Today, October 4th, is the fifty-second and fifth anniversaries of Sputnik I, and SpaceShipOne’s winning of the Ansari X-prize, respectively. I’ll probably have more thoughts up later today or tomorrow, at Popular Mechanics or Pajamas media.
[Update a few minutes later]
Some thoughts from Michael Belfiore on the X-Prize anniversary.
…call for desperate tax reforms? If California would do something like this, I’d feel a lot better about moving back, and maybe even start a business. I can’t see it happening, though, absent a massive voter revolt that throws out the gerrymandered morons in Sacramento. And the gerrymandering dictates against that, absent some kind of proposition to blow up the redistricting system.
A warning for America, from (Dr.) Paul Hsieh.
…kill GM and Chrysler? Not single handedly, but it may have proven the fatal blow. Between that, and the fact that so many consider them Government Motors, and run by union thugs, they may never recover. The question is, what does the administration come up with next to punish Ford and level the playing field?
[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts from Mickey:
…they seem to have grossly misperceived consumers’ reaction to the equities of the bailout itself. And that 45% can’t be all Republicans.
Nope.
I also have to say that this saddens me immensely, having come from a GM family (and having a brother who still works there). If they do go under, I hope that someone can take the assets and do something more productive with them. But that might also require an overhaul of the government in Lansing, and I’m not sure what the prospects are for that.
[Update mid morning]
Speaking of my last point: Michigan’s budget train wreck. And to think that some people a few years ago (and maybe even now) were bewailing that pesky Constitution that didn’t permit darling Jennifer to run for president.
Thoughts on Barack Obama’s deficits.
[Thursday morning update]
Related thoughts from John Stossel: “No matter what the numbers say, it’ll be called a success.”
[Another update a few minutes later]
Happy fiscal New Year! Out with the old deficits, in with the new.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been half a decade since the first X-Prize flight. I remember it well because I had moved to Florida only a month before, was still recovering from being hit by two hurricanes within two weeks (Frances and Jeanne), and watching on television, frustrated that I could no longer just get in the car and drive up to Mojave to see it.
Now I’m back in California, and hope I’ll have more opportunities to go up and see the other exciting activities that it spawned. Things haven’t moved along as fast as people hoped, either for Virgin Galactic (due to some poor technical and contracting decisions on their part, in my opinion), or the field in general, but things are starting to pick up. As Arthur Clarke noted, we are often overoptimistic about schedules in the short run, but overpessimistic in the long run. It’s starting to be a longer run from 2004.
That’s the (devastating) unemployment rate for young people:
Al Angrisani, the former assistant Labor Department secretary under President Reagan, doesn’t see a turnaround in the jobs picture for entry-level workers and places the blame squarely on the Obama administration and the construction of its stimulus bill.
“There is no assistance provided for the development of job growth through small businesses, which create 70 percent of the jobs in the country,” Angrisani said in an interview last week. “All those [unemployed young people] should be getting hired by small businesses.”
There are six million small businesses in the country, those that employ less than 100 people, and a jobs stimulus bill should include tax credits to give incentives to those businesses to hire people, the former Labor official said.
“If each of the businesses hired just one person, we would go a long way in growing ourselves back to where we were before the recession,” Angrisani noted.
…Angrisani said he believes that Obama’s economic team, led by Larry Summers, has a blind spot for small business because no senior member of the team — dominated by academics and veterans of big business — has ever started and grown a business.
But they went to Ivy League schools, and are smarter than us, so things will work out. Perhaps they just haven’t raised the minimum wage high enough.
Why aren’t we spending more money on it?
David W. Keith, a physicist at the University of Calgary, reviews some of the technologies for air capture of carbon and notes that there is not a single government program devoted specifically to that purpose. Dr. Keith estimates that less than $3 million per year in public money is currently being spent on related research, even though it could potentially be a bargain. He writes:
[Early] estimates suggest that air capture will be competitive with technologies that are getting large R.&D. investments. For example, the cost of cutting CO2 emissions by displacing carbon-intensive electricity production with roof-mounted solar photovoltaic panels can easily exceed $500 per ton of CO2. Yet even skeptics suggest that a straightforward combination of existing process technologies could probably achieve air capture at lower cost. And the fact that several groups have raised private money for commercialization suggests that there are investors who believe that it is possible to develop technologies to capture CO2 from air at costs closer to $100 than $500 per ton of CO2.
When I wrote about Richard Branson’s $25 million prize for figuring out how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, I wondered if governments and other entrepreneurs would follow his example (and if we would someday have nanobots gobbling up carbon dioxide). So far, I guess, the answer is no, but perhaps Dr. Keith’s article will stimulate some interest.
Don’t count on it. It doesn’t give them enough control over our lives, or force us to tighten our hair shirts sufficiently.
[Sunday evening update]
Things seem to have gotten a little off track in comments. Let me restate the question, to get more useful responses. Given that the people currently running the country think that atmospheric CO2 is a problem, and given that we are currently spending much money to address this (wind, solar, other non-nuclear “green” tech, etc.), why are we not spending a higher proportion on this? I contend that I have already described why. The collapse of the Soviet Union having (at least temporarily) given socialism a bad name, the socialists have taken over the environmental movement, and are using it as a Trojan Horse for their (non-environmental) collectivist agendas. I’m looking for alternate explanations from the usual defenders of the watermelons. I’m also looking for plausible ones, but I don’t expect to see them.
Some thoughts.
It really is a mess, and it isn’t helped by the technocluelessness of airline personnel. You’re supposed to “turn off” your phone (whatever that means), but you can fire up your laptop in the air. It has Bluetooth and a wireless widget that are almost certainly emitting, unless one is diligent enough to disable them. How many do that? I rarely do. I think that, like what happens before you board the plane at the airport, it is just more security theater, and has nothing to do with actual flight safety.
I wonder if one airline came up with smart policy, it would provide them with a competitive advantage that would force the rest of the industry to follow?
[Via Geekpress]
Some thoughts. I think that several departments and agencies should be razed, and be rebuilt from the ground up (if they need to be replaced at all). State is an essential department, but it does need a complete overhaul. Same thing with the CIA, which would be disbanded, and replaced with something else. Over course, the departments of Education and Labor should be simply eliminated.