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doing an audit of the DoD still cost over $400M https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/11/15/heres-what-t...
The DoD budget is ~$700B, so that's <0.1%
In the context of this .1% doesn’t sound so bad.
Wait until they hear about the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of all sorts of stuff sitting idle that has been purchased by the DoD and USG paid for by tax money.
doing an audit of the DoD still cost over $400M https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/11/15/heres-what-t...
It is nice to know the cost, but it shouldn’t be an argument not to perform a critical task for the function of the organization.
I'm slightly confused; is the story that the state of New York bought equipment for Tesla worth $300 million dollars, and a sixth of it is currently unused (meaning five sixths of it is being used currently)?
Considering that Tesla will longer make solar cells in that factory (Panasonic is ending the relationship and withdrawing by September) I’d guess that it will all be unused shortly; this is just what has obviously been relocated so far.
Solar cells? Panasonic was making battery cells for Tesla. Are you mixing up different uses of the word “cell”?
> State government documents put the final price tag at $958,600,000 for the property, building construction and equipment. The cost for the equipment alone is close to $300 million. What a staggering number. How does our government get away with wasting so much money without any accountability?
Contrast that with the aborted Amazon deal. The deal was fairly straightforward, but but it was simply coordinated between Amazon and the governor's office. They shot themselves in the foot by not playing with every local assemblymen and community boards -- not that any of them would have had any useful input.
Wait until they hear about the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of all sorts of stuff sitting idle that has been purchased by the DoD and USG paid for by tax money.
In relative terms I'm probably at least as bad.
As usual, Tesla's involvement in the original deal is reported incorrectly. Tesla had no involvement in the original deal. Nor did Solar City. In fact, Silevo did the deal, was then acquired by Solar City which was then acquired by Tesla.
Wait until they hear about the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of all sorts of stuff sitting idle that has been purchased by the DoD and USG paid for by tax money.
This seems like kind of a 'gotcha' article. "One out of every $6 spent on machinery for the Tesla factory is now unused." I'd imagine most healthy large companies operate this way. Utilizing the majority of their equipment and having some reserve capacity in parts and equipment stored.
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It seems like it would be a better use of resources to just build up enough of a stockpile that the industry would be able to safely retool into a similar civilian industry, such as railroad locomotives, and then have time to switch back without a loss of combat capability. You'd just have to keep a small industry around for upgrades and maintenance.
That is unfortunately no longer realistic. The skills and supply chains needed to produce high-end military equipment are too different. The production lines have to be kept continuously running or else they would take so long to reestablish that in any serious conflict it would be too late.
Pre-massive-globalization, we had no problem gearing up for WW2. Our industrial capacity was largely in-house. There were some things like rubber that were off-shore, but generally the industrial toolchain was domestically produced.
Nowadays, many domestic industrial producers rely heavily on these (bloated) military contracts to maintain relevance in a globalized industrial setting where the center of gravity for a lot of heavy industry and tool production has shifted to Asia.
I love international trade and I'm skeptical of military spending (and even more so of military adventurism), but this effect should be kept in mind when making trade policy. The military-industrial complex is keeping alive much of our industrial know-how that would otherwise be entirely be off-shored and retired domestically.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is tanks in general have little use in the vast majority of modern American battles.
I’d say this is false, even as I myself am a US Army veteran who spent a year in Iraq 2003-2004. Tanks are still useful, but aren’t as useful against non-conventional forces. The pentagon has spent the past 4-5 years retooling for what they call “near peer” threats which is to say China in the Pacific and Russia in Europe. Tanks, and really good ones in specific, would be required to push back a Russian incursion int…