An interesting but somewhat unexpected move. Now that she's certainly not going to get that spot with the Consumer Protection Bureau, it seems a fair move. Add that to the fact that Brown is an R-Senator in one of the bluest states in the country. This could be a really good race. I really respect her and what she has tried to do. For a country that appears inflamed by populist uprisings, she certainly has the populist cred to get in the game.
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She has her work cut out for her, but I can't imagine she doesn't have even a good chance of winning if she works her campaign correctly.
Brown won his seat while the legislative and executive branches were both blue. Now that both branches are red, she has a real chance of taking that seat back for the Democrats. I don't know much about her though, I'll have to look into it.
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I'm looking forward to seeing her on the ballot. The woman who ran against Brown did a terrible job promoting herself and it wasn't a shock that she lost. Brown hasn't been as bad as I've feared... He's decently moderate but not as liberal as I'd like of course.
But I'd rather have a liberal.
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I don't know that she's such a slam dunk as a candidate. The Globe story points out that Brown has the highest approval rating of any MA congressperson. And Warren, despite her high name recognition, still trails him by high single digits/low double digits in head-to-head polls. She's a Harvard professor with ties to a relatively unpopular President and no political experience. I don't see what'll prevent Brown from persisting in his "man of the people" routine while casting Warren as an out-of-touch, elitist dilettante. If she can't counter that perception, she'll run into the exact same problems Coakley did, losing Dems and independents in working-class towns up and down the 93 corridor.
It'll be an interesting race to watch, and lots can happen in the next year, but given what I know right now I'd put Warren's odds as less than 50/50.
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The fact that she's a carpetbagger will hurt a bit, but she's also a solid liberal in one of the bluest states in the country with great Populist credentials at a time when railing against corporations is good fare. She's also lived in the northeast for years.
She's extremely smart and articulate. She's a neophyte, but she also went through the meatgrinder in Washington with her role in the administration, so while she's new to being a politician, I think it's a misnomer to say she's new to politics.
Brown can run as a man of the people, but Warren has the cred to run as a PROTECTOR of the people. In Massachusetts, the dichotomy between those two is much more advantageous for her than it would be in a place like Alabama.
It's going to be a fascinating race. How the two of them position themselves will be interesting. And it will be neat to see how she decides to go after Brown without having any real training in campaign speak.
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There was an Elizabeth Warren mash piece on WBUR this morning, along with a personal interview where I think she telegraphed how she'll try and overcome voters perceptions of Harvard professors as out-of-touch elitists (helpfully, WBUR got Larry Tribe, a Harvard Law professor, to talk about how being a Harvard Law professor could be a negative factor in the election).
The piece focused almost exclusively on Warren's early life, pre-Harvard, growing up in Oklahoma, the youngest child of a family that lived through the Great Depression. She was at pains to point out that she worked as a babysitter at 9 and a waitress at 15, that she was married at 19 and had a baby at 22, really pushing the narrative that she's someone who understands blue collar voters.
In the interview portion, after pushing the sympathetic bio, she got two somewhat pointed questions from Tom Ashbrook. The first was what she thought about the President's jobs bill and Republicans' characterization of it as more failed stimulus spending. She gave a generic answer about needing to innovate and then pivoted to clean energy (memo: Solyndra!). Asked what differentiates herself from the other Democratic hopefuls (there are six other Democratic candidates who've declared), she said she just hopes to get her voice out there and have her issues heard. Both answers seemed like carefully-crafted non-statements, indicative to me that she's got good advisers and good personal discipline. She'll stick to her talking points and toe the party line, but it'll be interesting to see if that discipline makes it hard for her to connect with voters. At a minimum, she seems to already have "campaign speak" down (if, by that, you mean the ability to avoid substantive statements).
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I am so pumped about this. I wish I lived in Massachusetts so that I could vote for her. I read the Two-Income Trap years ago and have followed her career since. I would love for her to have a larger voice in our government.
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quote:then pivoted to clean energy (memo: Solyndra!)
Solyndra isn't the canary in the coal mine that people on the right are painting it as.
In fact, it points to a couple of interesting developments in the industry. You to ask, why did Solyndra collapse? Answer? Because the entire company was premised on the idea that silicon for photovoltaic cell productions was inherently expensive and would remain so, so they came up with a silicon alternative that at the time promised to be less expensive than silicon.
However, the Chinese have been pouring money into the production of silicon in recent years. It's heavily government subsidized for a couple of reasons. One of them is that they want to control the market. They've driven down the price to the point where American manufacturers, for example, are having difficulty turning a profit when Chinese alternatives are so cheap. "Hooray!" most people say, this is a great thing for solar power. Cheaper silicon means the industry expands faster and we can expand renewable energy faster. Perhaps, but it has a couple of negative side effects.
