@masonwheeler said in In other news today...:
And the more you find out about Solyndra, the less it looks like a boondoggle and the more it looks like simple bad luck.
Yeah, their bad luck was that they got federal funding. If they hadn't they would of folded quietly and nobody would ever have heard of them.
Solyndra had an ambitious plan (more ambitious than most of their now successful competitors) with numbers that looked pretty. But they had failed to acquire any significant private funding at a time when private investment in alternative fuels was growing on trees. Investors were falling over themselves to get in on the ground floor. Yet, despite the glut of money in the market, Solyndra had almost no interest. It was always a risky investment.
After the government handed them a giant check, they turned around and horribly misused the funds. With almost no oversight at all from the DoE, they were able to waste all the money and never even get close to their end goal.
So yeah, I think you can all it a pretty colossal failure. With so many points along the way where anyone with a brain would of stopped and said "Hold on a minute, this doesn't look right, perhaps we should slow down and think this through". But hey, it is government, the only job where having a brain is a fire-able offence.