Wow, Dice is really turning the screws and trying to get Slashdot to earn money any way it can. How much did Austin Sea Veggies pay for this Slashvertisement? Is there a Slashvertisement rate card? I know a company that might be interested in purchasing one.
Calling the spending "wasteful" is certainly opinionated and will certainly spark discussion and clicks. Calling the machines "nude-o-scopes" takes it into MoveOn territory.
That may very well be the case, yet it's not the first time Slashdot has expressed this sentiment so you shouldn't be surprised to see it again. You may not realize that the whole purpose Slashdot exists is to spark discussion (and clicks, which is how they get paid) -- without discussion, I think few people would come here since the submissions that are posted largely come from other news sources. I didn't see your comments on either of the previous two Slashdot postings, so feel free to comment and explain why you think that the statements are over the top and unfair. That's why everyone is here, right?
I love a good incendiary summary as much as the next guy, but isn't this a bit blatant, even for Slashdot?
Given that the incendiary parts of the summary linked to two previous Slashdot articles titled Congress: The TSA Is Wasting Hundreds of Millions In Taxpayer Dollars and The Ineffectiveness of TSA Body Scanners - Now With Surveillance Camera Footage, then no, I don't think it sounds blatantly incendiary for Slashdot since it's just repeating what they've said before.
Being human. That's the problem. I don't know of any other animal that cheats, lies, steals, and deceives like we do. Whatever happened to just plain ol killing?! Oh...never mind.
My dog is pretty good at stealing - she'll take a steak off the table when I leave the room. When she hears me coming back, she'll scurry over to her bed and lie there innocently, which I guess is her way of lying about it. And she has never once admitted to getting into the trash while I'm at work, even if the trash is still stuck to her head. She think she is a good liar but she doesn't know when she's been caught red-handed.
If she ever catches a squirrel in the back yard, I think she'll prove herself to be a killer as well.
Just because YOU can't get along with your wife, doesn't mean you should be permitted to make rules for other people who are not you and do not have your shortcomings (individual or as a couple). Not every couple is up to the challenge, but some are. The ones whose relationships fail spectacularly at work have bigger problems to begin with.
I don't know if you'd bothered to read my post, but I asked how many successful husband wife teams work at a company, not how many of them founded a company or did great science. Couples that start a company together have already demonstrated that they can work well together, and if they are the founders, if they come out of the copy room half-dressed, there's not going to be any office gossip about the boss sleeping with his wife, and if they go through a messy divorce it's going to affect the company whether or not they both work there or not. The rules are different for company founders versus rank-and-file employees, which is where I've had the worst experiences with office romances.
And I said that my wife and I *do* run a small business, relatively successful in that it pays for its expenses (including a couple employees) and a decent profit. yet despite our success at running the business ourselves, I'd cringe if our employees started dating amongst themselves, knowing that there's a good chance that we'd end up losing one or both of them as employees when the relationship fails.
Are you telling me that Slashdot is worth less than a cheapy mp3 player full of songs? Sheesh! To Dice: if it ain't broken, don't "fix it".
Yes, it turns out that merely having users is not as valuable as Facebook would like you to think. Unless those users help earn you revenue in some way (like purchasing your products), there really isn't much money to be made in showing ads to them. (I know, you're going to point to Google,but Google's ad network lets them earn ad revenue even when people are on other sites)
Missiles are too task specific. All they can do is blow up a target.
They cannot perform surveillance.
What's what unmanned drones are for - and you can send a half dozen of them cheaper than sending a single aircraft
They cannot defend themselves.
There's no reason why a missile or drone couldn't have defensive weapons
They cannot adapt to changing targets (ie if the ground target manages to get airborne, you have to have a completely different missile to take it out).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standoff_Land_Attack_Missile... can also be controlled remotely from the air. It relies on military-grade GPS and infrared imaging for navigation. It can strike both moving and stationary targets. It can be redirected to another target after launch if the original target has already been destroyed, or is no longer a priority...
They have no linger time.
