Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

I Am Completely Unsurprised

100 Comments

…that the president doesn’t read much. I’d be willing to bet that one of the things he hasn’t read is Hayek. Or Friedman. Or Sowell. If he had, he wouldn’t be such an economic ignoramus.

Speaking of which, IBD:

Only minutes after her department reported that payrolls had shed another 131,000 positions in July, there was Secretary Hilda Solis speaking brazenly of the “strong and immediate action” the White House had taken to save or create “more than 2.5 million American jobs.”

But as the market action showed, investors could see she didn’t know what she was talking about.

But then, Solis is no different from any number of administration officials who by their comments or actions demonstrate almost daily that they know nothing about creating jobs or anything else to improve the economy.

And why should they? There’s never been an administration led by so few people with any experience in the private sector — including the president, the vice president and even the treasury secretary, who last week wrongly called it a “myth” that raising taxes on high-income Americans would hurt small business.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

Business, Space

Clarifying

17 Comments

I talked to Elon for half an hour or so last night, to make sure that I was getting the story straight on an article I’m writing for Popular Mechanics, but he didn’t really tell me anything that changed the relevant aspects of my story. It does, however, change the spin on the story that AvLeak did a few days ago, and they’ve provided a correction, based apparently on a similar conversation with him. It’s always possible to read too much into technical papers presented at professional conferences (not to mention retirement aspirations), and that seems to be what occurred here. SpaceX would like to build a heavy lifter, but they don’t see the market for it absent NASA interest, which sort of makes the point that I’ve always made — that it’s not affordable, or even necessarily the best way to do the exploration job. I am sure, though, that if NASA really needs a heavy lifter, funding SpaceX to build it is the most affordable option.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Why They’re Not Hiring (Part 2)

38 Comments

More thoughts on this post from yesterday:

The flat truth is no one is going to hire new employees unless there is some reasonable promise that the additional cost of the employee will be recovered through increased profits resulting from the new employee’s work. That’s not “greed”, it is bare survival in tough economic times. And all the recent additions to per-employee costs aren’t alone. There is a seemingly endless well of new possible costs coming, including new environmental regulations, the possibility of a massive new “carbon tax”, and “card check” that promises to raise labor costs even further with exactly zero (at best) increase in productivity. Vague gestures towards a few thousand dollars of tax credits to stimulate job growth don’t even begin to cover the risks.

On top of it all, if you happen to be an oil worker on the Gulf Coast, your job is politically verboten. Sorry about that. Or not.

Only a crazy person would be eager to start large-scale hiring in this political environment. Yet many anti-corporation zealots profess themselves outraged that the Evil, Greedy Corporations won’t get with the business of economic recovery.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Mike Griffin

14 Comments

…continues to defend the indefensible. Clark Lindsey has a response. Others have commented on this particularly bit of misleading the uninformed:

Griffin also suggested that the plan didn’t put much thought into the decision to defer a human return to the Moon in favor of a mission to a near Earth asteroid by 2025. The made that choice, he suggested, “apparently without realizing that the delta-V to get to almost all asteroids is higher than the delta-V to get to Mars” with similarly long travel times and limited launch windows. “In a number of ways reaching asteroids can be harder than reaching Mars.”

While I agree that it’s unlikely that much thought was put into the 2025 asteroid mission, this is disingenuous. No one said that we’re going to visit “almost all asteroids,” or even one in the main belt, so the velocity needed to get to “almost all asteroids” is irrelevant. All that really matters is the delta-V to get to the one that we choose, and there are many earth crossers with very low requirements.

On the subject of his comments about new technologies, I would expand on Clark’s critique. Mike says:

He was skeptical of the plan’s emphasis on “gamechanging” technologies to enable human space exploration. “Any time I develop a new technology I potentially change someone’s game,” he said. “Without a plan, I don’t know what game, I don’t know if it’s the game I ought to be changing, or if it’s a high-value game or a low-value game, but I’m going to change something, so it’s pretty easy to promise that I’ll do gamechanging technologies.”

He added that such technology development programs can be prime targets for future budget cuts, either by the Office of Management and Budget or in Congress. “The Congress surgically removes those programs and spreads the money to goals that they have in mind,” he claimed. “No congressman or senator ever gets credit for a technology program. Congressmen and senators get credit for projects.”

The first statement is simply gobbledygook (to be kind). It’s real simple, Mike. The plan is to explore the solar system with human beings. The current “game,” which you reinforced with Apollo on Steroids, deliberately eschewing the use of any new technology, is unaffordable and unsustainable, the complete opposite of what the Aldridge Commission recommended that the VSE must be. Any technology that dramatically reduces the development or operational cost, or increases the amount of activity that can be performed for a given cost, is a “game changer” and a high-value one. Deferring for now the development of heavy lifters and replacing them with propellant depots (as the Augustine panel members cited as a “game changer”) would be one example.

As for what congressmen or senators get “credit” for,” all he’s really saying is that unless it’s a big jobs program, it’s not politically sustainable. That is all the more reason to get the commercial people in the game as soon as possible, so that they can rely on things other than porcine motivations for continued space activity. And as the events of the past few months show, it’s clear that when the price per pound is astronomical, even pork can’t survive forever, even if it was accomplishing useful things toward the goal of opening up space, as Constellation was not. So given the choice between politically unsustainable hyperexpensive launchers and politically unsustainable useful new technologies, give me the technologies.