In which I take some folks at Barclays to school on asteroid mining.
Category Archives: Business
Is Asteroid Mining Legal?
Jim Dunstan and Berin Szoka discuss the issue over at Wired.
Eleven Days Before The Election
That may be when the election is over.
The Crucifier
…has resigned. But the damage has been done:
EPA was finally persuaded to drop its action against Range, probably out of concern that a federal court might strike down its statutory authority to crucify oil-and-gas companies altogether. That was wise, because EPA already got what it wanted from persecuting Range. The company had to spend $4.2 million defending itself against a totally arbitrary action that could have come down on virtually any oil or gas company. And the industry has taken note.
In fact, as a demonstration meant to instill fear in the oil-and-gas industry, the crucifixion of Range Resources worked precisely as Armendariz intended.
There has to be some kind of legal recourse against this kind of arbitrary action.
California Class Warfare
How elitists in Hollywood and Silicon Valley are destroying California’s middle class and business climate:
Progressives and many Occupy protesters mourned the death of high-tech innovator and multibillionaire Steve Jobs. They also tend to view social-networking firms like Facebook more as allies than as class enemies. This embrace of Silicon Valley is nearly as strange as the Occupy movement’s decision to target the ports of Los Angeles and Oakland—large employers of well-paid blue-collar workers. Activists portrayed the attempted port shutdowns as attempts to “disrupt the profits of the 1 percent,” but union workers largely saw them as impositions on their livelihood. As former San Francisco mayor and state assembly speaker Willie Brown wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle: “If the Occupy people really want to make a point about the 1 percent, then lay off Oakland and go for the real money down in Silicon Valley. The folks who work on the docks in Oakland or drive the trucks in and out of the port are all part of the 99 percent.”
The explanation for the progressives’ hypocritical friendliness to Silicon Valley is simple: money and politics. Venture capitalists and highly profitable, oligopolistic firms like Google (with its fleet of eight private jets) invest heavily in green companies; they were also among the primary bankrollers of the successful opposition to a 2010 ballot initiative aimed at reversing AB 32. The digital elite has become more and more involved in local politics, with executives from Facebook, Twitter, and gaming website Zynga contributing heavily to the recent campaign of San Francisco mayor Ed Lee, for example. Lee has, in turn, been extremely kind to the digerati, extending a payroll-tax break to Twitter and a stock-option break to Zynga and other firms that may soon go public.
Hollywood manages to outdo even Silicon Valley in its class hypocrisy. Former actor Schwarzenegger doesn’t let his green zealotry stop him from owning oversize houses and driving fuel-gorging cars. Canadian-born director James Cameron, who contents himself with a six-bedroom, $3.5 million, 8,300-square-foot Malibu mansion, talks about the need to “stop industrial growth” and applauds the idea of a permanent recession. “It’s so heretical to everybody trying to recover from a recession economy—‘we have to stimulate growth!’ ” says Cameron. “Well, yeah. Except that’s what’s gonna kill this planet.”
Insanity. And it continues.
As Jeff Greason says, you can have the regulations, or you can have the jobs, but you have to choose.
[Update a few minutes later]
Unfortunately, it’s not just California. Behold, the new reactionaries:
On matters of energy, Obama has regressed to the Earth Day mindset of the 1970s, when we were reaching “peak” oil, and untried wind and solar were soon to be the new-age remedy for soon-to-be-exhausted fossil fuels. Add up the anti-empirical quotes from Obama himself, Energy Secretary Chu, and Interior Secretary Salazar (inflate your tires, “tune up” your car, look to U.S. algae reserves, let energy prices “skyrocket,” hope gas rises to European levels, don’t open federal lands even if gas reaches $10 a gallon, etc.) and, in reactionary fashion, we are time-machined back to the campus quad of the 1970s. In this la la world of Van Jones, evil oil companies supposedly connived to stifle green energy and hook us on fossil fuels, inferior energies that have nothing to recommend them. It is as if the revolutions in horizontal drilling, fracking, and discoveries of vast new reserves never occurred, as if Exxon and Chevron dodge taxes in a manner that Google and Amazon never would, as if efficient smaller gas engines, clean gas blends, and pollution devices have not made the American car both clean-burning and economical beyond our imagination forty years ago. The Obamians, frozen in amber, really believe oil is about to run out, “tuned up” internal combustion engines powering underinflated tires pollute as they did in the 1920s, and Teapot Dome U.S. oil companies need to be “crucified”—as regional EPA director and Obama appointee Al Armendariz, in fact, boasted. So we borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize money-losing solar and wind plants, while putting federal lands rich in oil and gas off-limits to companies eager to pay royalties, hire thousands, and supply the U.S. with its own energy—and all for a regressive ideology. Few see that Solyndra really is the new Teapot Dome.
Let’s hope that enough do in November.
A College Education
The false promise.
