A billionaire who wants checks from US taxpayers so he can line his pockets. Hey, retard, if your ideas are so good you would be able to use your own capital or raise more to implement them. If you need free money from the government, it means your ideas suck.

A billionaire who wants checks from US taxpayers so he can line his pockets. Hey, retard, if your ideas are so good you would be able to use your own capital or raise more to implement them. If you need free money from the government, it means your ideas suck.

I'm watching their pilot on a computer that can the wikipedia “history computer” to tell me that.

Oh, they chose a high number for their 1968 series. They said the Time Tunnel cost $9B if i recall correctly. My history computer cost $600

Isn't that exactly what we want again? If there are any energy technologies around the corner, and if the time is right to seek them – I'm saying do it, and then step back for the commercialization phase.

(Check Vannevar Bush on “as we may think”)

Amen, brother! All growth and innovation comes from smaller, nimbler companies, not to mention new jobs. With few exceptions, large corporations either cut jobs or move them overseas to enact cost savings. They get the wagons in a circle and their idea of innovation is a new spin or lobbying to preserve the status quo in whatever industry their failing in (auto? finance?).

Amen, brother! All growth and innovation comes from smaller, nimbler companies, not to mention new jobs. With few exceptions, large corporations either cut jobs or move them overseas to enact cost savings. They get the wagons in a circle and their idea of innovation is a new spin or lobbying to preserve the status quo in whatever industry their failing in (auto? finance?).

Perhaps the major lesson of the 1990s in Silicon Valley was that a 'portfolio approach' to investment in high-tech startups works adequately well. Sure – there were the Pets.com, Boo.com and Webvans. But there were also Paypal, EBay, and Amazon. Most significantly, we all learned that the return on investment in startups proved extremely hard to predict up front.

At first (late 1980s – early 1990s) VCs took more conservative approaches. Yet for every Oracle and Sun there was a Next or massive over-procurement in fibre. More permissive times saw remarkably similar rates of success. In the end the VCs were (and still are) shoveling money out with pretty minimal attention to even trying to 'pick winners'. They don't want out and out frauds, but if you have a half-way plausible business plan (customer? product? risks? budget? project plan?) they are usually good with the cash.

The lesson is that thinking too hard about things wastes time. And what you don't want are a small number of mega-projects. Rather, you want a large number of small to medium sized projects, which implies a larger number of due diligence and oversight teams — exactly the management structure the piece suggests Chu is putting place.

So speeding it all up increases the likelihood of even lower returns from government investment and the likelihood that Pickens ends up with a bigger share of the booty.

That's begging the question. There are perfectly reasonable mental models of this situation where the exact opposite outcome occurs (where lowering the “activation energy” required to apply for funds leads to a relatively higher proportion of funds going to smaller-and-worthier applicants, which leads to better returns on government investment (it may also lead to more money, in absolute terms, in Pickens pocket… but if our goal is stimulus and not “screw T. Boone Pickens,” that might be a necessary evil)).