591–600 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But imagine if we put people to work building useful stuff instead of useless stuff. Power grid infrastructure, new bridges, new rail lines, etc.
Defence equipment isn’t useless. In the event of war it becomes essential. Spending has to continue on these programmes in peacetime to retain capability.
The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…
NASA just successfully sent a helicopter to Mars. We developed two very effective vaccines using mRNA technology in a few months and had it through FDA trials in under a year. CAR T cell therapies (3 FDA approved and more coming) are changing how we treat cancer. There's amazing technology all around you.
Nuclear reactor design: mostly already considered by the Navy in the 50s and 60s.
Space Exploration: Space shuttle was reusable too. Rockets that could land were demonstrated in the 90s IIRC (admittedly SpaceX improved on this quite a bit).
Electric/Renewable Powered Aircraft: Soviet Union had a hydrogen powered airliner.
I'm not saying the new stuff isn't impressive. It is and those small improvements add up to a lot, but it's not revolutionary in the way a jet engine or a nuclear reactor was.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think Germany is looking at the F/A-18 to replace parts of their aging Tornado fleet?
Because the Eurofighter can't carry the nuclear bombs that the US has stationed in Germany, and Germany wants to be the one providing the pilots and aircraft that deliver them.
The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you blame Thiel for bureaucratic bloat in the US government? NASA, the canonical example of a formerly productive organization becoming hopelessly turgid, was dysfunctional by the time he was a teenager.
Thiel believes that rent seeking monopolies are desirable and necessary to enable innovation. He's plainly wrong about that as a mater of economic science. Lockhead's use of regulatory capture to extract as much money as possible is directly in line with how Thiel thinks business should be done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course, I don't mean killing hundreds of thousands of people was good, but it did end WWII, and presumably saved lives that would have been lost via a land invasion (US + USSR)
This is far from how I learned it. I am not saying either of us is right, just noticing how interesting it is that historical facts taught differently completely change a person's perception. We will probably never learn the truth as none of us were there. I have always been told that Japan was already ready to surrender and that dropping the bombs was simply the first step into the cold war -- a bombing to show stre…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb
Great book nonetheless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fear of terrorists sells better than fear of ice storms. Especially for the states (and representatives) that the ice storm is 100 year. Dams fail, and when they fail, they don't affect the people that didn't want to live near a dam.
So is it the “randomness” of terrorism that causes us to overweight the risk? It seems like we’re just really bad at thinking clearly about low probability / high severity risks
The dam flooding isn't random, its an unfrequent event that will occur so it is something we should prepare for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Full disclosure: I don't work in defense, but I've read Wikipedia. >>> I can't comment from the perspective of the F16 specifically, but from experience working on upgrade efforts of military and IC ground processing systems, the challenge is the legacy systems are very tightly coupled to the hardware. They make strong assumptions about register size and number, bus bandwidth, filesystem block size, all kinds of thin…
Thank you. I guess it is a good start. But, as a solution - develop new protocols and standards, and declare that military does not buy _anything_ that does not interoperate on these standards, no matter how advanced your shit is?
But that wouldn't likely make it any easier to update the software. Say the military makes the PowerPC ISA (e.g. RAD750 processor) and IEEE_1394 bus the new standards. If you have to port a program written to run on a MIL-STD-1750A processor with a MIL-STD-1553 data bus, you're dealing with an entirely different ISA, new drivers, and probably a lot of behavioral differences between the old and new bus behaviors.
And given this is aerospace, some options for dealing with those differences (e.g. emulators) may be totally off the table (for instance, I think I read somewhere that coding standards for one of the recent US fighters forbids dynamic memory allocation).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#Military_and_aerospa...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more than just a jobs program too. It's a reelection plan for senators/house members. Look at what states and districts get these big DoD contracts and then look at what committees the congressmen/women are sitting on. They approve plans that benefit them then direct the funds right into their districts so they can campaign on it. I mean it's not the worst form of corruption but it's pretty shitty when you reali…
How can we create new incentives to discourage this behavior and to encourage infrastructure projects that provide jobs as well as create superlinear value?
Because Members of Congress basically need to continuously raise money, there’s always an incentive to spread the wealth among congressional districts.
For the F35, I can think of one company in a rural area who fabricates some metal component for the project. Because of the way it is contracted, acceptance standards, etc they sell it for something like 50x it’s value of you were to order it, and whomever gets the part spends even more to receive it.
Planes are small and have lots of parts, so they suffer more from these issues. We’re still ok at building warships, because you can’t build a shipyard in some coal town in Kentucky.