Interesting article looking at the state of the regulatory state bell weather (California.)
Where goes California there goes the U.S. I hope Not!
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Category Archives: Society / History
Regression as a good thing!
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.”
Space the lost frontier? Losing other things…
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.
If it all happens with virtual #’s do you hear the ‘Earth shattering Kabooom’?
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.”
Cultivating (social) Conscience
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
I’m going Green in ’12 Kermit for Veep!
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..
The Gov’t is here to help…relieve you of your (fill in the blank)
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.
Why 5 Years?
‘Musk has a great point.’ when doing projections, part of my job, I know that I ‘should’ be able to project a couple of years into the future with at least some expectation of being close, but after 18 months you know it’ll be wrong. You can forecast five years out in general terms based on ‘momentum’ but you know that all you are doing is a version of ‘Moores Law’ which is more a market roadmap than anything else. This is more about tech-base support than anything else, and a form of jobs program, one that is needed at some level. But maybe a bit more flexible approach can be found.
Not saying ULA is doing anything wrong, this is just old style mindsets setting policy.
Be Here Now
How did we get here? Why is this happening now?
The Here and Now is a phonograph needle tracking the wobbles in the groove that all our yesterdays laid down.
Is there a way out?
There is only foreward there is no going back.
There is a Destiny which has the control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of Human Nature. (From)
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to Mrs. George William Fairfax, Sep. 12, 1758
Not sure I agree at an individual level all the time, but on the aggregate in the immediate time frame I would. Perhaps its like this: Science tells me that most of my actions are planned a significant fraction of a second ahead of my consciousness recognizing what is going on. It is impossible to change what you do not know is coming but if you plan ahead you can control what happens at a future point in time and space.
And what we do individually and locally does matter nationally and globally, at least a little and if not now then sometime in the future.
Does that mean I demand “Word Gov’t Now!” how stupid do you think I am?
We need more self-control, personal control, local control and less regional control, national control and global control. We do need norms and some way of enforcing them for such things as : life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and such easily debased things as contract enforcement, property rights, ecological cost accounting, financial cost accounting…a few others…maybe
But….the old bureaucratic model, relying on a plethora of relatively well paid trustworthy functionaries to enforce norms is becoming unaffordable.
Laissez-Faire – let it be – management doesn’t work, it doesn’t work in regulation either.
Why has the US Constitution remained important for more than 200 years? Because its simple, basic, lays out fundamentals and leaves the rest for interpretation but by being fairly simple, constrained and pragmatic it is actually possible to interpret it to cover very large sets of cases.
We have to get over the belief that you can make life perfect if you can just tune your laws/regulations/rules just right and get the humans out-of-the-way. We used to know better, I think that most scholars know better. But somehow many folks have come to believe that if not all, then the one specific law they care about can be perfected, and since they care about it passionately they push it forward, usually through a system that has no time to really understand the consequences of this law when combined with that law and this social reality, etc. And with each law becoming more complex because of fiddling to tune it to perfection, the way they interact becomes utterly unknowable. And the law becomes harder to obey and easier for smart lawyers to subvert.
So….
So where do we go from here?
Start to build down the complexity we have built up at every level, what about:
- For every new rule, two old ones have to be eliminated and no double dipping?
- Limit the length of any law/rule/regulation to two double-sided 8 1/2 by 11 sheets one inch margins typed in 11 point Times New Roman with the option of an extra sheet of readable graphics?
- Eliminate mandatory this, no tolerance that, rules that have become a pox on our society?
- Make Judges accountable to other Judges and the Bar with impeachment by the people an option?
You can think of more, I know you can!
Cheers
NaNoWriMo Post something or other: Five and the Base
Five opened here eyes and looked at the base spread out across the grays and browns of the asteroidal body it had been planted in. She didn’t know which base it was, she was fairly certain that it was one she hadn’t seen before.
“We are shedding the kids Commander.” Mother said in Five’s head. A glance showed the twenty roughly similar pieces of rubble that had trailed behind the slightly ovoid blob that was Watcher Sixty five thousand, five hundred and sixty-five were diverging and forming up to make their way into the repair and update bay.
Five looked back at the base. she was looking into the side, though at first glance it was like a city of tall skyscrapers seen from directly above, all sharp edges and spires poking out of the asteroidal body. The gravity generator spikes speared ‘down’ from the asteroid. Mother and Five continued towards the ‘sky scrapers.’ as Five wondered where the word skyscraper had come from, it tasted familiar, but it elicited no definition tag from the tac glossary.
Mother’s target was now very obviously the ‘bottom’ of the structure, dark blocks with massive lattice structures between above and around them. That was the BlankBank, like every BlankBank in every other base. There Five would find her sisters and be able to exercise, eat maybe, think, even sleep, “Perchance to Dream?” a voice not her own or Mother’s seemed to whisper.
“Uh, Mother?””
“Yes dear?”
“Uh did you, hear something?”
“No dear.”
They were both silent during final approach. From what Five could see there were at least ten other Watchers docked. That seemed a lot and if each of the Banks had the same number that would be a Hundred at this base alone, and several thousand more out on their long looping patrol orbits. Seven minutes later Mother entered a bay and docking arms reached out to snag the camouflaged fighter. Continue reading
This World and Others 