Mar 12, 2021 | Sci-Tech
Alex Epstein has a podcast on “Steps toward decriminalizing nuclear” with Robert Hargraves, cofounder of ThorCon and author of “Thorium: Energy Cheaper Than Coal.”
Topics covered include:
- Why since the creation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) over 45 years ago not one nuclear power plant has been designed and built to completion.
- Why the Linear no Threshold guiding the NRC should be abolished.
- What ALARA is, and how it increases nuclear costs.
- Why South Korea builds nuclear plants at 1/3 US costs.
- Should the NRC exist at all?
Mar 11, 2021 | Sci-Tech
From July 2020:
How did they do it?
From Cuomo Advisers Altered Report on Covid-19 Nursing-Home Deaths (WSJ):
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top advisers successfully pushed state health officials to strip a public report of data showing that more nursing-home residents had died of Covid-19 than the administration had acknowledged, according to people with knowledge of the report’s production.
The July report, which examined the factors that led to the spread of the virus in nursing homes, focused only on residents who died inside long-term-care facilities, leaving out those who had died in hospitals after becoming sick in nursing homes. As a result, the report said 6,432 nursing-home residents had died—a significant undercount of the death toll attributed to the state’s most vulnerable population, the people said. The initial version of the report said nearly 10,000 nursing-home residents had died in New York by July last year, one of the people said.
The changes Mr. Cuomo’s aides and health officials made to the nursing-home report, which haven’t been previously disclosed, reveal that the state possessed a fuller accounting of out-of-facility nursing-home deaths as early as the summer. The Health Department resisted calls by state and federal lawmakers, media outlets and others to release the data for another eight months.
State officials now say more than 15,000 residents of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities were confirmed or presumed to have died from Covid-19 since March of last year—counting both those who died in long-term-care facilities and those who died later in hospitals. That figure is about 50% higher than earlier official death tolls.
Related: Governor Andrew Cuomo Deserves Emmy But Not Governorship
Feb 18, 2021 | Sci-Tech
According to Alex Epstein “the root cause of the TX blackouts is a national and state policy that has prioritized the adoption of unreliable wind/solar energy over reliable energy.” Writes Epstein, Texas “is having an electricity crisis during bad winter weather because it did not focus enough on building reliable power plants and infrastructure–because it was obsessed with getting as much unreliable wind/solar electricity as possible” and “the expense and distraction of accommodating “unreliables” takes away money and focus from resiliency. In CA this meant not maintaining power lines. In TX it may have meant not focusing enough on making the reliable power plants resilient enough to winter weather.”
Read the rest.
Epstein also appeared on Glenn Beck’s radio program:
Jan 27, 2021 | Sci-Tech
Parler’s chief policy officer, the thoughtful Amy Peikoff, has an enlightening interview on Spiked Online on the app’s cancellation by Big Tech. According to Ms. Peikoff, “Parler’s mission has always been to allow people to express themselves freely to the maximum extent possible consistent with the law and with our own business purposes….” and that the answer to so-called “hate speech” is ” more speech.”
In regards to Parler differentiating itself from Twitter and Facebook, Peikoff states that Parler “want[s] to respect the privacy of users. Unlike with Twitter and Facebook, there’s no data mining, profiling, and targeting of ads based on profiles.” She adds: “The people on Parler are not the commodity.”
Peikoff also finds it “scary” that,
“Politicians are hauling tech CEOs before Congress and urging them to remove more and more content, even when the particular category of speech in question would be protected by the First Amendment or similar laws around the world.
“It’s a scary prospect, because we get to a stage where we are not in a completely free country.
In regards, to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s call for what some describe as “censorship by proxy”:
“Moreover, Mark Zuckerberg supports new regulations under which platforms would be required to issue so-called transparency reports. These are reports in which firms describe what they have done to deal with ‘objectionable content’, including speech that is protected by the First Amendment.
“He has gone further to suggest platforms should be required to prove their effectiveness at dealing with that content. If that ends up being put into law, it would represent the government trying to achieve, via regulation of social-media companies, what it could not achieve by directly censoring.”
Read the full Spiked Online interview here.
In an article on her personal website, Don’t Let It Go (named after a brilliant article by philosopher Ayn Rand), Peikoff writes on Zuckerberg’s proposals:
“Now recall that Mark Zuckerberg, in the most recent Big-Tech-CEO-Hearanguing before Congress, suggested amending Section 230 as follows:
- “Transparency” – each company enjoying Section 230 immunity would be required to issue periodic reports detailing how it dealt with certain types of “objectionable” content.
