Larry Kudlow apparently interviewed Fred Thompson today for his CNBC show. I didn’t see it, but he has provided what he thinks is a summary of the results.
If it is an accurate assessment of his positions, there is absolutely nothing on which I disagree with him related there. Which is pretty amazing to me, because that’s unusual, if not a first, for a major party politician with me.
Maybe fifty percent cheaper.
I’d seriously consider a rooftop system here in south Florida if that happened. Those kinds of prices would seriously reduce payback time.
I think that Megan McArdle (and Tyler Cowen) has a good explanation for one of the reasons that space policy, and NASA is such a mess. It has too much money:
In an altogether excellent piece on medical innovation, Tyler Cowen notes:
The NIH works as well as it does because the money is mostly protected from Congress. It is not a success which can easily be replicated. The more money is at stake, the more Congress wants to influence allocation. We should guard this feature of the system jealously and try to learn from it. If we can.
This is a seriously, seriously underrated factor in public policy analysis, and I include the libertarian variety. The fact that you can do something awesome with $15 million does not mean that you could do something super-awesome with $150 million. It may simply not be possible to broaden what you are doing very much before countervailing forces–such as congressional interference (Exhibit A: the goddamn Acela)–kick in.
This is a fundamental problem of bureaucracies, and one that won’t be fixed with regard to space until private activities are much larger than government ones. Or actual space accomplishments become politically important. They certainly aren’t currently, and haven’t been since the sixties.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of Megan, she’s spending some time in Hanoi, and has a lot of interesting posts about Vietnam. Check out this one, on the state of the economy and human productivity:
The sight of people carrying goods in traditional ways, selling produce off the backs of bicycles, looks terribly romantic. I walked past two tourists today who were agreeably chatting about how beautiful and sustainable it all is. But it’s hard to find anything romantic about human beings using themselves as mules.
As one commenter notes, wealth doesn’t just happen on its own (or rather, it does if not prevented by poor governance), and unfortunately, collectivist economic theories tend to destroy, rather than create it.
Is the email age ending? I got an account on Facebook recently, but I still haven’t figured out why. Of course, I’m kind of anti-social by nature.
“anonymous.space” has some questions over at Space Politics for the Senate to ask NASA:
1) Given the Space Shuttle
“anonymous.space” has some questions over at Space Politics for the Senate to ask NASA:
1) Given the Space Shuttle
“anonymous.space” has some questions over at Space Politics for the Senate to ask NASA:
1) Given the Space Shuttle
This is depressing.
In Iraq, databases of DNA, fingerprints and iris scans have been collected from entire city populations. They brought in ballistics and other forensics experts. They train troops in staying alive and police in evidence handling. They conduct IED clearing operations. They analyze the IEDs. They analyze, profile, they catch in the act sometimes via UAV and roll up the cell.
Then they do it again when the cells evolve to foil the latest counters.
And from an unlikely source:
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi’s work as “fabulous”. “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years,” he says.
“Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years,” Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
Not just unusual because he’s a surfer, but also because he seems a little old to do something like this, which is supposedly more likely from a younger mind.