…has gone live. Salmon are being caught.
Colonizing Venus
The surprisingly strong case for it.
One of the many disappointments of the NRC report on human spaceflight is the almost total neglect of this topic. That’s at least partially because if was rooted in a neo-Apollo mindset, which must have boots on the ground, though it’s not clear what they’ll be doing.
Birth Control
If it’s not your boss’s business, why do you expect him to pay for it?
…the Hobby Lobby decision opens the door for closely held companies to deny coverage of all forms of birth control if they can plausibly argue that doing so would violate their conscience. The decision doesn’t apply to large, publicly held corporations, but even if it did, it is unlikely that many companies would go down that path. And even if they did, birth control would not be “banned” – employees simply would have to pay for it themselves. The notion that denying a subsidy for a product is equivalent to banning that product is one of the odder tenets of contemporary liberalism.
The cognitive dissonance required to be a leftist must be quite painful.
The EPA’s Empire Building
How it got in the way of its science.
It’s what happens to politicized bureaucracies.
Shelby’s Antics
The Houston Chronicle weighs in.
I don’t think this is quite correct, though:
Under the current Commercial Crew Development program, SpaceX contracts with NASA for a flat payment. If SpaceX comes in under cost, it gets to keep the profit. If it goes over budget, SpaceX has to make up the difference. This system gives SpaceX more flexibility to operate as it sees fit.
Shelby has inserted language in a Senate appropriations bill that would instead force SpaceX to work on NASA’s old cost-plus model. This would require the private company to track every step of its development, assign a cost to those steps and charge it to NASA, plus an additional fee. This stilted payment model forces engineers to be accountants and removes disincentives for bloated budgets.
Shelby isn’t forcing the company to cost plus. He’s doing something worse (and stupid), forcing them to account for it as though it were cost plus, but on a fixed-price contract.
Space
Without the space. XKCD stitched together all of the land area in the solar system.
Self-Driving Cars
Hyundai did a bad-ass stunt outside of Mojave.
[Update a few minutes later]
For those wondering (as I was) where that was, it’s on Hyundai’s test track northwest of town, according to Doug Messier.
The IRS’s Illegal Destruction Of Evidence
It’s looking worse and worse:
Any private company that conducted itself in this way would be crucified. It happens from time to time, but rather rarely nowadays, as the duty to preserve evidence is well known in the business world. The IRS’s account of its own behavior is, frankly, shocking. I can hardly imagine what a federal judge would do to a party that took no steps to preserve documents, erased backup tapes, allowed employees to delete relevant emails and memos, and “recycled” the crashed hard drive of its principal witness, all while the lawsuit was pending.
I guess we may find out soon, as True the Vote’s motion is scheduled to be heard on July 11.
Let’s hope. Who will be the equivalent of Judge Sirica in this case?
[Update a while later]
Lois Lerner, Colonel Mustard, and the Blue Screen of Death.
I hope that Megan is feigning credulity to maintain her own credibility when she finally comes down on these serial liars like a hammer.
[Update a while later]
Issa to Koskinen: Want to revise your testimony?
College Speech Codes
FIRE is going to sue every school that has one until they are gone forever.
Good. They’re one of the ways that the ideology is imposed, and they’re in complete opposition to the purpose of a university. Go here if you want to contribute to the cause.
Book On Sale
To celebrate the 45th anniversary of the first moon landing on the 20th, Astrobooks is offering the book for $15.95 through the end of July.