Jeff Foust’s take. I’ll be talking about this on The Space Show on Sunday.
Category Archives: Economics
Post-Election Thoughts
In no particular order:
1) Despite his “approval rating,” this was an utter repudiation of the last eight years (and to a lesser degree, the previous eight years under Bush). Trump is Obama’s “legacy.”
2) I hope, and even expect, that Giuliani will be the next AG. He will take the handcuffs off the FBI, and finally get to the bottom of all of the Obama lawlessness as well as hers. In the spirit of reconciliation, Trump should offer her a pardon, on condition they shut down the foundation, and she exit our lives.
3) There will obviously be no post-election confirmation of Garland. Ginsburg and Breyer will probably be rethinking their retirement plans.
4) I assume that House Republicans have a repeal and replace plan to give to Trump in January.
5) Expect a flurry of executive orders undoing much of Obama’s lawlessness in the first week.
More anon.
[Update a few minutes later]
Will “liberals” finally discover the appeal of limited government?
[Update a few minutes later]
Predictably, embittered Democrats engage in racist outbursts. Well, this is nothing new; they have historically been the party of racism.
[Update a couple minutes later]
What "uncertainty"? It's dead, Jim. https://t.co/1UwLXbRfln
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) November 9, 2016
[Update a couple more minutes later]
Would’t accepting a last-minute pardon from Obama be a tacit admission that someone did something wrong? That’s why Nixon didn’t necessarily want one.
[Update a while later]
It occurs to me that now that the crime family has no favors to offer, the donations to the Clinton Crime Foundation will start to, or immediately dry up.
Unlike Hillary, @KellyannePolls is clearly a woman of high historic actual accomplishment.
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) November 9, 2016
[Late-morning update]
Yes, a large part of Trump’s appeal is a backlash against the fascism of political correctness.
O’Neill Space Colonies
It’s seemed clear for a while, but Jeff Bezos has now said explicitly that that’s his vision for humanity’s future in space. While Elon remains a planetary chauvinist. Fortunately, there’s room for both visions.
SLS
Bob Zimmerman has some thoughts on potential upcoming (and unsurprising, since it doesn’t really matter whether or not it actually flies) schedule slips:
…it means that it will have literally taken NASA two decades to build and fly a single manned Orion capsule, beginning when George Bush ordered the construction of the Crew Exploration Vehicle in January 2004.
Plenty of time to take it behind the barn and put it out of its misery.
Molten-Salt Reactors
Yes, we could use them both here and on Mars.
The Rising Health Insurance Premiums
Loony leftist blames the party that didn’t vote for the legislative atrocity.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: David Harsanyi: “When Will Liberals Answer For Obamacare’s Failures? Is there any accountability in politics for being completely wrong? Not for defenders of Obamacare.”
#ProTip: They’re not “liberals.” There is nothing liberal about them.
A New Transistor
…that doesn’t need batteries. Seems like it would have applications for the outer solar system.
I have to say, after reading decades of science fiction, that it does feel like the future is arriving. For better or worse.
[Update a while later]
3-D printed magnets.
Climate McCarthyism
Wikileaks exposed it, from Podesta and Steyer:
Since the fivethirtyeight.com uproar, Pielke has quit publishing about climate change. He’s gone on to become a world-leading expert on sports and doping. He now heads the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado, which is housed within the university’s athletics department. He has more than 8,000 followers on Twitter and is an active, maybe rabid, tweeter. “I’m having a blast,” he told me. Working on climate change, he said, “you wake up, it’s the same people arguing about the same stuff. In sports, you have no idea what idea you will be writing about. . . . There’s so much going on. There’s so much upheaval.” What lessons did he learn from his stint in the climate-change discussion? He replied that the debate is “almost religious in its intensity.” Instead of having a rational discussion about the best ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the debate has become solely “about power, about who gets to speak and whose voices are deemed legitimate.” The smear campaign against him by Romm and ThinkProgress was designed “to make public speech costly.”
The lawsuit against me and others is mentioned as well. What fascists these people are.
Steven DenBeste
He was one of the greats of early blogging, and a brilliant man in many fields. I have to confess that I feel partially responsible (though I’m sure I was far from alone) in chasing him away from blogging with an ill-thought email. I think I later apologized, but if I didn’t, Steven, if you can read this, please accept my deepest apologies.
[Tuesday-morning update]
More thoughts from Jim Geraghty.
Elon’s Mars Plans
He had an AMA yesterday. I’d be more interested in this, if I gave a rat’s patoot about Mars.
I found this bit more interesting:
Musk was asked about the reusability of the Falcon 9 rockets currently flying. He stated “I think the F9 boosters could be used almost indefinitely, so long as there is scheduled maintenance and careful inspections.” He emphasized that the current Falcon 9 rockets in production would be retired soon and that their next version would be designed for easy reuse. The new Falcon 9, which he calls “Falcon 9 Block 5” – the fifth and final version in the Falcon series, is scheduled to have its first flight in six to eight months.
I assume the cores for the heavy will be of similar design. I wonder how often “careful inspections” need to occur? Every flight?