Lately I have been feeling a lot like a sponge lately attempting to soak in every ounce of knowledge possible. Mostly centralized around the subjects of Technological Development in the areas of space flight and cloud computing; as well as in Economics regarding employment and centralized banking.
In the past couple years I have been following Elon Musk's company Space X and its endeavor to privatize space flight. Recently they have made several break though accomplishments with their launch of falcon 1 in order to deliver on a private contract to put a satellite into space; and the successful orbital launch of falcon 9 (their platform designed to ship supplies and personnel to the international space station). With all these success it brought me to ask who else is out there competing for space flight contracts (It seems that it is no longer just national super powers competing these days). I discovered that Lockheed Martin and Boeing formed a joint venture under the title of United Launch Alliance, LLC. That has developed several launch vehicles already and despite close ties with existing government contracts lost the bid to Space X. However they continue to develope technologies in hopes to win future bids. Also in the race is Blue Origins and Orbital. Orbital seems to be going off the same platform as Space X. Cheap reliable launch platform with smaller scalability than the historical launch platforms. Meanwhile Blue Origins is in an entirely different market that is set out a little further in the future, trying to develop take off and landing technologies. Of course I can't leave out Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and their Space Ship Two, which is really in its own industry (space tourism). All in all its pretty exciting to see where these companies might take their ambitions in the next decade. Private ventures in space flight are long overdue, we are just now entering the "Space Race" part deuce.
The world of cloud computing is also continually accelerating and a faster and faster rate the fact that when I post this blog it the RSS feed from this site will also post to various social networking sites that I belong to is proof enough. Also the twitter feed at the top of this blog that receives updates from my phone and posts them on twitter, Facebook and here all instantaneously. The fact that I now store 90% of all my personal and school documents on Google Docs. I don't even store much of a personal music collection anymore, I have 5 or 6 songs physically located on either my phone or computer. Thanks to Pandora, Last FM and Slacker Radio I no longer have the need to constantly hunt down and buy album upon album of music from my favorite artists when they can be accurately delivered to me via internet radio. All this and other observations have brought me to consider who is profiting from these markets. Well obviously we have all the Social Networking sites on top of that you have Google, Apple, and Microsoft as pretty big players. One of the ever more increasing characteristics that define choices in cloud participation is the consumers phone platform. An individual with Google's Android is more likely to take advantage of cloud computing supported by the applications within its OS. Counter to that Microsofts new Kin encourages its users to participate in Microsoft's Live community. Of course Apple continues to build on its iPhone platform not really taking full advantage of its opportunities but still doing well for itself. The success of these three cloud computing giants is going to drastically be determined by its mobile user base. As society continues to become more mobilized we should start to see a heavy dependence on cloud computing. I expect to see a surplus of jobs available in fields ranging form communications, database management, software development and wireless infrastructure development.
To continue with my outline I have also been reading the works of Murray N. Rothbard, and I have been discovering quite a few simple truths from his writings regarding monetary policy and centralized banking. He talks about the historical implementations of centralized control and its abuses along with the common sense of having market driven commodity based currencies. Also the dishonesties of banking based on a pure fiat currency and its contribution to mass inflation and consequential market corrections that would ensue. I recommend picking up his book What has the government done with our money? as well as looking into other authors such as Ludwig Von Mises, Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell.
I sometimes come across as a gold nut or a tea party fanatic. The term tea party is just the medias attempt to bring several movements under one name for easier definition the reality is that I am a pro limited government libertarian who believes in common sense government. The upholding of laws and regulations. That concludes this blog posting or better titled rant. Thanks for reading.