- “Accountability” –platforms enjoying immunity could also be held to some minimum level of “effectiveness” with respect to dealing with that “objectionable” content. (Recall he also bragged about how effective Facebook’s “hate speech” algorithms are.)
“Perhaps you think “transparency” at least, is good. But imagine what information ends up being collected and retained as ‘ordinary business records’ when complying with this sort of law, and read on.
Peikoff notes that though Parler was singled out by Amazon, Google, and others, the left-leaning Salon “blame[s] Facebook for playing a much larger role in facilitating the planning that led up to the 6th.
Writes Peikoff:
“….What does Salon hope to gain by blaming Facebook and showing sympathy to Parler? I argue that placing responsibility for user-generated content on platforms plays right into the totalitarians’ hands.
“With all the platforms now being blamed for user-generated content containing threats or incitement, the new Congress needs only to accept Mark Zuckerberg’s engraved invitation to amend Section 230 along the above lines. But, as we’ve learned in the last week, no system of guidelines enforcement is perfect. If Facebook, with all its algorithms and other resources could not ‘adequately’ deal with this content, then what company could?
“If it’s not actually possible to be good at this, to the standard that everyone seems to expect, and Zuckerberg is calling for all of us to be regulated according to that standard, then what exactly is he calling for (whether he realizes it or not)? For government to take over, to have arbitrary control. For all online platforms to operate only by permission of government, according to whatever standards politicians (or the Twitter mobs pulling their strings) deem fit—and this will be true with respect to both free speech and privacy.”
I would love to see a debate between Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Parler’s CPO Amy Peikoff on this vital issue.
For context, below is a video interview with Tucker Carlson on the targeting of Parler by Google, Apple, and Amazon:
Top Photo: FoxNews Tucker Carlson Show
Related:
Dec 20, 2020 | Sci-Tech
NASA has spent over 23 billion dollars on the Orion spacecraft – that has yet to be able to take a person into space. Writes Eric Berger in “The Orion spacecraft is now 15 years old and has flown into space just once“:
The Orion spacecraft dates back to 2005, when NASA issued a “request for proposals” to industry with the goal of “developing a new Crew Exploration Vehicle by 2014 that is capable of carrying astronauts beyond low Earth orbit.” NASA sought Orion as a building block to land humans on the Moon as part of what became known as the Constellation program. This program was later canceled, but Orion survived. Since that time, according to The Planetary Society’s Casey Dreier, NASA has spent $23.7 billion developing the Orion spacecraft. This does not include primary costs for the vehicle’s Service Module, which provides power and propulsion, as it is being provided by the European Space Agency.
For this money, NASA has gotten a bare-bones version of Orion that flew [without a crew] during the Exploration Flight Test-1 mission in 2014. The agency has also gotten the construction of an Orion capsule—which also does not have a full life support system—that will be used during the uncrewed Artemis I mission due to be flown in 12 to 24 months. So over its lifetime, and for $23.7 billion, the Orion program has produced:
- Development of Orion spacecraft
- Exploration Flight Test-1 basic vehicle
- The Orion capsule to be used for another test flight
- Work on capsules for subsequent missions
How does that compare to Elon Musk’s privately run space initiative, SpaceX?
SpaceX is generally considered one of the most efficient space companies. Founded in 2002, the company has received funding from NASA, the Department of Defense, and private investors. Over its history, we can reliably estimate that SpaceX has expended a total of $16 billion to $20 billion on all of its spaceflight endeavors. Consider what that money has bought:
- Development of Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy rockets
- Development of Cargo Dragon, Crew Dragon, and Cargo Dragon 2 spacecraft
- Development of Merlin, Kestrel, and Raptor rocket engines
- Build-out of launch sites at Vandenberg (twice), Kwajalein Atoll, Cape Canaveral, and Kennedy Space Center
- 105 successful launches to orbit
- 20 missions to supply International Space Station, two crewed flights
- Development of vertical take off, vertical landing, rapid reuse for first stages
- Starship and Super Heavy rocket development program
- Starlink Internet program (with 955 satellites on orbit, SpaceX is largest satellite operator in the world)
The author calls this an “extreme” comparison. Far from it, when comparing the economics of capitalism and socialism it is the norm.
