Megan Gannon has another article on this past weekend’s DC-X meeting in Alamagordo.
Category Archives: Economics
Mad-Men Economics
No, we can’t return to those ridiculously high post-war tax rates (which few people paid, anyway).
California’s High-Speed Pork Project
Will Elon Musk kill it?
Let’s hope.
A MannSuit Update
Jonathan Adler analyzes the current state of play.
Expect some breaking news (and good news, as far as I’m concerned) in the next couple days.
A Nuclear Reactor
…competitive with natural gas.
That’s quite a trick, considering how cheap fracking is making gas.
[Update a few minutes later]
Wrong link, fixed now. Sorry!
We Need To Burn More Coal
At first glance, it would appear that the largest recent contribution to global warming is clean-air laws. Fortunately, China is continuing to help with their coal plants.
A Libertarian Moment
Is America having one?
Let’s hope.
The Airline Business
I have a late-afternoon flight out of Tucson to LAX, but the business that I thought I had in Tucson today has fallen through. There’s a morning flight with seats available.
In days of yore, American would have let me go standby on an earlier flight same day with no change fee, which makes business sense, because if they can satisfy their commitment to me to get me where I want to go earlier at essentially no cost other than fuel to carry my weight (assuming that the flight isn’t full), they have an opportunity to sell my seat (at $252 according to a quick check) on the later flight.
Apparently, the suits have decided that they’d rather charge me $75 bucks for the change. Now, it would be nice to get home earlier, but it’s not worth $75 to me, because I can do work here and just catch the later flight. So they just lost the opportunity to sell that seat on the afternoon flight. I guess they think this makes business sense, and maybe they have revenue models that indicates it does, but I’m annoyed.
DC-X At Twenty
I’ve been at a celebration/workshop since Friday to commemorate the first flight of a radical new vehicle back in 1993 (which I attended at the time — it was just two or three months after I resigned from Rockwell International to try to be entrepreneurial).
Here’s an article about it by my (new) friend Megan Gannon at Space.com.
Shale Gas
…is Rearden metal:
Rand’s fictional progressives don’t want Reardon Metal to succeed any more than their modern, real-life equivalents want shale gas to succeed.
Why not? For the same rag-bag of made-up, disingenuous reasons which progressives have used to justify their war on progress since time immemorial: it’s unfair, it uses up scarce resources, it might be dangerous. Rand doesn’t actually use the phrase “the precautionary principle.” But this is exactly what she is describing in the book when various vested interests – the corporatists in bed with big government, the politicised junk-scientists at the Institute of Science (aka, in our world, the National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society), the unions – try to close down the nascent technology using the flimsiest of excuses.
It was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.