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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Withdrawing from NATO, I could see Trump entertaining that (wouldn’t actually happen).

    Fire a bunch of the top leadership? For sure. That would both be something Trump could “order the military to do,” as well as something he might do, and it would also harm the US military’s capability to wage war.

    Zero out Pentagon funding? Not possible for trump to do alone, but depending on the congressional make up, it could be done and would severely limit the ability of the US Military to wage war. They could even do it without affecting enlisted personnel enrollment. The Pentagon has their own funding 100% separate from military spending.

    Could also deny all future discretionary spending for the military/pentagon.














  • Just in time manufacturing addresses warehousing issues, it does not have any affect on maximum capacity. If a machine can produce 1000/widgets an hour, but I can run it for 10minutes a day to produce 167 widgets to meet my line on the demand curve while saving on warehouse costs, then that is what I’m going to do. Additionally I’ll restructure my workers so that instead of needing 100 workers for 8hrs to produce 8000 widgets a day, I’ll simply hire 16 workers ( or more likely 2 workers plus 10 part-time workers) to produce 167 widgets in a day. I don’t spend any time or effort creating a machine that can only run for 10minutes a day and produce only 167 widgets.

    The capacity of my widget machine is still 8000/day.

    e: Or more likely, I’ll be creating 167 widgets for raytheon at 3x profit, I’ll be creating 20 widgets for north korea at 4x profit, and 4000 widgets for the NCCCP as that is part of their 20 year plan.



  • Eh. While Capital expenditures can’t be created overnight, these aren’t novel machines they are creating that require exotic materials. The way government bidding works the majority of the components are created across hundreds of sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors, and they are given a target quota of “100widgets” a year. I doubt that the majority of these sub-contractors only have the capability to create 100widgets year. The limitation is the number of hours they run the factory. Without knowing anything else about the missiles, I bet that production could be doubled by simply using excess factory capacity (i.e. hiring workers for more shifts,) that is simply not done by the capitalists that own the factories, simply because it isn’t profitable to do so.

    Obviously at some level of production you run out of machine tool capacity, and at some level beyond that you run out of raw materials, but I doubt we are anywhere near the later and there is a good amount of head room for the former.

    The US, despite it’s decline, still has a very large amount of manufacturing capacity and these missiles aren’t using a significant amount of it.

    https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/default.htm

    An estimated 77% of total US industrial capacity is being utilized.