It’s certainly plausible to me. Given how much of an overshoot there was, it wouldn’t be surprising to see it dip that low before stabilizing. As I’ve long said, over a hundred bucks was unsustainable. I would hope it won’t stay that way for long, though. It’s harder to justify shale and new drilling (and conservation) at those prices.
A Threat To Straight Marriages
This sounds like a straw man (and one that I often hear in the gay marriage debate):
The anti-gay-marriage argument that simply makes no sense to me is the one that says allowing gay folks to marry will mess up my marriage – my heterosexual marriage. I don’t follow the reasoning that gay married couples will undermine the ability of straight married couples to form and sustain marital partnerships.
Perhaps someone has made that argument somewhere, sometime, but I’ve never seen or heard it myself. It would be helpful if she would provide a link to support the straw man. Of course it makes no sense to her. It makes no sense at all, which is why few people make such an argument.
I think that this may be a perversion of the real argument, which is that, for those uncertain of their sexual orientation, it will weaken societal pressures to have a heterosexual lifestyle and marriage. If society is no longer heteronormative, then a little boy might grow up thinking that it’s OK to marry his friend Joey, instead of Sally. Actual homosexuals are going to grow up to be gay regardless, but it’s not necessarily a good idea to encourage wavering where it exists. Now, one can argue whether it’s a good or bad thing to do so, but that’s the argument to be discussed..
The argument isn’t about existing marriages–that’s nutty. It’s about future ones.
Not New Ideas
Just bad ones:
Obama plans to resuscitate the welfare policies of the Great Society, but by stealth. It will be the same thing-the dole-but it will be called a “tax credit,” which has a more emollient sound than “relief,” “public charity,” “the dole.”
What I find depressing about this-as, indeed, about the whole Obama juggernaut-is the extent to which it represents a return of bad ideas that have already been tried time and again, have failed and made people poorer and less stalwart, and yet seem poised to make a sorry comeback once again. I’ve written about the “déjà-vu-all-over-again” phenomenon before in this space. Bill Ayers? Haven’t we done that? Jeremiah Wright? Haven’t we done that, too? Haven’t we tried Obama’s “soak the rich,” anti-business economic policies? Haven’t we tried his “can’t-we-all-just-get-along” foreign policy? Don’t we know that economics is about the creation rather than the redistribution of wealth, and that low taxes and strategies that encourage productivity and investment are best calculated to make the entire society, including the less fortunate, more prosperous? Don’t we know where appeasement and capitulation get us in foreign affairs? Don’t we remember Jimmy Carter? Haven’t we learned anything?
We’ll find out on Tuesday.
Death Of A Blogger
Dean Barnett has lost his battle with cystic fibrosis. It’s a shame that he couldn’t last long enough for a cure. He was by all accounts a good man, and he was a great blogger, who faced his enemy with courage and equanimity. Condolences to his family and friends.
Don’t Know Much About Launch Costs
The Space Review is up (a little late–it’s usually available first thing Monday morning, but Jeff is probably recovering from his trip to New Mexico), and it has a couple interesting articles. The first one describes the benefits of amateur efforts toward space settlement. The second one is a relook at the economics of O”Neill’s Island One space habitat. It’s nonsensical, because the author doesn’t understand much about the economics of space launch. Let’s start with this:
O’Neill’s expectations about launch costs (like those of other 1970s-era prophets of space development) proved to be highly optimistic, even given the disagreement about how these are to be calculated. A $10,000 a pound ($22,000 per kilogram) Earth-to-LEO price, almost twenty-five times the estimate O’Neill worked with, is considered the reasonable optimum now.
Considered so by whom? Not by ULA. Not by the Russians. Not by SpaceX. The only launch vehicle that has launch costs that high is the Shuttle, and that’s because it flies so seldom that its per-flight cost is on the order of a billion dollars. In a due-east launch, it can get close to sixty thousand pounds to LEO, and if it cost six hundred million per flight (as it did before Columbia, when the flight rate was higher), that would be about ten thousand bucks a pound. But to call this “optimum” is lunacy. Other existing launchers are going for a couple thousand a pound (the Russians are less based on price, but its not clear what their costs are, and if they’re making money). SpaceX is projecting its price for Falcon 9 to be about forty million, to deliver almost thirty thousand pounds to LEO, so that’s a little over a thousand per pound. And that’s without reusing any hardware.
