[hansvm]

It's something like $3 straight out of my pocket, and it's going to be a flop. That trillion dollar military budget has a lot of semi-unavoidable costs (pensions, salaries, etc), but it has a lot of bullshit like this too.

Your argument feels something like the heap paradox [0], "the budget is big, so this thing doesn't matter." The budget is made of things this size though, and all it takes to fix it is to start taking grains of sand out of the pile instead of stacking the pile higher.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

[tonyhart7]

200 million is 0.02 percent of 1 trillion.

does 30 cent matters to you??? because its not 3 dollar as a comparison but 30 cent is

[hansvm]

> 30 cent is

Not everyone pays the same amount in taxes.

> does 30 cents (or the actual value, $3) matter?

Not hugely, but the other point is still important. If somebody takes $3 out of my back pocket a few times each hour it adds up, and when the net effect is nearly guaranteed to be a transfer of funds to OpenAI with no benefit to the taxpayer (likely a negative benefit given our usual stance on letting monopolies run amuck) I'm especially salty about it.

[NHQ]

The entire Trillion is wasted. The entire trillion could be used for public benefit, or simply never "taxed" in the first place.

Very few people would willingly pay for military spending if for example when they buy food they are prompted with the option "do you want to give 30 cents to the military industrial complex?" And that "very few people" would not in sum render 1 Trillion.

[imtringued]

The cost of the Indian space program is roughly $1 per Indian. You're getting nothing for a third of the per capita cost of ISRO.

[tonyhart7]

Indian space program don't have armed forces that cover 80% entire planet