One of those effects is companies like Solyndra. They had an experimental, innovative take on solar power. It failed because the bottom fell out of silicon, in much the same way that tar sands and shale oil deposits can only become profitable when the price of a barrel of oil skyrockets, but when the price of oil falls, no one says that investing in shale fields was a terrible decision; it was the best decision at the time. The failure of the company has no far reaching lessons to be learned about the renewable energy market as a whole.
Except this: Without more investments in technology, we'll be stuck with what we've got now, or with what the Chinese invest in the future. They're determined to corner the market, and the Chinese government is heavily investing in helping them do it. People can argue about "free market" forces all they want, but the fact is that the market isn't very free when the other side is so heavily weighting their own dice.
Government investments aren't about picking winners and losers, they're about making sure there's a level playing field, and they're also about implementing a national energy policy, which by and large we are sorely lacking.
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Actually, I have to say, several of the candidates were pretty well. Warren was great, but if I didn't know any of the candidates at all, I probably would have sided the most with Marisa DeFranco. There were a few other candidates who were quite good as well.
But for Warren, as a front runner, she was solid, and when you're the front runner, all you have to be is solid. She has a virtual lock on the nomination short of some drop outs or other candidates rocketing to the top.
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Yeah, she's had a great rollout. She's already polling even with Brown, and at significantly less name recognition. It's a long campaign, but I'd probably give her better than even odds at this point of winning the seat. She's got such an edge in national level support that I can't imagine any of the local candidates will give her much of a challenge in the primary.
I think her whole-hearted embrace of the OWS crowd is an interesting move politically. There's a bit of political risk involved, as there are definitely fringe elements to the protests. That risk has decreased significantly with the labor unions' legitimization of the protest, but it's still not zero.
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BTW, Lyrhawn, did your opinion of Solyndra's significance change at all after the FBI raid? The administration internal emails expressing concerns over its solvency essentially right from the start? You might be right that it's a big ball of nothing, but if it turns out the company received loans that the company knew it couldn't repay, that shows criminal malfesance on the part of the company and significantly poor judgement on the part of the Administration. If it turns out the Administration privileged the company's application, moving it to the front of the line so to speak, that'd make it a lot worse. And if elements of the Administration knew the company didn't realistically intend to repay the loan, that'd be a five-alarm scandal, as it cuts to the heart of the transparency and good governance that was a central element of Obama's campaign.
It's probably true that nobody in the Administration is guilty of anything more than bad judgement and getting caught up in a sales pitch that turned out to be a dud (as often happens with government R&D funds). But I think your above characterization is more than a bit overly sanguine.
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I honestly haven't been paying a lot of attention to the hearings, though I was troubled when the solyndra people pleaded the fifth. Can you link me to an up to date article on what we know and what the government knew? If it turns out they knew then ill change my opinion.
My bigger problem is the attempt by the GOP to 1. Discredit green power as a whole with this. 2. The assumption that every investment must be a success. That isn't how it works in public OR private investing in r and d.
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Solyndra was a politically motivated piece of bad judgment that the administration knew sucked as an investment before they spent money on it. Not, sucked but had enough of a chance of a good payout to be make sense on the balance, but sucked pretty much completely in a way that no competent venture capitalist (who're fine with running extreme risks) would bother with, because even if they somehow managed to start making solar panels at a profit, that profit was guaranteed to be small. That's not a way to improve American manufacturing or the economy.
It's all well and good to think a piece of technology sounds great, but when it doesn't stand a chance of making enough money to pay back the investment even when the investment is being made, you realize that maybe it isn't the time to be funding *production* of that technology, and it might be better to fund research that might make for cheaper tech, eventually. Solyndra was not a research company.
And the anti-China fearmongering in your previous post is a bit out of character for you. The price of silicon dropped because lots of people realized there was money to be made in that. Then silicon became a heck of a lot cheaper (something many people had predicted would happen) and silicon based solar panels became cheaper. Solyndra's manufacturing tech started out more expensive than silicon manufacturing by a lot, but they insisted that at scale they would be able to lower the price. However, the inputs they need aren't ones that can easily be increased under increased demand, and they weren't going to be generating that much demand, anyways, even at their biggest imagined scale.
