979, but my loathing of capital punishment led me to vote Liberal instead. Still, when I saw her on the steps of Downing Street, the day that coincidentally I changed career, I was delighted.

When I socialised next with senior ex-colleagues, they were in shock at having been instructed to read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and think about how to free the market. It took a while, but the ablest and bravest of them became enthused by a prime minister who had a clear vision, mastered the briefs, debated robustly, won the debates fair and square, was a kind boss (unless you were a defeatist minister) and always took the public flak for difficult decisions.

As one of her cabinet secretaries put it, “she made us positive about the revitalisation of the British economy”. By the time she left office after 11 years, the UK economy was an inspiration to much of the world. She had also been a major and constructive player on the world stage, the Falklands victory over a malign dictatorship had made the UK respected again, she had revolutionised the status of women and had wrought a transformation even in the Labour Party.

She forgot, though, the part about how she, along with Reagan and the Pope, killed the USSR.