As I noted earlier, now that the 90s tech bubble has popped, some of the former dotcommers are learning what business is like in the real world.

Their entrepreneurial spirit undaunted by the false dreams of their recent past, they’re starting new businesses–ones that actually create and deliver products that people can use, rather than hype, even if those products are more mundane than the next New Thing.

They’ve plummeted from a rarefied world in which unlimited money was flung at them, business clothes were eschewed, and they were worshipped as the next phase in human and industrial evolution. Now, rather than being courted by venture capitalists, they’re simply scraping by on the funds borrowed from friends and relatives, rolling up their sleeves, figuring out what customers want, and working long hours to deliver it.

They’re not the only class of people who will have to learn new ways in a new industry. While the government space program is by no means withering away any time soon, it no longer represents the bright future of space activities. That future lies in commercial activities, providing services that have traditionally been far afield from aerospace, at least the “space” part of it.

Like the deflated dotcoms, the government-contracting civil space industry is a hothouse plant, sustainable only in a peculiar environment, and perhaps, ultimately, doomed to failure if it cannot adapt to the new circumstances. Over a decade after the end of the Cold War, it moves forward mostly from inertia and momentum of past relics of that era, such as the International Space Station.

Unfortunately for the major aerospace contractors (but fortunately for their smaller but more nimble competition), they’re ill suited, by corporate culture and experience, to take advantage of new commercial opportunities. Over four decades of working for the government have made them too expensive to compete in a truly competitive marketplace, and they have inculcated management attitudes that will prevent them from taking the risks that may be necessary in order to stay in the forefront of the industry.

Government contractors in the space business work, for the most part, on what are called “cost-plus” contracts. That means that they are paid on the basis of time and material for the effort, plus some percentage of profit. While this may be necessary in order to get companies to bid on high-risk government programs, it doesn’t encourage a culture of low cost because, perversely, the higher the cost, the more the contractor makes (within certain limitations).

As an example, I’ve often mentioned XCOR as an exemplar of the new way of doing space business. If the cost of their activities to date had been estimated ahead of time using a conventional aerospace industry cost model, it would almost certainly have predicted at least one, and perhaps two orders of magnitude higher cost than they’ve actually spent to date.

Yet despite their low costs, there are companies hungry for lower costs yet. John Carmack, the founder of Armadillo Aerospace (who also happens to be the man behind many successful video games, including Doom and Quake, and is funding Armadillo with his own fortune), recently posted on Usenet:

I did get a price quote from XCOR early on, and it just didn’t make sense for us. Four or five engines from XCOR would have cost more than our entire first year of development. I think hard about all large $$$ purchases, because it is a slippery slope to get on, where you just throw money at a problem.

This exemplifies the ethos that must, and will, rule the new space age. The small mammal is dancing around the toes of the dinosaurs, and is being nipped at by a tiny rodent that has an even faster metabolism and motivation.

But it’s not just the inability to run projects “lean and mean” that will hold back big aerospace. It’s their attitude and approach to business.

Large public corporations, particularly ones to whom research and development is a profit center (with the government as a customer), rather than an expense of doing business, will be loathe to risk their own money on uncertain markets, even with potentially high payoff.

It involves such a radically different way of doing business that it falls well outside their comfort zone. It means identifying commercial customers, rather than selling to a single government customer, who is amenable to pressure from lobbying Congress, and providing them with something that they have to purchase with their own money, rather than that of anonymous and, for the most part, oblivious taxpayers.

Long ago, when I worked for a major aerospace contractor, I and some colleagues tried in vain to get management to consider a commercial project. The conversation went something like this:

“So, you want to put investors’ money into the development of this new system that will be superior to the competition.”

“That’s right.”

“And you propose to sell the services that it offers to the commercial market?”

“Right.”

“And you’ll take the profits from that, and repay the investors?”

“You got it.”

“???…You people don’t seem to understand anything about business–why don’t you just go out and win a government contract?”

Old economy…new economy. May the best company win…

Galen Rowell, and his wife Barbara, were killed in a plane crash in the eastern Sierra.

His work will be missed, particularly by readers of National Geographic.

Del Norte Vista, CA (APUPI)

In a case reminiscent of the famous Bakke decision, a California high school senior is suing the University of California over their refusal to admit him to their prestigious Berkeley campus, despite his sterling biography and SAT score of over 1700, under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Todd Hepplewitt, an honors student at Caca Fuego High, in Del Norte Vista, is claiming that, in today’s society, he’s handicapped by his lack of hardship in life. He contends that the difficulty of making it in a victimized society, and getting no government or institutional support, is underestimated and can’t be appreciated by those who have been burdened all their lives by life.

“I wrote an essay describing my difficulties to them, but they completely ignored it.”

“I’ve done everything I could to struggle through, and to make changes at home. I asked my parents to get a divorce, but they refused, no matter how much I pleaded. My father tried drinking, but he turned out to have an allergy to alcohol, and I couldn’t get him to beat me when he wasn’t drunk. I wanted him to quit his job so we could go on unemployment and put pressure on me to drop out of school and work full time, which I could then resist, but he wouldn’t do it.”

“They just kept on paying the bills, encouraging me to do well in school, providing a nurturing environment for success.” He went on, the faintest hint of tears gleaming in his eyes, “It’s as though they didn’t even care whether I got into college or not.”

