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This is a really unfortunate situation with geopolitical consequences. It weakens belief in our system of governance as a whole. The US can spend this kind of

This is a really unfortunate situation with geopolitical consequences. It weakens belief in our system of governance as a whole. The US can spend this kind of money .. with not much progress .. and no real consequences for failure. Adversaries see this as weakness because that is what it is. This has real world consequences … when people see the US spends 10 times more than any other nation on its military and its space program it becomes apparent this doesn’t equate to necessarily a 10x factor in results. So yes we may have the best tech/gear in the world but may be spending way too much to only get a slight edge and find this edge is not even sustainable.

bombolo 3y ago
[dead]
kristofferR 3y ago
It's not like the money spent just disappears, though, someone gets it. The SLS is a huge jobs program. Me and GPT had a good discussion about it: https://chat.openai.com/share/828cb390-dac0-4f3b-a556-f02972bb832e https://chat.openai.com/share/828cb390-dac0-4f3b-a556-f02972...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wkat4242 3y ago
  But how much of that ends up in the hands of shareholders and execs? If you want to provide jobs it's better to provide them directly. The shareholders have enough money as it is.
  - themadturk 3y ago
    So what would it take to give NASA the manufacturing infrastructure and expertise to start building its own rockets? Such programs have always been done by contractors, non-government industrial partners. That's part of working in a capitalist economy.
  - kristofferR 3y ago
    True in the logical sense, but not in the practical sense. Just giving regular people good jobs isn't popular in the US, because why would the megadonors sponsor Senator campaigns if they can't profit from it? In the US system (oligarchic democracy) the wealthy needs to earn their hefty share, otherwise the thing in question likely won't happen at all.
smfugit 3y ago
> weakens belief in our system of governance as a whole That already happened with 2008 GFC. Whats happening with NASA is a small rounding error compared to the amount of pure junk that has accumulated on the FED balance sheet since then, to keep delusions afloat. So the stock market/health care/edu/real estate/iphone/sls prices keep rising. Even though its all pure junk.
- Angostura 3y ago
  'weakened' is not a binary. Every small step to correct issues is important
adolph 3y ago
> The US can spend this kind of money .. with not much progress .. and no real consequences for failure. Adversaries see this as weakness because that is what it is. I donno about this. Adversaries might just as well conclude the opposite, that the US can blow that kind of cash on SLS and other dumb stuff all over the world without major problems. IIRC, UBL's thesis was A-stan is/was the graveyard of empires and would also be the US', but it turned out to be an otherwise forgotten Pentagon rounding error.
- elcritch 3y ago
  I generally agree, but I don't think Afghanistan and Iraq were rounding errors by any factor. It's a major percentage of the US'es debt, as in trillions of dollars. Perhaps the US economy (and politics) is resilient enough to handle it and not crash outright, but poorer folks in the US feel the squeeze of inflation and lowered wages due to cantillion effects.
  - adolph 3y ago
    A truer measure of the [Astan & Iraq] wars’ total costs pegs them at between $4 trillion and $6 trillion.[0] (2015 article) US debt in 2000: $5.6T, in 2022: $30.9T [1] The larger wars of this century drove about a quarter of debt growth. Major but not the majority. That more people will risk life and limb to immigrate than emigrate indicates to me that as bad as inflation is, living elsewhere is still worse. 0. https://time.com/3651697/afghanistan-war-cost/ https://time.com/3651697/afghanistan-war-cost/ 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-the-united-states-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-th...
    - elcritch 3y ago
      A quarter sounds about right, and that's a quarter of our debt that could've been used to rebuild decaying infrastructure, increase medical care, housing, etc. Aside from the monetary cost the country will loose out on the dividends those sort of investments would've yielded long term. Sure the US may still have a higher quality of life than many others, it doesn't mean that Americans lives couldn't have been better. Also I believe the US recently actually had decreases in both life expectancy and younger generations prospering fincially. So we didn't collapse, but we're not healthy either.
rgbrenner 3y ago
Which adversary are you thinking of that has less corruption and less waste than the US? And then has the economy to take advantage of this?
- WitCanStain 3y ago
  I guess China is the obvious candidate due to reduced costs in pretty much everything but they still have immense corruption.
  - gustavus 3y ago
    > I guess China is the obvious candidate due to reduced costs in pretty much everything Achievement: You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor. Get the poster at https://despair.com/products/achievement?variant=2457295683 https://despair.com/products/achievement?variant=2457295683
  - simonh 3y ago
    There’s no real way to evaluate the effectiveness of the Chinese military because they’ve not seen significant action in several generations. However that itself is not a good sign. As for their kit, Myanmar bought some of their planes but none of them are operational. The planes were a joint project by China and Pakistan, but 8 years after the deal was signed apparently have persistent unsolved technical and structural issues. Meanwhile Thailand bought three of the new Yuan class subs from China, but they aren’t operational either. Problems with the engines so bad that they need replacing. Meanwhile China now has two aircraft carriers, but still hasn’t committed either of them to long range operations. They have only conducted experimental night takeoffs and landings, their carrier assigned planes are still largely land based, and they have yet to operate the boats beyond range of land based airstrips. Modern carrier operations are as complex as it gets, and they seem to be struggling with it.
    - nradov 3y ago
      The first few Chinese aircraft carriers were probably never intended to be fully combat effective and are mainly intended to develop an experienced cadre of naval aviators. The carriers lack catapults, which means they can't really launch tankers (or any heavy aircraft at all). US Navy carriers almost always have at least one tanker up while conducting flight operations. This makes a huge difference in safety because an aircraft that gets into any trouble has an option to conduct aerial refueling instead of having to rush a carrier landing, or divert to a distant land base. The next generation of Chinese carriers are expected to have catapults but those are technically challenging. I'm sure that this is a priority area for their spies.
lmm 3y ago
> The US can spend this kind of money .. with not much progress .. and no real consequences for failure. Adversaries see this as weakness because that is what it is. I've heard just the opposite about the similar SDI/"Star Wars" - that the US pouring billions into this blatantly impossible and pointless programme, and suffering no real consequences for doing so, was what finally convinced the USSR they couldn't win.
- jakobson14 3y ago
  I don't think the chinese are going to look at this and give up. They're going to say "we can build our outpost on the moon for way less" and then they'll do it.
- chii 3y ago
  > convinced the USSR they couldn't win i dont think they were convinced they couldn't win - they just realized their economic laggardness. The remnants of the USSR is still trying to win! For a real example of "they couldn't win", you'd have to look towards Japan. And is it such a bad thing to "not win"?
  - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - decremental 3y ago
      [dead]
    - torstenvl 3y ago
      The United States never made any such promise, and doesn't have the unilateral ability to expand NATO in any case.
    - martin8412 3y ago
      Russia is the best NATO recruiter in the world. Countries are actively applying to become NATO members, because they don't want to be puppets ruled entirely by the Moscow elite. Sure, American imperialism is awful, but for most countries that's a far better proposition, because it comes with way more democratic freedom and less strings. A country can leave NATO if they want to. A country can't cut ties with Russia without a war.
paulddraper 3y ago
> It weakens belief in our system of governance as a whole. Accurately
JeremyNT 3y ago
> This has real world consequences … when people see the US spends 10 times more than any other nation on its military and its space program it becomes apparent this doesn’t equate to necessarily a 10x factor in results. Isn't this already known though? The US has such vast resources it can afford to squander them freely due to corruption and incompetence without the people involved ever really being held accountable. This is true of civilian infrastructure projects as well. Yet at the end of the day the country is still so massively wealthy, it makes no practical difference.
lukas099 3y ago
Honestly I would love the US to stop being the biggest spender in so many categories, I just don't think anyone else is really poised to take that spot other than China, which I find even more troubling.

