Category Archives: Media Criticism

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

The Latest Bailout

3 Comments

Just in time for the holidays. Congress has to step in to keep the North Pole from going under:

“These are grim economic times for everyone, but even more so for non-profit toy manufacturers in the Snow Belt,” said Kringle. “Our accountants have indicated that we are on track to exhaust our reserves of cash and magical pixie fairydust by December 23. Oh deary me.”

Kringle and UET union president Binky McGiggles presented a draft emergency bailout plan to the committee calling for US $18 trillion in federal grants, loan guarantees, and sugarplum gumdrops that they said would keep the company solvent through December 26.

“We believe this proposal shows that management and labor can work together to craft a reasonable, financially responsible short-term survival plan,” said McGiggles. “After the new Congress is seated in January, we would be happy to return to present a long-term package to get us through April.”

Kringle warned that failure to approve the plan would have dire global economic consequences.

“Oh goodness,” said an emotional Kringle, fumbling with his glasses, “think of all the children who will wake up sad and angry and confused on Christmas morning, with nothing in their stockings. Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to be their parents. Or a someone answering your switchboards on December 26.”

Where will the madness end?

Of course, if Santa isn’t too big to fail, who is?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

It’s The Productivity, Stupid

3 Comments

I have some thoughts today on the real problem with the UAW, over at PJM.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from Mickey Kaus — from Taylorism To Wagnerism.

[Update a little after 9 Eastern]

Here’s an excellent piece on the same subject by Michael Barone.

[Afternoon update]

Jim Manzi has more thoughts on Wagnerism versus Taylorism:

…there appears to be a cyclical nature to these things. More-or-less the same, basically sensible, method for business operational improvement — carefully observe current work practices, think of them holistically and in light of the goals of the business, and then redesign work practices — keeps getting reinvented. Taylorism, “Goals and Methods”, factory statistical process control (SPC), Total Quality Management (TQM), reengineering, and so on are all just manifestations of this approach. Each is typically pioneered by innovators who have a fairly supple understanding of the often unarticulated complexity of the task. It drives clear profit gains, and many other people want to apply it. A group of experts are trained by the pioneers, who are also quite effective. There is an inevitable desire to scale up the activity and apply it as widely as possible. It becomes codified into some kind of a cookbook process that can be replicated. This process becomes a caricature of the original work, and the method is discredited by failure and ridicule. (Seeing this phase of reengineering at several companies in the 1990s, a close friend of mine once described it as “like the Planet of the Apes, but the monkeys have taken over from the humans”.) Within a few years, some new pioneers develop some new manifestation of the approach, and the cycle begins again.

Just before I left Rockwell in the early nineties, they had caught on to the latest TQM management fad. We all went to courses on it, as well as taking classes based on the management philosophy of Stephen Covey.

Much of it was absurd. There is no sensible way to apply statistical management process control to research and development, but they attempted to do so, having us set out the processes by which we did trade studies, etc. This senseless training was, of course, charged to overhead (i.e., it was included as part of the burden on our Air Force and NASA cost-plus contracts). Just in case you were looking for more reasons that space stuff costs so much.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

Epic Fail

That’s what Iowahawk says that his five-year plan was:

I started this blog with a simple goal in mind: to attract gullible millions into a worldwide online cult and then bilk them of their life savings. Five years, 450-odd posts and almost that many pageviews later, my actual market appeal has proven somewhat more selective. Extremely more selective. Still, it’s much more than I deserve, and I’d like offer my very sincere thanks for your patronage. I sure hope you had 1% of the fun reading the junk I post here as had typing it, even if (especially if?) you don’t see eye-to-eye with me politically. If any of it annoyed you I hope that deep down, were also a tiny bit amused.

I (and I suspect many others) disagree (and I say this as someone who was beating on him to get a blog via email for many months prior to its inception). His top-twenty-five hits are spectacular, and somehow, I had missed the liberal elevator pitches, which are hilarious (as are some of the reader contributions in comments).

Here’s to at least another five years of the unexcellable Hawk.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

What They Need

3 Comments

…but won’t get. Iain Murray describes what will be necessary for a successful auto industry:

…the best way to save the auto industry remains a deregulatory bailout, reducing government-imposed burdens on the industry, and in particular Congress backing off on its destructive CAFE requirements.

One of those government-imposed burdens is the Wagner Act and the NLRB that enables the UAW to maintain a stranglehold on the industry. Unfortunately, all of the above, while the most needed, are also the most unlikely things to be had from the new regime. If anything, as I’ll note in a Pajamas column tomorrow, they’re only going to make things worse.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

From “Dictator” To “Czar”

4 Comments

Jonah Goldberg with some brief thoughts on the unconscious fascism of the denizens of the Beltway.

[Update in the afternoon]

Mickey has a good point:

We need a Czar Czar, to crack the whip on all the czars. … P.S.: Also a federal czar policy. Right now, czar decisions are made on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis, with no attempt at czar harmonization.

It seems like a logical next step.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Broken-Window Fallacy Redux

7 Comments

In a discussion of Peter Diamandis’ recommendations to NASA (most of which I broadly agree with), Ferris Valyn makes the classical error in discussing government spending:

As for your other point:

You’re contradicting your statement that there is no guaranteed ROI. Money spent on NASA is money NOT spent on everything/anything else. You are assuming your conclusion is true and using that in your argument to prove your conclusion [otherwise known as “begging the question” — rs]. That’s not allowed.

Money spent, whether wisely or not, always grows the economy. Whether its the 60 cents I spent to buy gum, or government buying a new power plants, that money always grows the economy. The fundemental question is, whether it grows the economy in a way that we want to grow it. And while I will agree that we haven’t proven that space development grows the economy 100% in the way we want, I would argue that space development has a large preponderance of evidence supporting it.

