It does feel like a huge clash of visions coming. And one of them is an Orwellian nightmare.
Category Archives: Economics
Unsustainable California
What can’t go on, will eventually come to a stop.
I think the only question is how it will play out.
[Update at noon]
Mark Pulliam is voting (again) with his feet.
[Update a few minutes later]
Boise residents: “Go back to California.”
Pricing Health-Care Services
Any elective procedure should be transparently priced. That’s it’s not is one of the disasters of the current health-insurance situation.
Launch Costs
In light of the latest admissions, some thoughts from Wayne Hale.
Just Fly Already
NASA is planning to reduce crew size on ISS because of uncertainty in Commercial Crew. This probably means no research during that period.
SLS Costs
For years, NASA has been providing a BS number of a billion dollars a flight (with no basis). Now, at least the White House is admitting that it’s at least two billion.
And here’s an update this morning. Yes, five billion a flight is a low estimate.
A Million People On Mars
It could (maybe) be done in a century.
But no, I don’t think they’d have to learn to eat crickets. The paucity of imagination in studies like this is always amazing.
Moon By 2022
If SpaceX pulls this off, it’s going to be pretty embarrassing for NASA (and Congress).
The Rolling Blackouts In CA
No, they’re not a climate-change story. It’s about rampant insanity and corruption of rent-seeking “green”-energy firms.
And this seems like cheating: Texas lures California businesses with promises of electricity.
What did socialists use to light their homes before candles? Electricity.
[Late-morning update]
California is approaching Puerto Rico territory.
Speaking of which…
[Thursday-morning update]
California is “winning” its way into the Stone Age.
And is the state becoming pre-modern?
Apparently. Pat Brown has to be rolling in his grave at what his idiot son has wrought.
[Bumped]
Model Land
Judith Curry, on a new paper concerning how to escape from it:
Naïvely, we might hope that by making incremental improvements to the “realism” of a model (more accurate representations, greater details of processes, finer spatial or temporal resolution, etc.) we would also see incremental improvement in the outputs. Regarding the realism of short-term trajectories, this may well be true. It is not expected to be true in terms of probability forecasts. The nonlinear compound effects of any given small tweak to the model structure are so great that calibration becomes a very computationally-intensive task and the marginal performance benefits of additional subroutines or processes may be zero or even negative. In plainer terms, adding detail to the model can make it less accurate, less useful. [Emphasis added]
Computer models can be useful in some circumstances, but they are not science.