A Terrible Week

The week was filled with terrible economic news. For the first time since the Second World War the US had net zero job growth in a month. So much for the promise of green jobs with the hundreds of billion spent by the administration and their department of entropy. In fact the administration is looking mighty dumb this week after Solyndra went bankrupt and this was the poster child of President Obama’s new green economy. The backer of Solyndra is a booster for Obama. This means he raised money for Obama’s campaign. He was handsomely rewarded by gaining over $550 million of loan guarantees for his solar voltaic startup.

Back in March 2009, I hosted a radio hour with Dave The Brain Wave on blog talk radio that dealt with Solyndra and their novel technology of placing photo voltaic within a glass cylindrical tube instead of a flat panel. Dave and I basically said 30 months ago that these guys stood little chance against the competing technology of polysilicon based solar cells. We discussed learning rates and that companies that have innovative yet unique technology cannot rely on the communal learning of a broadly adopted technology and that Solyndra like the Sony Betamax will likely fail. Of course President Obama and Secretary Chu thought otherwise and will now face the questioning of the GOP. President Obama will address Congress next week on his plan for job creation. After his green jobs fiasco I wonder what the next debacle he is planning? Perhaps we should not put colors to jobs. Perhaps we should just talk about productive useful jobs. Perhaps the President should quickly get Secretary Chu to explain the second law of thermo to him. If Chu is not available perhaps the President should call the Green Machine who will explain the newly proposed fourth law of thermo. That is that “As governments start to spend vast amounts of money on ideas that violate the second law, then the entropy of the system approaches a maximum and Shift will Happen”. Note the fourth law should not be mixed up with the third law that states “as temperature approaches absolute zero, entropy will approach a constant minimum”.

The President is a lawyer and never did study thermo. He did get a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing a few weeks after entering office. His Secretary of Energy did win a Nobel Physics Prize for low temperature thermodynamics and Chu should have known better than to bet these billions on junk science. I have been asked why Chu sold out? Perhaps he was told to sell hope not thermo to the masses by his boss. Perhaps he simply loved the power of being Secretary of Energy of these Ignited States or perhaps he simply wanted the Chinese to win the economic battle and was happy to support junk science with billions of dollars while the Chinese erected polysilicon factories and beat the crap out of the likes of Solyndra. I cannot opine on whether Chu is an American Patriot but I can say for a guy who won a real Nobel Prize in low temperature physics he has been a joke of a Secretary of Energy and is right up there with Sam The Sham Bodman that hyped hydrogen and other piles of junk science. Both Chu and Bodman have science or engineering based PhDs. Both Chu and Bodman are flaming fools for what they have done to us. Chu certainly knows the third law of thermo as that was the basis for Nobel Prize in Physics. Now that the fourth law has been proclaimed, Chu should also be told it is time for “Shift to Happen”. As for President Obama he should look in the mirror and see Jimmy Carter in the reflection.