patrick.net

Good read.

"VC has ceased to be the funder of the future, and instead become a funder of features, widgets, irrelevances"

yup, less risky to fund 50 dudes in an industrial park than ~500 doing a real trial engineering roll-out.

plus all the non low-hanging fruit has to compete with some very well-entrenched interests.

You want to go toe-to-toe with PG&E, Chevron, Mobil?

Good luck with that!

Anything that has to use a lot of land is also a non-starter. Just look at how much push-back the HSR is getting.

Going to the moon had the signal advantage of not competing with existing business models, to a great extent it was a decent jobs program for the post-Sputnik national defense state.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=kM0

is a pretty stunning chart, really, defense expense / wages.

We needed a 20% income tax just to pay for the DOD in the 1960s!

(LBJ's request to slap an extra 10% income tax on everyone in 1967 pissed a lot people off, of course.)