This looks like an interesting plan, but it’s not clear that making it a tourist destination would be compatible with its current R&D activities.
Category Archives: Economics
Official Unemployment Numbers
Yes, I’m shocked, too.
Commercial Crew
Jeff Greason says it’s crucial to maintain competition.
ObamaCare
Six reasons it can help the GOP win the senate.
Against Editors
Here is the traditional career track for someone employed in journalism: first, you are a writer. If you hang on, and don’t wash out, and manage not to get laid off, and don’t alienate too many people, at some point you will be promoted to an editor position. It is really a two-step career journey, in the writing world. Writing, then editing. You don’t have to accept a promotion to an editing position of course. You don’t have to send your kids to college and pay a mortgage, necessarily. If you want to get regular promotions and raises, you will, for the most part, accept the fact that your path takes you away from writing and into editing, in some form. The number of pure writing positions that offer salaries as high as top editing positions is vanishingly small. Most well-paid writers are celebrities in the writing world. That is how few of them there are.
Here is the problem with this career path: writing and editing are two completely different skills. There are good writers who are terrible editors. (Indeed, some of the worst editors are good writers!) There are good editors who lack the creativity and antisocial personality disorders that would make them great writers. This is okay. This is natural. It is thoroughly unremarkable for an industry to have different positions that require different skill sets. The problem in the writing world is that, in order to move up, the writer must stop doing what he did well in the first place and transition into an editing job that he may or may not have any aptitude for.
Engineering has a similar problem, in that if you want to advance, you often have to go into management, even though a lot of good engineers are terrible managers.
The Job Crisis
Unlike Clinton’s lies in 1992, this really is the worst economy since the Depression. And for many of the same reasons — government meddling in it.
Extraterrestrial Resources
The next Mars rover will generate oxygen from the atmosphere.
It’s a small step, but a lot better than nothing.
Reagan Versus Obama
Comparing the economic legacies.
It’s not really fair, though. One president knew how to allow the economy to create wealth. The other only knows about, and cares about, redistributing it.
[Friday-morning update]
Post recession, one third of Americans think they’re worse off.
Pretty sure the polling wouldn’t have indicated that in 1986. Of course, the Obama defenders will say that those deluded people have false consciousness.
[Bumped]
When Regulation Kills
Let Africa have a potential weapon against ebola.
The overcautiousness over the past half century as a result of thalidomide has probably killed millions.
Millennials And Workforce Participation
Remember when Bill Clinton lied his way into office in 1992, claiming that it was the “worst economy in fifty years” when in fact it hadn’t been that bad and the recession had actually ended? Well, it really really is the worst economy in seventy years now, and it’s due to the kind of government interference in the economy and war on business that caused it the last time, in the Roosevelt administration:
It seems rather perplexing that the Los Angeles Times could try to creatively rename unemployed millennials trying to survive by working a bunch of “off-the-books jobs for cash to survive as ‘freelancing’”. But the simple facts are that businesses have adapted to the Obama Administration’s taxes, regulations, and the “Affordable Care Act.” Add the burden of Governor Brown’s tax increase to the highest level in the nation, and California millennials are rewarded, according to the Times, with “16.2% of Californians — or about 6.2 million — were either jobless, too discouraged to seek work, working less than they’d like, or in off-the-books jobs.”
It’s not actually perplexing at all, of course.
[Update a few minutes later]
Three quarters of Americans think that their childrens’ lives will be worse than theirs.
They will, if we don’t get a huge change in direction, back to the Republic and liberty.
[Update a few more minutes later]
From apathy to dependence:
Tyler went on to suggest that democracies tended to go through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
It’s ironic that it was Joe Biden who said that it was the Republicans who “wanted to put y’all back in chains.”
[Update a while later]
First link was wrong. Fixed now.
[Update a couple minutes later]
A glimmer of hope from the generation that has been the most abused by these little tyrants:
“An overwhelming majority of these Millennial-aged voters actually think government aid does more harm than good, that the government is at its max when it comes to helping the poor, and – get this – that people on the government dole have it way too easy.”
Being underemployed and underpaid while having to support people who don’t work at all will have that effect.