Do we not need a military?
Nothing is perfect, but we are trapped on a planet with a bunch of violent, highly intelligent apes. Certainly the military does things I disagree with, and things could always be improved, but generally what is the alternative?
If you can stage a coup or rile up and train a militia to fight your proxy war, there is no need for an outdated notion of "imperialism".
The US has the most powerful military the world has ever seen, and that power is not simply being tossed into the dumpster.
That said I do agree we spend too much on our military. We should always spend more than any other nation to ensure dominance, but I'd imagine cutting the budget down would force efficiency and actually improve the military at this point.
However it seemed the person above was saying that militaries in general are bad or murderous which is very different from saying the budget just needs to be reduced.
Cuba's shiny new banking system, Japan's Navy(?), and Afghanistan's poppy fields disagree.
> Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
...but I am concerned that HN is changing for the worse.
It's something a teenager might write, yes, because teenagers often aren't hypocritical enough to ignore the murders just because it's a nation-state doing them. That doesn't make it wrong.
The United States military has lost its privilege to play any form of moralism or rational justification after their actions over the past 30-50 years. It's no longer defense in most cases, it's assault. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, the second Iraq, invading Afghanistan for funsies, there's no point to most of it.
We've only had one success in decades, and it still wasn't even related to defense!
There's a difference between defense and imperialistic invasions, and the United States military hasn't defended much of anything at home in quite a while.
Force projection - do as we say or else.
Obviously, the U.S. Military does slightly more than assault. Proportionally not much more, but a bit more. Like football.
Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced. I also think most federal spending is bureaucratic fluff. That said, I have less problem when there are efforts to stabilize or reduce spending via technology. And I find that people who try to take an ethical stance over companies offering any kind of service to the government is short sighted at best, and dangerous or destructive at worst.
In the end, this will happen, and I'd rather it go to a company that is focused on the problem (technical infrastructure for computing resources) over the government trying to build a bureaucratic mess that costs a significant amount more.
Not that everything should be outsourced. For example, I think privatized prisons are far, far, far worse for society than providing a cloud network for the federal govt.
I'm not a proponent of our foreign engagements at all... however, this isn't the place where such a line should be drawn. I find that anywhere the government can more effectively reduce costs and/or improve it infrastructure should generally be preferred.
Frankly, I'd love to see most of our foreign deployments dramatically scaled back. I just don't think the mentality that nobody should provide any kind of technical services to the government would only make things worse, not better overall, and that specific criticisms shouldn't be part of decisions of infrastructure use.
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/artic...
And then there’s tens of millions of artillery shells, if you’re counting all ordnance.
Vietnam war had a huge amount of bombing too, with cluster bombs and the like.
I’d be a bit surprised if Obama made the top 5, but maybe.
In either case, offering cloud services to the Government isn't really an authoritarian position.
This is only true, if you take it as axiomatic that armed forces have one job, which is killing and that all killing in armed conflict is simple murder. That's not a position I take.
DoD uses a lot of linux and other open source software. Should we stop working on that too since, according to you, it's "enabling murder"?
Development labs end up using Linux and other open source software all over the place, but it gets a bit more iffy when you're going into production.
We had to verify everything was approved through DADSM (potentially navy specific), but other than that as long as we had a legal license to run we were good.
This is what forced me into using centos for our deployed infrastructure, and mIRC as our chat client of choice.
Combine that with a persistent stigma against working in defense and we have a recipe of losing our technology edge within the this century if not sooner. What will our rivals decide to do once that happens?
Nothing, you have a capacity to turn Earth into a glass fields. Also the work to improve said capacity seems to have started.
The US military has ensured peace and prosperity for billions around the world for decades given its formidable global presence.
Imagine the chaos and crime that would descends on a community without police or law enforcement. The world operates the exact same way. There will always be a most powerful country enforcing stability and global compliance, and I would much rather it be the US than Russia or China.
I've lived there but if you don't believe me, ask a few Vietnamese yourself, they're not shy about it.
Also the US did not bring "the piece and prosperity" to Vietnam unless you mean withdrawing from that murderous war that they started in a first place. What brought a relative prosperity was that their communist government did soften their stance towards market based economy. And feeling some guilt US probably contributed few pesos.
On one hand, we need to be thoughtful and mindful of the ethical implications of all that we do. On the other hand, every action always has a context inside a larger system and has unintended consequences and being an ethical purist can sometimes be more harmful. Most people who are older fall somewhere between striving to do the right thing but also recognizing they cannot control all the consequences and even if they could, they cannot predict what greater harm or good may result.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_double_effect
With quotes from this thread like "in the meantime the work doesn't get done," and "bid for contracts that [enable] government to make some real progress," you'd never guess this stuff is going to be used to and to enable murder.
So many people were focusing on how Microsoft Ɛ> Linux or Open Source or whatever (so much so that even rms went to Microsoft and complimented them) yet completely ignore the harm they're still trying to cause.