Pylimitics

Let’s say you’ve come up with a genuinely clever new gizmo that can do lots of things fairly well, and sparks people’s imaginations because it looks a lot like the imaginary gizmos from super-popular movies and TV shows, especially scary ones. You and your friends start companies and manage to raise insane amounts of money from investors by claiming your new gizmo is going to be able to do not just lots of things, but EVERYTHING, and not just fairly well, but BETTER THAN ANYBODY EVER.

You know your gizmo better than anybody, and you see that “lots of things” and “fairly well” is about as good as it’s going to get. But you can’t tell anybody, because of all that money…a lot of very powerful and wealthy people are going to want to their investments IN YOU to pay off. What you need is a government bailout. But with a twist; you don’t ask the government for money. Instead you start claiming that your new gizmo is, yes indeed, going to be able to do everything better than anybody ever BUT it might randomly explode with the force of a supervolcano, and Real Soon. So you ask the government to order you and your friends to quit working on your gizmo. That way you can blame somebody else (the government) when you can’t pay back your investors.

Sure, everybody might eventually realize you were just full of hot air the whole time, but you’ll figure that out later. And in the meantime, you’ve still got all that lovely lucre.

[This is just a thought experiment, cross-posted from LinkedIn. Any resemblance to actual persons or real events is mere coincidence.]