7 ms·

The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery has an idea for a new one

229 points by mocy 12y ago

anigbrowl 12y ago
tl;dr the path he has chosen involves one of the toughest problems in battery science, which is how to make an anode out of pure lithium or sodium metal. If it can be done, the resulting battery would have 60% more energy than current lithium-ion cells. That would instantly catapult electric cars into a new head-to-head race with combustion. Over the years, numerous scientists have tried and failed—it was lithium metal, for instance, that kept setting Stan Whittingham’s lab on fire at Exxon in the 1970s. It's a very interesting profile/historical review of this great scientist and his work, but if you were curious about the actual headline, the lede was buried almost at the end.
- Apofis 12y ago
  Yeah, the headline was almost an afterthought. I guess he isn't really talking and they needed something to give people a reason to click and read. Gave me enough reason to read about him though, and I definitely don't regret it.
breckinloggins 12y ago
A note for those who go looking for the technical details: there aren't many here. According to the article, Dr. Goodenough is being tight-lipped about his work.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Given what happened before you really can't fault him.
  - lumberjack 12y ago
    How much would he have gotten in royalties anyway? I don't think there are any billionaires who got there just through patent royalties, right?
    - simonh 12y ago
      The inventor of the B&D Workmate has earned a 3% royalty on 55 million sales. That's almost certainly over $100m. It's very rare to make a lot of money on a patent, but for something popular let alone ubiquitous it's entirely possible.
    - sgt101 12y ago
      It's rare for individuals, because a patent costs ~$25k to file and maintain, and the process takes ~5 years. Patents are narrow and taken out very early in the inventive process - so prone to being irrelevant or silly. The really valuable patents - fundamental ones - are particularly risky. This adds up to meaning that the mass insurance of corporate sponsorship is the only way for inventors to profit (marginally, and as a group).
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  I expect a note in the margin of one of his journals, discovered posthumously, "What a simple and elegant anode, the margin is too small to contain it." I get that he is angry, but I worry that his anger may rob us of what he could do.
  - kbenson 12y ago
    At the same time, he knows the power of copious notes proving the origination of the idea, so hopefully it won't be that bad.
mschuster91 12y ago
What I'm worried about is the waste of lithium and other battery/accumulator metals. In theory, people should turn electronic devices and batteries to recycling facilities, but a large part of the population ignores the rules and throws their gadgets into the trash when broken... I wonder if someday we will find a way to "separate" trash on atomar level (i.e. put arbitrary stuff in on one side, get raw atoms on the other side)...
- alex_duf 12y ago
  Well that would require a lot of energy !
  - mschuster91 12y ago
    Achieving nuclear fusion should provide us with the energy.
    - hobs 12y ago
      Yeah that was what I was about to say, fusion, solar, and other centralized energy tech (if we every readily deploy them) should allow us to trade more energy for more of the materials we need, and then as other commentators have said, the trash piles of the world start to look like just a bunch of raw materials.
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    In theory it may not be that much. There's no reason you can't reuse the same few J to split several molecules, and capture it again for the next batch. One probably can't get a resersible process, but just adding up the energy to break all the trash can be wrong by several orders of magnitude.
  - gizmo686 12y ago
    Not necessarily. A lot of our trash is in complex molecules. If the binding energy of those molecules is higher than the binding energy of the simpler elements/compounds that we get out then, in theory, the process would also be energy positive.
higherpurpose 12y ago
> But Goodenough is equally dismissive of such tinkering and its measly 7% or 8% a year in added efficiency. 7% extra efficiency per year means electric cars will have twice the capacity in 10 years...and then double up again in 10 more years...and so on. That's a far greater rate of improvement than for gasoline-powered cars, even if we're impatient and we want our $10,000 500 mile on a charge EVs now. > But the path he has chosen involves one of the toughest problems in battery science, which is how to make an anode out of pure lithium or sodium metal. If it can be done, the resulting battery would have 60% more energy than current lithium-ion cells. I don't know how "real" its technology is, but SolidEnergy promises a 50 percent increase in energy density using an "ultra-thin metal anode". The company promises commercialization for phones in 2016 and for EVs in 2017. http://www.solidenergysystems.com/technology.html http://www.solidenergysystems.com/technology.html
