Reagan was on a privatization kick. It resulted in wonderful growth for the Beltway Bandits. Another reason privatization does not work for government is because government is not private enterprise that can decide what markets to enter and which to exit. Programs are mandated by law. Sure laws can change but it is a long arduous path. And you wouldn't want it any other way. Changing things on a whim has brought current U.S. to its knees, and the damage appears to be long lasting.

Want to see privatization at work? Look at the U.S. health system. Those insurance companies use actuaries to determine who gets covered. A good team of actuaries can put a price on your grandmother and her cat and will if you ask them to. As a consequence, we have a health system which can send you to the poor house in under a year because of a medical condition.

DoD is one of the largest organizations on the planet. Saying their failure to pass 8 audits in a row ignores the scale of the problem. First off, it was never built to be audited. The idea of auditing DoD is just like DoD telling a contractor to add this extra special whizzy to their weapons system after it had already been built. It has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort to corral systems that were never built with auditing in mind into sysrtems that can be audited. And those systems are not stand alone, they all interact.

Then the question come up of what software will you use to audit a system this large and complex. They chose SAPs software (for the most part). Ever interact with SAP's ERP? Hell is more welcoming. They chose SAP because no other system was big enough. Oracle is for babies. MS? (okay, stop laughing). In addition, Congress keep mandating new requirements. And new systems are constantly being brought on line and old ones retired. It is like changing a plane's internal mechanisms while it is flying. Ever try to hit a moving target of an engineered system while keeping the system up and running? If you answer no, you do not understand the scope of the problem.

There's no freezing DoD in place so you can perform an audit on it. It is constantly changing. To make matters worse, Congress and Administrations keep changing. Their priorities keep changing. Meanwhile, you must be sure to keep DoD's job of defense up-to-date, and offense must be kept up-to-day as well.

Gee, it is almost as if the U.S. government needs to encourage homegrown solar panels. If only the U.S. could find such a government.

Even re-architecting might not fix their problem. It depends upon how much their software people are relying upon bot generated code. Given their famous attention to detail, what's the likelihood that they are pushing out code they do not understand because "it worked"? The hardest bugs do not show up in test harnesses. So if they have built up a giant sticky wad of code they do not understand, there's no going through it all quickly if that is even possible. If they re-architect with the same software dependence on bots, they haven't really solved the underlying issue which is the way they build stuff.

There will be no manned Mars missions: radiation. The problem is that no one has any doable idea to stop it. And this isn't the milk toast radiation we get around the Earth. This is the really nasty stuff from the rest of the Universe. And if you are lucky, you won't run into a solar flare on the way. Aside from the pretty lights, it is really nasty radiation. Don't forget to protect your space craft's instruments, they are more delicate than even you.

Another reason is that if you send someone up there for roughly a year just to get there, their bodies are not programmed to work very well in extended periods of no gravity. One's heart and other organs were developed in the Earth's gravity. When they get there, they get to enjoy low gravity. And then up to another year later, they are in the right planetary positions to catch the red-eye back. We might get them there and back (irradiated as they are), but they won't be living on Earth. Their internal organs will not take the strain.

Ever lived with 4-5 college roommates in a tin-can for even a month. It won't be pretty. Now we want them married to each other for 3 year years. Yup, that'll work.

So to sum up, I think we should send you. You are dim-witted enough not to understand the implications so you won't experience any angst over the trip or the radiation or the lack of functioning bodily organs. But you'll at least be wanting in a little buddy. I suggest Elmo, he too is dim-witted and is wildly enthusiastic enough to go. And he has the money to make it happen. Go submit your application to him for the trip. Better take a lot of ketamine with you (hint: that's what you will need, not him).

"It's like the toddler in chief never had to understand the consequences for any action he's ever taken." That is precisely correct, he never has had to understand the consequences of his actions. He's just a two-bit bunko artist. A bunko artist never does have to understand consequences as long as he gets what he immediately wants. There's always another mark out there.

And el Bunko is no different. After stiffing banks, he still found banks willing to lend to him. After stiffing contractors, there were plenty more where they came from. And up until about May of last year, he always found enough Maggots who would believe him. Now he's running out of those kinds of Maggots. It seems some have found out he lied to them about the la Presidenta-Epstein files. And now he's lying about the Epstein-Iran war. He lied about his tariffs. He lies about everything and never could tell the difference between truth and what he wants.

