Tuesday, January 7, 2014

To dead 60 minutes old-timers: make the stupid stop.

60 min on the decline.  Recently attractive Laura Logan botched a Bengazi story with false info, putting a guy on to tell of his being there when he was not, and listing solutions that were not available.

Last Sunday they laid another egg.  Leslie Stahl did a hit job on renewable/green energy.  It's a failed technology she said, totally failed, one company and product after another.  Well, Ms. Stahl, focused on Solindra (SP?), a favorite GOP and science denier theme.  Truth is they collapsed quickly because the industry is changing and inventing at lightning speed.  It is a kettle of boiling price reductions and new manufacturing processes moving very fast with capitalist attributes, i.e. the guy with the new advantage is quick to push competitors into ruin and gobble up market.  As for if it is wise that governments fed, state, local give them grants or breaks, well, the SBA sees the majority of their loans to start ups fail, within 10 years about 75% fail.  Face it, most companies fail, and for lots of different reasons.
But beyond that, Solar energy is competitive now in some parts of the nation, and around the world, the newest wind turbines are beyond competitive now, generating the lowest priced energy for some areas. The one thing that is not doing so well is ethanol and biomass.  Unlike wind and solar they do not have free fuel.  The distillery product, corn or grass has to be bought and the price swings wildly.  Plus, they are not very efficient, ethanol burns with less calories than gas, it competes with food production, refiners hate it, and it takes about a gallon of fossil fuel to make a gallon of ethanol (fertilizer, transport, farm machinery fuels, distillery utilities etc.).
Lots of experts wonder why she didn't ask for advice on this.  These new technologies are not failing, they are gaining like hell, and maybe with a caveat for ethanol, they are taking us to a good place.
It was not what Ed Bradley, Morley Saffer, Mike Wallace and the original team members were accustomed to, and me either.

4 comments:

  1. Sixty minutes is becoming sixty seconds ... ; )

    ReplyDelete
  2. I can't believe Mike Wallace's kid is on FUX. Maybe Mike was away on assignments too much to teach that dumb fuck about things like credibility and intergrity.

    I haven't watch Sixty Minutes in a long time...

    Ron

    ReplyDelete
  3. Experts??? My ass! What was presented by this women is exactly what they wanted portrayed. They meaning Big Whore Media which is the 1% and corporation all in one big bundle.

    Now Falloojeh is back in the news. There was only one place way back that told the truth of what happened there and that was Democracy Now and you can damn well bet the truth is there now as well and it will be oh so much different than all else because of no corporate influence.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The reason Solyndra went tit's up is China was selling solar below cost in order to grab market share.

    ReplyDelete

Anonymous comments might end up in the trash.