If you want linger time, use a long endurance drone:
I am quite sure that some readers will point out that xxxx is viable. My answer is "maybe" but what about running costs? Example. Say you decide to use natural gas (assuming deliverable, cheap and plentiful) . In principle great however why duplicate what is already provided via the customer electrical grid and even if you did you would have to maintain your power generating system which is not cheap.
I believe the rationale is that if they have to provide XX megawatts of natural gas generating power anyway, and if they can generate power via natural gas more cheaply than they can buy it from the grid, then why not use natural gas as primary power and the grid as secondary?
It's not likely that they are running traditional gensets, but something like the Bloom Box fuel cell (as mentioned in the summary) which has no (or few) moving or consumable parts and is cheaper to operate than a traditional genset.
Inter-office romance shouldn't be banned, but you better be damn sure before jumping into a relationship with a co-worker. I don't see how the job description changes that fact. Life isn't fair, and if the relationship ends badly (and it surfaces at work), the woman is more likely to be the subject of gossip and office drama among colleagues.
As a manager I wish office relationships were banned. No matter what the intentions are when starting a relationship, the truth is that many relationships die, and sometimes die a horrible, prolonged death. And when it involves two people that have to work together, the whole team suffers.
Well I'm glad you don't get to decide that dipshit, because historically husband and wife teams have done some excellent work.
Given my experience at the workplace, I'd say that about 10% of office romances last more than a year. About 30% of the remainder end in emotional mess, leaving one or both partners unable to work at their full potential for weeks or months (or never, leading one to transfer or quit), the the other 70% end quietly, with just some gentle tension between the former partners.
How many of these great husband-wife teams have worked successfully at a company? (as opposed to working for themselves... my own wife and I have been successfully running a small business, but that doesn't mean that I'd want her to be a coworker at the office).
I'm simply convinced that there is no way this massive universe is here without there being a practical way to travel it. There absolutely has to be a way.
Does this theory at all reduce the chance that when the Warp Drive ship arrives at its destination that it will emit a huge gamma ray burst? This planet destroying side effect would sure put a damper on any kind of arrival party for the warp drive ship.
If on-site power generation becomes commonplace and more large customers do it, is there a possibility that the power company will oversell their capacity enough that a large natural gas outage will also take down the power grid?
If there are are 5 datacenters in a particular area and each has the capacity to draw 20MW of power, but usually generate their power via natural gas, can each facility be assured that the power grid in that area can supply 100MW of power to keep all 5 datacenters running when a major natural gas pipeline shuts down natural gas service in the area? Or will the power company only provide 80MW of transmission lines in the belief that not all of the datacenters will failover to electricity at the same time?
Is Natural Gas more reliable than electricity? I'm assuming that they don't have huge CNG tanks to keep their generators running if there's a natural gas interruption.
I can believe that under normal circumstances the natural gas is an excellent backup to electricity since there are many failure modes that can affect one service but not the other, but in a disaster (hurricane, earthquake, flood, etc) or widespread power blackout, is natural gas going to be more reliable than electricity?
Using NG as the primary power source makes a lot of sense with current NG prices, and I'm sure they can design their systems so they can flip a switch and have utility power be primary power and NG be the backup, in case the economics go the other way.
It's true, female programmers tend to be ugly and insecure. We had one in our class and she was shy as hell.
That's funny, one of our dev teams is over half female and none of them are ugly or insecure. And what does shy have to do with it? One of our star developers is shy and reserved outside of his team, but he still does great work. It may take longer to get to know a shy person, but it's generally worth the extra work. (I was painfully shy in high school and early college, but now I'm much more outgoing and have no problem giving presentations even to large (100+) groups)
Inter-office romance shouldn't be banned, but you better be damn sure before jumping into a relationship with a co-worker. I don't see how the job description changes that fact. Life isn't fair, and if the relationship ends badly (and it surfaces at work), the woman is more likely to be the subject of gossip and office drama among colleagues.
As a manager I wish office relationships were banned. No matter what the intentions are when starting a relationship, the truth is that many relationships die, and sometimes die a horrible, prolonged death. And when it involves two people that have to work together, the whole team suffers.
