Item — HN Reader

> Why didn't the government try...

As a broad generality, governments are utter crap at inventing/building/operating bleeding-edge technologies at giga-scale. Exceptions are generally narrow-focus military hardware, plus flood control, aqueducts, and other "obviously needed for the nation's welfare" stuff.

2 comments

Are they actually worse than businesses though? The internet, jet engines.. in fact whole swaiths of technology have been created under governments not enterprises. This just feels like an economic concept people blindly accept.

Except that they aren’t. In fact they do most of the basic research that isn’t commercially viable that lays the groundwork for business to later commercialize. There would be no Waymo without the darpa self driving prizes. No uber without GPS. I could go on and on.