It is true. The number you're looking at doesn't include all military spending. For example, it doesn't include the nuclear weapons programs, intelligence programs, veterans affairs, ...
So when we consider school spending it's important to count every penny but when we consider military spending we can just neglect vast swathes of spending?
Zero chance? What odds are you offering, because this bet looks very appealing?
I am guessing that you would not actually go all-in against a penny, and I’m curious to know what implied probability you actually offer. I will see your bet amount as an expression of your confidence level. If you say that you don’t bet, I’ll take that as an indication that you have no confidence, and believe the probability to be something above 50%
Initially I did set a number to be donated to a favorite charity but decided it was in poor taste/mean spirited and quickly edited it out. We don’t need to be petty just because we disagree.
The Trump admin will not be held accountable for the blatant market manipulation and betting on internal info they engage in. That’s the smart “bet” metaphorically speaking. It’s a self enriching circus.
Ever-more-restrictive government regulations are what allows these OEMs to ‘leverage’ their market power this way. I am not sure that a new regulation can solve it, as these sorts of mandates don’t seem to have worked in any other market.
The argument isn't 'more' regulations or 'less' regulations, it is the right regulations. The problem is that big companies slowly allow regulations that don't hurt them but do block competition by aggressively fighting regulations that help the startup (their competition) or help the consumer in ways that make them less money. It isn't hard to be evil and create regulatory capture. You don't actually have to be active in crafting regulation, just be active in blocking the right regulation. General statements that are 'against regulation' play into big companies making things worse.
These big companies absolutely allow regulations that "hurt" them. Deere doesn't want to deal with farmers who are pissed off that emissions stuff results in a service call at a bad time and can't be overridden, or obnoxious safety stuff that make products less useful outside of their "textbook" application, or something that forces them to expensively certify their product is XYZ or something.
Buuuuut, the cost of implementing that stuff hurts the competition way more, so Deere and friends don't really fight it.
They're trading absolute market size for stronger control over market share. Less people are going to buy their products at the margin if the products are made worse. But those that do will buy it from them, so more profit.
Those are load-bearing quotation marks: you're saying the regulation doesn't hurt them, only "hurts" them. If the regulation hurt them, they wouldn't allow it.
You're proposing a binary version of "hurt", they are proposing a spectrum. If a regulation hurts company A but it will survive whereas company B, A's main and essentially only competitor stopping A from a monopoly, will go out of business from that regulation, you know that company A won't fight it.
That's a double edged sword. Investors demand a return regardless of what IP law is. They'll invest in the companies that find some way to protect their investment -- NDAs, stronger technical protections, services-models, etc.
You don't have to prioritize them. You can choose to encourage the rich to hoard their money elsewhere. But there are consequences to every policy decision.
The rich don't have money, they have assets, and those assets can't go anywhere. It doesn't matter if the rich buy or sell a farm in Canada, the farm is still in Canada.
> It doesn't matter if the rich buy or sell a farm in Canada, the farm is still in Canada.
Have we learned nothing from what happened to the US's industrial economy.
If you turn the farm into an obviously poor investment it'll go tits up because neither wall street nor main street is dumb enough to invest money into a losing proposition.
'Global slavery index' is not a credible source, even according to Wikipedia.
I'm sorry I spent 2 minutes of my life looking it up - I should've known better.
This conversation is over. I can't trust you to not throw random crap a google search produces that supports your fantasy that I then have to spend brain cells to debunk.
Then pick a different one. Which measure did you use to come to your conclusion?
I suspect you didn't use one at all, because I am not aware of any measure of "slavery" that correlates positively with any measure of investment activity.
Labor practices and protections are much better in countries with high economic investment.
Remember that those regulations are written by the OEMs they benefit and whom bribe legislators to pass those regulations.
Any argument made without acknowledging this is purely in bad faith. The problem is not regulation that benefits OEMs. The problem is that you can simply purchase regulations that benefit you.
There are many regulations, written by a variety of actors, often in strange alliances. Safety, environmental, and disclosure regulations are often the culprits behind industry consolidation and oligopolization.
From looking at the sources below, it looks like Ukraine still has about 1/3 of the fighter aircraft it started the war with, though it started with many non-serviceable units (seems that at least 20 aircraft were non-operational), and received many parts from abroad:
I am not sure what is meant by 'a significant number of', and I'm not sure if all commenters have a common definition of that phrase, so I'm unable to judge the veracity of the comments above.
The grandparent provided an anecdote relating to absence of evidence; the parent provided some anecdotal counter-examples. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so the respondent's anecdote is more compelling if we give them equal credence. Disproof by counter-example is usually a very effective method, especially when arguing about whether something 'ever happened'.
It is very popular in many industries; when it is accomplished by convincing re-sellers to take in more stock than they desire, it is called 'stuffing the channel'. Book publishers are famous for doing this to achieve 'best-seller' status.
Yes and the response is telling you that you can build something orders of magnitude more sophisticated without any trouble. The point is, the firearm is not the tube the projectile comes out of. Firearm is closely defined and not intuitive to the general public.
That's just not true; the US Military Budget for 2025 was (USD) $768 BB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
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