Given U.S. military budgets, this seems like a rounding error. Especially as the article claims that this was over a five year period. Four mil a year in procurement fraud is probably a drop in the ocean.
This makes me sad. I get that rounding errors are a thing. However, a million here, a billion there, pretty soon, we're talking about real money.
In the real world, most people can't really comprehend the value of $1,000,000.00. One million might as well be one billion might as well be one trillion. At the risk of being cliche, if we did not have the loss of the $4 million per year (of just this one specific thing), what else could that money have been used for instead?
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
As a student of WW2, there's no indication that Ike was not serious about what he said in that quote.
In fact, he was offered and declined a presidential ticket immed. after WW2 to command NATO in Korea. So he wasn't politically-motivated.
One thing you could possibly fault Ike for is that when he criticized the military-industrial complex (MIC), he pulled his punches: he wanted to add Congress (a la MICC) but realized that doing so would make them feel defensive and reduce his support.
The reason Ike talked about the wastefulness of war was that the entire industrial outputs of the USA, Europe and Japan for almost a decade were wasted.
> However, a million here, a billion there, pretty soon, we're talking about real money.
While that may be true, the million won't have contributed to the problem in that case. :p
> At the risk of being cliche, if we did not have the loss of the $4 million per year (of just this one specific thing), what else could that money have been used for instead?
We could have raised the annual salary of active duty personnel by almost three (3) dollars a year each.
I wonder how many "3 million dollar drops in the ocean there were".I bet if we totaled them all up service men could have gotten a very nice pay raise.
A lot of the really popular shooters out there now are collaborative, or have a strong collaborative element. For example, Destiny 2 can be solo, but really encourages you to group up with a couple friends to run 3 person strikes and other activities. Overwatch is a 6v6 game that is unwinnable without teamwork, and similarly R6 Siege requires advanced team collaboration. PUBG (2.2 million current active players at this minute) and Fortnite both derive a large part of their appeal from their very popular duo and 4 person squad modes. If you look at what people are actually playing right now, a huge chunk of it is largely collaborative games.
I have an aunt and uncle who do this, but they aren't desperate, they're retired. They travel around the country, visiting places they'd like to see, and taking seasonal jobs as something to do and to help defray expenses. They still own their own house, but they choose not to live there, renting it out to their kids / their kid's friends. They've worked as lighthouse keepers, Amazon warehouse pickers, and as bookkeeping/maintenance for a sugar-beet picking operation (they're a little old for field work). Currently they're wintering over at the Grand Canyon while working at the general store in an rv park.
The point is not all of these nomads are forced into it by desperation or financial necessity; some of them just want to spend their retirement traveling and don't mind a little work along the way.
I hear you, but care must be taken not to dismiss the plight of these people simply because there are those who seek a similar situation by choice. Doing something because you want to versus doing it because you have to can make the same thing a pleasure or torture. Both perspectives are legitimate.
I'm currently looking for a suitable property to live off the grid, and move to more of a subsistence lifestyle (the usual stuff, veggies, few animals). But I realized that the exact same end state is pretty bleak if it's something you were born into.
I love this. Thank you for the link. Reminds me of what the Internet was going to be back in the early 2000s. Tell your aunt and uncle they have a new follower.
> The point is not all of these nomads are forced into it by desperation or financial necessity; some of them just want to spend their retirement traveling and don't mind a little work along the way.
I was about to post the same thing. Not everyone is in desperate need of affordable housing. YouTube is full of channels by RVers of all ages who simply want to travel and experience adventure on the road.
On the other hand, don't be ashamed of using a tool that works for the job, even if it isn't the latest or coolest thing. jQuery is no longer the best choice for a lot or circumstances, but if it is for yours, go for it.
Exactly - I don't understand why even computer literate people have trouble understanding that computers aren't "an" activity, they're a gateway to millions of them, limited by your imagination.
My parents also limited the time I could spend on a computer... and I ended up writing programs on paper while I waited for the next day :P
It can be more complicated than that, though. People need down time, we need an opportunity to reflect on what we've learned instead of jumping to the next thing.
Just anecdotally, I've found that the second round trip overwhelms any performance gains from not rendering on the server, especially if you have to boot up a heavy framework such as e.g. angular before even starting it.
The isomorphic model is that the first page load happens on the server (1 round trip), and that any additional page loads hit the api directly and re-render the page in the browser (also 1 round trip).
