It’s a bit shocking mostly because of the scale of investment.

Meta alone has spent $36B on VR. To put this in perspective, iPhone development cost $3.6B. It’s the fastest, largest single investment into a new technology. https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-meta...

This is misleading. $36B is for all of Reality Labs, which includes Virtual Reality, but also their Augmented Reality glasses in development, Ray-Ban smart glasses, Horizon, Meta's AI org, the Portal product line (now discontinued), the unreleased smart watch, tons of R&D, etc.

For the cost of this object, we could have built 3 new subway lines in NYC WITHOUT dealing with our cost disease.

For the cost of the object, you could set up a university program to figure out Anglo cost disease, then build ~10 subway lines at Japanese costs.

Asking why our society funds things the way they do is a very reasonable and responsible question

As a slightly less wonky comparison, the entire market cap of Delta (the largest airline in the world by market cap) last year was $23B, so Facebook could've just outright purchased Delta and still had over $10B left over.

And then they could have gotten Delta to build a virtual reality headset!

(And possibly gotten a better outcome, seeing as Delta has a helluva lot more experience than Facebook with ergonomics and normal people)