NASA should stop making rockets

A colleague of mine at work sent me a link today about an astronaut losing a tool bag in space during a space walk to work on the international space station. That seems as good a lede

lead[ing sentence]

as any to introduce a thought I've had for a while: NASA needs to be gutted.

Now, I like scientific research as much as the next guy — probably more than the typical next guy, actually. And despite my general preference for a small federal government, I do think the federal government needs to play a major part in funding science. Some of the most interesting and useful things we enjoy in the modern world have their origins in pure scientific research, and that's the kind of research that individuals and private companies have the least to gain from in terms of ROI.

My problem with NASA isn't that the government is spending so much money on research, it's that we're getting virtually nothing in return. We're not even trying to do real research anymore; manned missions these days are just excuses to fix whatever piece of the shuttle broke on the way up, and maybe pop another module to a space station that seems to be its own raison d'être.

In fact, one of NASA's points of pride is that its rovers and probes now use cheap, off-the-shelf parts. NASA sees that as proof that it's learning to work on a budget; I see it as proof that its innovative days are over. I'd rather spend $500 million and have learned something new than spend $100 million for what is, essentially, an expensive toy.

And while I'm trying my best to bite my tongue and not delve into a rant about the agency's all-consuming obsession to find water on Mars, suffice it to say that my world would be not be rocked in the least if they found ice there, or even evidence of Martian bacteria.

Where does that leave space research? At the risk of shedding my usual pinko hue for a deeper red, it's time for government to just get out of the private sector's way. The X Prize produced more innovation in space travel in eight years than NASA has since inventing the shuttle in 1981. If we want to make space travel a part of daily life, NASA's space missions should be gutted and the money appropriated to incentives in the private sector.

To be fair, there is still a substantial amount of pure research the government does through NASA. In particular, space telescopes and probes are giving us fascinating new insights to the universe. We've all but confirmed that black holes exist, and much of that research has been in the past decade; we're seeing farther and farther out, and thus farther and farther back in time. NASA should keep these research projects; but it should start shifting away from the job of getting the satellites themselves into orbit.

And please, can we stop talking about manned missions to Mars until we have a reason to go there? "Because it is there" is a great reason to go where no man has gone before, but George Mallory didn't cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

McCain's and Obama's speeches

It's late (I'm starting it at 2:15 AM)., so please excuse me if this isn't well written or thought out. Tomorrow (ie, "later today") or Thursday I'll follow up with some more reflections, but for now, I'd like to scratch out a quick note on my take on McCain's concession speech and Obama's victory speech.

I thought Obama's speech was very, very good. It was definitely celebratory (especially near the beginning, where, as my mom pointed out, it was even somewhat self-aggrandizing), but especially towards the end, had some very good points. His call to arms, as it were, was not as succinct or powerful as Kennedy's "ask not," but it resonated strongly with me. And while I usually dislike personal anecdotes, I (begrudgingly) liked his story of Ann Nixon Cooper. It drove through the message that the world has changed over the last 100 years in literally unimaginable and unpredictable ways, and it's up to us to make sure that the world 100 years from now will be better, even if we know we cannot begin to predict how it'll look. The big challenge will be to get people to actually commit to that commitment.

I also thought McCain's speech was very good. It was disturbing, of course, to hear the boos and taunts, but I can't be sure Obama's supporters wouldn't have done the same had they lost. And although I was a bit torn at first about McCain's focus on Obama's ethnicity, I now think it was appropriate. Clearly, this is a huge leap forward for the black community, and it's important that we have an official voice (not just the media) declare it as such explicitly. Obama say that, though; it would make it look like he really had been running as a black candidate, not just a candidate, and would strongly undermine and alienate his broad-based support. McCain had the grace to say what nobody else could: everything else aside, the fact that America was able to elect a black president is a huge deal and represents phenominal progress from a dark past.

