The road map, from Keith Hennessey.
Category Archives: Business
Dear Person Seeking A Job
Here’s why I can’t hire you.
What does its future hold?
Destroying The Environment
…through environmentalism. It’s not global warming that is causing these devastating fires.
A Response To Paul Bain
Your first paragraph amounts to an argument (or reduces to an argument) that “Everyone is doing it”. So, it is OK to use the N-Word because all your friends in the KKK use it? Is it OK to use ANY insulting degrading term “because all your friends” use it? Really?
Ignorance of where a term came from, or what it’s propaganda purpose was and is, is not an excuse. It is even a worse excuse in what is supposed to be a peer reviewed or carefully objective broad science context. Is it acceptable to just plead ignorance of, say, Einstein and Relativity in a paper on physics? Just say “Oops, didn’t know that, but I’m going to keep on ignoring it anyway.”? In ANY paper on the sociology of “Denier” one would reasonably expect the very first step to be looking at where the term originated, from whom, for what purpose and to what effect.
So here’s one free clue for you: I, like others, will now use the term “Denier” from time to time for ourselves. This is EXACTLY like blacks using the N-Word with each other to blunt the effect of it. Someone outside the group uses it, it is a red flag of bigotry. Similar to an Italian calling himself a “Wop” or any of a dozen other bad terms being used inside or outside the insulted group. So WHEN you use the term Denier, and you are not a Skeptic, you are waving a large “I Am A Bigot” flag. Got it?
Keep using it, and you are saying “I am HAPPY to be waving a large I Am A Bigot flag”…
Saying “All my friends us it” is saying “I’m Happy that all my friends are waving large I Am A Bigot flags”.
Just ask yourself “When is the N-Word” acceptable and you will have a decent guide to the proper usage and context of the term, and an accessible touchstone for the sociology of the term.
Indeed. As a reminder, here’s what I deny:
I deny that science is a compendium of knowledge to be ladled out to school children like government-approved pablum (and particularly malnutritious pablum), rather than a systematic method of attaining such knowledge.
I deny that skepticism about anthropogenic climate change is epistemologically equivalent to skepticism about evolution, and I resent the implications that if one is skeptical about the former, one must be similarly skeptical about the latter, and “anti-science.”
As someone who has done complex modeling and computer coding myself, I deny that we understand the complex and chaotic interactions of the atmosphere, oceans and solar and other inputs sufficiently to model them with any confidence into the future, and I deny that it is unreasonable and unscientific to think that those who believe they do have such understanding suffer from hubris. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary policy prescriptions require extraordinary evidence.
I continue and am proud to be a “denier.”
[Update late morning]
You really should read the whole thing, if you haven’t. This is just a small excerpt from a massive take-down of the warm-monger crowd by an econometrist (and modeler).
One Giant Step
Frank White says that the Obama space policy is the second most important in history after JFK’s. I agree. Not sufficient reason to give him a second term, though.
Astronauts Want To Increase Crew Size
Eric Berger has the story. But no mention of when they could do this, other than “later this decade.” What’s the constraint? As far as I know, nothing except the lifeboat issue. NASA insists (irrationally in my opinion — we have no such capability for Scott/Amundsen in the southern winter) that it must be able to evacuate the entire crew all the way to earth in an emergency, and since a Soyuz can only handle three, the maximum crew with two of them docked is thus six.
What would it be worth to get that extra researcher aboard? Again, someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but most crew time is taken up with maintenance functions of the facility, leaving only one crew member available for the actual research for which the thing was ostensibly built. If true, that means that adding another crew member would effectively double the amount of utility from the facility (presumably, CASIS would know). That is, if we get (say) four thousand hours a year of scientific research at the ISS with six crew (I’m assuming more than a forty-hour week, obviously), we might get to eight thousand with that seventh crew member. If it’s costing three billion a year to maintain, that drops the cost per hour from $750K/hr to only $375K/hr. Still ridiculously high, but a relative bargain.
What is such research time really worth? Likely a lot less than that, of course, but suppose someone were willing to pay $50K/hr for ISS research. That would mean that the extra crewperson would be worth $200M/yr. A different way of looking at it is, how much would the marginal cost of that person be were we to accelerate the time line? To answer that question means that we have to understand what is involved in such an acceleration.
If Dragon had a life-support system (even one only good for a couple hours) and couches, it has demonstrated its ability to serve as a lifeboat now, except for one issue — it has no independent docking/undocking capability, and won’t until it gets a NASA Docking System (NDS) as part of Commercial Crew. But despite what Skip Hatfield says in the linked Space Safety piece, even the system it used for the berthing could be used to undock in an emergency, by just releasing it and backing off with thrusters. Similarly, Boeing could probably have a CST sitting there within year or so, after a test flight to demonstrate its entry capability (as Dragon did in 2010), given sufficient funds. The long pole in its use as a crew module are development and testing of the abort system, which is unnecessary if it is used as a lifeboat. If I were CASIS, I’d ask SpaceX and Boeing how soon they could provide that service, and how much it would cost. Because, at least in theory, it’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The fact that this isn’t being accelerated while wasting billions on an unneeded rocket that won’t fly for many years (and is unlikely to ever fly) is just one more demonstration of the dysfunction of our space policy.
Farmers, The Committee, And Tinkerbells
Jeff Foust reports on Mark Albrecht’s diagnosis of NASA’s ills. And in comments over there, Mark Whittington once again demonstrates himself to be a tinkerbell.
[Update late evening]
Hilarious. Tinkerbell has showed up in comments here, whining about being aptly named, and cluelessly clapping her little hands to keep the useless SLS/Orion alive.
[Monday morning update]
Jeez, Mark is so bereft of the ability to understand Albrecht’s metaphor that he imagines I’m actually calling him a fairy.
Losing A Bet On Tesla
And here’s Elon’s response: “Thanks Dan, you are a good sportsman. I will still donate to DWB as though I’d lost.”
“Low-Carb” Bread
This really is a big problem for people who are trying to eat paleo or reduced carb. Unfortunately, the food that’s the worst for us tastes damn good.