Wow. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a single piece so rife with them. Not sure it’s worth my while to fisk it, but others can have at it in comments.
Here are just a few (ignoring his misstatement of the purpose of government in the very first sentence):
The spin-off benefits of human spaceflight exceeds the cost.
We don’t spend any money in space, it’s all spent on earth.
We need giant government projects.
Why are we spending money on bullets instead of what I want to spend it on?
Jeff Foust reports on Mark Albrecht’s diagnosis of NASA’s ills. And in comments over there, Mark Whittington once again demonstrates himself to be a tinkerbell.
Did the nation invest a hundred billion dollars in Colorado Springs? What will the effect be on foreign policy if it burns? Shouldn’t safety be the highest priority for our firefighters? Don’t their lives have infinite value? Why are we risking their lives in fighting this fire?
Because the Obama campaign knows that one of its most important constituencies is economically illiterate yokels — a demographic to which the president himself apparently belongs — it is on the airwaves claiming “Romney’s never stood up to China — all he’s ever done is send them our jobs.’’ (Whose?) The Obama campaign cites a Washington Post story on the subject, and the Romney campaign has noted that the folks over at WaPo did not distinguish between outsourcing and offshoring (and, indeed, the story is not a very smart one — do read it and see). Obama responded thus: “Yesterday, his advisers tried to clear this up by telling us that there was a difference between ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ Seriously. You can’t make that up.” And indeed you wouldn’t have to make it up, because it is a real thing: different words with different meanings. (Seriously, can we get this guy a library card?)
To be fair, he’s ignorant about business and economics in general. And it shows in his policies.
…why not just legalize prostitution. Legal prostitution is safer and healthier, and it’ll provide employment opportunities for some of those unemployed college grads.
It’s not like it goes away if you make it illegal.
Yeah, I know. I’m just being a crazy “right winger,” as usual.
…cannot hold together. With France joining the rest of the PIIGs, it’s hard to see survival of the Euro, except perhaps in Germany and the Netherlands. They may reach a point at which it just makes sense to go back to the guilder and deutschemark.
In reading this article about whether or not there’s money to be made on the moon, I came across this link, with an estimate from about three years ago of the cost of a lunar base.
The numbers seem way high to me, but of course, they’re based on Constellation. But I can never get over the cost estimate for Altair. Twelve billion dollars to develop a lander? How can that possibly be? The only way I can think that they came up with that is to look at the LEM costs in the sixties, and scale them up in both size and current-year dollars. Which is a completely useless way to do it.