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > I don't know how "real" its technology is He's got an amazing track record. > but SolidEnergy promises a 50 percent increase in energy density using an "ultra-thin metal anode". The company promises commercialization for phones in 2016 and for EVs in 2017. The problem with battery tech is that it is a bit like solar: every year there are 10's of announcements like that, usually not from parties that have had such breakthroughs in the past. As is noted in the article since better battery tech is such an absolutely incredible breakthrough there is no shortage of those that would use this to their benefit absent any actual science. So for battery and solar breakthroughs my personal hurdle is 'show me', until then I will happily wait by the sidelines (not as if it would matter in anyway if I didn't). But I'll give this particular scientist a break and I'll say that I will be much less surprised if he's going to the the one to nail the next substantial increase in battery efficiency. I hope the result will be as safe to use as Li-Ion or LiPo. We're getting to the point where chemistry of explosives and chemistry of batteries is quite comparable and that's one reason why this is such a hard problem. Making a better stable battery is the hard challenge. And LiPo is pushing it there, those are not batteries I'd want on my person or in a spot where they can cause a lot of damage when they go.
- WellDressed 12y ago
  SolidEnergy also looks like it has a solid team behind it as well. http://www.solidenergysystems.com/people.html http://www.solidenergysystems.com/people.html
kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
> Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. Yes we would. All these things existed without Li-ion. The power/space budget would be more constrained but it was perfectly achievable. What wouldn't work is senselessly burning cycles running managed code in a VM with heaps of battery sucking DRAM. People today have no concept of how much computing power is wasted as excess heat because of modern software development practices.
- bwindels 12y ago
  I agree, and hope new high-level but efficient languages like Rust could help here.
- floatrock 12y ago
  > People today have no concept of how much computing power is wasted as excess heat because of modern software development practices. Or of how many new ideas are created because generous power/space ratios give us the luxury to develop quickly using abstractions higher than highly-optimized references and pointers. You can take a hit on optimal energy efficiency if it results in a larger ecosystem with more possibilities. The real challenge is to get both.
  - visarga 12y ago
    But I think it is energy efficient already. The modern smartphone replaces the radio, tv, newspaper, store, school, workplace, you don't need a clock, a walkman or a map any more. All o these consumed energy or cost money to buy and are heavy to carry around.
  - alextgordon 12y ago
    But high level languages do not require VMs. Time for a rant. We were lead down a collective rabbit hole by rabid VM and JIT enthusiasts. Notice the absence of those extolling the benefits of JIT compilation today. People used to claim that at some point Java would consistently outperform C due to the greater number of optimisations available to a JIT compiler. They've all become silent because it's quite obviously a load of baloney. The irony is that we had the answer all the time, but nobody wanted to believe it. Back in the day, languages like Haskell, early C++, early Objective-C and Scheme compiled to C. Compiling to C was great! No need to spend man-centuries building an optimising cross-compiler to compete with GCC (and fail), no need to screw around with GIMPLE. In 2015, compiling to a mid-level language is back in style. Except we don't call it C, we call it LLVM-IR. If you squint it's the exact same thing we were doing 15+ years ago. LLVM-based languages that look like Rust and Swift will eventually dominate, because they are universal. You can use Rust for the lowest level embedded programming. You can use Swift for the highest level architecture astronautics. What is depressing is that we could have built them 15 years ago but we were too busy fannying around with a dead-end technology.
swamp40 12y ago
I cannot decide if that Soundcloud laugh was completely distracting, or whether it improved the storytelling.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- davidgerard 12y ago
  Completely improved. That's what we want our Mad Scientists to sound like, dammit.
justizin 12y ago
> "Goodenough in his lab at the University of Austin." There is no University of Austin, it's the University of Texas at Austin, or "UT Austin" - same as there is no "University of Berkeley", but instead, "Cal". ;)
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  University of Austin sounds like a Portlandia-like parody of hippies and alt-culture types putting up classes in old abandoned buildings and alleyways and living in fear of being found out by UT security.
  - justizin 12y ago
    You could always throw back to "Road Trip" with Tom Greene: "Austin, not Boston" ;)
jamespitts 12y ago
The QZ article gets much of its information from this March, 2001 oral history interview: http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/materials/public/Goodenough/Goodenough_interview.htm http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/m... His recollections are very detailed, and you can clearly see what a genius John Goodenough is. Many early computing and defense industry interviews have a similar feel as this one -- so wonderful to read and be inspired by material like this.
