Turn it into Drone Valley. Some interesting thoughts on regulatory arbitrage from Marc Andreesen.
[Update early afternoon]
Link was a little off, but fixed now.
Category Archives: Business
Congress Anchors NASA
I have a description of the current policy mess over at Reason.
The Space-Policy Teddy Bears, RIP
Temporarily, anyway. Things had gotten sufficiently absurd recently on the space-policy front that a new video would have almost written itself, but sadly, Xtranormal went tits up last summer, with all user info. Fortunately, there wasn’t much money in my account to lose, and all my videos are preserved on Youtube, but I’m not sure how I’ll be making any new ones.
Obama’s Student Loan Subsidies
Expect them to cause college costs to soar even more.
It’s a shame that the president doesn’t seem to have even taken Econ 101.
[Update a few minutes later]
Universities are one of America’s many failed dinosaurs.
Dads Are Stupid
A disturbing advertising trend:
The ads tell you that fatherhood – indeed, any sort of domestic entanglement – turns you into a dullard, a dope, a neutered clueless dork who can be reduced down to oversized tools and stammering befuddlement at Important Things. Why would any man want to be that? What rewards does the culture offer in return?
Not much, sadly.
Climate Change
…and hot air:
In other words mitigation to slow or halt GHG emissions will be costly today with little payout over the next 100, if not 1000, years, making it unlikely that large mitigation projects have a positive net present value. And for these results to occur, the United States would have to be joined by the rest of the industrialized nations as well as the developing ones, something that is not going to happen.
Given that mitigation has gained little policy traction, many climate scientists seem to be paying more attention to adaptation. Indeed, the subtitle of the IPCC’s 2014 report is Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. In contract to earlier IPCC reports, the press release in April mentioned mitigation only once and adaptation 12 times. According to Chris Field, chairman of one of the IPCC working groups, “The really big breakthrough in this report is the new idea of thinking about managing climate change.”
What a concept.
[Noon update]
Math is math: “(100,000′s of Jobs + Billions of Taxpayer $’s) x 85 years = 0.018° C.”
The Way To Mars
Will it be paved by robots?
I’m sure it will, to some extent.
Boeing And Lockmart
The Cantor Defeat In Virginia
it’s not obvious, but it’s potentially great news for space policy.
[Update a while later]
I elaborate at Ricochet.
[Wednesday-morning update]
OK, for those who aren’t Ricochet members, here’s what I posted there, under the title “What Does Cantor’s Loss Mean For Space Policy?”:
OK, I know that post title will excite almost no one, because no one (to first order) cares about space policy. It’s a prevailing theme of my (non-best-selling) book.
But for those few who care, Eric Cantor didn’t give a damn about it. Neither did/does John Boehner
But Cantor just got involuntarily retired, and Boehner has long displayed indifference to continuing as Speaker of the House.
So tonight’s electoral loss will set off a huge and unpredictable fight for House leadership. While I don’t want to predict the outcome, the most obvious beneficiary of tonight’s event is Kevin McCarthy, the Majority Whip (usually considered to be second in line behind Majority Leader, which Cantor was). If McCarthy takes over as leader as a result of Cantor’s not only loss, but humiliation, he will be next in line to take over as Speaker if (as seems likely) Boehner steps down next year.
Which means that the congressman from Kern County, California, will be in a position to select members and chairs of the committees that oversee the NASA, DoD and FAA budgets. Which means that he will be in a position to select Congresspeople who could decide to stop making insane decisions about human spaceflight based on their own parochial interests, and instead congresspeople who actually care whether or not we actually open up space. Because he will have a local constituency in Mojave that has a strong interest in commercial spaceflight, he may exercise his power to make the committee more friendly to it than it has been in the past.
Will this happen? Who knows?
There will be a potentially chaotic fight for leadership in the sudden vacuum, and McCarthy may not come out on top. But if he does, things may suddenly become very interesting for the future of productive human spaceflight, because he will be potentially a Speaker of the House whose willing ear commercial space advocates will have.
[Wednesday-morning update]
CNN (I know) is reporting that with Cantor’s defeat, Boehner’s interest in stepping down is somewhat, if not a lot diminished. Apparently Cantor was the heir apparent, and Boehner may not step aside for anyone else. Of course, there is no iron-clad law that he continue to be Speaker. Like Cantor, he himself may be susceptible to a challenge from one of the young turks.
One other point. The next shoe to fall will be Cantor’s replacement as Majority Leader, which will likely happen soon, because he’s lost a lot of clout as a lame duck. If it’s McCarthy, he will become the new heir apparent (since he had previously been favored by Boehner). And even as Majority Leader, he’ll have a lot more influence over the committee structure.
[Update a while later]
OK, according to this National Journal article, McCarthy may be a victim of a general revolt. We’ll see how he maneuvers. But actually, Ryan wouldn’t necessarily be bad for space policy either.
[Afternoon update]
OK, one thing I hadn’t factored in. McCarthy may have to buy votes with committee chairmanships, which complicates any efforts to clean up the policy mess.
The Big Fat Lie
Another review of Nina Teicholz’s book
Because the importance of cholesterol as a risk factor for heart disease had been accepted as dogma, it was pretty well impossible to challenge it. For example, one of the outstanding nutrition scientists, David Kritchevsky, suggested in the 1980s that there should be a weakening of the recommendation on dietary fat and encountered hysterical opposition. Here is what he told the author:
“People would spit on us! It’s hard to imagine now, the heat of the passion. It was just like we had desecrated the American flag. They were so angry that we were going against the suggestions of the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health.”
This meant that anyone who had the temerity to challenge the official line was committing professional suicide. Applications for funds to support research, which might question the prevailing views on fat, were unlikely to be supported. Even if funds were obtained (eg from independent foundations) the researchers would find difficulty in publishing their results in scientific journals and they were rarely invited to serve on expert panels. By stifling opposition, the public was presented with what appeared to be a uniform scientific consensus.
Say, that sounds familiar somehow.