2011/05/09

Dois Coisas e um Brinde

What? It's Portuguese.

I thought of two things I need to note. They're both reality check, one for me and one for Obama. And then I had a thought. Anyway.

For me, remember here when I was talking about cancelling the Constellation program but still developing the "Orion drive ship"? Turns out the "Orion spacecraft" all those documents refer to is something completely different: it's this, basically more reminiscent of Soyuz than anything else. Apparently it's named after the Apollo lander, but, one, why did the thing we can just call "Apollo lander" have a separate name, and two, why didn't anyone notice that calling the thing "Orion" could get it confused with this bad mamma-jamma?

So enough reality check for me. Onto Obama. Did anyone else notice the problem, in that speech where he was basically justifying his opposition to increased drilling? He said something like "There's no easy way to make gas prices go down." Which, sorry, his claim to be the smartest president ever (which, in fairness, was made for him, not by him) takes a serious hit when he says things like that.

I never went to Harvard but I do know the meaning of supply and demand. "Increasing supply while demand remains constant will lower prices" is, to my knowledge, an iron law, like "doubling velocity while mass remains constant will quadruple kinetic energy". There are many valid arguments against drilling, environmental and even economic—just off the top of my head, you could warn about an over-supply resulting from a shortsighted increase in production—but denying a basic principle of economics isn't one of them.

But no matter what you think of Obama (or thought of Bush), he's your country's executive. As an act of patriotism, I intend, this July 4th, to drink to Obama's health. I trust you'll do likewise?

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