Japan and Europe are cooperating on a pre-cooled turbojet.
Unfortunately, they seem to be ignoring the real issue, which is drag and fuel consumption. I think that Mach 5 is above the sweet spot for a practical system.
Category Archives: Economics
3-D Printing
Finally goes true 3-D.
It’s finally starting to feel like the 21st century.
[Update a while later]
Aaaaaannnd, self-flying cars by 2017?
Seems a little optimistic, but if we’re going to have flying cars, they’ll have to be self flying.
[Mid-morning update]
Aaaaand, molecular 3-D printers. The future is looking very interesting. Both in the conventional and the Chinese sense.
[Late-morning update]
Aaaaannnd, lab-grown chicken meat?
That would be huge breakthrough for both earth and space. I’d really like to see it for pork, though. Technically, would lab-grown pork be kosher? Or halal?
Mars Or Bust, Or Mars One, Busted?
Thoughts from Laura Seward Forczyk. As she notes, media hype about SLS/Orion getting anyone to Mars is greatly exaggerated, with the connivance of NASA PAO.
California’s Social Priorities
…are pretty screwed up:
California continues to lead the country, and by some measures even the world, in environmental quality and climate change initiatives. But public policy must evolve to leverage these environmental achievements into corresponding improvements in educational attainment and middle class job creation. With more than 18% of the nation’s poor, and less than 1%3 of global greenhouse gas emissions, California should also embrace the challenge of leading the world in the creation of middle class manufacturing jobs for the rapidly evolving clean and green technology that California’s laws mandate, California’s educational and technology sectors invent, and California’s venture capital investors bring to the global market.
Instead, California’s policies, and regulatory and legal costs and uncertainties, tend to divert thousands of middle class jobs even in emerging green industries (including those not requiring high school diplomas) to other locations, including the Tesla battery manufacturing facility, which moved to Nevada. The loss of projects that help achieve important environmental objectives, create high quality jobs, and comply with California’s strict environmental and public health protection mandates, continues to occur in part because well-funded special interest groups ranging from business competitors to labor unions file “environmental” lawsuits as leverage for achieving narrow political or pecuniary objectives rather than to protect the environment and public health. This study suggests that the state must work much harder to ensure that California’s landmark environmental laws are not misused or pursued in a manner that adversely affects other, equally important policy priorities for California’s large undereducated and underemployed population.
The idiotic carbon law is going to do huge harm to the economy and the middle class, while doing nothing about “climate change.”
[Monday-morning update]
A tale of four droughts. All true, but, as Paul Dietz notes in comments, the biggest problem is that there is no rational water market in the state.
[Bumped]
Restaurants In Seattle
…going dark as a $15 wage looms.
Morons. I find it particularly amusing that they are so precise in what they think the right number is, with Obama’s imbecilic $10.10. It’s like when Roosevelt arbitrarily raised the price of gold twenty-one cents “because it was three times seven.”
BEAM
Leonard David has the story of yesterday’s roll out in North Las Vegas.
In my view, there were three events in human spaceflight this week. The SRB firing, BEAM, and the announcement by Lockheed Martin of a long-needed space tug. Only the latter two have any relevance to the future.
California’s Water
There’s one year left, if we don’t get a wet winter.
A sane electorate would start fracking the hell out of the Monterey Shale, opening up wells of shore, and use the energy to run desalinization plants, instead of wrecking the state economy with carbon mitigation that will have zero effect on the climate, and building high-speed rail.
So we won’t be doing that. Not yet, anyway.
How To Boil A Journalist
Some thoughts on the evolving “consensus” on climate science:
…there never has been a “crunch point” forcing journalists to re-examine the issue. Instead they have just kept the same ridiculous views for over a decade even though no sane journalist coming to the subject of “global warming” after 18 years of pause, complete failure of climate models, global ice back at normal levels, no increase in climate extremes, a decrease in hurricanes and children still knowing what snow is … no journalist would swallow this non-science about doomsday warming in the face of NO EVIDENCE to support it. (Rookies might be more sceptical, but they probably quickly get indoctrinated into the journalists alarmists views)
They don’t ever look at global warming afresh. They just keep believing the same non-science they have for over a decade despite the overwhelming evidence against their insane views.
The fever (to borrow a metaphor from the alarmist-in-chief) will have to break at some point.
[Update a while later]
Naomi Klein showcases everything that is wrong with climate alarmism.
The Commercial Space Industry
It looks to Dan Rasky as though it’s literally about to erupt.
I do think it’s probably figuratively, though.
Annals Of Higher Education
This is what the past decades have wrought. The federal student loan program has been an unmitigated disaster for almost everyone, except (so far) the university administrators.