What in the world were they thinking?
Category Archives: Business
The Mainstream Media
The Republicans should declare war on it.
Yes. It’s been waging war on them for decades. They really are largely Democrat operatives with bylines.
It could start with harsh mockery of Gail Collins and the New York Times by Scott Walker. He has nothing to lose, because they’ll continue to attack him regardless.
Climate Skeptics
How and when did you become one?
A lot of interesting responses.
As some note there, to me the biggest deal with the release of the CRU data five years ago wasn’t (just) the duplicity and unscientific behavior revealed in the emails, but the utter crap that was the source code of the computer models. It was clear that it was not done by anyone familiar with computer science, numerical methods, or modeling, and the notion that we should have any confidence whatsoever in their output was societally insane. In terms of Matthews’ paper, I’d put myself somewhere between “lukewarmer” and “moderate skeptic.”
[Update a couple minutes later]
Starting to read through the comments. Here’s just one horror story:
Most of the claims being made by climate change advocates appear to run contrary to basic meteorology. As I’ve been attacked personally and professionally for offering contrary views, I decided to leave the field. I will defend my Atmospheric Science PhD thesis and walk away. It’s become clear to me that it is not possible to undertake independent research in any area that touches upon climate change if you have to make your living as a professional scientist on government grant money or have to rely on getting tenure at a university. The massive group think that I have encountered on this topic has cost me my career, many colleagues and has damaged my reputation among the few people I know in the field. I’m leaving to work in the financial industry. It’s a sad day when you feel that you have to leave a field that you are passionately interested in because you fear that you won’t be able to find a job once your views become widely known. Until free thought is allowed in the climate sciences, I will consider myself a skeptic of catastrophic human induced global warming.
Yup. Totally, totally politicized. It’s not a science any more. Unless you think that Lysenko was a scientist.
Asteroid Retrieval
Over at Space News, Jon Goff has ten reasons it’s a good idea.
I agree with all of them. I’m not opposed to ARM per se, except to the degree (and it’s unfortunately a large one) that the primary reason for it is to justify SLS/Orion.
Our Spaceflight Future
Wayne Hale says he can’t be specific, due to NDAs, but it’s going to be amazing.
Yes, notwithstanding dead-end programs like SLS/Orion, we’re about to enter the most exciting era in space since Apollo, and it will vastly surpass it.
The Democrats’ Green-Energy Dream
…may be turning out to be a nightmare. But as Instapundit notes, it provided a lot of good opportunities for graft for years.
[Update a few minutes later]
The dark underside of big-money insider politics that dominates the green-energy movement.
Jon Stewart
Kyle Smith isn’t as impressed with him as we’re supposed to be:
Though Stewart has often claimed he does a “fake news show,” “The Daily Show” isn’t that. It’s a real news show punctuated with puns, jokes, asides and the occasional moment of staged sanctimony.
It contains real, unstaged sound bites about the days’ events and interviews about important policy matters.
Stewart is a journalist: an irresponsible and unprofessional one.
Yes, as Jim Treacher put it, the “clown nose off, clown nose on” schtick got pretty tiresome. The tears of all those bewailing his departure are delicious.
Automation
When all these technologies are in place, what will we need the people for?
We are already seeing serious issues for low-skilled labor. And of course, the official “unemployment rate” is a lie.
The Sunk-Cost Fallacy
…in love, and automobile manufacturing.
This is a big problem for space enthusiasts. “Oh, we can’t cancel SLS/Orion! We’ve already spent so much on them, all that money would just go to waste!”
Well, since the purpose was really never anything except to maintain the work force, it wouldn’t really have gone to waste, and continuing them would waste even more, if our actual goal is to do useful things in space. We need to cut our losses as soon as politically possible.
LauncherOne
…moving to Long Beach. Guess they’re not put off by California taxes and regulations. Yet.