Business, Economics, Law, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Trump’s Latest EO On Regulations

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I like the idea conceptually, and it may even be legal (but the courts will have to rule on that), but it will be almost impossible to implement. But it’s long past time to dismantle the regulatory state; Congress has delegated far too much of its duties on to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.

[Afternoon update]

What does this mean for FAA’s rules on spaceflight?

Business, Economics, Popular Culture, Space, Technology and Society

Hyperloops And Tunnels

10 Comments

So we went over to the pod competition yesterday. I may have some pics later, but some quick observations:

I saw a lot of innovation; as Elon said, of the 27 teams, no two concepts were alike. I was amused that almost everyone had an aeroshell, for a vehicle that’s supposed to operate in vacuum. As I noted to Gwynne (who I just happened to run into for a minute, meeting her husband for the first time), the primary functional purpose of the aeroshells seemed to be to provide real estate for sponsors’ names, like race cars. (I also saw and finally got to meet Sandy Mazza from The Daily Breeze, who has been having fun covering Elon’s antics).

The winners of the race were supposed to be announced at 4:30, but at that point, only the German team had actually run (we heard their pod rattle by behind us as we were eating a hot dog by the tube). Apparently, it took a long time between runs, because they had to evacuate the tunnel after the pod was placed in it, then repressurize to get it out the other end. To pump it down took half an hour. My question (which I didn’t get a chance to ask anyone): Why not have an airlock at each end? Evacuate the tunnel, put the pod in the airlock, evacuate the airlock (which could happen much more quickly, then open the door to the tunnel. Reverse the process at the other end. Seems like it would save a lot of both time and energy.

Finally, as we were walking to the event (we parked at Lowe’s, across the street from SpaceX), we saw a lot of activity in the adjacent SpaceX parking lot. Elon had (as he’s warned on Friday) apparently started digging a hole for his tunnel. As he said in his remarks at the event, they were just getting going, and were going to start trying ideas on better tunneling tech (he thinks it can be improved five or ten fold, in terms of time and cost), but that they didn’t yet “know what they were doing, (which reminds me of an old quote from von Braun, possibly apocryphal, “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing). Anyway, interesting times in Hawthorne.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Trump’s Refugee Charlie Foxtrot

8 Comments

This is the sort of thing that I actually expected, given Trump’s history and statements. He’s never read the Constitution, he doesn’t care about it, and he doesn’t even care about the law. As Jonathan Adler writes, he may have hired “the best people” (and he does have many good picks), but he apparently relied on idiots for this:

Whatever one thinks of the underlying policy, the degree of administrative incompetence in its execution is jaw-dropping. . . .

Under normal circumstances, I believe that the policy embodied in the Trump EO is lawful under existing precedent and would survive judicial review. That is, I believe the executive branch may decide to identify specific countries from which immigrants and others seeking entry into the country must receive “extreme vetting” and that the President may order a suspension of refugees from particular places (as Obama did with Iraq in 2011). Despite some of the President’s comments during the campaign about wanting a “Muslim ban,” this EO does not come anywhere close to effectuating such a ban, as it largely focuses on countries that were previously identified as sources of potential terror threats.

I stress “under normal circumstances” because these are not normal circumstances. The cavalier and reckless manner in which this specific EO was developed and implemented will likely give judges pause — and with good reason. Courts typically give a degree of deference to executive branch actions under the assumption that polices are implemented after serious consideration of relevant legal and policy questions. Indeed, the more serious the government interest allegedly being served, the more serious one expects the government’s internal review to be (unless, of course, there are exigent circumstances necessitating immediate action, but that was not the case here).

I’d like to think that he’ll learn from this, but I doubt it. He completely lacks impulse control. The good news is that, at some point (particularly if he continues to ignore court orders), the real Republicans are likely to decide that Mike Pence will be a better president.

Meanwhile, while it was a huge screw up, it’s driven the Left completely around the bend:

Trump’s order is, in characteristic Trump fashion, both ham-handed and underinclusive, and particularly unfair to allies who risked life and limb to help the American war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is also not the dangerous and radical departure from U.S. policy that his liberal critics make it out to be. His policy may be terrible public relations for the United States, but it is fairly narrow and well within the recent tradition of immigration actions taken by the Obama administration. . . . Trump isn’t making this up; Obama-administration policy effectively discriminated against persecuted religious-minority Christians from Syria (even while explicitly admitting that ISIS was pursuing a policy of genocide against Syrian Christians), and the response from most of Trump’s liberal critics has been silence.

