It’s the IT, stupid.
As noted over there, this whole mess started with Roosevelt’s wage controls during the war. But did they fix that? No, they triple down on the socialist stupidity.
Category Archives: Business
The Reply To “Bad Astronomer” About Climate Skepticism
…that Slate refused to publish:
The argument I made was that climate change has benefits as well as costs and that the benefits are likely to be greater than the costs until almost the end of the current century. I maintain that the balance of evidence supports the conclusion that up to a certain level of warming — about 2 degrees Celsius — the benefits of climate change will probably outweigh the costs. Plait admits that there will be benefits, but he assumes that they are smaller than the harm however small the warming and that I am somehow foolish for not sharing his assumption. He gives no source for this claim, which flies in the face of peer-reviewed sources.
Sadly, that’s Phil’s style. His claims are essentially faith-based.
[Update a few minutes later]
Climate moron David Suzuki doesn’t even know what the data sets are.
If You’re Tired Of Budget Theatrics In DC
We need a new Senate, and majority leader:
Whatever else you can say about the House of Representatives and President Obama, at least these folks have consistently produced spending documents in rough approximation to legal requirements (to be sure, Obama’s latest offering, showed up two months late and $5.2 trillion long when it came to increasing deficits over the next decade).
In contrast and despite a solid one-party majority, the Senate has passed exactly one budget in the past four years and in most of those years, they didn’t even produce the necessary document as mandated by law. Instead, we were treated to journalistic valentines to former Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), the guy in charge of the Senate budget wonkery, by a pliant press.
As my colleague Ed Krayewski reminds us in his essential survey of “4 Washington Scandals That Still Matter,” the Democrats couldn’t pass a budget even when they controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House. It’s been the Senate all along that’s been the problem, at least since Sen. Harry “We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year,” Reid (D-Nev.) has been running that godawful show.
And will for at least another year and a half, until we can fix the problem.
Another Body On The ObamaCare Trainwreck Tracks
Hey, it’s just a little “glitch.”
“Old spin: If you oppose ObamaCare it’s because you want kids to die! New spin: Hey, what’s a half-million kids in the scheme of things?”
One child’s loss of health coverage is a tragedy. Half a million of them is a statistic.
Barack Obama’s Ego
Will it cause him to force a government shutdown?
Why not? It’s caused him to do lots of other stupid things.
Golden Spike
Jim Lovell has seen the light, and embraced commercial spaceflight. Really, it’s the only hope for those who want to see Americans return to the moon. NASA will never do it.
DARPA’s New X-Rocket
I didn’t mention it last week, because I was having posting problems, but Leonard David has a good overview of the program, with some quotes from Yours Truly.
The IPCC
…and its inconvenient truth:
Based upon early drafts of the AR5, the IPCC seemed prepared to dismiss the pause in warming as irrelevant ‘noise’ associated with natural variability. Under pressure, the IPCC now acknowledges the pause and admits that climate models failed to predict it. The IPCC has failed to convincingly explain the pause in terms of external radiative forcing from greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar or volcanic forcing; this leaves natural internal variability as the predominant candidate to explain the pause. If the IPCC attributes to the pause to natural internal variability, then this begs the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural internal variability. Not to mention raising questions about the confidence that we should place in the IPCC’s projections of future climate change.
Nevertheless, the IPCC appears to be set to conclude that warming in the near future will resume in accord with climate model predictions.
Why is my own reasoning about the implications of the pause, in terms of attribution of the late 20th century warming and implications for future warming, so different from the conclusions drawn by the IPCC? The disagreement arises from different assessments of the value and importance of particular classes of evidence as well as disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for linking and assessing the evidence – my reasoning is weighted heavily in favor of observational evidence and understanding of natural internal variability of the climate system, whereas the IPCC’s reasoning is weighted heavily in favor of climate model simulations and external forcing of climate change.
The models are utterly useless, as a basis for public policy. In fact, to the degree that people don’t understand this, they’re worse than useless.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: no ice-free Arctic this year. Mazlowski is falsified.
Lynx
An in-depth report on the XCOR vehicle from Michael Belfiore.
The Safety Culture
Some cogent thoughts from Mollie Hemingway:
Many parents just can’t accept the reality that we’re not in as much control of our children as we wish. Last week my nephew went to an outdoor camp in Colorado with the rest of his 5th-grade class. They were supposed to stay just one night. Floods hit the region, the roads washed out and filled with boulders. There was nothing anyone could do. After being stranded for three days, the parents heard about plans to airlift the kids out via Chinook helicopter. That plan was halted when some parents complained it was too dangerous. Who knew that helicopter parents would be threatened by actual helicopters?
Never mind that riding on a Chinook would be the adventure of a lifetime for a 10-year-old. Perhaps because there were no other reasonable options, the airlift commenced the next day. Every child survived and my nephew reported that “No one ever had so much fun in a natural disaster.”
Look, I’m a mother. I care deeply about my children’s safety. But safety is just one important thing to teach our children. And it’s not even anywhere near the most important thing. Keeping your kids from dying or getting hurt is of secondary importance to teaching them how to live. Safety isn’t even a virtue. If you’re teaching your kids more about safety than you are about honesty, kindness, respect for others, responsibility, gratitude, integrity, cooperation, determination, social skills, enthusiasm, compassion and manners, you’re doing it wrong.
That’s the kind of culture that breeds the hypersafe culture of spaceflight that my book is all about.
And then there’s this:
My neighborhood is in Northern Virginia, an area that has been rewarded for playing it safe and going after government cash. Many of my neighbors are government employees, lawyers and lobbyists. Many of them have found success regulating other people’s businesses out of existence, destructive acts all too frequently predicated on fears that somebody somewhere might get hurt. It’s not surprising, in that context, that my neighbors would call for regulation of the lemonade stand or lawn mowing business run by the kids next door.
The fact is that America is now run by people who profit from keeping everyone else from taking risks. It’s lucrative work if you can get it. Six of the ten richest counties in the country are next to Washington, D.C., for good reason. [“It’s where the money is.” — Willie Sutton] But this isn’t a recipe for prospering culturally or politically.
Yup.