It seems to me that the big problem is that there is no relationship between student loan rates and prospects of paying them off, because the government got involved and completely eliminated the connection between them. In a sane world, an art history degree would carry a much higher interest rate than an engineering degree, and the market would send a signal to the students that maybe they weren’t making the best choices in major.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Jerry Pournelle:
What everyone seems to overlook is that the cost of college tuition will always rise to exceed the amount of money seeking tuition. The more money the government puts into the market, the higher the price of college, and it will trickle down from Harvard to the meanest community college. When more money chases goods, the price of the goods goes up; and if government then acts to increase the money supply, the price will rise without limit. Evan as I write this, the faculty of the California State Universities is voting to authorize a strike because they have not had raises in four years, poor things. The California State Universities were in the master plan to be the State Colleges, undergraduate institutions kept cheap and open essentially to everyone qualified to be in a a State College. They were to incorporate the State Teachers Colleges, and be the primary undergraduate education system; outstanding students would be accepted at or allow to transfer to the State University system, which would have a monopoly on graduate education.
The State College took over the State Teachers Colleges and next thing you know they needed to offer graduate degrees in education (although there is no evidence that those who have graduate degrees in education are any better at teaching, and in fact California State Colleges for twenty years taught such an ineffective system of reading that the illiteracy rate in California soared; but that’s for another story. If you know anyone about to enter the California state public schools, go to www.readingtlc.com and get my wife’s reading program so the kid will learn to read even if the teacher is a Cal State grad.) Anyway, all the Cal States offer graduate degrees in everything, and most of them are not very useful; but so long as the money supply lasts the costs will continue to rise, the faculties will be paid and paid and overpaid and pensioned off at very high levels, and the dance will continue.
So now it is becoming manifest that not only is the public school system nearly worthless, but half the graduates of the higher education system are unemployable.
There are solutions to this, most of them drastic, and we know how to have good higher education institutions. But so long as we are willing to pay for it, we’ll continue to have what we get. Charlie Sheffield and I played with this decades ago in a book called HIGHER EDUCATION. Alas it is not yet a Kindle book (I’m working on it). But the decay of our institutions of higher education under the relentless attacks of the government shoveling in money and the Iron Law assuring that the money will be accepted and overspent continues. And the beat goes on. We sowed that wind a long time ago, so why are we astonished at what we reap now?
Not all of us are.
[Update a few minutes later]
Glenn Reynolds expands on the thought:
What would a serious student-loan reform look like? Well, it would look more like normal loans. Students’ ability to borrow would be based on the likelihood that they’d be able to pay. Plus, loans would be dischargeable in bankruptcy if things turned out badly.
Right now, student loans are sold on the basis that “college” promotes higher earnings. But “college” isn’t an undifferentiated product. Some degrees — say in Electrical Engineering — increase earnings dramatically. Others — in, say, gender studies — not so much. A rational lender would be much more willing to finance the former than the latter.
Oh, and in ordinary credit transactions, creditors bear some risk. Loan someone money that they can’t pay back, and you take a loss if they go bankrupt. In the housing bubble, this discipline broke down because the people writing the loans weren’t going to hold on to the mortgages. Similarly, colleges today get their money upfront; if the student can’t pay it back, that’s someone else’s problem.
Let’s give colleges some “skin in the game” by making them absorb the loss, or at least part of it, if students can’t pay. Perhaps if students can’t pay their loans by 10 years after graduation, they should be allowed to discharge them in bankruptcy, with the institutions that got the loan money on the hook for, say, 20 percent of the loss.
If not a higher percentage. This would go a long way to fixing the broken incentive structure. But what Obama is proposing is just more of the same, pouring more gasoline on the flames.
[Afternoon update]
More thoughts from Nick Gillespie, and a response from Instapundit. Yes, humanities degrees aren’t intrinsically worthless, but the way that many of them are taught these days makes them so in many cases.
Blade Runner
What did Philip K. Dick think of it? Now we know.
Libertarian Immigration
This isn’t exactly news (Milton Friedman, no doubt among others, pointed it out years ago) but you can’t have both open immigration and a welfare state. Mark Krikorian has some related thoughts:
I can keep playing this game: “it’s simply unsustainable to have a libertarian immigration policy and a post-national elite that has no concern for sovereignty,” “it’s simply unsustainable to have a libertarian immigration policy and a public school system,” “it’s simply unsustainable to have a libertarian immigration policy and laws requiring emergency rooms to treat all comers regardless of ability to pay.”
At some point you become like the Ptolemaic astronomer who adds epicycles on epicycles to avoid the bitter conclusion that the Earth is not, in fact, at the center of the universe. Occam’s razor would suggest embracing the simpler explanation — mass immigration is incompatible with modern society and should be discontinued. It makes no more sense than geocentric astronomy, and it’s a lot more harmful.
As Jim Bennett is wont to say, “Democracy, immigration, multi-culturalism: Pick any two.”
Moore’s Law
…is still holding up. If AMD isn’t working on this sort of technology, it seems like they’re going to fall behind.
More Asteroid-Mining Thoughts
From David Brin. I disagree with this, though:
It also correlates well with President Obama’s wise decision to abandon a fruitless return to the sterile Moon, in favor of studying objects that might make us all rich.
The moon is no more “sterile” (as far as we know) than the asteroids, and there is plenty there to make us rich as well. It’s going to be a trade off between time and velocity, and there’s probably room for ventures in both places. There’s enough water on the moon to make it very accessible even with high-thrust systems, and likely a lot of asteroidal wealth buried under the regolith. And it’s only three days away.