I thought at the time that it was a bad idea for the Pentagon to push for consolidation in the 90s, and in particular for the FTC to approve the sale of McDonnell Douglas to Boeing. History has proven me (and others) correct. The article doesn’t talk about space, but NASA’s procurement practices have been as bad as the Pentagon’s, in terms of encouraging and rewarding poor performance.
Category Archives: Economics
The Big One
Is Los Angeles ready for it? Probably not. There’s still a lot we don’t know about how structures will survive in such an event.
I found this interesting, from the perspective of my book:
Structural engineers point out that no building will ever be 100 percent safe.
We don’t know what’s going to happen to the ARCO Towers, or any of the other steel moment-frame buildings across Southern California. They could be OK when the Big One hits.
Or maybe the ground motion, soil composition and brittle welds will cause some of them to collapse or partially collapse.
How much of a risk, as a society, are we willing to take? And once we determine that a type of building could be dangerous in an earthquake, when do we act?
I posed this question to Bonowitz, the structural engineer who didn’t think a mandatory retrofit program for WSMF buildings is necessary.
“It’s a little bit crass, but suppose I told you that 99.9 percent of anyone in greater Los Angeles is going to survive the big earthquake. Is that acceptable to you?” he asked.
I told him I thought we should probably try to do everything that we can to save every life.
Bonowitz pushed back.
“I think to posit a large earthquake in an urban environment like Los Angeles and say it’s unacceptable if anybody dies in that earthquake, I think that’s unreasonable,” he said. “Especially if you have limited public money to put toward reducing the losses.”
Yes, we have to make a rational assessment. It’s the price of having a major metroplex in an earthquake zone.
Nike Redeems itself
A Signature Bernie Sanders shoe to help you survive socialism.
Heh.
J. K. Rowling
Why she may have done more for libertarianism than even Milton Friedman: Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy.
Colleges
Twelve trends that are killing them.
The ones that will die will deserve to.
[Update a while later]
Here’s reason 13: Colleges are turning/have turned into hate-crime hoax mills.
Trump’s War With Iran
He dodged an ambush by avoiding it.
Iran can be defeated, but we’ve gone forty years now with no national will on the part of anyone to defeat it. Including Reagan.
Ruining America
Boomers are to blame.
Not me, personally, but yes, my generation has been awful, compared to our parents’ generation.
The Current Space Race
Why it’s better than Apollo.
For one thing, it’s more sustainable. And it will accomplish much more. Whenever kids (i.e., people less than 50) tell me they envy me that I saw men walk on the moon, I tell them that I envy them for all the much more exciting things in space they’ll see (assuming that we don’t get life extension).
Lesson For Trump From Media Attacks
Yes, continue to focus on the flawed climate science:
The CNN video ridicules Trump for saying that global warming is “an expensive hoax.” We should respond by outlining the costs involved. Over one billion dollars a day worldwide is now spent on “climate finance,” according to the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative, yet we see no impact on climate. In 2017, Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, explained that if the UN Paris Agreement targets for 2030 were met and sustained through the rest of the century, there would be 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit less warming in 2100, if the models relied upon by the UN were correct. He explains that the cost of the Paris pact would be $1 – 2 trillion every year. So clearly, CNN’s criticism tells Trump that he should continue calling it “an expensive hoax,” and cite the cost estimates and forecast results to illustrate his point.
Yup.
Those “Impossible” Burgers
It may be a surprise to some, but not to me, that they are neither healthier for the eater or for the environment.
I’d like to eat actual lab-grown meat, but it has to be cost effective, and nutritionally equivalent to the stuff on the hoof (or claw).
[Update a couple minutes later]
In reading, as is often the case, part of the health claim derives from the false notion that eating “red meat,” and particularly saturated fat, is unhealthy. There is zero scientific evidence for either. So they’re basically proposing to replace something humans have been eating since the dawn of humanity with some lab-produced glop about which we are completely ignorant of its nutritional effects.