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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (39208)	10/6/2003 6:03:09 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

BP Solar is becoming quite a big deal. In 50 years, the oil part of BP might be trivial compared with what they are doing in other spheres, perhaps totally unrelated to energy, let alone oil. And I think that's also a GREAT IDEA.. Oil companies need to change their mindset and become "energy companies". And although I don't believe that solar is viable at this time (given the raw material and environmental cost required to produce large solar farms), I'm pleased they continue to spend money researching the field. Companies are good at wasting money, but they are amateurs compared with governments. This I agree with. But both are producing GDP. This I don't, except in certain scenarios such as where private market failure occurred and the government brought its resources to bear to provide solutions/innovations (which are then leased at low cost to the private sector). Take, for example, jet aircraft. No private corporation possessed the will or resources to take such a market risk on an unknown technology. The government, in the throes of fighting WWII and a later "cold war", was the only entity capable, or demanding, such a technology. The same with computers, initially for ordnance fire control, and later, the space program... Private industry, primarily interested in short-term profits, is a poor creator of long-term technological advances (or relies upon planned obsolescence to make consumers buy "upgrades). But government, being a consumer with nearly bottomless R&D resources at its fingertips, is generally more efficient at providing long-term research and innovation. But for a start, we could say that children under age 2 are more than likely civilians. Probably even those under age 10. But if these children are being brain-washed in their Madrasas, and possibly instructed to carry out suicide bombings, are they not combatants? This is obviously one of the more difficult aspects to the current war we are engaged in. It's a war of cultures, in which the combatants are being bred, brainwashed, and mission briefed at a very young age to carry out the will of their Islamo-Fascist leaders. And look, for example, at the recent bombing in Haifa. Carried out by a female law graduate. A revenge killing carried out because her Islamic Jihad brother was killed by the Israelis. Hawk