Someone has to make the pie. War on women. Recommended reading

View 782 Monday, July 15, 2013

 

I put up a mail bag including comments on the verdict last night.

 

Roberta sees the questioning of the Zimmerman Verdict as just more in the war against women.

The Attorney General is moved to investigate despite the fact that the FBI already investigated. The President to his credit has said that this is a nation of law and the jury has spoken, but he seems to be the only member of his administration to talk that way.

Either we live in a nation of law or we have a tyranny in development.

Moving ahead in commercial space.

The only way the United States can survive the wild increases in disability and unemployment benefits and the rest of the entitlement rush is through a massive increase in productivity. If you are going to give everyone a slice of pie there has to be enough pie to go around. There also have to be some incentives for those actually producing the pie to continue raising the fruit and berries and wheat and baking powder and butter (or at least lard) and see to the mixing and baking and – but you get the idea. There has to be a pie, and it has to be large enough for everyone to get a share, or spreading the wealth around is just a slogan to attract votes.

Democracies endure until the majority learns that it can vote itself largess from the public treasury. Up to that point awarding yourself money for doing nothing was known as graft. Old Ed Crump, the highly popular and successful city boss of Memphis when I was growing up, used to talk about ‘honest graft’ dishonest graft. Honest graft was the sort of thing like knowing where a road would be built or improved and tipping off your friends to buy out in that direction. Dishonest graft was stealing money from the treasury or intimidating taxpayers. Crump talked openly about it: he didn’t put up with theft and embezzlement and incompetence, but he rewarded efficiency and honesty. Oddly enough, most people believed him, and did so all the time I was in Memphis. I haven’t been back since. I suppose there has been some kind of debunking and posthumous degrading of the old man since I left in 1950.

But I ramble. My point is that the entitlement programs, all of them, Medicare, Social Security Retirement, Social Security Disability which has become a new form of extended unemployment – few who get on SS Disability ever return to the work force – are going broke. There is not enough pie to give out as much as has been promised to the Baby Boom generation (actually which it promised itself).

Fortunately commercial space is developing new ways to make more and better pie, and there are still entrepreneurs. For a while.

We all know Space-X and X-Corps. There are others.

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/space-all-small-cheap-satellites-may-one-day-do-your-6C10488674

Space for all: Small, cheap satellites may one day do your bidding

Matt Rivera and Alan Boyle NBC News

July 14, 2013 at 5:11 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO — Someday, swarms of satellites the size of a tissue box will be snapping pictures, taking environmental readings and broadcasting messages from orbit — but the entities controlling those satellites won’t be governments.

Instead, they’ll be hard-core hobbyists and elementary-school students, entrepreneurs and hacktivists. In short, anyone who can afford a few hundred dollars to send something to the final frontier.

The technology for this outer-space revolution already exists: It’s a type of satellite known as a CubeSat, which measures just 4 inches (10 centimeters) on a side. The CubeSat phenomenon started out as an educational experiment, but now it’s turning into a crowdsourcing, crowdfunding movement of Kickstarter proportions. And not even the sky is the limit.

This year alone, more than two dozen CubeSats are due to go into orbit, piggybacking on commercial and government space launches.

. . .

It may not be long before CubeSats start going beyond Earth orbit: Scientists and engineers are working on schemes to send the nanosatellites to the moon, or to the outer solar system. (A Kickstarter campaign for interplanetary CubeSats is in progress right now.)

Eventually, putting a satellite into outer space could be as easy as sending camera-equipped balloons into the stratosphere — in other words, so easy a 7-year-old could do it.

"Realistically, in the next couple of years, it’s going to be possible to put a sprite into orbit for less than $1,000, so that will bring it within the reach of hobbyists and high-school students for science fairs," Manchester said. "It’s the sort of thing I wish I had when I was a kid."

 

Of course it takes entrepreneurial talent to figure out ways to make money with these programs: if they don’t make money they’re just another entitlement adding to the looming tidal wave of debt. But they are making money.

Moore’s law is inexorable. We can do more and more with less and less. The precision gyros and accelerometers in a Minuteman missile cost millions of dollars. Now you can get a full set of gyros and accelerometers with a GPS receiver to boot on a chip for under $50, and that cost is falling. You can build a satellite capable of doing crop forecasts for a few thousand dollars and get it launched as a cube sat. Telemetry is no longer expensive – the batteries cost more than the electronics. In the early days of spy satellites we had to drop physical film packages and catch them off Hawaii before they fell into the sea to get good pictures of the Soviet ICBM installations. Now a cubesat can give you an instant picture at much better resolution.

My Firefox open tabs list is getting far too long. I tend to keep tabs open when I intend to write something about their subject – generally I am sent a reference to the site by one of my readers, and having looked at it I decide to keep it open to remind me to comment. And then come a couple of bad weeks and the number of open tabs grows and grows, and I realize I will probably never have time to comment on all of them.l

Here are some of the open tabs I am closing. Every one of them is worth reading for one reason or another. Most deserve a comment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/opinion/sunday/why-the-fuss-over-the-dsm-5.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fopinion%2Findex.jsonp&_r=3&

http://www.gopusa.com/theloft/2013/06/05/excuse-me-did-you-just-say-gun/?subscriber=1

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/virtue.html

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/the-faulty-logic-of-the-math-wars/

http://www.mongabay.com/history/syria/syria-structure_of_society.html

http://www.fantasticalandrewfox.com/2013/06/20/burn-the-witch-swarm-cyber-shaming-in-science-fiction/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703749504576172714184601654.html

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/a-junior-officers-perspective-on-brain-drain

My apologies for throwing so much at you, but the titles are pretty well self explanatory so you can choose among them ones that you might find interesting. As I said above, I think each is worth your time, but clearly I don’t have time to deal with all of them. I thought it better to show them than just to forget them.

A comment to a mailbag item from last night:

 

"Stand Your Ground" comment

Jerry, the guy who gave you the piece on the Florida “Stand Your Ground” law may be somewhat mistaken.

He said “Under the law, I can go punch Mike Tyson in the face in locked room. If he hits back and I fear "great bodily injury" I can shoot him because I have no place to run.”

Tucker Max gives an absolutely beautiful exposition of the legal concept of “proximate cause” (legal term), in “Hilarity Ensues” at pp. 188-190 (http://books.google.com/books?id=0PJ2PdpE2XkC&pg=PA188#v=onepage&q&f=false <http://books.google.com/books?id=0PJ2PdpE2XkC&pg=PA188#v=onepage&q&f=false> ). He starts by quoting the Wikipedia entry, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause> , on “proximate cause”: “In the law <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law> , a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to a legally recognizable injury to be held to be the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law: cause-in-fact, and proximate (or legal) cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the "but for" test: But for the action, the result would not have happened. For example, but for running the red light <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light> , the collision <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision> would not have occurred. For an act to cause a harm, both tests must be met; proximate cause is a legal limitation on cause-in-fact.”

That would seem to be directly applicable to your correspondent’s hypothetical, and suggests that your correspondent would not fare well at trial. While Iron Mike’s return punch might be the cause-in-fact for his fear of great bodily injury, his initial assault on Iron Mike would almost certainly be considered the proximate cause, making him, not Iron Mike, responsible for the final outcome.

–John