Despite living daily with the unceasing ravages of normalcy, Todd managed to graduate valedictorian, earn three letters on the track team, and serve as president of the student council, all while starting and successfully growing a mail-order Mongolian ferret business on the internet into a multi-million-dollar powerhouse of rodentiary commerce.

He worked hard, and hoped that, despite his appalling paucity of sob stories, he could still somehow persevere and achieve his lifelong dream–to attend the jewel of the UC system.

But alas, it was not to be. He received his rejection letter last Tuesday, though he knew that several people with more chaotic home lives had been accepted with much lower scores.

Undaunted, he made a determined decision to use the tactics of the elitists, those who rose to the top solely through adversity, to press his case, using government pressure.

“Actually, I’m not sure I want to go now, after the way they’ve treated me, but there’s a principle involved. I’ll continue to fight until everyone realizes what a true challenge it is, in today’s America, to make it without challenges.”

UC Berkeley officials were unavailable for comment.

(Copyright 2002 by Rand Simberg)

Internet Explorer has a major vulnerability to a “man-in-the-middle” attack, and has for several years. This means that (for example) someone can set up a spoof version of a financial website (like your bank, or an ecommerce site from which you’re purchasing something), that will fool IE into sending your credit card data to it, instead of the intended recipient, because Explorer apparently isn’t rigorous enough about checking certificates on the Secure Socket Layer.

While this is irritating, even infuriating, in itself, it’s made more so by many site designers’ insistence on writing their sites to IE’s perverted version of HTML and other Microsoft technologies, so that one can’t even use other browsers (e.g., Opera) with them. I avoid using IE as much as possible (and once I finally get the Windows monkey off my back, it won’t be possible to use it at all), but there are some sites that are vital for managing my accounts that either don’t work at all, or are unviewable on any other browser. The Schwab site, for example, won’t do business with you in secure manner unless you have Explorer. They claim that this policy is in the name of “security.”

I hope that this will cause them to rethink that philosophy, given the self-evident irony of it with today’s news (and numerous other instances in the past of Redmond’s less-than-devoted commitment to security in general).

Some unemployed dotcommers have picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and are learning what real businesses are about.

Where once a sales call meant driving to a mirrored glass building in Silicon Valley to pitch clients on $250,000 software packages, Mr. Ehrmann’s pitches now involve handing out little plastic cups of soup to people on the street.

“People love soup,” Mr. Ehrmann said. “I say I’m building a soup company and people say, `Soup ? that’s cool.’ It’s satisfying. You’re giving people something that affects them right away.”

Here’s a story that’ll warm the heart of monkey-man Ken Layne.

Monkeys are apparently using millipedes as an hallucinogen.

Doug Bandow, from Cato, lays out a case against a war with Iraq.

The problem with a lot of these arguments (not just Doug’s), is that they set up strawmen, in the sense that they describe the array of arguments against going after Saddam, and then knock them down, one by one. The problem with that approach is that no single argument is probably sufficient to justify it–it is the combination of them, in totality that justifies it (if it is indeed justified).

For example, he says:

Lots of arguments have been offered on behalf of striking Baghdad that are not reasons at all. For instance, that Saddam Hussein is an evil man who has brutalized his own people.

Certainly true. But the world is full of brutal regimes that have murdered their own people. Indeed, Washington ally Turkey’s treatment of its Kurds is scarcely more gentle than Iraq’s Kurdish policies.

Moreover, the U.S. warmly supports the royal kleptocracy next door in Saudi Arabia, fully as totalitarian, if not quite as violent, as Saddam’s government. Any non-Muslim and most women would probably prefer living in Iraq.

The point is not that Saddam should be taken out because he’s a brutal dictator–as Doug points out, that criterion applies to lots of thugs around the world.

The fact that he’s a brutal dictator is simply used to buttress the more important argument that he will have no compunction against using such WMD against us, if he can get his hands on them. Particularly if he can do it in such a way as to not leave fingerprints. Of course, that’s an argument that Doug doesn’t address.

Another point that Doug makes is that Saddam is rational; therefore he can be contained and deterred. However, there’s a lot of evidence to believe otherwise–he’s calculating, to be sure, and has a strong sense of self preservation, but he’s also liable to major missteps, and miscomprehension about just what he can get away with (the invasion of Kuwait being a notable example).

What needs to be done, and I don’t have time to do right now, is to lay out a whole series of criteria that one would use to determine whether or not to go to war with a despot like Saddam. Put them in a matrix, and come up with rules about how many must be met, or how many must be met in conjunction with others, to make a go decision. One would hope that someone is doing that in the State Department or the Pentagon or the White House Security Council.

That will be a much less assailable argument for those who are opposed to the war, than allowing them to go after rationales piecemeal.

Vodkapundit has returned, apparently refreshed, from his honeymoon. But posting will be reduced (the free ice cream cones will be 27% smaller, as Lileks says), due to more pressing matters (I know that story). Belated congratulations to Steven on the getting-married thingy.

Vodkapundit has returned, apparently refreshed, from his honeymoon. But posting will be reduced (the free ice cream cones will be 27% smaller, as Lileks says), due to more pressing matters (I know that story). Belated congratulations to Steven on the getting-married thingy.

Vodkapundit has returned, apparently refreshed, from his honeymoon. But posting will be reduced (the free ice cream cones will be 27% smaller, as Lileks says), due to more pressing matters (I know that story). Belated congratulations to Steven on the getting-married thingy.