5 ms·

I don't look like a hippie, but I totally subscribe to the idea of "make love, not war". I imagine what the possibilities would be if we funded general non-mil

by blunte 6y ago

I don't look like a hippie, but I totally subscribe to the idea of "make love, not war". I imagine what the possibilities would be if we funded general non-military projects with the kind of money that goes into the military. Trillions have been spent on wars or war preparation, and of course the net result is worsening for humanity. What if instead that money were spend on helping humanity? Do we really need a conflict to be willing to stand behind an expense? Now in the case of AR, most of our lives are not lacking because we don't have AR headsets. But there are a lot of workplace (and entertainment) situations where good AR headsets would be beneficial or simply fun. Wouldn't it be great if that were a technology funded for the general benefit of all people?

hayst4ck 6y ago
> I don't look like a hippie, but I totally subscribe to the idea of "make love, not war". I used to be exactly like this. Republicans being bad faith actors and then asking democrats for unity is a key example to me of why war is inevitable and it's better to have all the power than no power. You cannot convince these people out of their delusions. We share real space, but have two mutually exclusive realities. We can't agree on masks, we can't agree on vaccinations. We can't agree that science is a higher authority than religious leaders. Half of America was almost "dominated" rather than compromised with. Our own cities were referred to as "battlespaces" and our own people were combatants. The democrats tried to make love (compromise) but failed to prepare for war. Then on the macro scale, I look at situations like China. China has no problem abusing human rights or acting imperialistically. America built business in china. America thought China would democratize, educate their citizens, and improve human rights abuses as its prosperity went up. In reality power was ceded and now we have both less overall peace and an ambitious highly nationalistic enemy with a weak moral system. Unless China deals with Xi and its nationalism, war is likely inevitable. How many conversations online have you run into where a person's stance is completely unalterable and a mutual understanding cannot be reached? Expand that idea to world politics. Pretend the issue isn't something trivial, but instead global warming or genocide. Who's side ends up being right? The one with more power. When you live in a moral system that says "do unto others as you would have done to you," it's easy to fall into the idea of make love, not war... But there are many moral systems, competing on the global stage. "Might makes right" is a moral system, "my culture above all others" is a moral system, "I will do anything to feed myself" is a moral system, "everyone should be made 'equal'" is a moral system, "the most effective competitor should win everything" is a moral system, "what my pastor says is the truth" is a moral system, "the emperor is the incarnation of gods will" is a moral system. You look at all the resources spent on military and ask "what's the opportunity cost." What's the opportunity cost of losing a war? What's the opportunity cost of ceding power? What's the opportunity cost of competing hegemonies? The prisoners dilemma is a dilemma. Cooperate is not always the best answer, and if you always choose cooperate when your opponent is defecting, you will lose.
hooande 6y ago
Speaking to the current realities in the United States and not your general sentiment, $22B is nothing relative to the federal budget. Congress is getting set to spend $3 trillion dollars in much the manner you've requested. Infrastructure, green technology, etc. It really seems like the government is doing exactly what you want
judge2020 6y ago
If it helps, I doubt the contract forbids MS from using any of its R&D on other projects, ie. Hololens 3/a consumer edition hololens.
- blunte 6y ago
  I just watched a not-incredibly-terrible Russian (English overdub) Netflix war film that featured a Boston Robotics dog with a mounted gun. Maybe it was a fake (probably). Either way, it's a bit like selling your sister into prostitution but agreeing that you all get some financial benefits. It's not how humanity should progress.
  - w0m 6y ago
    It is how humanity has (in large part) progressed though unfortunately. Not sure when or how we can ~ever expect that to change, raw capitalism doesn't have the right motivations.
high_priest 6y ago
Life is one big war. Just because you live in a pleasant neighbourhood, doesn't mean there are no malevolent people in the world...
- blunte 6y ago
  I believe that many malevolent people, or at least their followers, would be much less malevolent or active if they had their basic needs met plus a little bit of cushion to enjoy life. To be more specific, many of the worst people have lived through some truly horrible childhoods (often experiencing war and poverty as a child). Stop the cycle of war and poverty, and then see how naturally malevolent people are. We have the productivity to afford that; we just have chosen to consolidate it to a relative few.
  - nwienert 6y ago
    I think the only reason you have all your needs met is due to war, and now you sit on a pile of blood-stained surplus with clean gloves and make faces as though better. It’s all pointless moralizing. Sure, prosperity may reduce war. I tend to think MAD and global trade have done most of the reducing. But just dismissing war as if you have some superior moral compass to anyone with absolutely no sign of any insight to reduce it, or understanding of why it happens, just reeks of privilege and cheap moralizing that I’d prefer stay on Twitter and Reddit.
