Modern rocket engines are much safer than the historical examples he cites (e.g., XCOR has never had a hard start, let alone an explosion), and it makes no sense that a single accident would end the industry, any more than deaths on Everest stop people from climbing.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
In Praise Of Entrepreneurs
Over at Pajamas Media, I have some thoughts this morning on Steve Jobs and people who really change the world.
[Update a few minutes later]
The business of Apple was business, not politics.
[Update a while later]
Did Jobs die from quackery?
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the WSJ obit.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Lileks.
[Update a while later[
Michael Malone remembers Steve Jobs.
[Update a couple minutes later]
How his philosophy changed technology.
[Late morning update]
The Onion says we’re doomed.
[Update in the afternoon]
Rob Long: The right kind of tyrant.
A Letter To The Marching Morons
From David Freddoso:
Those people you left stuck in traffic have a hard time paying their bills and rents and health insurance and mortgages. They worry about things like finding decent schools for their children to attend and making sure they don’t get fired at work, and fixing leaking roofs and chimneys.
You know what they don’t worry about, ever? Smashing patriarchy and capitalism.
So when your organizers go on television and say things like, “It’s revolution, not reform!” and they’re not joking, those words might give some of these narrow-minded people an unpleasant, October 1917 kind of feeling.
Read all.
[Late-morning update]
The pathology of capitalism, new and improved with trutherism.
The Era Of Free Stuff
…is over.
I think this is a good thing. A lot of people hate a la carte pricing, but when you bundle things, there are no signals as to what the real demand for various goods and services are. Also, I don’t like subsidizing other people for stuff that I don’t need.
Health, Wealth And Aging
Some thoughts from Sonia Arrison.
Give Until Someone Hurts
An interesting article on pathological altruism.
It’s particularly dangerous when people like this go into politics.
Amanda Knox
My one and only post on this subject will just point to the one by John Hinderaker, in case any of my readers care.
[Update early afternoon]
OK, one more — Amanda Knox as femme fatale:
One lady I know offered the view that the femme fatale was a totally self-generated male creation. “The self-destructive acts are not orchestrated by women of some preternatural cunning. Most femme fatales do nothing. All the work is done by the men themselves. Femme fatales are only ordinary women who’ve accidentally found the right combination of buttons to push to make men do what they want. It is the fantasy of men that does the rest.” Her explanation made me uneasy because I had heard the same argument offered, in a political context, to explain the 2008 presidential elections. But in that view, we will never know any more about Amanda Knox than we will ever know about Barack Obama. Maybe neither actually exists as we think they do, except in our imaginations.
Well, the evidence against Obama continues to accumulate.
More Guns
there were 14% fewer murders in Chicago compared to the first six months of last year – back when owning handguns was illegal. It was the largest drop in Chicago’s murder rate since the handgun ban went into effect in 1982.
Note also how this occurred during a time of extreme economic distress. So two “liberal” shibboleths — that guns and poverty cause crime — have been hammered here.
[Update a few minutes later]
South Florida officials are worried that they might actually be punished for blatantly violating the law.
Good. Fine them and remove the criminals from office. Make some examples.
Innovation Starvation
Some interesting thoughts from Neil Stephenson. I think he’s a little to sanguine about the prospects for using ETs, though.
Connections
…some meditations:
I’m thinking: no dog, no bag hoarding instincts, no barf-containment. No iPod location mystery, no sorting through the glove compartment, no instantly-available barf bag. The reason this day didn’t end with a stinky car can be directly traced to the moment I walked past a pet shop in Uptown in April 1996, looked in the window, and saw my dog.
Wife took him for a walk later. He was slow. Very slow. “He’s not going to be with us much longer,” she said. Resigned. Then hopeful: “But I’ve been saying that for three years.”
“You saw him when the food showed up. Annoying as a puppy. Where did he take you tonight?”
“Well, I let him go where he wanted, and we went up the hill to the water tower, and then back down, and when we got home he didn’t want to go up the steps so he went down the street, and I thought he would go up the back steps, but he looked at me, like ‘I’m not done,’ and we walked east and around the neighborhood again. But it was dark and he can’t see anything.”
“But he can smell.”
Nearly deaf and nearly blind, and the world is still a story, every scent a character, every strong odor a twist in the plot. The dog walks outside and the world is his iPod, and it’s always set on shuffle. So it is for us all, really. If you have a dog you know how they come to the door and stand there waiting for you to let them out. Standing at the glass door. The wall that keeps the odors out. They can see, but they can’t smell. Daily life for us is just like that. If you’re lucky someone opens the door and all the glories rush over you.
It’s days like these that you realize how much you miss. For once, you saw all the connections. You suspect there are just as many threads between the now and the then every other day. Probably more. Would you go mad if you considered them? Would you exult to discover how everything braids itself together, fear for the action ten years gone that will explode down the road, anticipate the bloom that grows from a casual act last month? Sure. All of that. All these things. You can’t act if you remember everything. You shouldn’t act if you remember nothing.
What a writer. And he does it almost every single day.