448 karma · joined August 6, 2009
Just to be clear, your answer as someone invested in the defense industry to the question of "What military role does the F-35 fill in the modern world that unmanned drones can't?" is to say:
>A mission flown for the purpose of detecting targets and coordinating or performing attack or reconnaissance on those targets. Strike coordination and reconnaissance missions are flown in a specific geographic area and are an element of the command and control interface to coordinate multiple flights, detect and attack targets, neutralize enemy air defenses and provide battle damage assessment
Forgive my ignorance, but are you saying that we basically need a trillion-dollar endeavor to develop manned fighters which have just barely caught up to the existing technology to go pick fights abroad that we could have already been doing?
What new threat are we facing here, other than a slowing of contractual dollars?
Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work. See? It's better! And the customer is paying hand over fist, so everyone wins.
"But I already know Javascript, it's too hard to figure out something else"
> The "very essence" of being a boss is knocking out obstacles for the people under you. That is what a boss actually does, not tell people what to do.
Those types of managers/bosses are great, and are some of my favorite people because they simply allow me to do what needs doing while shielding me from bullshit. But by no stretch of the imagination (or certainly the experience of workers as a whole) do they represent every manager/boss. If you've been lucky or sheltered enough to avoid the kind that aren't like that, you should reflect on that as a fortuitous outcome and maybe consider that your experience isn't everyone's experience.
I'm all for optimizing for minimal resource usage, but if plugging $200 worth of RAM into the machine allowed the original query to run in an acceptable timeframe, that may well easily offset the hours of analysis and transformation that resulted in the shorter runtime. Unless, of course, we're more concerned with engaging in a performative defense of our arbitrarily self-bestowed credentials as "engineers".