You misunderstand the purpose the F35- it is a jobs and pork program first and foremost, like SLS. It has the side benefit of keeping people trained to build this sort of thing, so SpaceX can hire them.
We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.
It's more than just a jobs program too. It's a reelection plan for senators/house members.
Look at what states and districts get these big DoD contracts and then look at what committees the congressmen/women are sitting on.
They approve plans that benefit them then direct the funds right into their districts so they can campaign on it.
I mean it's not the worst form of corruption but it's pretty shitty when you realize how our infrastructure and defense is designed around congressional districts instead of what is best for our country.
Grid infrastructure and rail lines jump to my mind often in these discussions.
I am reminded how we got existing rail line through much of the U.S. 19th century land acquisition for private parties who built that infrastructure is easy to spin as a travesty. In many cases it was blatant corruption. And the legacy lasts to this day. All of that land and infrastructure is still privately owned.
Fast forward to today. Is it right that the government should build infrastructure to compete with existing private businesses? Should they build and operate grocery stores? Automakers? ISPs? Textile factories?
There used to be some idea that the government should not compete with private industry. That idea is much murkier more recently.
But if you want to build public infrastructure to compete with the likes of Union Pacific, shouldn't you start by nationalizing the likes of Union Pacific?
See also USPS for more interesting examples of public vs private enterprise. Imagine that the USPS contracted local delivery and long-haul transfer. Imagine that a local mom and pop could bid on a local contract. Newspaper delivery bicycle contractors everywhere could double their money for little additional effort. Or FedEx/UPS/Amazon might really sharpen their pencils and win those contracts.
Re: USPS, I’m still waiting to hear the interesting part.
The USPS is legally obligated to deliver mail to every household, 6 days a week. The private carriers don’t come anywhere close to meeting that level of service. Most of the US is incredibly sparsely populated. There won’t be bicycle contractors lining up to deliver mail up the Adirondacks or across the Great Plains.
How would a network of private interests handing off parcels between each other under government regulation deliver better service than a single organization with the problem already solved thanks to 200 years of domain expertise?
This isn't an argument for privatization, but the proposal from the OP are not the same as full an open free market. You still have the USPS responsible for ensuring delivery to the long-tail routes. That just gets bid out (probably at a higher cost that delivery occurs for today). These are the kinds of bids companies like Halliburton take.
I'm not in favor of this approach, either we have a really free market (with some limited regulation for things like anti-fraud) or you have the government manage the service. These public-private partnerships just seem to be grift programs write large. Let's not push for more corporatism. If there is already a private market, then sure, have the government bid for private contracts within that market. Otherwise you have companies whose full-time roles is figure out how to squeeze more money out of government, and they lobby hard to do so, often with much success (at filching taxpayers)
The USPS does not deliver mail to every household. Nor do they deliver universally six days a week.
Where I live, USPS doesn't deliver to any household, but UPS and FedEx do.
But that is beside the point. Any party that contracted with the USPS would be obligated to meet the terms of the contract.
You might be surprised at who lines up to deliver mail up the Adirondacks. One of the virtues of a free market is the amazing ingenuity of entrepreneurs to meet market demand in the most efficient ways. The free market provides the motivation for such ingenuity whereas non-profit single-player monopolies often don't.
But still this misses my interest in this discussion. I think there is an optimum balance for publicly-owned infrastructure and privately-owned service providers. But that balance is not always obvious and usually not stable. I think there is great benefit in continuous discussion of the pros and cons to monitor and adjust how we leverage the strengths of both sides of the equation.
I like the idea of "build more rail lines." But it takes more that four words to make this happen. If you are just trying to replace the pork of military spending, then perhaps the details don't matter. Just trade one corruption for another. Let the power brokers beat each other up clamoring for the money.
But if you're making such radical changes to the redistribution of wealth, why not have some thoughtful discussion that people can reference for the next 100s of years. Who are the Lockes and Keynes of 2021? I know they exist. Let's bring them out in public discussion.
>Fast forward to today. Is it right that the government should build infrastructure to compete with existing private businesses? Should they build and operate grocery stores? Automakers? ISPs? Textile factories?
There is absolutely nothing wrong with building public infrastructure considering in many cases the infrastructure in question would form a natural monopoly. However, car manufacturers, grocers, textile factories have lots of competition. Those markets are very healthy.
American ISPs fail to provide good service even in wealthy locations. Google had to stop their gigabit fiber rollout. That's definitively a failing market where a baseline of service should be provided by governments. Private companies can always provide superior service and charge for it.
But all these companies need a government that does compete with them the moment they stop innovating and start rent seeking, it's really best for them.
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-monopolized private sector.
Lots of us would love to believe this, and yet what does the unrestrained private sector churn out? Ad networks, app addiction, gig economy, throwaway culture, urban sprawl, climate apathy... hardly a winner.
SpaceX is everyone's favourite private sector success story, but they're basically just a younger, leaner version of Lockheed— surviving off of NASA and doing what they're contracted to do.
I don't think the private sector is ever going to do ambitious things like build rail infrastructure all on its own, nor is the current PPP model necessarily the way either, but maybe there is some option out there to get things done which looks like the bakeoff that NASA held with CRS.
> SpaceX is everyone's favourite private sector success story, but they're basically just a younger, leaner version of Lockheed— surviving off of NASA
In 2020, SpaceX did 26 launches. Only six of those had NASA as a customer. The rest were a mix of US military, commercial customers, foreign governments (Argentina and South Korea), and Starlink. Even if you add up NASA and US military, that's still only nine out of 26 with the US government as the customer.
So while no doubt SpaceX does benefit from NASA's business, it is now only a minority.
Sure, and legacy launch providers do business with the private sector also, but none of them could have been bootstrapped without years of unprofitable R&D on the public's dime.
There is no VC who would have accepted a pre-SpaceX pitch for low cost launches, Starlink, or any of the rest of it. It would have been straight up "lol Iridium amirite, get out."
> There is no VC who would have accepted a pre-SpaceX pitch for low cost launches, Starlink, or any of the rest of it. It would have been straight up "lol Iridium amirite, get out."
