4 ms·

"The result was a relative preponderance of lab researchers with Ph.D.s and a dearth of people with technical, operational experience running energy facilities.

"The result was a relative preponderance of lab researchers with Ph.D.s and a dearth of people with technical, operational experience running energy facilities. " Yep. But the plummet in energy prices alone would have doomed it.

intopieces 11y ago
So the failure was due to circumstances Kior could not have controlled, yet: '"In the suit, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood described KiOR as “one of the largest frauds ever perpetrated on the State of Mississippi."' Something doesn't add up here. The loan was only for $75m, and by this account the founder put in much more than that in his own money. It sounds like MS took a gamble they weren't prepared for and are now trying to get what they can out of it. Fraud doesn't seem to enter into it, but maybe that's just the bias of the article I'm picking up one.
- mikeyouse 11y ago
  You've got it.. The state help (we looked at it as well) involves making tech predictions about where your yields will be and your cost structure will be in 3-5 years... It's nearly impossible to get these projections right, and the companies are obviously optimistic so when the numbers come up short, it looks like they were lying. I highly doubt there was any actual fraud. It won't matter anyway, the whole point of running a business is to shield the investors from liability, none of our (smaller) incentives ever involved guarantees from investors.
graycat 11y ago
A Ph.D. can't do operational things? Uh, the Manhattan Project, WMAP, the US Navy's version of GPS, GPS itself?
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  "Technical, operational experience". It's really a thing. As specializations have become more narrow, it's more of a thing. We're all on intellectual ice floes, drifting apart.
  - graycat 11y ago
    Yup. But in the Manhattan Project, the Ph.D.'s seemed to get that experience quickly enough. Besides, where to find people with experience turning chemical goo into blocks of explosive and machining them to fit precisely in a 3D puzzle so that when the 40 or so detonators fired all at once, the explosive would make a nearly perfect spherical wave shrinking down to compress the nuclear fuel? The guy who did that first in the Manhattan Project did it the first in all of history.
    - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      Guys, plural. So I cheated and looked it up - Kistiakowsky had a background in ordnance :) von Neuman's model was critical though , and may well have been nearly pure invention. A lot of things like this in the present day are boring, path-dependent stuff. Takes a while to get up to speed.

intopieces 11y ago

So the failure was due to circumstances Kior could not have controlled, yet: '"In the suit, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood described KiOR as “one of the largest frauds ever perpetrated on the State of Mississippi."' Something doesn't add up here. The loan was only for $75m, and by this account the founder put in much more than that in his own money. It sounds like MS took a gamble they weren't prepared for and are now trying to get what they can out of it. Fraud doesn't seem to enter into it, but maybe that's just the bias of the article I'm picking up one.

mikeyouse 11y ago
You've got it.. The state help (we looked at it as well) involves making tech predictions about where your yields will be and your cost structure will be in 3-5 years... It's nearly impossible to get these projections right, and the companies are obviously optimistic so when the numbers come up short, it looks like they were lying. I highly doubt there was any actual fraud. It won't matter anyway, the whole point of running a business is to shield the investors from liability, none of our (smaller) incentives ever involved guarantees from investors.

graycat 11y ago

A Ph.D. can't do operational things? Uh, the Manhattan Project, WMAP, the US Navy's version of GPS, GPS itself?

ArkyBeagle 11y ago
"Technical, operational experience". It's really a thing. As specializations have become more narrow, it's more of a thing. We're all on intellectual ice floes, drifting apart.
- graycat 11y ago
  Yup. But in the Manhattan Project, the Ph.D.'s seemed to get that experience quickly enough. Besides, where to find people with experience turning chemical goo into blocks of explosive and machining them to fit precisely in a 3D puzzle so that when the 40 or so detonators fired all at once, the explosive would make a nearly perfect spherical wave shrinking down to compress the nuclear fuel? The guy who did that first in the Manhattan Project did it the first in all of history.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    Guys, plural. So I cheated and looked it up - Kistiakowsky had a background in ordnance :) von Neuman's model was critical though , and may well have been nearly pure invention. A lot of things like this in the present day are boring, path-dependent stuff. Takes a while to get up to speed.