Rasmussen says that almost 70% of adults think that scientists have been falsifying data in climate change research. A bit of good news amidst the coming economic apocalypse.
Category Archives: Business
First They Came For The Lemonade Stands
Why business isn’t hiring. Everyone is talking about government spending these days, but Iain Murray is trying to get them to think
Big-Government Morality
Thoughts from Timothy Dalrymple:
One of the great difficulties of this issue, for Christians, is that the morality of spending and debt has been so thoroughly demagogued that it’s impossible to advocate cuts in government spending without being accused of hatred for the poor and needy. A group calling itself the “Circle of Protection” recently promoted a statement on “Why We Need to Protect Programs for the Poor.” But we don’t need to protect the programs. We need to protect the poor. Indeed, sometimes we need to protect the poor from the programs. Too many anti-poverty programs are beneficial for the politicians that pass them, and veritable boondoggles for the government bureaucracy that administers them, but they actually serve to rob the poor of their dignity and their initiative, they undermine the family structures that help the poor build prosperous lives, and ultimately mire the poor in poverty for generations. Does anyone actually believe that the welfare state has served the poor well?
It is immoral to ignore the needs of the least of these. But it’s also immoral to ’serve’ the poor in ways that only make more people poor, and trap them in poverty longer. And it’s immoral to amass a mountain of debt that we will pass on to later generations. I even believe it’s immoral to feed the government’s spending addiction. Since our political elites have demonstrated such remarkably poor stewardship over our common resources, it would be foolish and wrong to give them more resources to waste. What we need our political leaders committed to prudence and thrift, to wise and far-sighted stewardship, and to spurring a free and thriving economy that will encourage the poor and all Americans to seize their human dignity as creatures made in the image of God, to be fruitful and take initiative and express their talents and creativity.
Fat chance of that. Not enough opportunities for graft.
Justice Is Served
Joe Fragola has backed down from his BS FUD:
“Since SpaceX filed its lawsuit … the Parties have been working collaboratively to resolve the matter. Regarding the underlying facts, Dr. [Joseph] Fragola investigated a rumor regarding the performance of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle during its most recent launch. Through email communications with both NASA and SpaceX on June 8, 2011, Dr. Fragola confirmed that the rumor was false in that no Falcon 9 engines failed and the first stage did not explode,” SpaceX and Valador said in a joint statement. “There was independent NASA tracking and video of the flight, and subsequent debriefing with NASA, indicating no such failure, indicating no such failures or explosions.
…Fragola, who is based in New York, makes his living as a safety expert. He was a member of the NASA Exploration Systems Architecture Study team that selected the Ares 1 and Ares 5 rocket concepts for the defunct Constellation Moon-return and Mars landing program.
Emphasis mine.
In a just world, he would be unable to make a living as a “safety expert.”
Real Monopoly
Why, when the game was first released in the 1930s, did people all over the world make an almost cooperative decision to drop the auction? (A decision that is especially puzzling given that it makes for a worse game).
Well I puzzled over this for a long time until my friend Becky – who along with her husband Darrell is something of a board games geek – supplied what I’m pretty sure is the answer. We, gamers as we are, might think a game featuring lots of inter-player shafting is superior to one without. But Monopoly is, and always was, played not by gamers, but by families; and inter-player shafting is liable to cause all sorts of upset.
This is actually frustrating, because (if I remember my history correctly) the game was originally intended to help teach about capitalism and free markets. By crippling the game in this way, it makes it much more about luck, which feeds into the notion that winners must “help out” the losers, because they have no control over their fates, thus feeding into the socialist impulse. That is, to use Dick Gephardt’s unfortunate phrase of a few years back about “life’s lottery,” it encourages fatalism and wealth redistribution, instead of initiative.
In any event, even if the real thing isn’t great for family and friends, gamers at least should play it seriously.
[Via Geek Press]
On The Radio
I’m supposedly going to be on the Tim Aalders show in fifteen minutes or so, to discuss taxes and tax rates.
The Consequences Of Default
…are too horrifying to contemplate, but Iowahawk contemplates them anyway. Avert thine eyes.
More NewSpace Coverage
I don’t have time to live blog it, but others are, and here’s the Twitter feed for the event.
More New Space Coverage
Clark Lindsey is covering it, as is Doug Messier (who is sitting on my left — here’s another post on the suborbital session).
Who Are You Going To Believe?
The climate models, or the lying empirical evidence?
The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA’s ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.
But let’s not let a little pesky science get in the way of social justice.
[Update a while later]
Gee, whaddaya know? A “climate researcher” who implied that our SUVs were drowning polar bears is being investigated for “integrity issues.”
It’s just the ninety percent of them who make the rest look bad.
[Update late afternoon]
Weep not for the polar bears: James Delingpole piles on.