Re:Entrepreneur’s Letter to Obama: Give Americans a Great Ch...
by bloaf on Friday January 25, 2013 @04:36PM
(#5117800)
Broad is different from general. I see breadth as a double edged sword. It does have the problems you mention. However, if the government could get sufficient buy-in, it helps because there are a large number of ways to improve per-capita CO2 emissions (e.g. improving housing insulation, increasing public transportation usage, development of CO2 scrubbing/sequestration technologies.)
I feel that the real killer of challenges is actually vagueness. "Improve health care" is vague because there is no well defined goal or target that we will be able to meet.
The problem with this is that it's too broad. There are a million different ways to do it which are almost all trade offs of one thing or another, and the people who have to sacrifice for any given one will be fighting tooth and nail to make you choose a different one, so you spend all your time arguing with people and never accomplish anything.
Pick a specific goal. Build a working commercially viable fusion reactor. Take something like that and put moonshot resources behind it and it will happen.