Tag: bankruptcy

Another subsidized solar power company going bust?

11:13 am

Your tax dollars at work! The U.S.’s largest solar power company, heavily subsidized by the federal government, now faces bankruptcy.

An SEC filing from TerraForm Global, a unit of SunEdison, claims “due to SunEdison’s liquidity difficulties, there is a substantial risk that SunEdison will soon seek bankruptcy protection.” Both SunEdison and TerraForm are delaying the filing of their annual financial report to the SEC.

News of SunEdison’s impending bankruptcy filing comes after the company’s shares fell 95 percent in the past 12 months, with shares now trading for less than $1 for the first time since the green energy company went public in 1995. SunEdison’s market value fell from $10 billion in July 2015 to around $400 million today.

The news also comes after the SEC announced it was launching an investigation into SunEdison’s disclosures to shareholders regarding the company’s liquidity. SEC enforcement officials “are looking into whether SunEdison overstated its liquidity last fall when it told investors it had more than $1 billion in cash,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

…The pro-labor union group Good Jobs First reported last year that SunEdison and its subsidiaries got nearly $650 million in subsidies and tax credits from the federal government since 2000. It was the 13th most heavily-subsidized company in America. This includes nearly $4.6 million in subsidies from the Department of Energy and Department of Treasury. Watchdog.org reported in October 2015 that SunEdison had gotten nearly $4.6 million from the Obama administration, including funding to build semi-conductors. A SunEdison bankruptcy could leave taxpayers on the hook for more than $2 billion.

But hey, what’s a few billion here or there, if the cause is worthwhile?

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SLS software over budget and behind schedule

5:28 pm

Surprise! The launch control software NASA is writing from scratch for its SLS rocket is way behind schedule and way over budget.

Development of this new launch control software is now projected to exceed $207 million, 77 percent above 2012 projections. The software won’t be ready until fall 2017, instead of this summer as planned, and important capabilities like automatic failure detection, are being deferred, the audit noted. The system is vital, needed to control pumps, motors, valves and other ground equipment during countdowns and launches, and to monitor data before and during liftoff.

NASA decided to write its own computer code to “glue together” existing software products a decade ago — while space shuttles still were flying and commercial shippers had yet to service the space station. Both delivery companies, SpaceX and Orbital ATK, rely on commercial software, the audit noted. [emphasis mine]

In other words, even though NASA could have simply purchased already available software that other launch companies were using successfully, the agency decided to write its own. And that decision really didn’t come before the arrival of these commercial companies, because when it was made a decade ago that was exactly the time that SpaceX was beginning to build its rocket.

This is simply more proof that SLS is nothing more than a pork-laden waste of money designed not to explore space but to generate non-productive jobs in congressional districts.

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“Why do Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton believe they know more about Islam than Muslim clerics?”

9:35 pm

Link here.

Read it all. This quote though sums it up nicely:

Sharia rejects freedom of speech as much as freedom of religion. It rejects the idea of equal rights between men and women as much as between Muslim and non-Muslim. It brooks no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It is a comprehensive framework for human life, dictating matters of government, economy, and combat, along with personal behavior such as contact between the sexes and personal hygiene. Sharia aims to rule both believers and non-believers, and it affirmatively sanctions jihad in order to do so.

Even if this is not the only construction of Islam, it is absurd to claim—as President Obama did during his recent visit to a mosque in Baltimore—that it is not a mainstream interpretation. In fact, it is the mainstream interpretation in many parts of the world. Last year, Americans were horrified by the beheadings of three Western journalists by ISIS. American and European politicians could not get to microphones fast enough to insist that these decapitations had nothing to do with Islam. Yet within the same time frame, the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded eight people for various violations of sharia—the law that governs Saudi Arabia.[emphasis in original]

I would answer the question in the headline very bluntly: The modern leftwing intellectual community, often led by Democratic politicians and college professors (but I repeat myself), are generally uninterested in reality. Their ideology trumps all, which is why they were able to push through Obamacare, and have had absolutely no understanding of the violence coming out of the Middle East and are willing to allow hundreds of thousands of people from that region to immigrate here without any vetting. As Obama ludicrously declared after the Brussels bombing this week, “We defeat them in part by saying, you are not strong; you are weak.” In other words, declaring them weak will stop their violence, end the terrorism, and make whole the lives they have shattered.

