Category Archives: Economics
The Great Irish Hunger
Lessons learned. Hint: it wasn’t a failure of the free market.
Houston, We Have An Earmark Problem
Over at Tea in Space web site, the Senate Launch System earmark is explained:
Do the senators who authored this language have more knowledge about systems engineering than NASA employees and contractors? Do the senators who authored this language have more knowledge about acoustical flight dynamics of SRBs than NASA employees and contractors? Do the senators who authored this language have more knowledge about the inherent risks and safety of SRBs than NASA employees and contractors?
They’re no rocket scientists.
How Far Is Egypt…
…from starving?
This isn’t going to end well. Revolutions in countries with large masses of illiterates rarely do, and the naive coverage of the situation, with hopeful talk of an “Arab spring,” has been appalling.
[Early afternoon update]
Things are falling apart in Egypt pretty rapidly. As Michael Totten says, the good guys are vastly outnumbered. And this administration has no plan.
Europeanizing American Space Policy
…by stealth. I have a column over at Pajamas Media this morning on the space “code of conduct.”
A Surreal Depression
Thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson. I think we’re about the same age, and I have similar memories of being told about the Depression by my parents and grandparents who lived through it. I don’t know what we’re in, but it isn’t (at least yet) a depression, though it seems as though the government is doing everything possible to get us there.
There Goes Another Hundred Million
The next (and penultimate) Shuttle flight is now no earlier than May 16th.
John Shannon said last year that it costs about two hundred million a month to extend the program, so this two-week delay cost another hundred million dollars (note that four months of that burn rate would provide enough resources for another entire SpaceX). That assumes, of course, that this delay will also push out the the schedule of the final flight. I don’t know enough about KSC flows to know if that’s the case, or if they can be parallel processing Atlantis, currently scheduled for the end of June.
I Did Not Know That
Whenever I hear an unemployment number, and particularly the statistic of how many people are in the labor force or looking for jobs, I wonder where they get the data. Well, here it is, explained.
From One Economic Lunacy To Another
Jeffrey Immelt doesn’t seem to know much about business:
“If I had one thing to do over again I would not have talked so much about green,” Immelt said at an event sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Even though I believe in global warming and I believe in the science … it just took on a connotation that was too elitist; it was too precious and it let opponents think that if you had a green initiative, you didn’t care about jobs. I’m a businessman. That’s all I care about, is jobs.”
Hate to break it to you, but if you’re a real businessman, what you care about is profits, and not pandering to the politically correct by declaring your fealty to the planet, or job creation. The purpose of a business is not to create jobs, and if you think it is, then the business is likely to suffer, particularly if it’s all that you care about. Immelt seems like a character right out of Atlas Shrugged.
In Which The Moonbat Gets It Right
…and by “right,” I mean sort of:
The problem we face is not that we have too little fossil fuel, but too much. As oil declines, economies will switch to tar sands, shale gas and coal; as accessible coal declines, they’ll switch to ultra-deep reserves (using underground gasification to exploit them) and methane clathrates. The same probably applies to almost all minerals: we will find them, but exploiting them will mean trashing an ever greater proportion of the world’s surface. We have enough non-renewable resources of all kinds to complete our wreckage of renewable resources: forests, soil, fish, freshwater, benign weather. Collapse will come one day, but not before we have pulled everything down with us.
And even if there were an immediate economic cataclysm, it’s not clear that the result would be a decline in our capacity for destruction. In east Africa, for example, I’ve seen how, when supplies of paraffin or kerosene are disrupted, people don’t give up cooking; they cut down more trees. History shows us that wherever large-scale collapse has occurred, psychopaths take over. This is hardly conducive to the rational use of natural assets.
All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order.
What he understands: there is no crisis in terms of abundant cheap energy.
What he doesn’t understand, and this is understandable, because it would require a renunciation of everything that he’s thought and known for decades, is that this is a good, not a bad thing.
Given that he was one of the first to understand the implications of Climaquiddick, maybe there’s hope that he’ll come the rest of the way over to the side of the light.