Re: Rewriting SSA. Is This A Chance For GNU/Linux?

On 31/05/2025 22:04, Bobbie Sellers wrote:

  On 5/30/25 16:33, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 30/05/2025 20:21, % wrote:

Joel wrote:

John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, 30 May 2025 07:22:51 -0000 (UTC) Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
 

Well, I guess that’s over, now that Elon Musk has left the
building. That’s the end of DOGE, without “saving” anywhere
near the trillion dollars he originally promised.

 Comes as a *total* shock, lemmetellya.

  Let's say they had cut that much with this DOGE BS (not that
it's 100% a stupid idea, of course, but they were not
approaching very rationally), wouldn't the proposed tax breaks
offset it?  Wouldn't we still be spending a large fortune every
year on the damn military?
 

no because there would be tariffs that go to trumps pocket

 Military spending is pretty low in reality.

 It is not low but the latest tools are fabulously expensive though
as un-piloted aircraft take the load off bombers and fighters whose
pilots will go to observational planes to check out the accuracy of
our unmanned devices.
 

 And it is a *pragmatic* program, whereas so much is spent on purely
 *moral* initiatives to employ people who think they can therefore
tell how to run your life better than you can yourself.
 

 So spending millions then on ineffective equipment was worth it to find out that unarmored personal carriers for example waste the lives
of trained and equipped soldiers combined with home built explosive
devices.
 

about 90% of *all* government spending is wasted.
Did you know that in WWII the chief means of German logistics was horses ?
"Over the course of the war, Germany (2.75 million) and the Soviet Union (3.5 million) together employed more than six million horses. "
Russia has gone back to Donkeys.  You can eat donkeys and horses with you cant do with a personnell carrier.
The USA were always dumb fucks who never listened.
We TOLD them in 43 that B17s would get shot out of the sky in daylight raids, but oh no, they thought they had enough defensive armament.
After Ireland and the IRA we knew pretty much how to protect soldiers from IEDS
Did they listen? Nah.

Pragmatically we need to return to a world in which civilian contractors are extraneous to the missions.  Civilian contractors not
only who build less effective weapons and vehicles but who enrich
themselves by selling the next "great thing" to the generals.
Civilian contractors who are empowered to ignore the military rules of engagement and are uncivil to the indigenous populations and
persons.
 

The problem is that no one knows what the next war will be like until they are in it.
AS it happens probably the most useful thing right now after the homebuilt drones in Ukraine, has been the Bradley fighting vehicle.
Built by BAE Systems US division.
The Bushmaster cannon is very effective against Russian armour, which is admittedly crap.
But for every Bradley, there is a useless Abrams tank, and some useless F35s.
The obsolete ATACMS too has proved extremely useful.
IN order to get stuff that works, you have to build a lot of stuff, and then when war happens you stop building the dogs and throw money at stuff that works.
  That's how life works, and especially  politics, You just fuck around until something actually works, then do more of it an pretend that was the idea all along.
The USA has always wasted money on everything until they found stuff that worked. In Europe we haven't got the cash to waste, so we tend to plan out how do do more for less.
The ARM architecture was developed by a bunch of guys in Cambridge some of whom I know, who basically wanted something as cheap and simple as a 6502 because they couldn't afford to fabricate a huge chip, that nevertheless would run blindingly fast compared with a z80.
And they spent ages deciding on what instruction set would fit into a tiny architecture and still be flexible and useful.
INTEL just threw money at making chips with massive instruction sets that cost a bloody fortune
Its just the way you make use of what you have, USA is 10 times the size of the UK with population, but 100 times more land area, and 1000 times more natural resources.  Its hard to avoid being rich in the USA and you don't even need to be clever.
UK has no natural resources left, so it has to be smart instead..

 

--
“Some people like to travel by train because it combines the slowness of
a car with the cramped public exposure of 
an airplane.”
Dennis Miller