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Crazy stuff. I'm bemused that this project goes on year after year and no one in the US govt has the onions to stand up to Lockheed Martin's lobbying machine.
by grizzles 11y ago
Crazy stuff. I'm bemused that this project goes on year after year and no one in the US govt has the onions to stand up to Lockheed Martin's lobbying machine.
A trillion f ing dollars!! For that amount, you could fund 1000 startup companies a million dollars each to develop their best fighter, and stage a knockout tournament until you have whittled it down to the 15 best designs and you'd still have $993 billion to spread among the surviving designs.
Oh, your war drones have humans strapped to them...how quaint. --Some future general
- shakil 11y agoYou could probably wipe out poverty on earth a 100 times over with that much money. But we cannot afford that kind of waste now can we?
- adventured 11y agoAfrica has received about a trillion dollars in aid since the mid 1960s. You can't wipe out much of the total global poverty (2 billion people in that category) for a trillion dollars. And the small impact you would make would be only temporarily unless you build up systems that drive income and self-sustaining economies. To put it another way, you could give the 2 billion people living in poverty around the world, $500 each. It wouldn't even remotely dent the problem.
- netcan 11y agoI wouldn't go quite that far. $500 each (2.5k for a family of 5) for the world's poorest people is a decent sum. If you could actually get it into their hands, that'd make a dent.
- merpnderp 11y agoA lot of the world's poor live in places with little to no infrastructure. A trillion dollar project to build up infrastructure (roads, power stations/lines, water/sewage treatment plants) would go further to eradicating poverty than you probably imagine.
- ori_b 11y ago> you could fund 1000 startup companies a million dollars each A billion dollars, you mean.
- jotm 11y agoI guess the thinking is "what are we gonna do? Spend another trillion for a new program?". They'll probably stick with it until it sort of works, then pray that the only wars they'll fight will require the planes getting from point A to point B and firing some missiles :-)
- lagadu 11y agoThere's a name for that: Escalation of commitment, aka: sunk cost fallacy.