Looks like Bezos really is shaking things up. I’ll be curious to see what it does for their circulation.
Category Archives: Economics
New Business Creation
We’re not number one:
A new study by the World Bank and the International Finance Corp. found that the U.S. ranks well behind countries like Rwanda, Belarus and Azerbaijan in terms of how easy it is for an entrepreneur to start a new business. The U.S. did narrowly beat Uzbekistan, though.
So we have that going for us.
Space Journalism
Why oh why do reporters imagine that cosmologists know anything about spacecraft?
Dr Xing Li, an Aberystwyth University expert on astrophysics and cosmology, said as a scientist it would be “beautiful” to be one of SpaceShipTwo’s privileged passengers.
But SpaceShipTwo travels at a super-sonic 2,500mph – more than four times faster than a passenger jet – and Dr Li believes it’s difficult to imagine anything that goes at that speed becoming affordable.
He said: “Now we don’t have supersonic flights because of the cost issue. At the moment I don’t see that it will be possible even in 30 or 40 years. It will only happen if we have some technological advance that would bring down the cost.”
Ask a frickin’ engineer, not a scientist.
Up With The Poor
Down with the LA Times.
It really is embarrassing that we have such an awful newspaper in the second-largest city in the country. Of course, the one in the largest city is pretty bad, too.
ObamaCare
Resolved: It is now beyond rescue.
The question is, will what replaces it be even worse?
ASAP And My Book
Over at Space Politics, Jeff Foust follows up on his book review from yesterday.
Green Energy In Germany
German businesses are considering jumping ship for cheaper energy prices in the developing world or (gasp!) the United States. For households, these subsidies have acted like a particularly regressive tax. The poor [more] feel the bite of higher electricity bills than do the rich. Germany’s new energy and economy minister Sigmar Gabriel is expected to announce a plan to cut renewable energy subsidies later this week in an effort to keep electricity prices down. That will be a step in the right direction, but significant damage has already been done.
And all in the name of junk science and pseudo-religion.
More on the EU’s turnaround at Der Spiegel.
China’s Shadow-Bank Bubble
Is it about to pop?
If too many shadow lenders go under, China’s credit-dependent economy might slow down too much. Of course, this might happen no matter what the government does. Shadow banks have made so many loans the past five years that it’s hard to believe a lot of them won’t go bad. They can borrow more money to try to hide any losses, but that wouldn’t be easy if inflation and interest rates rise. The worst of the worst would go bust, and people might panic once they discover that their guaranteed returns were neither. They might already be. China’s biggest bank just announced that it won’t make investors whole after it sold them a trust product called “Credit Equals Gold #1″—yes, that’s really what it’s called—that looks likely to lose money. It’s China’s version of Wall Street selling people crappy CDOs it told them were risk-free.
Goody.
The Normal Healthy Paranoia
…of the launch business.
SpaceX has gone through quite a learning process in the past decade, and now they’re poised to take over the industry.
Safe Is Not An Option
Jeff Foust has a review of the book (in the context of last week’s release of the 2013 ASAP report, which I’ve been meaning to comment on), over at The Space Review.
[Update a while later]
And of course the server at The Space Review would go down the day that he reviews my book. I must have crashed it with my link. 😉