Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Regrets, I Have A Few

8 Comments

Wayne Hale thinks that he posted in haste. But the problem remains:

Now I have re-read it and have some additional thoughts. It is clear that this is a vast scaling down from the requirements that say, Ares-1 and Orion had. And many of the paragraphs say that the specifications and standards can be replaced with alternatives, or with other standards that “meet the intent of” spec such and such. That is good. And to the casual reader that sounds like a big change. Unfortunately, it is not. Having to prove that an alternative standard is just as good as the standard NASA listed is an uphill battle. The adjudicator will be some GS-13 who has lived with one standard his whole career, understands it thoroughly, probably sat on the technical committee that wrote it, and loves it. Proving that his baby is ugly is going to be time consuming, and probably fruitless. I speak from sad experience.

So, what is my recommendation? Simple. Do what the Launch Services Program does: require that providers HAVE standards and follow them – don’t make them pick particular processes or standards, let the flexible, nimble, [your adjective here] commercial firms pick what suits their business best. As long as they have standards and stick to them – that is what we should require.

I would note that this is the FAA’s approach for launch licensing of passenger flights, until the industry matures sufficiently to develop certification standards (a point in time that is many years off).

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

It’s Not A Messaging Problem

3 Comments

It’s an honesty problem:

Sixteen of the waivers, you won’t be surprised to learn, were granted to union-based plans, which confirms that the sleaze-addled bill became a sleaze-addled law. Why, after all, should a few chosen companies be granted dispensation while others subsidize them?

The administration argues that these waivers are necessary only until reform takes effect in 2014, at which time workers will enjoy a wide range of approved options. Now, clearly anyone gullible enough to believe that a giant, invasive regulatory scheme is going to spur competition and choice is already working for the administration. But even if we were to suspend our disbelief, how does any of that comport with the president’s claim that we can all keep our insurance if we like it? (Answer: not well.)

The president has a problem with a lot of his claims. And as long as he continues to delude himself that the problem is the dog-food ad, and not the dog food, he’s going to continue to decline in popularity.

Business, Political Commentary

Business Versus Politics

13 Comments

This would explain much:

…after I taped my PJTV interview yesterday with David Kirkham — whose Utah Tea Party toppled Bob Bennett and brought a new Speaker into the Utah State House to boot — and Mike Wilson, whose Cincinnati Tea Party helped paint Ohio red last week, they stayed on the hookup and were talking about how the biggest surprise to both of them, each a political neophyte, was how comparatively easy politics was compared to running a business.

So it attracts mediocrities (if that’s not too kind a word) like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. And Barack Obama. They’re not competent at anything else. Not that they’re particularly competent at that, either.

[Update a couple minutes later]

They’re arrogant people, with much to be modest about.

[Update a while later]

The real Democrat messaging problem: they can’t get people to ignore reality:

This was the progressive agenda in full, with accomplishments and ideas most politicians could only dream of, and yet what happened in this election? The Democrats faced a historic loss with the public turning hugely against them. And why? It really comes down to a messaging problem. Liberals just couldn’t get their voices heard over the noise from their one foe that is always trying to tear down all their plans and belittle every accomplishment: reality.

The reality noise machine — with its job losses, terrorist attacks, and budgets — is always trying to shout down liberals’ ideas with its fear-mongering of actual problems that need to be addressed and a physical reality that needs to be appeased. When liberals create or save millions of jobs with a trillion dollar stimulus, there goes reality saying we’re spending money we don’t have and unemployment is only going up. When a progressive plan is proposed to get everyone free health care, there’s reality with its message of gloom that nothing is free and our health care will only get worse. And if we ever try to appease some nation like Iran through peaceful, diplomatic means, reality is always pointing out how close they are to nuclear weapons. Reality is obnoxious, and these days it’s everywhere, and people are actually listening to it over liberals.