SpaceX was funded by Elon Musk and later, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund. Starlink has been in part funded by a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity. And since then further funding rounds have been raised.
The DFJ and Founder's Fund investment was before SpaceX had any substantial NASA development contracts, let along their 2008 $1.6 billion launch contract.
Interesting, though I don't know if any of that really disproves my point. Musk's own money was a self-investment; he didn't need to pitch anyone for that. Jurvetson was involved with Tesla prior, and Thiel was obviously connected through PayPal.
Until the Dragon demo flights in 2012-2013, I think SpaceX would have been hard pressed to raise significant capital from anyone other than Elon's friends. I think the fact that so many private space companies have one or more wealthy benefactors bears this out (Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Armadillo to a lesser extent).
There's a wide gulf between "only a few people with the right skills and personal connections can bootstrap a space company" and "none of them could have been bootstrapped without years of unprofitable R&D on the public's dime"
The missing bits is that they bootstrapped after a lot of heavy lifting was done on public dime, and then landed a crucial bunch of govt contracts way before first succesful draco launch, the same kind of contracts that the previous private contractors also take.
I'd love to come up with examples as I type this to you from an open source web browser on a smart phone that contains more functionality than $20K worth of equipment did with more processing power than what all of NASA had in the 70s and access to more information than President Reagan had in the 80s and a faster throughput than anyone had in the 90s all hosted on a self made website by a startup platform helped fund and inspire hundreds of successful companies as I wait for my sushi dinner to be delivered to my door and take a break from my telecommute to work to hack out this absent minded response to you, but I'm drawing a blank.
Another Musk inspired project is the hyperloop and of course the Boring tunnels for electric cars. These are novel transportation solutions that solve for the problem in a more creative way than simply "build more light rails". That's the type of stuff a government will never come up with. There needs to be a creative maestro with massive capital. Musks are rare in the world but they certainly can move in a more agile way when they do appear.
I would also argue, telecommuting has solved for some of the transportation problems alone. Think of how many less cars are on the road as a result of work from home.
The thing that's different between Boring/Hyperloop and SpaceX is that SpaceX's entire business case is built on the cost benefit of landing and reusing a rocket, an idea for which the napkin math was obvious and in the end turned out to be extremely feasible but which legacy providers had been unwilling to even try.
Boring/Hyperloop don't have an idea like this. Boring's pitch is using conventional TBMs but making it cheaper by digging a smaller-diameter tunnel than the other guy. Does that meet the requirements? New subway systems are also reducing tunnel diameter by using LRVs instead of heavy rail cars... is there an actual innovation here?
Hyperloop is full of practicality issues, and addresses none of the real problems that are barriers to high speed mass transit projects today— specifically the fights over rights of way and station locations. The fact that it was initially pitched in 2013 as a system for moving around private automobiles should tell you a lot about how much understanding there is of the first principles of transportation— it wasn't until years later that this was acknowledged and corrected [1]. It would be like someone proposing an airline where each plane carries 10 cars instead of 400 passengers ("so convenient, you just drive right on board!")— it doesn't matter how fast the trains are, 840 passengers per hour for a Hyperloop would be a complete nonstarter when a normal subway does 40k/hr.
Maybe Boring/Hyperloop will end up pivoting into something worthwhile, but at the moment there is good reason for skepticism.
> The thing that's different between Boring/Hyperloop and SpaceX is that SpaceX's entire business case is built on the cost benefit of landing and reusing a rocket, an idea for which the napkin math was obvious and in the end turned out to be extremely feasible but which legacy providers had been unwilling to even try.
The cost of reusing a rocket has not been proven to be cheaper than building a new rocket. Consider factors like the inability to reuse the entire rocket, the reduced payload. At best you can break even. Unless you somehow reuse the entire rocket and do 100 flights with the same rocket the savings are meager.
This isn't something new. The space shuttle suffered from the same issues. Building new shuttles was almost the same cost and less risky.
I think it's pretty obvious that the current gen F9s are way more reusable and with way less refurbishment than the Shuttle ever was, even with the disposable second stage. But yeah, there are limitations, which is part of why FH is effectively cancelled in favour of just flying those payloads on a disposable booster.
But now that the basic principle has been proven, really leaning into it is part of the point of Starship— a new clean sheet design that is built for full reusability from the get go.
He just took the 100 year old vac train concept and repackaged it. Back in his original pitch he constantly said and laughed how easy it is. Once the years went by he slowly backed off from every promise and ultimately reduced his involvement to 0.
> of course the Boring tunnels for electric cars.
He promised to make tunnel boring cheaper, yet his only tunnel costs exactly as much as every other tunnel. He constantly advertises 150mph travel when the tunnel isn't even long enough to reach that speed. Have you seen the tunnel? It's so tiny you can't even open your doors if you get stuck in there. If even a single car fire starts in that tunnel everyone in the tunnel will die.
Cars themselves are pretty wasteful in terms of space and the way they rearrange the urban landscape. The concept of the Boring tunnel actually sounds like someone in 1894 wanting better spaces for horse carriages, except even more wasteful in this case.
> SpaceX ... surviving off of NASA and doing what they're contracted to do
Really this is more similar to VC investment where NASA funded it so they could get a return (better launches), but the future is that a probably large percentage of launches will be for commercial purposes (~50% of 2022 launches are for Starlink).
The elephant in the room is that military budget has to keep going up ("support the troops", create jobs and satisfy lobbyists) but there is no good goal to work towards. Great things happened in the 1940s to 70s because there were clear enemies and clear steps to take to gain and keep superiority. Today the US has a military budget three times bigger than that of the next largest spender, and everything necessary to fulfill the current challenges already exists and is in operation. So you spend the rest to prepare for the future, but with no external pressure to do so fast or efficiently.
Boring! How am I supposed to get reelected and campaign contributions without cool dream pictures? Infrastructure is just something you say, Pork is what you do.
Fear of terrorists sells better than fear of ice storms.
Especially for the states (and representatives) that the ice storm is 100 year. Dams fail, and when they fail, they don't affect the people that didn't want to live near a dam.
