To actually deliver a physical, one-of-a-kind, working vehicle of that scale & novel function, for low-digit millions, seems pretty impressive to me - especially if the effort documented enough of their choices/discoveries/limitations to help inform later efforts.
Trajectory planning what? Actually solving the inverse kinematics of 3dof manipulators is trivial. I did so 20 years ago using a Basic Stamp microcontroller for my 18 servo hexapod. I was 15.
Planning foot placement is a bit harder but I would say the compute heavy part today would be perception.
I think of “trajectory planning” as: you have a known target position and you have to figure out how to get there. That’s not hard with a 3dof manipulator.
But figuring out where to place the feet, which I consider a perception problem, is very hard. But I think that’s what you’re talking about and I just use different terminology. That’s why I was confused. Sorry if I came off wrong.
$5m by 1985, with another $3.5m earmarked [1]. Accounting generously for inflation, that's $25m today [2]. It would be interesting to know what the price would look like if they tried the same thing today.
Absolutely this. With the culling of most corporate R&D groups over the last 20-30 years, DARPA pie-in-the-sky research projects seem to be one of the last real sources for investigating anything that can't be immediately and quickly monetized.
How much real research, as opposed to early-stage product development, has ever happened at corporations? We can easily name a few specific examples (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) presumably because they weren't the norm. (And there were doubtless some others at companies that weren't as aligned with what's thought of as today's tech industry such as DuPont.)
What about them? They make nice gear. They've done some nice innovation around some of the gear they make. That seems different from pumping multi-millions of dollars into research that may never have direct commercial value--unless you're talking about a different MSR.
You might enjoy the book "The Entrepreneurial State" by Mariana Mazzucato makes a similar argument that a lot of innovation is actually driven by the state, because they can afford to invest a lot in research without an immediate payoff. The author mentions DARPA in particular as a great example of the US stimulating innovation that then later benefits companies. For example, while the iPhone is a great piece of innovation, it built on innovations made possible by state funded research.
There's also a very good book by Bill Janeway (of Wargburg Pincus notoriety) on the same subject called 'Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators and the State'.
He argues the same point about the states roll in RnD (also explicitly calls out DARPA) and also their role in booms and busts.
There’s some, obviously, especially in companies in chemicals and materials. I think the push in the 80s-90s to remove slack from corporations to reward managers and shareholders killed a lot of basic research they were doing for posterity.
[1] as far as I've seen, soviet vending machines used a shared glass. They must've been very confident both (a) that the glasses wouldn't grow legs, and (b) in their public health initiatives.
What are you talking about? Everyone is poor and miserable, families arent making rent. My uncle was just dumpster diving to feed his family two months ago.
That's the choice of your fellow citizens who'd rather spend money on weapons than feed people, and will come up with elaborate stories about why your uncle deserves to be in that position. :(
"My uncle is starving while defence projects get lots of money" and "Some defence projects have led to good outcomes for society".
Without aiming to insult here¹, is it interesting to anyone that the same things we say when we're 14-15 years old are the same things we say decades later? I remember having had this argument when I was a kid (and very space-obsessed) and it was almost exactly like this. I remember my classroom, even, and it was between Physics and English and the teacher hadn't come in yet.
It's like some number of people have to be thrown into the war of the ideas periodically to preserve the battle lines exactly as they are. Stop and you lose ground.
¹ like not saying I'm better than you guys, I could just as well do what you're doing.
> It's like some number of people have to be thrown into the war of the ideas periodically to preserve the battle lines exactly as they are. Stop and you lose ground.
Well, yes. Overton window and all that. Similar discussions on USENET 20 years ago. Although I think in some ways they've moved on, and in some ways regressed - the openness of troll conservativism, for example.
I sometimes think of these ideological fault lines as behaving like the geological ones; pressure maintained for years in equilibrium, then there is a crisis and a huge slip all at once. With a lot of stuff getting demolished along the way.
I'd be impressed if you could find a single hop in the modern network we're using that's actually run by ARPA. The ISPs, the hosting, the interconnect - all private. Who owns the transatlantic link?
Calling the internet an ARPA system is like insisting on calling telephones the Bell system.
Yes, but it’s exactly what DARPA generally does. They fund people to propose and prototype. I remember my Dad trying to get grants in the SBIR program. In phase I, they’re funding projects that are merely proposals for something they could eventually fund. Things may graduate from ARPA and go through the normal procurement process or they might be shelved.
The government and military are very large consumers of internet hardware, software and services, all of which would look very different if they waited on the private sector. (Probably something specified by ITU).
