Replies to post #28532 on The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[santafe2]

Come on, this board is too important for anti-government drivel from the WSJ editorial board. I read the WSJ every day but their editorials are mind-numbingly stupid. Many, if not most, significant ideas are funded by the government through universities and other entities and then handed off to business as it makes economic sense. Example: Solar panels cost $1,000 a watt when the government developed them for the space program, then oil companies stepped in when solar was $100 a watt and pot growers stepped in when they cost $10 a watt. Now panels are under $1 a watt. The right hates the government, the left hates oil companies and we demonized pot growers for decades until we figured out how to monetize and tax pot.

The internet was invented at UCLA and a few other universities with government money. I first ran into it a decade later consulting for JPL. Yup, more government money. Then Berners-Lee, (government funded at CERN), put a hypertext/hyperlink front end on the old tree structure Web 1.0 was ready for who? Pornographers. Pornographers were the first real wave of entrepreneurs to monetize the web. And of course today, the web is the backbone of every important business. There's a reason Jefferson saw religion as one of the three great evils of mankind.

The utter stupidity of the political left and right in this country drive me nuts. Our system works very well and we don't need the editorial goofballs at the WSJ or Mother Jones selling us their political opinions as fact when it's nothing short of religion. I don't care if they pray for salvation or the end of micro-aggressions but I do care when they try to upset a well oiled machine like we have in the US.

[n4807g]

I'm less concerned about the state of EV sales and more concerned about the lack of progress in domestic mineral production to support growth. We are entirely reliant on off shore production, and I don't see that dynamic changing for many years to come. Control of the basic resource puts that country/entity in the proverbial Catbird seat. Today, that looks like China, Australia, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Peru, and a handful of unstable African and Asian countries. As the world pushes into "electrification", we're falling further behind in basic materials.

[semi_infinite]

WSJ equates China's 500 EV manufacturers to how many in the US? So China is down to maybe 100 brands after 400 drops out. Anything that Murdoch puts out are opinion pieces unrestrained by facts.