I’ve often wondered if it’s a similar incentive misalignment with executives and politicians that helps ignore these low frequency events.
CEOs are graded quarter-to-quarter and politicians every 2-4 years. Low probability events (plane crashes, infrastructure failures, etc.) may not ever happen during their tenure, incentivizing them to defund preparing for them to favor other programs, understanding full well they’re bound to occur
Defence equipment isn’t useless. In the event of war it becomes essential. Spending has to continue on these programmes in peacetime to retain capability.
Communism had a great many failings, but they did allocate a lot of money to infrastructure and science.
But what real communism did isn't even relevant here, I'm pretty sure GP is talking about imaginary communism in the sense that anything that is good for the general population is somehow called communism in US politics.
In any economic system political aspects have a tendency to reduce the information available to consumers and producers. This is often done with laudable intent leading to terrible outcomes. In Soviet Communism the information feedback loop was so disconnected it resembled the theory of an AI "paperclip apocalypse"[1].
From 0:
The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products.
Whaling, like every other industry in the Soviet Union, was governed by the dictates of the State Planning Committee of the Council of Ministers, a government organ tasked with meting out production targets. In the grand calculus of the country’s planned economy, whaling was considered a satellite of the fishing industry. This meant that the progress of the whaling fleets was measured by the same metric as the fishing fleets: gross product, principally the sheer mass of whales killed.
The real solution involves a hybrid system where the government supports a baseline of services. Mostly food, water, shelter, electricity, roads, etc. The private sector's responsibility is to provide superior service above and beyond what the government is doing.
Pure communists think that the government baseline should be enough for everyone, even if it means inferior service.
Pure capitalists think that superior service should be enough for everyone, even if it is unaffordable.
The obvious answer is to find the middle ground and reap the benefits of both.
I personally don't think that the F-35 is falling into that. A jobs program fighter jet doesn't really make sense since it is not a long term investment with a direct return. It's more of an insurance policy against an imaginary foe. Yes, you have jets but unless you use them to conquer land or defend yourself there is no direct return on investment.
>real solution involves a hybrid system where the government supports a baseline of services
As Inread that I think: basic services are too important to miss the feedback loop and become the equivalent of universal low grade government cheese. At the same time, maybe the poor quality of government provided baseline goods and services would incentivize people to attain better, which is an improvement over direct subsidies which act like high marginal taxes when they are reduced in response to income growth. Unfortunately a significant number of basic needs are commodities, such as cheese, and are subject to mismeasure and goal seeking instead of value seeking, similar to the Soviet whaling industry of the 1960s/70s.
The F-35: similar to SLS and Soviet whalers, political considerations are weighted higher than value ones. The F-35 also has the challenge of being developed at a transitional period, in the late morning of a period that will be marked by low observability, human optionality, and high speed and precision impact. The F-35s story isn’t over yet and like other troubled weapons systems there is a lower than likely chance it may blossom like the M-16. It has already passed the Sgt York stage and is in the a state where like the BFV it will find its place within doctrine and eventually battle, or not. I think it is too soon to tell.
Walls and bullets too, don't forget that. Communists were not shy to kill their own people looking to escape the "wonders" of their system.
Barbed wire on the borders, bullets shot without warning at swimmers trying to cross freezing rivers, then families held hostage and tortured to punish and warn escapees - oh Communism was such an awesome experience, I can only wish it from the bottom of my heart to all its apologists.
Some years back a socialist told me that the Berlin Wall was to keep westerners out of East Berlin. I told him that I'd visited the Wall in 1969, passed through it and had a tour of East Berlin, seen the Wall museum, been on the platforms overlooking the wall, had East German guards wave at me, etc.
In a sense it is both good and bad that the Wall has been erased, people forget what it was like. Nobody should forget.
Nice propaganda there, most post soviet countries still havent recovered. Hell i aint a communist but most of these countries did better under communism if only because the US wasnt there to leech off them
> had higher standards of living while they didn’t
That’s debatable. Might be true in 1910-1920, but by the end of the last century all communist states with planned economy have failed their economies, catastrophically so, with direct consequences on standards of living. China’s the only exception, were lucky to have smart enough people in power to pivot towards market economy, and execute it relatively well.
I presume the parent poster is referring to things like housing cost assistance (called Section 8 in the US), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), social security, Medicare/Medicaid government assisted health coverage programs, disability financial assistance programs and other socioeconomic-hardship assistance programs.
Not to mention funding schools, universities, or government research grants.
That's among the things that get called communism or socialism here in the US.
The entire point of a government is to provide services; including but not limited to transport infrastructure, contract dispute settlement (civil courts), protection of life and property (police, criminal justice system, sewers, firefighting, public health, etc.) and education. If all of that is socialism then I don't know a country that isn't socialist. Maybe Somalia in the 90s. Of course words can mean whatever we want, but that definition doesn't sound useful.
> The entire point of a government is to provide services
Of course. That doesn't mean the services it provides aren't socialism. For a country on balance to be socialist, more than have of its goods and services would need to be provided by the government.
> that definition doesn't sound useful.
It's exactly what socialism is:
"a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
The first definition when googling "definition of socialism". Government is the means by which the community effects socialism.
The interesting thing is that it seems to be an unfixable and systemic problem. You could have someone come in and try to clean it up but then they'd face the backlash of the entire system that has been built on and benefited from the corruption.
Exactly... this is in fact the overall problem with the US government. Start by fixing that, and then the smaller systems like military procurement that depend on corruption higher up will become fixable.
How can we create new incentives to discourage this behavior and to encourage infrastructure projects that provide jobs as well as create superlinear value?
The easiest answer is probably public financing of elections.
Because Members of Congress basically need to continuously raise money, there’s always an incentive to spread the wealth among congressional districts.
For the F35, I can think of one company in a rural area who fabricates some metal component for the project. Because of the way it is contracted, acceptance standards, etc they sell it for something like 50x it’s value of you were to order it, and whomever gets the part spends even more to receive it.
Planes are small and have lots of parts, so they suffer more from these issues. We’re still ok at building warships, because you can’t build a shipyard in some coal town in Kentucky.
