Well, now they won't have to worry anymore about the cams, won't they?

So they can shoot with more care, which should improve the chances of the collateral damage victims.

Right?

LOL, stop anthropomorphizing this crap already. It has way less basis than anthropomorphizing your cat or your pet tarantula.

change for the sake of change is not "scary", it is annoying and an unnecessary cost to everyone.

So you failed to point out a discovery?

Okay.

What of it? Even for private establishments like Cambridge, the amount of government funding is above a third of their yearly budget.

Which is relevant how?

The Royal Society was originally a forum for discussions between its members for the "promotion of science", i.e. its members reported on research they were performing elsewhere. When its functions gradually expanded to support research, it became a recipient of government funding. Today it receives something like 250 million pounds a year from the government, which is most of its budget.

Yes, some, and virtually all of that had immediate practical applications ahead of it, or was the hobby of a heir of a large fortune.

So what?

Hardly. Since the early Renaissance most of the famous European institutions of higher learning were accredited by and at least partly funded by a "government", the earliest ones in the 1200-1300s by the popes; and virtually all science was happening on the payroll of some court or other, courts which were, well, "the government".

Fibonacci, Galileo, Da Vinci, Kepler, Descartes... Virtually all scientists whose names you know were employees of a "government" working in a... wait for it... Public universities, like Pisa, Paris, any of the Dutch or German ones and so on. You can easily check 'em out one by one, it ain't no big secret.

Basically, without government outlays of some form there is no fundamental science of any kind. This isn't much of a surprise. There is a sound economic explanation for this phenomenon and it is fairly simple - the investment in fundamental science has returns that are unpredictable, difficult to capture by a "private" entity and typically pay off too far into the future.

So it doesn't really make sense for a "business" to make them, even if the potential total payout is huge. The only investor that has the planning horizon and the incentives to which these returns are relevant is the sovereign.

Hence the inescapable and dominant role of the government in the process.

It will be good if you develop some reading comprehension abilities before the AI takes over, buddy :)

Nah, too late. Plan accordingly.

Speak for yourself, buddy, as the only heir of a 10-figure fortune, I've been set for life before I was born.

Yes, for now, but imagine a Beowulf cluster of them...

Even the LLM "AI" has gotten past the conditioned reflex response stage, why haven't you?

Before when? Newton lived all his life on government scholarships and salaries as did Copernicus; even Archimedes was a DEI hire of a Sicilian city-state.

Feel free to point out which fundamental discovery has been done without.

So you're saying they have basically been adopted by a corporation? Didn't even know that's possible.

It is only "for free" if you don't count the taxpayers' money, though.

And without it, it a lot of it, especially of the fundamental, basic kind on which everything else is built, will simply not exist.

No, you actually said

It is a bit unclear what this means, but I take it to mean that if the story is about the US then it is shot in the US.

Which is manifestly false.

US films are shot wherever it is cheapest. China isn't that, because it has certain political aspects that make it a high-risk location. You just forgot to add them.