tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32931256.post7819320736881325758..comments2024-03-22T05:20:44.167-07:00Comments on The Disaffected Lib: Has It Really Come to This?The Mound of Soundhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09023839743772372922noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32931256.post-89499327630669678652007-11-30T23:44:00.000-08:002007-11-30T23:44:00.000-08:00Well put, Alex. Damn but you're depressing! Than...Well put, Alex. Damn but you're depressing! Thanks for stopping by. I appreciate your thoughts.The Mound of Soundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09023839743772372922noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32931256.post-37417957605638407112007-11-30T21:35:00.000-08:002007-11-30T21:35:00.000-08:00Well of course military companies are a more secur...Well of course military companies are a more secure investment than clean energy companies - that much is obvious just from their business models. Private military contractors are in a field of business thousands of years old, with well-understood methodologies, reasonably low startup costs, and reliable income flows assuming you can get contracts. It's about the equivalent of putting up a pizza shop or a Tim Horton's - you'll succeed as long as you're not a fool, but you won't exactly be a Gates or Rockefeller when you're done. <BR/><BR/>Clean energy, on the other hand, is new, innovation-based, and has nothing fixed except a plan to fleece wealthy lefties. In order for you to achieve market success, you need to come up with either a revolutionary new way of generating clean energy, or a revolutionary new way of producing it for a tenth(or less) of its present cost. This is not the recipe for a stable market - it's basically like investing in a dot-com company in the late 90s. Yes, there's underlying merit to the approach, but too many people have flooded in with grandiose visions that simply cannot work in reality, and thus too many companies fail miserably. There'll be a few who do incredibly well, of course - the one guy who makes a big advance in the field will become filthy rich in a way no PMC investor ever could - but most will fail. It's a risky business, and even if it's likely to do as well on average as a PMC, people are less likely to go for risk. <BR/><BR/>Add to that that the economics and physics of clean energy are basically doomed to failure - I can think of only two sources of economically viable energy in history to be cleaner than their predecessors, and those are oil and nuclear, neither of which is exactly what you have in mind - and you're left with a hole that no self-respecting financier would go anywhere near. People are pouring money into it for many reasons, but financial viability isn't among them, and it won't be for quite a while.Alex Sloathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01742624020776277402noreply@blogger.com