Public financing would help as a component with corporate lobbyists but pork barrels wouldn't be affected. I use the term with a slight distinction - pork barrels are for parochial voter influnce while an "industrial complex" involves a company's interest in exchange for political benefits. The two may overlap if what helps the company also gets votes in itself. A stereotypical but perhaps unfair example of both (as I am uncertain of actual lobbying in the period) would be Detroit in its heyday - it would have a sizeable base of factory workers locally and large connected auto companies.
The problem of pork barrels is that it gets them votes directly by making things worse for everybody else in exchange for local benefits. Disproportionate representation is what enables it as a tactic or at least makes it more disastrous. Something which serves the interests of 30% of the population is closer to benefitting the whole than one for 3% of the population.
I would agree that it isn't magic. Keep in mind that one man's pork is another's bacon. Pork is part of the political process.
In the modern environment, material pork barrel spending is at the corporate/national level. Most congressional districts due to gerrymandering or demographics are very secure... the era of political machines handing out turkeys is gone.
If the craven corruption around defense contracting was only 80% as wasteful as it is today, you could give every member of congress a substantial slush fund to waste and still save money. Plus you would have working fighter jets that are able to compete with countries like Russia, that has a GDP equivalent to Texas but seems to be able to procure weapons.
We did: pork spending was mostly outlawed in 2011 (the F-35 dates from way before that). But as it turns out, the cure was almost as bad as the disease. Getting rid of pork has accelerated hyper-partisanship and dysfunctional gridlock, because without it there's no incentive to ever try to reach a deal with the other side instead of digging in on no-compromise radicalism to please your base.
Is there a longer discussion of this that you can link somewhere? I remember the phrase as a derogatory commonplace in adults' political discussion when I was a child, but the concept seems to have drifted out of the discourse since, and having now had my attention drawn to its absence I'd be interested to find out more about why.
There's definitely still pork. I mean, look at how many pet projects were included in Covid relief funding. Pork is the idea of stuffing an unrelated project to benefit your local district or state (and thus, the politician's reelection chances) into a bigger bill that is unrelated to that expense. Like the most famous one was the Alaskan "bridge to nowhere" that would have cost $400 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge
That dates to 2005, so you are not really contradicting grandparent's point that this was mostly outlawed in 2011 (and that this has accelerated hyperpartisanship by removing an incentive for compromise).
Grandparent never pointed to what law they were talking about. They just made an offhanded, unverified remark. I also pointed out that a lot superfluous pork was included in Covid funding. "Pork" was never outlawed. It's not even a formally defined thing. If you think politicians can't figure out how to wiggle pet projects into huge multi trillion dollar spending bills then you really ought to tune into C-Span more often.
This is the outdated proposal that didn't pass. But the current proposal is double this. I've tried to tune out politics for a while but you can be sure that pork is in a $1.9 trillion spending bill as sure as the sun rises.
Plus one state's useful new spending is 49 states' pork, meaning that it's always easy to label anything as being evidence of government waste and corruption. But earmarks served as a useful way for states to get federal involvement in local issues that otherwise would never see the light of day, so their loss not only reduced the ability to get major things done, but also to get even tiny things done.
Earmarks are supposedly coming back this year though.
I don't think it is possible to discourage federal contracts being awarded to the benefit of a particular state. If a state is home to a company with the expertise to complete a project the contract can't just be awarded to a another state that doesn't.
The best we could do is change the way contract funding is performed. Cost-plus pricing without an upper bound is a huge issue. This type of contract encourages bidders to bid low on cost and make up for it with project extensions.
Of course cost-plus is preferred by bidders as they can guarantee a minimum of profit since cost is already covered. However, fixed price contracts are better from the perspective of the government spending. The spend is known up front. It is up to the bidders to determine if they can make a profit or not.
Ideally the government shouldn't care if the bidder is making a profit. It is their duty to spend public funds frugally. Cost-plus makes it impossible to reign in contract spending without terminating the contract.
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 goals.
I keep seeing people say this. Maybe flying cars just don’t make sense? Wheels work really well when your engine dies. Have you seen people drive in 2d space? You want to add a z axis? What’s the efficiency of a small plane? Surely not better than a Prius.
The average person does virtually no regular maintenance / checking of their car, even basics like tyre pressures and oil levels not being checked regularly, happy to leave as much as they possibly can for an annual check at the garage. There’s a shocking amount of people also happy to drive around ignoring warning lights flashing.
Imagine that scenario with tons of metal that could fall out of the sky when something fails.
Very soon, cars won't really let you do anything without ID/phone number/paired phone/key serial number, gps lock, a full working complement of vehicle sensors, and a network connection to report all of the above in realtime to people you don't know (who are of course obligated to provide all of that data to military intelligence at any time, without a warrant or probable cause).
There isn't really an issue with that sort of lack-of-maintenance stuff where we're headed. It won't be long until cars either totally refuse to operate in extreme circumstances (due to manufacturer liability), or fall back to some impossible-to-ignore state like Tesla's "limp mode". Tire pressure/oil life being good examples of easily-detectable liability issues that no sane manufacturer would let slide.
The current state of affairs is simply because remote monitoring was expensive/infeasible. Most vehicles today ship with an always-on cellular modem in them.
Even my little 4K pocket gimbal camera won't operate without phoning home to "activate", same for all the drones sold by the same company. Flying cars would be sending telemetry from all local sensor measurements to HQ at pretty much all times.
In other words, can't afford to own/operate a car.
Note, that's not a put down on said people. I think it's a shame such situations exist. But, if you can't afford to pay for insurance/gas/maintenance, then you can't afford the vehicle.
But, regarding flying cars: I absolutely do not want more people operating airborne spinny death machines capable of destroying considering we've already established many people don't/can't perform basic maintenance on a much simpler and safer mode of transportation. It wouldn't go well.
> In other words, can't afford to own/operate a car.
Or they know it isn’t worth fixing.
I had an engine light on for about 20000km, and sold the vehicle like that, because it wasn’t worth fixing. One competent mechanic talked me into trying to fix it before I tried to sell it, and that wasted $1000.
Another friend had an engine light on, and the workshop said that happened with that model sometimes and it wasn’t worth fixing.