The other side of this is we spend a lot of money feeding people in the US. Unfortunately, it’s not an efficient system consisting of farm subsidies, food stamps, school lunch programs etc. If the goal was simply adequate nutrition for every American we could easily have that with current budgets. But, instead money must also end up in the correct people’s pockets while also feeding people.
>>DARPA R&D money always feels like money better spent than a lot of other military spending.
I think "better spent than a lot of other military spending" was the point of the post you responded to. The military may be wasting The People's Money, but DARPA seems to have low costs / high return comparatively, and often has high returns for civilians/society.
DARPA has driven a lot of research in self-driving cars, space exploration, internet infrastructure (TOR for example), neural implants and so on. It's budget is also lower than some weapon systems that have never even gone into production.
I dislike the american military-industrial complex, but if I had to keep one thing from it it might be DARPA.
Some notable ones off the top of my head include the Internet, GPS, computer mice (and basically the foundation of UI that uses them), onion routing, and prosthetic limbs.
Compare DARPA's $3B budget to e.g. the DoD's $650-700B budget. You can argue that either or both should be spending some portion of their budget on "the people" in a myriad of ways, but that argument gets way too close to personal politics for an engagement here to be worthwhile, IMO. Don't forget to vote!
With the exception of prosthetic limbs, so far those technologies have proven to be net negatives for humanity, only accelerating our suicide:
GPS: Nuclear missile guidance system
Internet: distributed nuclear missile command and control system
Computer mice: windows
Onion routing: fbi honeypot, enabled multiple violent insurgencies in northern africa and southwest asia.
And the list of actual successful darpa projects is longer than the one you provided, and the omissions are not nearly as benign as the ones you have cherry-picked.
And that's just what made it out of the lab. How many full ride college scholarships have they left on the cutting room floor? How many insulin shots? How many pounds of fresh food? C'mon man. DARPA makes war, not life.
I don't think those are very good examples. My internet must be defective. I haven't been able to launch a single nuclear missile from it.
Same for GPS-- compare the number of deaths from GPS guided nuclear missiles (0) to the number of lives saved by GPS (through more efficient farming, turn by turn directions, E911, etc)
Talk to the American people who will not vote on a candidate that insists on cutting funding to the military industrial complex (of which DARPA gets a very small percentage anyway) and the American people who hate the "welfare state" and "socialism," both of which would make it possible for your uncle to get assistance from the government via taxes.
Data: DARPA's 2019 funding was $3.556 Billion dollars. DoD budget for 2019 was $616.2 Billion dollars.
Lastly, a lot of DARPA's research actually gets used for projects that benefit the public. Other people already listed a ton of projects like GPS, so I wont do that here.
I feel for you, but military spending is a massive federal jobs program. Each job created has a job multiplier effect, creating additional jobs in the surrounding area. Manufacturing jobs producing military equipment have a much bigger job multiplier effect. So if you were to wave a magic wand and half military spending overnight, the economic impact would be disastrous, and many more people would be in dire economic situations.
So what if we used military construction money on schools and education? Or maybe capturing carbon? Plenty of useful things to the world we could spend the money on. No need to just cut spending and bank the money.
My comment was in reply to the GP's statement that it was a waste of money. When the federal government gives out money, it has a ripple effect as that money is spent on goods and services. Creating a service-based job will have a larger ripple effect, and creating a manufacturing job generally has the largest ripple effect.
So if you have a magic wand or just happen to become dictator, please keep in mind the multiplier effects when deciding where to spend the money. ;-)
Couldn't we use that money to create jobs that have a more meaningful impact on people's day to day? Invest in alternative energy, fixing our infrastructure, improving public transit, etc... Put that investment in technology into technology that is more productive instead of the nth iteration of some piece of military technology that we'll never use.
I find it interesting that this argument is only ever being made when there is talk about cutting military spending. Somehow it is never the problem that there is job losses when other spending (in particular social spending) is being cut.
There was actually a great response by a member of the German Labour Party (SPD) in the discussion about the spending on the Eurofighter project (sometime in the 90s IIRC). His response to the jobs argument was: We could also build a pyramid in honour of Helmut Kohl and it would create a lot of jobs, that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Yeah it’s a ridiculous argument. The money being spent on those jobs is taken by force (which has an unmeasurable chilling effect on the economy), and then allocated according to central planning, inevitably in a way far less efficient than the market would.
I dunno, when you consider the design intent of the Abrams (operating environment, crew protection, etc.) 4 million seems like a reasonable price tag to me.