hayksaakian 12y ago
tl;dr version: > Although Goodenough will not spell out his precise new idea, he thinks he is on to something
ylem 12y ago
I remember looking at his work when I was a grad. student. Some of it was amazing. For example, I remember once he set up an apparatus to grow crystals using chemical vapor transport. To know when it was finished, he sealed wires to inside the quartz tube (as an open circuit) and connected them to a battery and a light bulb. When the crystal (which was conducting) grew large enough between the leads, the light bulb would turn on. It was elegant and simple. (Usually this type of synthesis occurs in a furnace where you can't tell the progress and just have to guess and take it out). We still refer to the "Goodenough-Kannamori" rules of thumb when we're trying to use heuristics to guess how an oxide will order magnetically. He's had a truly impressive career...
- aceperry 12y ago
  Hopefully his career will continue and he comes up with a new breakthrough battery.
cko 12y ago
Kind of off-topic, and I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking this, but is it common to have clarity of mind at age 92? Is it mostly genetic or is it more like "keep challenging your mind and get enough sleep"? Anyone have good links? At 29, I'm (probably prematurely) worried about cognitive decline. I only started challenging really myself last year.
- kszx 12y ago
  (1.) The plasticity of the brain changes, which means that it takes more time to learn new things and change your mind. Many other abilities remain at a high level. (2.) You may look up a chart that plots dementia against age. Prevalence of dementia increases at an accelerating rate as you get older.
- robbiep 12y ago
  Avoid vascular disease to avoid (most) dementias. Much of the rest appears to be up to zest for life Source: me (MD)
- ManuelKiessling 12y ago
  I think one thing you can do is try to avoid a typical fallacy. My brother gave me a great example: - When people get older (say around 30-40), they realize that they can no longer memorize stuff quite as good as in their twenties - They start to write notes a lot more in order to make sure they don't forget stuff - Now they get even worse at memorizing stuff, because they challenge their memory a lot less
  - morlockhq 12y ago
    There is some brain plasticity research that seems to indicate that the more you challenge your brain with new activities and problem sets, the more resilient it is against decline in old age. Do you do a lot with your mind during the day? Take up wood working, knitting, or sewing as a hobby. Work with your hands. Do a lot with your hands during the day? Do something that engages your mind more. Take up art, writing, etc. Take dance lessons. If you are not a dancer already, learning to dance and then doing it has a lot of health benefits, social benefits (see below) and makes your mind work in different ways. I highly recommend trying square dancing (as corny as it may sound). Square dancing is very intricate and requires careful attention to called queues in order to maintain a steady stream of dance transitions. It is the fastest way to get into "flow" that I have ever experienced and have heard of number of other writers and technical types that rely on flow express the same sentiment. Learn, teach, and play more board games. Modern board games have a vast array of different mechanics and strategies in them offering lots of different problem spaces for your brain to tackle. There is also a good social aspect to them that is inter-generational (we have board game nights with ten year old kids regularly playing with retirees) and some decline in cognitive ability is linked to the lack of social engagement people experience as they age.
JDiculous 12y ago
Wish society would incentivize more smart people to tackle these important problems rather than go into finance, management consulting, working at the next hot tech startup, etc.
- patrickk 12y ago
  How would this work in practice? Maybe some form of corporate patronage, like Facebook and Stripe did in this story, and giving the inventor a generous slice of the returns from the invention (I can imagine several downsides to this too, of course): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791
  - JDiculous 12y ago
    The problem is that investments in the future and public goods will always be unfunded in a free market capitalist economy due mainly to the free-rider problem. Fixing it would have to involve the government (or a government-like entity) subsidizing these projects. Of course care would have to be taken to make sure this money is properly allocated, the incentives are properly aligned, etc.
gregorkas 12y ago
But.. the one we had was Goodenough.. yeahhhhh
nagaiah 12y ago
50% households do not have electricity. http://www.bepreparedsolar.com/lithium-solar-generators-s/1842.htm http://www.bepreparedsolar.com/lithium-solar-generators-s/18...
nagaiah 12y ago
50% households do not have electricity. http://www.bepreparedsolar.com/lithium-solar-generators-s/1842.htm http://www.bepreparedsolar.com/lithium-solar-generators-s/18...

