Recommend reading Sep Kamvar's essays known as Mastery and Mimicry. He is a former Stanford and current MIT professor. Fred Wilson is a fan of his work.
Venture hacks and Fred Wilson's blog both have a lot of great content, although I have no idea what the signal:noise ratio is because I mostly read the posts that make the front page of HN.
But there was significantly more investment in cleantech
than there was in the Internet during the last decade.
While said as an aside, if true, this is incredibly significant. Even if there is an internet bubble, it's hard not to argue that very real, visible progress has been made in web technologies over the last 10 years. Whereas the price of many forms of energy has (if anything) increased in real terms.
A glance at the numbers suggests that the government put more taxpayer money into Solyndra type companies than it did into web startups, and that this was one of the things that drew less scrupulous venture people to the area: use the dumb money from the government for an exit.
Not specifically because of this article, but on reading the notes in the series, I am truly amazed by this level and clarity of thought. Is this even teachable or does it arise more out of experience, can one do something to acquire such clarity of thought ?
I find it distressing that even PT has succumbed to this Orwellian use of the word "clean." CO2 isn't dirt.
The human instinct for hygiene is one of our most basic. When, as a calculated public-relations maneuver, you connect a scientific hypothesis (such as a climate model) to this instinct, you'd better make damn sure you're doing the right thing in every way, shape or form. I hope those models are well validated.
I get the feeling PT isn't a big believer in global warming, but the accepted term for those kinds of investments is "cleantech". If he called it "CO2-reducing technology investments", he'd sound like a curmudgeon who's more interested in being pedantic on the internet than being understood. ;-)
Sure. I wasn't harshing on PT - I'm a huge fan like all decent and reasonable people :-) In fact I'd be careful about attributing any kind of controversial position to him, but I must say defining thorium fission as "cleantech" is pretty clever - talk about dirt!
Anyone have recommendations for other writings covering similar topic material and with a similar signal-to-noise ratio?