A rare event, in which he rips the WaPo for media malpractice in reporting on Solyndra.
11 thoughts on “A Serious Post From Iowahawk”
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A rare event, in which he rips the WaPo for media malpractice in reporting on Solyndra.
Comments are closed.
We blow a half billion on a project to enrich Obama’s bundlers, and all the WaPo can come up with is “Won’t someone think of the children?”
The last big Iowahawk serious piece I recall is when he compared the test scores of Texas versus Wisconsin.
Yeah, I lost my government contractor job, and now I’m working for ethical oil. Ms. Sterio needs to get over it.
I remember a comment by Iowahawk at Ace of Spades around the time of the release of the first Climategate e-mails. I wish I had saved it.
He apparently understands math, which makes him exceptionally dangerous.
There are much bigger reasons that Solyndra failed, but one useful cost-cutting measure would have been to open in a far less expensive state like Texas. Nobody in their right mind starts a high-overhead business in California.
Building the Versailles of manufacturing plants was a boneheaded mistake, too.
The top profit killer is, of course, producing well above the level of demand. Solar is still mostly a luxury of the affluent.
Nobody in their right mind starts a high-overhead business in California.
I would not exactly call Elon Musk in his wrong mind. Still, I think picking Cali was a triump of hope over reality. It would not suprise me to see him relocate his large businesses eventually.
@ Puckett: Cali was where all the unemployed former rocket scientists lived.
Iowahawk made a good point along the lines of the Amity Shlaes “Forgotten Man” effect — the press or media concentrates on the one woman who gains or loses the government-subsidized job while ignoring the other jobs lost or gotten somewhere else in response to a variety of unintended consequences of the government program. I am thinking the vitriol of calling the Solyndra case a scam or naked cronyism may be over the top. The Solyndra case may have been some serious wishful thinking with respect to their business model, but so it is with many other things the gummint’ intervenes in.
A Paul Harvey-esque “Rest of the Story” is about how they do this government-subsidy-of-a-crony thing on steroids in China. Whatever went down with Solyndra, I am wondering if it is like Kirk commenting on Decker who sacrificed himself crashing a shuttlecraft into the planet killer, “Did you see the drop in power? Maybe Decker had the right idea, only he did not have enough power . . .” as Spock and the rest of the bridge crew begin to wonder if Kirk has come unglued in the way Decker had.
If Solyndra was Decker’s exercise in futility of “ramming this (small shuttlecraft) right down that thing’s throat”, China might be Kirk ramming the crippled but much larger Starship Constellation “right down that thing’s throat” that Scotty remarks “Rig to blow, Cap’n? I doo’in me best jus’ to keep ‘er frim blowin’!”
Apparently the market for solar photovoltaics is depressed beneath everyone’s cost, even below the price of raw silicon, because China has a full 98.62 or whatever decimal value Spock quoted of megatonnage from a blown Impulse Engine full of crony-capitalist government-subsidized dump-hydrofluoric-etching-compound-waste-on-the-farm-field solar ventures going on, and they are about to blow the solar market and themselves with it in the process.
So maybe Mr. Obama had . . . the . . . right . . . idea . . . only . . . he . . . didn’t . . . have . . . enough . . . money . . . behind . . . it . . .
I’m told that the big price tag behind solar is the battery technology. Attacking that is decades away (I hope).
If China is subsidizing solar cells below cost I have just one word for you…
Buy.
If they lose money on each one I want them to make it up in volume.
But would it kill the Post’s editors to occasionally re-examine its J-school narratives and acknowledge sometimes failure is not the result of Government Not Doing Enough?
Why yes, yes it would. DC is a company town and the company is government. Getting the Post to admit that more government is not the answer to everything is about as likely as getting the North Korean media outlet to admit that Kim Jung Il wasn’t perfect in every possible way.
Of course Kim Jong Il wasn’t perfect in every way (although to our unenlightened eyes at the time he may have appeared to be)–he fell short of the current dear leader, who of course is perfect in every way. DangerMouse could shoot 18 holes of golf in one stroke, I expect the current Dear Leader wouldn’t even have to swing a club.