Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Politicos Put Graft Before Progress

18 Comments

While this is a good general topic, nowhere is it more true than in human spaceflight:

Sometimes the new competition wins anyway. Uber has been good at generating a large base of mobile customers, then using them to pressure politicians: When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio went after Uber, Uber used its app to let its users pressure de Blasio.

Happy Uber customer Kate Upton weighed in, producing more pushback than de Blasio could withstand — especially when it turned out he’d gotten over $550,000 in donations from taxicab interests.

Other services aren’t so lucky, and the ability to do an end run around regulators, though welcome, isn’t universal. And if, on top of setting up your lemonade stand, you need licenses, permits, lobbyists and subsidies to make it, not many new lemonade stands will get started. That’s good news for existing lemonade stands, and for the politicians they support, but it’s bad news for everyone else.

Including people who actually want to affordably accomplish things in space.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

$15/Hour

24 Comments

How’s that new minimum-wage working out for you, Seattle?

The notion that employees are intentionally working less to preserve their welfare has been a hot topic on talk radio. While the claims are difficult to track, state stats indeed suggest few are moving off welfare programs under the new wage.

Despite a booming economy throughout western Washington, the state’s welfare caseload has dropped very little since the higher wage phase began in Seattle in April. In March 130,851 people were enrolled in the Basic Food program. In April, the caseload dropped to 130,376.

At the same time, prices appear to be going up on just about everything.

Some restaurants have tacked on a 15 percent surcharge to cover the higher wages. And some managers are no longer encouraging customers to tip, leading to a redistribution of income. Workers in the back of the kitchen, such as dishwashers and cooks, are getting paid more, but servers who rely on tips are seeing a pay cut.

Some long-time Seattle restaurants have closed altogether, though none of the owners publicly blamed the minimum wage law.

“It’s what happens when the government imposes a restriction on the labor market that normally wouldn’t be there, and marginal businesses get hit the hardest, and usually those are small, neighborhood businesses,” said Paul Guppy, of the Washington Policy Center.

And then there was this exchange I had with Asantha Cooray over on Twitter earlier in the week:

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Good Space Policy Advice

18 Comments

Stephen Smith has some for the presidential candidates:

U.S. Census statistics show that more people alive now were born after Apollo (185 million) than before (123 million). For the majority of the population, the 1960s Space Age is a page in a history book, and has little personal emotional resonance.

So do yourself and the nation a favor. Don’t invoke Kennedy.

As your campaign staff develops its space policy white paper, begin with a fundamental question — why should people be in space?

Yes.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Socialism In The US

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It’s been making a big comeback. And yes, corporatism is socialism. In fact, it could be said to be a form of national socialism. It sure as hell has nothing to do with the free market.

[Update a few minutes later]

Is Donald Trump a fascist?

I just heard Trump speak live. The speech lasted an hour, and my jaw was on the floor most of the time. I’ve never before witnessed such a brazen display of nativistic jingoism, along with a complete disregard for economic reality. It was an awesome experience, a perfect repudiation of all good sense and intellectual sobriety.

Yes, he is. But no more so than Barack Obama.

Or Hillary Clinton.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

SLS

22 Comments

Let the fisking commence: Continue reading SLS →

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Bernie Sanders

11 Comments

I have to say, I admire his honesty:

There are very few unspoken rules among major-party candidates for president, and Bernie Sanders is breaking one of them. He’s saying that America’s leaders shouldn’t worry so much about economic growth if that growth serves to enrich only the wealthiest Americans.

“Our economic goals have to be redistributing a significant amount of [wealth] back from the top 1 percent,” Sanders said in a recent interview, even if that redistribution slows the economy overall.

“Unchecked growth – especially when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent – is absurd,” he said. “Where we’ve got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but we’ve got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for all of our people. In other words, if people have health care as a right, as do the people of every other major country, then there’s less worry about growth. If people have educational opportunity and their kids can go to college and they have child care, then there’s less worry about growth for the sake of growth.”

Socialists don’t understand that in order for wealth to be redistributed, it has to be created.

