Will they put human prostitutes out of business?
This sort of begs the question of what will be a sexbot and what will be a human in the future.
Category Archives: Economics
The Next ObamaCare Lie
The Dems don’t really want to “fix it.” Every attempt to make a legislative change has been blocked in the Senate. Don’t let them get away with it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Hey, remember when Dems thought that the VA was a great model for government health care?
But they continue to pine for single payer, and surreptitiously or otherwise hope that the ObamaCare debacle will push us in that direction.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More problems and arguments lie ahead:
…the vast middle ground of “modify the law without repealing it” is terra incognita. It is as accurate as Burns’s formulation, and no less precise, to say that those who want to leave the law as it is are outnumbered more than 5 to 1 by those who want to repeal or change it.
There’s an additional ambiguity: What does it mean to leave the law “unchanged” when the Supreme Court has already struck down parts of it and the administration has declined to follow or enforce others? That’s not a salient question for immediate electoral purposes; in terms of voting intention, “left unchanged” can be taken as a statement of support for the Democrats. But even if the statutory language proves resistant to any effort at modification, there will be a new administration after 2016. That could mean more discretionary (or extralegal) changes and perhaps the end of ObamaCare as we know it.
“ObamaCare as we know it” is also an ambiguous turn of phrase, to say the least, for what do we know of ObamaCare? A few provisions are relatively straightforward, such as the expansion of Medicaid eligibility (in those states that have gone along with it) and the mandate that family insurance plans cover 23-, 24- and 25-year-old children of policyholders.
But the whole of ObamaCare is an insanely complicated scheme that even experts are still struggling to understand. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it–away from the fog of the controversy,” then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said in March 2010. We’ll be finding out for many years to come, and there’s no reason to think that “fog” will ever lift.
The only way to lift the fog is to blow it all away.
[Update a few minutes later]
And then there’s this:
“The IRS isn’t likely to bring such proceedings to earn a pittance,” Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan, tells McIntyre. Then again, it wasn’t money the Obama IRS was after when it embarked on a campaign of harassment against conservative nonprofit organizations. These ObamaCare penalties may be too draconian to be applied generally, but applied selectively, they could be a powerful weapon of an abusive administration.
This administration is nothing if not abusive of the weapons at its disposal.
Forget Safety, We Need Our Own Spaceships
I have a follow-up to my Friday USA Today column, over at The Corner.
[Update a few minutes later]
At the suggestion of a colleague, lest I appear to be advocating kamikaze missions, the suggested language for the legislation might be: “The exploration and development of space is a national priority. Therefore, NASA’s first priority must be mission success in the critical steps toward reaching this goal. Consistent with this priority NASA shall strive at all times to achieve a level of safety comparable to that enjoyed by other critical national programs in extreme environments, such as deep-ocean and polar activities.”
The challenge and onus would then be on NASA and Congress to say why that is not a reasonable standard (which is currently met without all of NASA’s ridiculous safety/cost-plus/certification rigmarole).
The Space Movement
Is it moribund, and losing ground?
I’m not sure it matters, except to the degree that it influences government policy. Ultimately, it’s going to happen privately, if the government doesn’t prevent it. The flaw of past thinking of the movement was the notion that NASA was going to lead the way, and that it would need more money to do so. It’s pretty clear that that was never a realistic possibility.
The Russians Hold The Trump Card
Eric Berger has started a series on the space-policy mess, over at the Houston Chronicle. I hope he’ll get into the safety issue.
A Space-Socialist Republican
Greg Autry is sort of singing my tune:
If NASA were compelled to “downselect” Commercial Crew to a single vendor, Washington power politics would clearly favor Boeing’s CST-100 capsule, a luxurious spacecraft, that while it has never flown, is on track for some unmanned flights to the ISS in about three years. This leisurely development schedule puts no pressure on SLS. While it is surely coincidently that both the SLS and CST-100 programs are headquartered in Houston, we are lucky to have Messrs. La Branche and Culberson standing between us and the utter chaos of free market competition.
…Frankly, DragonRider could fly to the ISS next month if it were subject to the same expectations of safety as NASA’s Space Shuttle. A truly conservative response to Mr. Rogozin would be to announce that the United States is ready to move a DragonRider launch forward without further testing, send eight Navy Seals to the ISS and “liberate” our space station from Russia’s state capitalist squatters.
Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far. But that’s Greg.
Crony Capitalism
The GOP needs to fight it by becoming the party of innovation:
This revelation, that new small businesses primarily create jobs and economic growth, demands a complete rethinking of economic policy for the United States. If Republicans understand this and thereby embrace the mantle of innovation, not only will they be expediting a new wave of ingenuity, but they will also share credit with entrepreneurs for the next tech boom.
This requires creating a regulatory and legal climate that fosters “permission-less innovation.” True innovators often can’t afford—either in terms of money or mental energy—to hire lobbyists and change the law. Entrepreneurs should not be wasting their start-up capital on lawyers, consultants, and PAC donations.
Given the stakes—the future of the economy—a political party that is not serious about technology and innovation is a party that is not serious about economic growth and job creation. Thus far, the Republican Party is not serious about technology and innovation. Republicans talk about regulatory reform but in practice do little about it.
Good luck with that, for the Stupid Party.
A New Space-Settlement Initiative
…will be announced on FridaySaturday. I’ll probably be there, since I’m speaking the day before.
The Antarctic Ice Sheet
OK, there seems to be a Twitter panic going on, so I went and read Alan Boyle’s story about it. That was the first time I heard that (even if the models are valid) the problem is two hundred years off.
Isn’t there anyone out there who understands discount rates?
[Update a while later]
Here’s more detail from John Timmer:
Even in the short term, the new findings should increase our estimates for sea level rise by the end of the century, the scientists suggest. But the ongoing process of retreat and destabilization will mean that the area will contribute to rising oceans for centuries.
Sorry, but I’m not going to worry about “rising oceans for centuries” today. Even the end of the century is effectively discounted to zero. It’s economically insane to reduce economic growth now to prevent something that won’t happen for decades.
[Late afternoon update]
As I noted on Twitter earlier:
Not sure that the warm-mongers realize that the ice-sheet story completely obliterates their argument for CO2 reduction. #Inevitable
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) May 12, 2014
If the sea rise is really inevitable, then it makes no sense to mitigate carbon to prevent it, when we'll need the future wealth to deal.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) May 12, 2014
Cognitive Biases
The top ones that prevent us from being rational.