ccc3

I don't think that's exactly true of dot com and '08. In both cases the developing bubbles were identified and widely discussed in the years prior to the burst. The surprise in '08 was not that there was a bubble in real estate, but rather that a massive fraction of the financial system was built on leveraging that sector. To paraphrase Buffett, you don't know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out.

Mass. Electric cars are much heavier. F=ma.

This is a pessimistic, anti-progress perspective. As you point out, there are plenty of other problems in the recycling chain. But this is a small step in the right direction. And the investment here is pretty small too. $1.2m probably covered a handful of engineers for around a year plus the cost of tooling. Given that Heinz sells a lot of ketchup, I would expect that the impact/dollar here is pretty high.

Also, I’d bet that the new cap is cheaper than the old one. I’m sure that helped justify the investment to management. Kudos to the engineers who made this happen for finding a solution that is palatable to management and also makes the packaging more sustainable.

Talk about burying the lede

This was an interesting point in the context of comparing YC to a large company:

Comparing himself to an air-traffic controller, Graham says much of his time is spend making introductions and helping the YC community solve problems within the network

Most of the large companies I've worked with are missing somebody in the "air-traffic controller" role. It can be very difficult for individual employees to understand all the resources that are available within the company, or who they should contact with a particular question. YC might actually have an advantage in this area.

At some point in the article he states:

Evolution simply could never have anticipated...

Evolution, by definition, doesn't anticipate anything. It's disappointing to see a university professor writing on evolution who seemingly doesn't even understand the evolutionary process.

Can we please drop this hyperbolic platitude that "ideas are worthless." You need to have ideas. That's how you decide what to do. In the case that the author describes, your ideas will help you decide what type of "smart nerds" you need to find. After all, there are as many different types of nerds as there are topics to study in depth.

The real problem is thinking that you're just one big idea away from a successful company. A successful company is made up of thousands of ideas and many man-years of execution. The real value creation happens when you have infrastructure in place to separate the good ideas from the bad ones.

So it's true that a single untested idea isn't worth much, but a huge collection of validated ideas really is valuable.

A couple of comments:

And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold

Actually, no it wouldn't. If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now. That means cars will have to be replaced much more frequently. There would be fewer cars sold than there are now, but it wouldn't be 20x fewer.

The operating percent of a car will go from 4% to that 96%

This seems wildly optimistic to me. The driverless cars may be capable of driving around 96% of the time, but that doesn't mean they can be carrying people 96% of the time. No matter how efficient the system, if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day, then a lot of those cars will be sitting around doing nothing at night.

If the author were writing in the late 60's he could have titled a similar piece: Why GM will never feel threatened by Toyota

FYI, this is one of those "classic blog posts." It was originally posted in 2005 when many of his points hadn't yet been repeated to death.