141–150 of 303 posts
So much for humanity’s greater good Sam.
Depending on your political views it may be good if it helps USA keeping its military edge over China and preventing China from invading Taiwan.
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Bad faith argument. Why are you moving the discussion to DOGE when that's not what I was talking about? You know the word "governments" that I used, means a lot more than the current TRUMP administration, right? Broaden your mind and PoV. And also, how can you say with a straight face there isn't ongoing and never has been waste and corruption in any government? Again, think for yourself, ignore $CURRENT_EVENTS. Look…
Step up, throw down some numbers and sources.
If I don't post sources, then you just accept government corruption doesn't exist, simply because nobody Googled for you?
If I do post sources, then what? Do you just suddenly change your mind and accept that stuff documented by the press it does exist?
Where, in good faith, were you hoping this conversation leads to when you were asking that?
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Step up, throw down some numbers and sources.
Let's do a thought exercise on your loaded question, considering government waste and corruption has been thoroughly covered by journalists since the invention of the free press and are a Google search away for you. If I don't post sources, then you just accept government corruption doesn't exist, simply because nobody Googled for you? If I do post sources, then what? Do you just suddenly change your mind and accept…
If you post sources he will nitpick them to all hell. It's a classic bad faith argument move since it moves the discussion from one of the subject to one of source validity.
You usually see HN's resident handful of chronically linkposting jerks do it in the other direction (i.e. they make some insane statement and shit out cherry picked sources to back it up and it's up to everyone else to disprove them) but I suppose it could be used in this way too.
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Initial operating capability or initial operational capability (IOC) is the state achieved when a capability is available in its minimum usefully deployable form. The term is often used in government or military procurement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_operating_capability
So MVP (minimum viable product).
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DOGE found basically nothing, and they worked with an axe trying to cut anything that come close to waste. So I am not sure where you see all this "waste and corruption".
> "waste and corruption" Well, "waste" is often defined by conservatives as "anything spent on the poors and/or not given to the rich" - by that standard, yeah, there's a lot of "waste" in the US government.
Huge snub of Elon Musk's xAI. OpenAI is basically anti-Trump yet he still went with them. Says a lot about Trump and Musk.
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200 mil for a government contract is peanuts when you see how much taxpayer money governments loose via waste and corruption
DOGE found basically nothing, and they worked with an axe trying to cut anything that come close to waste. So I am not sure where you see all this "waste and corruption".
I'd argue that most of the military is waste and that America has no need to involve itself in wars. Something like Japan's SDF is sufficient and the extras could help with domestic infrastructure and public transport.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai... If the physical disconnect between killing a person (e.g. UAVs) wasn't enough to make that task easier then further offloading the decision of who to target might help.
With rising authoritarianism in the US it is highly likely the military will be increasingly deployed against US citizens. Replacing the humans in the loop with AI removes a key safeguard. We’re heading down a very very dark path.
People don't feel nearly as stupid as they ought to for being complicit in the 30-40yr that lead us to where are now
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DOGE found basically nothing, and they worked with an axe trying to cut anything that come close to waste. So I am not sure where you see all this "waste and corruption".
Bad faith argument. Why are you moving the discussion to DOGE when that's not what I was talking about? You know the word "governments" that I used, means a lot more than the current TRUMP administration, right? Broaden your mind and PoV. And also, how can you say with a straight face there isn't ongoing and never has been waste and corruption in any government? Again, think for yourself, ignore $CURRENT_EVENTS. Look…
I'm going to unpack this a little. The second sentence does not actually follow from the question asked by the first sentence.
"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved. I may consider an outcome to be of high value where you see the outcome as low value, and vice versa.
"Reasonable market rates" is a peculiar term to use when speaking about things government does. There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.
Your answer to your question contains a logic error due to the language choices of the question. You disagree with the value versus the cost spent. That does not mean there was corruption. It just means you disagree. Other people can hold the opinion that the value was worth the cost.
I am not claiming that there is 0 corruption or waste ever in government. I am saying that there has been an effort to create a perception that there is far more corruption and waste than actually exists. That in turn is being used as justification for taking a wide variety of actions that would be hard to sell otherwise.
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With rising authoritarianism in the US it is highly likely the military will be increasingly deployed against US citizens. Replacing the humans in the loop with AI removes a key safeguard. We’re heading down a very very dark path.
What is this fear mongering?