Business, Economics, Education, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Obama’s Learning Curve

14 Comments

I wouldn’t call it “slow.” It actually basically vertical:

The education President Obama received at Columbia University and Harvard Law School — and delivered to others as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School — encourages the fantasy of a political world subject to almost limitless manipulation by clever and well-orchestrated images. This explains why the harsh exigencies and intractable forces of politics keep stunning the president, each new time as if it were the very first.

How might higher education be reformed to produce political leaders more familiar with how the world really works, more alive to the realities of social and political life and better able to discuss them honestly with the American people?

He’s lived his entire life in a bubble of unreality. A lot of us realized this in 2008, but a few million too few.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

When The Lies No Longer Work

6 Comments

It would appear that day has arrived.

The Dems on the Hill aren’t very happy with him, either.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is the most encouraging poll result, I think:

Gallup has been asking the question since 2000. “Prior to 2009, a clear majority of Americans consistently had said the government should take responsibility for ensuring that all Americans have healthcare,” the firm reports. The proportion answering “yes” peaked in 2006 at 69%–27 points higher than today’s number. Then it began declining, to 64% in 2007 and 54% in 2008.

The current 42% is the lowest figure ever recorded, but the percentage answering in the affirmative hasn’t risen above 50% since 2009. Remember what happened in 2009? . . .

Perhaps the most dramatic finding: The proportion of Democrats who say it isn’t the federal government’s responsibility in 2013 (30%) is higher than the proportion of all voters who said the same thing in 2006 (28%).

This could provide a political opportunity to get the federal government out of a lot of things it has no business doing and isn’t very good at.

Economics, Space, Technology and Society

Venus

16 Comments

Jon Goff has some thoughts on utilizing its resources.

[Update a while later]

For the record, I think that Venus is a much more interesting destination than Mars, but that’s because I don’t suffer from a desire to redescend into a gravity well. It has much more light for solar power, and as Jon points out, easy-to-harvest resources in the upper atmosphere. I think that habitats floating high in it could be nice places to live.

Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Inspiration Mars

10 Comments

Joel Achenbach reports on Tito’s plans.

He wants to use Cygnus, but how does he propose to enter? Guess I have to read the paper. I think he’s crazy to stake the mission on an SLS flight.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jeff Foust has a more detailed description. I think it’s crazy to rely on unbuilt NASA hardware.

[Update a while later]

This makes so little sense that I am compelled to think that it is driven by politics. I smell Boeing/LM behind this.

If I were Tito, I’d be working with SpaceX to do the mission with a dual-heavy concept, and use Dragon, not Orion. I’d order a stretch Centaur from ULA, or use two of them. I’d also bypass OSC and go directly to Thales Alenia for a PCM. The changes needed are so extensive that it doesn’t make sense to start with a Cygnus.

[Early-afternoon update]

So Tito and Taber MacCallum had a phone call with the press afterwards, and said that they couldn’t make the case close commercially, that the solutions didn’t have the margins they wanted. Question: Did they ask ULA if they could demo orbital fueling within three years? Of course, Boeing/Lockmart would never let ULA do that, which is why it would be good for the space industry to force a divestiture. You have a commercial space company that’s hamstrung by its cost-plus-contractor parents.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Space Science

The CBO And Human Spaceflight

8 Comments

It’s not surprising at all that it would see it as a potential area to reduce the deficit (see page 74). The entire NASA budget is an option for that, in fact, as is the entire federal budget, really. But it points out how completely out to sea we are on why we’re doing it. Note the underlying assumption.

This option would terminate NASA’s human space exploration and space operations programs, except for those necessary to meet space communications needs (such as communication with the Hubble Space Telescope). The agency’s science and aeronautics programs and robotic space missions would continue. Eliminating those human space programs would save $73 billion between 2015 and 2023, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

The main argument for this option is that increased capabilities in electronics and information technology have
generally reduced the need for humans to fly space missions. The scientific instruments used to gather knowledge in space rely much less (or not at all) on nearby humans to operate them. NASA and other federal agencies have increasingly adopted that approach in their activities on Earth, using robots to perform missions
without putting humans in harm’s way. For example, NASA has been using remotely piloted vehicles to track
hurricanes over the Atlantic Ocean at much longer distances than those for which tracking aircraft are conventionally piloted.

