51–60 of 74 posts
$399B is enough to have funded NASA from 1980-2012. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C...
Do they say $399 Billion because it looks cheaper than $400 Billion? ;-)
It would appear this nation's military is a fat, bloated welfare recipient, feeling entitled and too powerful for anyone to do anything about it, impoverishing the nation. We all know it has many brilliant and capable individuals and teams in it who can do great work, but the system is anything but. The money ultimately goes to people, meaning we are paying people to do unproductive work, though I'm sure plenty of it…
All the money we spend on the fighting the wars, yet we can't over spend on treating the veterans. It's really pathetic.
Pierre Sprey (F-16's designer) on the F-35 "The F-35 was born of an exceptionally dumb piece of airforce PR spin" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw
War is Boring over at Medium has a lot of great coverage of the F-35 program and all the huge missteps and disasters along the way.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring
(When I've recommended them before, I've had someone point out that their coverage is quite biased against the F-35. This is true. That bias does not mean, however, that they're wrong).
... $399 billion could virtually end hunger in America. ... Or, you know, we could kill more innocent people halfway across the world. Yeah, let's do that. America!!!
This isn't Reddit. I don't come to HK to read memes or "jokes." Please contribute something more substantive. You could have made your point about hunger and priorities without it turning into an "America!!!" gag. Then maybe someone else would have replied and the conversation would have moved forward.
We're just lucky that this sort of boondoggle only happens in the military. Imagine how much trouble we'd be in if the rest of our government were engaged in this kind of corruption and/or ineptitude!
GM had/has an amazing number of levels of mismanagement.
Go after multiple solutions. Sure, cut spending, eliminate bureaucracy, but improve the process of improvement as well: Figure out how to make government changes on a smaller and more agile level. Figure out how to make flatten the legal landscape and make it more accessible.
Do they say $399 Billion because it looks cheaper than $400 Billion? ;-)
They're worried that if they charged $400bil and the government paid with a 400 billion dollar bill, someone could just pocket it. This way, they'd have to make change for $1 billion from the till.
While I don't necessarily agree with the end product and how it will be used, I say defense spending like this is ultimately good for the tech sector. It's funding innovation that wouldn't otherwise get funded and creates lots of attractive jobs in technology that will hopefully bring more people to the field.
We may not have even had the microwave oven today if it wasn't for defense spending on radar technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sort of boondoggle happens in all corners of our society though. I mean... you like NASA... so I'll use them as an example. The Challenger blew up because of O-Ring failures. Devices that were needed to seal the different cylindrical sections of an SRB together. Why not simply make the SRB from one big cylinder ? Because it wouldn't fit on a semi truck for shipment to KSC. Why do we need to ship these cylinders,…
You will find many companies that work in dangerous industries, public or private, have had their share of disasters due to institutional problems. If you want the result of private companies' work, see: coal mining, oil drilling.
Nearly upend the global economy with derivatives - no consequences, because the economy is too fragile, because our derivatives imploded. Invade a relatively stable nation on the basis of known lies - no consequences. Compared to that, what does washing a mountain of coal ash into a river amount to? Or betting that Indian Point can survive an earthquake?
And so on down the line. Yesterday there was an article posted about how easy it is to get through university and not learn anything. Because, so far, it is possible to maintain a good reputation for academics and let that slide for the sake of revenue.
This is how you become something less than a first-world country, and how you get surprised by the demotion: Having undermined standards, you can't even measure how far we've slid.
$399B is enough to have funded NASA from 1980-2012. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C...