May 032015
 

The War on Poverty After 50 Years

Boils down to this graph:

BG-war-on-poverty-50-years-chart-2-825.gif

In short… the poverty rate had been plummeting since just after WWII. The plummet stopped and leveled off once the Great Society wealth transfer “War on Poverty” programs kicked in, and the poverty rate has remained constant ever since. However, spending on these programs has skyrocketed. Since 1964, the US has spent (in 2012 dollars) more than 22 TRILLION dollars on anti poverty programs… NOT counting Social Security and Medicare.

How many comets could we have dropped on Mars to terraform the joint into a second Earth for even *half* that amount?

 Posted by at 12:12 am
May 022015
 

Venezuela to nationalize food distribution

Tell me this here ain’t high-larious journalizing:

Various estimates suggest the government already controls about half of the country’s food distribution, but that hasn’t stopped record shortages in shops and markets.

Heh. Ya gotta wonder if the writer is actually surprised that having a pack of collectivists taking over a good chunk of a vital portion of the economy results in lower performance… or if this is some form of sarcasm.

 Posted by at 11:58 pm
May 012015
 

I’m still skeptical, but testing is testing:

New Test Suggests NASA’s “Impossible” EM Drive Will Work In Space

The electromagnetic drive works – if it works – by rattling microwaves around inside a metal can. Through the magic of… well, magic, I guess, the vanishingly tiny thrust developed by the microwaves as a pure photon rocket gets magnified into a measurable but still tiny level of thrust. How does this happen?

[T]he EM Drive’s thrust was due to the Quantum Vacuum (the quantum state with the lowest possible energy) behaving like propellant ions behave in a MagnetoHydroDynamics drive (a method electrifying propellant and then directing it with magnetic fields to push a spacecraft in the opposite direction) for spacecraft propulsion.

Whenever anyone starts yammering about quantum this or that or harnessing the vacuum, I have flashbacks to Deepak Chopra and start tuning them out. Still, NASA Eagleworks at Johnson Space Center is not known for a whole lot of crackpottery, so *maybe* they’ve stumbled across something. Or maybe they’re working on the newest Dean Drive.

Electromagnetics ain’t my schtick, so all I can say is that whenever anyone else has thought that they were getting a free lunch out of the universe, they found out that such a thing don’t happen. Superluminal neutrinos, anyone?

 Posted by at 10:22 pm