  - xd 6y ago
    "their basic needs met plus a little bit of cushion to enjoy life" Who's responsibility is it to meet these needs?
    - Shacklz 6y ago
      Irrelevant of the answer, it helps in general if your efforts & hard work towards a better life aren't bombed into oblivion
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
ljm 6y ago
> Do we really need a conflict to be willing to stand behind an expense? I think not, considering the situation veterans find themselves in. The US won't stand behind an expense unless there's money to be made from it.
peruvian 6y ago
The internet itself is a military project and its pioneers were all either military-employed or had contracts early on, for actual military applications or surveillance. Read Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley. Unfortunately it seems tech is forever tied with the military industrial complex.
- potatoman22 6y ago
  60 years isn't the best sample size for "forever".
nickff 6y ago
Lots of non-military projects/programs are funded at similar or greater levels than military ones. Look at education, wealth-transfer programs (social security), and healthcare (medicare and medicaid); each of these gets more money than the DoD. Very expensive science projects (such as JWST @ $10BB) also get funded, though they're often pillaged for either pork or increased welfare spending.
- wcarss 6y ago
  > as Forbes' Erik Kain points out — that state and local governments generally foot the bill when it comes to education spending in America. If you factor those contributions in, the US spent about $880 billion on education in 2011, compared to $966 billion total on defense. Maybe 2011 was just a really bad year for education, but I think you could stand to add citations on what seems like a pretty eyebrow-raising claim, that each of these things blanket "get more money" than the military -- let alone a whole discussion of the spending per user capita on these things and the value they have to society. Also, the James Web telescope, at $10BB, has been in development for 20+ years, so that's ~$1B/year or less in total expenditures, on a program that's the poster child for massive cost overruns and bungling. If it had been presented as $10B originally, especially as an instantaneous cost, it likely would never have happened. 1 - https://www.businessinsider.com/education-military-spending-comparison-2016-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/education-military-spending-...
  - nickff 6y ago
    Educational spending has continued to increase since 2011: >"Expenditures of educational institutions were an esti-mated $1.3 trillion for the 2016–17 school year (table106.20 and figure 2). Elementary and secondary schools spent 57 percent of this total ($759 billion), and degree-granting postsecondary institutions spent the remaining 43percent ($583 billion)." https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018070.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018070.pdf Total US Military budget was 619.5BB for 2017. https://defense360.csis.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Analysis-of-the-FY-2017-Budget.pdf https://defense360.csis.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Analy... Educational spending was a little more than double military spending.
golemiprague 6y ago
Why do you think not financing an army prevents war or brings love and peace? There is no evidence to that, probably the contrary. We do spend a lot of money on a lot of other things, at the end of the day we need to spend some part of the budget on security. So the question is how much and if there is some objection to this specific spending it should be explained specifically.
bushbaba 6y ago
There are about 300 million US citizens. 21.9 billion split evenly is $73 per person. And this is a multi year contract. It’s a lot of money, but not a huge amount divided across the population. This money likely also generates ancillary US jobs so the cost to tax payers might not be as bad as it sounds.
- thanhhaimai 6y ago
  Half of the US family has less than $500 in the bank. A large portion of people spent less than $10 per day on food. That's an absurd stand to argue that people can afford to go hungry for 7 straight days just so the military get some headsets. I'm not into heavy politics. But if you want to argue about job creation, I can bet that spending the above money on infrastructure (like last mile fiber internet) will create multiple magnitudes more jobs/opportunities for the economy than this.
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    Half of the US pays $0 in federal taxes.
    - thanhhaimai 6y ago
      Exactly! There are around 155m people working. Half of them pays $0 in tax. That means ~77m people who pay positive tax now has to pay for that $22b contract. That $70 now has become $285. The math looks even worse. The idea that some unjustified spending is OK just because it's "cheap" per capital is an absurd idea.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- skluug 6y ago
  nahh just give me $73
- Retric 6y ago
  First infants are hardly paying 73$, more importantly a total is only relevant if this is the only money being spent. Instead this is simply more waste by a bloated system which delivers sub par results at extreme prices.
RobRivera 6y ago
if you want peace, prepare for war.
luckylion 6y ago
> What if instead that money were spend on helping humanity? There's a German saying that captures the consequence of that thought very well, I think: Soldaten hat man immer im Land, entweder eigene oder fremde (You'll always have soldiers in your country, either your own or foreign ones).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jimbob45 6y ago
