Thanking SwRI and UCF for planning/hosting conference. Industry facing challenges, though most fun one for Florida. Excited about providing platforms for new areas of research. Investors still skeptical, know that space is good place for innovation, but can’t rely on government. Have to seek opportunities for industry-driven research. Celebrated ten years on orbit of permanent habitation of ISS and more research on Shuttle. Decades of good foundational research, but is it enough? We are believers in NASA and space, but we are the choir and have to not just listen to our own song. Not everyone understands potential in same terms we do, including the average citizen who sees lots of money that gets spent on infrastructure that gets cancelled. Need to expand research beyond peer review to involve industry in more concerted way. Florida ready to stand up to opportunity, will support community in very aggressive way. Have invested $30M in life-science center with hundred thousand square feet of space for animal care/integration for flight. Seen a significant increase in suborbital research interest, want to see a lot of coordination between suborbital and orbital research, from a hundred kilometers to Bigelow orbital facilities. Seeking collaboration on these activities and reaching out to industry for corporate dollars to broaden activities. Announcing that they will be releasing a program for matching funds for corporate investment in the next month. Will join with NIH and other sources for ways to find more bang for the buck. Welcome XCOR’s announcement of flight sales to SwRI. Looking forward to more such deals with Masten and others to operate out of Florida. Hope to spawn many new companies in research and applications, bring benefits back to earth and keep America a leader in space.
Category Archives: Economics
How To Insure Americans With Pre-Existing Conditions
The left won’t like it, though — it doesn’t involve involuntary wealth transfers and perverse incentives.
You Don’t Say
Public unions force the taxpayers to fund Democrats:
Everyone has priorities. During the past week Barack Obama has found no time to condemn the attacks that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi has launched on the Libyan people.
But he did find time to be interviewed by a Wisconsin television station and weigh in on the dispute between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the state’s public employee unions. Walker was staging “an assault on unions,” he said, and added that “public employee unions make enormous contributions to our states and our citizens.”
Enormous contributions, yes — to the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign. Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle.
Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.
Which is both why they need to be outlawed, and why the Democrats are fighting so hard, to the point of threatening blood in the streets, to protect them. It’s obviously part of that new civility we’ve been hearing so much about.
[Update a while later]
Time for public-employee unions to go, and end a half-century mistake.
[Early afternoon update]
Even FDR understood — there is no role for government unions.
For Those Who Want A Flavor
A scene from the upcoming Atlas Shrugged movie.
They’re not going to pull any punches on the sanctimonious scum.
Yes, Marx Is Dead
But unfortunately, I disagree that the labor theory of value is. I wish that it were. It is, fundamentally, what the argument in Wisconsin (and really, the nation at large) is about. Isn’t, after all, one of the claims of the union workers that they deserve what they get because they work hard?
Unions, Wages And Productivity
Some useful thoughts from Walter Russell Mead. It’s always interesting to note that, contra popular myth, the manufacturing sector is quite strong, just as agriculture is. They just don’t employ as many people as they used to. In both cases, this is a good thing.
Balance Of State Trade
So, Illinois is sitting pretty. It’s chasing out all of those annoying whiny greedy businesses to Wisconsin and Indiana, due to its rapacious tax and spending policies, but that’s not the best part. It’s now importing cowardly and corrupt Democrat politicians from both those states, on the off chance that its home-grown supply runs dry. It’s a win-win!
I disagree, though, that this is the right Monty Python reference. It’s this one.
A Call For Papers
Sort of. I’ve set up a new section of Competitive Space for HSF myth busting, but I haven’t had time to flesh out the pages, so I’m calling for suggestions, or drafts, that can be improved over time. Ideally, it would be as a wiki, but I don’t have time to figure out how to set one up right now. Instead, I’ll incorporate comments into the pages as they come in. Credit will be provided to contributors.
[Update on Wednesday morning]
For those wondering about the 404, I’ve taken the page down, because it wasn’t getting enough input to clean things up. I’ll just have to work on it myself and then inaugurate it again.
Launch-System Reusability
…and the ongoing policy insanity of completely ignoring the issue. A good essay by Stewart Money.
[Cross-posted at Competitive Space]
The Religion Of High-Speed Rail
Joel Kotkin follows up on Robert Samuelson. When will these religious fanatics understand that this makes no economic sense? Well, if this Congress doesn’t pull the plug on this lunacy, the next one (in even more dire financial straits) surely will.