Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

But Don’t Call Them Fascists

56 Comments

What were they thinking? It’s amazing to see them so willing to show their true totalitarian nature so blatantly. And it’s too late to pull it, despite the attempts. That’s the magic of the Internet.

[Update a few minutes later]

A comment that Iowahawk left at the Youtube page (and reposted on his FB page):

In order for your “No Pressure” advert to have been made, I am assuming several writers pitched a professionally-prepared storyboard to a committee, detailing shot-by-shot each second of …the film. The committee approved it, along with a minimum $250,000 budget to hire actors, director, & crew. Each scene probably took 3-10 takes, and weeks of post production by special effects wizards.

At no time did a single person involved in this clusterf**k say, “hey, maybe it isn’t the best PR to air our fantasies about detonating the people who don’t agree with us into a mist of blood meat and bone fragments.”

This has got to be the biggest FAIL in the entire history of the internet. Anyone remotely associated with the production of this film should forever be banished from any public institution in the English speaking world, and immediately referred for psychiatric evaluation.

I know what my evaluation would be.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from a James Delingpole:

With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.

Again, what were they thinking?

They were thinking something like the things these people (who were finally brought to justice) were thinking. Because they’re all children of the first totalitarian, Rousseau. It’s what the left does.

[Update a few minutes later]

Spring time for Al Gore — the eco-Anschluss.

Business, Political Commentary, Space

Innovators

2 Comments

There’s an interesting piece at the Journal today on “tomorrow’s winners” in new technologies. Several of them will be familiar to regular readers of this site:

Space Travel and Habitation

“Commercialized space travel will see a lot of innovation,” says Jeffrey Baumgartner, founder of the JPB innovation consultancy.

“Much of it will be incremental in nature, but the result—low-cost, easy travel to space and potential bases on the moon and, in the longer term, Mars—will involve substantial innovation.”

Some firms to watch, says Mr. Baumgartner, are Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic LLC and Bigelow Aerospace LLC.

Human habitation in space so far has taken place in rigid vehicles like the International Space Station. Bigelow, based in North Las Vegas, Nev., is developing inflatable modules that should be easier and cheaper to launch. Bigelow already is orbiting two unmanned, expandable prototypes and says it is planning assembly of four new spacecraft by 2015.

“The key here,” says Mr. Baumgartner, “is that aeronautics is leaving government control and being taken over by industry, where cost-cutting and profitability, rather than contractors milking the state for as much as they can get, will lead to a lot of innovation, affordability and efficiency.”

Heavy-Lift Launching

A critical obstacle to any sort of space-based future is getting some rather sizable objects beyond the reach of the Earth’s gravity.

But Langdon Morris, a partner with the InnovationLabs LLC consulting firm, notes that while state-invested companies in the U.S., Russia and Europe have developed “heavy lift” launch capabilities, one private firm is moving to surpass them all in terms of payload capacity—an innovation that could slash launch prices and make larger payloads commercially viable.

SpaceX, of Hawthorne, Calif., says it hopes for a 2013 launch of its Falcon 9 Heavy rocket, which is designed to carry payloads of up to 70,000 pounds into low Earth orbit, about one-third more than the Space Shuttle, which is the largest-capacity launch vehicle now in operation.

“Cost-effective heavy-lift launch will enable new space commerce industries,” says Mr. Morris.

Space-Based Solar Power

“Once heavy-lift launch is solved, space solar power will be close behind,” says Mr. Morris. “Space solar power could transform the Earth’s economy.”

The idea is for satellites in geostationary orbit to collect the sun’s energy and convert it into radio waves for transmission to surface stations, where it will be converted into electricity for local power grids.

Mr. Morris thinks there are several companies that could achieve this.

One is Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based Solaren Corp., which last year reached an agreement to sell 200 megawatts of electricity a year to California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., for 15 years, starting in 2016. Solaren says it plans to test key systems and deployments in space in 2014, and launch its Space Solar Power Plant into geostationary orbit in 2016.

A competitor, Switzerland-based Space Energy Group, says it hopes to launch a test satellite within three years, assuming it gets expected funding.

Emphasis mine. I have higher hopes for the space transportation companies that the power satelliters, but more power to all of them. So to speak.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Tax Issue

67 Comments

…isn’t about fiscal policy:

Broadly speaking, the Right believes that your stuff is yours. The Left believes your stuff doesn’t really become your stuff until the government says it is. So the Right sees taxes as a way to pay for necessary government services. The Left sees taxes as an instrument of social control and redistributive justice.

Because it’s what Marxists do. And Barack Obama is a perfect example, when in the debates he said that he’d raise capital gains tax rates, even if it resulted in reduced revenue, out of “fairness.”