SLS/Orion is not only not a “spaceship to everywhere,” it’s really is a spaceship to nowhere.
I really don’t understand what he’s thinking.
Category Archives: Business
The New Space Race
The Modern World
Yes. “The modern world is astonishing. But it has a price: sometimes the expectation of no communication is better than an expectation of communication that goes unfufilled.”
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related: Wifi is about to get faster.
Too bad it’s not about to get more reliable. I still have to reboot the router every time I want to watch Netflix.
Hipster Web Fonts
A righteous rant. As Glenn notes, a lot of web designers are young, with good eyesight, and monitors the size of a drive-in theater screen.
But now I’m thinking I should go look at my own style sheet.
Cosmos
Chad Orzell has some problems with the reboot. So do I and while it’s not his main concern, he puts his finger on it:
The bit where he called out young-Earth creationism for the impoverished scale of its vision was cute, too, though I’m not sure it was all that necessary or useful (in that the people who believe that won’t be watching, and wouldn’t be convinced), but then the show has clearly established a pattern of throwing red meat to the anti-religious from time to time.
Yes, if by “from time to time” he means every episode so far. I’m not traditionally religious, but I find it gratuitous and off putting. The writers and Tyson seem to get some sort of righteous satisfaction from putting a rhetorical thumb in the eyes of believers. It does not advance science, or their own secular religious cause.
Crowdfunding Is Not A Scam
It’s market research. She makes a good point, that it’s a quick, inexpensive way to identify products with no market, relative to actually putting them in the market. On the other hand, sometimes products that don’t do well in the market as their primary function find some other killer app that no one anticipated. If it dies in crowdfunding, no one would get the chance to discover that sort of thing.
The Democrats’ Scandals
They’re all rooted in the evil of unlimited government:
Adam Smith’s formula for prosperity — “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” — is the very modest ambition that conservatives aim for. Limited government is the tool by which government can be made to do good without necessarily being good, or being composed of good men.
The progressive state, on the other hand, is a state infused with moral purpose. If politics is to be a jihad, then the state must be invested with extraordinary power to achieve its moral mission. There is no way to invest the state with extraordinary power without also investing those powers in the men who hold its offices and staff its bureaucracies, which hold ever more nearly absolute power over our property and our lives. (And given that the Obama administration has made a policy of assassinating U.S. citizens without legal process, we might as well call that power “absolute.”) But if those elective offices and regulatory fortresses are to be staffed with men who are corrupt and corruptible, then the progressive vision of the morality-infused state must falter.
And they — we — are all corruptible.
Lord Acton was right, once again, about the power of power to corrupt.
Asimov’s Laws Of Robotics
Why they can’t protect us.
Unfortunately.
Government Ranges
We can’t rely on them for commercial spaceflight. It’s truly appalling that we’re going to have a multi-week delay at the Cape because the infrastructure lacks robustness. Unfortunately, the incentive structure for government expenditures allows this to happen.
Oculus Rift
Is the device sexist?