UTOPIA Joins the 1Gbps Club > Utopia FTTH

reply to somms

Re: Utopia FTTH

stop expecting the Gov't to spend taxer payer money and actually find other ways to build.

We waste trillions of dollars in the middle east and your worried about community broadband?

»www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf seems to offer a reasonable summary of expenses incurred since 9/11... this and most sources corroborate the widely-accepted fact that we spend HUNDREDS of billions of dollars on our efforts in the Middle East every year, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have together formed the longest period of military intervention in US history, far outdoing what we did in Vietnam. Also, this is not to mention the domestic R&D funding that goes into our operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere throughout the world (i.e. DoD projects, DARPA R&D funds, the CIA's covert operations which barely have any congressional oversight (sometimes they actually draw out of the CIA's discretionary budget and therefore are off the record even for congressional staff, let along mere mortals like you and me...) Throw in the drastic increase in funding for the NSA's domestic wiretapping and realtime data analysis programs, and yes, you do in fact have expenses going FAR past the trillion-dollar mark, all aimed directly or indirectly at supporting the wars we are currently fighting (or at least protecting the country from the potential backlash due to out presence in places like Iraq and Afghanistan...)
--
Physics: Will you break the laws of physics, or will the laws of physics break you?
If physicists stand on each other's shoulders, computer scientists stand on each other's toes, and computer programmers dig each other's graves.

reply to elray

Nice try.

Afghanistan and Pakistan aren't part of the Middle-East, and your source isn't exactly credible.

But I'll concede that there is certainly room to argue that the figure could be substantially higher than a trillion, depending on how you choose to do the math - and either way, its a ridiculous appropriation, given the cost:benefit analysis.

We should have had an official "war tax", paid by everyone, since 9/11, which would have tempered some of the enthusiasm for intervention.