Bob Zimmerman (who is doing his annual fundraising drive) has found a fascinating cave.
Category Archives: Economics
Space Settlement Straw Man
I don’t know whether this guy’s ideas for carbon capture make economic sense or not, but this I see a lot of this sort of nonsense:
You quote the Jesuit philosopher Thomas Berry, who writes about our being inseparable from the Earth. That’s not trending in Silicon Valley the way, say, terraforming Mars is.
What the hell do we do when we’ve trashed the hell out of Earth? We escape to another planet! That appears to be the attitude from the tech-os. Well, I find that hugely irresponsible. Why waste billions on going to Mars when we should be putting that into nourishing Earth? It’s your classic mechanical mind gone to the extreme, and I find it abhorrent from people that are meant to be intelligent. We are an integral part of Earth and until we start nurturing her, we are going to go down the gurgler. Maybe a few of those tech-os will end up on a spaceship, but the rest of us won’t.
I don’t know anyone who wants to escape to another planet because we’ve trashed the earth.
Where Drugs Come From
A tutorial for AOC from Derek Lowe.
Interior Design
…of long-duration space ships. I’d like to attend that event, but it looks like it coincides with the Space Transportation Conference in DC.
These issues are why I’ve never taken any Mars plans by NASA seriously. Until we dramatically reduce the cost of access to space, so we can afford an armada of spacious vehicles, sending humans to Mars will be a pipe dream, but at least Elon is taking that problem seriously, even if he’s doing nothing about the partial-gravity issue.
[Update a few minutes later]
Oops, there is no conflict, but I still can’t go; it starts tomorrow. I wonder if Lurio will attend?
A Luxury Space Hotel
No, the numbers never really added up.
The Space Access Conference
It’s baaaack. And better than ever, despite the fact that Yours Truly will be there. It will be in the Bay Area, instead of Phoenix, though (the latter is a slightly shorter drive from LA). On the other hand, that’s where it started, with the Making Orbit conferences in San Mateo, almost three decades ago.
The Democrats
Let’s see … what else happened in the busy world of crazy … excuse me while I flip through my files … Ah yes, there was congresswoman Ilhan Omar, parroting the Kremlin-Havana-Tehran line on the democratic uprising in Venezuela, calling it “a U.S. backed coup.” A few days later, Omar, a supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement whom the Democrats have awarded with a place on the House Foreign Relations Committee, said she “almost chuckles” because “we still uphold” the Jewish State of Israel “as a democracy in the Middle East.” I chuckle—and begin seriously to worry—that someone who cannot distinguish between tyranny in Latin America and democracy in the Middle East commands such acclaim and receives such attention. Omar has former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett in her corner. When Omar dismissed Congressman Lee Zeldin’s criticism of her views by Tweeting, “Don’t mind him, he is just waking up to the reality of having Muslim women as colleagues who know how to stand up to bullies!”, Jarrett replied, “Shake him up!” Zeldin is a Jewish Republican.
Finally, as the week came to a close, the Democrats went beyond their support for partial-birth abortion to defend—the very fact that I have to write the following words saddens me to no end—post-birth abortion. This practice has been known throughout history as infanticide, and it flourished widely in the ancient world before being condemned in the Judeo-Christian tradition. As we “progress” from that tradition—a progression that is in fact a reversion—the morals and values that bind us to a culture of life slowly fade away. They are still there, of course, gossamer-like and tenuous, which is why Kathy Tran, the Fairfax County delegate to the Virginia Assembly who sponsored a bill lifting all state restrictions on abortion, hesitated before admitting that her legislation authorized the termination of a pregnancy up to the moment of delivery.
I’m not sure that this is anything new as much as Trump has simply made it much more obvious.
Bill Nye
The Ignoramus Guy.
Pro tip, Bill. There are railroads in the Great White North, and they already carry food that is grown there.
Raptor
SpaceX is simplifying development to a single version to get to the moon as fast as possible. That makes sense. When it comes to the moon, the real space race is between SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Leaving California
The one thing she doesn’t mention about why people hate Californians when they move into their community; they’re afraid that they’ll bring with them the voting habits that have made the state such a disaster. I remember when we were in Austin a couple years ago, doing wine tasting in Hill Country. The tone of the conversation got distinctly chillier when they learned we were from CA. I tried to assure them that we weren’t the problem.