Every genius I met in tech had a story about how they couldn’t get any funding or time to research their own ideas, but had to follow the instructions of some cabal of geezers who control funding in their field.
If you want to look up the age discrimination or age distribution of scientific grants in America. You’ll clearly see that the funding apparatus doesn’t serve early career scientists as well as it did. Accordingly, the government is less valuable and people are correctly perceiving that resources could be better allocated.
Safe roads are hugely controversial, every time my city talks about speed camera or traffic enforcement, the progressives come up with a huge set of objections.
There are so many obvious counter examples you should be ashamed of yourself. Consider Pratt & Whitney working on geared turbofans for decades, they made that investment privately.
Or consider Tesla, they brought the roadster to market purely off private investment. That’s a lot of r&d for things like battery management systems, motors, and power electronics which took years.
It’s the most amazing AI system out there. I got fsd a few months ago and the rate of improvement is astonishing, I go about 100-200 miles between disengagements now and have zero intervention drives to the grocery. It’s much better than a regular Uber or Lyft driver.
40k people a year die on American roads and this technology seems like the leading candidate to reduce that dramatically. I highly recommend it.
Meta’s investment in oculus also defies a 90 day payback period edict.