Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History, Space Science, Technology and Society

The Diane Rehm Space Discussion

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Marcia Smith has a good summary. This amused me:

Rehm exclaimed that she didn’t understand what Gold meant because the “language you’re using” sounds “proprietary” and one cannot own the Moon. Gold began answering, but apparently the show ran out of time for that segment (music began playing) and he was not able to fully respond. Rehm said it “sounds confusing to me,” and cut him off.

Diane Rehm always strikes me as someone who is easily confused. I’ve never understood her popularity, except that a lot of Beltway denizens share her propensity for confusion.

[Update a while later]

Monumental willful ignorance from Mark Whittington:

The cancellation of the SLS, unlikely in the current political climate, would mean the end of any hope of sending American astronauts beyond low Earth orbit for the foreseeable future.

If you can’t see beyond the next five years, perhaps. It’s the lack of propellant storage and transfer technologies, and landers, that is keeping bound to LEO, not lack of heavy life. Money wasted on SLS is trapping us there.

Expect him to show up shortly with his standard, foolish, “But you provide no alternative,” despite the fact that he’s been shown alternatives many times. We can explain it to you, Mark, but we can’t understand it for you.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Bill In A China Shop

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The de Blasio era begins in New York:

He then recited the key elements of his platform: affordable-housing projects, an end to hospital closures, reform of the “broken” stop-and-frisk policy, and a tax on upper-income earners. After each item, he would say, “We won’t wait, we’ll do it now.”

Not content with promoting his own agenda, he had to take swipes at something called the “far right,” which he zinged for its agenda of “trickle-down economics” and giving “more to the most fortunate.” Luckily, much of de Blasio’s fiscal program will need approval from New York governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators — who, for all their faults, don’t appreciate the “Bill in the China Shop” approach of the new mayor.

Noah Rothman, a writer for Mediaite.com, was taken aback by the tone and tenor of the speeches. He tweeted that “MSNBC [is] really missing a branding opportunity here. . . . We’re swearing in a new prime time host.” Indeed, we can only thank the schedulers for at least sparing us from having MSNBC’s Al Sharpton at the podium.

This may very quickly provide an example of how disastrous leftist policies can be, leading up the mid-terms.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Problem With California

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It’s too damn big:

Because the state is so enormous and occupies some much of the attractive real estate on the West Coast, people have often been reluctant to leave even when its policies are badly flawed. Over the last decade, things got so bad that California finally did start losing large numbers of migrants to other states. But not before the state’s government dug a much deeper hole for itself than would have been likely had California been three or four smaller states, each forced to compete for migrants with the others.

That is the dilemma. It’s geographically such a desirable location that people are willing to put up with awful government.