For instance, look at the whole “death panel” debate from a while back. Despite numerous liberal journalists and commentators assuring people that death panels were not mentioned in the health care bill and that it was completely made up, people decided to instead listen to the reality of bureaucracy and limited supply over the intelligent people telling them to ignore that. And when New York Times columnist Paul Krugman constantly argues that we need to spend even more to get out of this economic situation, do people listen to the Nobel Prize-winning economist or reality? These days it’s reality, and people are going to keep choosing reality over their own interests unless liberals learn to fight back with better messaging.

Stupid realists. Who are they going to believe — the “reality-based community” or reality? Come on, people.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Coming Train Wreck

23 Comments

…for commercial space. A warning from Wayne Hale:

NASA at its highest leadership level has committed to try to allow commercial space flight providers a great deal of flexibility and cost control. There are ways to do this which will not compromise safety in design or operation. But having NASA civil servants as the arbiters of whether or not thousands of requirements have been satisfied is not the way to accomplish neither safety nor cost efficiency.

So whether Commercial Space Flight gets $6 billion or $3 billion or $50 million, the entire effort is on the way to a train wreck.

NASA must change or this effort will fail.

No doubt. Part of the point of the new policy was to get NASA to change, but it’s going to be a very painful process, and there will be vicious guerilla warfare in the trenches. The draft requirements are just one of the skirmishes in that war. At some point, they will have to be revealed, to allow them to be properly critiqued before they become something more than draft. If NASA had a strong administrator, he would note that they will be signed off at the top, where the buck stops. But if NASA had a strong administrator, Ed Weiler wouldn’t still be in charge of SMD.

If the train wreck occurs, it will be NASA’s problem, though, not that of the commercial providers. There will be commercial human spaceflight, sooner or later. NASA can make it happen sooner, but they won’t be able to prevent it, and once everyone sees other people flying on SpaceX/ULA/Boeing/Whoever vehicles to Bigelow (and perhaps others’) facilities, it’s going to be impossible for NASA to get the billions some (either at NASA or on the Hill) will request for their own doomed programs, in the coming austere fiscal environment. There is only one way forward for human spaceflight, and that’s commercial providers.

[Update a few minutes later]

I should add that I am not surprised, of course, in any way by Wayne’s report.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Bleeding And Purging

25 Comments

…to balance the humors of the economy:

The Keynesian idea of stimulus has no empirical basis, but the only active tool the government has in a time of economic downturn is its ability to borrow and spend. Surprise, surprise: during the Great Depression, governments fell all over themselves to embrace Keynes’s idea of borrowing and spending to “stimulate” the economy. They did so not because it was proven to work (then or since) but because it justified the one action that would make the government larger and more powerful and the political class larger and more powerful as well.

The Fed is now doing the same thing with inflation “Quantitative Easing”. There is no particular reason to believe that inflating the money supply will produce more real economic activity, indeed the history of the 20th century proves exactly the opposite. However, it is all the Fed can do right now so it is going to grab a convenient theory to justify inflating the currency.

For centuries, doctors tortured and killed their patients because neither they nor their patients had the courage to simply admit that there was little good the doctors could do. They created elaborate and detailed theories to justify their counterproductive interventions. Worse, after a time, everyone, doctors, patients, philosophers, proto-scientists, etc. all came to regard the tool driven rationalizations as facts. Not until the discovery of the germ theory of disease, quantitative chemistry and a general science of diagnostics did the nonsense theory of humors fade away. The invention of new tools drove the development of new, scientific theories.

We are doing the same damn thing with the current economic travails. Rather than admit there is little that the government can do to correct its colossal real-estate screwup, we get to witness the economic equivalent of bleeding and induced vomiting all based on a economic theories that have no other reason for existing that to justify the government bleeding and inducing vomiting in the economy.

“… but it’s what can be done,” could well be one of the most dangerous phrases in the English language. In very many cases, not just economics, the best thing to do is nothing. For any particular bad circumstance, there are near infinite number of actions that can make the circumstance worse but only a very few that can make it better. Indeed, there is no natural law that says that every circumstance can be improved with the capabilities at hand. Sometimes a “can do spirit” backfires. Some circumstances are like earthquakes or tornadoes: you can’t stop them, you just have to ride them out.

Don’t just do something; stand there.