bombolo 3y ago

[dead]

kristofferR 3y ago

It's not like the money spent just disappears, though, someone gets it. The SLS is a huge jobs program. Me and GPT had a good discussion about it: https://chat.openai.com/share/828cb390-dac0-4f3b-a556-f02972bb832e https://chat.openai.com/share/828cb390-dac0-4f3b-a556-f02972...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wkat4242 3y ago
But how much of that ends up in the hands of shareholders and execs? If you want to provide jobs it's better to provide them directly. The shareholders have enough money as it is.
- themadturk 3y ago
  So what would it take to give NASA the manufacturing infrastructure and expertise to start building its own rockets? Such programs have always been done by contractors, non-government industrial partners. That's part of working in a capitalist economy.
- kristofferR 3y ago
  True in the logical sense, but not in the practical sense. Just giving regular people good jobs isn't popular in the US, because why would the megadonors sponsor Senator campaigns if they can't profit from it? In the US system (oligarchic democracy) the wealthy needs to earn their hefty share, otherwise the thing in question likely won't happen at all.

smfugit 3y ago

> weakens belief in our system of governance as a whole That already happened with 2008 GFC. Whats happening with NASA is a small rounding error compared to the amount of pure junk that has accumulated on the FED balance sheet since then, to keep delusions afloat. So the stock market/health care/edu/real estate/iphone/sls prices keep rising. Even though its all pure junk.

Angostura 3y ago
'weakened' is not a binary. Every small step to correct issues is important

adolph 3y ago

> The US can spend this kind of money .. with not much progress .. and no real consequences for failure. Adversaries see this as weakness because that is what it is. I donno about this. Adversaries might just as well conclude the opposite, that the US can blow that kind of cash on SLS and other dumb stuff all over the world without major problems. IIRC, UBL's thesis was A-stan is/was the graveyard of empires and would also be the US', but it turned out to be an otherwise forgotten Pentagon rounding error.