And the emails that came out around three weeks ago are pretty brutal: they show OMB officials were pressured to make a deal specifically with Solyndra so quickly they did not have time to do "due diligence" (the specific phrase used). I don't think there was any corruption in that, just the sort of fanboyism a lot of people who envision green tech as a resurgence of american manufacturing (somewhat including you) demonstrate. While I think there's a lot of growth in green tech, solar panels are the area I'd least expect to see US companies doing actual manufacturing. As green tech succeeds, making solar panels will be quite possibly the most boring, low margin area of green manufacturing in existence. If it isn't, solar tech will have failed worldwide, without enough demand for solar panels to make them into the commodity products they should be.
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Interestingly, hasn't this been rated the biggest VC loss in history? Lots of VCs pumped millions into Solyndra, apparently even as the ship was going down.
quote:And the anti-China fearmongering in your previous post is a bit out of character for you.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it that. As you should also note in that same paragraph from whence you derive my anti-China sentiment, I'm pleased, overall, with the steep drop in the price of silicon. It makes solar companies around the world a lot more viable, and makes solar power more competitive. I'm totally down with that. However, I also note that China isn't heavily subsidizing the industry out of the kindness of their own hearts. They're trying to corner the market. Good on them, that's how it works right? And we even benefits from it in a great way. But that doesn't mean we can't prop up our own industries who can't possibly compete with that level of uneven competition. I'm not saying Solyndra is the answer, but investments in solar as a whole are. If China wants to continue doing what they are doing, then great, but I'm sounding an alarm that a lot of people tend to miss when they see solar companies folding because of steep Chinese competition. The bright side, for the moment, seems to be that American companies are actually doing well enough to take advantage of the price drop. Our biggest expense for imported solar materials was for silicon (no surprise), but we had a trade surplus last year in finished solar products, just barely. As China looks more towards producing panels and not just raw materials, that gap will narrow and disappear, and then the industry will shrivel up as a whole.
You don't seem to have a problem with that, but keep in mind there are a lot of higher tech solar power manufacturing processes out there than just plain old silicon-based panels. I think what we have now isn't going to be the mainstay of solar power production in 10 years. Aren't those the exact advanced manufacturing jobs we're supposed to retain when we send jobs making plastic toys overseas?
quote:(somewhat including you)
I appreciate the measured tone. That's totally me, and I'm unapologetic about it. However, given what you've told me, it would appear that Solyndra was not a particularly wise investment at this time. I'm totally a green tech and green power fanboy, but I'm also fairly pragmatic when it comes to on the ground stuff. You and I have differed pretty dramatically in the past when it comes to pacing and scale, how long it will take and what share of power generation will ever actually be green, and while I might be a lot more willing than you to pump money into something in the interests of pushing it along, I still basically agree that a poor investment in something that isn't going anywhere isn't worth making.
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quote:Interestingly, hasn't this been rated the biggest VC loss in history? Lots of VCs pumped millions into Solyndra, apparently even as the ship was going down.
Don't know, but more than half of their VC investment came after the loan guarantee. Gov't investment does distort the market.
quote:You don't seem to have a problem with that, but keep in mind there are a lot of higher tech solar power manufacturing processes out there than just plain old silicon-based panels. I think what we have now isn't going to be the mainstay of solar power production in 10 years. Aren't those the exact advanced manufacturing jobs we're supposed to retain when we send jobs making plastic toys overseas?
No, really not. It doesn't matter what technology we're talking about: if solar technology succeeds, solar panels will be cheap commodities that are easily assembled, with very low profit margins. Thus, in the long run, that's not a market the US will be in. It just doesn't make any sense. US manufacturing is good at making hard to make, higher profit margin items more efficiently. Nor is it a market we should want to be in; the only way to succeed in it is to have a technologically adept workforce that accepts lower wages. It isn't "advanced manufacturing".
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Lyrhawn, somewhere above Fugu mentioned that Solyndra was a manufacturing company, not a research company.
So if more advanced solar technology is developed, and panels fall by the wayside, that still would never have been something that A) Solyndra would have accomplished, or B) Solyndra would have benefitted from.
I think plenty of crazy conservatives like me wouldn't have any particular objection to well-conducted research into greener technologies. What I'm not crazy about is tossing money down the sinkhole of green manufacturing, as I think most green technology really just isn't there yet.
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No, it isn't. It doesn't matter how close to maximum theoretical efficiency (which isn't that high a multiple of current efficiency, anyways) solar panels get, what I wrote will almost certainly be true. The only way what I wrote won't be true is if solar panels don't become good enough to be worth the high rate of installation that would make them a serious, cost effective chunk of world electricity infrastructure.
