It's easy to run a small team of talented people, it's an entirely different ball game to run a company with 20,000 people
Same with systems. A small team of hackers can work wonders on certain problems with no methodology and some TDD, but imagine 1000 of those small teams, many of them now with below average programmers, all working toward a single vision, that now need to integrate their individual projects, some of which can only be tested once our twice ever due to cost.
I agree it's difficult to run a company with 20,000 people and that's my point. Break it up into many smaller companies with more accountability per company and you'd see a lot more progress. It's very difficult to align huge companies behind a goal and very few are able to do it - I believe Apple is one that does succeed.
$1.5T isn't a solution, it's the problem. Hackers succeed because they have scant resources, and defense contractors fail because they have nearly unlimited ones.
You're right. But spread that out across thousands of small teams and I'm sure the outcome would be greater than what we're seeing here. Having some competition among teams would also help - the big defense contractors aren't so much competing against each other as milking the government.
You forgot about commercialization of fusion ;)
and hyperloop...
and in his case we would additionally have permanent space colony, on Moon, Mars, deep space and one to be created in Venus ;)
Same with systems. A small team of hackers can work wonders on certain problems with no methodology and some TDD, but imagine 1000 of those small teams, many of them now with below average programmers, all working toward a single vision, that now need to integrate their individual projects, some of which can only be tested once our twice ever due to cost.