Category Archives: Technology and Society

Gaia And Space

Are environmentalists finally coming to their senses?

ames Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia theory, said: “I strongly support space travel. The whole notion of Gaia came out of space travel. It seems to me any environmentalist who opposes space travel has no imagination whatever. That gorgeous, inspirational image of the globe that we are now so familiar with came out of space travel. That image has perhaps been of the greatest value to the environmental movement. It gave me a great impetus.

“There are the unmanned spacecraft, which are relatively inexpensive, that I certainly think should continue. The more we know about Mars, for example, the better we can understand our own planet. The second sort, the more personally adventurous sort of travel, offers great inspiration to humans. And, were it not for space travel we’d have no mobile phones, no internet, no weather forecasts of the sort we have now and so on. There’s a lot of puritanical silliness about it.”

And that doesn’t even get into the benefits of moving polluting industry off planet.

A Strange Product

I’m shopping at American for flights from SFO to LAX, and they have a variety of non-stops for fifty-nine bucks. But what’s bizarre is that they offer one-stops as well (e.g., through Seattle, or Dallas). And they only charge four hundred bucks for them. How many people buy one? You have to really want the miles, and like riding in airplanes. I wonder if it’s just an artifact of their reservations software, that no one has bothered to fix? Or if they’ve ever actually sold one?

The Threat To Innovation

…from Obamacare.

[Update a few minutes later]

Opting out of Medicare:

…the truest answer as to why we do not accept Medicare is that the service does not focus on what we feel is paramount: practicing effective and efficient medicine in order to ultimately achieve and maintain the good health of our patients. The service’s paltry reimbursement structure coupled with its impossible to-adhere-to regulations doesn’t allow us to offer a complete service to our patients. This complete service includes wellness care as well as the ability to take the time to understand each patient’s unique medical needs and circumstances.

The crux of the issue is that Medicare worries about the forest, in other words, the internal process, money management, reimbursement and policing agreements, data mining, and organizing dozens of internal bureaucracies. These agendas and policing policies help the Medicare service to manage the forest, however these are often in direct conflict with what we feel is key to effective healthcare: taking care of the individual, or each tree.

OK, Dems, want us to have confidence in a “public option”? Fix Medicare first.

Electric Cars

…are not a moon shot:

“What people overlook is that accomplishing ‘big picture’ programs like Apollo require accepting the concept of unlimited spending to achieve the mission,” says Ron Cogan, editor and publisher of the industry authority Green Car Journal and editor of GreenCar.com. “Current levels of unprecedented federal spending notwithstanding, electric cars are not an exclusive answer to future transportation challenges and consumers will not be willing to buy them at all costs.”

As I pointed out at the last Apollo anniversary, it’s time to stop using this economically ignorant analogy. And that means you, Mr. President. The only time that he ever talks about space is when he can use it as an excuse for one of his non-space economically nutty programs.