Decius wrote:
In the early 90's recession I'll bet everyone on MemeStreams could have predicted a telecom boom. Three and more years ago MemeStreams was predicting a housing crash. If there was an opportunity for growth, you'd think someone here would be tuned into it. I'm not. With gas prices back to normal I don't see the boom in green technologies and urbanization that many people imagine. Political will doesn't create economic opportunity. It comes from pent up demand. The only thing I think we have pent up demand for right now is retirement savings.

I don't completely disagree with the sentiment, but I do not think it is wise to dismiss the whole green technology thing. The driving force behind IT since the end of the dot-com fallout has been efficiency gains. These days, the tech stocks I hold have lost the least amount of value in comparison to what were considered quite reliable blue-chips. FPGA's, tech services, software, and "heavy iron" are beating aluminum and steel these days. Gas prices might be down, but I'm still thrilled I own a Prius because it's making my bottom line much better than it would be if I still had the SUV. No one who bought a hybrid during $4.00+ gas regrets it now.

The same efficiency seeking effect is what's going to drive the whole green technology space. Better technology for running and managing demand of the power grid will be leading the way. In the end it will probably wind up creating a google sized number of millionaires, it's just not going to be a big boom kind of thing. It will be slow steady growth and adoption.

Furthermore, it will be technology and products we will make money off selling overseas. Unlike the housing boom, it will not be a solely domestic effect that only gets reflected in the financial companies.

If the new products and technology we create don't follow the standard boom-bust cycle it would be a good thing. It isn't that far fetched of an idea that the technology leaders would be the first to figure out that the big-bang theory of new market opportunities isn't as desirable a model as steady and reliable growth, even if it's slower. Slow is the new growth model.

Or another way to look at it: We really don't have a choice. When it comes to energy, we've got to squeeze the stone. Anyone who isn't hip to the fact yet, will be within a decade or so. If you think the housing and tech bubbles were tough suds, just wait until the century long energy bubble starts to bust. Can this be maintained?

Rattle wrote:

Decius wrote:
In the early 90's recession I'll bet everyone on MemeStreams could have predicted a telecom boom. Three and more years ago MemeStreams was predicting a housing crash. If there was an opportunity for growth, you'd think someone here would be tuned into it. I'm not. With gas prices back to normal I don't see the boom in green technologies and urbanization that many people imagine. Political will doesn't create economic opportunity. It comes from pent up demand. The only thing I think we have pent up demand for right now is retirement savings.

I don't completely disagree with the sentiment

Neither do I. But I wish more people would consider alternative ways of dealing with our problems.

but I do not think it is wise to dismiss the whole green technology thing.

Agreed. Although I don't think those are necessarily good investments anymore. The government is going to spend an awful lot of money nudging us in this direction and the homebrew market is already there. It's the 21st century dammit. We need to be doing this just because it's more efficient and advances a lot of other production techniques (materials science, production and distribution efficiencies, etc). As the old world passes, a new world will fuel some growth. Not unlike replacing all your cassettes and vinyl with ceedees. But the ROI's on these stocks and the general dollars spent will be poor, since we're basicaly borrowing very expensive money to pay for all of this stuff.

Gas prices might be down, but I'm still thrilled I own a Prius because it's making my bottom line much better than it would be if I still had the SUV. No one who bought a hybrid during $4.00+ gas regrets it now.

I dunno about that. I think EV's will become a very large component of the market, but we're in very infantile stages of this market (even though they've been around since the dawn of automated transportation!). The Prius is perhaps the ugliest and poorest engineered car on the market, despite the fact that it has high owner ratings and a lot of gizmos. It does not advance the market as much as it takes advantage of a marketing zephyr. Considering the price premium for a new hybrid, you're much better sticking with your already purchased vehicle.

Furthermore, it will be technology and products we will make money off selling overseas. Unlike the housing boom, it will not be a solely domestic effect that only gets reflected in the financial com... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Decius wrote:
In the early 90's recession I'll bet everyone on MemeStreams could have predicted a telecom boom. Three and more years ago MemeStreams was predicting a housing crash. If there was an opportunity for growth, you'd think someone here would be tuned into it. I'm not. With gas prices back to normal I don't see the boom in green technologies and urbanization that many people imagine. Political will doesn't create economic opportunity. It comes from pent up demand. The only thing I think we have pent up demand for right now is retirement savings.

Your comment assumes gas prices stay where they are. They are not now (going up over 20% in the last six months) nor will they in the future be, where they are currently. The global economic crunch has slowed things down, but thinking where we are now is where we will be in two years is folly. I'm looking at suburban green tech (solar water heating, hybrid/electric cars, new version solar panels, LED light bulbs, etc.) not because it is cheap, they're generally pretty pricey, but because the long term costs are cheap.

