Since when do you have to be hungry to eat a doughnut? It doesn't taste any better.

I would not be surprised if you are not familiar with the movie Other People's Money, from which the above is taken. I don't believe it was an extremely popular movie. It's not bad by any stretch --- as far as I'm concerned, anything with Danny DeVito and Gregory Peck is worth 103 minutes out of my life at least once. DeVito plays "Larry the Liquidator" Garfield, a corporate raider attempting a hostile takeover and dismantle of a family-run business, run by Peck as Andrew Jorgensen.

The climactic scene of the movie is when the shareholders vote to either retain the current leadership, or install Larry and his team. The company's president, of course, wanted to keep things on their current course - "One day when the yen is weaker, the dollar is stronger, or when we finally begin to rebuild our roads, our bridges, the infrastructure of our country, demand will skyrocket." In his speech to the stockholders, Larry's reply was that the company, New England Wire and Cable, would be unable to recover from its bad economic state because the emergence of fiber optics (the movie came out in 1991) would render it obsolete - "You know, at one time there must've been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw."

I read the letters to the editor from newspapers in 3 cities daily. Two of them have, in their online versions, recently allowed comments about the letters to be posted online, which I also read. I'm not a news junkie, but I do pay some attention to what's going on. Obviously, there's been a lot of discussion lately about the price of gas, and about fuel and energy overall. And whether it's politicians or the public, the only thing you hear from folks on the right is, DRILL. Drill here, drill now. They want to drill in ANWR. They want to drill off-shore. They want to drill, drill, drill. That's their only answer. Gas prices too high? We need to drill. We're too dependent on foreign oil? We need to drill. Heartbreak of psoriasis? We need to drill.

I can't help but wonder how many buggy whips they'll find down there.

There are plenty of opportunities out there - wind, solar, biofuels, to name a few. And, to quote an old David Letterman Top Ten List item... How 'bout Superman getting off his ass? I'm not going to pretend to have the answers as to what the best solution is. I don't personally know.

Here's what I do know. Whatever the source is, energy will be produced. The organizations that control the sources will then sell the energy to those of us who want it to power things. (It's almost kinda sorta close to the way things work now.)

Politicians, especially Republican politicians, love to boast about the ingenuity of Americans, especially American businesses. So why are the energy companies not working on this? They should be in serious competition to be the first to develop the new technologies, so they can, at least for a time, corner those markets.

Obviously, it will take an enormous expenditure to research and develop the needed technology. Our current government has given huge tax breaks to the big energy companies. Wouldn't it be a good idea, instead of just giving a tax break of $X, to mandate the company spend that money researching and developing alternative fuel? Had we done that even in just this decade (we should have done something long ago to spur on the development of other sources of energy, but that's another story), just imagine how far along we'd be, if there had been a serious investment of money and effort --- of that hallowed American ingenuity. The same companies would be supplying and selling the energy, so they'd still be making money. Once the infrastructure to deliver the power was in place, I would think their costs would reduce significantly. It can't cost as much to draw power from the sun, the wind or water as it does to pump it out from under hundreds of feet of desert, ocean or tundra, can it? Seems to me their profits would still be through the roof. They wouldn't have even really lost anything in the development, since the money would have come out of what legitimately should have been taxes paid. We, in the form of our government, wouldn't have lost anything since "we" so graciously declined to accept those taxes in the first place. It's wins all the way around, isn't it? Am I missing something, some way where this doesn't work?

I'm just one guy in little Elk River, Minnesota coming up with this. I don't understand why the brightest minds in business and our government... well, in business... couldn't have come up with this, or something better. I don't understand why they're still making their goddamn buggy whips.