[dmix]

> They insisted on building a three-week quarantine facility with slivers of lunar samples

There was a ton of money flowing in for space and it was the big new thing of the future. Makes sense other agencies would try to insert themselves and try to seem relevant to the new popular thing in the news and latch themselves onto any future spending/authority.

[stinkbeetle]

Yep, government bureaucracy has always been horribly corrupt, incompetent, and self-serving, unfortunately.

[jrockway]

I can kind of see why someone whose job it is to quarantine soil samples from other places on Earth would want to quarantine soil samples from another planet. Sort of.

[lazide]

Good thing corporations don’t have different divisions vying for relevancy by being super important to the new hotness (cough AI cough), and this is just the government being weird eh?

[robertlagrant]

As long as they're wasting profits from people giving them money voluntarily and not taxes taken on pain of imprisonment, it's fine.

[simgt]

Bureaucracy is always corrupt, incompetent and self-serving to varying degrees. There is no way around it, it's a necessary evil for communication and organisation. At least governments in democracies have some form of oversight on them, there is less oversight in corporations or dictatorships.

Maybe an AI dictatorship would rid us of bureaucracy, but we'd both end up in a paperclip sweatshop.

[qwery]

Paperclip sweatshop? I thought all three of us would end up in a paperclip.