[maxxxxx]

"because governments are buying them."

The main problem in american politics is that a lot of decisions are made either to damage the "other" party or to accommodate some donor. When you look at Congress they barely think about doing something right.

[tru3_power]

Off topic question- but this is always something that interested me: do you have any blatant examples of a high level politician solely choosing a product to accommodate a donor?

[maxxxxx]

Maybe one example: NASA is developing the SLS mainly to keep jobs in some districts. so billions are spent on something that's really not the right thing from a technical point of view.

Same for voting machines: They are often either bought to keep jobs somewhere or because there is some connection between the vendor and decisions maker.

[MrEldritch]

Another example is the Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters - the reason they're there, essentially, is to keep Thiokol happy.

[jtuente]

From my perspective, it usually derives from some kind of 'think of the jobs' mentality.

https://pilotonline.com/opinion/editorial/article_947f55ff-3...

[stevehawk]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer has often been considered one of those items, given that there was seemingly very little to gain by bringing up a ship twenty years after it sank.

But there are also some conspiracies about why the sub had fifteen extra people onboard and that Kissinger was looking for more information on that.

[maxxxxx]

There is a lot of more or less blatant bribery going on in state and local governments. My girlfriend does investigations in that area and she has a ton of examples (which I can't publish). As far as I know pretty much every state and country manages their own election system so they are very vulnerable to local politicians who often don't even understand what they are dealing with.

[JustSomeNobody]

There's a term for that: "Pork barrel spending".

> Pork barrel is a metaphor for the appropriation of government spending for localized projects secured solely or primarily to bring money to a representative's district.

It's isn't hard to imagine who benefits from that.