The latest issue is up.
Probably Both
Roger Kimball wonders if the seeming wilful ongoing destruction of the American economy by the new administration is a result of incompetence or malice.
It’s hard to know for sure, of course. Back in the nineties, J. Porter Clark (at sci.space.*) came up with a variation on Clarke’s Third Law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”), now known as Clark’s Law: “Any sufficiently advanced cluelessness/incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” I think it was in reference to spam, but it would seem to apply to current economic policy as well.
Evolutionary Benefits
…of religion.
I don’t know whether or not I’ve blogged on this subject before, but it’s a common notion that while not everyone requires a supreme lawgiver to be good, most people perhaps do, and that a retributive religion promotes a better society. Similarly (and perhaps it’s a corollary, as pointed out in the link), while dying sucks for an individual, some view it as a good for society and the species, by getting the fogeys out of the way and making room for fresh blood and ideas. At least in the latter case, I think that the cure is worse than the disease, and I’d like to have the problems associated with indefinite lifespan, and look for solutions to them, than die without getting the chance to tackle them. Of course, one of those solutions is space migration.
A Voice Of Sanity Among Democrats
I hope they’ll listen to Senator Bayh.
[Thursday afternoon update]
Stephen Spruielle makes a good point (that sort of occurred to me at the time):
If one accepts the dubious proposition that government spending is required to mitigate the effects of the recession, how can one oppose higher spending that would take place this year — especially after voting for the trillion-dollar stimulus package? All this handwringing over the size of the omnibus from the likes of Bayh and Specter is just comical. It’s like listening to a guy who downed an entire bottle of tequila lecture his buddies on the dangers of taking one more shot.
Sometimes it seems like the lunatics are running the asylum.
[Bumped]
A Stone-Age Phrase Book
I’m a little skeptical that this would actually work. But the researchers have the luxury that there is no chance that they would ever be able to test it.
[Update early afternoon]
Got Medieval makes short work of this.
We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Air Breathers
Henry Spencer (who I expect will be at Space Access this year, after missing last year for the first time ever) explains (once again) why the future of space launch continues to lie with rockets, despite the superficial appeal of not having to carry oxidizer.
This is an important point that I’d never thought about explicitly:
The pure-rocket design was more than twice as heavy as X-30 at takeoff, because of all that LOX. On the other hand, its empty weight – the part you have to build and maintain – was 40% less than X-30’s. It was about half the size. Its fuel and oxidiser together cost less than half as much per flight as X-30’s fuel. And finally, because it quickly climbed out of the atmosphere and did its accelerating in vacuum, it had to endure rather lower stresses and less than 1% of X-30’s friction heating. Which approach would be easier and cheaper to operate was pretty obvious.
This implies that a rocket powered vehicle will have much better off-design (higher delta V, such as more altitude or higher inclination) performance than the air breather, because its dry mass that has to be given the additional velocity is much less. It also means that it will be cheaper to deorbit, and the thermal load will be less, for a given wing area (assuming that it has wings, which an air breather certainly would). I suspect that no matter what the technology level, air-breathing launchers are doomed to remain the equivalent of flying cars — interesting in theory, but never achieved in practice.
Please, Just Kill Me Now
I don’t want to live in a world with Trek fragrances.
I Hope He Freezes In The Dark
Timothy Noah is cheering what he hopes is the upcoming demise of the nuclear power industry, in the wake of Obama’s closing off the Yucca Mountain option. I was never a big fan of Yucca Mountain — I think it a ridiculously overpriced solution to an hysterical non-problem. But for the money that they planned to spend on it, we could have come up with a safe and reliable launch industry, by using it as a market for storage on the moon.
Health-Status Insurance
A free-market solution to health care. Of course, it doesn’t pass the litmus test of socializing medicine, so it will be a non-starter with this administration.
Statists, Meet Petard
Northern Virginia and the other DC suburbs are going to be hit hard by the Obama tax plan. I’m guessing that these are areas that went overwhelmingly for The One, to give him his overall Virginia victory. Here’s a good example of Mencken’s dictum that democracy would give the people what they want, and ensure that they get it good and hard. And this points out the economic mindlessness and absurdity of picking an arbitrary income level to start punishing achievement:
Besides raising tax rates in 2011 on the highest income brackets, this year’s budget would lower the deductions families earning $250,000 can make from their income.
“In my district, we have a high household income, but I would say two things about that,” Himes said. “No. 1, there’s huge diversity in my district. It includes some of the poorest families in the country and some of the wealthiest.
“And second, income has to be held against expenses. We have one of the highest costs of living in the country as well, which is problematic for all sorts of things,” Himes said.
The median sales price for a home in Greenwich, according to the real estate website Trulia, is $735,000, but that’s down significantly. Bloomberg reported in February that home sales in Greenwich, where the nation’s hedge fund industry generally lives, plunged 84 percent in January 2009 compared to a year earlier.
It’s still cheaper to buy a home in Fargo, where the average listing price is $192,436, according to Trulia. It’s also safe to say that wages are a little lower in the Red River Valley.
There is a reason that federalism is a good idea. Like a national “minimum wage,” to the degree that such a thing should exist at all, it’s ridiculous to apply a one-size fits all to the entire country. Both tax rates and wage and price controls should be left to the states, not Washington. But hey, they wanted “change.” Don’t come crying to me.