Date Posted:1/1/00 12:03amSubject:
I have been accused of being nakedly racist against the Chinese on this board, in fact...
Rosaria posted: Solyndra went bust because they were selling their product for less than their production cost. I don't know what second grader they got to create a business plan but the only reason they got money from the gov't was their ties to fund raising for Obama.
Two more green technologies companies went bust this week. One of them got the full red carpet treatment from the Obama administration and had Joe Biden at their ribbon-cutting ceremony. Biden said this company would be on the 'cutting edge' and would create thousands, yes thousands, of new jobs and create new businesses who would employ thousands more people. Guess what connection that company's CEO had to the Obama administration.
A lot of dotcoms went bust in the 90s too, but you can't deny that overall green tech is doing well.
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"templars heal for like 300-400 a heal"
"wardens do waht 40 dps at most? friars do 600 dps"
"well maybe the aoe taunt that bains had..."
"Eck theurg pets are unstunnable..." -- bryldan
Date Posted:1/1/00 12:03amSubject:
I have been accused of being nakedly racist against the Chinese on this board, in fact...
Rosaria posted:
Groucho48 posted:
dae_trist posted: It's a relief to hear someone who isn't a frothing at the mouth imbecile accusing China of subsidies for green energy
Given the situation China has to deal with...huge population, poorly educated, little infrastructure, limited natural resources, no experience with democracy, I am not a major China basher.
However, there is a long history of right wingers here on the Outpost, using China as a positive example of how to handle lower and middle class folks, compared to the U.S.
There are things that China does that I think we need to do...like invest, invest, invest in the future. But, China, overall, is not a model the U.S. should be looking to emulate.
Really? Name one suggestion I've ever posted re China's handling of lower class folks and its application to the US.
Edit: I'm responding to Groucho's post about right wingers because he refers to me as one. According to him, though, Obama is a conservative.
I recall you contrasted the Obama response to the housing disaster unfavorably to China's building lots of dormitories for people. There's other stuff but it was a while ago and I don't really keep track. But, generally, during the time of the stimulus and after, you consistently compared what China was doing to what the U.S. was doing and preferred what China was doing. Even though what China was doing...trying to bootstrap hundreds of millions of rural workers up from abject poverty to plain old poverty was completely different from what the U.S. was trying to do...keep 10's of millions from falling from a comfortable life down to poverty.
And, yes, Obama has governed as a moderate conservative. Obamacare is a conservative program. Cap and trade is a conservative program. The Patriot Act was a conservative idea. Extending the war in Afghanistan is a conservative response. He campaigned against gay marriage. He refuses to even discuss the legalization of pot. Most of his economic team are Wall Streeters who would be perfectly at home in a Republican Administration. He's been decent on environmental issues but clearly sees them as political chips in a political game. He embraced the right wing idea that deficits are the most important problem we face, at a time of massive unemployment and economic stagnation. And before even negotiating with Republicans, he put massive eviscerations of SS and Medicare on the table.
I would rank you moderately to the right of him, with most right wing Outposters a light year or two to the right of you.
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“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.†– Richard Feynman
Scarne Title: Capo di Scientifico Posts: 1,087 Registered: 2001-7-23 15:24:34
Date Posted:1/1/00 12:04amSubject:
I have been accused of being nakedly racist against the Chinese on this board, in fact...
Rosaria posted: Solyndra went bust because they were selling their product for less than their production cost. I don't know what second grader they got to create a business plan but the only reason they got money from the gov't was their ties to fund raising for Obama.
Solyndra went bust because the cost of silicon tanked (from over $300/kg to under $30/kg). They had invented a novel way of making solar panels without silicon. The huge shift in silicon costs made their panels no longer cost competitive. They probably held out for a while selling under cost hoping silicon would go back up, but that didn't happen in time for them.
Date Posted:1/1/00 12:04amSubject:
I have been accused of being nakedly racist against the Chinese on this board, in fact...
To be fair I don't think you can describe the vast majority of rural Chinese as being in abject poverty. Their GDP may be low, but the government underreports rural GDP by 30-50% on top of nominal/PPP pricing problems. As far as what they've saved up (value of their assets), they're far richer than rural counterparts in almost all of Eastern Europe, Brazil, India, etc.
China doesn't get the credit it deserves for mitigating wealth inequality, but to praise them would be to criticize the neoliberal free-market fundamentalism that has the world in its thrall.
