Hi Jim.
I am glad you consider this thread to be multi-opinioned. It's that way by intent, even if sometimes posting material is done in the spirit of providing equal time to opposing views for want of anyone who frequents here possessing those views. I posted the NY Times article rebuffing Gates' point of view on R&D knowing full well what your earlier purpose was in posting the latter, and that you'd enjoy evaluating the Times piece as much as I and hopefully many others here did. My regard for subsidies spent for alt energy is mixed and varied, similar to how I regard the effectiveness of pumping money into other areas, including broadband.
After the full impact of September 2008 began settling in our collective consciousness, I, like many others, saw more than a modicum of merit in the use of "make work" projects for its own sake, i.e., to pump money into the economy for jobs and giving a much needed boost to critical infrastructure, and what better way to do that than to address areas like energy that were woefully behind the curve. In terms of the electric grid, to cite only one area, one might even say dangerously close to becoming perilously inadequate, and of course broadband to rural areas was equally wanting and apropos of an infusion as well.
So a sweeping license was given by most observers to proceed with haste, more or less in the same vain that we took the ratings by Moody's and Standard & Poor as reliable indicators of a security's merit to buy and sell a while back, mainly trusting that right decisions would be made in how our money would be spent.
There's an old saying that goes: If you want to get a good idea of the condition of a lived-in home's interior, first look at the condition of its front door. The front door of the stimulus program through the filter of my eyes, at least, consists of the areas that I know best. It starts with what everyone calls "broadband" and ICT, and it proceeds from there.
From the conditions of the door that I'm looking at, I suspect a tour through this house would reveal a most unusual floor plan and space arrangement. It wouldn't surprise me, for example, to find a storage room immediately upon entering the structure and the master bedroom situated somewhere between the kitchen and the laundry room on the top floor next to the attic, although most of the other rooms would be where you'd expect to find them, even if only half-built, under a precondition that the owner would build the rest.
One of the talking-heads financial shows on tv yesterday ran a segment on the stimulus spending questioning the merits of 'most of the projects' (the anchor's words) by providing an example of a very-well-built road in New Hampshire in the middle of nowhere that was paved with the monies in question, but would only be used by a very few, highlighting, while following up with a question (paraphrasing): "While this road was build very nicely, is this the best use of our tax dollars?"
Closer to my imaginary "home" I'm observing lots of money being spent on the perpetuation, if not the reinforcement, of structural foundations that have long been obsolesced, or worse, run counter to 21st Century revelations about the wisdom of their being, or more to the point, the lack of wisdom of their being, in the first place.
I wouldn't expect a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington scurrying about like so many sycophants to understand architectural issues, so maybe they should have stuck to building dams and roads and shoring up our bridges and overpasses, and not f***'ed with some of the areas that they did, but instead permitted a more reasoned approach to those areas to professional architects and practitioners of specialized area who know what they are doing (even if the latter professionals, themselves, very likely require de-programming and a new look at how things ought to be).
Trimming one to two percentage points from the ranks of the unemployed, which is the range that was cited during the talking-heads segment I alluded to above, is a good thing, but I'm fairly certain that the same ends could have been achieved without, for example, fortifying a national electric grid that will for the next century be only one-third efficient due to initiatives that will assure that transmission lines remain overextended and continue to burn more energy in the delivery path than they deliver at the load.
Now, back to last night's football game ...
FAC
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