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Fugu, I think I may be missing something. It sounds like what you are saying is that if they become worth manufacturing, the US won't be the right people to make them. Why would this be true for solar panels and not other kinds of manufacturing? And if it is true for other kinds of manufacturing, aren't we kind of doomed?
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: Lyrhawn, somewhere above Fugu mentioned that Solyndra was a manufacturing company, not a research company.
So if more advanced solar technology is developed, and panels fall by the wayside, that still would never have been something that A) Solyndra would have accomplished, or B) Solyndra would have benefitted from.
I know. I said as much. We've moved on to discussing solar manufacturing as a whole.
quote:I think plenty of crazy conservatives like me wouldn't have any particular objection to well-conducted research into greener technologies. What I'm not crazy about is tossing money down the sinkhole of green manufacturing, as I think most green technology really just isn't there yet.
Most? That's a troubling word. It requires you to know precisely what is still to come in order to say we aren't ready yet. Yes, there are still dozens of unproven and promising technologies in the pipeline. Some of them require a leap of faith and some investment, some of them aren't worth it. But plenty of technologies are ready now.
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The way I see it, solar panels and wind turbines are perfect for Chinese manufacturing. If you build one hundred cheaply enough, it doesn't really matter if one out of a hundred end up failing, you can either replace it or route around it.
There are other products that require much higher quality control. Even if only one out of a hundred nuclear reactors melts down, you have have a serious problem. If one in a hundred airplanes crashes, you have a serious panic on your hands. These are the sorts of areas that I think would be more productive.
Going head to head in something that is bound for low-end mass production is going to be fairly tough.
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: Lyrhawn, somewhere above Fugu mentioned that Solyndra was a manufacturing company, not a research company.
So if more advanced solar technology is developed, and panels fall by the wayside, that still would never have been something that A) Solyndra would have accomplished, or B) Solyndra would have benefitted from.
I know. I said as much. We've moved on to discussing solar manufacturing as a whole.
Oops, my mistake.
quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
quote: I think plenty of crazy conservatives like me wouldn't have any particular objection to well-conducted research into greener technologies. What I'm not crazy about is tossing money down the sinkhole of green manufacturing, as I think most green technology really just isn't there yet.
Most? That's a troubling word. It requires you to know precisely what is still to come in order to say we aren't ready yet.
No it doesn't! I explicitly don't need to know what's still to come for me to make an assessment on where we are now. This seems so intuitive that I am almost certain I misunderstood you somehow.
If some new tech is rolled out in 10 years that is renewable and super efficient I would be delighted! But most of what I've read on the current state of solar panels, wind turbines, etc. has left me feeling incredibly underwhelmed.
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It's a question of the scale required combined with the efficiency of the competition (that is, other sources of power). Solar panels are already pretty darn low margin, and that's with heavy subsidies. Even huge efficiency increases will only start making them competitive without subsidies with the most expensive other forms of power. Also, even at high efficiencies, the world would need many, many more of them every year, which means they'd be a commodity good, ensuring low margins from competition.
A lot of manufacturing isn't a good fit for the US; doing it profitably would involve American workers taking substantially lower wages than they currently make (note: I mean lower wages than they make as things like retail clerks), but there are plenty of areas that are good fits, which is why US manufacturing is the strongest in the world. We make aircraft, complicated machinery, scientific hardware, medical equipment, and lots of other things that fit our strengths. Some areas of green technology will continue to be our strengths; for instance, I suspect that the US will lead the world in making the machines that make solar panels.
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What I mean by "doomed" is that I am concerned that the number of people needed to manufacture the things we are good at does not fit the number of people who need jobs (or their training) in order to sustain a livable middle class.
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Trying to subsidize and manipulate industries into providing jobs that would otherwise be non-viable seems to me to be an awfully roundabout way of providing money to people.
It seems easier to concentrate on and support people in the kinds of industries that you *are* good at but simply tax them and give the money to those who need it. It's a lot more direct.
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Manufacturing was less than half of the jobs in the US middle class in the 70s, and has dropped considerably since. Yet the middle class is still roughly the same size.
There isn't some magic to manufacturing that makes it the foundation of the middle class.
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: Trying to subsidize and manipulate industries into providing jobs that would otherwise be non-viable seems to me to be an awfully roundabout way of providing money to people.
It seems easier to concentrate on and support people in the kinds of industries that you *are* good at but simply tax them and give the money to those who need it. It's a lot more direct.
If only we could get such a plan to fly in the land of Calvinism.
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And I thought she did a very nice job against a very rude heckler. He was doing fine, albeit rudely, in his aggressive questioning, until he called her a "socialist whore."
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