Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Landline Problem

19 Comments

I’ll give up my landline when they pry the receiver from my cold dead hands, but many people are just fine going cell-only, which could cause big problems down the road for the telecom industry.

I think that we have a generation of people who have no experience with quality phone service, and think that when calls get dropped, or you have trouble hearing the other person, that’s just the way it is, so they don’t know what they’re giving up. It’s going to be interesting to see how we continue to improve broadband if there is no cross subsidization from voice.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Unaccountability

9 Comments

Some thoughts:

The Empire State’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs New York City’s buses and subways, is not that different from Citigroup, in that it’s a supposedly independent, corporate-style public authority that enjoys the perception of a government guarantee.

Last week, the MTA consummated an embarrassingly profligate deal with its largest labor union, and yet the political class has largely escaped accountability.

Because the MTA is supposedly independent of political forces, Governor Paterson can adeptly deflect attention away from his responsibility for the deal, although the powerful transit union, of course, knows to be thankful.

Meanwhile, the MTA’s own management bureaucracy plays its role only too well. The MTA itself largely serves as a distracting generator of incompetence and intrigue, so the media doesn’t focus consistently on the fact that it’s the elected pols who are only to happy to give away the store at the expense of actual investment in transit and in the city’s economy.

Do we really want the global financial industry — necessarily affected by Citi’s outsized, government-guaranteed role — to be subject to the same poisonous and demoralizing political and public-policy dynamics as New York’s MTA?

This is where corporatism (in the interest of political correctness, I won’t call it by its true name — fascism) leads.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Long Live Space Station!

4 Comments

So says Jeff Manber:

By all media accounts, including that of Augustine himself on the news shows, the officials were told that going back to the Moon or on to Mars is impossible at current budget levels. I’m happy about that—because it just seems to me that the Augustine panel’s report should focus not on another hardware project, but how the federal government procures space goods and hardware.

I’ve thought from the start that a government commission deciding which rocket should be built, or where the orbiting gas stations should be located, smacks of government planning at its worst. If all of Washington, including President Obama, can agree that despite investing $50 billion in General Motors, the auto czar has no place selecting the new models of automobiles, why should it be different for rockets or lunar modules?

For me, it was kind of a Cold War throwback to have watched as members of the Augustine panel have traveled around the country listening to engineers and industry executives talk up one launch system and bad mouth another, push for one new NASA program and throw cold water on another. Think “sunshine laws” meets a Politburo meeting.

Norm Augustine should report to the president that the problem afflicting our space program is not this hardware or that program, but the way we are spending our tens of billions for space.

Exactly.

[Afternoon update]

The Space Frontier Foundation says that Ares needs a death panel:

“Derivatives of proven commercial launch systems, and new ones under development, could meet any reasonable need for heavy lift,” said Foundation co-Founder, James Muncy. “The barrier is psychological: NASA will have to stop pretending it can design cost-effective launch vehicles and instead focus on exploration systems that fit on the launch vehicles taxpayers can really afford.”

Werb concluded: “The choice is clear. We can continue funding an overpriced, government space limousine, or we can kick-start a whole new industry that will reduce government’s costs and create new jobs. The tools of private sector innovation and competition offer our best and only chance to have affordable and sustainable human space exploration.”

Unfortunately, it’s not so clear to those who want to keep Huntsville green.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

A Rare Thing

67 Comments

Anthony Weiner is an honest Democrat:

S: So, Anthony, I figured it out over the break. You actually do want the federal government to take over all of health care.

W: Only in the sense that the federal government took over health care for senior citizens 44 years ago.

S: You want to expand that for all Americans.

W: Correct. I want Medicare for all Americans.

Weiner wants to destroy the private sector insurance market, which accounts for 15% of the American economy, in order to have government control health-care decisions. At least, as Jazz says, he’s honest … for what that’s worth.

It’s actually worth a lot. I wish we’d see that kind of honesty from the president and congressional leadership.

[Update mid morning]

From the Trojan Horse’s mouth: they plan on a slippery slope. Gee, what a shock.