Whether the US Army needs 9000 tanks is a separate discussion though.
US DoD had as a strategic goal the ability to fight and win a two theater global conflict against peer or near peer nations up until a few years ago, when it was changed to fight and win one theater, while not losing the other (holding ground until the other theater is won).
If you're looking at needing to fight China and Russia, at the same time, over an extended period of time (2+ years), having 9,000 tanks in your back pocket seems like a good idea.
Also, it's a jobs/pork barrel program. Congress keeps ordering tanks that the Army puts into storage because the M1 is a beast of a machine that keeps a lot of people employed. The US manufacturing base is pretty depleted, and ordering tanks you don't necessarily need is a good way to keep the skills and tool chains you could need in the future around.
>Also, it's a jobs/pork barrel program. Congress keeps ordering tanks that the Army puts into storage because the M1 is a beast of a machine that keeps a lot of people employed. The US manufacturing base is pretty depleted, and ordering tanks you don't necessarily need is a good way to keep the skills and tool chains you could need in the future around.
Sure, that's nothing new to anyone who's familiar with Cold War economics. The Soviet Union was able to keep its economy crawling along without sanctioning free enterprise by making enormous investments into collectively-owned (i.e. state-owned) products like nuclear submarines and combat aircraft. Turns out you can achieve much the same goal but also benefit the people if you put that effort into state-funded infrastructure. Whether the US body politic will support reducing M1 Abrams production in favour of fixing the USA's crumbling infrastructure is again a separate discussion.
A little numbers correction: it's more like $11 MM per tank. And not to build, to refurbish.
More precisely: for the 2020 fiscal year, the US Army did not procure any new M1 Abrams tank, and is not budgeting any for the 2021 year either. Instead it is modernizing existing tanks at a cost of $1.7 BN for 165 units in '20, and $1 BN for 89 units in '21. This comes at about $10.6 MM per tank.
It was new in that it was computer controlled. General Electric had demonstrated a 4-legged walking truck in 1965.[1] Arms and legs were slaved to the operator's arms and legs. It was very hard to drive. Trying to do that with computer control in 1985 was worth trying.
Building the prototype at full scale, not so much. If they'd gone through a few iterations starting with a dog sized version, it might have worked out better. But there was a political problem. DARPA funded a pony-sized legged walker in the late 1960s[2], and it was publicly shamed as a waste of taxpayer money by Sen. Proxmire. So DARPA went for one big enough to carry a real load.
Early thinking about legged locomotion was all about gait and foot placement. It turns out that balance dominates foot placement, and slip control dominates balance once you get off the flat.
Today, most of the problems have been solved, and there's still no market. Which is disappointing.
It's amazing how much you can achieve with a relatively small team of experts. I also believe people have gone "blind" to how much a million is and what it can afford. I mean a million can employ a decent software developer for a decade, and a solo developer can achieve a lot in a decade. I've probably produced about a million LOC in that period in half a dozen languages.
Empire Strikes Back released 1980, complete with its AT-AT walkers. This US military walking tank project kicked off 1981. Just coincidence? Or a big-budget fan-boy tribute?
Person carrying multicopters are common enough on YouTube videos (at least some of which probably aren’t fraudulent).
Give me $30k, and I’ll build you a multicopter capable of delivering a 500lb payload 1km away made mostly out of hobby parts. It’s no longer rocket science.
They did one the size of a large horse, but for the complexity and cost, it unfortunately didn’t seem to have much practical benefit over a semiautonomous 6-wheeler.
I know someone who worked on a big radial hexapod robot for dod recently, and he said everyone involved in the project felt it was pointless (hexapods are just not a good platform for doing much of anything), but it was well-funded so they did their best.
> hexapods are just not a good platform for doing much of anything
Care to expand on this? There's an awful lot of insects with six legs that seem to do OK. Maybe I've watched too much Patlabor/GitS but I would have thought it a viable candidate for any number of mechanical platforms.
Every actuator comes with a lot of overhead in terms of cost, mass, complexity, and two more limbs don't offer much of an advantage over a quadruped. Interesting point about insects, but this was a largeish vehicle. How many large hexapod animals can you name?
I have many books on on robotics and AI from Stanford and MIT from that era, back when I started to get deeply involved in the field. My son is about a year away from graduating with degrees in CS and Robotics. He was quite surprised to realize that much of what he is learning today isn't new at all. Tremendous work was done decades ago in both domains. Put simply, you can only get so far with neural networks when your only option is an 8 bit microprocessor with 64k-bytes of RAM and a a megabyte or two of non-volatile storage.
