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New Canadian Politics Thread

MindzEye said:
Here's something not really being said in the US conversation on the future of their military when they go it alone like they appear to intend to.

They can't actually afford it. They didn't take a bunch of nation partners on to the F-35 program because they were really nice guys who wanted to make sure we all had the same kick ass planes as they do. It was as a way to guarantee that the cost per plane would get down to a reasonable and affordable enough number for them to be able to afford enough of them to replace the set of aging airframes they were looking to move on from that were still in service. Get enough countries in on it, and the economies of scale of ordering 2-3x in total as many of them as what the US by itself had the need of, and now a 1.5-2 Trillion dollar program becomes viable.

If you look at a lot of what the US has developed by itself over the last ~15 years

- The Gerald Ford class carriers are Nimitz class hulls with technology improvements and it was getting cheaper to just build new ships than it was to do another major retrofit of the carrier fleet again. Most of the development was parallel development in things like nuclear power, and incremental development of things like the catapult system, radars, etc.

- Similarly, they re-used the F-15 system to created the EX variant with a bunch of new toys because their last air superiority project produced an insanely good plane that cost a metric fuckton of money and they had to cut the fleet order in half but still needed new birds

- The new Abrahms is the old Abrahms with new systems, similar to

- They fucked up the Zumwalt program to replace the Arleigh Burke destroyers and burnt a lot of money along the way. The Navy is now just ordering new Arleigh Burke's, which are on par with the Type 45's the Brits developed, but not better. They're mid development into the DDG program and that program has turned into another goat fuck with the cost of each hull recently getting revised to 2.5B each. The Frigate being developed in parallel will now cost 1.4B per hull, up from 1B.

It's all updates to old systems that worked, and new development failures that didn't, even when it produced incredible equipment (F-22) it was so wildly expensive that they couldn't afford them.

I wouldn't be remotely surprised if their NGAD 6th gen project turned into another circus and one of the two competing western 6th gen programs beat them to market with a fighter more advanced than the F-35 is.
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How the fuck do you know all this stuff?
 
zeke said:
i like the sounds of it though i can't quite believe it until i see it.


but yeah you figure losing the majority of their customer base would hurt the bottom line.
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The best way to think about it imo is to take the lessons of the Russian "modernization" where a decade of money got shit down a hole of corruption because of course it did, it's Russia. You can't funnel that kind of money through a deeply broken system of government and expect efficiency to come out the other side.

Well, decades of corporate soft procurement corruption has turned the entire game into a massive motherfucking boondoggle, where you throw 25B at developing a new type of destroyer that you expect to build 30+ and you end up instead with 3 for the same price and the corrupt political end of your busted ass procurement system kept throwing good money after bad even when the project was clearly broken because this shipyard is in some jerkoffs district or state and brings lots of jobs, or this other dipshit Senator on the appropriation committee graduated from the naval war college in 1960 and the best days of his life are from when he rowed crew for the college team yadda yadda, so he blocks the vote whenever this program comes up for getting dummied.

I don't care how powerful or rich a nation you are, soft corruption is almost as debiliating over a long period of time as more obvious corruption is. It's the same reason why they can't build high speed rail in California. They're up to their eyeballs in soft corruption and it's drowning them.
 
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MindzEye said:
The best way to think about it imo is to take the lessons of the Russian "modernization" where a decade of money got shit down a hole of corruption because of course it did, it's Russia. You can't funnel that kind of money through a deeply broken system of government and expect efficiency to come out the other side.

Well, decades of corporate soft procurement corruption has turned the entire game into a massive motherfucking boondoggle, where you throw 25B at developing a new type of destroyer that you expect to build 30+ and you end up instead with 3 for the same price and the corrupt political end of your busted ass procurement system kept throwing good money after bad even when the project was clearly broken because this shipyard is in some jerkoffs district or state and brings lots of jobs, or this other dipshit Senator on the appropriation committee graduated from the naval war college in 1960 and the best days of his life are from when he rowed crew for the college team yadda yadda, so he blocks the vote whenever this program comes up for getting dummied.

I don't care how powerful or rich a nation you are, soft corruption is almost as debiliating over a long period of time as more obvious corruption is. It's the same reason why they can't build high speed rail in California. They're up to their eyeballs in soft corruption and it's drowning them.
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The SLS rocket (Senate Launch System) is another excellent example of this phenomenon.

Actually building a fucking rocket that can get to the moon hasn’t just taken a back seat. It’s hanging onto the bumper by its fingertips while pork barrel spending is drunkenly driving the bus.
 
zeke said:

View: https://x.com/blogTO/status/1902422510093717887
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Surprisingly it's' actually good news:


Waterfront Toronto reported the discovery of a bryozoan colony living in the mouth of the Don in February. The species of filter-feeding aquatic invertebrates have fossil records dating back to the Ordovician period tens of millions of years ago, and are commonly referred to as moss animals due to their tendency to exist in sedentary colonies.

According to the waterfront agency, "Bryozoans are filter feeders, eating plankton, algae, and bacteria. They clean the water as they feed. Their presence means the water quality is good. So, seeing one in the new mouth for the Don River is a sign that efforts to clean up the Don River are working."
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