elcritch 3y ago
I generally agree, but I don't think Afghanistan and Iraq were rounding errors by any factor. It's a major percentage of the US'es debt, as in trillions of dollars. Perhaps the US economy (and politics) is resilient enough to handle it and not crash outright, but poorer folks in the US feel the squeeze of inflation and lowered wages due to cantillion effects.
- adolph 3y ago
  A truer measure of the [Astan & Iraq] wars’ total costs pegs them at between $4 trillion and $6 trillion.[0] (2015 article) US debt in 2000: $5.6T, in 2022: $30.9T [1] The larger wars of this century drove about a quarter of debt growth. Major but not the majority. That more people will risk life and limb to immigrate than emigrate indicates to me that as bad as inflation is, living elsewhere is still worse. 0. https://time.com/3651697/afghanistan-war-cost/ https://time.com/3651697/afghanistan-war-cost/ 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-the-united-states-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-th...
  - elcritch 3y ago
    A quarter sounds about right, and that's a quarter of our debt that could've been used to rebuild decaying infrastructure, increase medical care, housing, etc. Aside from the monetary cost the country will loose out on the dividends those sort of investments would've yielded long term. Sure the US may still have a higher quality of life than many others, it doesn't mean that Americans lives couldn't have been better. Also I believe the US recently actually had decreases in both life expectancy and younger generations prospering fincially. So we didn't collapse, but we're not healthy either.

rgbrenner 3y ago

Which adversary are you thinking of that has less corruption and less waste than the US? And then has the economy to take advantage of this?

WitCanStain 3y ago
I guess China is the obvious candidate due to reduced costs in pretty much everything but they still have immense corruption.
- gustavus 3y ago
  > I guess China is the obvious candidate due to reduced costs in pretty much everything Achievement: You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor. Get the poster at https://despair.com/products/achievement?variant=2457295683 https://despair.com/products/achievement?variant=2457295683
- simonh 3y ago
  There’s no real way to evaluate the effectiveness of the Chinese military because they’ve not seen significant action in several generations. However that itself is not a good sign. As for their kit, Myanmar bought some of their planes but none of them are operational. The planes were a joint project by China and Pakistan, but 8 years after the deal was signed apparently have persistent unsolved technical and structural issues. Meanwhile Thailand bought three of the new Yuan class subs from China, but they aren’t operational either. Problems with the engines so bad that they need replacing. Meanwhile China now has two aircraft carriers, but still hasn’t committed either of them to long range operations. They have only conducted experimental night takeoffs and landings, their carrier assigned planes are still largely land based, and they have yet to operate the boats beyond range of land based airstrips. Modern carrier operations are as complex as it gets, and they seem to be struggling with it.
  - nradov 3y ago
    The first few Chinese aircraft carriers were probably never intended to be fully combat effective and are mainly intended to develop an experienced cadre of naval aviators. The carriers lack catapults, which means they can't really launch tankers (or any heavy aircraft at all). US Navy carriers almost always have at least one tanker up while conducting flight operations. This makes a huge difference in safety because an aircraft that gets into any trouble has an option to conduct aerial refueling instead of having to rush a carrier landing, or divert to a distant land base. The next generation of Chinese carriers are expected to have catapults but those are technically challenging. I'm sure that this is a priority area for their spies.

lmm 3y ago

> The US can spend this kind of money .. with not much progress .. and no real consequences for failure. Adversaries see this as weakness because that is what it is. I've heard just the opposite about the similar SDI/"Star Wars" - that the US pouring billions into this blatantly impossible and pointless programme, and suffering no real consequences for doing so, was what finally convinced the USSR they couldn't win.

jakobson14 3y ago
I don't think the chinese are going to look at this and give up. They're going to say "we can build our outpost on the moon for way less" and then they'll do it.
chii 3y ago
> convinced the USSR they couldn't win i dont think they were convinced they couldn't win - they just realized their economic laggardness. The remnants of the USSR is still trying to win! For a real example of "they couldn't win", you'd have to look towards Japan. And is it such a bad thing to "not win"?
- 4gotunameagain 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - decremental 3y ago
    [dead]
  - torstenvl 3y ago
    The United States never made any such promise, and doesn't have the unilateral ability to expand NATO in any case.
  - martin8412 3y ago
    Russia is the best NATO recruiter in the world. Countries are actively applying to become NATO members, because they don't want to be puppets ruled entirely by the Moscow elite. Sure, American imperialism is awful, but for most countries that's a far better proposition, because it comes with way more democratic freedom and less strings. A country can leave NATO if they want to. A country can't cut ties with Russia without a war.

paulddraper 3y ago

> It weakens belief in our system of governance as a whole. Accurately

JeremyNT 3y ago

> This has real world consequences … when people see the US spends 10 times more than any other nation on its military and its space program it becomes apparent this doesn’t equate to necessarily a 10x factor in results. Isn't this already known though? The US has such vast resources it can afford to squander them freely due to corruption and incompetence without the people involved ever really being held accountable. This is true of civilian infrastructure projects as well. Yet at the end of the day the country is still so massively wealthy, it makes no practical difference.

lukas099 3y ago

Honestly I would love the US to stop being the biggest spender in so many categories, I just don't think anyone else is really poised to take that spot other than China, which I find even more troubling.