229 points by mocy 12y ago

tl;dr the path he has chosen involves one of the toughest problems in battery science, which is how to make an anode out of pure lithium or sodium metal. If it can be done, the resulting battery would have 60% more energy than current lithium-ion cells. That would instantly catapult electric cars into a new head-to-head race with combustion. Over the years, numerous scientists have tried and failed—it was lithium metal, for instance, that kept setting Stan Whittingham’s lab on fire at Exxon in the 1970s. It's a very interesting profile/historical review of this great scientist and his work, but if you were curious about the actual headline, the lede was buried almost at the end.

Apofis 12y ago
Yeah, the headline was almost an afterthought. I guess he isn't really talking and they needed something to give people a reason to click and read. Gave me enough reason to read about him though, and I definitely don't regret it.

breckinloggins 12y ago

A note for those who go looking for the technical details: there aren't many here. According to the article, Dr. Goodenough is being tight-lipped about his work.

jacquesm 12y ago
Given what happened before you really can't fault him.
- lumberjack 12y ago
  How much would he have gotten in royalties anyway? I don't think there are any billionaires who got there just through patent royalties, right?
  - simonh 12y ago
    The inventor of the B&D Workmate has earned a 3% royalty on 55 million sales. That's almost certainly over $100m. It's very rare to make a lot of money on a patent, but for something popular let alone ubiquitous it's entirely possible.
  - sgt101 12y ago
    It's rare for individuals, because a patent costs ~$25k to file and maintain, and the process takes ~5 years. Patents are narrow and taken out very early in the inventive process - so prone to being irrelevant or silly. The really valuable patents - fundamental ones - are particularly risky. This adds up to meaning that the mass insurance of corporate sponsorship is the only way for inventors to profit (marginally, and as a group).
ChuckMcM 12y ago
I expect a note in the margin of one of his journals, discovered posthumously, "What a simple and elegant anode, the margin is too small to contain it." I get that he is angry, but I worry that his anger may rob us of what he could do.
- kbenson 12y ago
  At the same time, he knows the power of copious notes proving the origination of the idea, so hopefully it won't be that bad.

mschuster91 12y ago

What I'm worried about is the waste of lithium and other battery/accumulator metals. In theory, people should turn electronic devices and batteries to recycling facilities, but a large part of the population ignores the rules and throws their gadgets into the trash when broken... I wonder if someday we will find a way to "separate" trash on atomar level (i.e. put arbitrary stuff in on one side, get raw atoms on the other side)...

alex_duf 12y ago
Well that would require a lot of energy !
- mschuster91 12y ago
  Achieving nuclear fusion should provide us with the energy.
  - hobs 12y ago
    Yeah that was what I was about to say, fusion, solar, and other centralized energy tech (if we every readily deploy them) should allow us to trade more energy for more of the materials we need, and then as other commentators have said, the trash piles of the world start to look like just a bunch of raw materials.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  In theory it may not be that much. There's no reason you can't reuse the same few J to split several molecules, and capture it again for the next batch. One probably can't get a resersible process, but just adding up the energy to break all the trash can be wrong by several orders of magnitude.
- gizmo686 12y ago
  Not necessarily. A lot of our trash is in complex molecules. If the binding energy of those molecules is higher than the binding energy of the simpler elements/compounds that we get out then, in theory, the process would also be energy positive.

higherpurpose 12y ago

> But Goodenough is equally dismissive of such tinkering and its measly 7% or 8% a year in added efficiency. 7% extra efficiency per year means electric cars will have twice the capacity in 10 years...and then double up again in 10 more years...and so on. That's a far greater rate of improvement than for gasoline-powered cars, even if we're impatient and we want our $10,000 500 mile on a charge EVs now. > But the path he has chosen involves one of the toughest problems in battery science, which is how to make an anode out of pure lithium or sodium metal. If it can be done, the resulting battery would have 60% more energy than current lithium-ion cells. I don't know how "real" its technology is, but SolidEnergy promises a 50 percent increase in energy density using an "ultra-thin metal anode". The company promises commercialization for phones in 2016 and for EVs in 2017. http://www.solidenergysystems.com/technology.html http://www.solidenergysystems.com/technology.html