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"templars heal for like 300-400 a heal"
"wardens do waht 40 dps at most? friars do 600 dps"
"well maybe the aoe taunt that bains had..."
"Eck theurg pets are unstunnable..." -- bryldan
Date Posted:1/1/00 12:04amSubject:
I have been accused of being nakedly racist against the Chinese on this board, in fact...
Scarne posted:
Rosaria posted: Solyndra went bust because they were selling their product for less than their production cost. I don't know what second grader they got to create a business plan but the only reason they got money from the gov't was their ties to fund raising for Obama.
Solyndra went bust because the cost of silicon tanked (from over $300/kg to under $30/kg). They had invented a novel way of making solar panels without silicon. The huge shift in silicon costs made their panels no longer cost competitive. They probably held out for a while selling under cost hoping silicon would go back up, but that didn't happen in time for them.
An invention like that is incredibly valuable though. Conservatives hate science and can't understand that. They also refuse to acknowledge that a lot of the money "lost" was simply recycled back into the local economy through wages and purchases sourced from the US. But why bother trying to explain that to people who think giving away free money to crony dictators in the Middle East is "good for them con-my".
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"templars heal for like 300-400 a heal"
"wardens do waht 40 dps at most? friars do 600 dps"
"well maybe the aoe taunt that bains had..."
"Eck theurg pets are unstunnable..." -- bryldan
Date Posted:1/1/00 12:04amSubject:
I have been accused of being nakedly racist against the Chinese on this board, in fact...
Quote: EILPERIN: Silicon is incredibly important. It's basically the raw material that's processed to make these silicon wafers, and they create boles, kind of almost ingots, and then slice them and process them into the solar wafers on panels that are essential for essentially converting sunlight into electricity, which needs to be converted in terms of its supply to then transmit to homes and companies.
But what's fascinating about this is, again, initially, when you look at silicon and where - what it was used for, silicon was important for the semiconductor industry, and that's where the supply was going, and essentially the solar industry was getting the leftovers.
And then, at a point, that flipped. And as the solar industry took off, they got the silicon, but silicon was - there wasn't enough supply to really, you know, address adequately what the solar industry needed. And at that point, when silicon was so expensive and going upwards, you know, to something like $350 per kilogram, people thought: We've got to come up with an alternative source of solar energy. We've got to figure out another way that's not reliant on silicon in order to make a price.
And that's when you saw entrepreneurs like Chris Gronet - who's the engineer behind Solyndra - look for a very different model in order to kind of move away from what had been the rock, the basis of the solar industry in this country for several decades.
GROSS: So Solyndra's goal was to build a solar panel without using - without relying on expensive silicon.
EILPERIN: Exactly. His conclusion - again, with kind of the mindset of almost a venture capitalist - is: Let's think completely out of the box, and instead of relying on the same technology that's been operating since the 1950s and '60s, let's try to come up with something totally different and see if that's a way that we can kind of break out of the box and not get trapped by these high silicon prices.
GROSS: But instead what happens is that silicon becomes very cheap. How does that happen?
EILPERIN: What's really interesting you saw an explosion in manufacturing. And as we're seeing in many of these instances, it's things like the Chinese getting in. And once they were willing to put in the investment to put up a plant that would manufacture silicon, it was pretty cheap, and they could undercut these prices.
And we've see, for example, again the price of silicon - which was above 350, at some points $400 per kilogram - drop below $30 per kilogram. So, again, think of how that explodes your model if you've gone to something that was extraordinarily expensive, which then becomes widely available, very cheap and therefore allows the conventional technology that's been around for a while to dominate, while those who were thinking of kind of a very different model are left outside in the cold.
GROSS: So China is really dominating now when it comes to solar power cells. How did they get the edge over the U.S.?
EILPERIN: Well, it was a combination of things. One is that they have a coherent industrial policy that encouraged the manufacture of solar panels. So what you've seen is everything from providing relatively inexpensive land for people who are interested in solar panel manufacturing, lines of credit from the national bank, which has made it cheap for them to borrow money.
And, obviously, they do have relatively inexpensive labor and some other factors. And as a result of that, you know, you've seen an incredible reversal, where, for example, you know, in the mid-'90s, you had - the U.S. supplied roughly 40 percent of the world's solar panels. That's now down to 6 percent. And by contrast, China, at this point, is providing roughly half of the world's solar panels.
