Because it's "critical".

You don't have to tell me. Clearly absolutely everything is "critical". The internet, and possibly even life itself, will cease to exist if there's even 1 penny less in funding for any area of research.

Without funding, how would we know that climate change causes truffle shortages and violence in Darfur ?

because every area facing cuts is always "critical".

And it's impossible for anyone to make software easy to use without government money to run a study.

If only it were that simple. Unfortunately, the classroom full of unvaccinated children may contain one of the few unlucky ones who have legitimate medical reasons for not being vaccinated. The fact that there are a small fraction of people like this, dependent on herd immunity for their protection, is one of the reasons for compulsory vaccination.

The cure for a cold is to wait 2 weeks.

I'm the guy arguing that employing people for package delivery is more economical that employing robots.

But the backhoe operator is paid a lot more than the shovel operator. Because automation boosted his productivity by 50-100x.

I don't think drones can boost package delivery productivity enough to even pay for the drone itself -- unless the people delivering the packages are artificially overpaid by 5-10x already.

How much to you think it costs to employ a rural delivery driver? How many packages to you think rural people receive? (Exclude heavy or bulky packages, anything delivered in bad weather, anything that requires a signature, etc.) How much do you think autonomous flying drones (big enough to carry a substantial package) cost?

Think about it. How long will it take the drone to pay for itself?

Because the drones will enter office buildings and deliver packages door-to-door and collect signatures?

Only if postal workers are overpaid relative to the value of their skills.

It's not news.

Why won't this useless search engine tell me the best place to ford the thunderbird river?

Equal to what? Why should it be equal? A company like Yahoo would be very happy to have a search that was half as profitable as Google's.

They could sell ads without tracking people.