Apr
10
2026

Unusual Job Requirement? You Don't Want to Know.

And now on to the daily hodgepodge:

  • I really hesitated to post this. At the Free Press, Frannie Block is asking "out loud" about what a lot of people are probably thinking: Could Artemis II Burn Up on Reentry?

    The two most dangerous moments in space flight are the launch and the reentry. The launch of Artemis II went smoothly, but on Friday, when the four-person crew reenters the earth’s atmosphere, significant danger lurks.

    As it begins its reentry, the spacecraft Orion will enter what’s called the thermosphere, where they will travel through heat that can reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. “You’re in the middle of a fireball for about 15 minutes,” Charlie Camarda, a retired astronaut and senior engineer at NASA, told me.

    Artemis I had some pretty nasty erosion on its heat shield on its reentry. Camarada has been out of NASA since 2019, but "he doesn’t trust NASA’s engineers to have fully understood, and rectified, the heat shield’s problems." And

    Even if the heat shield holds this time, Carmada thinks disaster at NASA is inevitable. “We’re just playing with the odds, and the odds are going to get us, because we’re not fixing the real problem,” he said, “and that’s the culture.”

    Complaints about NASA's "culture" are mandatory after astronaut-killing disasters (Apollo 1 in 1967; Challeger in 1986; Columbia in 2003). Recommended reading: Richard Feynman's "Appendix F" to the Rogers Commission report on the Challenger accident, which contains the bottom line:

    For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

    We've seen a lot of "public relations" over the past few days.

    My (admittedly cynical) view: socialism doesn't work in space any better than it does on Earth. I'll be watching the coverage on TV tonight, with all my hopes and fears turned up to 11.

  • Speaking of socialism on Earth… The CBS News show with a "long-standing tradition of existence", 60 Minutes, devoted about 13 minutes on Sunday to…

    The AntiPlanner, Randal O'Toole, watched and concluded: 60 Minutes Misses the Point.

    Californians are fed up with high-speed rail. And no wonder: the state has spent $18 billion so far and hasn’t laid a single mile of track; the whole project is approximately four times over budget; it is expected to be done 20 years late; and all the state has to brag about is the jobs that have been created doing nothing. If you don’t believe people are fed up, just read all of the responses made to the jobs tweet.

    Unfortunately, when 60 Minutes asked why the U.S. doesn’t have high-speed passenger trains when so many other countries do, it completely missed the point. It’s answers were things like the Eisenhower administration building the Interstate Highway System, thus “fueling the world’s proudest car culture”; farmers objecting to having their farms cut up for a high-speed rail line; and “California’s exacting environmental regulations.”

    But those aren’t the reasons we don’t have high-speed rail. The real reason is that high-speed rail is a high-cost solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. That problem is how to get people from one urban area to another and we already have two solutions to that: airlines that can move people faster and at a lower cost than trains; and highways that give people more flexibility to reach more destinations at a lower cost than trains. Between those two answers, there really isn’t a need for high-speed trains.

    For the record, Elon Musk is tweeting his solution:

    True? We'll probably never know.

    2026-04-16 UPDATE: David R. Henderson provides some annotations to the 60 Minutes video:

    4:22: It’s arguable. Seriously? Just arguable?

    5:27: “Failure is always an option.” Exactly. I use that line a lot in many situations.

    10:17: $125 billion to complete what I call the “medium speed rail.”

    11:59: Notice how the guy goes off the rails, pun intended, in claiming as public benefits various items that are private benefits: comfort, safety, and reliability.

    Puns, intended or not, are always welcome at Pun Salad.

  • Hey, kids, what time is it? Vero de Rugy says It's Time to Take Unserious Presidential Budgets Seriously.

    The president's fiscal 2027 budget is out, and I have two reactions. The first will sound familiar: Like so many budgets before it, this is not a serious effort to put America's government on a sustainable path. The second is more important: It would be a mistake to dismiss it as just another unserious document. That is exactly how we got here.

    Start with what the new budget does and does not do. It's not a comprehensive fiscal plan. It covers only about one-third of federal spending, focusing heavily on discretionary choices and largely ignoring the autopilot spending that drives our long-term debt.

    The headline item is defense spending. The administration proposes a jump of $445 billion to reach $1.5 trillion. That's a 42% increase in one year, the largest since the Korean War, raising defense spending to roughly 4.4% of GDP.

    Well, that's a lot. In Trump's defense (heh), he's been blowing up a lot of stuff over the past year or so.

  • Disappontment! Usually the Josiah Bartlett Center is a reliable and moderately sensible conservative/libertarian voice. So I was a little shocked at the headline on a recent article: SNAP candy & soft drink ban would hurt retailers.

    Um. May I suggest a fix: "SNAP candy & soft drink ban would help taxpayers."

    The article summarizes a study by Zachary Cady, which you can read here. Like the article, the study doesn't consider taxpayer benefits.

  • On the LFOD watch. Whitney Curry Wimbish's American Prospect article has a pretty dire headline: Live Tax-Free and Die. Eek!

    Late last year, the godfather of supply-side economics dropped in on a Georgia state Senate special committee hearing. He spoke of the urgent need to dump their income tax, a “killer, killer, killer,” akin to “a nuclear weapon,” that has destroyed the 11 states that have instituted it as of 1960: Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia.

    “Each and every one of those states in population has had a cataclysmic decline relative to the rest of the nation. It’s just amazing,” said Arthur Laffer, inventor of the “Laffer curve,” the discredited theory that claims lowering taxes raises tax revenue. Georgia could avoid the same fate if they got rid of their income tax, which funds nearly 60 percent of the state’s entire $34.8 billion budget.

    This was a familiar refrain from a conservative anti-tax champion. But before Laffer left, he asked to make one more point, something that staked out new territory for his movement.

    “I know I’m pushing on my time on you, but I got one thing else I’d like to mention, and it’s very important in Georgia, and in all the states except for one,” he said. “You have a big, big, big … big property tax problem.” That’s the real policy holding the state back from prospering. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Freezing those property taxes would bring Georgia all the way back, Laffer counseled.

    According to Whitney, things get apocalyptic really fast:

    THIS IS MAGA’S NEW FRONT in the war on working people, falsely packaged as a boon to the poor and an answer to the affordability crisis. It expands the GOP’s half-century-long project to reduce taxes of all kinds to deprive governments of raising money to pay for services, saddling citizens with unsafe roads, traffic congestion, canceled traffic projects, lower teacher pay, higher teacher turnover, larger class sizes, ruined parks, and people losing their health insurance. Twenty-six states have cut their personal and/or corporate income taxes since 2021, and four intend to reduce them to zero: Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.

    I was reminded of those classic Ghostbusters lines: A "disaster of biblical proportions!" "Real wrath of God type stuff!" "Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!" "Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes..." " Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... MASS HYSTERIA!"

    I boogied on over to the WalletHub study to find out where Georgia ranked tax-burden wise. It turns out they're … mediocre: in position #30 overall, with the state grabbing 8.15% of its taxpayer's personal incomes. Pretty far away from both New Hampshire (5.38%) and Hawaii (13.30%). Still, plenty of room for improvement, but also plenty of room for plunder!


Last Modified 2026-04-16 6:08 AM EDT