And this is something I’ve been noting every day on Twitter:

If you are horrified by what you see Trump doing, is it because when Obama did things like that you just didn’t see? Or did everything look different because it was Obama doing them?

And yes, Obama is much more of a Big Brother figure than Trump could ever hope to be. But the Left is blind on this issue.

[Update a while later]

“Scrap this half-baked immigration order and start over“:

This isn’t anywhere close to rational anti-terrorism policy. This is, rather, incompetence and ignorance by a White House inexperienced in government and deliberately insulated from those with experience. If it is additionally tainted with bigotry or cruelty, that would make it worse.

“Half-baked” is too kind. The batter is still in the bowl.

[Update a few minutes later]

“The president tramples innocent people in his rush to fulfill an ill-advised campaign promise.”

[Late-morning update]

Separating fact from hysteria on the immigration order. There’s sure been a lot of hysteria.

Business, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Alexa, Stop!

22 Comments

I don’t understand why we have to be stuck with “OK, Google,” Or “Hey, Siri.” We can customize our ringtones, why can’t we customize our command delimiter?

[Afternoon update]

OK, so here’s my problem with these devices and software. In order for them to work, they have to be always listening. WHich means they could be continuously recording. Which means that someone could hack your phone, and listen and record as well.

History, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Half A Century

15 Comments

Fifty years ago, three astronauts died on the launch pad in a ground test. It occurs to me that, like the Kennedy assassination, this was one more event that, had it not occurred, the moon landings may not have been successful. There were many problems with the program that weren’t seriously dealt with until after that disaster. It reinforces the reality of how unlikely the success of Apollo was, and why it’s foolish to think we can replicate it half a century later.

Meanwhile, Commercial Crew is delayed again. Because it’s more important to not lose an astronaut than to end our dependence on the Russians, even though at this point, we should have no confidence in their systems. While crew flights use Soyuz, not Proton, they both use the third stage that just failed on the Progress mission. And they seem to have systemic problems in their aerospace industry.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a piece from the WaPo.

[Update a while later]

Andrew Chaiken asks, did it have to happen? They were being very sloppy. They hadn’t had any problems with pure O2 in Mercury or Gemini, so they ignored the issue. I’d forgotten the name Marty Cioffoletti; he went on to work on the Shuttle, and I worked with him occasionally in Downey in the 80s.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is a useful bottom line, that I’ve been thinking about this week, in the context of the book:

A month after the fire, NASA’s director of manned spaceflight, George Mueller, said in a Congressional hearing that NASA’s experiences with Mercury and Gemini “had demonstrated that the possibility of a fire in the spacecraft cabin was remote.” Mueller’s words lay bare the false logic that, in the pressure to meet President Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade deadline for a lunar landing, had skewed the thinking of nearly everyone at NASA: It hasn’t bitten us, so we must be okay. This fallacy would strike NASA again, with the O-ring leaks that brought down the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and the broken-off chunk of foam insulation that doomed its sister ship Columbia in 2003.

It’s nice to think that if we only spend enough money, and take enough time, we can ensure that no one ever dies, but as I write in the book:

No frontier in history has ever been opened without risk and the loss of human life, and the space frontier will be no different, particularly considering the harshness and hazards of it. That we spend untold billions in a futile attempt to prevent such risk is both a barrier to opening it, and a testament to the lack of national importance in doing so.

Those men died because we were in a rush, because what we were doing — beating the Soviets to the moon — was at the time considered important. But now, “safety is the highest priority.”

[Update a while later]

[Mid-morning update]

OK, I had forgotten that the Outer Space Treaty was opened for signature on the same day. It didn’t get as many headlines.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Another Amicus Brief

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This one is from Steve McIntyre:

In the end, an objective review of these reports quickly reveals their flaws and omissions. As The Atlantic has noted, competent investigations into these issues could “have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong.” Given this accurate assessment, the reports cannot serve as the basis for a “clear and convincing” finding that the Appellants had serious doubts about the alleged falsity of their statements.

It nicely complements the one from Judith Curry. I’m told to expect one more from the other amici who supported us the last time; they got an extension until Monday.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!