Category Archives: Business

Business, Space

New Wyoming Space Company

2 Comments

Tim Bendel, of Frontier Astronautics, is giving a presentation on how to address the gap between the ability of garage-based startups and larger companies to raise money. Not very many angels with money who are interested in space who aren’t already doing it.

Giving a history of the Zeppelin. After the count lost his first ship, he threw in the towel, because he’s lost all his money, but a lot of Germans sent him money, and he ended up with more than he had started with. Are there space enthusiasts who could do the same thing?

Talking about Warren Buffett’s stock, and its high value that he refuses to split. Independent holding companies evolved by purchasing a few shares of Berkshire stock, and then issuing new, lower-priced stock based on that asset.

His proposal is to gather small investors for the holding company, put their money into escrow, and fund start-up space companies off the interest. Different “flavors” or classes of stock would be issued, with different Class A escrow accounts, which could be associated with specific start ups.

Unfortunately, most of the info is on his charts, which I can’t read because I’m all the way in the back (where the laptop power is), and too dense for me to quickly transcribe even if I could.

He claims that it avoids sunshine laws, according to SEC lawyers that they’ve talked to. The basic idea is to provide a means for small investors to invest in small companies, albeit indirectly.

Issues: Have to pay for licenses, need to be broker/dealer, etc., a lot of paperwork. Probably about a hundred thousand bucks to get started. Goal is to do it for profit, in addition to helping space industry. Makes money on trades, but could also use other investment tools, such as puts and calls.

Has a business process patent on it, needs about a quarter million to start up.

Hard for me to evaluate it, given my funky state of consciousness, and inability to look at the numbers. I’ll talk to TIm about it later.

Business, Media Criticism, Social Commentary

Murderous Businessmen

19 Comments

Jonah is wondering why Hollywood types always imagine big businessmen knocking off their enemies, when this seems to happen so rarely (if ever) in real life.

I know I’ve blogged about this before, but a diligent search doesn’t turn up the post, so I’ll just repeat it.

Here’s my theory. Even ignoring the fact that a lot of Hollywood writers tend to be leftist, some of them may actually have personal reasons to hate “big business” and think it venal. For them, it often is.

First of all–they work in Hollywood, for those well-known paragons of probity and above-board accounting, television and film studios, and production companies. And horror stories about them abound. One could easily see why, if that was the only experience one had with the business world, one would have a pretty jaundiced view toward business and businessmen.

But there’s another part that is less obvious. People tend (rightly) to write what they know. And when screen writers are between screen-writing gigs, who do they work for?

Well, here’s a clue. What is one of the most common businesses to be depicted in television and movies? Think, for example, “Bewitched.” Or “Thirty Something.”

That’s right. Ad agencies. I haven’t done the research (it would be a good thesis project), but I’ll bet that television and film characters work at ad agencies vastly out of proportion to the number of people who do so in the real world.

After all, it’s a natural fit for a creative writer.

But it’s also (based on a lot of stories I’ve heard from people who have done it) one of the most vicious, back-stabbing industries in the nation, dominated by creative types rather than rational businessmen and good managers.

So, it only makes sense that if your only employment experience with business, big or otherwise, is working for the entertainment industry or the ad business, you’re not going to have much appreciation for how a real business, where you have to actually develop and manufacture things that people go out and willingly buy, and has to be run by people with a talent for business (not murder and skullduggery), actually works. It’s actually quite similar to the reason that life in the military is rarely depicted accurately. They have no real-life experience.

Business, Education, Media Criticism

An End To Journalism Schools?

3 Comments

Let’s hope so. A key point that the author misses, though, is that one doesn’t really learn anything in them, other than how to report things. It’s a metadegree, like a degree in education (though not quite as bad).

One of the reasons that much reporting is so bad, and that many bloggers can run circles around so-called journalists, is that they actually have knowledge to impart, and they can usefully analyze events in a way that a generalist, or “journalist,” simply can’t.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Irrational

9 Comments

Mike Griffin is worried about losing a Shuttle crew if the program is extended:

“Given that our inherent risk assessment of flying any shuttle mission is about a 1-in-75 fatality risk, if you were to fly 10 more flights, you would have a very substantial risk of losing a crew. I don’t want to do that.”

If we accept his risk number, that translates into a 13% chance over ten flights. That doesn’t seem “substantial” to me. There are a lot of good reasons to not extend the program, but risk of crew loss isn’t one of them. I’m sure that most of the astronauts would be happy to take the risk, and the real loss wouldn’t be astronauts (of whom we have a large oversupply), but the loss of another orbiter, which would almost certainly end the program, because they probably couldn’t manage with only two left. If what they’re doing is important enough to risk an orbiter, that is almost literally irreplaceable, it’s surely important enough to risk crew, who are all volunteers, and fully informed of the risk.

When I was watching coverage of the cranewreck in Manhattan yesterday, they cited a statistic from the Bureau of Labor statistics that there were forty-three construction deaths last year (I think in New York alone). Can someone explain to me why is it acceptable to kill construction workers, but not astronauts?

On the other hand, here’s one thing that I do agree with Mike on: the last thing we need is another space race.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Problem With Health Insurance

9 Comments

It’s not insurance.

Nothing new here to people familiar with the situation, but many don’t seem to understand the problem. But this is the origin of it:

Health insurance started to change, though, during the Truman administration. (I hasten to mention that I wasn’t actually there: I was born during the Eisenhower administration, when the process had only gotten started.) Truman wanted to implement the progressive new notion of a national health care plan, but couldn’t get it through; at the same time, post-war wage controls were still on, so employers bidding for new workers had to find other ways to compete.

Through a sequence of compromises, what came out of it was a system in which companies and only companies could buy health insurance and health care for their employees, and deduct the cost as a business expense. My father’s music store and the steel mill across town could buy health insurance, basically, at a discount. (My uncle the butcher couldn’t; he wasn’t a “business.”)

Years pass. (Insert visual of wind-blown calendar leaves here.) Medical care becomes more complicated, legal conditions change, and a lot of things that used to be major medical issues that mostly affected the life insurance rates become things that could be cured, or at least managed. Increasingly, what was “major medical” insurance became, simply, health insurance; we expected the insurance companies not just to pay for unexpected events, but for the normal sort of day-to-day maintenance we all need.

People will pay to repair their car, or their pets, or appliances out of pocket, but somehow, over the past decades they’ve come to believe that it’s a fundamental human right to have someone else pay for your doctor visits. Until we cut off this disastrous government policy of tying health insurance to employment, and allow everyone to deduct medical expenses on a level playing field, and get people to understand that we have to return to the model of health insurance the problem will not be solved.

Business, Science And Society, Technology and Society

I Always Suspected It

15 Comments

I’ve always thought that Monster cables were a scam, and that the supposed quality improvement couldn’t justify the ridiculously high prices, and that it was quite annoying that they’ve monopolized so much shelf space in the electronics stores. It’s hard to get reasonably priced audio cables (though things are better at Home Depot). But really, I’ve always figured that most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Monster and lamp cord.

Well, it turns out that supposed audiophiles couldn’t distinguish between Monster and coat hangers. But I suspect that the scam will continue, with salespeople continuing to push them. There are probably great margins for both the manufacturer and the retailers.

[Via Geek Press]