Is she hiding major problems?
It wouldn’t surprise me. Hiding things is, after all, what Clintons do.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Economics 101
As long as we have prices, the government will have a budget. And reducing the interest rate on loans with a high delinquency rate compared to other loans means that we will have less money to do something else. Giving people free tuition will also mean that the government will have less money to do something else — a lot less money. Sanders tries to deal with this problem by conjuring hundreds of billions worth of imaginary tax revenue out of thin air, but alas, the actual president will have to find real money, taken from some other use. Is subsidizing the folks who are going to end up as the best-off members of society really what we would choose to use that money for?
He was told there would be no economics.
[Update a while later]
Bernie Sanders: The economics of a toddler, and the ethics of a thug.
In other words, a typical leftist.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Sort of related: A liberal professor has given up on academia.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Last link was broken, fixed now.
The War On (Some) Drugs
This is outrageous:
…of course, we can’t have the media looking into critical public safety initiatives like “Operation Constant Gardener.” If such scrutiny revealed that cops consider merely shopping at a garden supply store to be suspicious behavior, that drug testing field kits are more about circumventing the Fourth Amendment than accurate results or that a sheriff’s boast of having shut down a drug operation run by an “average family” in a “good neighborhood” was actually a terrifying raid in which SWAT cops held two kids at gunpoint because their mother enjoyed drinking tea … well, some people might begin to question the wisdom of the drug war.
I hope they win on appeal.
Women And Gaming
Lauren Southern explains capitalism to a moron.
My theory is that the guys like the shooters because it’s like hunting, and the women like Pacman because it’s gathering. With many exceptions, of course.
The CA Methane Leak
It think it’s very misleading to call this the “worst environmental disaster since the BP oil leak.”
Will There Always Be An England?
David Frum reviews a new history.
And this seems related: The rejection of the West:
As the great 15th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun observed, societies that get rich also tend to get soft, both in the physical sense and in the head. Over the past two centuries, Western societies, propelled by the twin forces of technology and capitalist “animal spirits,” have created a diffusion of wealth unprecedented in world history. A massive middle class emerged, and the working class received valuable protections, not only in Europe and America, but throughout parts of the world, notably East Asia, which adopted at least some of the Western ethos.
The current massive movement of people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia to Western countries suggests the enduring appeal of this model. After all, people from developing countries aren’t risking their lives to move to North Korea, Russia or China. The West remains a powerful beacon in the “clash of civilizations.”
Yet a portion of these newcomers ultimately reject our culture and, in some cases, seek to liquidate it. They do this in countries where multiculturalism urges immigrants to register as “victims,” and not indulge in Western culture, as did most previous immigrant waves. After all, why assimilate into a culture that much of the cultural elite believes to be evil?
Perhaps the biggest disconnect may involve young immigrants and their offspring, particularly students. Rather than be integrated in some ways into society, they are able, and even encouraged, not to learn about “Western civilization,” which is all but gone from campuses, with barely 2 percent retaining this requirement.
The dominant ideology on college campus – “cultural relativism” – leaves little room for anything other than a nasty take on Western history and culture. Many students, whether of immigrant parentage or descendants of the Mayflower, have only vague appreciation or knowledge of Western civilization, making them highly vulnerable to such pleading. They often go through college now with only the vaguest notion of our history, the writings of the American founders, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, our vast cultural heritage or the fundamental principles of Christianity or, if you will, Judeo-Christianity.
This will not end well.
[Update a while later]
First link was wrong, fixed now. Sorry!
A Patriot, Not A Partisan
Is Jim Webb getting ready for an independent run?
I noted on Twitter yesterday that I’d like to see a five-way race between Trump, Hillary, Webb, Sanders, and a real Republican.
[Update a few minutes hater]
Fun. Michael Bay is coming out with a movie about Benghazi, just in time for primary season.
New Lunar Fiction
I’ll have to check this out, and see if it really does beat TMIAHM. Out Heinleining Heinlein is quite the claim.
