China’s rail system continues to not be what it’s cracked up to be by Tom Friedman and other Sinophilic fascists.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
An Advantage, Not A Vulnerability
I was at the Reinventing Space conference yesterday, and an AF general gave a speech saying that space is currently an advantage for the nation, strategically, but he fears that it is on the verge of becoming a vulnerability. We have to come up with a new way of doing business.
Anyway, I was thinking about going over today as well, but the Internet was dead when I got up this morning, so I had to hang around here waiting for a Verizon guy to show up. It needed a new modem.
That’s What She Said
Training computers to tell jokes.
Hey, FDA
Hands off my genome. It’s my genome.
The Country’s In The Very Best Of Hands
A third of the FBI’s cybercrime agents are incompetent.
I wish I could say I was shocked.
Ready For The Future?
XKCD has the timeline.
I Hope So
Has Stuxnet crippled the Iranian nuclear program?
I’m disappointed that the Swiss are helping them, if they are. Switzerland will be in range of Iranian missiles, too.
Just A Right-Wing Fantasy
No, of course Atlas Shrugged has nothing to do with life in modern America:
Ah, that must be the Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Law, or one of the Fairness Laws, or something, right? The WSJ isn’t sure what law the NLRB is talking about, either. Not only do businesses routinely relocate to find the most advantageous environment possible, states and cities compete for that business by calculating their business climate. If this has escaped the notice of the NLRB, perhaps they should get out more.
This will be an important court case, assuming it’s fought. Then again, it’s hard to feel too bad for Boeing — as Mickey says, live by crony capitalism, die by crony capitalism. Sadly, we’ve also seen this sort of corporatism/fascism wasting our space dollars as well, in addition to inhibiting innovation.
Thorium
Kirk Sorensen points out its potential to solve the energy problem.
China’s Train Wreck
High-speed rail in China isn’t all it’s cracked up to be:
Liu’s legacy, in short, is a system that could drain China’s economic resources for years. So much for the grand project that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times likened to a “moon shot” and that President Obama held up as a model for the United States.
Rather than demonstrating the advantages of centrally planned long-term investment, as its foreign admirers sometimes suggested, China’s bullet-train experience shows what can go wrong when an unelected elite, influenced by corrupt opportunists, gives orders that all must follow — without the robust public discussion we would have in the states.
And where we have robust discussion, it gets canceled (as in Florida). Unfortunately, the discussion in California hasn’t yet been sufficiently robust.