Mech_Engineer said:
OmCheeto said:
I think we'd still be waiting on interstate highways, sewers, and water works, if we had waited on the market.
I think you're wrong about that. How do you explain privately owned utility companies? If there's a need and lots of people are willing to pay for it, someone will find a way to fill that need.
Frankly, I don't know how utility companies became private, nor do I care. I don't really see how it relates to infrastructure.
I was listening to the radio the other day, and a young gentleman put it in much better words than I could.
Imagine if everything were private. Gas, electricity, sewer, roads.
Imagine 20 different companies, from the above 4 fields, all after your money.
You'd have 20 separate sewer lines running to your house, 20 separate gas lines, 20 electric lines. And how are you going to fit 20 roads in the space of one road? Stack them? All so we can chose the cheapest, or most reliable, or the least rat infested?
NO! We don't need to privatize the whole world to make it a better place, given your apparent assumption that privatization will solve everything.
If no one wants to invest in it, it could be it's not that great of an idea to begin with... However as it is, there is a LOT of private investing happening in alternative energy research.
There is also a
LOT more
public investing happening in alternative energy research. Unfortunately, it's public investing by other countries, competing against our "free" market companies. We can sit around with our thumbs you know where, waiting for our companies to do the right thing in the right way, while foreign companies are getting massive government subsidies, getting ready to ramp up production in, you guessed it, alternative energy.
hmmm... Guess who loses? We do.
There are only a few basic concepts in economics that I've ever thought worthy of devoting brain cells to, one of them is the theory of the economies of scale. If the YenWonYuan Corporation is 100 times bigger than Oosa Corporation, guess who's going to determine prices. Guess who's going to have the most jobs.
Waiting around for market may have worked in the past, but we're not in the past anymore. And wagging your finger at the Chinese Government for being unfair by dumping billions into their upstart companies, is not going to make them stop.
Just one example:
But A123 has another problem on its hands. A pair of giant lithium-ion battery makers -- Japan's Panasonic and Korea's Samsung -- has recently stated plans to radically boost spending to retain industry dominance. They also plan to cut prices to pursue market share, and that's a battle that relatively tiny A123 is ill-equipped to fight. So even as the company looks set to sharply boost sales in 2011 and 2012, gross profit margins may be so low that the company's operating losses fail to shrink. The key for a turnaround in this stock is a path to eventual profits. And until investors can see that path, shares are unlikely to rebound much.
And they didn't even mention the Chinese companies.
Ugh! And I never thought I'd quote Bill Gates:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20007344-54.html
Invest a minimum of $16 billion a year on clean energy. The group said that the U.S. currently spends $16 billion overseas on foreign fuel every 16 days.
But he's right. While we're sitting here, hundreds of billions of dollars are being flushed overseas.
I don't like that you think it's a good thing that the federal government is great at investing in things no one else will; in fact it seems to me this is one of the fundamental problems with the federal gov't- they are rarely subject to cost-benefit analysis.
Well, I can somewhat agree with you here. I had a post deleted quite a few months ago. It was fairly extensive, and consumed probably 12 hours of research. It was a severe criticism of a pair of academics who, based on a
government installed solar project, determined that solar energy was not financially viable. I'll not go into the details, except that yes, the project was incredibly expensive, and would never provide a return on investment.
