NASA Space Act Agreements Face New Limits | AVIATION WEEK.
Arrrgh…not satisfied with gutting the commercial access program by funding it at ~50% they are now putting on the iron shackles.
Photo from UK Daily Telegraph original AFP
Great synopsis of the mistakes driving the collapse of the Eurozone…punditry is now betting on collapse of some form.
Big problems rarely appear from nowhere….this piece from the American Interest jives with many other articles, puts it in a longer context.
Fannie, Freddie and the House of Cards
By Mary Martell
“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (collectively the two largest “GSEs”, or government-sponsored enterprises) have engaged in a broad range of residential mortgage activities for many years.1 The economic disaster of recent times has drawn considerable attention to Freddie and Fannie, which is not surprising considering the role that the mortgage sector of the U.S. banking system played in that debacle. Together the two institutions hold or pool about $5 trillion worth of mortgages, and so sketchy were their operations that in September 2008 the U.S. government had to bail them out and place them in conservatorship to keep the entire mortgage market from imploding. While the U.S. government has by now been made whole by TARP-assisted banks, it is not clear whether the billions of dollars provided to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac afloat will ever be returned to the U.S. Treasury.”
Read the whole thing
Interesting article looking at the state of the regulatory state bell weather (California.)
This article seems to have very exciting implications. Cellular regression in diseased heart tissue with the help of oncostatin M: Credit: MPI for Heart and Lung Research-press. They have found a channel where heart muscles can be regressed to stem cells (dedifferentiate?) which then can multiply and re-differentiate into healthy heart muscle tissue. This has huge implications not only for heart attack victims but many other diseases and treatments. As Glenn Reynolds would say “Faster Please.”
There was a flurry of space interest coinsidering with the shutdown of the Shuttle and the announcement of the Senatorial Launch System, then some good traffic on visiting asteroids etc. Now it seems to have fallen of the face of the earth. It’s this kind of thing that drives me nuts, we live in such a press release driven world that there tends to be these booms and busts of interest and its all about as artificial as much of the rest of the so-called news. I know that I can in fact keep up on what’s going on via various web sites and blogs, but I find it disturbing that the there is no concerted effort to keep space front and center in the american people’s attention.
And no I am not saying NASA should be flogging its programs, but the rest of the space world should be, not only US but the world, there is interesting stuff going on around the world, from the first Chinese docking, to the flyby of the big rock tomorrow etc, etc, that there is never a paucity of things that could be used to keep people’s interest tickled.
I am a bit afraid that the likely coming downturn (recrash…zombie cat bounce…) is going to crush eSpace, maybe not, most are probably fairly well isolated but maybe not if things really go bust.
On another topic…….
Talking about busts I have a feeling that the administration and others may have absolutely no idea the devastation they are looking at if the military downturn turns into a bust due to one force or another. A huge amount of the US industrial base depends on defense spending for some of its more profitable work. Maybe (hopefully) not its base, but the stuff that really makes the books sing every once in a while. I know the vendors who do work for the company I work for, while they may curse us quite frequently, also love us for the ‘quality’ of the work with contract out as well. Us and dozens of other defense related companies.
Generally the economic multiplier effect of a defense dollar is over ten, in space or aviation it can be nearly twenty, things like green tech are probably decent but sub ten, automotive is in the same range, but get to more basic stuff and its a few turns at best. And if you start subtracting a lot of those 10 to 20 X multiplied dollars and either don’t spend them or spend them on more basic products, you are going to see a much more massive downturn than expected.
Hopefully the grownups all realize this and are planning for it…….Oh, yeah, there are no grown ups….there is only us. Maybe we’re in trouble.
Economist blog Free Exchange discussing current Euro(pean) implosion…. A quote “from the International Strategy and Investment Group, explain the political dynamics: Papandreou’s motives are understandable: So far the opposition has provided no support for the measures that he has been forced to push through, and he and his party have been left alone facing the public anger. The opposition’s tactics are in a sense similar to those used by the Portuguese opposition earlier this year. There the opposition forced the government to fall, took over power, and promptly implemented policies very similar to what the previous government was going to do anyway. Papandreou knows that story, and his decision can be interpreted as a refusal to be the victim of the same game.”
Review of a book by Lynn Stout, Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People. The review provides a synopsis of Dr. Stout’s thesis, she has tied together the results of modern research from a broad range of relevant science threads to present strong argument against the punitive and overly complex laws and rules that are the norm today.
She argues that the populist lowest common denominator laws with their no tolerance, zero sum, economic animal analysis of the human mind, far from making us safer and more law-abiding are deeply damaging to the social fabric we all depend on. She points out the mechanisms that lie behind some of the strikingly good results of modern urban policing and that these same mechanisms can be expanded more broadly. This probably explains why experiments with shaming young drug offenders seems to have better results than time in jail.
Lynn Stout is the Paul Hastings Professor of Corporate and Securities Law at the UCLA School of Law. She is the coauthor of several books and a frequent commentator for NPR, PBS, and the “Wall Street Journal”.
(This is a bit of an update with the book link…and bio from B&N book page)
Cheers
So i finally found the party that I can support! The GTP Green-Tea-Party, Kermit the frog is their spokesperson and their motto is, “it’s not easy being green.” This sounds like a joke, may be in some minds but the ‘party platform’ and tenets are seriously focused and not just on traditional green issues. At least I don’t see it as ecology + fuzzy/finned friends, this is seriously about a better world through the stimulation of innovative, low impact, sustainable, low bureaucrat, and economically sound/practical policies….this is a political philosophy that could->should rival the now utterly depleted/tired/corrupted progressive>liberal<>mercantilist <onservative spectrum we seem damned to suffer with today. Read the article, it’s concise and rational, go GTP->Kermy!!!
Photo: InsEyedOut, via flicker, Defining Ideas..
This Forbes piece is in violent agreement with yesterday’s post. I guess more and more people see the problem the way I do…though I don’t think the gentlemanly solution is going to get us where we need to be, but might keep the problem from getting as bad as quickly in the future when the people have taken their eye off the ball to deal with other important issues.
This World and Others 