Lennart Thornros <lenn...@thornros.com> wrote:
> That works in large organizations. Solindra for example is of course poor > allocating of funds. > You are missing the point. Yes, Solyndra was a poor allocation, but most of the money invested by the DoE Loan Programs Office was in excellent allocations. Overall, the fund made a good profit and it helped modernize and advance U.S. energy. The results were as good as investments by any bank or industrial corporation. > However, in the end we have no means to get any better decisions by > analyzing why and how. > That is completely wrong. We can easily analyze how and why this happened. This is conventional technology and the results speak for themselves. We do have a means to get better decisions. Vote for responsible members of Congress and presidents. Obama has a far better track record than most previous presidents in that regard. Yes, somebody need something and someone else wanted something else and > suddenly someone could collect and decided wrong. It was not a scientist or > a person with understanding of research or anything of value to bring to > the table. > That is completely wrong. All of the DoE decisions were made by top experts from industry and government. That is why most the decisions worked out well. You cannot expect any group of experts to achieve 100% success and make a profit on every investment. If the decisions had been made by people without understanding, or if the decisions had been made on the basis of politics, you would end up with deep losses in most investments. It would be like military spending, which is highly corrupt. The DoE spending on conventional technology works well. DoE spending on basic research is not as good. Dept. of Defense spending is terrible. Different Departments do better or worse. You should blame the Representatives in charge of the committees, and the president for these problems. You should also give them credit for programs that work. Most government programs work. That is why we have highways, air traffic control, very few cases of food poisoning, reasonably safe drugs, and so on. > You say that it was better in old times. In a way you are right and it was > less need to CYA as less of the economy was handled by the big government. > No, in the post-WWII period, a much larger fraction of the economy was handled by the government. This was also the most prosperous time in U.S. history. The government's role was especially large in basic R&D. All of the major post-war technologies such as computers, integrated circuits, the laser, jet aircraft, space-based technology such as weather forecasting and the GPS, nuclear power and the Internet were either paid for by the government or invented by government researchers. *All* of them. We cannot turn back the clock and go back to the 1950s and 60s, nor should we. But we should learn from history and implement some of the good programs from that era. > Otherwise I would say there are pros and cons as time goes by. My point is > that the decisions must be relocated to risk willing individuals or small > homogeneous teams. > That works for investments in the millions or up to a few billion dollars, but you cannot replace all of the coal fired plants in the U.S. with renewable energy without a major role by the government. That is on the same scale as building a hundred major highways. Only the government can organize such a thing. You cannot implement cold fusion without a huge role by government, especially in performing basic physics research, and later setting standards and ensuring safety. - Jed
