"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message
...
distro pruned to RCM

On Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:14:43 -0700 (PDT),
wrote:

Reagan defunded renewable energy in the eighties. He's partly to blame
for our current situation.
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Even for a government program this was a scam and super
boondoggle.

Tons of money going in and *NO* results, with concurrent huge tax
breaks for the oil companies for R&D, again with no results.

One example is the purchase of ZiLOG, an Intel microchip
competitor by Exxon with some of its "excess profits", who then
preceded to run it into the ground. The excuse was that ZiLOG
could help improve motor efficiency and thus save energy.

Just because something is called "energy sufficiency R&D" does
not mean its not a scam. A quick check of the claimed R&D by the
car and energy companies indicates we should be driving cars that
get 100MPG and fusion power so cheap you don't pay for the power,
but for the distribution wires.

Riiiiiiiiiiiight!!!!!!!!!!

There were never any hard milestones, benchmarks, or program
reviews, just calls for more money....

And that points out two popular myths. One is that there is no difference
between the parties. As we saw when comparing the difference in the
government when Clinton was president to when Bush was president, the
difference in parties is huge. The second myth is that government can't do
anything right. While this is more or less true when republicans are running
it the truth is government does work. The only catch is that the people
working in the government have to be competent. In the last eight years we
just saw a government where the people had two problems, they were not
competent, and they had a philosophy that prevented them from using the
government to do anything to aid the average American. Put the two together
and you get a useless government. I think I just accidentally described the
Bush administration.

Hawke