Office romances (especially within the same team) are always bad news. Though the story comes off as a poorly written romance novel - a sort of Shades of Grey fantasy novel for geeks.
That said, I've dated girls in my field and girls outside of my field, and I've found that I get along better with those outside my field. We don't need work to be our 'common ground', and we don't find ourselves telling each other how to do each other's job. When she tells me about her workday, I don't feel so compelled to tell her how to solve her problem since I have no expertise in her field. And vice-versa. On the flip side, if I'm looking for advice about some specific problem I'm facing, I can't go to her, but that's what friends are for.
Well, despite the Macbook Air being extemely small. They have dedicated a fair amount of size to the battery. Check out this picture to see just how much space the battery takes up in the Macbook Air. I only wish my HP thickbook used the same percentage of the volume for the batteries. I'd be able to work an entire day without charging. I'd gladly go without the optical drive if they could replace the entire thing with a battery.
I thought all the laptop vendors had something similar to Lenovo's "Ultrabay" battery that lets you swap out the CD-ROM drive for a battery? I know I've seen a Dell that has the same thing. HP doesn't?
Since this is related, what do you guys use for personal finance tracking? I used Microsoft Money for a long time, but they don't release new versions of that anymore. Would Microsoft Access be an overkill? What do you guys use?
Since this is related, what do you guys use for personal finance tracking? I used Microsoft Money for a long time, but they don't release new versions of that anymore. Would Microsoft Access be an overkill? What do you guys use?
I use Paytrust. I have all of my bills sent to them, and they scan them in and pay them automatically based on payment rules I set. I can categorize each bill and generate reports from that, which is good enough to let me separate my investment property rental expenses from the rest of my personal expenses at tax time. At the end of the year I can buy a CD with my annual activity archived.
For investment tracking, I rely on E*Trade.
This system works for me and I'm not sure what I'd gain from something like MS Money, I don't need to track anything down to the last penny, I don't even balance my checkbook.
Keep track isn't hard. Telco's already have optimisation for tcp re-delivery from the mobile gateway so that the distant sender doesn't have to re-send the missing packet, the telco can do that.
Keeping track of data that's delivered may not be hard, but if you accept that the Telcos charge so much money for data because it costs a lot of money to deliver data to your phone, it's that last mile of wireless delivery that's the most expensive. It costs them nearly nothing to get the data from the internet to their cell tower, the expensive part is in maintaining the infrastructure to get the data from the tower to your phone.
As long as they are only counting costs for data when it leaves the cell tower and aren't counting data that needs to be retransmitted because it got lost somewhere else in their network, charging for the data is "fair" in that it reflects their true cost of delivering the data. But it's "unfair" in that the cost is shifted to the consumer that is trying to use his phone in a fringe coverage area when that consumer can't do anything about that -- only the cell carrier can add more capacity and if they actually earn more money for poor coverage, there's less incentive to do so.
We still need tech advances in alternative energy. Subsidizing manufacturers of current tech does not get us there. We need basic R&D, which this program does not fund. The entire premise is flawed.
What good is R&D if no one can afford to make the new product? A researcher may come up with a 50% efficient solar cell, but who is going to invest $2B into a manufacturing plant for large scale manufacturing when they know that Chinese manufacturers will just undercut their prices with older and cheaper technology? Given enough time, the product will slowly enter the market as a manufacturer starts up a small production facility, then as the product is sold he can afford to upgrade and expand, but I'd rather not wait 2 decades for that to happen when it already took a decade to come up with the product in the first place.
The USA has huge subsidies for the shipbuilding industry, as they feel that having shipbuilding capacity in the USA is of strategic importance. Shouldn't energy also be deemed of strategic importance?
Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be looking into alternative energy sources?
Not at all. But investments in alternative energy should be judged on their merits. The fact that the Iraq War was a colossal fiasco is completely irrelevant.
It's only irrelevant if you look at each expenditure independently.. if you look at government spending as a whole, then you wonder why the same congress that supported getting into the Iraq war for no reason at all and ended up costing us trillions of dollars is suddenly worried because we're spending $34B to help USA industry compete on the world market. I guess we may as well keep buying our Solar cells from the Chinese - what possible harm could there be in sending more of our money to China?
