Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Where’s My Flying Car?

12 Comments

And what happened to my space colonies?

Yes, it was never a mass movement, and even with the merger of NSI and L-5, I don’t think that NSS has ever had more than a hundred thousand members. I do think, though, that it is sufficiently appealing to a sufficient number of people that when we break out of the NASA paradigm, and the supply actually responds to demand, some people will live in space in the future.

[Evening update]

Clark Lindsey responds to Dwayne Day’s dyspeptic space colony post:

In the 1970s space had become a niche topic little noticed by the general public. Within that niche area one could search around and find a tiny sub-niche dealing with in-space orbital space colonies. Sure, there were the occasional articles and a handful of books about O’Neill space colonies and a small group of people had a high interest in them. However, you could say the same thing about a million other topics as well. Orbital space colonies never came close to being a topic that most people were aware of, much less considered in any thoughtful way.

If in 1980 you asked a randomly selected group of a thousand people what they thought about space, a thousand would say, probably in the first sentence, that space was wildly expensive. If you asked them if they had read an article about space colonies in the past decade, I doubt even fifty would say yes. And most of those fifty would say such colonies might be a great idea but are impractical while space travel is so wildly expensive.

Yes, as is the case of much of space policy, it’s all about information and perspective. (I’ve added “Media Criticism” to the categories for this post, and bumped it…)

Economics, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Parasites

18 Comments

Here’s another guest post, from “Douglas,” on the subject of carlessness.

Most of my oh-so-enlightened (all of them college drop outs like me) liberal-minded freaks of friends (no, they are freaks, social deviants) are in fact smart people, but they assume an intelligence that isn’t theirs based upon their defiance of social norms.

Most of them live in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago, and don’t own cars any more; they only update their driver’s licences so that they can defer portions of their taxes to Indiana rules rather than Illinois.

One of them, since he got rid of his car, hasn’t visited his mother once in almost ten years. Since then, he’s gotten married, had two kids, filed for bankruptcy, taken “loans” from his mother, who was there to visit her boy, but he has never found his way across the border for any reason other than pretending he’s an Indiana resident.

Same for some of the other friends, but to a lesser degree.

There is a selfishness to this “I don’t need to go anywhere I can’t walk” attitude. I lived in other countries, and was technically poor, but I still visited my mother, I still made my brother’s wedding, and if I was somewhere that there were roads that got me somewhere, I would get in my car and I would make it to important moments for my friends.

I drove from Chicago to Vegas for a one-night trip three times, so that I could be a part of my friends’ getting married. I got in my car and drove to Florida for the same reason, I made it to Kentucky twice for a cousin’s christening, and again for another cousin’s divorce. (the divorce one is a complicated story)

I drove from Chicago to Hammond, Louisiana four times, because I was the only one who could be counted on to help a friend move back to my area, in an escort, since my friend was so possessive of certain possessions, that he didn’t trust the mover.

It took four trips.

If I didn’t have a car, my friend in Louisiana would have been assed out, if I didn’t have a car, I wouldn’t have been able to be a part of those other very cherished (other than the divorce one, though there is a degree of satisfaction that I felt) events. If I hadn’t had a car.

If you don’t have a car, if you don’t have freedom of independent movement, you are a parasite, and must depend on people who DO have cars, or on people who are taxed to pay for inefficient buses and trains to get you where you need to go.

This “walking” society is a lie. They will walk a few blocks, they won’t walk the miles that the working class did at the turn of the century to get to where they needed to go, instead, they parasitically demand that they have a right to go from one place to another, and everyone else that is not them pay for it.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Shocking News

34 Comments

It’s cheaper to own a car than to use mass transit. When you take all the costs into account (and even ignoring the convenience factor) it’s not really surprising at all:

Anti-car people will argue that the high cost of living in New York City or San Francisco is some kind of anomaly, and that proper government action could magically create low cost of living dense urban areas. I am doubtful. Government regulations usually drive up costs rather than reduce costs (with the exception of regulations carefully thought out to prevent value transference). In fact, the rent control laws in New York City, which liberals think are making housing more affordable, are actually contributing to the high cost of living here. I’ve previously suggested two reasons why dense cities are so expensive: (1) dense cities create transportational and space inefficiencies; and (2) dense cities attract liberal voters who elect liberal politicians who enact dumb laws which increase the cost of living. Maybe there is some third or fourth reason as well. Until someone can demonstrate a place where it’s reasonable to be carless and it doesn’t cost a fortune to live there, one has to assume that such places are inherently economically inefficient.

The arguments against cars and sprawl are aesthetic (and elitist), not economic.

[Saturday update]

Randall Parker has further observations.

[Bumped]

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Bag The Sex And Religion

15 Comments

An open letter to the Republican Party.

[Update a while later]

The GOP needs a new marketing department:

Now, before this turns into a two-hundred comment post with people yelling about not giving up their core principles, let me be clear. I do not advocate that the party pull left or advertise itself as “Democrat-light.” But I do advocate prioritizing the issues that form the foundation of our marketing campaign..

I’m sure “Transformers 2″ has a romantic subtext between Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox. I’m sure that there are at least two minutes in the film of them making kissy face and being sappy. Yet, the trailer is all about giant robots trashing everything in sight. In fact, almost every shot is a giant explosion, or a giant robot. That’s smart marketing. It’s a summer popcorn movie. Give the people what they want. If there is a great romance or moments of rip-roaring comedy, that’s a pleasant surprise. But, if I don’t see a forklift turn into a robot and crush an Apache helicopter, I will be disappointed.

Did the Democrats put nationalizing the banks, firing corporate CEOs, and practically making out with Hugo Chavez in their trailer? Did their poster include Obama’s embarrassing world apology tour? I think not.

Yet, we allow the media to frame the discussions and the debates. Why, for example, did most of our pundits take the bait on the Perez Hilton thing and let the media frame the arguments as an example of the gay marriage issue being debated in the public forum? That incident was about how the left stifles free speech. It was about how women are second-class citizens in the Democratic party. Every discussion of Ms. California should have been an opportunity to bring up the media’s treatment of Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. But it wasn’t. Instead, we allowed the Democrats to cut our trailer and replace the robot on the key art with a photo of Shia LaBeouf.

The problem is that many Republicans remain fair-weather federalists. They have to start arguing that the federal government has no business in either your wallet or your bedroom.