People are not rational about risk.
Category Archives: Economics
This Morning’s Historic Launch (And Landing)
Tim Fernholz provides some perpsective.
My FISO Telecon
I talked about the book in the context of recent events. The slides and audio are available for download now. There was a glitch partway through in which everything was echoing, not sure if they edited that part out or not.
The Climate Cover Up
I was amused to hear about the panic of “scientists” in the government “protecting” from the Trump administration data they’ve been hiding for years. But here’s a comprehensive round up of their rewriting the past.
A Taxonomy Of Uncertainty
This is a beautiful taxonomy. The root of a great deal of suffering is people believing their field is level 3, when it's actually level 4. pic.twitter.com/8yg2sRocNL
— Will Wilson (@WAWilsonIV) February 15, 2017
Climate science is currently somewhere between levels 4 and 5, but many (particularly ignorant adherents of the climate religion) think that it’s at 2 or 1.
Making In Space
Here’s a nice survey of advances in orbital manufacturing. What goes unsaid is that this further obviates the need for heavy-lift systems.
Risk In Human Spaceflight
I didn’t make it to the conference in time to hear him, but I was told a couple weeks ago that Bill Gerstenmeier would be talking about many of the themes of my book. He apparently did. I would note though, that “loss of crew” isn’t just probability of killing crew; it also includes causing a career-ending injury.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: With new types of launch systems, we’re discovering new causes of launch failure, even after almost sixty years of orbital spaceflight.
Oroville
A photo essay of the incompetence of California state officials, who are too busy building trains to nowhere to worry about properly maintaining the infrastructure they have.
[Update a few minutes later]
The threat of the dam failure prompts the evacuation of Marysville, and Yuba, Butte and Sutter counties. Funny, I don’t recall a nuclear plant ever having that kind of widespread effect.
AI
The huge economic issue that no one in Washington is talking about:
Driverless trucks delivering goods to fully automated warehouses and loading docks. Drones delivering everything from pizza to furniture. Offices will become almost fully automated as work is farmed out to smart machines. There’s even speculation that AI could take the place of reporters and editors, writing copy with more speed and less bias than humans.
Most of these innovations are not far off. What’s worse, our schools are stuck in a time warp, teaching kids as if it was the 1970s, sending them to college where they major in English Lit or Environmental Management. How many of these young people would be better off going to a trade school and learning a valuable skill that would be useful in the new economy?
What’s needed is a revolution. Not rage against the machines, but a clear-eyed recognition in society from top to bottom that we can’t go back. The days when you could graduate from high school and go to work for 40 years in the local plant, earning a good middle-class wage and being able to buy into the American dream, are gone forever. Donald Trump can’t bring them back. The Democrats can’t bring them back. The unions can’t bring them back.
Nope.
Federal Bureaucrats
…are disconsolate over the repeal of their regulations.
Good.
#ProTip: Many of them aren't civil servants. They think we're their servants. Especially at the EPA. https://t.co/7iLVgCEnyp
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) February 12, 2017
[Update a while later]
This is an amusing argument. And by “amusing,” I mean stupid:
Pizarchik is already working on ideas to write a new version of the stream rule under a future president, though he declined to share any details. He also hinted someone could mount a constitutional challenge to the review act itself, which critics have long argued tramples on the separation of powers.
“I believe there’s a good chance that, in a legal challenge, that a court will overturn Congress’ actions here as an unconstitutional usurpation of the executive branch’s powers,” he said.
So let me get this straight. He thinks that Congress repealing a rule arising from a law passed by Congress, per another law passed by Congress, is a usurpation of the executive branch’s powers? Hokay…
Do you know what’s a real usurpation of separation of powers? Unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats taking over the legislative function through rule making.
[Update a few minutes later]
As a (female) friend told me last week in DC, I bathe in and drink their tears every night:
“It’s almost a sense of dread, as in, what will happen to us,” said Gabrielle Martin, a trial lawyer and 30-year veteran at the Denver office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where colleagues now share daily, grim predictions about the fate of their jobs under Mr. Trump’s leadership.
“It’s like the movie music when the shark is coming,” Ms. Martin said, referring to “Jaws,” the 1975 thriller. “People are just wary — is the shark going to come up out of the water?”
Very soon, I hope.