No, it is quite possible to spend money and shrink the economy (and few entities are better at doing this than governments — see, for example, Soviet Socialist Republics, Union of). For instance (to use the classical example), we could institute a government program to pay half of the populace to dig holes, and the other half to fill them. How fast does Ferris think that the economy will “grow” under such a program?

This is also one of the classic lousy arguments that space advocates use to advocate. I discussed it in a column a few years ago. Space spending has to be justified on its merits, in terms of the return we get for it in terms of actual space activity. It can’t be justified simply as “spending” that “always grows the economy,” because there are potentially many other means of “spending” (such as simply letting the taxpayers keep their own money) that are much more effective at doing so.

Media Criticism, Space

The Latest Fantasy From The Usual Suspect

4 Comments

Mark Whittington now “thinks” (to use the word generously, since it is without evidence) that Doug Cooke has made his imaginary friends in his imaginary “Internet Rocketeers Club” “very angry.” I wonder if he “thinks” they’re so angry that they’re going to go after him with their Illudium Pew-36 Explosive Space Modulators.

Of course, to be fair, it’s hard to provide evidence about the emotions of imaginary friends.

It certainly doesn’t make me very angry. In fact, it doesn’t make me angry at all. Like all of Mark’s posts about his imaginary friends, who don’t seem to have names, I find it amusing. Of course, I don’t really care much what Doug Cooke says. But anonymous.space has a response to it in comments at Space Politics:

“‘I attended the review myself, and despite what was said in the blogosphere and the sensational media, it was very professionally done,’ he said.”

Cooke’s memory of the Ares I PDR is at complete odds with the written record.

Many reviewer comments highlighted the PDR’s lack of technical substance and preference for requirements processing over actual design analysis. It was arguably a System Requirements Review (SRR, which should have been completed much earlier in the program), not a Preliminary Design Review (PDR). Among the comments making these points:

[snip many comments worth following the link to read]

Finally, Cooke’s comment here from the STA luncheon:

“So we asked a lot of hard questions, and I have to say that the team was especially well-prepared.”

Just makes no sense. If the team had been well-prepared, then they wouldn’t have earned so many yellow and yellow/red grades in the review. Out of ten grades, Ares I earned four yellow grades and three yellow/red grades. As NASA’s next human space flight system, Ares I should be a model of technical excellence. Instead, the program hasn’t done its homework (or is finding its homework too difficult, given the constraints on the design) and is earning average or below average grades in seven out of ten areas — about as close to failing as a program could get.

The specific technical concerns pointed out by the reviewers in the yellow/red grades include ridiculously stupid issues, like document interfaces and physical clearances, that should have been resolved long before PDR. Examples are:

“- No formal process for control of models and analysis.
– Areas of known failure still need to be worked, including liftoff clearances.
– Process for producing and resolving issues between Level 2 and Level 3 interface requirement documents and interface control documents is unclear, including the roles and responsibilities of managers and integrators and the approval process for identifying the baseline and making changes to it.
– Numerous known disconnects and “TBDs” in the interface requirement documents, including an eight inch difference between the first stage and ground system and assumption of extended nozzle performance not incorporated in actual first and ground system designs.”

For several decades, Cooke has been a stalwart human space exploration architecture designer and line engineer on the STS and ISS program. But, and forgive my French, if this is the kind of crap that’s going to pass for technical excellence with the new ESMD AA in an Ares I PDR (or any other NASA technical review), then NASA needs yet another a new ESMD AA, and Cooke should go back to architecture studies. The program simply can’t afford for things to keep going the way they are.

Doug Cooke, like Mike Griffin, is likely a short timer. It’s pretty hard to get very wound up about his attempts to whitewash this disaster. I suspect that it will be over soon enough.

[Monday morning update]

From another comment, on Ares’ compliance with the Aldridge Commission recommendations:

I’d argue that the approach that is being taken with the Ares transportation system in particular doesn’t advance U.S. science, economic, or security interests, is not sustainable or affordable, does little to advance technologies, knowledge, and infrastructure, does little to promote international and commercial participation, and “builds in-house” rather than “acquiring” crew transportation to the ISS. In fact, the Ares approach not only doesn’t advance these areas, but it actually harms a lot of them, for example, by competing with them or absorbing funding from them.

But other than that, it’s great.

[Another Monday morning update]

Hilarious. Now Mark imagines that this post is “very heated.”

Mark seems to have a great deal of difficulty discerning actual emotions of others, or perhaps projects his own on them. For some bizarre reason, he often imagines that I am “angry” or full of “rage,” or “heated,” when I rarely, if ever display this, either personally, or on line. I think that some people are simply emotionally blind.

I can’t even parse this:

Now I can understand Rand being not angry at Doug Cooke, He treated the Internet Rocketeer Club with supreme contempt. But me? I wonder what the obsession is?

Can anyone figure out what he’s attempting to say here? I can’t. He can understand me being “not angry” at Doug Cooke? Well, that’s good, I guess, since I’m not angry at Doug Cooke. Or at Mark. But who is the (inappropriately capitalized) “He” who treated Mark’s imaginary friends with “supreme contempt”? Me? Doug Cooke? And is “He” also treating Mark with “supreme contempt”?

Well, if amused ridicule of his ungrammatical fantasies constitutes that, I guess I’ll have to plead guilty.

[Early afternoon update]

Clark Lindsey correctly points out that Doug Cooke is confused. It wasn’t Mark’s imaginary Internet Rocketeer Club that dissed his PDR — it was NASA employees who actually participated in it. Admittedly, some of us in the blogosphere pointed this out, but he’s shooting the messenger here.