Category Archives: Economics
Risk Aversion
…costs more than fast failure.
This is about defense, but it applies to space as well. NASA in particular suffers from paralysis by analysis, as demonstrated by how long and how much money it took to do that stupid Orion test flight last year (and how long and how much more money it will be until the next one). But it doesn’t matter, because Congress doesn’t really care if anything is accomplished as long as the jobs don’t go away. I may expand on this in the next edition of the book.
Electric Cars
It’s time to end our “green” worship of them.
Top Box
Whenever I hear about records for box office, I always wonder if they really are, in terms of inflation adjustment. Well, here’s the top ten with that adjustment. There are a few surprises, but I’m not at all surprised that Gone With The Wind is number one.
The Climate Warriors At The UN
They’ve revealed their end game:
…that is why the global warming scare is so hard to kill. The end game is world domination. With such a big prize – the biggest possible, facts aren’t even inconvenient. They are not part of the process. It has been a long slog but gird your loins for a battle that might last into mid-century. Lima was COP 20 and Ms Figueres is prepared to take it to COP 40.
Yup. It’s been a long time since it had anything to do with actual science.
ObamaCare
Why libertarians hate it.
Much of the health-care system was a huge infringement on liberty even before it passed. This just made it worse.
Robots
Sixty-one amazing things they can do now.
The implications for military applications are pretty terrifying.
Climate Skeptics
How and when did you become one?
A lot of interesting responses.
As some note there, to me the biggest deal with the release of the CRU data five years ago wasn’t (just) the duplicity and unscientific behavior revealed in the emails, but the utter crap that was the source code of the computer models. It was clear that it was not done by anyone familiar with computer science, numerical methods, or modeling, and the notion that we should have any confidence whatsoever in their output was societally insane. In terms of Matthews’ paper, I’d put myself somewhere between “lukewarmer” and “moderate skeptic.”
[Update a couple minutes later]
Starting to read through the comments. Here’s just one horror story:
Most of the claims being made by climate change advocates appear to run contrary to basic meteorology. As I’ve been attacked personally and professionally for offering contrary views, I decided to leave the field. I will defend my Atmospheric Science PhD thesis and walk away. It’s become clear to me that it is not possible to undertake independent research in any area that touches upon climate change if you have to make your living as a professional scientist on government grant money or have to rely on getting tenure at a university. The massive group think that I have encountered on this topic has cost me my career, many colleagues and has damaged my reputation among the few people I know in the field. I’m leaving to work in the financial industry. It’s a sad day when you feel that you have to leave a field that you are passionately interested in because you fear that you won’t be able to find a job once your views become widely known. Until free thought is allowed in the climate sciences, I will consider myself a skeptic of catastrophic human induced global warming.
Yup. Totally, totally politicized. It’s not a science any more. Unless you think that Lysenko was a scientist.
Asteroid Retrieval
Over at Space News, Jon Goff has ten reasons it’s a good idea.
I agree with all of them. I’m not opposed to ARM per se, except to the degree (and it’s unfortunately a large one) that the primary reason for it is to justify SLS/Orion.
The Democrats’ Green-Energy Dream
…may be turning out to be a nightmare. But as Instapundit notes, it provided a lot of good opportunities for graft for years.
[Update a few minutes later]
The dark underside of big-money insider politics that dominates the green-energy movement.