Trying to break in to a broken Pentagon procurement system.
[Tuesday update]
Speaking of the broken Pentagon procurement system, here’s an interesting take on it from AvWeek.
[Bumped]
Category Archives: Business
Space Water
Thirteen things to do with it:
Technically we don’t need water in space for drinking because we can recycle our pee. If you’re not really fond of that idea, then you must be very fond of space mining, because otherwise recycled pee is on the menu. It’s really not so bad to drink recycled pee. Here on Earth you do it all the time. It’s just not as easy on a tiny spaceship where the proximity of the recycling equipment forces you to remember where your beverage came from. And recycling on such a small scale as a spaceship is expensive and tricky. Giant spaceships like Earth are better at that stuff. Anyhow, without space mining, you’ll be drinking lots of pee. If on the other hand you have lots of water from mining in space, then your pee can be dumped overboard to make miniature yellow comets in orbit around the sun. Consider it a form of art. So it’s your choice: making space art, or drinking pee.
News you can use.
By the way, I’ve added Phil’s blog to the blogroll.
Also, related: Chris Lewicki talks about space-based propellants.
Mad Men Ads
Lileks (who has finally replaced the irreplaceable Jasper with a new puppie) has thoughts on the decline of advertising and the suckitude of the early seventies:
What’s the opposite of nostalgia? What’s the word for an exaggerated dislike of a particular time? I know I am nostalgic for things I did not experience, and only see through the pop-culture elements left behind, which communicate incomplete and occasionally misleading messages. But I have antipathy for things I experienced at the fringe of adolescence – not because it was a bad time, or I didn’t like them then, but because they seem now to be the products of a culture that was getting cheap and lazy; it was full of gimcrack baubles turned out by an exhausted system that tried to adapt to the times, but had no strength to put forth any ideas or uphold any ideas that went before. The period from 1967 to 1975, with some stellar exceptions, was just a horrible time for everything, and you can reduce it all down to one middle-aged balding dude with wet hair plastered over his head in brown polyester pants and a mustard-yellow shirt approving one thing after the other because the kids will go for it.
That’s a generalization. Somewhat. But. I’ve said this before: “Mad Men”’s exploration of the late 60s somehow avoids the fact that advertising in that era was horrible. Compare an issue of Life magazine from 1968 to its 1958 counterpoint – it’s as if style, color, art, romance, seduction, adulthood, and bright-eyed joy had been drained from the world. The ads weren’t about the product anymore; the ads were about the ads.
[Yes, I know it’s not fresh material — I’d gotten behind on my Bleatage.]
Tomatoes
Breeding better ones, through genetic modification.
So of course, the luddites will fight it.
Piketty’s Book
Why it’s “garbage.”
Kyle Smith asked today on Twitter, if you put a check for a hundred bucks in the middle of Hillary’s new book, how many of them would get cashed? I’d say the same thing about Piketty’s book. It’s a “classic.” That is, a book that everyone wants to display and have read, but no one wants to actually read. Fortunately, some people who understand math did slog through it.
Ghostbusters
Why it’s the most libertarian Hollywood blockbuster of all time:
How many Hollywood blockbusters involve private businesses as the heroes and government regulators as the villains?
Dickless would certainly fit in well with the current EPA.
My Phone Is In Its Prime
When I first bought it, I was unhappy with the battery life, so I bought a spare, for thirty bucks. Last week I bought two for $2.41 apiece. I’ll never be without Droid juice again.
Shelby’s Latest Crusade
Why it’s self defeating.
At best, it’s a delaying tactic.
[Update a while later, about an hour before my appearance on The Space Show]
Sam’s thesis is a matter of some dispute. I suspect it will be addressed in comments over there.
The Space Show
I’ll be on this afternoon from 2-3:30 PM PDT, to discuss the book in the context of current events with Russia, commercial crew and congress.
The Climate Cult
Thoughts from Steve Hayward on the latest propaganda failure:
The temperature plateau and the persistent limitations and errors of the computer models strongly suggest the kind of “anomalies” that Thomas Kuhn famously explained should constitute a crisis for dominant scientific theories. What’s more, several papers recently published in the peer-reviewed literature conclude climate sensitivity is much lower than previously thought, making the problem of climate change much less likely to be catastrophic and more likely to be easily managed. But with the notable exceptions of the Economist and straight-shooting New York Times science blogger Andrew Revkin, these heterodox findings, which have steadily eroded the catastrophic climate change narrative, have received almost no media attention.
Despite all this, there has been not even the hint of a second thought from the climateers, nor any reflection that their opinions or strategies could bear some modification. The environmental community is so deeply invested in looming catastrophe that it’s difficult to envision a scientific result that would alter their cult-like bearing. Rather than reflect, they deflect, blaming the Koch brothers, the fossil fuel industry, and Republican “climate deniers” for their lack of political progress. Yet organized opposition to climate change fanaticism is tiny compared with the swollen staffs and huge marketing budgets of the major environmental organizations, not to mention the government agencies around the world that have thrown in with them on the issue. The main energy trade associations seldom speak up about climate science controversies. The major conservative think tanks have no climate change programs to speak of. The Cato Institute devotes just two people to the issue. The main opposition to climate fanaticism is confined to the Heartland Institute, the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and a scattering of relentless bloggers who have acquired surprisingly large readerships. That’s it. These are boutique operations next to the environmental establishment: The total budgets for all of these efforts would probably not add up to a month’s spending by just the Sierra Club. And yet we are to believe that this comparatively small effort has kept the climate change agenda at bay. It certainly keeps climateers in an uproar.
Well, someone has to do it.