Category Archives: Business

The New Commercial Space Bill

Stephen Smith has an analysis. While it’s nice that they slightly mitigated the idiotic language about using SLS/Orion for ISS missions in 2010, the most significant aspect of the bill, to me, is the extension of the learning period. I don’t think the language about mining is all that significant, legally. It simply makes explicit what’s always been customary law since the moon samples.

College Pays Off

“…on average. Your results may vary.”

What, exactly, are we getting for all the money we’re spending on college? “Helping students pay for college” sounds like a fine public policy goal. “Helping people to spend years of their lives taking on debt just to find out that they’re unlikely to get a high-paying job” … considerably less so.

Degree-blind loans are disastrous. They’d never happen if the colleges and banks had skin in the game. They survive only through well-meaning but mindless taxpayer largess.

Vizio Televisions

This is why they’re lower priced. The company makes revenue from selling your viewing habits.

Here’s the thing. I’ve got plenty of video input sources. I don’t want a “smart television.” I don’t even want to waste money on audio amp and speakers. I just want to pour all of my television money into a good-quality picture. But it’s very hard, if not impossible, to find just monitors in the large-screen class.

Coddling The Snowflakes

An interesting interview with Jonathan Haidt on the victims and crybullies on campus. With a bonus Mars reference.

And “Microaggression, meet Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Yes, the modern progressives are the lineal ideological descendants of the Puritans. It’s the reason Massachusetts is so blue.

Also, the seductions of safety. [Via Glenn]

George Will weighs in: On campus, freedom from speech. And Ross Douthat says it’s a crisis our campuses deserve. Yes, they created this monster.

Ed Driscoll has more, related links.