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

How To Stop A Centralized Bureaucracy

28 Comments

Math:

The only thing that will upend the carefully crafted apple cart the political bosses have set up is math. The math that Mark talks about in the Soundcloud clip I posted is rapidly becoming a reality in states like Illinois. The answer from Democratic politicians has been to look for ways to increase taxes and fees to keep the shell game going. None of them have cut the size and scope of government. None of them have deregulated anything to allow more choice and freedom for people. Interestingly, the United States federal budget allocates 62% of all spending to entitlements, and the number will rise dramatically with Obamacare. It’s totally unsustainable but the crony capitalists in Washington don’t care about it. They’ll be fine.

They were told there would be no math.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Suburbia

6 Comments

Countering the Left’s assault on it:

…if the American Dream is not dead among the citizens, is trying to kill it good politics? It’s clear that Democratic constituencies, notably millennials, immigrants and minorities, and increasingly gays—particularly gay couples—are flocking to suburbs. This is true even in metropolitan San Francisco, where 40 percent of same-sex couples live outside the city limits.

One has to wonder how enthusiastic these constituents will be when their new communities are “transformed” by federal social engineers. One particularly troubling group may be affluent liberals in strongholds such as Marin County, north of San Francisco, long a reliable bastion of progressive ideology.

Forced densification–the ultimate goal of the “smart growth” movement—also has inspired opposition in Los Angeles, where densification is being opposed in many neighborhoods, as well as traditionally more conservative Orange Country. Similar opposition has arisen in Northern Virginia suburbs, another key Democratic stronghold.

If Republicans were smart, they’d make this a major campaign issue. So they probably won’t.

[Update a while later]

Hey, Obama, want to force communities to integrate? Start with Chappaqua.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Democrats turn hard Left.

I think they may find that they had bad timing. I certainly hope so.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

SpaceX’s Path To Reliability

29 Comments

Doug Messier has a long but useful piece on the current state of affairs.

We’ve been trapped in a moribund, high-cost space-transportation industry for decades because the cost of each flight is so high that it doesn’t allow for anything resembling real flight test. That has traditionally meant that much verification of design is by analysis, rather than test, and design changes are careful and rare. Working on more of a software model with frequent upgrades, SpaceX has broken that mold, with probably every vehicle slightly different, continuously improving the system, but walking a fine line with risk of failure from something new and untested. But a software change rarely has unrecoverable catastrophic consequences, as a rocket launch can. I suspect that ultimately the finding will be that such a change had an unanticipated effect that caused the recent loss.

ULA can’t (or at least traditionally hasn’t been able to follow) the same philosophy because of the conservatism of its customer, which values reliability above all else for its expensive, critical payloads. This makes it difficult to quickly evolve its own designs (one of the reasons, no doubt, that Tory Bruno wants a new rocket, rather than a re-engined Atlas that he knows won’t be competitive with SpaceX). One of the challenges they will have is how to break out of that mode.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

All But Dissertation

12 Comments

…and happy with it:

Grad school became a financial burden after I took my full-time job in industry. Although my salary tripled and I’m a frugal and financially responsible person, my school expenses became too much for me to handle without taking on student loans, something I hadn’t done since undergrad. I managed to avoid student loans by depleting my savings.

After I left my university department’s employment as a graduate research assistant, I was responsible for my tuition payments. I was only enrolled in 3 credits per semester for a doctoral research course, basically, a symbolic class for the privilege of calling myself a doctoral student. Unfortunately, once I left my department’s protection, the university saw me as a dollar sign instead of a person. They used a loophole to unfairly charge me over triple the tuition rate, and even my protest to the university president landed on deaf ears because universities are all about profit (and I attended a public university!).

Had I been charged a fair tuition rate, I would have been able to afford to stay enrolled in grad school indefinitely and may have eventually finished. The greed of the university forced me to make my decision to quit when I did, which may have been a good thing in the long run because I didn’t drag it out too long. To this day, I regret paying that last semester’s tuition, as that money would have served me much better in my savings account.

The current higher-educational system, fueled by the student-loan system, has become, with exceptions, a massive scam.