The overall impression I get of such projects is that politicians celebrate the funding victory, and then forget about it. Then the project's funds get eaten up by administrative costs over time. Ezra Klien [1] recently highlighted two such examples: high speed rail in CA, and rural broadband subsidies. Personally, I haven't seen much, if anything, actually spent out of Biden's infrastructure bill. The money from these programs just seems to...vanish. Allowing this to happen undermines the idea that the USG is a trustworthy spender of our money. I would personally prefer it if political success wasn't just grabbing more budget, but actually overseeing successful execution of public projects.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZxaFfxloo

I was about to post Metalhead (https://www.howclosetoblackmirror.com/metalhead) but found you got there first. Interestingly I read that the initial draft had the robots being remotely piloted by humans, which would have been much less frightening (and it would have ruined the apocolyptic setting). The only real fantasy element are the super-high density batteries and extremely fast solar charging. The embed-in-the-skin tracker tech doesn't seem realistic, either - but I suppose if you have those batteries it's possible. Each tag appears separately powered, and needs enough power to transmit through walls and over great distance. The AI and robotics are, ironically, the least fantasy of the elements.

The theme of technology continuing without humans was treated in Ray Bradbury's excellent, melancholic, still-relevant tale written in 1950 "There Will Come Soft Rains". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(sh...

I think the real reason people don't take supply chain endpoint security seriously is that it too quickly regresses to distrust of the OS and hardware. At that point you abandon smartphones entirely.

>Trump has a massive ego and I would have expected him to want the biggest rockets, and to pain them gold.

Sure, but he has to weigh the cost of funding intellectual elites against the benefit of what they can make for him. His base wants smaller government and doesn't want intellectuals. So, the move is to defund NASA and fund a military parade on his birthday. This undermines the future, but the future past 3.5 years is not his problem.

US native Sr. Full-stack developer and enterprise(-ish) architect with a resume that includes JPL/NASA, Blizzard Entertainment, and Bricklink. java, js, ts, react, ng, pgsql, mysql, redis, kafka, aws, gcp, jenkins, git/hub, tcp/ip, dns, http, html, css, spring, docker, k8s, linux. Enjoy coding, mentoring, system design, short and useful meetings; removing code is almost always better than adding it. Email for resume hn@simpatico.io.