Author: CS Admin

Falcon 9 Delivers Eleven

SpaceX, Falcon 9, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Space, NASA, Common Sense, illustration

Earlier this week, SpaceX made history. Again.

Back in 2008, the company had launched the Falcon 1 into orbit —a big deal in the Space Age, previously dominated by governments.

Blue Origin, which is the baby of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has been providing Elon Musk’s SpaceX some stiff competition. A few weeks ago, Blue Origin sent up the New Shepard rocket — and returned it to earth vertically.

This week, SpaceX pulled ahead, sending its Falcon 9 up beyond New Shepard’s suborbital heights, putting eleven (count ’em: 11) satellites into orbit … and returning to touch down safely onto dry land — on the launch pad — vertically.

Just like we imagined when we (well, some of us oldsters) were young, before we witnessed Mercury and Apollo splashdowns.

Back in 2012, when I wrote about SpaceX — and NASA’s outsourcing of launches — I called it progress. One reader worried about the whole thing, though: “A spy satellite is still a spy satellite even if some telecom conglomerate puts it in space.” He was afraid of privatizing tyranny. That would be bad, but it doesn’t seem to apply to this week’s new satellites … unless M2M (machine-to-machine) Internet devices mean something different than what I understand them to be.

In any case, costs have been contained: while NASA’s Space Shuttle was also reusable, it cost about half a billion bucks per launch, which, we’re told, is “about eight times the current cost of a Falcon 9.”

Free enterprise: delivering the goods at a fraction of the cost.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Elon Musk, Falcon 9, Jeff Bezos, space, SpaceX

folly ideological culture national politics & policies

This Is Not Politics

Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, politics, children, illustration, Common Sense

First, Hillary lied. She said that ISIS was using Trump in terrorism recruitment videos. The Donald responded with contemptuous ridicule, using a vulgar word for her 2008 defeat by Barack Obama.

Then, the Democratic Party presidential contender got all teary-eyed and said we had to treat each other with more respect, be nicer.

This is presidential politics?

Mrs. Hillary Clinton and Mr. Donald Trump are both addicted to telling whoppers. Their “stretchers” are now the everyday stuff of our nightly news.

Mrs. Clinton’s fact-less charge that Trump was being used in recruitment videos is all the more ridiculous considering that Mr. Clinton does star in such a video. Maybe she meant merely that Mr. Trump’s call for barring Muslim immigration will help ISIS paint America as anti-Muslim, telling the tall tale because, well, it “ seems true.” Even if it isn’t.

In this, she differs not a whit from Mr. Trump, who not too long ago “remembered” “seeing” “thousands” of “Muslims” in “New Jersey” celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 — a video he cannot produce, either.

Politicians hyperbolize from bigotry to factoid all the time. What’s new is Trump’s foul calumny, in response, and Clinton’s painting of Trump as a bully for belittling her. That’s not how I remember politics. It seems new to adult debate.

But it isn’t new to our experience. It’s children bickering on the playground, then whining and lying all the way to Teacher. Or even Home.

Responsible adults don’t believe every charge lodged by little boys and little girls.

Like Donny and Hillary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016

education and schooling folly free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

The Truth About Tuition

tuition, supply and demand, subsidy, government

Subsidize something, and you tend to get more of it.

But wait, what if you subsidize demand for something, but don’t really allow (or continue to disallow) increased supply?

Then prices for that something go way up.

This is elementary economics — nothing controversial about it.

Except that politicians and bureaucrats who make public policy tend not to acknowledge this aspect of reality when they propose subsidies. Instead, they expect praise for their “heroic” and “caring” program of destruction.

They need to be educated. But, alas, all this applies best to college education. How does one educate the educators?

A new study, which reliable economists tell me is “sophisticated,” finds that the bulk of recent college tuition price inflation can, indeed, be directly linked to the federal government’s loan subsidies.

This study makes for some opaque reading, alas: “Essentially, demand shocks lead to higher college costs and more debt, and in the absence of higher labor market returns, more loan default inevitably occurs.” Yikes.

The college education bubble has been much talked-about for years, at least amongst skeptics of government policy. But in hushed tones — the big fear, here, is that a bursting of the bubble will lead to — who knows what? I mean, who-knows-what policy reaction.

Probably just more government subsidy and control. And even higher tuition still. Double yikes.

Thankfully, while the brick-and-mortar higher education institutions suck up more and more government-backed money, the Internet is enabling some great alternatives. The future, I think, does not belong to the university system as we have known it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags college, subsidy, supply and demand, tuition

folly general freedom ideological culture too much government

Discreditable Credit

China Credit System, Sesame, China, Credit Rating, Common Sense

Capitalism can be rigged a hundred different ways, apparently. China’s is run by its Communist Party, and even current innovations bear the stamp of the Party.