A Belated Christmas Present To My Kickstarter Supporters
An excerpt from my project that I just wrote:
I’ll conclude with a discussion on mission risk and reliability. SLS supporters make an argument like this:
The greater the number of flights it takes, the more the probability of successfully delivering the elements needed for a Mars mission is reduced, because that probability is a multiplication of the individual probabilities of success of each rocket flight. For instance, if it takes thirty flights of a vehicle with 98% reliability, the probability of mission success (POM) will be 0.98 to the thirtieth power, or only 55% or so. A rocket with the same reliability for which only six flights are required will have a much better POM: 0.98 to the sixth power, or 89%.
Moreover, because of NASA’s superior experience and processes developed over decades, SLS will probably be greater than 98% reliability, compared to those amateur commercial rockets. SpaceX just blew one up last summer, so their demonstrated reliability is only 20/21 (as of the end of 2015), or 95.2 percent. That means that a mission that required thirty successful Falcon flights would only have 0.952 to the thirtieth POM, or about 23%, less than a one in four chance. Why are you trying to sabotage our Mars plans by insisting on using these dinky, unreliable rockets?
I know that because I don’t have a specific quote, this sounds sort of strawmannish, but there have been arguments like this made by SLS proponents for years. And the logic and math seems indisputable, right?
Well, it’s a lot more complicated than that. In fact, a greater number of flights to accomplish a given job actually increases the chance of mission success. And also in fact, this would only be counterintuitive to someone in the warped space industry, stuck in the Apollo and general “mission” mindset. Let’s unpack the above “analysis,” to see why.
First, it assumes without basis that the loss of a single flight causes the loss of an entire Mars mission, ignoring the fact that the lost payload could be delivered on another flight. The only flight failure that could cause mission failure would be one carrying an irreplaceable mission element. But if we have irreplaceable mission elements, we’re clearly doing it wrong.
We could do a reductio ad absurdum, and assume that we are going to deliver everything for a human mission beyond earth orbit and back in a single launch.
Oh, wait! That’s what we did in Apollo!
For Apollo, the Saturn V carried all of the hardware elements described in the DRM, plus propellant. If the launch system failed, the mission failed. The reliability of the launcher put a ceiling on the POM; if the Saturn was 95% reliable, the POM could be no greater than that, and of course it would be less, because of the potential for failure of any of the other mission elements (as happened with Apollo 13, when the liquid-oxygen tank in the service module exploded). For the launch system, it was all or nothing.
Let’s go back to the truck analogy. Suppose we build the house in the factory, ready to live in, and then deliver it to its final destination on a giant truck. It’s a very expensive payload, because of all the value added in the factory where it was built.
Now the success of getting your house to your building site is totally dependent on the truck not crashing somewhere along the way. Would you really want to make that bet? Because trucks do crash with some regularity. And if it happens, you’ve lost a hundred-thousand-dollar (or more) house. Who would insure that?
That’s why we build houses on site from much smaller, less expensive parts, and we add value by assembling them there. That way, if you lose a shipment, it’s not that big a deal. You just send out another load of cheap cement or plywood or studs or drywall, or whatever.
This is the way we do things on earth. There is nothing magical about space that means we should do it any differently there, except that the one time we successfully did what we’d like to do again—send humans beyond earth orbit—we did it the crazy way, because we were in a hurry, and got away with it half a dozen times.
There will be more to come. BTW, I’ve been struggling to find a quote like that, but we all know that people have made that argument. Anything folks can come up with via crowdsourcing would be appreciated, particularly from NASA officials.
Space Exploration Delenda Est
Not really Christmas related, but I was working on a section of the report about this, and realized that I hadn’t blogged it at the time, a few days ago. Pew Research released an opinion poll, in which they asked “what role the US government should play in advancing space exploration,” in the context of a broader poll asking what the government role should be in a wide range of activities. For “space exploration,” the public was basically split according to Pew, with almost half favoring a government role, and almost half favoring little or none. But there was a crucial assumption in the question: That everyone agreed on what “space exploration” meant.
I think polls like this are meaningless, because the public is so ill informed, and the notion of “space exploration” so (no pun intended) nebulous. Planetary probes? Space mining? Space settlement? Astronomy? The answer is going to depend very much on what the individual thinks that space exploration is. That’s why I’ve declared warfare on the phrase.