Both of us could afford to fix the vehicles. That said, if an oil light comes on I stop the vehicle immediately.
That’s a dangerous mindset unless you’re actively pulling the check engine codes daily or more frequently. That one light represents many possible codes, and in all cars I’ve seen it’s on or off instead of, say, on and brighter.
The check engine light is a UI problem. LCDs are cheap now, it should be able to display the real problem. At least with a numeric code on the panel that you can look up in the owner's manual.
Where exactly do you live? In the US it's not common to have more than an aesthetic checkover of a car during inspection. There's not necessarily any reason to clear those lights, and in general you can avoid fixing relatively expensive things that do not prevent the car from running outright.
Contrast to my understanding of Germany's system, where your car must be aesthetically pleasing to the inspector.
Im confused. Most US states if not all require emissions testing at each inspection. Break lights or engine lights are automatic fails. Suffucient tire tred, working wipers etc.
I've never heard of an engine light being a fail, even with emissions test. You could still pass despite whatever the dash says.
But, what some people have been talking about makes sense now. If you get a bad manufacturer who lights up the dash for everything then they're forcing you to spend money.
The number of people who need cars to survive is far greater than the number of people who can afford to fix every nuisance fault. So long as it can keep rolling and comply with whatever minimum safety requirements actually get enforced, people will run it.
But also, the fact that it was impractical is itself a metaphor -- it turns out many of the things they thought would be cool and futuristic were actually impractical when you get to the details.
Sure, but that's besides the point. It's sort of like that meme about "The World If <my pet policy was implemented>" (example: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/394/070/7f2...). It features over the top flying cars and infrastructure because it's trying to make a point.
When one says "we could have had flying cars, but instead we got X", that's the underlying concept. Whether or not the flying car is "practical" is kind of besides the point. Either that, or we need to find some other generally agreed upon term to represent an actually practical but futuristic invention that represents human progress (or the lack thereof).
The maths are about right for MPG. Time is what you (might) save. I'll get around that at cruise - 135kts or 155mph @ ~ 10gal/hour. Better fuel usage if you slow down a bit. Tempted to say if you slowed down to max Prius speeds on the autoban, the C182 might be more fuel efficient. I'm sure it gets 50mpg at 75mph, but doubt it gets that at 109mph.
Here in Norway we have a lot of fjords with small communities all over. The roads are narrow, twisty and often at high risk of falling rocks[1].
Due to the many roads and relatively few people using a lot of these high-risk roads, maybe flying cars would be a more cost-effective option here... would possibly also reduce the need for expensive ferries[2].
Top Gear did a race from Italy to the UK. Clarkson driving a Bugatti Veyron, Hammond and May flying in a Cessna 182. They couldn't fly over the mountains, and May wasn't qualified to fly at night. It didn't save a lot of time.
Not sure which bits you could cut with a flying car - the safety checks, air traffic control involvement, runways, refuelling stop, qualifications/licenses, but it would have to be a lot to make a large difference.
The reason you don't get flying cars, is the very same, you cant make a lot of other technology. People will want to invent the flying car parking house. And they kind of did - on the 11 of September 2001. You can not hand technology over a certain level to a infantile (nicer sound then retarded) species. Its that simple.
Its already madness to allow wealthy citizens into space. Tesla and Amazon are one freight flight to space, filled with tungsten rods, away from becoming there own nation - with non-nuclear deterrence. That somebody - whoever it is, out there is getting humankinds tech progress to a grinding halt, is a blessing in disguise. We actually do not even get a honest discussion about the risks on this path.
Problem is though, we always scienced our way out of our problems with our volatile nature. Tap some energy here, create some fertilizer there, oversupply solves the problems we do not want to solve. Exponential supply for exponential unchecked demand.
Enter social tech- in theory we could limit ourselves, could curb our demands, could become starving monks in the desert, hypnotized by coloured lights playing across enchanted stones. This seems to be the road we need to take, for the other road to be traverse-able.
I do not get it- why is exponential powerful tech, such a serious matter if somebody wants a nuke (Iran, North-Korea) or even just proliferate per-existing ones, considered a serious issue. But once a entity with clear interests in venturing outside the sphere of law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Breakup) and the monetary/organizational power to acquire such tech, ventures towards something similar classifiable, such a threat is a joking matter?
Also if you stream a movie tonight, like millions others, who just have a roof, food and a flickering screen that sand in the dessert might be very fine integrated - and already have gotten everywhere. So nobody is asking you or me, might as well discuss the scenarios.
OK, SpaceX applies to launch an orbital bombardment cannon and launch approval is denied. That was a good day, next.
OK, SpaceX ignores the denial and launches anyway. Elon Musk threatens to destroy Washington DC to gain independence for ... some territory somewhere. Unclear where, or why he'd want that since he already has enormous wealth and influence and doesn't need to run his own military to keep it. The United States arrests Elon Musk and seizes all of SpaceX with overwhelming military might. The end.
Is that really as threatening as North Korea developing nuclear weapons?
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 of research dollars available to anyone with a Ph.D and some grant writing abilities. It's absolutely possible to make a good career out of being an inventor and getting a government to flip the bill on it.
The issue is that we've reach the point in society where technological progress in incremental. Instead of three guys inventing a revolutionary device like the transistor, we have thousands of people working on making marginal improvements to battery chemistry.
Every industry is like that now. Something like four guys entirely designed the original small block Chevy motor, but today, GM has like 400 people designing just fuel system components for the ancestor of that engine. Innovation, it seems, is O(n^2).
This is studied by economists!
"Growth is slowing down at the same time as we’re spending ever more money on research and development. So what that tells us is it’s just taking more and more dollars of R&D to increase growth, or to increase output, to keep growth at a reasonable rate. And the only way to tie these together is it’s just getting harder and harder to find new ideas."
> And there's plenty of research dollars available to anyone with a Ph.D and some grant writing abilities
Do tell.
NIH paylines (i.e., the percentage of grants funded) are in the teens, with some institutes at/near single digits. NSF is a bit better, but the awards are much smaller. I don't think DARPA, CDMRP, (etc) have explicit Paylines, but the programs are very competitive as well.
