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Comment by devteambravo | Hacker News Reader

Incredibly chilling for you to have to type this! But yes indeed.

Ad serving probably has less false-positives, because those cost the ad companies money.

You think that false positives requiring the staging/deployment of a multi-million dollar weapon system don't cost money?

It's not about how much absolute money is spent per each false positive, it's about how much you can get away with wasting. If a decision maker in the CIA is not punished for each brain fart, why would they avoid mistakes ? You get the behaviour that you reinforce and tolerate.

Exactly. A false positive likely results in more money because you need to buy more equipment to replace what you just used, and even more to do it "right this time".

Welcome to what happens when NatSec gets to set their own terms on visibility.

Not really, the US military practically has a blank check.

I can think of multiple decade-long government projects off of the top of my head (including from NASA) that had entire programs scrapped because they ran out of money.

Overages from a single military program, like the F-35, have eclipsed the entire budget of those canceled projects.

That has more to do with the fact that Congress hasn't the backbone to call the Executive to heel on spending or transparency, or to empower OIG/GAO to pierce the national security veil.

You can't make actionable tweaks to the system when the books are compartmentalized.

None of that though doesn't cost money. Which is why I question the logic that Ad serving is somehow more responsive or accurate because a false-positive "costs money".

Ad companies don't get to hide their books from the public.

Only if they're public companies. If they're private (eg Dell) then their books are hidden from public view.

Congress is considerable source of explicit allowance for overages in such projects, including at times forcing politically popular purchases that military doesn't want. While forcing inefficiencies in procurement from projects having to buy votes by spreading production.

Ah yes... The sordid NASA/pork barrel effect. I am aware. That's orthogonal to the fact that Congress, besides setting the budget is also tasked wit Oversight. I'm damn sure they've not done/doing a great job of it, because there are many members of the legislature who find themselves straight up lied to by the Executive, yet nothing is done in terms of consequences.

Many examples of the IC lying to Congress can be found with digging. Dirt can absolutely be dug up if Congress sees fit to do so. They just haven't seen fit to glex their oversight powers.

Digging would endanger their own grift after all

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