“To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” George Washington
chrisseaton 6y ago
How well does your idea work in practice if we look at examples from history? Before the Second World War Lloyd George tried to make love not war with Germany. How did that end up? Sometimes the bad people are just absolutely intent on fucking you up no matter what and you need to be able to defend yourself.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  Right, but our gnee-jerk response can't just be to smash the pedal on military spending. You need to have a strategy for trade and innovation.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  WW2 (at least in europe) was pretty much a result of the harsh on the loosers of WW1 treaty of Versailles. So germany did not feel much love from the world - the world was demanding lots of pay as reparations every year(I think it was originally planned till 1990!). They felt they have to get strong to reclaim what was theirs. (Very simply put)
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    No matter how much 'love' you give, someone somewhere will want to take more from you. And if you have nothing to defend yourself with they're going to walk all over you. What 'love' do you think the US should have given to Japan to stop them attacking? What do you do when you've given all your 'love' and have nothing left and they ask for more or they'll attack? You need a military and it needs to be good.
    - hutzlibu 6y ago
      Oh, sure. Si vis pacem, para bellum. But the thing is: for example switzerland can claim they are honestly doing this. The US not really. There it seems more "to prepare for war to go for war".
    - ativzzz 6y ago
      > What 'love' do you think the US should have given to Japan to stop them attacking? Oil and military equipment. > After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and French Indochina in 1940, the United States began to restrict trade with Japan. In 1940, it ceased exporting airplanes, airplane parts, aviation fuel and machine tools to Japan, and in 1941, it stopped the export of oil. This intensified the Japanese need for rubber from Malaya and oil from the Dutch East Indies [0] [0] https://www.reference.com/history/did-japan-attack-united-states-1941-1ff64a253174bef7 https://www.reference.com/history/did-japan-attack-united-st... I kid though, it was a war situation for the US anyway. They stop supplying Japan, Japan goes to war. They keep supplying Japan, Japan gets stronger and secures more resources until it feels confident in going to war.
someonehere 6y ago
If China had the same attitude, yes. The military is in a constant race with China to get a leg up on them. It goes back and forth.
datavirtue 6y ago
"I imagine what the possibilities would be if we funded general non-military projects with the kind of money that goes into the military." Amen. China is. They are building a new silk road that they will control. What's our answer? A bomb?
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  So china does not have a big military budget, too?
  - datavirtue 6y ago
    Yes! AND strategies for innovation and trade that are well underway.
  - wcarss 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... 4x as many people, roughly 1/3rd of the budget.
    - break_the_bank 6y ago
      Stuff is cheaper in China too.
      - wcarss 6y ago
        That's a pretty interesting point! I hadn't ever really considered how cost of living or cost of goods differences in different nations would impact a graph like that. I'm a bit skeptical that many military supplies (e.g. the cost of a grenade or of a standard issue rifle with comparable specs) vary dramatically, but personnel wages, basic supplies, housing, repairs, etc. all probably have a big impact.
        hutzlibu 6y ago
        "I'm a bit skeptical that many military supplies vary dramatically" Well, how much do you think china is paying for one of their own developed (or copied) and manufactured assaults rifles - and how much is the US? I didn't look up the numbers now, but I am pretty sure they do vary dramatically. The change might get less, when we are talking about very advanced war tech, like fighter missiles and radar systems, but overall China with all of its big factories and strong central controlled government - might have an edge there.
harikb 6y ago
When we say "military spending", much of it is not actually spent on wasted resources - it is sort of welfare for the military industrial complex and its dependent people. It is just like social security, medicare etc, some amount is earmarked for a different group. What we shouldn't assume is that "not spending on military" automatically implies spending on stuff that is actually good for the country.
- spaced-out 6y ago
  > When we say "military spending", much of it is not actually spent on wasted resources - it is sort of welfare for the military industrial complex and its dependent people. And what if instead of paying those people to develop weapons, we paid them to develop tech and infrastructure that would provide utility to every day people?
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    I don't think he's talking about Raytheon engineers. ~50% of the military budget is literally just compensation and personnel costs for the enlistees.
    - moolcool 6y ago
      And what if instead of paying those people to d̶e̶v̶e̶l̶o̶p̶ ̶w̶e̶a̶p̶o̶n̶s̶ be in the military, we paid them to develop tech and infrastructure that would provide utility to every day people?
      - missedthecue 6y ago