This isn't entirely true. The US subsidizes military costs for all of our allies. It costs a lot, and a huge amount of funds go to that.
There are parts that are like jobs programs, and the contractors intentionally drive up costs as part of their business model, but there are also real expenses to maintaining stability across the parts of the world where our military operates.
>>> The US subsidizes military costs for all of our allies.
Speaking as one of those allies... not really. Often times US allies spend money they really don't want to in order to keep the US happy. Canada and the UK probably wouldn't have invaded Afghanistan if not for their obligations as US allies. That certainly wasn't cheap. Canada is soon to replace its fighter fleet. Will it buy to cheaper Saab Grippen? Or will it feel obligated to buy the 35, a US program that Canada has paid into (aka subsidized) for many years without actually receiving any aircraft?
This argument would be more persuasive if more countries actually met their recommended NATO spend. In reality it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Take for instance Germany. The federal republic increased their spend to $63.8b last year but that's still a shortfall of ~$27b relative to what a 2% spend would be.
Aggressive estimates (above official estimates) of the UK's (a similar sized ally) spending on Afghanistan in 2011m put the total figure at $26b for 10 years.
The cumulative shortfall in NATO contributions for Germany over that period is more than 10 times greater than the entire invasion and continued operations in Afghanistan during that period.
And that argument would be more persuasive if so much NATO spend wasn't funnelled back to the US in both direct and indirect ways.
The UK has Trident and was supposed to be buying F-35s. A number of UK military and civilian aerospace projects were either cancelled (various examples) or crippled commercially (Concorde) because of US interference.
The Afghanistan and Iraq misadventures are still causing significant political costs across Europe. Meanwhile the US has failed to protect the EU against some obvious and immediate threats, including political interference. (Although to be fair it hasn't even protected itself - which is a different problem.)
In any case - the US really isn't a credible victim of exploitation in any of this.
The "recommended NATO spend" is just another way the US is costing its allies money. Sure, in 2019 Germany only spent $50bn (1.3% of GDP). But if the hypothetical enemy is Russia with a military budget of $65bn, then what's the point of spending $80bn? Especially if you are in a treaty that ensures you don't have to defend yourself alone.
The U.S. has no interest in NATO beyond keeping Europe free. Don't think for a second Russia wouldn't pull a Crimea in the Baltics or Poland if NATO were dissolved. And then what, the European Parliament will suddenly get its act together and figure out how to counteract a superpower? Any attempt to do so will last precisely as long as it takes Russia to shut down energy supplies to Germany.
That’s a bit of a stretch... shutting down energy supplies to Central/Western Europe would cost Russia more than it would Germany considering that energy exports are 70% of their total exports and generate over 50% of budget revenue.
Besides there are no good reasons for Russia to occupy the baltic states (or atleast the cost would considerably outweigh anything they might gain from it). Subsidizing Crimea is already very expensive and controlling the baltics (no even speaking about Poland) would cost considerably more (both due to lost income and because they’d have to dedicate considerable resources policing the local populations which (unlike Crimea) don’t want them to be there)
It may be a stretch that Russia has no good reason to occupy the Baltic states, but maybe not. The reason to occupy Eastern Ukraine was that a lot of Russians live there. Guess where else a lot of Russian live.
I think you are probably right. But this is the kind of thing where being wrong is potentially catastrophic. And the world can change faster than you can adjust your defense posture.
Note that I did not mention germany, rather the US and canada, while the OP said "all of our allies". No two countries are ever the same. And NATO /= USA. There are lots of other organizations which would quality a country as an "ally" of the US other than NATO. Canada and the UK are linked to the US through numerous other organizations (eg NORAD).
Because the Eurofighter can't carry the nuclear bombs that the US has stationed in Germany, and Germany wants to be the one providing the pilots and aircraft that deliver them.
And because the US, needed to certify the free falling nuclear bombs on aircraft, signaled that this certification would take way longer on non US aircraft.
Which is, more or less, the main reason.
EDIT: I think the F/A-18 is a great choice and one hell of a plane. The other options, a potentially obsolete F-15 and a maybe delivered in time F-35 aren't that great.
Read more about petro-dollar scheme. Basically US provides military services to oil producers in exchange for global tax. This is only possible if US is able to retain their military position. So every dollar you think is being subsidized to allied countries is in fact paid back with lots of premium from all countries - both allies and enemies.
Petro-dollar is not about US dependences on oil producers. It is the other way. It is about forcing all countries to using dollars to buy oil. This allows the US to sell dollars and charge for this in various ways. On the other hand it requires the US to keep military control of oil logistics. The advatege for allied oil producers it that they can trade oil more easily. You know - transferring billions of dollars over international sea in the form of oil requires a lot of support from military just to make it happen.
The "petrodollar" is just an urban myth verging on a conspiracy theory when talking about Iraq, the fact that oil is priced in dollars (and it isn't always) doesn't mean countries need to have dollars to buy oil, it's just a convenient and stable unit of account. You can use Euros to buy oil priced in dollars in the same way you can use Bitcoin to buy drugs priced in dollars.
> Basically US provides military services to oil producers in exchange for global tax. This is only possible if US is able to retain their military position.
The justification for foreign aid to Israel is always pretty much “but it’s OK because most of it comes back to us via arms sales”. Essentially billions of dollars of American taxpayer wealth transferred to defense contractors laundered through the IDF.
Israel stops Iran from blowing up or conquering the entire Middle East. Also, military intelligence. Also, the military industry is probably more beneficial to the US by being based there rather than being outsourced to China. I think the tax money given to weapons manufactures is paid back in double by tax. Also, you wouldn't want to fight wars with allies in Chinese planes. Hope this answers your concerns.
I am. They have sworn to destroy Israel and America. They are developing nuclear weapons to do so. They are funding proxy wars throught the Middle East. They are trying to gain control over syria, iraq, yemen etc. The irgc is probably the best funded terrorist organization in the world https://www.state.gov/foreign-terrorist-organizations/ . I'm afraid of Iran.
KSA, Syria, Kuwait,
and Turkiye probably have a lot more
to do with it than Israel.
