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Why are people surprised by this? It seems so naive to think they would be upfront with their massive secret, dark projects.
by some_account 8y ago
Why are people surprised by this? It seems so naive to think they would be upfront with their massive secret, dark projects.
- 6nf 8y agoI hope most of the money goes into high tech secret projects but I suspect a lot of it is just paying off dictators with pallets full of cash.
- mtgx 8y agoThe whole "military investments have helped tech so much!" is so overhyped. If you had put the same amount of money into research grants, you would've obtained 100x the commercial inventions we eventually got mainly by accident from the military.
- analognoise 8y agoReal tech (hardcore stuff: chips, systems, radios, satellites, supercomputers, etc). If you mean the latest subscription service for cat videos (or "like Uber, but for..." type trash) then no, the military doesn't help with those things.
- petra 8y agoTo be fair, OP talked about research grants , not VC for crap.
- maxander 8y agoBecause trillion. If that’s true, that’s not just some extra secret projects to break all encryption and build a secret moonbase- it would mean that the US government was secretly printing a quantity of cash roughly equal to its own GDP, indicating that the dollar would be worth a fraction of its apparent value (if anything) and making a total economic collapse of Western civilization a virtual necessity. It merits a bit of surprise. However, looking into the .gov report where they’re getting this from, it looks like the “21 trillion” figure is the total of all adjustments both up and down, to any part of the budget sheet- sloppy accounting is being done, but the net “adjustment” (the amount of money being unilaterally summoned from unclear sources due to Pentagon malarkey) is merely (!) in the hundred-millions or billions.