Category Archives: Business

Jeff Bezos

An interesting interview. It’s mostly about Amazon’s business model and plans, but Blue Origin does come up:

Levy: You have a separate company called Blue Origin that hopes to send customers into outer space. Why is that important to you?

Bezos: It is a serious effort. When I was 5 years old, I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. It made me passionate about science, physics, math, exploration.

Levy: Will you walk on the moon someday?

Bezos: Me? Are you saying would I if I could?

Levy: I bet you’d like to, but do you think you will?

Bezos: Boy. I’ve been asked to make tough predictions before. That one’s very tough. But that’s not what this is about. If I wanted to buy tourist trips to fly to the International Space Station and Soyuz and those things, there’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s $35 million. I want to lower the cost of access to space.

Levy: How do you do that?

Bezos: I like to say, “Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.” For Amazon, that’s selection, speed of delivery, lower prices. Well, for Blue Origin it’s cost and safety. If you really want to make it so that anybody can go into space, you have to increase the safety and decrease the cost. That’s Blue Origin’s mission. I’m super passionate about it.

Levy: Do you feel that it’s a bit disconnected to start a space-exploration company in this economically grim time?

Bezos: No. We employ a lot of aerospace engineers. They have families, their kids go to college. We buy a lot of materials. Somebody made those materials, right?

I don’t even understand that last question, but note the use of the e-word. I wish we could get people to think about space in terms other than science and exploration.

[Late morning update]

This is sort of related. Lileks isn’t impressed with the Kindle Fire.

The Ironic Presidency

The difference between 2008 and 2011:

The one constant here is Obama’s false pitch in 2008 that everything that came before his hope-and-change elixir was simply awful and everything after would be wonderful, from a cooling planet to falling seas — all delivered in teleprompted mellifluousness with a new post-racial cool. In 2008, for a conservative critic to suggest that the former Chicago community organizer was a glib rookie senator — without any experience in national politics, clueless about the private sector, with no prior record of industry or inspired legislation, and with a mostly unknown and poorly researched past — was to earn the charge of racism; in 2011, for a liberal to do the same, I guess, will be seen as sober and judicious bipartisan reflection.

And they’ll still call us racists.

Lynx

…is finally moving forward, apparently no longer constrained by cash flow.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is pretty cool — robots that could build facilities on the moon.

[Another update a few minutes more later]

Speaking of lunar bases and cash flow, they sure buried the lede in this story about Shackleton Energy Company:

The company has set a goal of US$1.2 million and at the time of publication of this article had raised $3,665 with some 40 days remaining.

So, only $1,196,335 to go.

The Avastin Decision

Did the FDA do the right thing?

The Wall Street Journal, and others, have denounced the FDA’s move as “a chillingly blunt assertion of regulatory power.” But my Manhattan Institute colleague Paul Howard is the guy who gets it right, in a blog post for Medical Progress Today:

If you think (as I do) that the FDA should be expanding the accelerated approval pathway and allow more drugs to get to market based on promising early studies. rather than waiting for large Phase III clinical trials that can take years to complete, you can argue that this outcome actually strengthens AA. Critics have charged that AA is sop to industry, and that companies never do the follow up studies to support AA. Avastin proves them wrong.

This is exactly the point. If you want the FDA to approve more innovative, new drugs based on promising but early clinical results, you have to give the FDA a way to revoke those approvals later on, should larger trials prove that those drugs aren’t as safe or effective as they first seemed. This is why the FDA should be congratulated for the way it has handled the Avastin breast cancer saga, and why I hope we will see the FDA handle more cases like this one, not less.

Yes, this is better than the way they’ve done it in the past, but this argument presumes that the FDA should have such regulatory power in the first place. It’s one thing to provide data on efficacy. It’s another to prevent people from making their own decisions about what drugs to use for which ailments.