It almost looks like the fix was in.
[Monday-morning update]
Here’s a detailed analysis from ESPN. It’s really hard to see how anyone could consider being knocked down “minimal contact.”
Category Archives: Business
Your Router
How to supercharge it.
I might try this, on both the router and the extender.
Gridlock
Why aren’t we thanking it for the economic recovery?
Because it doesn’t fit the narrative. But as Jefferson said, it’s a good demonstration that that government that governs least, governs best. If only we could roll back a lot of this crap.
It’s worth noting that things started to go to hell after the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, and didn’t really start to recover until the Republicans took the House back in 2010.
A Gravity Lab
A concept for doing it on the cheap.
One problem I see in the near term is that NASA plans to use Dragons as lifeboats, so I’m not sure when one would become available on orbit.
[Update a while later]
Actually, I think that a cargo Dragon meets the requirements for this much better than a crew Dragon. It’s an on-orbit mission only, so there’s no need for couches, which just take up room. It can’t be used for a lifeboat, because it has no docking adaptor (at least currently), so NASA wouldn’t miss it. Even a Dragon V2 would need an ECLSS upgrade, so might as well just put it in the cargo version. It would have a lot less value to NASA than a V2, so it would be easier to get it from them. All they’d be giving up is the cargo return (which they could even get when the mission was over, months later, if they wanted).
That Stupid Slate Article About Space Billionaires
I don’t know if I mentioned this foolish piece by Charles Seife last week (what would we do without “journalism” professors?). At the time, I merely tweeted that I didn’t understand why I was supposed to care whether or not Virgin Galactic and SpaceX were about “exploration.”
Jeff Foust commented that Slate editors must have taken the week off (which I think gives them too much credit during the non-holidays). Anyway he has taken it apart.
It’s difficult to imagine a student of Professor Seife’s turning in a class assignment with such factual errors and getting a passing grade.
Zing.
And speaking of “space exploration,” I’ve decided that this is the year I make all-out war on the phrase. It has held us back for decades in thinking about space in a sensible way.
Video Games
I’m not a gamer, but here‘s what Pop Mechanics thinks were the top ten of the year, at least in terms of innovation.
The Government Shutdown Option
How to end it [behind a paywall, though usually you can read by Googling the headline):
The GOP almost always bears the blame for a shutdown, because the smaller-government message of Republicans is easily portrayed as aiming to deprive the public of government services. President Clinton faced off against House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995, and Mr. Clinton won. President Obama dueled with the Republican House in 2013 and Mr. Obama won.
The advantages to the political party that favors higher spending—i.e., the Democrats—reflect the existing legal regime. But the next Congress can change the law (the most relevant one being the Antideficiency Act) so that the public suffers less inconvenience when the political parties cannot agree on spending levels. In case of a government shutdown, the government would continue to spend on discretionary programs at a level close to the amount authorized by the previous year’s budget. A reasonable default target might be 95%.
Such a law could be a political game-changer. The public would be less likely to suffer serious inconvenience with spending at this default target, and a 5% solution would strengthen the leverage of the party favoring less spending, i.e., the GOP. A 5% cut would in any event be closer to what Republicans ultimately want. They could hold out for a deal preferable to the default, since there would be very low costs imposed on the public in the interim.
Yes, if the Republicans were smart, they’d deprive the statists of this weapon. Unfortunately, there are lots of things the Republicans would do if they were smart, that they don’t. Which is why I’m not a Republican.
Minimum Wage Hikes
Everything we don’t know about them:
It wouldn’t be all that surprising if a small hike in the minimum wage had little effect on unemployment. But that doesn’t mean that you can extrapolate that result to very high minimums, like the Sea-Tac law, which hiked the local minimum wage by more than 50 percent from a level that was already well above the national average. To illustrate the problem, imagine raising the minimum wage by a penny. It’s extremely doubtful that anyone would fire workers in order to save 40 cents a week. But you’d be foolish to conclude that it would therefore be safe to raise the minimum wage to $100 an hour. The size of the increase matters.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
Another Dumb Space Piece
If it weren’t for that fiasco at The American Spectator yesterday, this would take the prize for the week, if not the month.
After reading this "Billionaires' Space Club" piece, I can only assume Slate's editors are taking this week off. http://t.co/eZFGoyLofB
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) December 30, 2014
Statins
A long piece about the science wars. Answer: we still don’t really know, but I’m avoiding them.