The US government already spends more on healthcare and social security than on the military.
Most of that military spending is salaries for US workers. Guess where that $15 billion carrier is getting built? In the US from US parts. Its a jobs programs that conservative senators can support.
Fungible, budgetable, money is not spent on social security. Social security is funded by it's own tax, and is it's own account. Measuring it against voluntary expenditures chosen by congress is inaccurate.
Money can be borrowed with interest from social security, and while paying down that interest is closer to a voluntary expense, it is still a much more serious decision than simply deciding not to do so.
People in poverty aren't paying any taxes to fund any of that though. As the article somewhat noted, people in poverty get an average of $12,400 from the government annually. (Excluding Medicaid, which is much more spending, but even poor people do pay a small amount into that.)
57% of people pay no income tax.[1] The carriers and planes are essentially only being paid for by the top 40% of earners.
It’s not just about who’s funding the military, it’s about misuse of resources. If that same money was spent building out our public transit, food production or community improvement, we’d see an improvement in the lives of US citizens up and down the socioeconomic ladder. The reality is we spend our resources building weapons that only have a negative impact on humanity, producing nothing.
How much of this spending is really about creating defense jobs in the various representatives districts? Here is an article that argues defense spending is a form of indirect welfare.
Abstract:
this article, we present a new theory that, given the economic consequences of military spending, some governments may use military spending as a means of advancing their domestic non-military objectives. Based on evidence that governments can use military spending as welfare policy in disguise, we argue that the role of ideology in shaping military spending is more complicated than simple left-right politics. We also present a theory that strategic elites take advantage of opportunities presented by international events, leading us to expect govermments that favor more hawkish foreign policy policies to use low-level international conflicts as opportunities for increasing military spending. Using pooled time-series data from 19 advanced democracies in the post-World War I period, we find that government ideology, measured as welfore and
MEC, which used to be Canada's equivalent of REI, went bankrupt a couple of years ago (the C used to be co-op, currently stands for company after they got rescued by a fund). Talking with a long-time employee, a big reason was ~100M spent on big fancy headquarters (new owners promptly sold them to EA)
I work for one of the largest health care companies in the country. About 20 years ago, they started buying up the office buildings they were putting their employees in. Made sense in a lot of ways.
Then COVID hit.
In the post-COVID era, they've sold at least four of their buildings, two are sitting completely empty and still on the market and they've consolidated a majority of the employees (in my state at least) into three or four newer buildings. I've heard rumors over the next few years, more consolidation is in the works as they sell off most of their holdings.
I wonder which company that is. In my area, a local health insurance company is somewhat well known for remaining "non-profit" by directing a lot of their extra money into local real estate, much of it commercial buildings downtown. Seemed clever years ago, but hopefully they're feeling some pain now.
I'm not saying it is but everyone has survivorship bias. Kodak and other titans of industry of yesteryear also had their large campuses and projected growth too.
My point is that nobody can predict the future and nothing is guaranteed. Surviving isn't even the norm. We're down to about 50 companies from the original Fortune 500.
For San Jose's sake I hope it's not completely abandoned. But the combination of the failure of RTO and interest rates rising above zero is going to be pretty hard on commercial real estate developers for quite a while.
if your severance package is "good enough" in your opinion, you mail it back in the box they send you
if your severance package isn't "good enough" in your opinion, you keep it and reformat it...eventually they tell you that your severance will go away unless you return the equipment
most returned equipment will just become e-waste, no one is going to breathe life into my four year old laptop
I see a lot of companies just telling people to keep it and use it as they see fit
some security types freak out about former employees being able to access "confidential" information on their own laptops after being terminated...newsflash: if we wanted to mail this stuff to North Korea we could have been doing it five times a day
I use mine as a 2FA on services that support it, and I've never had to do anything but plug it in
remember though, you will need pc smart card support...typically the pcscd daemon must be started and enabled