I read that in the sense of, "Let's say that I'm in the position of being a general manager", as a hypothetical rather than something to be taken literally.

No, I'm saying that government spending does that, regardless of whether the revenue comes from taxes, borrowing, or glowing presses. Collectively we make what we make (goods and services), and whatever portion of that GDP is diverted into government hands is just that much less for the people (except for the remarkably tiny percentage of government spending that actually goes to needed infrastructure, perhaps, but that's almost a rounding error in recent budgets).

Oh, yes, it worked so well for the Greeks, I'm sure it will work just as well for us. It's individual consumer spending that has pulled us out of every recession, and that waits on stability more than anything else. The best thing the government can do in a recession is: change nothing: no new regulations, no obviously-temporary programs. Historically people start spending again once they feel they've adjusted to the "new normal".

Again, spending, not taxes, is what affects efficiency, not productivity. "Broken windows" are great for productivity, but do nothing to actually make things better.

How is using blu ray cheaper than hard drives?

3 TB will fit on 120 25-GB BD-Rs. At 40 cents each, that's $48 in media costs. If you do like I do and reserve 20% for dvdisaster error-recovery data, you're still only looking at $60.

A 3 TB WD Green will set you back $95. (Want to spring for the NAS-rated Red drives instead? That'll be $119. Their absolute cheapest 3 TB hard drives are a couple of models from Seagate and Toshiba at $90 each.)

The trick is getting BD media into the terabytes and getting it at a price point where it is decently affordable. For example, a 100 GB BDXL disk is $65, but it should be about 10% of that price in order to be a viable backup medium.

My last spindle of 25 GB BD-Rs cost me maybe $0.60 each or so. I could drive down to Fry's right now and pick up a spindle for about $0.80 each. A 4x increase in storage density isn't worth a two-order-of-magnitude increase in price. I would be surprised if Farcebook didn't arrive at the same conclusion.

Going by the numbers from the video in TFA, they're getting over 10k BD-Rs in a rack. While the basic concept isn't new, they appear to have developed it to a considerably higher density.

Strange, but I'm finding I agree with this.

If they are storing their photos on facebook, they are doing it wrong.

FTFY. I can kinda understand posting stuff to Farcebook so others can view it, but using it as your primary storage medium? That's at least a dozen different kinds of wrong.

Fortunately, when it comes to public policy, everyone's opinion is of equal worth.

I think it's safe to say that in any SHTF event, it's the people who believe themselves to be smart who will suffer the worst.

Facebook seems to have your friends in mind, at least for now. They have a system where old photos are store quite cheaply, because they simply fail to display the first time you try to view them. By giving up on storing them in a way that can serve a web page hit, Facebook can be quite cheap (though I hear they use powered-down HDDs, not optical - and Western Digital has a new line of HDDs just for this purpose).

Well, we need to buy something to replace aging airframes, so it might be better to say "we could save that just by building a one new F-15 instead of a new F-35". (Seriously, I'm as hawkish as they come, but the F-35 isn't the answer, and fortunately we haven't shut down F-15 production).

The government can only print dollars. It can't print goods and services, so you're still diverting those goods and services (whatever the government is buying) away from the people. Also, there is a high "frictional" cost to an unstable currency - it's just an inefficient waste, so, again, less goods and services for the people.

No one has a gun to their head forcing them to work for/in CA.

You can spend hundreds of thousands at a state or Ivy League college getting a useless degree, have giant debts, end up on food stamps, and Obama doesn't care.

But if you spend the same at University of Phoenix or ITT Tech and have the same result, Obama gets his panties in a wad.

So the lesson here is that money should only be wasted on government approved institutions.

Sadly, not just the FA18, but almost everything else: F15 (ends in 2019), F16, FA18, A10 (as if), and AV8B. Pretty much only the big FA18E/F that replaced the F14 is left, and that only because the Navy has been able to insist on twin-engines for their main fighter.

The S/VTOL version makes sense. It's an upgrade from the Harrier, and while it's a shitty air-to-air plane, a shitty bomber, and a shitty close air support plane, it's much better at all 3 roles than having no plane at all. For a VTOL role, that's what matters. For a standard runway plane, it's just evenly shitty at all roles,without much to redeem it (though it will do just fine against low-tech opponents even so).

It's been called the Bradly Fighting Vehicle of fighters, and I think that's an apt comparison. OTOH, the BFV evolved into something quite useful, and who knows, this might too.