71–80 of 208 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a huge, gigantic difference between not having a military at all and spending 1 trillion a year to be an imperialist superpower. It's almost like... there's a middle ground.
There's not, because it maintains a world order that would be happily taken up by someone else if the US didn't do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a huge, gigantic difference between not having a military at all and spending 1 trillion a year to be an imperialist superpower. It's almost like... there's a middle ground.
The thing is, we spend that much and we're not even good imperialists. When was the last time we annexed any territory? Declared a lesser state a protectorate? Or established a new colony? We spend trillions/year to be the world police so our "allies" don't have to while they mock us on twitter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is all defense-related work complicit in murder? Do we not need a military? Nothing is perfect, but we are trapped on a planet with a bunch of violent, highly intelligent apes. Certainly the military does things I disagree with, and things could always be improved, but generally what is the alternative?
Answer to the first question: in the United States, yes. Whether that is a bad thing is debatable and not suited for the site we're on; try a philosophy subreddit. The United States military has lost its privilege to play any form of moralism or rational justification after their actions over the past 30-50 years. It's no longer defense in most cases, it's assault. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, the second Iraq, invading Afgh…
After 15 years of being a DoD contractor, it is frustrating to see yet another sole source entity getting the contract. Prices will inflate and there is no competition. HP and Oracle have been reaping the benefits of this for at least two decades now. We put databases on Oracle that should be handled by Postgres or MariaDB since DoD prefers Oracle. We would buy useless HP software because we were a HP shop. I fought…
I mean, if you’ve already budgeted the CapEx for some additional Oracle licenses, the OpEx efficiencies of having unified tooling and a unified ops doctrine are no joke.
I haven’t worked with an Oracle DBMS, but I think this is analogous: I’d sure hate to have to manage a cloud infrastructure where parts were on AWS, parts on GCP, and parts on Azure. Sure, there are generic tools that treat all three the same, or over-layers like K8s that don’t care about substrate—but what if the projects on each platform were taking advantage of that platform’s specialties? What if I was using SNS on AWS, or BigQuery on GCP?
To bring that back through the analogy, what if our Oracle projects were tuned using Oracle-specific query-planner hints, while our Postgres projects did their ETL using PG-specific Foreign Data Wrapper connectors?
In both cases, the only real solution is hiring and retaining O(N) specialized ops headcount, one team for each stack. And that cost gets a lot higher than just paying for another darn Oracle license.
After 15 years of being a DoD contractor, it is frustrating to see yet another sole source entity getting the contract. Prices will inflate and there is no competition. HP and Oracle have been reaping the benefits of this for at least two decades now. We put databases on Oracle that should be handled by Postgres or MariaDB since DoD prefers Oracle. We would buy useless HP software because we were a HP shop. I fought…
This thread is kind of chilling, because everyone within is treating it like it's just chat software or something. With quotes from this thread like "in the meantime the work doesn't get done," and "bid for contracts that [enable] government to make some real progress," you'd never guess this stuff is going to be used to and to enable murder. So many people were focusing on how Microsoft Ɛ> Linux or Open Source or wh…
So, you'd rather we keep spending too much, using too little information, and putting too many innocent people at risk? I mean, it's not like we dropped more ordinance under Obama than every president before him combined, or that the trend didn't decrease by very much after him or anything. Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced. I also think most federal…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Answer to the first question: in the United States, yes. Whether that is a bad thing is debatable and not suited for the site we're on; try a philosophy subreddit. The United States military has lost its privilege to play any form of moralism or rational justification after their actions over the past 30-50 years. It's no longer defense in most cases, it's assault. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, the second Iraq, invading Afgh…
If you think that the only thing the U.S. military does is "assault" then you haven't really done any research at all, have you? Read up on force-projection, specifically as it relates to soft-power.
Obviously, the U.S. Military does slightly more than assault. Proportionally not much more, but a bit more. Like football.
this kind of stuff is such an american way of doing things. - bid for contracts that enables government to make some real progress - lose - sue because you lost, claim winner can’t start until your suit is over - introduce 1-2 year delay of waiting while your complaint is processed and people wonder why china gets things done in a quarter of the time
Yeah, they get things done because they're a totalitarian, completely opaque regime. I'll take western governments with all their faults and inneficiencies, thank you.
So sure, you can get a lot done in those cases, but it might not be the right things to do, and there's zero process for remediation except to hope that another party leader takes over and changes it for you.
So when anyone says China is totalitarian this is what is meant and why the US is ideologically opposed to China and Chinese rule.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a huge, gigantic difference between not having a military at all and spending 1 trillion a year to be an imperialist superpower. It's almost like... there's a middle ground.
The thing is, we spend that much and we're not even good imperialists. When was the last time we annexed any territory? Declared a lesser state a protectorate? Or established a new colony? We spend trillions/year to be the world police so our "allies" don't have to while they mock us on twitter.