You're thinking with the mindset of a company that needs to save $50 so that it can make rent at the end of the month, and wasting valuable time and effort scrambling to scrounge up money.

Large companies looking to increase revenue can't operate like that. If they're going to penny pinch then that oversight alone to micromanage the expenses of the company with thousands of employees would probably cost more than the money it saves.

And not only that, lower the productivity of the entire company as everyone puts in weekly effort to justify every cent, instead of doing their actual work.

Management commits money for the budget it invests into the company and as far as they're concerned, it's spent.

They don't care about penny pinching to get back $500k of their $500 million budget. They're more concerned on whether spending that $500k could have raised their revenue by another $100 million and the only way to know is to spend it. A healthy company drives forward to maximize revenue, not look backwards to save a few cents.

> decades of stagnation.

So do the moon landings themselves don't count as significant government progress?

Even after that, you'd really consider the launch of countless satellites into low earth orbit which revolutionized earthbound technology including communication and GPS for everyone on the planet, an international space station, countless probes to the furthest reaches of our solar system and probes entering interstellar space, and space telescopes that have revolutionized our understanding of the universe "stagnation"?

You're seriously in a space enthusiasts sub saying that there has been no significant progress in space technology for the last 50 years?

Have a good day.

That's why I said it's uncertain at best, at which point you replied that you're certain. Obviously we can't look into alternate realities so I don't know why you'd reply that you'd be certain.

I gave specific examples, fusion power and space travel, where government bootstrapped the research and development 50 years before any private investor would touch it. At any point during the last half century a private investor could have taken the reigns but that never happened.

"Governments destroyed the world"? It really feels like I'm getting into a political argument here with no clue what your politics are. Government and private industry aren't blood enemies in some epic battle of good vs evil, most of the time they work hand-in-hand to build a functioning society with pros and cons of each. The pros of government funding is that they'll fund advanced technology long before any private investor would.

> stalled progress for decades.

You're just making this up. It's pretty much the consensus that World War 2 advanced human technology by leaps and bounds in a way that wouldn't have happened without it.

Unless you're arguing that the private sector would have increased advancement by the same amount, or even anywhere close to the same amount, the rest of what you're saying is built on a house of cards and what seems like a hatred of government funding that's unfair to bring up because it's not based on logic.

Space travel being difficult is the reason it took so long, not government bureaucracy. I'm not seeing your POV which is basically saying humans would already be on Mars if it wasn't for the government. In no reality would that have happened.

The same example you provided, SpaceX, disproves your point that an impenetrable oligopoly is always the end result because a brand new company has entered to challenge the big players in the space launch industry and successfully disrupted the market, and probably will become a leader in the industry by later this decade.

And all this progress built on the back of 70 years of government funding long before any private investor would touch it.

>The truth is, had there been no space race or NASA, we would've gotten something like SpaceX far, far sooner.

You're using an example where it was government funded efforts, namely through WW2, that advanced aviation in leaps and bounds and created the modern aviation industry.

At best it's uncertain whether government slows down progress. Government funding seems to still be the only way to pay for technology where the return is too far in the future and too risky to be worth the investment for private investors.

It's the government that's been the primary source of funding for fusion energy since the 1950s. Only recently, as late as last year, after all the government funded work and breakthroughs has private funding started equaling government funding.

Efforts to build a base on the Moon and send humans to Mars are still primarily government funded. Very few private investors seem to see a prospect of return on investing now.

Why would you say that government stagnates the private sector? If the private sector saw a profit in it, what's stopping them from funding, building and launching their own right now?

> the experiment was based on a modelling that was so simple that it could just as well have been studied using a pencil and paper.

If a scientist drew the wormhole on a piece of paper The Guardian would probably still publish this same headline.

It's easy to trust the government when your economy is growing in leaps and bounds and everyone is happy.

Frankly, I think China could rival the US for world's largest economy if it wasn't for the CCP. China was always expected to be an economic superpower since 1945 which is why they were granted one of only five permanent seats on the UN Security Council. It was the CCP's need for power that caused China to defy all expectations and plunge themselves into a 3rd world country for 50 years.

The success of their own people is a threat to an authoritarian government so their economic success has a limit, and it looks like they've already hit that limit.

Was it not? There was anti-lockdown content literally everywhere. I was personally sent dozens of videos and articles, and no doubt there were hundreds or thousands more, claiming COVID-19 was an engineered virus by Bill Gates being used by sinister ungodly forces to enslave the human race.

These videos/articles were all publicly available and free for anyone to view. The anti-lockdown view was very much in the public eye and free for anyone to find. Entire US state governments became anti-lockdown after initially locking down due to the severity of infections and deaths. Are you suggesting entire US states were somehow censored from the internet?

So, obviously, it was up for debate.

Do you live in China? I sympathize with you if you do.

I live in a country that had lockdowns but also made all data publicly available, with that data provided by entities separate from those in power to ensure transparency.

We had the same numbers that the executive branch of our government had, updated daily, and daily being scrutinized by the public to ensure the lockdowns were justified and didn't go on for longer than it needed to.

Again what was "rational" in terms of limiting our freedoms was up for debate, but my country was nothing like China where the cities being locked down literally don't know if there's 1 case of COVID or 1 million.

We had plenty of US states that were firmly right wing state governments and even state governors publicly denying the seriousness of COVID.

Every single one of those states mandated restrictions at one point. Their bullshit was just to appease their base but their actions said something very different.

It's your choice to disagree with the consensus of every single state government, and frankly every country in the world, that the pandemic was serious enough to temporarily restrict freedoms. Whether that's "rational" is up for debate.

The "numbers" are the problem in China. Over here we had countless sources not just from every US state but other countries of the numbers on a daily basis. Whether or not you agreed with the measures taken by your government any rational person would agree that there was truth in the numbers and that something had to be done.

In China there's no such transparency. You don't know what the numbers are and even worse, the government has committed to the impossible goal of "zero COVID" implying that even one case can trigger a city-wide lockdown. The lack of transparency alone is 100% deserving of the protests but the reasons have gone far beyond that.

Reason why China surpassing the US as the #1 economy was always a pipe dream. The success of their own people is a threat to China's authoritarian government.