        Because it's not like your average 19 year old in Parris Island was plucked from the deans list at MIT
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    Most economists would say it does not matter what they build. The economic results would be the same if the Military Industrial complex were paid to dig holes and fill them in again.
proc0 6y ago
I think war preparations probably prevent war, especially in the intelligence/communications area. Also the military does much more than just fight wars. There are many ways defense and recon tech can be used that have nothing to do with eliminating a target.
TomK32 6y ago
How about putting AR helmets onto generals, politicians and soldiers, all at once due to some special occasion, and never ever bringing them back from that alternative reality where they can keep playing eNdlessWar[1] while we get on with a better reality? [1] maybe we are already playing it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eXistenZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eXistenZ
fermienrico 6y ago
I have the complete opposite view: it’s such a naive thing to say we don’t want wars - ofcourse no one wants wars. Spending on defense and being prepared isn’t going to war, it’s preventing it in the first place.
onetimemanytime 6y ago
Sadly the world is not the simple. Small, defenseless nations and people are enslaved, one way or another. So, yeah, life is grand in USA and Western nations (relatively speaking) but maybe it's because their military defends it? Ukraine for example feels different https://i.insider.com/54ff45afeab8ea38458b4568?width=800&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/54ff45afeab8ea38458b4568?width=800&for... . War sucks so best to make sure no one dares to start one with you.
optimiz3 6y ago
It's not zero-sum. Having a strong military allows you to pursue your (peaceful) interests without interference from others who disagree with your agenda.
- fweespeech 6y ago
  https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison Yes but spending as much as the next 10 countries combined is not needed.
  - bastardoperator 6y ago
    This ^
  - quickthrowman 6y ago
    Cool, let’s pull out of all of our military bases globally and really speed up Chinese unipolar hegemony. Sounds fun! We can’t remove ourselves from the position we inherited in 1946 without disrupting the global power balance on a massive scale. Idealism and global geopolitics don’t mix. There’s no supranational organization to mediate disputes between countries, at least yet. Without that, brute force/power projection is how it works.
  - xvector 6y ago
    Is it not? It’s possible that the amount of funding required scales exponentially with relative military power, as you have more nations that would be willing to dethrone you, so you must be able to withstand your opponents’ cumulative military strength. Even with as much as we spend, China is a formidable military threat.
  - optimiz3 6y ago
    Debatable. R&D funding, job creation (including at overseas bases and embassies), massive economic benefits from being the world reserve currency, etc.
cryptica 6y ago
The military is a great vehicle for cronies to launder large amounts of money to each other... All paid for by the tax payer of course through taxes and asset inflation. Straight from the money printer. Millennials can say goodbye to ever owning a property. Microsoft executives will own all the real estate (thanks to their bonuses coming straight from the government; taxpayer funded) and we can all rent from them. Millennials love it when the government takes away their earning power to subsidize their own slavery.
mirekrusin 6y ago
Ask any history teacher that question if you find opportunity.
sneak 6y ago
> if Jeff Bezos gave up his entire networth, you could run the US military for ~90 days > If you liquidated both Bill Gates & Elon Musk too, you could get to maybe ~180 days > Throw Zuck into the grinder & you squeeze out another ~45 days > You’d still need ~$200B+ to finish the year Source: https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1291970792293425152 https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1291970792293425152
quickthrowman 6y ago
> I imagine what the possibilities would be if we funded general non-military projects with the kind of money that goes into the military. The possibility of being invaded and a the invading country stealing all the nice stuff we built instead of defending ourselves. Oh wait, we’ll just call 911 but for countries!
navi0 6y ago
“... what if we waged peace as fiercely as we are prepared to wage war?” Bill McDonough (2002) < https://mcdonough.com/writings/waging-peace-intelligent-design/ https://mcdonough.com/writings/waging-peace-intelligent-desi...> If the US spent a fraction of what it spends literally lighting money on fire with missiles and bombs, I’d bet we’d see a big decline in non-geostrategic hostilities or non-rogue actors (i.e., except for China, Russia, or the Saddam Hussein’s of the world). Terrorist movements arguably win support because of the lack of good government and economic opportunities of the populations they purport to rule. The worry then becomes how the money is spent, which companies win the contracts (e.g., Buy American provisions), and perceptions of vassal states, but historically, it has been a successful strategy and is similar to what China is doing with its Belt and Road Initiative. If armed insurgency means the loss of a decent percentage of GDP thru wealth transfer, then it’d lessen some of the incentives and reasons for armed conflicts. It’d also be important to make sure funds are distributed equitably with a country and not under the World Bank model.