Finally, a thought on cheers. I've never been one for the 1-2-3 cheers. But as I was listening to the speech in my car, it occurred to me that if you have to have one, "yes we can" isn't bad at all. It carries no jingoist message (c.f. "U S A!"), nor does it mindlessly focus on any one issue (I'm looking at you, "drill baby drill"). But most importantly, it's a very versatile message. The "we" can be practically any subset of the group that cheered it at the various Obama rallies -- youth, blacks, optimists, liberals, the elderly, whites, etc -- and the things "we" can do are just as mutable. The scariest part of unified cheers, to me, is that they dehuminize the cheerers and unify them into a mob; but "yes we can" inherently counteracts that tendency.

And now, enough ramblings. It's bed time.

McCain's health insurance plan

One of the central tenets of McCain's health insurance plan is to let Americans buy insurance from any state, regardless of the state they live in. This might be a good idea if health insurance were a fully free-market commodity, but it guts the power of any state to set its own regulations or subsidize policies. Any state that tries to set minimum coverage or cap prices will be undermined by policies in states that don't, and any state that subsidizes health insurance policies will suddenly find itself paying for the whole country with the tax revenue of only its own residents.

Here in Massachusetts, we're embarking on an interesting plan to provide nearly universal coverage. It's by no means a fool-proof plan, and it looks to me like it'll probably fail. Not just that, but I knew even back when it was still being proposed that it would probably end up failing; the bar was incredibly high, and the state had no precedent from other states that it could learn from. Still, I always supported the plan, because I'm confident that even if it fails, what we'll learn from it will be invaluable as we set up its successor. My hope is that, in a couple decades, Massachusetts will hit on an iteration that really works.

Given America's current health insurance system, there's no way any state — or the federal government, for that matter — will get it right the first time. What the country needs is 50 independent laboratories, each trying its own way to provide the best coverage to the most people. Some states will go the free market route, and I can only hope that at least one or two try to nationalize (state-ize?) health care, taking as their model some of the very successful Western European countries.

Here's the crux: McCain's plan would eradicate those 50 laboratories. We'd have just one place to try policies, and it would be at a level so high — the federal government — that any experiment would be politically and economically impossible. Health insurance policy would fester under McCain's plan.

Of course, Obama's plan also works at the federal level; that's what a president's plan does. But he wouldn't strip power from local governments. His plan would largely keep regulation in the states' hands, except for the mandate to insure all minors — a reasonable floor to set, I think. At the core of it, Obama is proposing to set up a parallel health insurance system: if the regulations set by your state don't provide you a good option, you can go for the health insurance that federal employees get, which by all accounts is a very good one.

In other words, McCain's plan would strip states of their ability to control health insurance; Obama's would set a minimum bar for them, and in doing so would create an upwards pressure for them to create an environment that begets even better policies.

I would actually like Obama's plan more if it gave states more control. If a state provides a health insurance policy that's roughly equivalent to the federal government's, it should be able to petition the federal government to have it (the federal government) withdraw its coverage from that state's citizens. This would increase the state's pool of insured, allowing it to provide cheaper plans with better coverage, without undermining the minimum coverage that the federal plan was meant to provide.

States' rights? What states?

In some optimistic corner of my mind, I still cling to the idealized notion that the GOP is a small government, states' rights party; I like to think that its current policies represent a temporary if horrible corruption of their real position.

Of course, I know I'm deluding myself. Republicans today aren't about small government, and they're certainly not about states' rights. What's mildly interesting is that the party actually still pretends to be in favor of states' rights when it suits it: specifically, with the abortion issue. But McCain's insurance plan is a great example of the GOP's complete comfort with trampling over states in nearly every other matter.

Palin, the small-town mayor

Despite what they claim, the GOP have presented Sarah Palin almost purely as a nice storyline. There's little talk about the fact that as mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire the town's librarian after asking her to ban books, that she asked the town's top officials to resign as a loyalty test, or that she wants to teach creationism in public schools. People should give her credit for reining in big oil in Alaska and cutting down on government spending, but those efforts came at the expense of nearly everything else, according to Gregg Erickson, a columnist for the Anchorage Daily News.