jacquesm 12y ago
> I don't know how "real" its technology is He's got an amazing track record. > but SolidEnergy promises a 50 percent increase in energy density using an "ultra-thin metal anode". The company promises commercialization for phones in 2016 and for EVs in 2017. The problem with battery tech is that it is a bit like solar: every year there are 10's of announcements like that, usually not from parties that have had such breakthroughs in the past. As is noted in the article since better battery tech is such an absolutely incredible breakthrough there is no shortage of those that would use this to their benefit absent any actual science. So for battery and solar breakthroughs my personal hurdle is 'show me', until then I will happily wait by the sidelines (not as if it would matter in anyway if I didn't). But I'll give this particular scientist a break and I'll say that I will be much less surprised if he's going to the the one to nail the next substantial increase in battery efficiency. I hope the result will be as safe to use as Li-Ion or LiPo. We're getting to the point where chemistry of explosives and chemistry of batteries is quite comparable and that's one reason why this is such a hard problem. Making a better stable battery is the hard challenge. And LiPo is pushing it there, those are not batteries I'd want on my person or in a spot where they can cause a lot of damage when they go.
WellDressed 12y ago
SolidEnergy also looks like it has a solid team behind it as well. http://www.solidenergysystems.com/people.html http://www.solidenergysystems.com/people.html

kevin_thibedeau 12y ago

> Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. Yes we would. All these things existed without Li-ion. The power/space budget would be more constrained but it was perfectly achievable. What wouldn't work is senselessly burning cycles running managed code in a VM with heaps of battery sucking DRAM. People today have no concept of how much computing power is wasted as excess heat because of modern software development practices.

bwindels 12y ago
I agree, and hope new high-level but efficient languages like Rust could help here.
floatrock 12y ago
> People today have no concept of how much computing power is wasted as excess heat because of modern software development practices. Or of how many new ideas are created because generous power/space ratios give us the luxury to develop quickly using abstractions higher than highly-optimized references and pointers. You can take a hit on optimal energy efficiency if it results in a larger ecosystem with more possibilities. The real challenge is to get both.
- visarga 12y ago
  But I think it is energy efficient already. The modern smartphone replaces the radio, tv, newspaper, store, school, workplace, you don't need a clock, a walkman or a map any more. All o these consumed energy or cost money to buy and are heavy to carry around.
- alextgordon 12y ago
  But high level languages do not require VMs. Time for a rant. We were lead down a collective rabbit hole by rabid VM and JIT enthusiasts. Notice the absence of those extolling the benefits of JIT compilation today. People used to claim that at some point Java would consistently outperform C due to the greater number of optimisations available to a JIT compiler. They've all become silent because it's quite obviously a load of baloney. The irony is that we had the answer all the time, but nobody wanted to believe it. Back in the day, languages like Haskell, early C++, early Objective-C and Scheme compiled to C. Compiling to C was great! No need to spend man-centuries building an optimising cross-compiler to compete with GCC (and fail), no need to screw around with GIMPLE. In 2015, compiling to a mid-level language is back in style. Except we don't call it C, we call it LLVM-IR. If you squint it's the exact same thing we were doing 15+ years ago. LLVM-based languages that look like Rust and Swift will eventually dominate, because they are universal. You can use Rust for the lowest level embedded programming. You can use Swift for the highest level architecture astronautics. What is depressing is that we could have built them 15 years ago but we were too busy fannying around with a dead-end technology.

swamp40 12y ago

I cannot decide if that Soundcloud laugh was completely distracting, or whether it improved the storytelling.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
davidgerard 12y ago
Completely improved. That's what we want our Mad Scientists to sound like, dammit.

justizin 12y ago

> "Goodenough in his lab at the University of Austin." There is no University of Austin, it's the University of Texas at Austin, or "UT Austin" - same as there is no "University of Berkeley", but instead, "Cal". ;)

drzaiusapelord 12y ago
University of Austin sounds like a Portlandia-like parody of hippies and alt-culture types putting up classes in old abandoned buildings and alleyways and living in fear of being found out by UT security.
- justizin 12y ago
  You could always throw back to "Road Trip" with Tom Greene: "Austin, not Boston" ;)

jamespitts 12y ago

The QZ article gets much of its information from this March, 2001 oral history interview: http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/materials/public/Goodenough/Goodenough_interview.htm http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/m... His recollections are very detailed, and you can clearly see what a genius John Goodenough is. Many early computing and defense industry interviews have a similar feel as this one -- so wonderful to read and be inspired by material like this.

