Just shaving 36 hours off of the availability date of commercial crew could potentially save more lives than would be lost in the worst case Commercial Crew crash. Even if expediting the process, dropping many of the NASA Human Rating requirements, dropping some of the abort tests, and sticking with Space Act Agreements instead of FAR Contracts really meant a massive decrease in actual safety (I don’t think it would) to say a 5% chance of losing a crew on a given flight, over the course of the ISS’s life you would have saved hundreds of times more US lives by taking that course than you would potentially risk in astronaut lives.
I’ll have to incorporate this thought into the book. I made the point, but not quantitatively, just that our approach is an indicator of how unimportant ISS research is, despite NASA lip service.
This is the problem that Bastiat described. Loss of crew is very publicly visible, while the people who die are anonymous and unknown to all except those closest to them, and their deaths aren’t understood to be a result of flawed government policy. This is the same problem that the FDA has, so it ends up inhibiting innovation, destroying jobs and killing people lest it be blamed for letting people die through underregulation.
Charlie Martin, who is making good progress on his goal toward healthier lifestyle, notes that the focus on weight is misguided:
In the first 13 weeks I lost two inches on my neck and two inches around my waist. In the following four weeks, I’ve lost another 3 inches (a total of FIVE inches) around my waist.
Obviously, I like the Army’s numbers better, so let’s use them — according to the Army, I’ve lost 5 percentage points of my body fat over the last four weeks, with my weight remaining stable. (Other methods give me somwhere around 29 percent, which is the most common value from the Withing body impedance too.) My weight is around 273, and 5 percent of 273 is 14 pounds close enough.
To have lost that much body fat, and still gained roughly 2 pounds over that four weeks means I’ve exchanged some amount of body fat for muscle, while also being around 32,000 kcals in arrears for that whole four weeks.
I’d remind Charlie that a lot of linebackers weigh more than him. I don’t think they’re necessarily fat.
Unfortunately, California environmentalists are trying to turn much of the Central Valley’s farmland back into desert too. Thanks to the Endangered Species Act, federal courts have ordered farmers to divert hundreds of billions of gallons of water away from crops and into the Sacramento River, where it is supposed to help revive the delta smelt.
The diverted water has not helped the smelt much, but it has turned hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland fallow and sent unemployment in some farming communities as high as 40 percent.
California could solve this problem by building more dams, thus adding water capacity. But the state hasn’t built a major new dam since 1979 and none is on the drawing board.
One reason is the California Environmental Quality Act of 1970. Modeled after the federal National Environmental Policy Act, CEQA was intended to make infrastructure planning easier. As the accompanying chart shows, it is anything but an easy law to follow. Unlike most state environmental planning laws, CEQA allows plaintiffs to recover attorney’s fees from defendant infrastructure developers (whether they be state, city or private actors).
This has created an entire environmental lawsuit industry — a very profitable one that chills development. According to the California Chamber of Commerce, CEQA has become “a morass of uncertainty for project proponents and agencies alike.”
Local government smart-growth plans have made it next to impossible for developers to build single-family homes near job centers such as the Bay Area or Los Angeles. As a result, real estate prices along California’s coast are among the highest in the nation, forcing many middle-class families to downsize or move elsewhere.
But the moron voters keep reelecting these people.
Despite the differences in our extroversion (the mere idea of appearing on camera sends me diving under the furniture) I considered him a kindred spirit – another guy who loved his wife and kids, happy despite being sick of the bullshit. Although I can’t claim to have known him as well as others here at Breitbart, I cherished him a friend whose passing is still personally painful.
With all the tributes and venom being churned out today it’s obvious he still looms large in the political conversation, and it’s hard to think of another figure in media or activism who would be a trending topic a year after their death. I think the reason why is that he represented a new kind of cultural/social conservative. Maybe not in the conventional sense (it’s still fun to freak my liberal friends by noting Andrew’s status as a pro-gay marriage, pro-pot decriminalization Jewish activist for women and minorities who loved of 80s New Wave), but on the value of honesty. I’ve heard him referred to as a “reactionary.” I suppose he as a reactionary – in the literal sense – against an increasingly contrived, vapid, narrative-driven news culture, one that attacks and marginalizes any non-conforming message. He studied the bullies’ playbook, called them out, and bloodied their noses. Hard as it may be for these bloody-nosed bullies to believe, it had nothing to do with their ‘liberal’ politics. If there was a parallel universe with a dominant right wing media culture as dishonest and conformist and thuggish as the left wing one here, Andrew would’ve been more than happy to rocket there and punch them in the mouth, too. If that’s what a reactionary is, then sign me up for the t-shirt.
Some of us from NRO were assigned to a cluster of hovels and lean-tos that has come to be called Ezra’s Alley. Others of us are acres away, on a strip they call Boehner’s Run. Still others are unaccounted for.
There is word of potable water and even some fuel on the other side of the river. But all of the crossings are controlled by the warlords of Alexandria and their confederates. From the tales told of their depravity, you’d rather drown than be taken alive.