[Early afternoon update]

More honesty from the left: the history of the “public option“:

Following Edwards’ lead, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton picked up on the public option compromise. So what we have is Jacob Hacker’s policy idea, but largely Hickey and Health Care for America Now’s political strategy. It was a real high-wire act — to convince the single-payer advocates, who were the only engaged health care constituency on the left, that they could live with the public option as a kind of stealth single-payer, thus transferring their energy and enthusiasm to this alternative. It had a very positive political effect: It got all the candidates except Kucinich onto basically the same health reform structure, unlike in 1992, when every Democrat had his or her own gimmick. And the public option/insurance exchange structure was ambitious.

But the downside is that the political process turns out to be as resistant to stealth single-payer as it is to plain-old single-payer. If there is a public plan, it certainly won’t be the kind of deal that could “become the dominant player.” So now this energetic, well-funded group of progressives is fired up to defend something fairly complex and not necessarily essential to health reform. (Or, put another way, there are plenty of bad versions of a public plan.) The symbolic intensity is hard for others to understand. But the intensity is understandable if you recognize that this is what they gave up single-payer for, so they want to win at least that much.

And winning is all that matters to them.

Business, Economics, Space

Doubts About Depots

29 Comments

Josh Hopkins has a thoughtful article over at The Space Review on the issues that must be addressed by proponents of propellant depots. I may have a response a little later, but I would note that Boeing has done a lot of work on the concept, and may have answers to some of the questions. In any event, we could have resolved them with a tiny fraction of the money that we just pissed away on Ares over the past four years.

[Update early afternoon]

In comments over there, Jon Goff makes one of the points that I would have had I gotten around to it (we’re getting ready to move, and writing SBIRs among other things, around here). It’s worth repeating:

2-Regarding launch costs: I think most depot researchers, like myself, would agree that if the cost for propellant delivery were truly likely to be in the $30-60kg range, that depots weren’t likely to make sense. However, is using delivery of cargo to a manned space station, where the cargo carriers themselves have to function as pressurized space station modules, really that realistic of a starting point for estimating the cost of propellant delivery to a likely unmanned depot? I know that that was probably the easiest way to do the analysis, since those numbers are available…but aren’t we setting up a strawman here? First you pick the obviously most expensive route (having the tankers be fully-functional prox-ops vehicles), and then pick one of the most expensive possible cases of such vehicles–vehicles designed to interface with a manned space station.

This is a typical tactic of opponents of an idea — to pick a worst case, and sort of imply that it’s a best one. It is not a realistic assumption, and was one of the flaws that jumped out at me at the time.

Another one is the concern about departure windows. Yes, launching from earth gives you more flexibility, but so what? If there are multiple opportunities per month from orbit (and there are, depending on how much you want to pay in delta vee for wider windows), then it doesn’t help you much to be able to launch more often from earth when your HLV architecture won’t be able to afford to launch more than a few times a year, even using the cost estimates of its most ardent proponents.

[Tuesday morning update]

Clark Lindsey has further thoughts.

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

The End Of Tinkering?

18 Comments

Well, it’s not gone, but it certainly has gone out of fashion compared to when I was a kid. How many kids work on their own cars these days? Though I would note that just changing a head gasket is not equivalent to rebuilding the whole engine.

I think that this is part and parcel of the whole academic bubble, which continues to inflate beyond economic reason. Particularly in today’s economy, people should realize that plumbing can’t be outsourced.

[Update about noon]

Speaking of the upcoming pop of the education bubble, some schools are now not allowing parents to see their children’s grades in college. How many parents are going to put up with that and continue to pay tuition to such an institution? The notion of “treating students as adults” works fine for students who are actually adults. But adults pay their own way. There’s a lot more to being an adult than simply surviving long enough to reach the age of majority.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Why Mars Is Hard

22 Comments

Jim Oberg has a good piece today. It’s just not as easy as the Barsoomophiles want to believe. That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be an ultimate goal, but we need to put first things first — reducing the costs of launch, developing critical technologies (particularly propellant handing and manufacturing from ISRU) and preliminary scouting to the moons before it will be practical to put people on the surface.

[Mid-afternoon update]

It’s official: NASA is a jobs program. Not that that’s news…

“…critical skills”, “industrial base”, and “workforce retention” have been frequently-mentioned items in the committee’s deliberations to date, so I suppose I should have seen this coming, but it’s still one of the starkest illustrations I’ve encountered why government programs and NASA in particular will never accomplish the goal of making humans a spacefaring species.

Fortunately, there are alternate paths.