One of the key differences between now and then is the monumental improvement in computing power, sensors, hardware in general and energy storage. As a result the devices we produce today look far more impressive. Think about it this way: I don't think there's anything in a Roomba that did not exist in the 1980's other than far greater computing power at a very low cost.
It is an interesting exercise to look through the Old Robots site (www.theoldrobots.com). One of my favorite's (because I owned one and still have a couple of arms on the shelf) is the Hero 2000:
It took an Intel 8088 processor and 11 Z-80 8 bit processors to run this thing in the early 90's. That cost thousands of dollars. Today you can to a thousand times more with a $5 to $30 single chip processor.
Oh, that thing. Back when I was into legged locomotion, I found out more about that machine than I ever wanted to know.
The designer was really into four-bar linkages. The leg mechanism is set up so that one actuator moves the leg in X, one in Y, and one in Z, with a four-bar linkage encoding that into the leg position. This simplifies the control problem, while complicating the mechanics. I suspect they wanted to be able to get the thing home by manual control of the actuators if the computers crashed. It's not towable; you'd need a crane and a flatbed.
It could only walk on flat ground. It was supposed to be able to cross a ditch, but that was manual. The driver had to drive it up to the ditch and stop. Then lock five legs, and, using a joystick, move one of the leading legs across the ditch and set it down. Then, with support in place, move the vehicle forward slightly with no leg lifts. Then lock five legs again, and place the second forward leg. Repeat until all six legs had made it across.
Cool, but not useful.
In the 1990s, a company in Finland got this right.[1] They built a six-legged walking timber harvester. It's impressive. Deere bought the company But it's not better than 8-wheel articulated timber harvesters [2], so it was never produced as a product.
Oh I want one of those "Timberjack" machines. (well without the timber cutting stuff). Based on some of the papers I found on the OSU project it seems like you could replace the entire computing infrastructure it was carrying around with about one pound (1/2 kg) of computers.
I don't suppose you have a pointer to an IK paper on the 4-bar linkages do you? Looks like something that might be fun to cons up with servos.
Now that's a more modern way to use a four-bar linkage. The ASV used it to simplify the kinematic problem, which is doing arithmetic with big steel connecting rods. That little quadruped is using it to get two degrees of freedom without the first actuator having to carry the mass of the second one.
Hey you might know this. Is there a term for using what effectively a differential gear arrangement to get two axes of motion as shown in the arm in this video (twice actually, for axes 2/3 and 4/5)?
There's an MIT Press book.[1] Chapter 6, "Leg Design by Four Bar Linkage Synthesis" covers the four-bar linkage. They were struggling to get enough working volume for the foot out of the four bar linkage without the mechanism becoming too bulky. They wanted to be able to move horizontally using only one actuator per leg, which allowed manual backup control.
It's an interesting piece of history, but there's no need to do it that way today.
I once camped wild with a friend in the middle of a forest. The next morning there was sawing in the distance, no worries. Got closer and closer ... so we hurried to pack our things .. just in time to have our camping place vanished as it was in the path of destruction. I was not aware before how fast they could be.
(and I don't know, if we just had bad luck, or he had fun messing us, but we were quite hidden)
Well, I think I actually had some dreams in that regard, because there was also a second encounter with unexcpected approaching foresters and this time in a dramatic setting, with a strong thunderstorm approaching and we generally were quite paranoid, because we were in the border area of germany and Czech and we were really scared of the high wildcamping fines that exist in theory and we did not know at that time, that usually you get away with a warning and mostly not even that.
So we felt a bit like hunted ...
(ah yeah, also because a hunter was shooting close to us, without noticing us)
About the timber harvester: I assume better here is meant from a economical perspective, because from a ecological perspective the walkers are superior, as they do not devestate the ground so much. But that is sadly not really a issue for most wood production, but I could imagine, with rising awareness for the forests, market demand for not so intrusive wood harvesting(along with advances in the field in general) could bring the walking timber harvester back.
I would very much welcome it. I really hate, having all the forests paths messed up in the wood cutting season.
Well, yes, I know horsetracks who already look very bad, after regular riding.
But most forest paths are not driven (or walked) 500 times back and forth. Sometimes just once to go in, cut down and take it out. Enough to cut open the soil with the conventional foresters - but much less intrusive with mechanic legs.