Eliminating humans from spaceflights would avoid risk to human life and would decrease the cost of space exploration by reducing the weight and complexity of the vehicles needed for the missions. (Unlike instruments, humans need water, air, food, space to move around in, and rest.) In addition, by replacing people with instruments, the missions could be made one way—return would be necessary only when the mission required it, such as to collect samples for further analysis—thus eliminating the cost, weight, and complexity of return and reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere.

A major argument against this option is that eliminating human spaceflight from the orbits near Earth would end
the technical progress necessary to prepare for human missions to Mars (even though those missions are at least
decades away). Moreover, if, in the future, robotic missions proved too limiting, then human space efforts
would have to be restarted. Another argument against this option is that there may be some scientific advantage
to having humans at the International Space Station to conduct experiments in microgravity that could not be
carried out in other, less costly, ways. (However, the International Space Station is currently scheduled to be
retired in 2020, postponed from an earlier decommissioning in 2015.) [Emphasis added]

There are multiple flawed assumptions in this analysis. First that the only purpose of sending humans into space is about science. Second, that it is about exploration. Third, that Mars is the goal.

If we aren’t going to develop and settle space, there is no point in sending people there, or hazarding their lives. But we never have that discussion.

[Evening update]

Seemed to be a link problem. Hope it’s fixed now, sorry.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The ObamaCare Death Spiral

102 Comments

Some observations from Richard Epstein:

The Obamacare fiasco now flunks Justice Holmes’ extreme rational basis test in the 1905 decision of Lochner v. New York: “I think that the word liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment is perverted when it is held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion, unless it can be said that a rational and fair man necessarily would admit that the statute proposed would infringe fundamental principles as they have been understood by the traditions of our people and our law.”

In the light of day, Obamacare is that bad, even if the minimum wage law is not. Even the most ardent defender of government power must concede that it is sickening when a president tells people without healthcare insurance that they must navigate his government websites or go without. If “the right to healthcare” is fundamental, Obamacare violates it. Delay here is no option. If left in place, every single structural problem that besets Obamacare today will continue to wreck innocent lives a year from now. Striking it down is an act of mercy for the American people.

Bottom line: other than that it is logistically impossible and unconstitutional, the president’s “fix” is just fine.

[Update a while later]

Three lessons from ObamaCare.

I’m sure there are more than three, but I agree with them.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Morality

9 Comments

We are apparently born with it.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. There are sound evolutionary reasons for us to cooperate. But these are statistical studies, and some people are clearly miswired and sociopathic. Many of them become politicians.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems related somehow: Ace on the psychopathy of the Left:

Leftist politics, I maintain, are not a politics at all, but a psychological response to one’s shortcomings and feelings of failure. Leftist politics are, simply put, a way of getting even with a world that’s done one wrong — and most people carrying about such grievances against a world that’s done one wrong are psychologically broken.

These fairytale “politics” give them an avenue to vent their rages and turmoils about their failures and inadequacies in a way that is deemed, incorrectly, to be socially acceptable and even high-minded.

If a man were raving on the street in this fashion — about his hopes that someone would literally sh*t in a perceived “enemy’s” mouth (a perceived “enemy,” who, crucially, he’s never actually met) — most of us would shake our heads in secondary shame. Some of the more empathetic of us would call social services and attempt to have the madman brought in for psychological treatment.

But the left — Martin Bashir, Chris Matthews, Daily Kos, all of the hateful, raging, vibrating-with-resentment left — does this sort of thing in the guise of “political commentary” and no one makes the connection between this broken-souled primal screaming and mental unwellness.

All while their ratings remain in the same gutter as their political views.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Real Barriers To Exploration

12 Comments

“Ray” over at the Vision Restoration blog writes about the ridiculous discussion last week on SLS/Orion:

This past week rewarded us with a panel discussion Removing the Barriers to Deep Space Exploration. The subject of the panel turned out to be the SLS heavy lift rocket and the Orion spacecraft. Surprisingly, in spite of the title of the panel, the discussion was not about cancelling SLS and Orion to allow funding to go to the robotic precursor missions, exploration technology development, and affordable space infrastructure needed for actual deep space exploration that have largely been squashed by the SLS/Orion pair. In fact, the discussion really didn’t seem to be about barriers to deep space exploration at all. Instead, it seemed like a snugglefest of love for the expensive capsule and even more wildly expensive rocket.

I weary of even writing about it any more, it’s so unutterably absurd.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!