I’m definitely into minimizing my disutility, especially if it saves time, plus I’m lazy about these things. I end up having my hair cut too short with relatively long intervals between haircuts. Of course, there’s a very noticeable contrast between what I look like right after a haircut and what I look like after six weeks without one, but it’s a gradual process interrupted only by sudden contrasts in my appearance. I realize politicians need to look the same all the time, but I don’t.
It’s not just the cost of the haircut. It’s the irritation of it, in terms of time out of my life, and having to interact with the haircutters.
“I’ve decided to launch an effort through my Share Space Foundation….Share Space Stakes! A sweepstakes or raffle. Proceeds benefit space related and scientific and educational goals. Donations open possibility of winning prizes. Starting with parabolic flights. Expanding to suborbital flights.
“Soyuz costs…millions of dollars…. The cost could be paid for by hundreds of thousands of people donating $50.
“We have not yet developed the rules, but it will be posted on our Share Space web site. Share Space Stakes is scheduled to be launched this year.
“Winners will have to be 18, satisfy certain health restrictions. This will be non-transferable.
“Space travel is poised to go from the few to the many. I hope to play a role with Share Space Foundation…. Who knows who will be one of the lucky winners about to take their own space adventure.”
“I think the reason it happens in America is there’s access to weapons — you can go into a supermarket and get powerful automatic weapons,” Keith Ashcroft, a psychologist, told the Press Association.
You can’t legally purchase “automatic” weapons anywhere, let alone in a supermarket, but that doesn’t prevent Dr. Ashcroft from pontificating about a country he knows nothing about. And the WaPo reporter can’t be bothered (and likely is just as clueless) to correct it for the reader.
Art Dula speaking at the Space Investment Summit in Manhattan today called for Congress to reform the Outer Space Treaty to cap the unlimited liability that signatory countries have for their nationals’ space accidents. “They don’t have this for oil tankers or airplanes.”
[Update by Rand Simberg]
One of the reasons they don’t have it for airplanes is the Warsaw Convention. Did he propose extending that to space?
[Update by Sam Dinkin]
He proposed getting an act of Congress passed to unilaterally limit the US federal government liability.
I’d like to see a class-action lawsuit against the university by parents of the injured and murdered students, particularly if any of them had CCW. That would discourage not just VPI, but other universities from arbitrarily disarming their community and leaving them exposed to nightmares like yesterday’s.
[Late morning update]
Some in comments here have some weird fantasies about gunfights at the OK Corral if those with permits are allowed to carry on campus, and that even more would die in the confusion if there had been multiple people with guns. First, I would point out that a campus like that probably has a very high percentage of ROTC, with weapons training. I think that the notion that, had they been allowed to carry, many more would have died is ludicrous. We now have empirical evidence of what happens at Virginia school shootings when people are allowed weapons, and when they are not. It’s pretty overwhelming in favor of the former at this point. I think that in the face of both theory and experience, it is criminally negligent for a university to make itself a “gun-free zone.” Particularly if it is warned of the potential consequences ahead of time.
But apparently, to people like this, making people “feel” safe is more important than actually making them safe. In the modern “liberal” mind, feelings trump all.
I feel your pain, Clark. You’ve done yeoman’s work in keeping us all informed on space stuff. The rest of us will just have to try to pick up the pace so that you can take a well-earned break, or at least, easing off.
And I agree with the commenters that we have to figure out a way to make this more remunerative for him.