Rob Coppinger (speculatively) answers the question “whatever happened to Blue Origin“? I really find their go-it-alone, and not be part of the community, or industry, attitude annoying, and wonder if they’d be doing better if they were more open.
And in the way of more speculation, Jon Goff makes some guesses about how SpaceX plans to recover their upper stage.
From John Tierney. I’ve discussed this extensively in the past, and tied it to Shuttle costs. As I noted then, if you want to eat healthy, and not overeat (particularly the wrong kinds of foods), don’t eat out.
…yet. I think that there’s a typo here, though:
Some experts argue that Fed chief Ben Bernanke is simply replacing money annihilated in our economy’s “Great Deleveraging” and that he should print even more. Retired securities lawyer Frederick Feldkamp, a Michigan native, says the Treasury’s nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac alone erased $33 billion in bank capital. The Treasury inadvertently wiped out the two mortgage giants’ preferred stock, which hundreds of banks had held as core capital, and which was considered so safe that regulations let the banks leverage that capital by as much as 50 to 1 when making loans. Feldkamp reckons that when banks wrote off the $33 billion in preferred stock, support for about $1.65 billion in debt was erased — a significant credit contraction.
I think that’s supposed to be $1.65 trillion. $1.65 billion is seat-cushion change these days…
There’s a long piece in this week’s Economist on the current prospects for solar power satellites. It’s a pretty good overview, but has a few problems. First of all, it doesn’t mention lasers at all. This is particularly a large oversight when it comes to the discussion of military applications. If space-based power is used for military logistics, it’s unlikely that it will be of the microwave variety — the power density is far too low to be practical for many of the envisioned needs. Lasers are more likely (though they will still not be a cost-effective weapon, despite the paranoia of some who will oppose the concept).
Also, in the discussion on launch costs, they didn’t spend enough time discussing the suborbital route, though they mentioned it. And while there was never much prospect of Gene Myers launching ETs into orbit, the chance that it will happen now is essentially nil, so the discussion of Space Islands is (at best) anachronistic. A description of Bob Bigelow’s activities with his orbital facilities, which weren’t mentioned at all, would have been much more useful and relevant to the reader.
[Update a few minutes later]
There seems to be a push on to get the Obama administration to adopt SBSP as a new energy initiative. Given all the other energy alternatives they want to chase (wind, terrestrial solar, etc.) why not? Even if it doesn’t pan out, it could result in lower launch costs for other things, which (as the report points out) are a prerequisite.
I think that this is a misdiagnosis:
How come nobody connects the following dots:
1. Massive bank problems precipitate a $700 billion federal bailout.
2. Meanwhile, private companies (including automakers) find it difficult to get banks to loan them money.
3. So those private companies go to the feds for bailouts of their own.
4. Nobody says: “The federal government won’t bail out companies that can’t get private loans. That’s why we gave the money to the banks, so the banks could make private loans. Loan money is what banks do. If you need money, go see a banker. We gave them lots of money they can loan out. Maybe they’ll loan some to you.”Am I missing something?
An excellent point. So I put it to some auto supplier and finance sources, and this is what they say we’re missing: The federal credit bailout ain’t working.
Credit is still frozen. No banks are willing to lend. And the auto companies are still in free fall.
I don’t think that’s the problem at all. I don’t know whether credit is still “frozen” or not (there seem to be a lot of mortgage loans happening), but even if it were melted and boiling, I don’t think you’d find a sane banker who would lend these companies money, even at junk-bond rates, given the nature of their business plans and prospects. That’s why they have to go to Congress…
Manzi is on the job, deconstructing it. Bottom line:
…this is not a real business plan, but simply a political document. It exists to provide political cover to members of Congress. But if that’s the case, it’s an unintentionally beautiful illustration of why industrial policy fails. It’s both economically crucial and very hard to allocate capital well; that’s why people who are good at it make so much money. Businesses struggle to do this well, and they’re really trying. What do you think the odds are that this is a wise use of money, when the people involved are barely pretending to try?
All this is doing is kicking the can down the road, and delaying (and making much worse) the inevitable and painful restructuring that has to take place. And I’m not talking about just GM, or the auto industry.
It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it…
“We’re on the brink with the U.S. auto manufacturing industry,” Press told The Associated Press in an interview. “If we have a catastrophic failure of one of these car companies, in this tender environment for the economy, it’s a huge blow. It could trigger a depression.”
I’d be inclined to take this more seriously if it weren’t coming from someone asking the taxpayers for a multi-billion-dollar handout.