No. 1 Rule of la Presidenta: He destroys everything he touches, and the U.S. made that idiot president.

Hey, lay off la Presidenta. He's needs time to play with his new "present" (very expensive we're told, but not by anyone reliable) from Iran.

you have that backwards, the alien called Ross Perot met with humans.

At least the summary only contains clips from youtube, X-thingy, and South China Morning Post. I think we want to wait until we see demos, and no sneaky AI demos.

The Second Amendment contains the wording: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed".

Now, which well-regulated Militia are you a part of? ICE doesn't count as it is more or less a gang of thugs with little training and is certainly not well-regulated. A National Guard would count. The Amendment was written at a time when militias of the U.S. lived in their homes from whence they set to militia or whatever they did. We do not let National Guard troops keep their weapons at home.

In addition, the Amendment was written at a time when muzzle loading arms were state of the art, not machine guns or pistols with large clips. And, the states were sparsely populated so one needed a gun to fight off the critters who were looking for a meal after we pushed them out of their habitat and Native Americans after we pushed them out of their habitat.

It isn't that we think gun-lovers are going to go ape-shit and shoot everyone around them, it is that a proportion of gun-lovers will do this. Which ones? Why you just have to ask them. And that is why I do not wish you to have a gun. I don't trust you.

Without knowing this story was about Hong Kong, you could have thought it credible enough in the current environment to be applying in the U.S.

Spawning little daughter AI Agents to go out into the world to fornicate with old and over-the-hill AI agents.

I view it as a way to address investors' stupidity on AI-Hype and putting their name out there into the AI-Verse as relevant to a synergistic forward thinking future-centric Brave New AI-World. Marketing across the techno-babble universe will get hyperbolic over this. Marketing profits will flow. And then, in a fit of synergistic forward thinking future-centric hypergasm, they'll make it Quantum Ready.

How will it be useful except as a new grift opportunity for el Bunko and his friends? It's expensive moving shit between the Moon and Earth so we can forget about manufacturing anything up there. Maybe we can test how much radiation astronauts can handle before conking out so that we'll know how stupid it is to plan to send them to Mars. Or we can test how much the lost of gravity affects their bodies before they totally collapse on return to Earth.

On the other hand, maybe we can set up a prison for Elmo on the Moon like for Boris the Animal in Men in Black III. Now that's something worth while.

That's not even wrong. The Iranian people will eventually remove the ayatollahs from their misery on their own given the increasing frequency of their eruptions against that regime. The only problem is that then la Presidenta cannot claim it as a "win".

Let's list some of la Presidenta's wins, shall we:

1. The Big Dumb Bill locking in eye-watering deficits far into the future and thus jeopardizing the stability of the U.S. as a nation.
2. Tearing health care from millions of Americans so he could pay off the rich folks.
3. Industrial scale grifting for he and his family.
4. Screwing up foreign aid which was minuscule in the Fed. Budget thus essentially poisoning millions of people world-wide.
5. Building a private army of thugs stealing people off the street and now infesting the nation's airports.
6. Razing science budgets, especially mRNA research, which is a promising technology to counter cancer and other diseases.
7. Sending NASA off on some dumb mission to populate the moon for no particular reason.
8. Canceling the Kennedy Center.
9. Turing the U.S. government into a pay-for-play enterprise.
10. Reducing the U.S. Dept. of Justice to the point where they lost over 7000 lawyers (they couldn't put up with the increase in vomiting) and where judges across the country tell the DoJ they do not trust them any longer.
11. Weaponizing the DoJ doing exactly what he accused the Biden Administration of doing.
12. Dragging the U.S. standing in the world to below that of Russia.
13. Sucking up the Putin.
14. Throwing the Ukrainians under Putin's bus.
15. Blowing up boats in the Caribbean for no valid reason other than he likes to see them go boom.
16. Starting a needless war thus emptying U.S. stockpiles of munitions putting the U.S. at risk for defending itself and whatever friends it has left, and then causing the gas price to increase by a third, and then asking Congress to help that idiot pay for the war to the tune of $200 billion dwarfing the $34 Billion in heath care he took away.
17. Spreading lies about migrants voting when the numbers of illegal voting are vanishingly small.
18. Demonizing migrants and blaming them for all the troubles his Nazi sympathizers cause.
19. Stealing migrants and shipping them off into foreign prisons, don't forget, we're a fucking Christian nation.

Damn, life is too short but I could go on quite a while.