I forgot that you also need to add a front loader to the machine and still maintain your specs. Speed and agility is what a fighter does, hauling cargo is what a bomb truck does. Vertical take-off and landing is a uniquely taxing aerodynamic feat and adding a front loader to a car/truck hybrid is the best analogy I could come up with. Anyone ever build a fleet of those and use them successfully for anything?

But the F-35 is not a generalist platform. Quite the opposite. It is specification creep taken to the comical extreme. Per your point, imagine what would happen if Ford decided to try really hard to make the F-150 outrace a corvette. It would end up being a far less capable truck and still wouldn't be able to catch the vette. It would be an insanely expensive F-35 like creation that nobody would want to buy. It would be way cheaper and smarter to buy a separate vette and F-150.

The B-52 is a general bomb truck. It carries ordnance cheaply and reliably. It doesn't try to do it using stealth or take off vertically. That's why it is still around and, unlike the stealthy B-2 hangar queen, will continue to be around and serve effectively for years to come. Ditto for the F-16 regarding the air to air mission.

I don't know what war will be like in 2045. So maintaining a hot, proven, and ugradeable fighter like the F-16 and using the trillion dollars left over to develop and sling a photon torpedo or high powered laser under a pylon is a way more future-proof way to go.

Yes you can cram all the mission hardware in the fuselage but that makes it fat which also increases drag and enormously increases complexity. There's no free lunch. It also means that hardware upgrades will be orders of magnitude more expensive. It will destroy their Air Force by eventually sucking up all of their available training and operational resources. But that's no surprise.

The primary mission of the F-35 is to spend money. Anyone who has thought about trying to combine a Corvette with a pickup truck with a front loader understands what an utterly ridiculous idea this airplane represents. It can be shredded by a 50's era dog fighter and is way too expensive and has way too little capacity as a bomb truck. Beyond visual range engagements will stop the second you down a friendly radar blip rather than an enemy one. All summarized with professional clarity and detail here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

The only mission this plane excels at is funneling money to Lockheed and their sub-contractors. Canada is probably buying it because that's the price of staying under the US nuclear umbrella. And, go figure, they have corrupt politicians too.

I'm a consumer and I want no part of the regulatory monstrosity that you call the FDA. I advocate the peaceful solution of clearly labeling items "NOT FDA APPROVED" and letting consumers (and their doctors) choose.

Standards that are too conservative stifle innovation and kill people by denying them access to drugs, technology, etc. Engineering (and life in general) is not about perfect safety or reckless risk. It is about a reasonable trade-off between the two. As for Frances Oldham Kelsey, she suspected thalidomide could cause neuropathy in users. She never mentioned any concerns about teratogenic effects on gestating children until after it was reported in the press. The bottom line is that she was dragging her feet and she got lucky. In that case, foot dragging was good because several thousand US children were spared birth defects. In the cases of beta blockers, AIDS drugs, and too many "drug lag" instances to mention, foot dragging by the FDA or insistence on insanely conservative standards killed many more people than they saved.