And let's be clear, she's no centrist. Palin is against abortion even in cases of rape and incest, supported a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage in Alaska and is no friend to the environment.

I would love the discussion to focus around these issues, but instead, Palin and others in the party have focused on her being a "hockey mom" we can all relate to, an average Jill who's just a hard-working mayor from a small town. This is somehow being spun as a plus.

I know plenty of nice people. I know plenty of people who are hard-working. But I don't know anyone who I'd consider ready to be president of the United States of America. And I'm sorry, but hunting moose is no qualification for conducting international politics — it's a completely orthogonal skill.

Have people forgotten that we're picking a leader here, not a pal? Imagine if GM were looking for a new CEO and picked one of their shift managers because she "understood blue-collar issues" and was "a down-to-earth candidate." Given that McCain is 72 years old, this is not just a rhetorical point; his VP must be qualified to be a good president.

Granted, Obama doesn't have a lot of political experience. But his now-derided "community organizer" role was in a city with a population literally more than four times greater than all of Alaska — and that's not counting the metro region outside Chicago proper. He's demonstrated his approach to foreign affairs. He's also run a large and extremely successful campaign for more than a year now, so his experience has been somewhat tested and highly scrutinized, as Republican Joe Scarborough pointed out (at 2:00 into the clip). Palin is coming out of left field.

Besides, Obama isn't pretending that his lack of experience is somehow a good thing, as Palin is.

Obama's failing, and why it shouldn't matter

It’s funny how a flip-flop can look like a betrayal if you’re on the wrong side of it.

Since he secured the Democratic party’s nomination, Obama has made a well-documented dash to the center. He’s tempered his 16-month pullout from Iraq by saying he’d adjust the timetable as needed, putting him fairly close to McCain’s (also new) position that timetables are irrelevant but that we should be out by 2013. With regard to oil, Obama now supports tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a reversal of his earlier position. He also did a 180 on FISA; ditto public campaign financing, and he’s not even relying on small donations as much anymore.

Now, each of those shifts is arguably the sensible thing, and one could be tempted to just shrug it off and say, “that’s politics for ya.” The problem is that Obama started out with — and still maintains — the notion that he’s somehow a new class of politician, and that’s turned out to be a lie. If we wanted a standard centrist, we had Hillary.

Don’t get me wrong — I’d still pick Obama over McCain. Obama has stayed firm on his tax brackets, which redistribute wealth more to the have-nots. I’d also prefer to see Obama picking the next one or two Supreme Court justices, and Obama’s certainly a more charismatic leader. Electing Obama would be a show of good faith to the rest of the world, although my guess is that it would be a fairly short-lived honeymoon. When it comes down to it, Obama is left-of-center, and McCain is right-of-right-of-center. I guess beggars can’t be choosers.

Obama's rush to the center reminds me of why I’m in favor of states’ rights. America will never elect a truly innovative class of politician as president, because it’s just too big and diverse. If you average out a rainbow, you get a muddy, unexciting color.

America should strive to work a bit more like the European Union: a tight union of separate, independent states. Each state should be responsible for its own moral compass, governmental initiatives and much of its own administration; the federal government should primarily be a coordinating body, distributor of wealth and guardian of a few basic human rights.

The argument might come back that the EU suffers from a disconnect from its citizenry, slow political movement caused by various countries’ hesitations at one point or another, and a general confusion as to the path it should take. I would respond: exactly.

In other words, I would like to see more of an “agree to disagree” attitude within America. Texas and Massachusetts are going to differ on a lot of things, and there’s no reason to let Ohio and Florida decide, every four years, whose opinion gets to rule supreme.