>In this list of recipients of the DOE's 1705 Loan program, 5 of out 26 are listed as being in serious financial difficulty,
Does that seem like a low level to you? I can tell you that any private lender looking at that many of his loans going bad would be in deep shit.
-jcr
Of course they are risky investments, if their business plan was so sound that they were able to get traditional loans, they'd just get traditional loans.
The government is acting more like a VC firm for these companies, and the average silicon valley VC firm has around a 50% success rate.
The answer is in your post: "showing what I've done so far". If you don't have enough work to show them, then maybe you don't have the experience they are looking for.
When hiring contractors (or employees), I prefer experience over certificates and generally only glance at certs.
Governments do not "invest", Governments move money from one place to another... VERY inefficiently. How are Obama's solar investments doing? Oh, that's right, they taxed you... took your money, then gave it to some businessmen that promptly filed bankruptcy and drove off in their BMWs. Congrats.
In this list of recipients of the DOE's 1705 Loan program, 5 of out 26 are listed as being in serious financial difficulty, the majority of the projects on the list are on-track.
Direct costs of the war in Iraq were $800B, by the time all direct and indirect costs are accounted for (interest, injured and wounded, veteran care and pay), it could hit $4T. The Loan Program cost $34B (and that's only if all $34B loans are defaulted on).
So, for somewhere between 5% and 0.8% of the cost of war that we shouldn't have started, the US Government can help to move us toward alternative energy sources, and off of foreign oil (I know we have domestic sources for much of the oil we use, but since it's a global commodity, any oil we consume means more that volatile middle eastern states will sell)
I'm not sure that the vetting process for all companies is fair and balanced, but I do think it's a useful program.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, Dice is really turning the screws and trying to get Slashdot to earn money any way it can. How much did Austin Sea Veggies pay for this Slashvertisement? Is there a Slashvertisement rate card? I know a company that might be interested in purchasing one.
Calling the spending "wasteful" is certainly opinionated and will certainly spark discussion and clicks. Calling the machines "nude-o-scopes" takes it into MoveOn territory.
That may very well be the case, yet it's not the first time Slashdot has expressed this sentiment so you shouldn't be surprised to see it again. You may not realize that the whole purpose Slashdot exists is to spark discussion (and clicks, which is how they get paid) -- without discussion, I think few people would come here since the submissions that are posted largely come from other news sources. I didn't see your comments on either of the previous two Slashdot postings, so feel free to comment and explain why you think that the statements are over the top and unfair. That's why everyone is here, right?
I love a good incendiary summary as much as the next guy, but isn't this a bit blatant, even for Slashdot?
Given that the incendiary parts of the summary linked to two previous Slashdot articles titled Congress: The TSA Is Wasting Hundreds of Millions In Taxpayer Dollars and The Ineffectiveness of TSA Body Scanners - Now With Surveillance Camera Footage, then no, I don't think it sounds blatantly incendiary for Slashdot since it's just repeating what they've said before.
Being human. That's the problem. I don't know of any other animal that cheats, lies, steals, and deceives like we do. Whatever happened to just plain ol killing?! Oh...never mind.
My dog is pretty good at stealing - she'll take a steak off the table when I leave the room. When she hears me coming back, she'll scurry over to her bed and lie there innocently, which I guess is her way of lying about it. And she has never once admitted to getting into the trash while I'm at work, even if the trash is still stuck to her head. She think she is a good liar but she doesn't know when she's been caught red-handed.
If she ever catches a squirrel in the back yard, I think she'll prove herself to be a killer as well.
Just because YOU can't get along with your wife, doesn't mean you should be permitted to make rules for other people who are not you and do not have your shortcomings (individual or as a couple). Not every couple is up to the challenge, but some are. The ones whose relationships fail spectacularly at work have bigger problems to begin with.