Totally. I want that walker for my woodland, because it looks a lot less damaging to the soil (less soil disruption / compaction). The other thing is it would be nice for climbing to spots that don’t have easy road access. This way you can pick a few trees without devastating a whole area just to reach them.
Most timber today isn't harvested in natural forest, they are effectively tree farms, they have a 10 to 20 year growth cycle and since all the trees planted are harvestable, they basically clear cut the land, burn it, off cycle growth as needed, and do it again.
In those instances, there is no ecological consideration as the whole area basically gets wiped out.
That's not really accurate. It depends on the tree type, but the growth cycle is somewhere between 50 to 100 years for optimal results.
It's true that most forests today are not old growth anymore. They have been cut (usually clear cut) and then either replanted or just naturally reseeded and are now essentially waiting for the next cut. There are some areas where they are monocultural tree farms with not much else growing, but forest industry starts to realize that that's not the most efficient anyway. Most forests today, even those used for lumber (which are almost all) are integrated ecosystems. That's a great benefit to nature.
Clear cutting is quite bad for the surrounding ecosystem. Habitat loss, soil erosion, it's a pretty traumatic event for a forest. (Some shrubs really thrive for a few years after a clear cut though. In Sweden that's when you get to pick tons of wild raspberries, for example.)
An alternative is selective cutting where you only cut the oldest trees and leave everything intact. For that, such a legged harvester would be much better. The traditional method is to use horses, but that's too slow for modern forest industry.
I'm guessing you aren't from the U.S. but in the southern U.S. growing newer species of Pine (variants of Loblolly Pine). A standard lease is 20 years from seedling to harvest, some older variants can go 30 to 50, but you don't see that being planted any longer and that's all leases maturing.
And here, I can assure you they are very much mono culture, evenly spaced, engineered species of trees, almost nothing else happens on the land in that time period. (generally it looks pretty similar to this https://a.rgbimg.com/users/p/pa/paparabbit/600/mwYGk8q.jpg) They do come and selectively thing at 5, 10, or 15 depending)
See the issue is, at least in the southern U.S. they clear cut nearly everything in the 1800s. There is very little old growth left.
Yes they used to do forestry like that in Northern Europe. They realised the methods described by the OP are more sustainable and more reliable (e.g. diseases will wipe out monocultures).
I agree with it being better for the world in a lot of ways. And I would like to see it change, but it isn't likely to, at least not for a really long time.
P.S. As for mono culture timber, there is a reason almost no one in the US knows what a curant is. They (are/were) illegal in the US, because they are for a vector for a fungus that can wipe out timber pines.
"See the issue is, at least in the southern U.S. they clear cut nearly everything in the 1800s. There is very little old growth left."
I pity them. Real forest is something very different, than a wood farm.
With the recent droughts and dying out of the monoculture spruce, more and more mixed forest is coming back to europe. Idealism brought a little change, but the big drive was the huge economical loss of the timber industry that forced them to rethink how to do things.
There is a middle ground between the monoculture you describe and old growth. You can have an intact ecosystem with something every biologist would call "forest" even if you now and then strategically harvest some trees. We are almost 8bn people on this planet and we can't make do without lumber. All alternatives are much worse. Want to use plastic for everything? Steel? Concrete? We need to find a sustainable middle ground.
> because from a ecological perspective the walkers are superior
You sure about that? Soil compaction is the most serious long-term damage caused by timber harvesting. It's why only tracked harvesters driven by highly-paid fellers are allowed off the gravel. The masses of everyday log-truck drivers (and their wheeled vehicles) are not allowed on the dirt.
You want the ground pressure spread out as much as possible, not concentrated on tiny "feet".
I am not sure about compaction compared to a tracked forester.
Physics implies that tracked ones are better, for that, yes.
But they rip up even more surface. I believe it is a question, how often the specific path has to be passed by by a forester.
"It's why only tracked harvesters driven by highly-paid fellers are allowed off the gravel."
And this is sadly not true for germany or other parts of europe I know about. I think I never saw a tracked forester in europe.
Are they mandatory in the US? That would surprise me, given they have much more lax regulations in general (fracking for example)
Only thing non-tracked that goes off the gravel logging roads would be the Skidder (it literally drags bunches, or 'hitches' of trees to the transport vehicles). And even that might be partially or fully-tracked.
The feller, slasher, excavator, bulldozer, etc. are all tracked from what I've seen.
Mandatory? Doubtful. But they are most practical in the rough terrain.
