Comment on Senators Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Guarantee Military Right to Repair Its Equipment

• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  This is important.

  It’s the downstream consequence of decades of outsourcing, kicked off in earnest in the Reagan Administration. “Right to Repair” is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of military privatization.

  Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

  That’s the nut of it. This money is being wasted in the general sense. But it isn’t wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

  This goes back to the BBB and its rampage through some of the most high efficiency Medicaid programs on offer, in order to shuttle somewhere between $175B and $541B (depending on who is counting) to a national security system that’s just legions of badged up bullies harassing locals for the entertainment of a few hooting chuds.

  why can’t the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors?

  Because

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  and SaaS is how corporate industry has decided it will continue to grow its profits indefinitely.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    But it isn’t wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

    Which is also why people active against this will be killed many times before the stream made dry out.

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• RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  So finally they’ve figured out that “privatization” is a shitty idea. Not only does it introduce another point of failure in logistics and operations, but the private sector doesn’t mind trying to make every contract on they can retire off of using taxpayer money.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    This has nothing to do with privatization, at least not in the sense you seem to mean. It has everything to do with ownership, and the military wants to actually own the products it buys.

    This isn’t going against the private sector as a supplier of goods, it merely says if you sell to the military, the military actually owns that product instead of rents it.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Just informing you that good old USSR had a similar problem, except not just with the military.

    It, of course, had planning inefficiency problems, but the reason some stuff costed and was funded orders of magnitude more than the Western alternatives (sometimes being clones of those alternatives) was just that industries producing this stuff were closer to important interests in internal politics. Soviet production lines were not that much less efficient.

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• rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Look up military pricing too, I remeber seeing something about how the military pays $400 for $4 bag of fuses

  That “military pricing” is called “corruption”. Despite everyone knowing that it happens in most militaries (or big b2b), it still is that.

  Its a complete waste of taxpayer money. Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

  I mean, you had a truly magnificent military budget for already 30 years after the nation which was supposed to be the problem solved by it started asking for food aid and falling apart into pieces.

  When the funds are provided and it’s certain they won’t have to be used, the tasks existing expand to fill the budget.

  The US military budget is so over the top that even things that it achieves are not so significantly different from what Russian military budget with Russian corruption achieves, yet its size utterly dwarfs that.

  If US military budget were used as efficiently as that of, say, Poland, US military would have colonized most of the Solar system already. With actual people as colonists.

  That’s about that fiscal discipline the Republican party was supposedly in favor of, until it wasn’t.

  OK, I live in Russia, so shouldn’t probably blabber too much about US politics.

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• Deflated0ne@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  The entire military budget is a massive waste of taxpayers money.

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• Bosht@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Thanks for the type up! I really do appreciate the info, I’m just bitching about the current state of things and how this seems like a distraction compared to the laundry list of other stuff going on.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    It’s not though. The current administration can suck and also do good things. Both can be true simultaneously.

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  • helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    No problem. I’m not happy with the current state of things either, but crossing one thing off the list, even if its lower priority to us, is still good for someone.

    I find it interesting that some of the other comments go on picking apart my thing, that basically boil down to military = bad, so right to repair = bad and its not a problem because they are already wasting money. Be glad something good is moving toward.

    Consumer rights have been increasingly stomped on by the mega corporations for years now, and they continuasly push the boundries. The very concept of a terms of service “contract” that can be changed anytime by 1 party (and heavily in their favor) is insane. The more control we get back the better.

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