But in our highly politicized environment, anything less than 100% success rate is considered a fraudulent waste of government spending.

In this environment, it's hard to distinguish between failure and genuine fraud. The fraud is a real shame because we need this stuff and if people looted 100 million of the 500 million, they may have killed something which would have otherwise succeeded.

Germany is buying from external suppliers too.

They basically bought 2 years of every bit of production from Nanosolar to build a few big plants.

We won't get the benefits of Nanosolar and similar products until the major power plants are built.

This is what attracted me to the Leaf.
Electricity is currently 1/10th the price of gasoline (even less if home solar comes along).

My annual fuel costs were $2400.
Electrical costs would be $240 but call it $400 to make the math easy.

I give electrical cars an 8 year lifespan (not 15- no way).

So $16,000 in fuel savings. Plus a lot less maintenance-- call it $17000 over 8 years.

Take that off the cost of the car. You end up with the Leaf making sense financially if you can get by with the 100 mile (really 90 mile unless you have charging at your destination) limit.

Of course, if I had money- I'd try to get an ES Flow when they start making them. Straight out of the matrix and 150 mile range.

When you consider how much we spent to protect our oil interests (about 2 Trillion dollars since 2006), the real cost of oil is grossly subsidized.

I agree with you on that particular company. It's much better to offer tax credits and tax deductions to encourage solar.

Alternative and Oil have a feedback loop which makes it difficult to get alternative energy going.

The more effective alternative energy is-- the cheaper oil is. You shave 10% off the demand curve for oil, you lower the price of oil.

But the price of alternative energy is dropping quickly now. It's still too high. A $1200 investment will net you $36 per year of electricity. You'd be better off putting the money in coca cola stock and using the dividend to pay your electricity while getting capital appreciation.

But only one order of magnitude away... $120 investment for $36 per year of electricity. That's going to happen sometime in the next 10-15 years. The new solar material are lighter, less expensive to install as well.

Fox news pretty much sucks. I use a lot of news sources. I used to use Fox fairly frequently but they were really atrocious about rationalizing rather than being rational so I've mostly dropped them.

I know ... and damnit, that's what Youtube is for.
I have most of my songs from Youtube.

I don't know what those Napster guys were thinking!

It was bad enough that some of those things might have happened for a very short period.

More likely is that their assets would have been seized, lots of people who own their stock would have lost a lot of money (and that includes 401k money).

There would have been a somewhat worse depression (maybe 5% to 10% more unemployment) but it would have been over faster.

And the country would be in much better shape financially. And the moral hazard would not occur as everyone would know the government would not make good their gambling losses and so they would avoid gambling.

As it is... we have at least one more round coming. For many people, the situation is heads they win, tails the rest of us lose. Until we send them to prison and fine them more than they made (Goldman Sachs was fined about 500 million dollars-- that's 1/6 of the 3 billion in illegal fraudulent earnings they made-- and not one person went to prison).

The banks committed fraud on a massive scale and premeditated basis. It should have pierced the corporate veil. They should be in prison until 2030.

Something less than a few dozen people (all low level except a half dozen) have actually gone to jail.

Life find a way.

There are parts of the population growing faster than replacement rate.

Over time, they will come to dominate the population and those projections of a peak population will prove untrue.

It will end with a collapse of some kind. Just like when deer over breed.

And besides, we really need to drop the population down to about 3 billion to be sustainable on a millenial scale.

Who knows the cause of the collapse... political upheaval, another world war, solar flare, computer virus, pandemic... any kind of disruption to the increasingly brittle food distribution system.

I think it will happen after 2035 and before 2065.

Look at the birth rates for the 10 years before 1945.
Then look at the boomer birth rates from 1945-1960.

Look at the retirement rates over the last 10 years leading up to now.

Then do a little googling on the boomer retirement rates.

All easy to find in 10 minutes.

Basically, birth rates in 1933-1945 (and current retirement rates in 2000-2012) have been running about 2.5 million.

They jumped to 3.3 million in 1946-1949.
Then they jumped to 4.2-4.5 million from 1950 to 1963

Some in plush white collar jobs will keep working (lawyers, doctors, politicians) but it's less than 5% and isn't even showing up in the retirement figures so far. Probably because some are retiring at 62 (or earlier).

The deaths start big time soon too.

Yes I get that.

But why would you give your psycho neighbor next door an AK-47 just to annoy the guy down the street?

A missile that puts LA in range puts ALL of china in range.

Given a half dozen nukes on missiles like this, all of china could be held hostage. I'm wondering if china is thinking this one through.

Yes, I get that. But Pakistan did not give Afganistan nukes.

Today's friend could be tomorrows psycho enemy.

Once this tiny country has a nuke with 6,000 miles of range, it could turn on China.

China couldn't even invade if the country had more than one nuke. Any concentration of force is toast for a nuke.

This would be like letting cuba develop a nuke because they were currently angry at France.

What are the chinese thinking letting this nuke program complete RIGHT ON THEIR BORDER???

Wow... some very suspicious modding on the informative threads in this article.
Parent is NOT a troll. Has good sites.
You may or may not agree with his opinion but modding him down is chickenshit and cowardly. Post why he's wrong with your own links. Fight speech with speech- not with censorship. Save the troll mod for real trolls.

Parent Poster said:

"The idea that our government could plan anything this complex and succeed is preposterous."

Just like the Koch brothers and big corporations never convinced america to vote against it's own interests? Corporations have been COMPLETELY successful at turning capitalism into a damn near religion in many western countries. If you're a right winger or a libertarian you're not going to solve poverty.

Prof. Francis Fukuyama (pol sci) in Foreign policy magazine says you're voting against your own interest if you vote for the corporate parties (repub and dem).

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136782/francis-fukuyama/the-future-of-history

When even neocon cheerleaders like fukuyama are wishing there was a real left wing movement in america, you know corporations have succeeded in brainwashing many of the worlds electorates.

http://www.fpif.org/articles/the_next_marx

Americans (and people generally) aren't a politically literate bunch, they know a few bits and pieces of information about politics related to issues they personally care about and that's about it.

They've gotten greedy.

Study's have shown they now think people poor is the fault of the poor person and that being wealthy is entirely because they worked smart/hard/morally and the poor person was an immoral, unwise loser.

And as a result, anything they want to do to the poor person is justifiable and moral.

The AC had an very interesting point... Mod him/her up.

It's really strange that smaller cities used to support multiple newspapers on the older, less efficient, and higher-cost technology while only the largest cities today can support a single newspaper, and many of the big ones are going under.

Keep hope.

3.5 million EXTRA boomers retire over the next 4 years.

Then it's

2 million EXTRA boomers every year for the next 16 years.

Same thing is happening in Europe and China.

Employment will tighten up.

After our recent layoffs (where they decided to lay us off secretly and then worked us 70+ hours for two years before bringing in Infosys) most people were very picky about taking jobs with 45 hour a week professional schedules. A couple dozen of us who were over 50 retired and won't be in the labor force (going to find my passion.. if I can).

We have one more recession- perhaps in late 2013 to early 2014 and then things tighten up fast.

You also have dying boomers spending or passing on their wealth.