The new financial regulation bill includes racial and gender quotas for all. There are plenty of reasons to oppose this monstrosity. This is just one more, but it’s a big one.
Category Archives: Business
Grazing Dinosaurs
Wow. Am I unimpressed with ESA’s plans for a new rocket:
Multiple designs for a two- or three-stage rocket with cryogenic, solid-fueled and methane/oxygen main stages will be studied not only for their performance, but also for their long-term operating costs.
While no decision has been made, the early design work will focus on a vehicle that would add or subtract strap-on boosters to lift satellites weighing as little as 3,000 kilograms and as much as 7,500 kilograms into geostationary transfer orbit, the destination of most telecommunications satellites.
Unlike the current Ariane 5, the next-generation launcher would, under the preliminary designs being investigated, launch one satellite at a time into geostationary orbit, not two as typically is the case with the current Ariane 5.
And this huge breakthrough in launch technology will be available in only fifteen years.
Between 1945 and 1960, we went from the DC-3 to the 7407. Between 1955 and 1970, we went from Aerobees to moon landings. And between now and 2025, the Europeans want to develop yet another expendable rocket. I guess they learned the lesson of the Shuttle. It was the wrong lesson, but at least they learned a lesson, right?
Now I’ll Have To Rethink My Position
Are the elite starting to turn against Obama?
“If you’re asking if the United States is about to become a socialist state, I’d say it’s actually about to become a European state, with the expansiveness of the welfare system and the progressive tax system like what we’ve already experienced in Western Europe,” Harvard business and history professor Niall Ferguson declared during Monday’s kickoff session, offering a withering critique of Obama’s economic policies, which he claimed were encouraging laziness.
“The curse of longterm unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they’ll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time,” Ferguson said. “Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy.”
But…but…Nancy said that paying people unemployment was the fastest and best way to create jobs!
Ferguson was joined in his harsh attack by billionaire real estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman. Both lambasted Obama’s trillion-dollar deficit spending program—in the name of economic stimulus to cushion the impact of the 2008 financial meltdown—as fiscally ruinous, potentially turning America into a second-rate power.
“We are, without question, in a period of decline, particularly in the business world,” Zuckerman said. “The real problem we have…are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”
Gee, Mort, I could have told you that two frickin’ years ago. Why did it take you so long to catch on that you were one of the rubes?
And I loved this:
Ferguson warned: “Do you want to be a kind of implicit part of the European Union? I’d advise you against it.”
This was greeted by hearty applause from a crowd that included Barbra Streisand and her husband James Brolin. “Depressing, but fantastic,” Streisand told me afterward, rendering her verdict on the session. “So exciting. Wonderful!”
Brolin’s assessment: “Mind-blowing.”
To be fair, though, I suspect that you could blow Brolin’s mind with a butterfly wing.
This can’t be good for his renomination prospects. The long knives will be out on November 3rd, I suspect.
The Argument Never Ends
Keynes versus Hayek. Of course, it’s never an argument about how best to revive an economy — it’s an argument about how to either maximize government power, or to liberate the people from an overspending, overtaxing tyrant.
[Update a few minutes later]
Lynne Kiesling has more thoughts:
This theme of “economic control becomes political control” is crucial to making sense of the corporatist nature of political activity, and why regulation is so pernicious for individual well-being and liberty.
Hayek is, if not one of the first to make this connection, certainly the most prominent early proponent.
It’s Not Republicans Versus Democrats
It’s taxpayers versus Washington.
Let’s hope that the Republicans finally figure that out this fall, and don’t forget it.
It Just Makes You Want To Cry
Here we go again. No one at this American Thinker piece, neither the author or any of the commenters, has clue one about the new policy:
Now, with the Obama administration’s new “plan” for NASA effectively ending nationally funded human spaceflight, we drop a torch others are grabbing.
Where do they come up with this nonsense? How can one sanely characterize a policy that extends ISS until at least the end of the decade, and that has billions of dollars budgeted to buy crew services, as “ending nationally funded human spaceflight”?
NASA has long been planning to cancel the Shuttle program, which is understandable, considering budget constraints and the priority of the Constellation program. But to cancel both programs leaves the U.S. with no viable human space transport. The International Space Station, which represents a $100-billion investment by U.S. taxpayers, will be unreachable by scientists and astronauts from the U.S. without hitching a ride on Russian or Chinese space transport. This is unacceptable.
Or from commercial American services, which will be available much sooner than Ares/Orion. And later, he finally gets around to discussing this:
With the ending of the Constellation program, there are no future human missions for the U.S., except those made possible in commercial spaceflight. While commercial spaceflight is tremendous in its future implications, it will progress only in areas that have demonstrated a possible fiscal return…and space operations are so expensive and difficult that it is highly unlikely that any true exploration would occur. Commercial space flight is space exploitation, not space exploration. For the foreseeable future, an entity like NASA — which is nationally funded and not constrained by profits and losses — and a project such as Constellation is the best way to extend our reach into and knowledge of space. Robotic missions are all well and good for certain applications, but one does not learn anything about putting humans in space by putting robotic vehicles in space.
Sigh…
Where to start?
Look. We are simply transitioning from a mode in which NASA develops and operates its own earth-to-orbit vehicles to spec, to one in which it purchases transportation services to LEO for crew from private providers, as it has been doing for years for satellites and probes. No one said that NASA was “getting out of the planetary exploration business” when it launched LRO and LCROSS on a commercial Atlas, and if they had they would have rightly been considered insane. Why is it any different for astronauts?
Exploration starts when we get into LEO, not at Cape Canaveral.
And you cannot simultaneously know anything about Constellation and state that it is “the best way to extend our reach into and knowledge of space.” Constellation was a fiscal disaster waiting to happen. It was unaffordable both in terms of its development costs, and its operational costs. There are many better ways to accomplish that goal. The new policy is one of them.
Jeebus crow.
How Cloward-Piven
Whatever happens, I think we’re in for a rough ride. This fall may be the last chance to stave off real catastrophe.
The Fiscal Mess In Illinois
It makes California look frugal and responsible. So naturally, we took the people responsible for it and put them in charge in Washington. Not for much longer, I hope.
The Coming Depression
A cheery interview with Vox Day:
The dirty little secret of politics is that most politicians are of barely above average intelligence and possess very narrow educations. They’re mostly people with IQs of around 120 and a law degree. So, they know literally nothing about economics and lack the capacity to see that what the experts are telling them doesn’t add up. Given those circumstances, it should come as no surprise that they so readily embrace the economic theory that tells them exactly what they want to hear. “Go, thou, and spend, and thus shalt the economy be saved. And lo, thou shalt be the savior of thy people!” That’s a lot more palatable than being told that the nation is in dire straits and their careers are in jeopardy due to the actions of their predecessors, and that there’s not much they can do about it. So, they listen to the self-interested parties and blindly go about making the situation worse.
I think that he overestimates the intelligence of the narrowly educated lawyer/politicians. Particularly the one in the White House.
An Oil-Spill To-Do List
I’m sure that the president will get right on it, just as soon as he finishes his latest round of golf.
You know, I’ll bet that Bobby Jindal hasn’t hit the links once in the past couple months.
One of the most insane things is the EPA not allowing the ships to clean the water, because they only remove ninety-plus percent of the oil. This is bureaucracy run amok. The president could fix it with the stroke of a pen. I wonder why he doesn’t?