by blunte 6y ago

hayst4ck 6y ago

> I don't look like a hippie, but I totally subscribe to the idea of "make love, not war". I used to be exactly like this. Republicans being bad faith actors and then asking democrats for unity is a key example to me of why war is inevitable and it's better to have all the power than no power. You cannot convince these people out of their delusions. We share real space, but have two mutually exclusive realities. We can't agree on masks, we can't agree on vaccinations. We can't agree that science is a higher authority than religious leaders. Half of America was almost "dominated" rather than compromised with. Our own cities were referred to as "battlespaces" and our own people were combatants. The democrats tried to make love (compromise) but failed to prepare for war. Then on the macro scale, I look at situations like China. China has no problem abusing human rights or acting imperialistically. America built business in china. America thought China would democratize, educate their citizens, and improve human rights abuses as its prosperity went up. In reality power was ceded and now we have both less overall peace and an ambitious highly nationalistic enemy with a weak moral system. Unless China deals with Xi and its nationalism, war is likely inevitable. How many conversations online have you run into where a person's stance is completely unalterable and a mutual understanding cannot be reached? Expand that idea to world politics. Pretend the issue isn't something trivial, but instead global warming or genocide. Who's side ends up being right? The one with more power. When you live in a moral system that says "do unto others as you would have done to you," it's easy to fall into the idea of make love, not war... But there are many moral systems, competing on the global stage. "Might makes right" is a moral system, "my culture above all others" is a moral system, "I will do anything to feed myself" is a moral system, "everyone should be made 'equal'" is a moral system, "the most effective competitor should win everything" is a moral system, "what my pastor says is the truth" is a moral system, "the emperor is the incarnation of gods will" is a moral system. You look at all the resources spent on military and ask "what's the opportunity cost." What's the opportunity cost of losing a war? What's the opportunity cost of ceding power? What's the opportunity cost of competing hegemonies? The prisoners dilemma is a dilemma. Cooperate is not always the best answer, and if you always choose cooperate when your opponent is defecting, you will lose.

hooande 6y ago

Speaking to the current realities in the United States and not your general sentiment, $22B is nothing relative to the federal budget. Congress is getting set to spend $3 trillion dollars in much the manner you've requested. Infrastructure, green technology, etc. It really seems like the government is doing exactly what you want

judge2020 6y ago

If it helps, I doubt the contract forbids MS from using any of its R&D on other projects, ie. Hololens 3/a consumer edition hololens.

blunte 6y ago
I just watched a not-incredibly-terrible Russian (English overdub) Netflix war film that featured a Boston Robotics dog with a mounted gun. Maybe it was a fake (probably). Either way, it's a bit like selling your sister into prostitution but agreeing that you all get some financial benefits. It's not how humanity should progress.
- w0m 6y ago
  It is how humanity has (in large part) progressed though unfortunately. Not sure when or how we can ~ever expect that to change, raw capitalism doesn't have the right motivations.

high_priest 6y ago

Life is one big war. Just because you live in a pleasant neighbourhood, doesn't mean there are no malevolent people in the world...

blunte 6y ago
I believe that many malevolent people, or at least their followers, would be much less malevolent or active if they had their basic needs met plus a little bit of cushion to enjoy life. To be more specific, many of the worst people have lived through some truly horrible childhoods (often experiencing war and poverty as a child). Stop the cycle of war and poverty, and then see how naturally malevolent people are. We have the productivity to afford that; we just have chosen to consolidate it to a relative few.
- nwienert 6y ago
  I think the only reason you have all your needs met is due to war, and now you sit on a pile of blood-stained surplus with clean gloves and make faces as though better. It’s all pointless moralizing. Sure, prosperity may reduce war. I tend to think MAD and global trade have done most of the reducing. But just dismissing war as if you have some superior moral compass to anyone with absolutely no sign of any insight to reduce it, or understanding of why it happens, just reeks of privilege and cheap moralizing that I’d prefer stay on Twitter and Reddit.
- xd 6y ago
  "their basic needs met plus a little bit of cushion to enjoy life" Who's responsibility is it to meet these needs?
  - Shacklz 6y ago
    Irrelevant of the answer, it helps in general if your efforts & hard work towards a better life aren't bombed into oblivion
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

ljm 6y ago

> Do we really need a conflict to be willing to stand behind an expense? I think not, considering the situation veterans find themselves in. The US won't stand behind an expense unless there's money to be made from it.