I hope that the Obama plans to resurrect the New Deal don’t include things like this:
As part of its legislation, the NRA had all kinds of detailed codes for individual industries, describing to the letter how firms must do their business. The Schechters fell under the “Code of Fair Competition for the Live Poultry Industry of the Metropolitan Area in and About the City of New York” (and you thought Atlas Shrugged was fiction….). Among the things the code prohibited was “straight killing” which meant that customers could buy a whole or half coop of chickens, but did not have the right to make any selection of particular birds (such individual selection was “straight killing”).
This last rule was in direct conflict with Kashrut laws, which also served as an informal health code in the Jewish community. As Shlaes points out, the phrase “glatt kosher” referred to the fact that the lungs of the animal were smooth (which is what “glatt” means) and therefore free of tuberculosis. Inspecting the lungs was part of the official process of conferring Kosher status on a butcher shop. Removing unhealthy animals from the stock was one of the core principles of keeping Kosher, and the rabbinical inspectors were fanatic about doing this. But so were customers. As Shlaes points out, individual customers, both retailers and their customers, had the right to refuse individual animals. This minimized the risk of an unhealthy animal getting through when both seller and buyer did such inspections. And it ensured that the kosher laws served as a health code, or perhaps something more like the Underwriters Laboratory or Good Housekeeping seal.
The Schechters, as you may have guessed, were targeted by the NRA enforcement crew. They were inspected repeatedly during the summer of 1934, which forced them to violate their own Kashrut practices, telling customers that they could not reject individual birds as keeping Kosher allowed. Not surprisingly, their deeply religious customer base began to dwindle. The constant inspection turned up a variety of violations, including allegations that they had, in fact, sold sick chickens (not surprising, if true, given that part of their own internal inspection process was negated by the NRA code itself!). They were also accused of “competing too hard” and keeping prices “too low.” Shlaes recounts a couple of hilarious exchanges between the government lawyers and the Schechters where the knowledge of the actor is much greater than the knowledge of the expert.
Eventually, the lower courts found them guilty of 60 different violations and they all served a little bit of jail time. But more important, the Schecters’ lawyer continued to appeal and the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where the Roosevelt Administration saw it as the perfect test case of the constitutionality of the NRA, and perhaps the whole New Deal. Coverage of the case, Shlaes shows, was highly tinged with the standard anti-Semitism of the time, especially because the Schechters were right out of Jewish central casting, being immigrants with their Eastern Eurpoean cadences and traditional Jewish dress. It was the Jewish rubes of Brooklyn against the high powered WASP lawyers of the northeast corridor.
Fortunately, they ultimately won, and if was in fact the first hit against the NRA by the SCOTUS (which eventually resulted in Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the court to get it to allow him to rule unopposed). But as the bloggist points out, it’s also a demonstration of the blindness of Jews to their own interests in continuing to support Democrats in general, and Roosevelt in particular. Marxists talk about the false consciousness of the proletariat, but this seems to be a much more clear-cut example.
Clark Lindsey is live blogging it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Rob Coppinger is twittering from London.
Yes, that would have been an even stranger sentence a few years ago…
[Early evening update]
Clark has some links to news stories on the event.
The unending (and infuriating) irony of this election will be that the Democrats won this election by first tanking the economy and then (with the aid of the MSM) blaming the hapless Republicans for it. Tom Blumer explains:
The recession, once it becomes official, will thus richly deserve designation as the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) recession. Further, Obama’s and the Democratic Party’s performance on the economy must be benchmarked from June 1, 2008 — not Election Day, not Inauguration Day, and not, as traditionally has been the case, from October 1 of the new president’s first year in office.
Evidence of the POR triumvirate’s virtually unilateral damage to the economy began appearing as early as the fourth quarter of 2007, the first quarter of negative growth in six years. The POR recession itself began in June. The historically steep downward revision in second-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth from an annualized 3.3% to 2.8% in the government’s final September announcement was more than likely due to deterioration that occurred in the final month of the quarter.It’s not at all a coincidence that June was the month in which it became crystal clear that despite sky-high oil prices, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid were hostile to the idea of drilling for more oil — offshore or anywhere else. Pelosi insisted that “we can’t drill our way out of our problems.” In the speaker’s world, this means that you don’t drill at all. Reid declared that we have to stop using oil and coal because “it’s making us sick.” Obama seemed pleased that gas prices were so high, saying only that “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment” instead of the sharp spike. What a guy.
As would be expected, the country’s businesses, investors, and consumers, never having witnessed a political party dedicate itself so completely to starving its own national economy, reacted very negatively to all of this. I said at the time that “businesses and investors are responding to their total lack of seriousness by battening down the hatches and preparing for the worst.” Subsequent events have validated that observation.
As commenter Carl Pham pointed out recently, the American people bought fire insurance from an arsonist.