<story><title>No One Saw Tesla’s Solar Roof Coming</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/no-one-saw-tesla-s-solar-roof-coming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aerovistae</author><text>Another side note: it always annoys me when people insinuate that Musk using government funds is a bad thing.&lt;p&gt;The government is literally just US....it&amp;#x27;s our money and a collection of individuals from among us who we&amp;#x27;ve appointed to handle the general administration of us and the space we take up.&lt;p&gt;Why should American entrepreneurs, particularly ones doing such an outstanding job of moving technology in a positive direction, not get our financial support (a.k.a. the government&amp;#x27;s support)?&lt;p&gt;Who exactly is losing out when we support our own business initiatives with our own money?</text></item><item><author>wojcech</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m sure i&amp;#x27;m not the only one who feels like this is possibly the iphone moment of Solarcity&amp;#x2F;Tesla: an old-ish idea, made &lt;i&gt;sexy&lt;/i&gt; and tasty to consumers, together with technology reaching a tipping point(and also Musk &lt;i&gt;again&lt;/i&gt;  finding a way to maximally exploit government subsidies for clean tech.)&lt;p&gt;The tesla car itself could count as well, but felt less &amp;quot;design driven&amp;quot; imo. If this fails, everyone will call it obviously due to bad tech. If it succeeds, I&amp;#x27;d say it was because the tech was barely sufficient to keep up with the excellent luster.&lt;p&gt;On a side note, I wonder whether or not the heavy government subsidies will be forgotten in the lore of clean tech, just like silicon valley seems to have forgotten the complete and utter reliance on government funding in it&amp;#x27;s infancy(or possibly even today)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mokus</author><text>I imagine those loud objectors would take issue with the idea that the government is &amp;quot;literally just US&amp;quot; - it&amp;#x27;s much more literally a small minority of us who are deciding on behalf of us what we are to do with our resources.  There&amp;#x27;s nothing inherently wrong with that - the US was always intended to be exactly that - but it certainly leaves room for the represented to debate about the way they should be represented.  &amp;quot;Us&amp;quot; consists of people with different ideas about what is worth spending money on, both in terms of goals and effective ways of pursuing those goals, and using the government to allocate funding ignores all that.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s easy to look at Tesla and SpaceX and see a couple winning tickets in the &amp;quot;give money for technology&amp;quot; lottery, but they are not the only tickets our government has purchased.  Consider all the other entrepreneurs who are doing an outstanding job of not so much moving technology in any direction at all but rather lining their pockets while cratering their industry&amp;#x27;s reputation, or those that make reasonable attempts with interesting but ultimately impractical innovations.&lt;p&gt;The people who object are generally objecting to the playing of the lottery itself.  The most commonly proposed alternative is that these companies should earn the money by providing value in the market or convince investors (who have powerful financial incentives to get it right) that they can do so, rather than by convincing a relatively few laypeople with no real skin in the game to risk other people&amp;#x27;s money on them.&lt;p&gt;Pre-emptive disclaimer: yes, I know I&amp;#x27;ve not mentioned any of the opposing arguments here.  My purpose in writing this is solely to explain some of the key points (including some of the emotional appeals) in this particular side of this particular debate.</text></comment>
<story><title>No One Saw Tesla’s Solar Roof Coming</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/no-one-saw-tesla-s-solar-roof-coming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aerovistae</author><text>Another side note: it always annoys me when people insinuate that Musk using government funds is a bad thing.&lt;p&gt;The government is literally just US....it&amp;#x27;s our money and a collection of individuals from among us who we&amp;#x27;ve appointed to handle the general administration of us and the space we take up.&lt;p&gt;Why should American entrepreneurs, particularly ones doing such an outstanding job of moving technology in a positive direction, not get our financial support (a.k.a. the government&amp;#x27;s support)?&lt;p&gt;Who exactly is losing out when we support our own business initiatives with our own money?</text></item><item><author>wojcech</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m sure i&amp;#x27;m not the only one who feels like this is possibly the iphone moment of Solarcity&amp;#x2F;Tesla: an old-ish idea, made &lt;i&gt;sexy&lt;/i&gt; and tasty to consumers, together with technology reaching a tipping point(and also Musk &lt;i&gt;again&lt;/i&gt;  finding a way to maximally exploit government subsidies for clean tech.)&lt;p&gt;The tesla car itself could count as well, but felt less &amp;quot;design driven&amp;quot; imo. If this fails, everyone will call it obviously due to bad tech. If it succeeds, I&amp;#x27;d say it was because the tech was barely sufficient to keep up with the excellent luster.&lt;p&gt;On a side note, I wonder whether or not the heavy government subsidies will be forgotten in the lore of clean tech, just like silicon valley seems to have forgotten the complete and utter reliance on government funding in it&amp;#x27;s infancy(or possibly even today)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wojcech</author><text>I hope it came through in my comment that I dislike the denial of government aid in the creation of a &amp;quot;bootstraps&amp;quot; narrative when people want to argue against taxes, not the making use of government aid per se(otherwise now it&amp;#x27;s clear).&lt;p&gt;One valid argument against government aid is market distortion. One example of abuse is farming, where subsidies create a system(as far as I understand at least) where those that have enough land to tick of all subsidies have an edge over smaller farms (in addition to scaling), leading to consolidation and effectively paying land magnates with tax money.&lt;p&gt;A different aspect(more specific) is that &lt;i&gt;maybe&lt;/i&gt; solar is just not ready and should fail, and only the subsidies make it viable, meaning people will have &amp;quot;junk&amp;quot; on their roofs without Solarcity to maintain it if the subsidies fade. However, that argument is only valid to me if coal&amp;#x2F;oil does not get subsidies currently, which I doubt</text></comment>