peruvian 6y ago

The internet itself is a military project and its pioneers were all either military-employed or had contracts early on, for actual military applications or surveillance. Read Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley. Unfortunately it seems tech is forever tied with the military industrial complex.

potatoman22 6y ago
60 years isn't the best sample size for "forever".

nickff 6y ago

Lots of non-military projects/programs are funded at similar or greater levels than military ones. Look at education, wealth-transfer programs (social security), and healthcare (medicare and medicaid); each of these gets more money than the DoD. Very expensive science projects (such as JWST @ $10BB) also get funded, though they're often pillaged for either pork or increased welfare spending.

wcarss 6y ago
> as Forbes' Erik Kain points out — that state and local governments generally foot the bill when it comes to education spending in America. If you factor those contributions in, the US spent about $880 billion on education in 2011, compared to $966 billion total on defense. Maybe 2011 was just a really bad year for education, but I think you could stand to add citations on what seems like a pretty eyebrow-raising claim, that each of these things blanket "get more money" than the military -- let alone a whole discussion of the spending per user capita on these things and the value they have to society. Also, the James Web telescope, at $10BB, has been in development for 20+ years, so that's ~$1B/year or less in total expenditures, on a program that's the poster child for massive cost overruns and bungling. If it had been presented as $10B originally, especially as an instantaneous cost, it likely would never have happened. 1 - https://www.businessinsider.com/education-military-spending-comparison-2016-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/education-military-spending-...
- nickff 6y ago
  Educational spending has continued to increase since 2011: >"Expenditures of educational institutions were an esti-mated $1.3 trillion for the 2016–17 school year (table106.20 and figure 2). Elementary and secondary schools spent 57 percent of this total ($759 billion), and degree-granting postsecondary institutions spent the remaining 43percent ($583 billion)." https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018070.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018070.pdf Total US Military budget was 619.5BB for 2017. https://defense360.csis.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Analysis-of-the-FY-2017-Budget.pdf https://defense360.csis.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Analy... Educational spending was a little more than double military spending.

golemiprague 6y ago

Why do you think not financing an army prevents war or brings love and peace? There is no evidence to that, probably the contrary. We do spend a lot of money on a lot of other things, at the end of the day we need to spend some part of the budget on security. So the question is how much and if there is some objection to this specific spending it should be explained specifically.

bushbaba 6y ago

There are about 300 million US citizens. 21.9 billion split evenly is $73 per person. And this is a multi year contract. It’s a lot of money, but not a huge amount divided across the population. This money likely also generates ancillary US jobs so the cost to tax payers might not be as bad as it sounds.

thanhhaimai 6y ago
Half of the US family has less than $500 in the bank. A large portion of people spent less than $10 per day on food. That's an absurd stand to argue that people can afford to go hungry for 7 straight days just so the military get some headsets. I'm not into heavy politics. But if you want to argue about job creation, I can bet that spending the above money on infrastructure (like last mile fiber internet) will create multiple magnitudes more jobs/opportunities for the economy than this.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Half of the US pays $0 in federal taxes.
  - thanhhaimai 6y ago
    Exactly! There are around 155m people working. Half of them pays $0 in tax. That means ~77m people who pay positive tax now has to pay for that $22b contract. That $70 now has become $285. The math looks even worse. The idea that some unjustified spending is OK just because it's "cheap" per capital is an absurd idea.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
skluug 6y ago
nahh just give me $73
Retric 6y ago
First infants are hardly paying 73$, more importantly a total is only relevant if this is the only money being spent. Instead this is simply more waste by a bloated system which delivers sub par results at extreme prices.

