throwaway555666

Book of the New/Long/Short Sun were absolute masterpieces at telling a story within a world where the books and authors themselves exist.

Gene Wolfe really outdid himself, it's always incredible to me to reread the series and find that the books are written in a way that's not only engaging and interesting on a first read through, but equally captivating and enjoyable in new ways when you reread them and appreciate all the subtleties.

Is GDP really the best way to look at this though, when the US spends on the order of 2-5x more for equipment and weapons systems per unit compared to the Russian/Chinese equivalents, without necessarily being 2-5x better in real world applications?

It would be interesting to see a more accurate comparison with spending adjusted by total amount and actual purchase/operating costs, though I'm not really sure how to go about doing that, and it gets even more murky looking at price gouging by military contractors for ordinary objects in the US ($50,000 trash cans come to mind.) For the first reason and one above I suspect our actual reported value gained from our budget is vastly overinflated.

I also suppose something similar would be happening in Russia/China, maybe not as price gouging fraud but theft of supplies/funding, which would be harder to compare.