Will it put some of them out of business?
If so, it will be poetic justice.
Category Archives: Business
The Chutzpah Of Max Baucus
Mike Pompeo calls him on it:
If it’s a train wreck, Pompeo said, Baucus has no one to blame but himself.
“No one in the country bears more responsibility for the complexity of this law than you,” Pompeo wrote in a letter to Baucus on Thursday.
Baucus, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was a key architect of the Affordable Care Act. Most of its major provisions were crafted in his committee, and the Finance draft was consistently treated as the primary bill even as other Senate and House committees worked on their own proposals.
“You drafted it, you twisted arms to get it passed, and, until now, you have lauded it as a model for all the world,” Pompeo wrote to Baucus. “Your attempts to pass the buck to President Obama’s team will not work, nor will they absolve you of responsibility for the harm that you have brought via this law.”
Baucus has a competitive reelection fight coming up next year — just months after the biggest pieces of ObamaCare are set to take effect. Republicans have already made clear that they plan to target Baucus over his role in getting the healthcare law passed, and problems with the implementation could make the GOP’s job easier.
My emphasis.
It certainly should make it easier. These people are truly disgusting.
A Space Hacker Workshop
I’m busy preparing my presentation for this afternoon at Space Access, but Ed Wright is announcing a space hacker workshop up at Ames Research Center in Mountain View on May 4-5 for people who want to learn how to build cubesats that can fly suborbitally on XCOR’s Lynx.
[Update Friday morning]
I originally wrote this post in Phoenix last Saturday, but didn’t actually publish it until yesterday, in case it had anyone scratching their heads.
The EU Carbon Market
…is dying.
Can’t happen too soon.
Locavorism
Beware the high priests of the religion. This is certainly not something that the government should be involved with.
A Battery Breakthrough?
Let’s hope this pans out. Among other things, it would solve Boeing’s problem. In fact, it might make electric airplanes possible, let alone cars. And some obvious space applications.
The Wreck Of The Euro
It has already failed, and is a dead currency walking:
…we’re in an interesting situation. The crisis is crippling the south, but the south has no power to resolve the crisis. The crisis isn’t comfortable for the north but still looks less painful than the solution. So the north, which has the ability to resolve the crisis, doesn’t have the will to do it and the south, which has the will, lacks the ability.
And meanwhile everything in Europe gets worse. As we’ve said before, with the exception of communism itself, the euro has been the biggest economic catastrophe to befall the continent (and the world) since the 1930s. Politicians in Europe thought they were living in a post-historical period in which mistakes didn’t really matter all that much. They were horribly wrong, and the wreck of the euro is blighting lives and embittering spirits on a truly staggering scale.
An “interesting” situation in the same sense as the ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”
Crowdfunding Space
Jeff Foust has a piece up on the topic over at The Space Review.
The GOP Problem With Minorities
It’s not that they’re for small government — it’s that they’re inconsistently so:
Consider Indian Americans: More than 85 percent voted for Barack Obama, and 65 percent generally vote Democratic. This despite the fact that, like Jews (another anti-Republican minority), Indian Americans are wealthier and less likely to receive government support than the overall population. What’s more, Indian Americans should be natural allies of limited-government politicians, given how much government dysfunction they’ve witnessed back home.
So how do Republicans manage to alienate nearly every minority? By applying limited-government principles very selectively. During the last 50 years the GOP has opposed welfare handouts, racial preferences, and multiculturalism. Yet the Party of Lincoln has looked the other way when the government has oppressed minorities through racial profiling, discriminatory sentencing laws, and, above all, immigration policy.
America’s immigration laws are an exercise in social engineering that should offend any sincere believer in limited government. They strictly limit the number of foreigners allowed from any one country, largely to prevent America from being overrun by Hispanics and Asians.
We definitely need immigration reform, but not the kind being worked on by the Gang of Eight.