RobRivera 6y ago

if you want peace, prepare for war.

luckylion 6y ago

> What if instead that money were spend on helping humanity? There's a German saying that captures the consequence of that thought very well, I think: Soldaten hat man immer im Land, entweder eigene oder fremde (You'll always have soldiers in your country, either your own or foreign ones).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jimbob45 6y ago

“To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” George Washington

chrisseaton 6y ago

How well does your idea work in practice if we look at examples from history? Before the Second World War Lloyd George tried to make love not war with Germany. How did that end up? Sometimes the bad people are just absolutely intent on fucking you up no matter what and you need to be able to defend yourself.

datavirtue 6y ago
Right, but our gnee-jerk response can't just be to smash the pedal on military spending. You need to have a strategy for trade and innovation.
hutzlibu 6y ago
WW2 (at least in europe) was pretty much a result of the harsh on the loosers of WW1 treaty of Versailles. So germany did not feel much love from the world - the world was demanding lots of pay as reparations every year(I think it was originally planned till 1990!). They felt they have to get strong to reclaim what was theirs. (Very simply put)
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  No matter how much 'love' you give, someone somewhere will want to take more from you. And if you have nothing to defend yourself with they're going to walk all over you. What 'love' do you think the US should have given to Japan to stop them attacking? What do you do when you've given all your 'love' and have nothing left and they ask for more or they'll attack? You need a military and it needs to be good.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    Oh, sure. Si vis pacem, para bellum. But the thing is: for example switzerland can claim they are honestly doing this. The US not really. There it seems more "to prepare for war to go for war".
  - ativzzz 6y ago
    > What 'love' do you think the US should have given to Japan to stop them attacking? Oil and military equipment. > After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and French Indochina in 1940, the United States began to restrict trade with Japan. In 1940, it ceased exporting airplanes, airplane parts, aviation fuel and machine tools to Japan, and in 1941, it stopped the export of oil. This intensified the Japanese need for rubber from Malaya and oil from the Dutch East Indies [0] [0] https://www.reference.com/history/did-japan-attack-united-states-1941-1ff64a253174bef7 https://www.reference.com/history/did-japan-attack-united-st... I kid though, it was a war situation for the US anyway. They stop supplying Japan, Japan goes to war. They keep supplying Japan, Japan gets stronger and secures more resources until it feels confident in going to war.

someonehere 6y ago

If China had the same attitude, yes. The military is in a constant race with China to get a leg up on them. It goes back and forth.

datavirtue 6y ago

"I imagine what the possibilities would be if we funded general non-military projects with the kind of money that goes into the military." Amen. China is. They are building a new silk road that they will control. What's our answer? A bomb?

hutzlibu 6y ago
So china does not have a big military budget, too?
- datavirtue 6y ago
  Yes! AND strategies for innovation and trade that are well underway.
- wcarss 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... 4x as many people, roughly 1/3rd of the budget.
  - break_the_bank 6y ago
    Stuff is cheaper in China too.
    - wcarss 6y ago
      That's a pretty interesting point! I hadn't ever really considered how cost of living or cost of goods differences in different nations would impact a graph like that. I'm a bit skeptical that many military supplies (e.g. the cost of a grenade or of a standard issue rifle with comparable specs) vary dramatically, but personnel wages, basic supplies, housing, repairs, etc. all probably have a big impact.
      - hutzlibu 6y ago
        "I'm a bit skeptical that many military supplies vary dramatically" Well, how much do you think china is paying for one of their own developed (or copied) and manufactured assaults rifles - and how much is the US? I didn't look up the numbers now, but I am pretty sure they do vary dramatically. The change might get less, when we are talking about very advanced war tech, like fighter missiles and radar systems, but overall China with all of its big factories and strong central controlled government - might have an edge there.

harikb 6y ago

When we say "military spending", much of it is not actually spent on wasted resources - it is sort of welfare for the military industrial complex and its dependent people. It is just like social security, medicare etc, some amount is earmarked for a different group. What we shouldn't assume is that "not spending on military" automatically implies spending on stuff that is actually good for the country.

spaced-out 6y ago
> When we say "military spending", much of it is not actually spent on wasted resources - it is sort of welfare for the military industrial complex and its dependent people. And what if instead of paying those people to develop weapons, we paid them to develop tech and infrastructure that would provide utility to every day people?
- missedthecue 6y ago
  I don't think he's talking about Raytheon engineers. ~50% of the military budget is literally just compensation and personnel costs for the enlistees.
  - moolcool 6y ago
    And what if instead of paying those people to d̶e̶v̶e̶l̶o̶p̶ ̶w̶e̶a̶p̶o̶n̶s̶ be in the military, we paid them to develop tech and infrastructure that would provide utility to every day people?
    - missedthecue 6y ago
      Because it's not like your average 19 year old in Parris Island was plucked from the deans list at MIT
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Most economists would say it does not matter what they build. The economic results would be the same if the Military Industrial complex were paid to dig holes and fill them in again.

proc0 6y ago

I think war preparations probably prevent war, especially in the intelligence/communications area. Also the military does much more than just fight wars. There are many ways defense and recon tech can be used that have nothing to do with eliminating a target.

