• exu@feditown.com
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    6 days ago

    The original vote allowing the government to proceed with the purchase was very close, 50.1% for purchasing the F-35s. If they can somehow legally ask the populace again I’d say there’s a good chance it is rejected.

    • BobChorba@piefed.social
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      6 days ago

      The vote was only if new fighter jets in general should be bought, see here. It was very close though, only 9’000 votes that led to a yes.

      However the left (SP and Greens) are trying to get a referendum about buying the F-35 which I think could be successful given the state of the US and the increased price.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 days ago

        Despite me being American and thus never being able to afford anything imported, or made with imported parts…

        I agree, the few US Saab car owners I knew more or less described their cars as reliable, so long as you keep up with basic maintenance… and then GM bought their car division, and basically all downhill from there, we (USAsians) absolutely fucking suck at making cars, by basically every possible metric.

        • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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          6 days ago

          I mean, we are actually great at making stuff when we pull out all the stops. But we started letting beancounters run fucking everything, and that’s when shit hit the fan. We design down to a budget now, in almost all cases, including a ton of cases where we shouldn’t do that.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            6 days ago

            Sorry, I haven’t been alive at any point where the beancounters at finance were not the ones running pretty much all well known American manufacturing companies/brands, for anything, cars, aircraft, tools…

            Maybe possibly firearms is an exception.

            Maybe.

            Yeah, 30+ years is kind of a long time.

            We were great at making stuff… and then all the mergers and acquisitions happened roughly under Reagan, and things just got more bad from there, NAFTA under Clinton, massive financialization, stock buybacks, private equity firms, CDOs, etc etc.

            So yeah, we are no longer great at making stuff.

            I grew up with a super rightwing dad explaining the ins and outs of what you’re describing happening to Boeing, where he worked most of his life.

            He voted against literally everyone and everything that would have pushed back against the bean counters, and of course now more lately he’s voted for the idiots version of an ‘domestic industrial development policy’, ie, deport all our farm labor and slap import tariffs on literally everything, despite him knowing full well there are 0 complex mfg supply chains with a physical footprint on American soil that do not rely on imports.

            People like him are why we were good at making stuff, why we no longer are.

            30 years is more than enough time for a population to essentially unlearn a skill, at a societal level.

            • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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              5 days ago

              Yeah, it’s absolutely fucking tragic how McDD ended up zombifying Boeing after the latter acquiring the former - like a corporate ophiocordyceps unilateralis. They destroyed one of the most hardcore engineering-driven organizations in the world so they could get richer faster. Absolutely fucking travesty.

              • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                5 days ago

                Agreed, complete fucking travesty.

                As best I can tell, they also more or less also orchestrated the complete regulatory capture of the FAA, to rubber stamp and normalize their high bureaucracy, low actual safety and reliability paradigms.

                Oh right, they also uh, totally don’t assassinate whistleblowers.

                Totally don’t do that, nope, not at all, never.