I'll read this later in a browser tab i keep open for at least a year.
frezik
A lack of a standing army has implications. It's a huge drain on an economy that filters resources into tanks and guns rather than schools and healthcare. It also has ripple effects in places that aren't strictly military.
The US massively overproduces food. The reason is that farms were heavily subsidized during WW2 in order to feed an army where every soldier would potentially need a 3000kcal diet after matching all day, every day. Those farms dropped that money into automation, and that meant they still had the capability to produce that much after the war.
Dropping farm subsidies would have meant plunging that industry back into depression. So the subsidies kept going. You could nationalize the farms, but that doesn't happen for obvious reasons. Nobody has come up with another idea for getting out of that trap.
Contrary to what MAGA thinks, free school lunches aren't there to support "moochers". During the draft for WW1, 1 out of 9 draftees were rejected for reasons related to malnutrition during childhood. Those programs exist to make sure America can draw up an army. MAGA doesn't remember that lesson and undermine their own objectives in the process.
You need to subsidize heavy industry, too. Car companies become tank companies in times of war. Therefore, you better make sure your car companies survive in "peace" time. Hence all the government financing of those companies. Chrysler (or the company owning it) has been stumbling from one financial boondoggle to the next for my whole life because of this.
Even worse, you want the tank factories to stay tank factories. Which means Congress needs to order new tanks even when they're not needed otherwise, or else those factories close. Same goes for ships and planes.
None of which used to happen until industrialized warfare forced the issue. If Originalists want things how it was in the first few decades after the Revolution, then the military should have had its funding and staffing at anemic levels for about a decade now. Except that genuinely would be a problem in case of another big war.
A solution to this is to take our ball and go home. As long as Canada and Mexico are friendly, we face no threat on our own continent. An oversea invasion is impossible (I can go over the details of why, but it comes down to logistics). The scaffolding of an army and a navy focused on shore defense would be fine. Keep a few nukes if we really have to.
MAGA would never go for that, either. They're isolationist in some ways, but still want a giant military for some reason.
The US didn't have a large standing military or budget for it. This matters.
100k is the number usually cited for this. Not sure how that calculation is done, though.
Having read the memo--which is basically meeting minutes between the DoD and DHS-- it's seems to be missing an understanding of how much Trump is disliked up and down the ranks. They ultimately did almost nothing in LA. The birthday military parade had clear signs of everyone phoning it in on purpose. Signalgate convinced all but the most diehard MAGA soldiers (not as big a group as you might think) that this leadership is a bunch of clowns.
What this means is that the White House still overestimates how much the military is in their pocket. Good.
From Ur-fascism:
Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
What's missing from the analysis is that they can't objectively evaluate their own forces, either. As much as they go on about strength and fighting and war, they're actually really bad at it.
This and the ballroom are Trump trying to leave a permanent mark on the White House behind. If nothing else, he'll die of natural causes within the next decade, and he knows his name will be cursed from then on. If you have to call it "The Donald J Trump Ballroom", then he still has something.
I seem to recall that the White House is considered a historic building, and renovations need to be approved by Congress. It's actually been a problem, because there's a lot of wiring and plumbing issues that need to be addressed. Was this somewhere in the Big Murder Bill?
Oh, right, I forgot about what Administration we're dealing with. Of course he's going ahead with it.
Our industry has no idea how to hire people. Our interview processes are almost designed to filter out obviously bad candidates while accepting that some good candidates will fail, too. Getting a specifically good candidate is almost luck.
Remember this if you're bummed about a string of rejections.
Does PVPP come from animal products? Everything I could find about it suggests petrochemicals. Which is technically vegan. *ahem* "Vegan leather" *ahem*.
Which only leads to more questions, like "are 40k Orcs vegan?"
I don't think I've met #1 in real life, besides knowing more than a few of #2. The first one just gets really loud on the Internet.
This is my answer to people who are sad that FTL space travel is probably impossible. There are wonders right around you that you don't even know about. Space will always be there for humanity to explore. We don't have to be in a rush. Tons to learn about right here. It's not worth going to space if we leave a burnt cinder of a planet behind us.