But even these are hardly “optimum.” The true price drops will come from high flight rates of fully-reusable space transports, and there’s no physical reason that these couldn’t deliver payload for on the order of a hundred dollars per pound or less.
Of course we aren’t going to build HLVs for space colonies, as Gerry O’Neill proposed. If it happens, it will happen when the price does come down, as a result of other markets. But if the point is that Island One is unaffordable at current launch costs, it’s a trivial one–most intelligent observers realize that. But it’s ridiculous to think that lower launch costs can’t be achieved, or even that his stated number has any basis in reality.
Transcending Race
Gateway Pundit has a 1995 video of Barack Obama blaming white executives in the suburbs for not wanting their taxes to help black children.
I’m sure he’s changed his mind since, though, right?
[Late morning update]
Barack Obama’s redistributionist obsession:
I suggest henceforth that every time readers hear the word “change” from Team Obama, they insert the work “redistributive” in front of it.
Indeed. He said those words in 2001. Why should we think that he’s changed since? Particularly after his Freudian slip with Joe the Plumber?
[Update early afternoon]
Goody. Here’s some more race transcendance: white people shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Whenever I hear nutty proposals like this, I always wonder, who will decide who is and isn’t “white”? Does Barack Obama get half a vote?
Worse Than I Thought
And I thought that card check was already pretty bad:
Under EFCA, the terms set by the arbitrator will be the furthest thing from a “contract.” It won’t be an agreement between management and labor. Rather, wages, hours and terms and conditions of employment will be dictated by a government appointed arbitrator. The mandate will be binding on the parties for two years. Neither the company nor the employees can reject it (At least when the Central Committee set the wages for tractor assembly workers in the Leningradskaya oblast there was always the possibility that the wages might change later that afternoon).
Currently, if employees don’t like the tentative agreement negotiated between union leaders and management the employees can vote it down and instruct their leaders to go back to the bargaining table to get a better deal. Not so under EFCA. If the employees don’t like the arbitrator’s decree of a 2% wage increase, they’re stuck. Similarly, if the company can’t afford the arbitrator’s command to pyramid overtime, the company’s stuck. The consequences aren’t difficult to imagine.
This is a small business owner’s nightmare. As is the health insurance mandate. Obama will be a disaster, economically, at least if the Democrats get enough votes to block filibusters in the Senate.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here’s more on the job-destruction potential of Obama’s health-care plans, from that bastion of right wingery, the New York Times:
the penalty in Massachusetts is picayune compared with what some health experts believe Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, might impose as part of his plan to provide affordable coverage for the uninsured. Though Mr. Obama has not released details, economists believe he might require large and medium companies to contribute as much as 6 percent of their payrolls.
That, Mr. Ratner said, would be catastrophic to a low-margin business like his, which has 90 employees, 29 of them full-time workers who are offered health benefits.
“To all of a sudden whack 6 to 7 percent of payroll costs, forget it,” he said. “If they do that, prices go up and employment goes down because nobody can absorb that.”
Writ large, that is one of the significant concerns about Mr. Obama’s health plan, which like this state’s landmark 2006 law would subsidize coverage for the uninsured by taxing employers who do not cover their workers. And it is a primary reason that so-called play-or-pay proposals have had an unsteady history for nearly two decades.
This is 180 degrees from the direction that we need to go. Most of the problems of the current health-care system stem from its being tied so much to employment, which is an artifact of wage controls during World War II. The first critical step in fixing it is to decouple it from the job, so that plans are portable, and people are more connected with choosing their provider. McCain’s plan isn’t perfect, but it’s a big step in the right direction, and the demagoguery of the Democrats on this issue (as on most issues) has been shameful.
More LLC Links
Clark Lindsey is back from New Mexico, and has a roundup of links about the Lunar Landing Challenge.
Jeff Foust also has a couple video interviews, with Ken Davidian and John Carmack.
A Devoted Mother
…has passed on.
Firefighters spotted Scarlett, despite burns to her eyes, ears and face, toting each kitten out of the building to safety. Once outside, Scarlett nudged each baby with her nose to make sure she found all five.
The hero cat was taken to the North Shore Animal League with her offspring – and their story soon attracted attention from around the globe.
It’s instinct, but it’s not just instinct, because there are some mothers who don’t make the mark. All species can transcend, to limited degrees. But there are variations within.
Tax Incentives
Greg Mankiw compares the Obama and McCain plans. Neither of them are great, but one is much better than the other.