How we’ve mischaracterized it.
I’ve noticed that in public-policy areas in which we do a crap job of risk assessment/tradeoffs, it is areas in which there are policy agendas independent of the actual issues.
Category Archives: Economics
A Promising Life-Extension Drug
I hope that this is as good as it sounds.
We’re not making enough new people, so we’re going to have to keep the ones we have around longer.
Recovering Rare Earths
…from recycling electronics and coal fly ash.
Whenever I see a breakthrough in processing like this, I always wonder how applicable it will be to space resources.
When I was at Rockwell thirty years ago, one of the projects I managed, with Ed McCullough (who died a couple years ago–NSS needs to update the page) and the late Bob Waldron was in adapting processes they’d been working on for beneficiation of lunar regolith to recover high-quality silicon and other things from fly ash. I guess it ended up not going anywhere after I left in 1993.
Good NASA Versus Bad NASA
I’m supposedly quoted in this piece (or at least I gave Jim some suggestions), but unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall.
The Crazy Years
Thoughts on the dangers of ideology.
Privatize the Moon
…to cure Earthly poverty. A long research paper, that I haven’t read yet, but she appears (unsurprisingly) to take a Lockean approach.
Rockets Versus Airplanes
Brian Wang has run the numbers.
Reusable rockets have significant economic advantages at scale against aircraft for long haul. It’s partly because they don’t have to fight drag through the atmosphere for the whole trip.
The Lie That Was Covid
Bob Zimmerman lays it out:
Since day one of the epidemic practically every policy decision by government and the largely Democratic academic community has been based on lies. And those lies caused the initial response to COVID to be wrong and misguided. It was panicked, thoughtless, based on very flawed models rather than the actual data, and did far more harm than good. The later and continuing mandates requiring the COVID shots and masks to keep one’s job, to fly on airplanes, to cross borders, to even go to school or attend public events, are even more insane, based not on the now long-known facts but on lies and fear and the urge by those in power to wield that power corruptly.
It is long past time for everyone to stop buying into these lies.
Indeed.