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The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

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Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#361

Post by jcattle »

tomrod wrote: post #124
Loughla wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ada.gov website has a banner that reads, "Democrats have shut down the government. Department of Justice websites are not currently regularly updated." Trump is the king. Edit: To be clear, I think it's complete and utter garbage. I'm assuming people think I think it's a good thing? It's not a good thing. At all.

No, Trump has a minor fiefdom district and some authority for services the states and their representatives agreed to let the federal government execute. He is not king.

If Congress tells the Executive: "Here's some money, spend it on USAID to stabilize regions in which the US Army operates and are of strategic importance". And the Executive says, "thanks for the money! I will spend it on whatever the hell I choose." And congress just belly flops over the next time they pass a budget, without checking that overreach of power, the Executive looks more and more like a king.

You voted for congress, but apparently congress doesn't matter anymore.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#362

Post by ExoticPearTree »

mikkupikku wrote: post #336
Spooky23 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us. That’s a problem easily solved. We have the menace of the Red Maple Leaf people to the north, and perhaps a buffer zone south of the Rio Grand would stave off the caravans, give Texans some breathing room, and make more room for real Americans. Remember, the anti-Christ may show up at any time.

The American people have no appetite for war with Canada. Half the country think it's a deranged threat and the other half think it's a hilarious joke. There's no genuine support for it from the public. Mexico is another story, but even then I don't think there's much in the way of public support for a ground invasion.

More than half the country was against the wars in Vietnam or in Iraq (2003), but they still happened. And if the current administration decides they want to invade Canada, Canada will be invaded no matter what the country thinks. Same goes for Mexico. How it ends, it is a completely different story and another administration's problem.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#363

Post by potato3732842 »

scott_w wrote: post #353
potato3732842 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about the local implications of what you just said. If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all? You can absolutely make an argument about acceptin…

War and peacetime are two different things. During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs. Verification is easier because you go directly from the assembly line to the front line. If it doesn’t work, you find out and make changes quickly. You know what you need because you’re in the process of us…

> During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs

Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime.

If anything it seems like the difference is that during wartime it's easier for the end users to tell the bureaucracy to get out of the way and as a result value for money is unchanged or even improved.

>You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.

There is no difference to the taxpayer or the soldier in the trench whether the money went into one specific colonel's back pocket or got pissed away on running organizational process. The money is gone and the missile isn't there.

At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia). Imagine if instead of a colonel's pocket the money was spent pushing papers around to no end? It would be the Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme and nobody would be held responsible except perhaps an unlucky scapegoat.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#364

Post by cyanydeez »

stackskipton wrote: post #47

As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally. Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats but I'm not sure throwing out everything is solution to the issue. Move fast works great when it's B2B software and failures means stock price does not go up. It's not so great when…

You are missing the criminals for tge policy discussion.

Idiocracy vs kleptocracy.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#365

Post by kragen »

Y-bar wrote: post #359
mellosouls wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nerd culture. Def not maga, more silicon valley and tech startup types.

I'm not so sure, JD Vance created a company called Narya after Gandalf's ring and Viggo Mortensen has more than once had to call out far-right groups trying to co-opt the fandom or litterature: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-48187786 https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1litq7h/viggo_mort... https://www.brego.net/article/viggo-mortensen-interview-3/

Narya was a Thiel investment vehicle; Vance is a Thiel employee.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#366

Post by gcanyon »

moomin wrote: post #271
waste_monk wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, simply open up the sales of tanks to the civilian market. That's a joke, of course, but even if they were demilitarised variants there'd probably still be a market for it.

I’ve never really understood how the logic of the second amendment doesn’t extend to tanks and nukes.

This movie is for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_(film)

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#367

Post by indigo945 »

themafia wrote: post #254
nradov wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptography, radar, proximity fuses, and nuclear bombs are all examples of obscure secret technologies that were keys to military victory in WWII.

We weren't the only nation using any of those technologies. The Germans, for their part, were trying all of that. It was neither obscure or secret. Technical acumen in using commonly shared technologies was the difference. It's why people like to forget there were three distinct phases to that war. Russia was not always on our side. The outset was bleak, the middle was indeterminate, and the end, the part we like to…

The secrecy definitely played a major role when it comes to cryptography. It was not known to the Axis how far Allied codebreaking technology had come, and how much of their communications was being regularly monitored.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#368

Post by trollbridge »

moomin wrote: post #271
waste_monk wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, simply open up the sales of tanks to the civilian market. That's a joke, of course, but even if they were demilitarised variants there'd probably still be a market for it.

I’ve never really understood how the logic of the second amendment doesn’t extend to tanks and nukes.

People can and do own tanks. Since they are giant (hard to park), slow moving, consume a lot of fuel, tend to need expensive maintenance, and can't be operated on many roads due to weight / vehicle restrictions, few people want to do this.

As far as nuclear bombs go... there are restrictions on owning fissile material in general that would preclude owning enough to have a working bomb.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#369

Post by ACCount37 »

efnx wrote: post #269
almosthere wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> brand new jet acts up and results in crashes The thing is, we waste so much money it's better to crash 15 jets but build 2000 of them than waste the same amount of money and build 5 jets. Even us SWEs out in the wild, we sometimes... disable tests (gasp heard everywhere) so that a refactor can work. I mean it's why we have the expression "sometimes you have to crack a few eggs".

That’s putting a pretty low price on human life.

We're talking modern fighter jets. You can fly those around with a mass simulator in the pilot seat.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#370

Post by scott_w »

potato3732842 wrote: post #363
scott_w wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War and peacetime are two different things. During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs. Verification is easier because you go directly from the assembly line to the front line. If it doesn’t work, you find out and make changes quickly. You know what you need because you’re in the process of us…

> During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime. If anything it seems like the difference is that during wartime it's easier for the end users to tell the bureaucracy to get out of the…

> Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime.

Do you understand what economies of scale are? Of course some production costs go down because you're producing far more. You're producing at this high level because the enemy is busy blowing up your equipment!

This is also why it's easy to show results: you have live test subjects in the form of the enemy you're trying to blow up and who's trying to blow you up.

Hell, the article also makes clear that this "low-bureaucracy nirvina" that you seem to believe in was costing the US taxpayer huge sums of money in waste and inefficiency.

> At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia).

What planet are you on? Russia only found out because their tanks ran out of diesel and got towed away by Ukrainian farmers! Are you seriously suggesting the optimal result is for NATO forces to find out our equipment never got manufactured right when we need it?

Every comment I've seen from you has been "bureaucracy bad!" without any clear knowledge beyond some handwaving, usually ignoring the topic at hand.

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