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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

#401

Post by fragmede »

Brybry wrote: post #50
fragmede wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of PPE manufacturing in the US after 2021 is a travesty that does not simplify to LEAN is why we didn't. Dismantling the pandemic response unit didn't help. Not replenishing a stockpile of masks that existed for that specific reason didn't help. A lack of tooling supply base didn't help, Straight up corruption; no bid government contracts going to friends of the administration with no. proven capability to d…

Which 3M PPE factory folded? Cursory searching says in 2020 they created a new production line in Wisconsin and moved it to 3M Aberdeen.[1][2] If you look on Google street view dates for the Aberdeen factory and compare 2019 to 2023 it had a big expansion that's still there. The other major 3M PPE factory, 3M Valley, was expanded in 2024. [3] Edit: For the curious, Honeywell did fire their pandemic mask factory worke…

Thanks for calling me out. You're right, it wasn't 3M. (Why do I feel like an LLM writing that. Anyway...)

Yeah so 3M got kinda fucked, Honeywell got a little bit fucked, but it was the med/small timers that got turbo fucked, but they're smaller names that noone recognizes unless we're on similar rabbit hole adventures. Places like Patriot Medical Devices or Cleveland Veteran Business Solutions are descriptive names vs, say, HomTex or Halcyon Shades, but names aside, some people, in true American fashion, saw a problem, built a company, and then a factory. Hired employees, and then had to fire them all and fold, because globalization. Meanwhile Jared Kushner walks free.

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

#402

Post by herewulf »

scandox wrote: post #293
mmooss wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LoTR had a great distrust of power as dangerous and corrupting - the Ring corrupted everyone who tried to use it - and a rejection of those who abided with evil. The mission was to destroy the power, not build a super-army.

Well in fact the raising of a huge army is indeed one of the goals of the protagonists. Of course for them the goal is to defeat evil. I'm sure that the people behind Palantir, Anduril and other such companies also believe they are building a military capability that will allow the United States to defeat what they see as evil. Every centre right libertarian I've encountered also has a "great distrust of power". All…

This is an excellent interpretation but I would put forth that it is also possible that these people simply want to use "cool names" and get on with their business without any kind of deep understanding of the literature.

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

#403

Post by philwelch »

credit_guy wrote: post #180
carabiner wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's peacetime engineering. These things would be developed 10x faster during a hot war. Look at COVID vaccine in 10 months vs. 7 years normally.

That is not a guarantee. We look at WW2 and think that what happened then will happen at any other time. But in WW1 the US had to borrow rifles from France. WW1 was a total disgrace as far as the US military industrial complex was concerned. I know I'm committing a bit of a sin, today marks the 107th anniversary of the end of WW1 and that end was possible because of the US involvement. But, uncharacteristically for t…

You’re right of course, but there’s another important way the US contributed. Who do you think paid for those French rifles in the first place? The Entente was financed by Wall Street for years, until Wall Street ran out of money and the federal government took over the loans. The British Empire was close to insolvent at the end of the war—the main reason they were so insistent on receiving reparations from Germany was because of their own debt to the United States, a debt they ultimately defaulted on.

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

#405

Post by trenchpilgrim »

ElFitz wrote: post #330
SpicyUme wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better to keep things running at a low level than fully idle I'd think. Even if the outputs are consumed by testing, development, or even just stockpiled. Lots of things can get lost by not making parts for a while, including the knowledge involved in troubleshooting or replacing parts. Of course then people would complain about all the money wasted not utilizing the equipment/space enough.

Re: NASA chasing around for Saturn V blueprints and the blueprints for the equipment needed to make the actual rocket parts.

Also the DoE having to figure out how to make Fogbank again (a classified material used in weapons which they lost the manufacturing documentation for)

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

#406

Post by amfarrell617 »

potato3732842 wrote: post #386
scott_w wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ene…

>Do you understand what economies of scale are? Do you understand what results are? Not having something because people lied and took money is no different to the guy in the foxhole or the guy ordering those guys around than not having something because nobody lied and the money got spent paying people to do work that did nothing to get that something closer to being actually available. >Hell, the article also makes…

> no different to the guy in the foxhole

In peacetime, the American in the foxhole doesn’t die nor does the American or Brit across from him. Everyone merely has simulated results.

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

#407

Post by mikkupikku »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #362
mikkupikku wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A great deal changed after Vietnam. Iraq was only possible because the country had a general blood lust against Muslims after 9/11, who were easy for a mostly white christian country to "other".

Nothing like that exists for Canada. Proposals to invade Canada aren't taken seriously by the public. Those who pretend to support it are just trying to piss people off with how stupid they can be.

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

#408

Post by tsoukase »

There might be no 80 year long period in global history more peaceful than the current (measured by war fatalities per global population). And this happened due to a single reason: nuclear warheads. The super-powers USA, China, India whatever better go back to a cold war: stable balance, no casualties, only media fights. Every body, war guys and normal people, is happy. And in case the things escalate we are all to a sudden death than to a painful recovery.

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

#409

Post by lenkite »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #312
potato3732842 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter? At the end of the day it's all people cost. Just because it's fractional lives wasted in the form of man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor instead of whole lives doesn't actually make the waste less (I suspect it's actually more in a lot of cas…

> what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter? This is like asking what good do reserves do if you spend them down in a crisis. The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime. In war, the aims change--you're now not only ramping up production, but the penalties for fucking with a war are typically more…

> The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime.

Sorry, but is this sarcasm ? Pity that HN doesn't alow limited emojis to convey intent.

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

#410

Post by rpmisms »

tokai wrote: post #358
rpmisms wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A gag, a giggle. > Trump is gradually demanding the authority to control every aspect of American life Trump, or the federal government? This trend is bipartisan, and renaming the Gulf doesn't really hold a candle to PRISM.

You, and people like you, are a part of the problem.

By recognizing that both teams take away my autonomy at every opportunity? How does that make me part of the problem?
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