Mike the Usurper wrote:

Decius wrote:
In the early 90's recession I'll bet everyone on MemeStreams could have predicted a telecom boom. Three and more years ago MemeStreams was predicting a housing crash. If there was an opportunity for growth, you'd think someone here would be tuned into it. I'm not. With gas prices back to normal I don't see the boom in green technologies and urbanization that many people imagine. Political will doesn't create economic opportunity. It comes from pent up demand. The only thing I think we have pent up demand for right now is retirement savings.

Your comment assumes gas prices stay where they are. They are not now (going up over 20% in the last six months) nor will they in the future be, where they are currently. The global economic crunch has slowed things down, but thinking where we are now is where we will be in two years is folly. I'm looking at suburban green tech (solar water heating, hybrid/electric cars, new version solar panels, LED light bulbs, etc.) not because it is cheap, they're generally pretty pricey, but because the long term costs are cheap.

As an investor in clean-tech... why not just buy oil futures? Same thing.

Jello wrote:

Mike the Usurper wrote:

Decius wrote:
In the early 90's recession I'll bet everyone on MemeStreams could have predicted a telecom boom. Three and more years ago MemeStreams was predicting a housing crash. If there was an opportunity for growth, you'd think someone here would be tuned into it. I'm not. With gas prices back to normal I don't see the boom in green technologies and urbanization that many people imagine. Political will doesn't create economic opportunity. It comes from pent up demand. The only thing I think we have pent up demand for right now is retirement savings.

Your comment assumes gas prices stay where they are. They are not now (going up over 20% in the last six months) nor will they in the future be, where they are currently. The global economic crunch has slowed things down, but thinking where we are now is where we will be in two years is folly. I'm looking at suburban green tech (solar water heating, hybrid/electric cars, new version solar panels, LED light bulbs, etc.) not because it is cheap, they're generally pretty pricey, but because the long term costs are cheap.

As an investor in clean-tech... why not just buy oil futures? Same thing.

Because when I put money someplace I put it in people rather than just chase the money. The return may not be as good, but the money is doing something, not just making more of itself.

Mike the Usurper wrote:

Jello wrote:

Mike the Usurper wrote:

Decius wrote:
In the early 90's recession I'll bet everyone on MemeStreams could have predicted a telecom boom. Three and more years ago MemeStreams was predicting a housing crash. If there was an opportunity for growth, you'd think someone here would be tuned into it. I'm not. With gas prices back to normal I don't see the boom in green technologies and urbanization that many people imagine. Political will doesn't create economic opportunity. It comes from pent up demand. The only thing I think we have pent up demand for right now is retirement savings.

Your comment assumes gas prices stay where they are. They are not now (going up over 20% in the last six months) nor will they in the future be, where they are currently. The global economic crunch has slowed things down, but thinking where we are now is where we will be in two years is folly. I'm looking at suburban green tech (solar water heating, hybrid/electric cars, new version solar panels, LED light bulbs, etc.) not because it is cheap, they're generally pretty pricey, but because the long term costs are cheap.

As an investor in clean-tech... why not just buy oil futures? Same thing.

Because when I put money someplace I put it in people rather than just chase the money. The return may not be as good, but the money is doing something, not just making more of itself.

I'd rather put money and effort into pursuing a market that isn't a literal gamble based on commodity prices, personally.

Decius wrote:
In the early 90's recession I'll bet everyone on MemeStreams could have predicted a telecom boom. Three and more years ago MemeStreams was predicting a housing crash. If there was an opportunity for growth, you'd think someone here would be tuned into it. I'm not. With gas prices back to normal I don't see the boom in green technologies and urbanization that many people imagine. Political will doesn't create economic opportunity. It comes from pent up demand. The only thing I think we have pent up demand for right now is retirement savings.

The cloud and big data analytics. That is where the boom will come from. It will be just as disruptive as the adoption of mainframes and factory automation.

Jello wrote:

Decius wrote:
In the early 90's recession I'll bet everyone on MemeStreams could have predicted a telecom boom. Three and more years ago MemeStreams was predicting a housing crash. If there was an opportunity for growth, you'd think someone here would be tuned into it. I'm not. With gas prices back to normal I don't see the boom in green technologies and urbanization that many people imagine. Political will doesn't create economic opportunity. It comes from pent up demand. The only thing I think we have pent up demand for right now is retirement savings.

The cloud and big data analytics. That is where the boom will come from. It will be just as disruptive as the adoption of mainframes and factory automation.

The "cloud" is bullshit. Most services are off far more than they're on. Besides, storing your data in the cloud is a lesson in unsustainability. I can't even find tweets from late last year. Plus I recoil at business models that rely on me to do all the work in order for you to make a profit.

I do think that analytics, especially automated ones, will be an interesting sector. There's a tremendous need for BI services in companies however, most organizations don't even have adequate plumbing for even searching all their corporate data. It will be a hard problem to solve and not everyone will get a lot out of the solutions.

flynn23 wrote:

Jello wrote:

Decius wrote:
In the early 90's recession I'll bet everyone on MemeStreams could have predicted a telecom boom. Three and more years ago MemeStreams was predicting a housing crash. If there was an opportunity for growth, you'd think someone here would be tuned into it. I'm not. With gas prices back to normal I don't see the boom in green technologies and urbanization that many people imagine. Political will doesn't create economic opportunity. It comes from pent up demand. The only thing I think we have pent up demand for right now is retirement savings.

