Political Commentary, Space

Richardson’s Replacement

5 Comments

(Republican) New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg has accepted President Obama’s nomination to be the new Secretary of Commerce. Apparently, a deal has been cut to allow this to occur without a change in the balance of power in the Senate, by having the Democrat governor appoint a Republican to replace him.

From a space standpoint, a lot of people in the commercial space community were excited about the Richardson pick, because of his very visible and active support of commercial space and space tourism. As head of the Commerce Department, he could have been helpful to that cause, through the Office of Commercial Space, and perhaps helping ameliorate ITAR and other regulatory issues. But Gregg is a cipher on these issues, so it isn’t clear whether this is good, bad or indifferent for commercial space. It’s probably not a subject to which he’s given much thought. On the other hand, he’s reportedly a smart guy, and perhaps educable if people can get to him early.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Stimulation Through Liberation

12 Comments

Iain Murray has some alternatives to the Democrats spending plans:

Any “stimulus” bill that doesn’t include relief from the provisions of the National Environmental Protection Act…isn’t going to get any infrastructure project going any time soon.

So if you want to stimulate, you’re going to have to liberate. Similar arguments can be made as regards Davis-Bacon and 13C. There are a bunch of other such ideas, which will also get the economy moving by getting government out of the way. For example, finally suspending mark-to-market accounting properly, which will be a huge boon to the banks. Or getting rid of the burdens of SarbOx and other ridiculous and ineffectual regulations on small businesses. Antitrust reform would help, too. And you could even think about finally getting rid of the Corporate Income Tax, a hold-over from the days when income tax itself was unconstitutional, and which, at least before the 2005 reforms, probably cost more to collect than it raised in income.

Somehow, I suspect that this will not be the preferred Democrat approach.

Technology and Society

Now What Is Google Doing?

3 Comments

An emailer points out that a search for “Rand Simberg” in Google results in a malware warning for every single site associated with my name. However, it’s hard to take it personally, because apparently it is doing it with all searches (at least the few that I tried). Google has apparently decided that every site on the Internet is dangerous to your computer. I wonder if they have a new algorithm that’s screwed up?

[Update a few minutes later]

Whatever it was, they seem to have fixed it. I still have tab open with the problem showing, though. I guess I should take a screenshot.

[Early evening update]

For anyone curious, I didn’t do a screengrab, but here’s a sourcegrab from a typical search result this morning. A screengrab would be redundant at this point, since I could easily fake one from the source if I wanted to take the trouble to hack the HTML. But I didn’t. It’s the real deal.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Heh. I hadn’t noticed this the first time I looked. The only site that it doesn’t think will harm your computer is google.com.

[Monday afternoon update]

Here’s the story on what happened with Google.

[Bumped]

Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Six Years

It’s hard to believe, but the Columbia disintegrated, with seven crew, over the skies of Texas six years ago today. And our space policy remains as screwed up as ever.

[Update in the evening]

Clark Lindsey has links to some musical tributes to the disasters. Also, for those who missed the link on the earlier anniversaries this week, here are my thoughts a year ago on the cluster of space disasters at the end of January and early February.

[Bumped]

Administrative

Off To CA

I have a 6:15 AM flight to LA in the morning, and am packing. I’ll have to deal with my computer problem when I get back. For now, I grabbed some data off the drives and put it on my file server so I could transfer it to my laptop, which will get me through the trip, which will be for the whole month of February (though I may come back for a weekend). Anyway, blogging may be light until tomorrow night.

Administrative

Insane Commenters

10 Comments

Robert Oler has attempted to comment a few times over the past few weeks, but Word Press seems to be smart enough to not allow them through. I thought that I’d note this latest attempt, on this post, though:

well Rand ….you are the guy who believes in the Falwell theory of HRC murdering people…

Note first that it is a complete non sequitur in the context of the post.

Note second that this is nutty. I don’t even know what the “Fallwell theory of HRC murdering people” is, let alone believe in it. Robert apparently bought a copy of The Clinton Chronicles and then somehow has projected his fascination with it on to me (someone who has never even seen it).

I’m not sure why he engages in this kind of lunacy, but it is nice to have blog software that is smarter than him, so in general we don’t have to view it.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!