How do you convince the twentieth generation of space colonists to leave earth?
[Update a few minutes later]
Slightly related: Charles Krauthammer wonders if we’re alone in the universe. I disagree with him, though, that politics is the driver of human history. Technology plays at least as large a role.
…that summarize 2011, econcomically.
A federal judge has blocked implementation of the state’s idiotic carbon law.
A depressing description of how Wall Street bought the Congress and the White House for pennies on the dollar:
…the real bonus turned out to be Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who came up through the ranks as part of the bipartisan Robert Rubin–Hank Paulson–Citigroup–Goldman Sachs cabal. Geithner, a government-and-academe man from way back, never really worked on Wall Street, though he once was offered a gig as CEO of Citigroup, which apparently thought he did an outstanding job as chairman of the New York Fed, where one of his main tasks was regulating Citigroup — until it collapsed into the yawning suckhole of its own cavernous ineptitude, at which point Geithner’s main job became shoveling tens of billions of federal dollars into Citigroup, in an ingeniously structured investment that allowed the government to buy a 27 percent share in the bank, for which it paid more than the entire market value of the bank. If you can’t figure out why you’d pay 100-plus percent of a bank’s value for 27 percent of it, then you just don’t understand high finance or high politics.
It’s long, but read the whole thing.
Jeff Foust has to explain this to The New Scientist.
How trade policy caused them to lose it.
…of 2011. This is just one of them.
…at The Economist.
This is the first time that I’ve seen the aircraft called a “Stratolaunch.” I wonder if the correspondent knows something we don’t, or is just making a false inference? Also, I’m a little surprised that the editors don’t know the difference between a hanger and a hangar. Unless it’s a British spelling.
…of Barack Obama. And yet many continue to defend him.
…and what won’t? The only problem with the analogy is that I never purposefully go to a coffee shop, because I don’t drink coffee. Starbucks would go bust in a world full of me.