There is a beautiful thing called unilateral action.
I believe most employers mostly don't care about conformity as such.
The inner circle stuff is only true of elite schools AFAIK. You can outcompete the rest of the universities
University education can be made free pretty cheaply.
The cost at scale is in the credentials- you need to make tests, test students, and check those tests.
The classes can be filmed once, and updated every few years if necessary. Each course can have a forum board for discussion and meeting up for studying in groups.
See course credentials for things like AWS.
This implies that we should stop life from developing independently, and that if contact is made with aliens then the human making contact and any environment that's been in chain of proximity should be spaced
Start small, once you have an attractive umbrella working for a few projects you can take in the rest of the US, the the world
In my work I aggregate multiple other systems' work as well as doing my own.
I think a similar approach may be useful. Create standardized outputs each project has to send to the overarching org, allow each to develop their own capabilities and to a degree how what is required to make those outputs meaningfully reflect on the capabilities and R&D of the project.
This will lay the ground to self-regulate, keeps most of the power with the org (assuming it is itself good at actual research and creation) conditional on the org playing nice and being upstanding with the contributing members, and without limiting any project before it is necessary.
DOGE.
This is an opportunity to work with the levers of real power. If there are 5 people here who work on this for two years, that's an in with Senators, Congressman, bureaucrats and possibly Musk.
Just showing up and making connections while doing hard work is the most efficient way to get power right now, in the time before AI gets dangerous and power will be very relevant.
I do not believe that this should be taken as an opportunity to evangelize. People, not ideology.
This seems like something worth funding if someone would like to but can't afford it.
The first issue seems minor - even if true, a 40 year old man could have a new arm by 60
So unbundle it?