The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

Post by mattkrause » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #466

nemothekid wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a while back I was interested "where does billions we spend on national defense actually go" and I came to the conclusion that the DoD is really just a giant jobs program. Ultimately I think the reason we don't have things like flying cars is that the private sector gets stuck in local maxima (such as getting people to click ads) and in the public sector it's very hard to have focused time-blocked short term goa…

It's White Collar Welfare. As long as your semi-intelligent, college educated, and socially connected, you can easily get a DoD-related job. Also, we don't have flying cars because that would be ridiculously impractical. They would be essentially helicopters, which would drink gas and be exponentially more deadly to operate. There are lots of scientist and inventors around inventing cool new stuff. And there's plenty…

Post by cwhiz » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 10:14 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #122

cwhiz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all. The US spends about $3.6 trillion per year on health care. I have no idea what UBI might cost, but I know we don’t have the tax revenues to get even close. Maybe the money printer can go brrrr a little bit faster.

Sure, if you pretend we aren't already paying for health care and don't credit that against the price of MFA, MFA looks awfully expensive!

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 10:14 PM UTC

misiti3780 wrote: post #86

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…

Post by cwhiz » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #181

cwhiz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all. The US spends about $3.6 trillion per year on health care. I have no idea what UBI might cost, but I know we don’t have the tax revenues to get even close. Maybe the money printer can go brrrr a little bit faster.

> You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all. How in the world to other countries pay for Healthcare? The USA has tax revenue per capita very similar to New Zealand, the UK, Italy and Canada - all of which have good Healthcare for all. [1] The USA has more tha…

Post by wongarsu » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #497

mgreenleaf wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is really insightful. Misallocation of resources is what eventually brings down economies. There are lots of bright people around, but corruption can drain a lot of talent.

Perhaps the problem is that the government has too much of a role in allocating resources in our economy as it stands. Maybe the military-industrial complex had some cool things for the first couple decades of its existence, but as the decades went on, it became a rusty, slower version of its old self as bureaucratic creep and complacency set in. Now it seems hard to disrupt that, like what tends to happen in the non…