Depends what you look for. Most visible, front- line opposition, certainly. But who does all the high profile bombing and intelligence raids and computer hacking? I think it's Israel.
-Iranians have always treated me
better than Israelis or myy my fellow
Americans have.
That's fine! I'm not asking you to hate Iranians, and i'm also not asking you to love Israelis.
What i am asking you is to recognize that Iran is a global threat to peace and that Israel can offer the best answer. I think that's true.
> They are funding proxy wars throught the Middle East.
Would it be more honorable if they just invaded countries in the Middle East instead, the way the US does? Of course the US is funding proxy wars as well.
If a beligerant and much more powerful country came across the Atlantic and invaded Mexico and Canada, I know I would want some nukes as a deterrant.
Iran couldn't even defeat Iraq during their brutal eight year conflict. Even if Iran wanted to take over the ME, there is zero chance they would be able to.
The parent comment is fine because it adheres to the site guidelines. The problem with your comments is that you've been breaking those guidelines. I don't think it's so hard to see the difference? Please use HN as intended or, if you don't want to, please don't post. We're trying for one type of site here and not another.
The only difference is Marshmallow ultra-zionist claim that Iran was the belligerent dangerous nation trying to “take over the entire region” in contrast to my far more reasonable argument that the only nation in this skirmish whom has done that is the good ol’ US of A.
Racist anti-Iranian propaganda is almost never moderated whereas anything pointing out the reality of the Iranian situation is flagged or down voted to hell.
You wield the site guidelines in bad faith when it comes to Iran.
You're reading too much into how we moderate this place. It's shallower than that. Certainly it isn't based on views about, of all things, Iran.
It sounds as if you may be assuming that it's enough to have a correct opinion. That's not enough. People who have correct opinions (or feel that they do) often believe that their correct opinion entitles them to post as destructively as they please. After all, they're right and their cause is righteous, so what else matters? The answer is that protecting the commons also matters. An internet forum may be a trivial thing, far less important than the fate of a country—nevertheless, those who participate here are responsible for taking care of it. What good does it do the people of Iran, or anyone, if this place goes down in flames?
> Racist anti-Iranian propaganda is almost never moderated whereas anything pointing out the reality of the Iranian situation is flagged or down voted to hell.
Most people who feel strongly about a topic feel that both the moderators and the community are biased against them on the topic. Those perceptions aren't reliable—they're conditioned by distorting factors, such as the tendency to put much greater weight on the posts one dislikes. We don't moderate comments about Iran in any particular way.
Some posts that ought to be moderated don't get moderated, but that's because we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. When people run into an egregious post on a topic that they feel strongly about, they tend to assume that we left it unmoderated on purpose, and jump (inaccurately) to the belief that we must tacitly agree with it. The likelier explanation is that we just didn't see it. Anyone can help with that by flagging the post or by emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN and using the site for political and/or ideological and/nationalistic battle? It's not what this place is for, and it destroys what it is for. You've been doing a lot of it, unfortunately.
Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing with your interpretation of Iranian history. I'm talking about a repeated pattern of breaking the site guidelines, which is not cool. We ban accounts that do that—we have to, because otherwise everyone starts flaming everyone and soon this place burns to a crisp.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. The intended spirit is thoughtful, curious conversation.
We really don't give a shit about that (though I hear you about raspberry pi, and it's refreshing that you didn't say Rust). We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck, or at least to stave off collapse for a little longer.
The irony is that this is why foreign aid never works. It's mostly spent on weapons and if there is no foe the government can just use the weapons to suppress its own population and thus ask for even more foreign aid.
Developed nations don't care because their defense contractors get the money.
I think that's the benefit gained from the very rich, whether 18th century lords or modern billionaires - they can get us out of those local maxima. I'm thinking of people like Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir humphrey davies, and Elon musk.
We already have flying cars. They're called helicopters. They're very expensive to operate, mainly because of the very high maintenance costs. Those high costs are due to the fundamental problem that helicopters cannot survive losing a blade.
blades are too expensive. We need a powerful new powerplant that can direct a stream of deficient energy in sufficient quantities to enable flight. Powerplant doesn't yet exist, and my energy converter doesn't, either. In the 50's it wasn't imagined that commanding computers would use so many resources, rather human ingenuity would be directed towards revolutionising existing technology. This is yet to materialise. Sad
"directed energy stream of sufficient quantity" sounds like a jet engine, which exists.
if you're proposing something more powerful than that... that sounds like a fantastic weapon. Someone get the Pentagon on the horn, let's get this shit funded!
With apologies to Larry Niven: "A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."
steam engines were replaced by oil, and then, the rulebook was rewritten when jets were invented. That was 80 years ago. Jets are old. We need to minimise the moving parts. To do so we need to increase the density of stored energy so more can be used. The answer is atoms. Not old fashioned uranium atoms, but fresh, new fusion reactors. They shall create not heat, but clean electricity. It is long overdue. Even professor calculus knew that the best way to get tintin to the moon was by using nuclear energy. We need to reinvent the plane, not make a better version.
Absolutely a giant jobs program, but, as importantly, it's a conservative-friendly jobs program.
Republicans (nominally) care about spending, but make an exception for defense. Democrats care less about spending, and are afraid of being attacked for being "weak on defense".
Neither party has any incentive to rein this sort of spending in, so they don't.
A flying car is the wrong solution. It’s equivalent to building a faster, much more dangerous horse.
The problem is:
1. People need to commute large distances
2. People need to go fast
It can be better solved by removing the majority of commutes and using very fast, efficient, underground mass transport systems to move people when they (rarely) need it.
I’d rather cities and VR were redesigned so the average person doesn’t usually need to go more than 5 kilometers in any direction on a given day.
More than that, thr SR-71 was purpose-built. That means fewer hands on thr steering wheel, and fewer compromises to achieve multiple missions.
The F-35, by comparison, was a platform vehicle, with the base suited to adapting to a variety of capabilities and missions. That means more voices demanding priority of features, more expensive engineering to get a variety of polygon pegs into the same round hole, and many first-of-its-kind features for a variety of ancillary tasks.