Wall-E Surprise

I know I usually post only once a week, but I wanted to get a short entry in today, before July's Month o' Music starts.

I just saw Wall-E and was pleasantly surprised. I came in thinking it would be a cute, fun movie, but it turned out to have a good message as well. I'm not talking about the environmentalism, which turned out to be a relatively minor element.

The rest of this post has mild spoilers, so I'm hiding it. Click here to show it.

If you're looking at this through an RSS reader, you'll have to actually click through to the article. Or you could just run the rest of this post through a rot13 decoder, I guess

Bs gur inevbhf gurzrf va Jnyy-R, gur bar gung uvg ubzr zbfg sbe zr jnf gur vqrn gung jr'er urnqvat gbjneqf n frys-oenvajnfurq shgher va juvpu gur yrnqref bs gbqnl — pbecbengr nf jryy nf tbireazragny — jvyy pbageby gur haguvaxvat shgher. Erzrzore jura rirelbar va gur zbivr jnf mvccvat nebhaq va gurve ubirepunvef, ybbxvat ng gurve cebwrpgrq fperraf, boyvivbhf gb gur jbeyq nebhaq gurz?

Jryy, ercynpr gubfr fperraf jvgu rneohqf naq vg'f whfg yvxr ubj zhfvp vf nyernql gheavat hf vagb qebarf. Gung'f evtug, gur vCbq bs gbqnl jvyy oerrq gur zvaqyrff-UHQ-va-n-ubirepunve bs gbzbeebj. Lbh urneq vg urer svefg!

An environmentalist's manifesto

July is special, so I'm going to devote it entirely to a fun subject. No environmental stuff, no political junk, just my thoughts on music and why all these young whippersnappers with their "hip hop" and "rock 'n' roll" should get off my lawn.

To compensate, I'll leave you, my faithful reader(s), with my militant and proselytizing manifesto.

There's a lot of focus within the environmental movement on conservation: we take for granted that it's our right as humans to consume and consume, and if we've committed any sin, it's that we've consumed inefficiently. We should rethink that mindset.

I would submit that we never had a carte blanche in the first place; we've been taking luxuries as fundamental necessities without thinking, like some character out of The Great Gatsby who's slowly starting to realize that his money isn't coming from a deep trust fund but from a line of credit.

Let's take driving, because it's always fun to beat a dead horse. According to one site I found that lists carbon emissions by mode of transportation, a 180 lb man creates about 200 lbs of CO₂ every mile he drives alone in a car. It won't go away for thousands of years.

Okay, cars pollute — nothing new. But the crux is that driving isn't a basic right, it's a huge convenience. Humans survived tens of thousands of years without more than feet, horses and wheels, but we've forgotten all that in the last century. Suddenly, it's not driving that's fast and easy; it's walking or biking that are slow and hard.

It would behoove us all to remember that when we drive, use a computer, turn on the A/C or do any number of other activities that consume power, we're going above and beyond what nature was designed to let us do. We're spending what we were never given to spend.

I'm guilty too; I drive several times a week, use a computer for hours a day and enjoy the A/C at work. But I feel guilty about it, which makes me think every time I do something that pollutes, which makes me do it a lot less. It may be melodramatic and smack of self-flagellation, but I think it's one case where a bit of guilt is deserved and well placed. To put it bluntly: every animal has to pollute a bit, but we might ask ourselves what gives us the right to so grossly exceed our allowance.

And when you stop and think about it, taking an extra half-hour to use public transportation instead of driving isn't really that inconvenient. You're still saving a lot of time compared to having to walk those 6 miles. And if you bring a book or a magazine or manage to grab a seat and doze off for a few, it can honestly be a nice experience.

Hmm, that last graf

paragraph

wasn't too manifesto-esq, was it? Don't tell Marx.

On an unrelated note for anyone who's holding their breath for the answer to the math question I posed a while back: I haven't crunched the numbers yet, but I will at some point. The suspense will keep you coming back!