There's a lot of wisdom here. Stupid but hard goals are still hard goals. Necessity -- not taxpayer largess -- is the mother of all invention. The correspondin

There's a lot of wisdom here. Stupid but hard goals are still hard goals. Necessity -- not taxpayer largess -- is the mother of all invention. The corresponding risk is in the resulting cargo cult around arbitrary constraints whose reasons were forgotten. I bet if we committed to building the Panama canal with only spoons we'd have ended up with a lot of amazingly useful spoon-platform earth moving technology, and the commercial sector would've ended up with highly optimized spoon-based machines, and it'd all be very stupid compared to what we got instead.