Take “social credit.”

Not the quaint decentralist economic reform movement that was a minor deal in politics on the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada 60 or more years ago.

What I’m referring to is the innovative credit scoring system devised by a gaming company in cooperation with China’s commie-run government.

But it’s not quite like the credit scoring systems set up by competing companies in the U.S., which cook up “credit scores” based on going into debt and paying off debt. If you pay your bills, you get a higher score. If you don’t, it plummets.

The new “Sesame” credit scoring system is less interested in the debts you pay off and more in what you buy and what you put up on social media. The company has concocted a secret algorithm, and gives higher scores to good citizens — obedient people — and lower scores to lazy people (inferred from, say, if you play a lot of video games) or to folks who are rebellious free thinkers (posting pictures of Tank Man in Tiananmen Square, for example).

That is what it seems like, so far.

It rewards those Chinese who are industrious (yay?) and who kowtow to Communist Party expectations (yikes!) — and makes me extra glad I live in the U.S., where government is too chaotic and stupid to cook up anything quite this insidious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags big government, China, Communism, Credit Rating, government, surveillance, surveillance state

general freedom ideological culture

Spoiler Alert — Making Socialism Work

Post author By CS Admin
Post date December 18, 2015
2 Comments on Spoiler Alert — Making Socialism Work

Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction, TV, internet, devil, socialism, Common Sense, illustration

Despite the hoopla, I did not get a chance to watch Childhood’s End, the miniseries that aired this week on the SyFy channel.

But I didn’t really need to — and not just because it failed to receive critical or popular acclaim.

This is the age of the Internet, and — Spoiler Alert! — many cats get let out of many a bag. Facebook, Twitter, water coolers … we all hear things outside the designated venues.

Of course, many people knew the plot line of SyFy’s miniseries — simply because it’s based on a 1953 novel by Arthur C. Clarke.

So, when we notice that one of the show’s creators interprets the story’s stark ending as being more personal than cosmic, that it is about accepting the inevitability of death, we are not going to go into a snit about “spoilers.” We can all can handle it like … grown-ups.

Yes, the tale is in the “out there” branch of science fiction. Aliens come. They bring mankind a Golden Age, an era of plenty, curing disease and ending the need to work. And then, after a long stretch, they reveal themselves, in full-frontal corporeality: they look like devils, with huge horns, red gnarly skin, cloven hooves, wings and a tail. But finally the big truth dawns: the last generation of children becomes clairvoyant, ascend into the air, and, while destroying the planet, become “as one” in the universal Overmind.

Accepting death? Why not this interpretation: sure, socialism can work — but only by stripping us of our individuality and destroying humanity along with all life on the planet.

The devil, you say.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End, science, science fiction, socialism

education and schooling folly ideological culture responsibility

Anti-Lynch Lynch Mob

racism, political correctness, progressivism illustration, common sense, trigger warning, micro-aggression,

America’s worst racial and sexual injustices were institutionally addressed years ago, in the Sixties and soon after — by folks in the Civil Rights movement, everyday citizens, and their representatives.

So what do today’s earnest, Johnny-and-Jilly Come Lately “Social Justice Warriors” have left to complain about?

Why, building names, of course!

The local college in Annville, Pennsylvania, has been embroiled in a bizarre civil rights complaint about their Lynch Memorial Hall. Named after one Dr. Clyde A. Lynch, a Depression Era benefactor, some SJW students are demanding that it be changed, because of, get this, “associated racial connotations.”

“Lynch,” you see. It triggers them.

I kid you not.

Colin Deppen, writing last week on pennlive.com, explained how Dr. Lynch had nothing to do with the lynching of African-Americans in Jim Crow days. The extra-legal hanging tradition began much earlier, in the Revolutionary War, “with a Captain William Lynch of Pittsville, Virginia.” This fellow “headed a self-constituted court with no legal authority that persecuted suspected British loyalists.”

Lynching’s origins? White-on-white violence, not white-on-black.

SJW students, mostly ignorant and incurious, prefer coming off as whiners or moral scolds than learn something.

Or let a coincidence go.

The problem is this: the closer some people get to reaching their goals, they have less and less to do. Yet many “late adopters” covet the moral authority of their predecessors. So they pack all their frustration and passion into making more and more unreasonable demands.

But this may be self-correcting. They look like idiots. And they have obtained our attention. This Lynch Mob nonsense could be the sign of their end times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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