In this particular item on the agenda, chip fabs, it is not clear spending more money one time will produce a result, much less a faster result by attracting "bonafide super-geniouses." One might respond that "you can't win if you don't play" which would lay bare the gamble.
Chip fabs is just one of ‘many processes’ which was what I was replying to. It’s practically irrelevant if even 99% of all processes have this characteristic. There’s way more than enough remaining to occupy all available people who could actually speed up large complex projects by 10x.
Of course if they were somehow disproportionately forced to only ever work on chip fabs for the rest of their lives, then that would create huge waste, but this doesn’t seem likely.