I don't know if you'd bothered to read my post, but I asked how many successful husband wife teams work at a company, not how many of them founded a company or did great science. Couples that start a company together have already demonstrated that they can work well together, and if they are the founders, if they come out of the copy room half-dressed, there's not going to be any office gossip about the boss sleeping with his wife, and if they go through a messy divorce it's going to affect the company whether or not they both work there or not. The rules are different for company founders versus rank-and-file employees, which is where I've had the worst experiences with office romances.
And I said that my wife and I *do* run a small business, relatively successful in that it pays for its expenses (including a couple employees) and a decent profit. yet despite our success at running the business ourselves, I'd cringe if our employees started dating amongst themselves, knowing that there's a good chance that we'd end up losing one or both of them as employees when the relationship fails.
Are you telling me that Slashdot is worth less than a cheapy mp3 player full of songs? Sheesh! To Dice: if it ain't broken, don't "fix it".
Yes, it turns out that merely having users is not as valuable as Facebook would like you to think. Unless those users help earn you revenue in some way (like purchasing your products), there really isn't much money to be made in showing ads to them. (I know, you're going to point to Google,but Google's ad network lets them earn ad revenue even when people are on other sites)
Missiles are too task specific. All they can do is blow up a target.
They cannot perform surveillance.
What's what unmanned drones are for - and you can send a half dozen of them cheaper than sending a single aircraft
They cannot defend themselves.
There's no reason why a missile or drone couldn't have defensive weapons
They cannot adapt to changing targets (ie if the ground target manages to get airborne, you have to have a completely different missile to take it out).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standoff_Land_Attack_Missile ... can also be controlled remotely from the air. It relies on military-grade GPS and infrared imaging for navigation. It can strike both moving and stationary targets. It can be redirected to another target after launch if the original target has already been destroyed, or is no longer a priority...
They have no linger time.
If you want linger time, use a long endurance drone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-altitude_long-endurance_unmanned_aerial_vehicle ...for extended durations of time, typically 24 to 48 hours...
I'd like to see you get that much endurance from a single seat fighter.
I am quite sure that some readers will point out that xxxx is viable. My answer is "maybe" but what about running costs? Example. Say you decide to use natural gas (assuming deliverable, cheap and plentiful) . In principle great however why duplicate what is already provided via the customer electrical grid and even if you did you would have to maintain your power generating system which is not cheap.
I believe the rationale is that if they have to provide XX megawatts of natural gas generating power anyway, and if they can generate power via natural gas more cheaply than they can buy it from the grid, then why not use natural gas as primary power and the grid as secondary?
It's not likely that they are running traditional gensets, but something like the Bloom Box fuel cell (as mentioned in the summary) which has no (or few) moving or consumable parts and is cheaper to operate than a traditional genset.
Inter-office romance shouldn't be banned, but you better be damn sure before jumping into a relationship with a co-worker. I don't see how the job description changes that fact. Life isn't fair, and if the relationship ends badly (and it surfaces at work), the woman is more likely to be the subject of gossip and office drama among colleagues.
As a manager I wish office relationships were banned. No matter what the intentions are when starting a relationship, the truth is that many relationships die, and sometimes die a horrible, prolonged death. And when it involves two people that have to work together, the whole team suffers.
Well I'm glad you don't get to decide that dipshit, because historically husband and wife teams have done some excellent work.
Given my experience at the workplace, I'd say that about 10% of office romances last more than a year. About 30% of the remainder end in emotional mess, leaving one or both partners unable to work at their full potential for weeks or months (or never, leading one to transfer or quit), the the other 70% end quietly, with just some gentle tension between the former partners.
How many of these great husband-wife teams have worked successfully at a company? (as opposed to working for themselves... my own wife and I have been successfully running a small business, but that doesn't mean that I'd want her to be a coworker at the office).
I'm simply convinced that there is no way this massive universe is here without there being a practical way to travel it. There absolutely has to be a way.
So you are an Intelligent Design believer?
Does this theory at all reduce the chance that when the Warp Drive ship arrives at its destination that it will emit a huge gamma ray burst? This planet destroying side effect would sure put a damper on any kind of arrival party for the warp drive ship.
If on-site power generation becomes commonplace and more large customers do it, is there a possibility that the power company will oversell their capacity enough that a large natural gas outage will also take down the power grid?
