Business, Technology and Society

Sure About That?

11 Comments

Kaus says that there are only four GM cars that he would consider buying, and one of them is a Chevy Malibu. Well, I rented one from National at LAX on Wednesday night. The thing has the turning radius of a supertanker (which is particularly problematic given the postage-stamp-sized parking spaces in LA). It also scrapes the undercarriage (or at least the bottom of the front license plate) coming in and out of the driveway, a problem that I didn’t have with the Versa I was renting last week.

I wonder if he’s test driven one?

Political Commentary

The American Tea Party

57 Comments

…has a Facebook page.

You know, maybe the American Tea Party is a third party that could actually get enough adherents to work…

[Update a few minutes later]

Of course, that was just an off-the-cuff comment, and it deserves a lot more thought. “Clarendon” has provided some:

I’m not objecting to the protests. Far from it in fact. I’ll be at the protest in Washington, D.C. But I am not expecting anything other than street theater, or the political equivalent of clearing our throat rather than the yelling our politicians deserve to hear. I won’t compare it to the Boston Tea Party, because there is no comparison. To claim otherwise is to both cheapen the actual protest by 200 Bostonians and their thousands of supporters, and to inflate the magnitude of our current actions.

I wonder, what are we expecting to achieve from these protests? Are we content to merely register our disapproval, or are we seeking to change what Congress and our president have done? If it is the former, I’m sure the politicians will note our objection, and wait for us to quiet down. If it is the latter, I fear our current protests are too scatter-shot to do any real good.

What is the target of our protest? Are we protesting the President and Congress for an act already passed, or are we petitioning our state and local governments to refuse to accept the stimulus money?

What do we do if these protests do not result in the change in policies we are asking for? What happens next?

Make no mistake, once a movement like this has begun, it will, sooner or later, have to answer these difficult questions or risk failure. Now is the seed-time of liberty, and the steps we take and the words we use will either be recalled triumphantly by our grandchildren, or seen as a sad charade conducted by children who could not muster the strength and conviction of their ancestors.

It’s a good question. But a strongly related one (though not one that the original tea partiers had thought through themselves) is “what does this movement stand for? What are its principles?”

It’s very easy to say that we’re opposed to the bailout(s), just as “we’re opposed to tyranny and taxation without representation, and a tax imposed on our favorite hot beverage with no recourse.” But to what else are we opposed? What are we for? Those are the issues on which third parties have foundered over the decades, even ignoring the institutional difficulties of starting one. It’s very easy to unite against something, because the enemy of my enemy is always my friend, but the devil lies in the details of determining what one stands for.

I’d like to think that this is a small-government movement, but I fear that people who are opposed to the bailout(s) aren’t really opposed to big government — they just don’t like what the big government has been doing lately.

[Late Pacific update]

Here’s more from PJ Media.

[Sunday morning update]

Has the revolt of the Kulaks begun?

[Another update later morning]

OK, I didn’t watch Schoolhouse Rock, but I think I get it anyway.

[Early afternoon update]

Per one of the commenters, yes, the Perot mania is exactly what I was thinking when I expressed the concerns above. That was a Seinfeld campaign — a campaign about nothing.

Political Commentary, Space

More Lane Thoughts

2 Comments

I put up a post the other day in which I described how unimpressed I was with Neal Lane’s comments on space policy. It turns out that Paul Spudis didn’t think much of them, either. He’s actually harder on him than I was:

(Neal Lane) has made some public statements that are so egregiously ignorant that I cannot remain silent.

Tell us how you really feel, Paul.

[Update a few minutes later]

Paul writes:

Aside from the idea of continuing to fly the Space Shuttle (not a very good idea for many reasons), none of this is particularly new but rather a re-statement of the Apollo-era meme that, “If we can go to the Moon, we can solve the (fill-in-the-blank) crisis.” Since energy and climate change are the current crises du jour, some seek to capitalize on the public’s fondness for the NASA of old (“The Right Stuff”) with the frantic cry that it should be redirected to make these “fixes.”

I deconstructed this kind of thinking last summer, for the Apollo landing anniversary:

Putting a man on the moon was a remarkable achievement, but it was a straightforward well-defined engineering challenge, and a problem susceptible to having huge bales of money thrown at it, which is exactly how it was done. At its height, the Apollo program consumed four percent of the federal budget (NASA is currently much less than one percent, and has been for many years). Considering how much larger the federal budget is today, with the addition and growth of many federal programs over the past forty years makes the amount of money spent on the endeavor even more remarkable.

But most of the other problems for which people have pled for a solution, using Apollo as an example, were, and are, less amenable to being solved by a massive public expenditure. We may in fact cure cancer, and have made great strides over the past four decades in doing so, but it’s a different kind of problem, involving science and research on the most complex machine ever built — the human body. It isn’t a problem for which one can simply set a goal and time table and put the engineers to work on it, as Apollo was. Similarly, ending world hunger and achieving world peace are socio-political problems, not technological ones (though technology has made great strides in improving food production, which makes the problem easier to solve for governments that are competent and not corrupt). So most of the uses of the phrase never really made much sense, often being non sequiturs.

It’s important to understand that landing a man on the moon (or developing atomic weaponry as in the Manhattan Project — another example used by proponents of a new federal energy program) was a technological achievement. Achieving “energy independence,” or ending the use of fossil fuels, are economic ones.

As I note at the end of the piece, if we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we get people to stop making inappropriate analogies with landing a man on the moon?

[Saturday morning update]

Over at Space Politics, commenter “Red” has some useful thoughts:

Continue reading More Lane Thoughts →

Science And Society, Technology and Society

Weight-Loss Drugs

1 Comment

The current state of play.

[Update a while later]

Here’s an interesting article on progress in anti-aging. I found this part particularly interesting:

The study will also give more confidence to people who are trying to extend their lives by severely restricting their food intake. Such extreme dieting, popularized by the late Roy Walford, has grown into a movement.

“I’m not going to get on the diet-restriction bandwagon,” Morimoto said. “But a little less consumption would be good for us. If you fast for 12 hours, that’s enough to send the right signals to your system.”

I sometimes do go a while without eating. I often skip breakfast, and since I (literally) don’t break my fast, I can end up going twelve hours or more. It’s nice to know that it could be good for me. It also indicates that breakfast may not be the most important meal of the day, and could in fact be harmful. In any event, it’s harder for people who are susceptible to blood-sugar swings to do this.

Political Commentary, Space

A Space Council?

5 Comments

Jeff Foust has some interesting testimony from the president’s science adviser:

We have been looking at what the best way to resurrect the National Space Council in the White House would be. I think that’s going to happen. There’s no question that the gap in our capacity to put people in space is a matter of great concern with the shuttle program coming to an end and its successor program not yet ready.

That seems like good news. I wonder who will head it. Let’s hope that Joe Biden’s involvement is minimal.

He also lays out rationale for space:

Space is crucial to our national defense; it’s crucial to civil as well as military communications and geopositioning; it’s crucial to weather forecasting and storm monitoring; crucial to observation and scientific study of the condition of our home planet’s land, vegetation, oceans, and atmosphere; and it’s crucial to scientific study and exploration looking outward.

That’s all right, as far as it goes, but no mention of planetary defense or off-planet economic development or resources. There is nothing in there that would support an effort to open up space for the masses, or imply more support for private efforts. Too bad that there was no follow-up questioning in that regard.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!