"Solyndra Was Just a Bad Bet From the Beginning"

Good piece from Megan McArdle on why Solyndra was a bad idea from the start, tax dollars essentially flushed...

Scale matters--you can't take billion-dollar fliers on too many ideas. Appropriateness matters--retirees shouldn't put their living expenses in tech stocks. And the potential payoff matters--we should not invest billions to develop a slightly better form of white-out, or into experiments that have a 1-in-a-trillion chance of developing a low-cost way to turn lead into gold.

I think Solyndra flunks on all three counts.

Read it all.