Fiber speeds on copper phone lines?
Category Archives: Business
Obama’s Five Disconnects
…as pointed out by Mickey Kaus:
Does Obama recognize that his initiatives have a weak connection, and even perverse connection, with actually achieving his goal? I hope his biographer, Jonathan Alter, will tell me. But either way, there’s a vacuum between his speechmaking and governing. Is that unusual? After all, Democrats have campaigned for years by arguing that Republican policies benefit the rich–think of all the distributional tables Democrats distributed to fight Reagan’s budgets-without ever saying how much inequality, exactly, they’d be willing to tolerate.
But Obama isn’t vague or incoherent. He’s quite precise about where he wants to go–namely back to something like what we had three decades ago. If his means don’t come close to matching his ends, if they even subvert them, that seems a more troubling, almost pathological mismatch, in which liberalism becomes a sort of cargo cult whose mechanisms have zero hope of achieving the desired results.
Yes, it is a cargo cult, driven by magical thinking.
The XCOR/ULA Engine Development
An interesting story at Space News about the progress on a piston-pumped cryogenic RL-10 replacement.
First Detroit
…and Chicago may be next. How’s that Democrat governance and corruption working out, again?
McDonalds Math
This sort of thing is why we don’t want economic illiterates in charge of the economy. Hey, morons. Don’t you think that if McDonalds could just raise their prices (and hence revenues) by 17% (actually 26%), they’d have already done that?
[Update a while later]
Let’s say McDonald’s decided to double all its salaries, so that the entry-level wage became $16 an hour instead of $8 an hour. Why would McDonald’s continue to employ their $8 an hour workers when instead they could hire “better” workers who are worth more? (And those of you who think that the skills, linguistic abilities, experience, intelligence, etc. of fast-food workers makes no difference in service don’t eat in McDonald’s much.)
Again, this is why you don’t want people making policy who don’t understand how business works. And this administration (and sadly, Congress, of both parties, but much more so among the Democrats) is full of such people.
Climate Skeptics
…and the scientific method:
…how can criticisms of sceptics as politically motivated be squared with science’s commitment to findings always being provisional and open to challenge? At what point can we judge that a scientific question moves from a position of “doubt” to being “settled”?
Both climate change sceptics and advocates of climate policy see this question as important; sharing a faith that scientific evidence is the basis for public policy. However, such a faith omits the possibility that science is not suited to such a role, and that “solving” climate change does not flow linearly from agreement on the science. The attentions of sceptics may or may not be improving the practice and knowledge of climate science. However, if sceptics’ never-ending audit is really damaging policy, that may be more a reflection of an overly scientised policy process than a basis for denying them a voice in debate.
Yup.
Chaos And The Hockey Stick
The latest nonsense about the lawsuit and the saintly Michael Mann.
There Is Another Way To Space
The Space Frontier Foundation showed this video at the conference last week.
Meanwhile, NASA continues to attempt to defend the indefensible. I’ll probably fisk this later.
The Silicon Valley Of Space
Maybe, but I think that Pacific Northwest and the Front Range may give them a run for their money. The sad thing is that it’s probably not LA. Other than SpaceX, not a lot of it here.
Obama’s Economy Pivot
It’s over just as it begins.
Hey, he made some speeches. What more do you want?