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Category Archives: Technology and Society
BFR And Space Solar Power
Thoughts from Brian Wang. Keith Henson has been pushing Skylon for this for some time. As noted in comments, for a project of that scale, it would probably make more sense to use lunar materials than to launch it all from earth.
The Space Frontier Act
It’s nice to see bipartisan action on this useful bill, but I don’t see it as doing much about the frontier. And I’m glad that they’re finally taking OCST out of the FAA, something I’ve been advocating for a quarter of a century, ever since Gore buried it there.
Gay Pr0n
I don’t know why it would be surprising that women like watching it. As the article notes, most pr0n is made for men, and not particularly debonair men. If I never again see fellatio in pr0n, it would be too soon. I really do think that the proliferation of terrible pr0n is a cause of a lot of sexual dissatisfaction among millennials, many of whom likely don’t know what good sex is, because they don’t understand how unrealistic most pr0n is.
[Via Instapundit, who has the obvious explanation from a former girlfriend]
The Latest NASA OIG Report
I haven’t read it yet, but I question the assumptions.
Terraforming Mars
There’s not enough CO2 there. Doesn’t seem like a problem to me; just import carbon and oxygen (and hydrogen) from carbonaceous asteroids in the belt. And of course, they have to throw this in:
If you believe it’s possible to terraform Mars, you also must believe in human-caused climate change, because it’s the same process. Even if it’s impossible to terraform Mars, it’s clearly possible to areoform the mid-latitudes of Earth. Because people are doing it.
Ummmmm…no. We’re not.
Meanwhile, Tim Fernholz says we’re going to have to be careful to not contaminate the water there.
Russian Jamming
They’re testing their latest weaponry on us in Syria:
“All of a sudden your communications won’t work, or you can’t call for fire, or you can’t warn of incoming fires because your radars have been jammed and they can’t detect anything,” said Laurie Moe Buckhout, a retired Army colonel who specializes in electronic warfare.
“[It] can be far more deadly than kinetics simply because it can negate one’s ability to defend one’s self,” she said.
But we’re also learning from it. Great story from Lara Seligman.
Coming Into Port
Pauline Acaline got some nice telephotos of JRTI and Mr. Steven coming into the port of Los Angeles after retrieving the latest Falcon 9 Block 5 and half of the fairing. It’s amazing how clean those rockets are coming back with the new design.
Natural Arguments For God
Mark Tapscott has what he thinks are the five best ones. I find none of them particularly compelling, and the third one is very weak.
As I note in comments (the discussion has been going on for a couple weeks), science is orthogonal to the issue of whether or not God exists, and (as I argued with Hugh Hewitt years ago) the desire of believers to misuse/misunderstand the nature of science to validate their religious beliefs is indicative of a certain lack of faith. And of course, the fallacy of the blind watchmaker appears, in which I have to point out that rolexes don’t replicate with random errors to improve the breed.
The Hollowing Out Of The American Dream
For generations, California’s racial minorities, like their Caucasian counterparts, embraced the notion of an American Dream that included owning a house. Unlike kids from wealthy families—primarily white—who can afford elite educations and can sometimes purchase houses with parental help, Latinos and blacks, usually without much in the way of family resources, are increasingly priced out of the market. In California, Hispanics and blacks face housing prices that are approximately twice the national average, relative to income. Unsurprisingly, African-American and Hispanic homeownership rates have dropped considerably more than those of Asians and whites—four times the rate in the rest of the country. California’s white homeownership rate remains above 62 percent, but just 42 percent of all Latino households, and only 33 percent of all black households, own their own homes.
In contrast, African-Americans do far better, in terms of income and homeownership, in places like Dallas-Fort Worth or greater Houston than in socially enlightened locales such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. Houston and Dallas boast black homeownership rates of 40 to 50 percent; in deep blue but much costlier Los Angeles and New York, the rate is about 10 percentage points lower.
Rather than achieving upward class mobility, many minorities in California have fallen down the class ladder. This can be seen in California’s overcrowding rate, the nation’s second-worst. Of the 331 zip codes making up the top 1 percent of overcrowded zip codes in the U.S., 134 are found in Southern California, primarily in greater Los Angeles and San Diego, mostly concentrated around heavily Latino areas such as Pico-Union, East Los Angeles, and Santa Ana, in Orange County.
The lack of affordable housing and the disappearance of upward mobility could create a toxic racial environment for California. By the 2030s, large swaths of the state, particularly along the coast, could evolve into a geriatric belt, with an affluent, older boomer population served by a largely minority service-worker class. As white and Asian boomers age, California increasingly will have to depend on children from mainly poorer families with fewer educational resources, living in crowded and even unsanitary conditions, often far from their place of employment, to work for low wages.
I would encourage Mike Schellenberger to work with the Cox campaign to oust Newsome and the entire corrupt “woke” CA establishment, by pointing out the insanity of the state’s energy policies, that hit minorities the hardest. A Cox win would be a political bombshell.