I didn’t link it at the time, but he had an interesting Q&A on Reddit the other day.
Category Archives: Business
Space Property Rights
I haven’t read it yet, but this looks like an interesting paper, from Cato.
Koonin Pushback
Andy Revkin has the story.
I may respond to the Carnegie-Mellon letter later, after reading.
[Update a few minutes later]
Judith Curry, the biggest threat to the “consensus”?
The Left Versus The Climate
An almost book-length book review of Naomi Klein’s idiotic book.
Bash Shellshock
Well, actually, I’m not sure it’s everything. I’m doing a full update on my system, but not sure that will solve it.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, you may think you’ve patched, but you haven’t yet. Not clear how long it will take to fix it.
The Recovery
…that left out almost everybody.
It’s the worst since the Depression. For the same reasons. Because the same economic ignorami are in charge.
Jerry Pournelle
He’s posted a brief but complimentary review of the book (it’s buried deep in the post, after his lengthy discussion of his computer tech upgrades):
Safe Is Not An Option, by Rand Simberg is a reliability expert’s look at the space program. The book is discussed at length on its own web site. Those interested in the space program should read it: the book is quite critical of current space policies. It has endorsements from both astronauts and space policy analysts.
His general thesis is that NASA’s obsession, born of the days when “ours always blow up” and brought back with a vengeance by the Challenger disaster, is eliminating all human risk from spaceflight. That doesn’t work and the obsession is a huge obstacle to progress. There will always be risks, and we will always have heroes.
Simberg is an aerospace engineer with considerable experience and his analyses of various space incidents such as the Challenger Disaster are spot on, which is to say, I agree with them. Recommended.
Thanks!
Coffee
Is it ruining your productivity?
In other words, that euphoric short-term state that you enter after drinking coffee is what non-habitual caffeine consumers are experiencing all of the time. The difference is that for coffee drinkers, the feeling doesn’t last. “Coming off caffeine reduces your cognitive performance and has a negative impact on your mood. The only way to get back to normal is to drink caffeine, and when you do drink it, you feel like it’s taking you to new heights,” Bradberry explained. “In reality, the caffeine is just taking your performance back to normal for a short period.”
See, for me, the thing is that I can’t even tell whether or not I’ve had any. I just drink it for medicinal purposes. In fact, even though I now drink two cups almost every morning, I don’t consider myself a “habitual” drinker, because that implies that it’s a habit. It really isn’t, for me. I sometimes forget to drink it.
#GamerGate
Not being a gamer (and/or part of that community) I haven’t really been paying attention to this, but it appears to be pretty ugly. Unsurprisingly, it’s driven by leftist “journalists.”
Broken Government
Laws have gotten far too detailed:
Until recent decades, law based on principles was the structure of most public law. The Constitution is 10 pages long and provides basic precepts—say, the Fourth Amendment prohibition on “unreasonable searches and seizures”—without trying to define every situation. The recent Volcker Rule regulating proprietary trading, by contrast, is 950 pages, and, in the words of one banker, is “incoherent any way you look at it.”
Legal principles have the supreme virtue of activating individual responsibility. Law is still supreme. The goals of law are centralized, but implementation is decentralized. Every successful regulatory program works this way. New airplanes, for example, must be certified as “airworthy” by the FAA. There are no detailed regulations that set forth how many rivets per square foot are required. It’s up to the judgment of FAA officials. This system works pretty well. Which would you trust more, a plane approved by experts at the FAA or a plane that was allowed to fly merely because it satisfied a bunch of rules, many outdated?
The health-care law exemplifies this problem.