hayksaakian 12y ago

tl;dr version: > Although Goodenough will not spell out his precise new idea, he thinks he is on to something

ylem 12y ago

I remember looking at his work when I was a grad. student. Some of it was amazing. For example, I remember once he set up an apparatus to grow crystals using chemical vapor transport. To know when it was finished, he sealed wires to inside the quartz tube (as an open circuit) and connected them to a battery and a light bulb. When the crystal (which was conducting) grew large enough between the leads, the light bulb would turn on. It was elegant and simple. (Usually this type of synthesis occurs in a furnace where you can't tell the progress and just have to guess and take it out). We still refer to the "Goodenough-Kannamori" rules of thumb when we're trying to use heuristics to guess how an oxide will order magnetically. He's had a truly impressive career...

aceperry 12y ago
Hopefully his career will continue and he comes up with a new breakthrough battery.

cko 12y ago

Kind of off-topic, and I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking this, but is it common to have clarity of mind at age 92? Is it mostly genetic or is it more like "keep challenging your mind and get enough sleep"? Anyone have good links? At 29, I'm (probably prematurely) worried about cognitive decline. I only started challenging really myself last year.

kszx 12y ago
(1.) The plasticity of the brain changes, which means that it takes more time to learn new things and change your mind. Many other abilities remain at a high level. (2.) You may look up a chart that plots dementia against age. Prevalence of dementia increases at an accelerating rate as you get older.
robbiep 12y ago
Avoid vascular disease to avoid (most) dementias. Much of the rest appears to be up to zest for life Source: me (MD)
ManuelKiessling 12y ago
I think one thing you can do is try to avoid a typical fallacy. My brother gave me a great example: - When people get older (say around 30-40), they realize that they can no longer memorize stuff quite as good as in their twenties - They start to write notes a lot more in order to make sure they don't forget stuff - Now they get even worse at memorizing stuff, because they challenge their memory a lot less
- morlockhq 12y ago
  There is some brain plasticity research that seems to indicate that the more you challenge your brain with new activities and problem sets, the more resilient it is against decline in old age. Do you do a lot with your mind during the day? Take up wood working, knitting, or sewing as a hobby. Work with your hands. Do a lot with your hands during the day? Do something that engages your mind more. Take up art, writing, etc. Take dance lessons. If you are not a dancer already, learning to dance and then doing it has a lot of health benefits, social benefits (see below) and makes your mind work in different ways. I highly recommend trying square dancing (as corny as it may sound). Square dancing is very intricate and requires careful attention to called queues in order to maintain a steady stream of dance transitions. It is the fastest way to get into "flow" that I have ever experienced and have heard of number of other writers and technical types that rely on flow express the same sentiment. Learn, teach, and play more board games. Modern board games have a vast array of different mechanics and strategies in them offering lots of different problem spaces for your brain to tackle. There is also a good social aspect to them that is inter-generational (we have board game nights with ten year old kids regularly playing with retirees) and some decline in cognitive ability is linked to the lack of social engagement people experience as they age.

JDiculous 12y ago

Wish society would incentivize more smart people to tackle these important problems rather than go into finance, management consulting, working at the next hot tech startup, etc.

patrickk 12y ago
How would this work in practice? Maybe some form of corporate patronage, like Facebook and Stripe did in this story, and giving the inventor a generous slice of the returns from the invention (I can imagine several downsides to this too, of course): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791
- JDiculous 12y ago
  The problem is that investments in the future and public goods will always be unfunded in a free market capitalist economy due mainly to the free-rider problem. Fixing it would have to involve the government (or a government-like entity) subsidizing these projects. Of course care would have to be taken to make sure this money is properly allocated, the incentives are properly aligned, etc.

gregorkas 12y ago

But.. the one we had was Goodenough.. yeahhhhh

nagaiah 12y ago

50% households do not have electricity. http://www.bepreparedsolar.com/lithium-solar-generators-s/1842.htm http://www.bepreparedsolar.com/lithium-solar-generators-s/18...

nagaiah 12y ago

50% households do not have electricity. http://www.bepreparedsolar.com/lithium-solar-generators-s/1842.htm http://www.bepreparedsolar.com/lithium-solar-generators-s/18...