If there are are 5 datacenters in a particular area and each has the capacity to draw 20MW of power, but usually generate their power via natural gas, can each facility be assured that the power grid in that area can supply 100MW of power to keep all 5 datacenters running when a major natural gas pipeline shuts down natural gas service in the area? Or will the power company only provide 80MW of transmission lines in the belief that not all of the datacenters will failover to electricity at the same time?
Is Natural Gas more reliable than electricity? I'm assuming that they don't have huge CNG tanks to keep their generators running if there's a natural gas interruption.
I can believe that under normal circumstances the natural gas is an excellent backup to electricity since there are many failure modes that can affect one service but not the other, but in a disaster (hurricane, earthquake, flood, etc) or widespread power blackout, is natural gas going to be more reliable than electricity?
Using NG as the primary power source makes a lot of sense with current NG prices, and I'm sure they can design their systems so they can flip a switch and have utility power be primary power and NG be the backup, in case the economics go the other way.
It's true, female programmers tend to be ugly and insecure. We had one in our class and she was shy as hell.
That's funny, one of our dev teams is over half female and none of them are ugly or insecure. And what does shy have to do with it? One of our star developers is shy and reserved outside of his team, but he still does great work. It may take longer to get to know a shy person, but it's generally worth the extra work. (I was painfully shy in high school and early college, but now I'm much more outgoing and have no problem giving presentations even to large (100+) groups)
Inter-office romance shouldn't be banned, but you better be damn sure before jumping into a relationship with a co-worker. I don't see how the job description changes that fact. Life isn't fair, and if the relationship ends badly (and it surfaces at work), the woman is more likely to be the subject of gossip and office drama among colleagues.
As a manager I wish office relationships were banned. No matter what the intentions are when starting a relationship, the truth is that many relationships die, and sometimes die a horrible, prolonged death. And when it involves two people that have to work together, the whole team suffers.
Office romances (especially within the same team) are always bad news. Though the story comes off as a poorly written romance novel - a sort of Shades of Grey fantasy novel for geeks.
That said, I've dated girls in my field and girls outside of my field, and I've found that I get along better with those outside my field. We don't need work to be our 'common ground', and we don't find ourselves telling each other how to do each other's job. When she tells me about her workday, I don't feel so compelled to tell her how to solve her problem since I have no expertise in her field. And vice-versa. On the flip side, if I'm looking for advice about some specific problem I'm facing, I can't go to her, but that's what friends are for.
Americium-241 decays mostly by alpha emission, and is near harmless as long as it is not ingested or inhaled. It's in smoke detectors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_americium#Americium-241
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium#Isotopes
The bigger problem is that the Beryllium makes the Am-241 into a Neutron Source.
Which is isn't all that great for human health
So I still wouldn't sleep with one of these under my bed even though I have Am-241 in the smoke detector over my bed.
Well, despite the Macbook Air being extemely small. They have dedicated a fair amount of size to the battery. Check out this picture to see just how much space the battery takes up in the Macbook Air. I only wish my HP thickbook used the same percentage of the volume for the batteries. I'd be able to work an entire day without charging. I'd gladly go without the optical drive if they could replace the entire thing with a battery.
I thought all the laptop vendors had something similar to Lenovo's "Ultrabay" battery that lets you swap out the CD-ROM drive for a battery? I know I've seen a Dell that has the same thing. HP doesn't?
Since this is related, what do you guys use for personal finance tracking? I used Microsoft Money for a long time, but they don't release new versions of that anymore. Would Microsoft Access be an overkill? What do you guys use?
Since this is related, what do you guys use for personal finance tracking? I used Microsoft Money for a long time, but they don't release new versions of that anymore. Would Microsoft Access be an overkill? What do you guys use?
I use Paytrust. I have all of my bills sent to them, and they scan them in and pay them automatically based on payment rules I set. I can categorize each bill and generate reports from that, which is good enough to let me separate my investment property rental expenses from the rest of my personal expenses at tax time. At the end of the year I can buy a CD with my annual activity archived.
For investment tracking, I rely on E*Trade.