The cloud and big data analytics. That is where the boom will come from. It will be just as disruptive as the adoption of mainframes and factory automation.

The "cloud" is bullshit. Most services are off far more than they're on. Besides, storing your data in the cloud is a lesson in unsustainability. I can't even find tweets from late last year. Plus I recoil at business models that rely on me to do all the work in order for you to make a profit.

Amazon EC2 is incredibly stable, as is S3. They have more 9s than almost anyone can afford to have.

Anyway: Its the new applications that take advantage of they cloud and they big data that will be the revolution. I talked about this at length here.

If you've played with it... and seen what it makes possible... its a bit hard to deny the shock and awe, imo.

Jello wrote:

flynn23 wrote:

Jello wrote:

Decius wrote:
In the early 90's recession I'll bet everyone on MemeStreams could have predicted a telecom boom. Three and more years ago MemeStreams was predicting a housing crash. If there was an opportunity for growth, you'd think someone here would be tuned into it. I'm not. With gas prices back to normal I don't see the boom in green technologies and urbanization that many people imagine. Political will doesn't create economic opportunity. It comes from pent up demand. The only thing I think we have pent up demand for right now is retirement savings.

The cloud and big data analytics. That is where the boom will come from. It will be just as disruptive as the adoption of mainframes and factory automation.

The "cloud" is bullshit. Most services are off far more than they're on. Besides, storing your data in the cloud is a lesson in unsustainability. I can't even find tweets from late last year. Plus I recoil at business models that rely on me to do all the work in order for you to make a profit.

Amazon EC2 is incredibly stable, as is S3. They have more 9s than almost anyone can afford to have.

Anyway: Its the new applications that take advantage of they cloud and they big data that will be the revolution. I talked about this at length here.

If you've played with it... and seen what it makes possible... its a bit hard to deny the shock and awe, imo.

The whole nature of "cloud computing" is that 9's are irrelevant. The cloud is nebulous and always on, so the uptime of a particular component is abstracted to users. This isn't the case in reality, as all of these services have seen significant downtime. I'll remind you that five 9's of uptime yields just under six minutes per year of downtime. Clearly AWS hasn't even gotten close to five 9's. I've had corporate systems that gave two 9's. They weren't nearly as expensive as AWS's probable costs. Which actually might make your case.

The hardware and software vendors LOVE cloud computing because it gives them another rush of customers trying to catch up with the new fad. I'm sure that billions of dollars of IT infrastructure have already been sold in the name of cloud computing, but results have been dismal. So yeah... there's "growth".

flynn23 wrote:

Jello wrote:

flynn23 wrote:

Jello wrote:

Decius wrote:
In the early 90's recession I'll bet everyone on MemeStreams could have predicted a telecom boom. Three and more years ago MemeStreams was predicting a housing crash. If there was an opportunity for growth, you'd think someone here would be tuned into it. I'm not. With gas prices back to normal I don't see the boom in green technologies and urbanization that many people imagine. Political will doesn't create economic opportunity. It comes from pent up demand. The only thing I think we have pent up demand for right now is retirement savings.

The cloud and big data analytics. That is where the boom will come from. It will be just as disruptive as the adoption of mainframes and factory automation.

The "cloud" is bullshit. Most services are off far more than they're on. Besides, storing your data in the cloud is a lesson in unsustainability. I can't even find tweets from late last year. Plus I recoil at business models that rely on me to do all the work in order for you to make a profit.

Amazon EC2 is incredibly stable, as is S3. They have more 9s than almost anyone can afford to have.

Anyway: Its the new applications that take advantage of they cloud and they big data that will be the revolution. I talked about this at length here.

If you've played with it... and seen what it makes possible... its a bit hard to deny the shock and awe, imo.

The whole nature of "cloud computing" is that 9's are irrelevant. The cloud is nebulous and always on, so the uptime of a particular component is abstracted to users. This isn't the case in reality, as all of these services have seen significant downtime. I'll remind you that five 9's of uptime yields just under six minutes per year of downtime. Clearly AWS hasn't even gotten close to five 9's. I've had corporate systems that gave two 9's. They weren't nearly as expensive as AWS's probable costs. Which actually might make your case.

The hardware and software vendors LOVE cloud computing because it gives them another rush of customers trying to catch up with the new fad. I'm sure that billions of dollars of IT infrastructure have already been sold in the name of cloud computing, but results have been dismal. So yeah... there's "growth".

Well... look, if you can't see the benefit to innovation of a startup not having to buy any hardware, and how new innovation might be achieved by limitless processing and IO for short periods... then I don't have anything to add.

But I am surprised.