That exercise was hardly a waste.

Sure. But it looks goofy. Which is the point.

If your government takes climate change seriously, and a non-trivial contributor to climate change is livestock emissions, then it's not a waste to go out and conduct research on the scale and degree of livestock emissions. But if you are paying taxpayer dollars to measure cow farts, people will call it pork and nonsense.

It's not a waste for Musk to sell flamethrowers and burnt hair cologne - but it's the sort of stuff that can easily be framed as stupid. And hey - some of it is stupid, and some of the stuff that government does is stupid. But with Tesla, 99% of the stuff was straight towards accomplishing the goals of the company as they understood them at the time; as long as it's a small amount, there's no problem doing a little stupid stuff. Whether you think the same is true of the federal government or not, it's not like Musk's path to wealth didn't involve a little of it too.

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