Until the American people reject these head-in-the-clouds fools, we will be subjected to more terrorism, more violence, and more ludicrous and impossible laws that make our lives miserable. My chief worry, however, is that the American people might be as disconnected from reality as these Democratic leaders.

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Bill to trim BLM/Forest Service power

11:19 am

Good news: A new bill has been introduced in Congress to take all law enforcement powers away from the BLM and the Forest Service on federal lands and transfer those powers to local sheriffs.

It is always better to have control and power decentralized as much as possible. Having these lands administered and controlled by a bureaucracy in Washington has never made make sense, and was always really a power play between the federal government and the states.

This bill is part of a larger movement coming from the western states to restrict the power of these environmental agencies, who happen to control a vast majority of the territories of those states. With Congress increasingly shifting to the right in recent years, expect this movement to accelerate.

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House proposes killing Commerce Department

9:00 am

In a just released budget resolution, the House budget committee has proposed eliminating the Department of Commerce in an effort to cut costs.

The biggest potential shift from the status quo would be breaking up the $9 billion commerce department. DOC is one of the least-known, and most unloved, of all federal agencies. But it nonetheless oversees a huge scientific portfolio that includes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Census Bureau. Under the heading “options worthy of consideration,” the budget committee suggests moving NOAA to the Department of Interior, placing NIST within NSF, and assigning the Census Bureau, including the massive decennial census, to the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Another commerce agency, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, would become an independent agency.

The obvious goal would be to eliminate the expensive upper management positions at Commerce and thus reduce cost. Such changes however are going to face opposition in the privileged science community. While that community has been unable to sustain the growth of its funding in the past decade, it has successfully prevented the elimination of any program or any significant reduction in the science budgets. We shall see if that record will hold in the coming years, with the electorate appearing to steadily shift more and more to the right.

The article, by Science reporter Jeffrey Mervis, also included this wonderful example of yellow journalism:

The proposed budget resolution talks repeatedly of the need to reduce spending and, in particular, curb the clichéd “waste, fraud, and abuse” that is allegedly rampant across the federal government by killing duplicative or unnecessary programs. [emphasis mine]

I’ve noted Mervis’s agenda-driven writing in the past. In the sentence above he illustrates his unreliability as a reporter. For any educated journalist to consider waste and fraud in the federal government to be “alleged” is to be a person either with his head in the sand or having so strong a bias that he is intentionally misreporting the facts. Sadly, in the case of Mervis and many in today’s so-called elite intellectual community, I think it is both.

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An estimated $55 billion in Obamacare waste

9:31 am

Finding out what’s in it: Since its signing Obamacare has caused the government and public to waste approximately $55 billion.

Though most of that number, $45 billion, is an estimate of the amount of money businesses and people have been forced to spend filling out Obamacare paperwork and thus somewhat guesswork, the remaining $10 billion is based on hard data and real waste, such as handing out almost a billion in improper subsidies or spending $2 billion to construct a website that did not work.

But who’s counting? It is more important that we can go to bed at night knowing that the Democrats care about us, and will try anything, even if it is insane or completely stupid, to make us feel better about ourselves.

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DOD opens ULA investigation

9:12 am

The deputy inspector general of the Defense Department has notified the Air Force that he is beginning an investigation into ULA and the DOD over their relationship and contract.

He also made it clear that the investigation was sparked by last week’s comments by a ULA executive who subsequently resigned.

This is all a game. The Air Force and ULA have been colluding for years to squeeze out any competition. There is no one in Washington who needs an investigation to find this out. The inspector general will issue a report, the Air Force will admit its error and promise to do better, and they will then try to have things continue as they have.

The one difference, however, will be that SpaceX will be there, providing real competition. Thus, what matters isn’t the investigation by the inspector general. What matters is the existence of a competing company willing to put cost pressure on ULA and the Air Force.