This system works for me and I'm not sure what I'd gain from something like MS Money, I don't need to track anything down to the last penny, I don't even balance my checkbook.
Keep track isn't hard. Telco's already have optimisation for tcp re-delivery from the mobile gateway so that the distant sender doesn't have to re-send the missing packet, the telco can do that.
Keeping track of data that's delivered may not be hard, but if you accept that the Telcos charge so much money for data because it costs a lot of money to deliver data to your phone, it's that last mile of wireless delivery that's the most expensive. It costs them nearly nothing to get the data from the internet to their cell tower, the expensive part is in maintaining the infrastructure to get the data from the tower to your phone.
As long as they are only counting costs for data when it leaves the cell tower and aren't counting data that needs to be retransmitted because it got lost somewhere else in their network, charging for the data is "fair" in that it reflects their true cost of delivering the data. But it's "unfair" in that the cost is shifted to the consumer that is trying to use his phone in a fringe coverage area when that consumer can't do anything about that -- only the cell carrier can add more capacity and if they actually earn more money for poor coverage, there's less incentive to do so.
We still need tech advances in alternative energy. Subsidizing manufacturers of current tech does not get us there. We need basic R&D, which this program does not fund. The entire premise is flawed.
What good is R&D if no one can afford to make the new product? A researcher may come up with a 50% efficient solar cell, but who is going to invest $2B into a manufacturing plant for large scale manufacturing when they know that Chinese manufacturers will just undercut their prices with older and cheaper technology? Given enough time, the product will slowly enter the market as a manufacturer starts up a small production facility, then as the product is sold he can afford to upgrade and expand, but I'd rather not wait 2 decades for that to happen when it already took a decade to come up with the product in the first place.
The USA has huge subsidies for the shipbuilding industry, as they feel that having shipbuilding capacity in the USA is of strategic importance. Shouldn't energy also be deemed of strategic importance?
Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be looking into alternative energy sources?
Not at all. But investments in alternative energy should be judged on their merits. The fact that the Iraq War was a colossal fiasco is completely irrelevant.
It's only irrelevant if you look at each expenditure independently.. if you look at government spending as a whole, then you wonder why the same congress that supported getting into the Iraq war for no reason at all and ended up costing us trillions of dollars is suddenly worried because we're spending $34B to help USA industry compete on the world market. I guess we may as well keep buying our Solar cells from the Chinese - what possible harm could there be in sending more of our money to China?
>In this list of recipients of the DOE's 1705 Loan program, 5 of out 26 are listed as being in serious financial difficulty,
Does that seem like a low level to you? I can tell you that any private lender looking at that many of his loans going bad would be in deep shit.
-jcr
Of course they are risky investments, if their business plan was so sound that they were able to get traditional loans, they'd just get traditional loans.
The government is acting more like a VC firm for these companies, and the average silicon valley VC firm has around a 50% success rate.
The answer is in your post: "showing what I've done so far". If you don't have enough work to show them, then maybe you don't have the experience they are looking for.
When hiring contractors (or employees), I prefer experience over certificates and generally only glance at certs.
Governments do not "invest", Governments move money from one place to another... VERY inefficiently.
How are Obama's solar investments doing? Oh, that's right, they taxed you... took your money, then gave it to some businessmen that promptly filed bankruptcy and drove off in their BMWs. Congrats.
In this list of recipients of the DOE's 1705 Loan program, 5 of out 26 are listed as being in serious financial difficulty, the majority of the projects on the list are on-track.
Direct costs of the war in Iraq were $800B, by the time all direct and indirect costs are accounted for (interest, injured and wounded, veteran care and pay), it could hit $4T. The Loan Program cost $34B (and that's only if all $34B loans are defaulted on).
So, for somewhere between 5% and 0.8% of the cost of war that we shouldn't have started, the US Government can help to move us toward alternative energy sources, and off of foreign oil (I know we have domestic sources for much of the oil we use, but since it's a global commodity, any oil we consume means more that volatile middle eastern states will sell)
I'm not sure that the vetting process for all companies is fair and balanced, but I do think it's a useful program.