Saturday, October 31, 2009
California story
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1931582,00.html
It's good to see an optimistic article about the economy of California. Trouble is, these are all nascent industries (that are supposed to "lead the pack"). Any question I have of someone saying they are spearheading the future out there, or something similar is: are you hiring?
How many jobs is the guy with the taco truck really creating?
And in my opinion, there are really four Californias: southern, northern, Silicon Valley and the Interior. In this way southern really means the coast from Santa Barbara south. These regions all have their own needs and ideological buttresses, a point made about 30 years ago that unlike solar, has not quite caught on. The article claims that through clean energy efforts, the state already saved 56 billion dollars. Really? Where did that money go? Maybe by saved they mean something else, a point on the flaky language skills that are coming out of the troubled public education system. P.S. Kaiser does not often get rave reviews either.
Once in a while I hear something like: why don't they just put 500,000 solar panels in the Mojave desert and power the whole friggin country? Well, let me ask you this - who is going to drive out there and service it when something goes wrong? And whose panels are they going to be? Will they be America-made or maybe Japanese, German or Israeli models? The claim that SunPower makes the best panels in the world is, from someone who is familiar with the industry - debatable. However, if you are a homeowner and you've ever thought about going solar, there's never been a better time to look into it. The incentives have never been better. (You can ask your local utility company about the Go Green Program! :))
California is a place where as soon as something goes wrong with the romance, they just get rid of the romance and get a new one. So its kind of like Hegel's antithesis never occurs. I don't believe that's a model of behavior that should be an example set for the rest of the country - America as leader of no-fault divorce-type-behavior.
Computer tech is, in geological terms, still a nascent industry. Things go wrong and oh well! let's throw our money into real estate and property development instead! Something's gone wrong? Oh well - throw our money into clean tech! What this article is not saying is that like in many other gold rushes of the state's past, the person "throwing their money" is some capital investor from outside the state, and those larger numbers who have been dislocated by changes in the industry -whichever industry it is - are just moving along so that they can survive and keep chasing the dream.
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