> The F-35, by comparison, was a platform vehicle, with the base suited to adapting to a variety of capabilities and missions. That means more voices demanding priority of features, more expensive engineering to get a variety of polygon pegs into the same round hole, and many first-of-its-kind features for a variety of ancillary tasks.
> No real surprise that it didn't work out.
For a humorous presentation of this, watch the movie Pentagon Wars:
Not really. The SR-71 was the final plane of an extended program called OXCART which created the A-12. The program was nominally to replace the U2, but even oxcart was within a large aircraft design plan. There was even a interceptor (YF-12) that was meant for shooting down Valkyrie-class mach3+ bombers. These aircraft were very similar to the 71, so similar that most people seeing them might not spot any difference. Any assessment of the 71's development costs is therefore very difficult.
"YF-12C: Fictitious designation for an SR-71 provided to NASA for flight testing. The YF-12 designation was used to keep SR-71 information out of the public domain."
The basic concept isn't even a terrible one. It was a reaction to the many functionally-overlapping aircraft that the various service branches were having designed and built. But it seems clear at this point that the F-35 tried to be too general purpose.
AND, the problem with F-35, as stated directly in the article, was not that we CANNOT build cool things, its that we didn't need something too fancy, and it became too fancy through add-ins that were not slated as requirements.
This is a fun talking point, but the reality is more complex. The fact that jobs and multi-state payouts are leveraged to ensure programs have political staying power does not mean that the whole shebang is just a corporate / political handout.
It just seems to be what people say when these programs fail, but I don't hear this said about programs that have succeeded.
> We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.
ARPA was always kind of a jobs program, but nonetheless it created the internet at the same time as NASA was putting a man on the moon, the government was successfully building the interstate highways and Bell Labs was Bell Labs instead of whatever it is now.
Today we get the F-35 and the Big Dig and whatever other money furnace du jour that consumes more resources than the space race but has yet to put a single human on Mars or make fusion work or cure cancer or whatever else things it could have done but hasn't.
Fusion in particular has never been funded in line with project requirements, we are significantly below projecting "fusion never" levels and that's exactly what we've gotten.
don't worry it just needs war to get there things going. Warfare drives all innovation. I can't think of anything major last century that wasn't developed for military uses. I think we will get another infusion of war in about 18 years when China will start blowing everyone out of antarctica. Government will carry on pretending to care about environment and proceed to release vast amounts of carbon in the South Pole. It's an entirely predictable conflict, yet only China will be partly prepared.
The pieces on the wargame board are going in place for a round one canceling out of 2B+ population between India, China and expect the thermal nuclear exchange to melt the snow on the high altitude mountainous region keeping them apart.
...a jobs and pork program first and foremost, like...
...everything in USA military.
Have we won a war in your parents' lifetimes? Have any of our many military misadventures accomplished any of the goals cited as justification? Has anyone in the Pentagon ever been fired for spending too much money? Does the Pentagon even have any idea what it spends on what?
And it isn’t just a domestic jobs program. Countries that agreed to buy the F35 were rewarded with subcontract work. There are at least a dozen partner countries.
I have always assumed this and the $500 toilet seats are just making room for black projects. There were no publicly visible budgets for the U2/F117 projects.
I had a friend who, many years ago, got a military contract to manufacture an item. I jokingly asked him if he was competing with $1200 hammers and $500 toilet seats and his response was "if you had any idea how much paperwork and red tape is involved in doing anything with the government you'd say that the $500 toilet seat was under-priced and the contractor probably lost money on every one."
My dad was involved in military aircraft purchasing.
It was very tricky to avoid getting in trouble.
Putting stuff out to bid was the main thing he managed. When possible he just went with previous winners as it cut down the paperwork needed.
Lot of times someone would come in really low on the bid, he knew the people and that it would be crap product. So lots of work to get higher bids approved.
Also apparently if you get a ride in the company limousine, the drivers have tons of juicy gossip.
In some places the cost to do a govt deal can be many multiplates easily (and totally justified) normal cost.
The hammer is not actually $1,200. The paperwork can easily be.
Do you have McBride Principles stuff done and documented? Have you trained your staff on McBride principles if they might purchase supplies, documented it and maintained proper documentation (this is about something in Northern Ireland which has very little to do with buying snacks for a kids program). Repeat x100. Where I am the ethnicity / race / national origin stuff is huge, and the different agencies don't have a common set of labels. So you are stuck asking everyone very personal questions even they don't understand. I mean, for ethnicity you are one thing, for race there is another set of labels, so you have to ask them the same race question 4 times under each random set of labels that are being used, for national origin another set etc.
The actual quality of your hammer? Never tested. The details on the paperwork - lots of folks looking and nitpicking. Some of this just starts as a resolution at some level, that gets added on and added on over and over. So some politician will say McBride principles are great. 2 years later a contract analyst or internal auditor asks, how are we documenting / demonstrating compliance with this requirement. They then push their vendors to train staff involved in purchasing on the principles. Then they want documentation of that training. Each one in isolation is a small waste, but at scale it's a monumental waste.
What's even funnier, stuff stays forever. There are requirements in contracts to hand out old IRS forms (W-5) for Advance EITC - that program is long gone, but you still have to hand out the forms - and tell staff that if they fill them out and submit them nothing will happen. Sure builds staff faith in govt efficiency.
You can't even argue this stuff, I used to try and it's a brick wall.
I can't stand it, but if you can push paper and have some political pull it's a gravy train, because cost / quality is so low on the basis of selection list. This tends to attract the wrong type of company (ie, scammers get a lot further than they should, and companies delivering good product don't).
Basically it's the same PITA when it comes to getting things countersigned, approved etc. for spending $200 in parts as it is for spending $2000 in parts. So might as well order in bulk.
I don't know about hammers but I don't know who on earth is willing to pay this much on a manual crimping tool other than governments looking for certified tools.
Also the Air Force admitting it is a failure proves nothing, since the reason it’s a mess is because the US Govt were trying to make one airframe for many customers, weren’t they? One customer, even one collaborator, being upset doesn’t mean the program has admitted anything.
We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.