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TMT leadership looks at alternatives to Hawaii

9:01 am

Though they have refused to comment publicly, the Facebook page for the Thirty Meter Telescope on Monday showed the telescope’s management visiting the Canary Islands, a potential alternative site to Hawaii.

Their Facebook post serves two purposes. It shows that they mean business when they say they must start considering abandoning Hawaii. It also might force the Hawaiian state government to stop dragging its feet in the permitting process that protesters have forced TMT to go through, a second time.

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VA reinstates worker who committed armed robbery

10:11 pm

Our government at work: A VA worker has been reinstated with back pay after being fired for participating in an armed robbery.

It is worse than you think. The reason her union won her case was because the VA hadn’t fired other workers who had broken the law, so thus it was unfair to fire her as well.

A Department of Veterans Affairs employee in Puerto Rico was fired after being arrested for armed robbery, but her union quickly got her reinstated — despite a guilty plea — by pointing out that management’s labor relations negotiator is a registered sex offender, and the hospital’s director was once arrested and found with painkiller drugs…

Employees said the union demanded her job back and pointed out that Tito Santiago Martinez, the management-side labor relations specialist in Puerto Rico, who is in charge of dealing with the union and employee discipline, is a convicted sex offender. Martinez reportedly disclosed his conviction to the hospital and VA hired him anyway, reasoning that “there’s no children in [the hospital], so they figure I could not harm anyone here.”

The union’s position — that another employee committed a crime and got away with it, so this one should, too — has been upheld by the highest civil service rules arbiters, and has created a vicious Catch-22 where the department’s prior indefensible inaction against bad employees has handcuffed it from taking action now against other scofflaws.

And the intellectual elites in Washington wonder why people are angry and want to throw the bums out. In fact, that they remain clueless about this anger and continue to do nothing about this kind of obscene corruption in the government departments that they control is only more reason to throw them out. Maybe we should even consider bringing back that old American custom: to tar and feather them and ride them out of town on a rail.

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Conservatives to block gigantic budget plan

10:54 am

Good news: The conservative Freedom Caucus in the House is moving to block the new 10-year budget plan put forth by the Republican leadership.

And why you ask? The highlighted sentence below explains it all:

The fiscal blueprint, released Tuesday by Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., relies on eliminating health care subsidies and other coverage provided by Obama’s health care law, sharp cuts to Medicaid, and reprises a plan devised by Ryan years ago that would transform Medicare into a voucher-like program for future retirees.


But as in past years, GOP leaders have no plans to implement the severe cuts recommended by nonbinding blueprint. [emphasis mine]

This budget plan is merely a tool to make us think they are cutting things, when they really have no intention of doing so. When they finally get down to writing the real budget the increases will be there, as will funding for Obamacare and many of Obama’s pet projects, as they have been in all the previous years since the Republicans took power in Congress.

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Blue Origin engine testing update

9:33 am

The competition heats up: Jeff Bezos has released an update on Blue Origin’s test program of its BE-4 rocket engine, being built as a possible replacement for the Russian engines in the Atlas 5.

Bezos’s final comment kind of explains why Boeing has favored them over Aerojet Rocketdyne for this engine:

One of the many benefits of a privately funded engine development is that we can make and implement decisions quickly. Building these two new test cells is a $10 million commitment, and we as a team made the decision to move forward in 10 minutes. Less than three weeks later we were pouring the needed three-foot thick foundations. Private funding and rapid decision making are two of the reasons why the BE-4 is the fastest path to eliminate U.S. dependence on the Russian-made RD-180.

I imagine however a lot of Congressmen are upset by this. If they do it too cheaply or too quickly there will be far less opportunity to spend pork in their districts!

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UC-Berkeley Chemistry College to shutter?

10:16 am

The coming dark age: The University of California in Berkeley is considering disbanding its College of Chemistry to deal with $150 million pf debt.

One commenter noted this key fact: “What about African American Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies? Are those programs going to be affected too?” with two others adding sarcastically, “No, they are essential,” and “Because they teach such marketable skills.”

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