Most businesses over a certain size also waste a f**kton of money. The larger the organization, the harder it is to avoid doing so.

I told you exactly how this practice creates waste. At the end of the year, unspent budget goes away, so the people to whom the budget was assigned look for ways to spend it. Most of that spending was not specifically budgeted for, or else the stuff would have been bought earlier in the cycle. And if it were strictly necessary, it would have been explicitly budgeted, rather than being bought because there just happened to be money left over.

What percentage of that spending provides a real benefit? There's no way to know, because they didn't have to provide a formal justification and ask for more funding to cover it, since there was money left over from something else that didn't cost as much as expected.

Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

The fact that you can't see government waste tells me that either you're not looking closely enough to see the problems or you're benefitting from the waste.

One of the core problems with government waste comes from the budgeting process itself, wherein money that is not spent a the end of a budget year must be given back, and your next year's budget will likely be cut based on the fact that you didn't use your entire budget that year. This sounds like a good idea in theory, until you realize that managers see that as a risk to them being able to do what they need to do the next year, which means they will find ways to spend any unused budget at the end of the year (or worse, the quarter), even if it is for things that could easily be deferred until a later year, or for things that they don't strictly require. And this is how budgets bloat.

To be fair, the same thing happens in businesses, academia, etc.; it is not specific to government. But it is very, very common in government. And while those expenses might not look like a lot at an individual team level, they add up to a lot by the time you look at the organization as a whole.

But no, the hilarious thing is that you're telling me I'm wrong without actually rebutting a single point that I've made, which means you're likely arguing based on blind faith in an ideology or political group, rather than based on an actual understanding of how government budgeting works, which makes your opinion largely irrelevant in practice.

Just saying.

Either that or it's a persistent urban legend.

Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.

I hear that the National Street-level Drug Pushers Association is lobbying Congress for immunity against drug laws.

If asked to say which one I sympathize more with - the pushers of physiological drugs or the pushers of psychological drugs - I might have to flip a coin. OTOH the street guys are at least up-front about what they're doing and their motivations, so I might be tempted to give them the pass so I could watch the likes of Zuck hanging and twisting in the wind.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to say about printing small rocket parts, such as for the engines. But they were printing basically sheet metal cylinders, which is such an immensely slow and inefficient way to go about it, and it left them with parts that were heavier and less aerodynamic (rougher surface). Crazy that idea ever got any funding.

The one seen over Moscow might have been, with a bit more thrust...

"SapceX has got to be a huge scam too" - SpaceX launches the vast majority of the world's commercial cargo to orbit. The Falcon 9 FT has the highest success rate of any rocket with a statistically significant number of launches under its belt, and is dirt cheap. SpaceX's core operations are roughly breakeven, but that's including subsidizing the development of Starship. Starlink is a money printer.

There are lots of things sketchy about the SpaceX IPO, to say the least, but SpaceX, as a company, has been extremely successful with rocketry.

Is that true? I can't find any reference to it, and it seems like the kind of thing that would be documented, if only to make fun of it.

May I ask where you found that value? The linked-to article (press release, really) does not say. Is that 500 across all three units, of 500 each?

Statism creates billionaires.

Real property tax. This is about other types of property, and Prop 13 would not necessarily apply.

The hilarious part is where you actually think I'm on the right. The right thinks that government waste comes from abuse, which really translates "things we don't like". Then, they try to cut out all the things that they don't like, and make a mess of it, because those things exist for a reason, and the result is predictable.

I'm pretty squarely in the center ideologically. I am fiscally conservative, in that I believe governments should tax enough to pay their bills. Such a statement would piss off both the right and the left in the United States right now, because neither side wants to do that. They'd rather use bond measures as credit cards and run up a lot of debt for the next generation to pay.

But saying that there is very little abuse or fraud is not the same thing as saying that there is no waste. The government wastes colossal amounts of money because of not modernizing their tech. The government wastes colossal amounts of money by pinching pennies in ways that come back to bite them in the a**. And so on. And if you don't believe this, you've never worked in any government, public school, or public university.

Case in point, every paved road is likely to be a mistake. Concrete costs only marginally more, but lasts a lot longer and requires less maintenance on average. We have between 2 and 2.5 million miles of these "cost savings" in the United States. If governments had just spent just a bit more when they built the roads, by my very, very rough math, the U.S. would probably save about $10 billion dollars annually. That's $10 billion dollars of government waste that nobody is doing anything about, because fixing the problem costs money, and there's no actual money being allocated for reducing government waste.

The government also wastes colossal amounts of money on social programs that don't work. Once a program exists, it's impossible to kill it, even if it isn't actually achieving the desired goals. Instead, they pour good money after bad. Case in point, we dump huge amounts of taxpayer dollars into a public transit system that nobody uses, all to lower the fares so that poor people can take it. Yet when I put a pencil to it a couple of years ago, I calculated that it would actually be cheaper to give everyone living below the poverty line a monthly gift card with enough Uber credit for their average daily commute. And more of the working poor would be better able to hold down jobs by wasting far less time commuting, too. And some of those buses on some routes have so few people that single-occupancy cars would actually be more efficient, so it isn't even necessarily bad from an environmental perspective, either. Mind you, this is just back-of-the-envelope math, and a more detailed study could come to different conclusions, but I don't see anyone even asking the questions. They just seem to assume that doing it the way it has always been done is the right way to do things, and don't even consider that the right answer might be to scrap it and start over from scratch.

This is not to say that the ideas I'm suggesting here are necessarily 100% correct, nor that there aren't even better approaches. This is also not to say that government is inherently less efficient than business. All things being equal, it should be more efficient on average, because it isn't trying to make a profit. But there's a lot of waste in most businesses, too, so that's not really an argument that government isn't wasteful, just that we shouldn't automatically assume that it is more wasteful than for-profit companies trying to do the same thing. :-)

MidJourney was the first sizable AI company to become profitable, having done so back in 2022.