TomK32 6y ago

How about putting AR helmets onto generals, politicians and soldiers, all at once due to some special occasion, and never ever bringing them back from that alternative reality where they can keep playing eNdlessWar[1] while we get on with a better reality? [1] maybe we are already playing it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eXistenZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eXistenZ

fermienrico 6y ago

I have the complete opposite view: it’s such a naive thing to say we don’t want wars - ofcourse no one wants wars. Spending on defense and being prepared isn’t going to war, it’s preventing it in the first place.

onetimemanytime 6y ago

Sadly the world is not the simple. Small, defenseless nations and people are enslaved, one way or another. So, yeah, life is grand in USA and Western nations (relatively speaking) but maybe it's because their military defends it? Ukraine for example feels different https://i.insider.com/54ff45afeab8ea38458b4568?width=800&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/54ff45afeab8ea38458b4568?width=800&for... . War sucks so best to make sure no one dares to start one with you.

optimiz3 6y ago

It's not zero-sum. Having a strong military allows you to pursue your (peaceful) interests without interference from others who disagree with your agenda.

fweespeech 6y ago
https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison Yes but spending as much as the next 10 countries combined is not needed.
- bastardoperator 6y ago
  This ^
- quickthrowman 6y ago
  Cool, let’s pull out of all of our military bases globally and really speed up Chinese unipolar hegemony. Sounds fun! We can’t remove ourselves from the position we inherited in 1946 without disrupting the global power balance on a massive scale. Idealism and global geopolitics don’t mix. There’s no supranational organization to mediate disputes between countries, at least yet. Without that, brute force/power projection is how it works.
- xvector 6y ago
  Is it not? It’s possible that the amount of funding required scales exponentially with relative military power, as you have more nations that would be willing to dethrone you, so you must be able to withstand your opponents’ cumulative military strength. Even with as much as we spend, China is a formidable military threat.
- optimiz3 6y ago
  Debatable. R&D funding, job creation (including at overseas bases and embassies), massive economic benefits from being the world reserve currency, etc.

cryptica 6y ago

The military is a great vehicle for cronies to launder large amounts of money to each other... All paid for by the tax payer of course through taxes and asset inflation. Straight from the money printer. Millennials can say goodbye to ever owning a property. Microsoft executives will own all the real estate (thanks to their bonuses coming straight from the government; taxpayer funded) and we can all rent from them. Millennials love it when the government takes away their earning power to subsidize their own slavery.

mirekrusin 6y ago

Ask any history teacher that question if you find opportunity.

sneak 6y ago

> if Jeff Bezos gave up his entire networth, you could run the US military for ~90 days > If you liquidated both Bill Gates & Elon Musk too, you could get to maybe ~180 days > Throw Zuck into the grinder & you squeeze out another ~45 days > You’d still need ~$200B+ to finish the year Source: https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1291970792293425152 https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1291970792293425152

quickthrowman 6y ago

> I imagine what the possibilities would be if we funded general non-military projects with the kind of money that goes into the military. The possibility of being invaded and a the invading country stealing all the nice stuff we built instead of defending ourselves. Oh wait, we’ll just call 911 but for countries!

navi0 6y ago

“... what if we waged peace as fiercely as we are prepared to wage war?” Bill McDonough (2002) < https://mcdonough.com/writings/waging-peace-intelligent-design/ https://mcdonough.com/writings/waging-peace-intelligent-desi...> If the US spent a fraction of what it spends literally lighting money on fire with missiles and bombs, I’d bet we’d see a big decline in non-geostrategic hostilities or non-rogue actors (i.e., except for China, Russia, or the Saddam Hussein’s of the world). Terrorist movements arguably win support because of the lack of good government and economic opportunities of the populations they purport to rule. The worry then becomes how the money is spent, which companies win the contracts (e.g., Buy American provisions), and perceptions of vassal states, but historically, it has been a successful strategy and is similar to what China is doing with its Belt and Road Initiative. If armed insurgency means the loss of a decent percentage of GDP thru wealth transfer, then it’d lessen some of the incentives and reasons for armed conflicts. It’d also be important to make sure funds are distributed equitably with a country and not under the World Bank model.