That timber harvester looks amazing. As I commented below, the weight distribution is a pretty appealing aspect for minimizing the impact on soil. Though, unclear how much better it is then the tank treads which also do a pretty good job distributing weight as far as I know?
Super cool though. Would be a nice way to selectively take out trees without tearing up a whole area for access, etc.
My yard is a forest. I have a mini excavator with tracks and I can sneak in and out of places without disturbing things too much - as long as I don't have to turn sharp (and the ground isn't too wet). I think the walking machines might have an advantage there. The tracks can only slide sideways when you turn, that tears stuff up.
I know what you mean — we’re restoring an oak woodland and between the various springs and poorly drained soil, there’s a very small window where an excavator can actually get in there to work.
Our Douglas Fir stand is on good soil, but getting to it is a little tricky. Getting a bit easier though after 3 years of blackberry removal, and tree limbing (to reduce wildfire risk and improve trails etc).
Tangential but I find it interesting how the old ad shows the machine and explains why it is interesting while the new one has detail shots, buzzwords and epic music.
I guess it’s just to catch the eye and then one can find all the info later, but still.
> It could only walk on flat ground. It was supposed to be able to cross a ditch, but that was manual.
Well, now I'm wondering what they needed eleven onboard minicomputers for. How much route planning intelligence do you really need if you're operating over identical terrain every time?
I have seen working walking Timberjack models in Ohio I have pics from early 2000s someplace of fresh painted unit standing in the woods getting ready to clear some dead forest to stop all the wildfires we where having.
Looks really cool and futuristic. I'm sure something much better and faster could be built today, but wheeled/tracked machines are still superior.
It's actually impressive how versatile wheels are - a legged truck would have to move much faster and be able to cross some extreme terrain to be a better choice than something with 4+ big wheels.
> Between the engine and the 18 variable displacement pumps [...] was a 100-pound flywheel. It spun up to 12,000 rpm and could store .25 kWh of energy.
> The flywheel also allowed the vehicle to recuperate some energy from the pumps when the ASV came to a stop […] and ensured a smooth shutdown in case of a sudden loss of power.
DARPA is basically just a way to hack the US' intensely militaristic nature to fund basic science & engineering advances. I'm happy some public money was spent researching robotic legged locomotion.
This is why I believe the US should withdraw from NATO, and many of our other foreign military engagements. We could service our population's worst off so much better if we cut our global footprint to the bare minimum required to secure our most core interests (napkin math, but at ~150 billion usd, overseas bases make up ~20% of the DoD's budget[0]).
Even reallocating those expenses by a quarter would be a tremendous boon to our social services infrastructure while still allowing us to invest in new technologies.
Do you genuinely believe that whats holding back spending on social services in the US is the necessity of maintaining its military? That seems naive in the extreme.
It isn't at all, however Americans fixated upon some mythical conception of state fiscal responsibility will find the expansion of certain programs more politically palatable if accompanied with roughly commensurate cuts in other areas.
Reducing America's global footprint would also likely have the effect of producing a massive global political realignment, as nations in an increasingly multipolar world would need to adjust their security policies in order to face the potential challenges of existing without a global hegemony interested in fixing national borders and guaranteeing the secure flow of trade good worldwide.
This resulting uncertainty would, I believe increase the relative value of maintaining a presence large internally stable (relatively speaking) markets like the NAFTA, while reducing the viability of complex, brittle supply chains dependent on outsourcing the production of many individual components overseas.
With companies increasingly incentivised to produce where they sell their good, the power disparity between laborers and corporate entities would be reduced, as their labor force and their consumer base would be either the same, or intermingled. With workers better able to negotiate terms with their employers, rather than be forced to increase benefits for their workers, companies might find it more expedient to outsource the provision of a social safety net to federal and state governments through lobbying efforts.
None of this, of course fixes the general administrative incompetency of the American government. But it also sets the stage for a greater latitude of internal reforms by simplifying the machine that's in motion, as well as reducing its number of foreign dependents.
The Eurozone (NATO) is protected from Russia and other aggressors by US military spending, and trades along sea routes which are kept open by US military spending, to list only two ways in which the EU benefits massively from our tax dollars here in the US.
If the EU decided to allocate a proportional share to their common defense, maybe the US would have less reason to be intervening overseas and could spend some of our money here instead.
The EU spends about 4 times that amount that Russia (the only direct military threat) spends. Russia has much smaller population and a much smaller economy and pretty much depends on selling oil and gas to the EU to survive.
I've been talking about this kind of stuff with some friends. You can't just tell reality from fiction by the news, anymore. Sometimes is a crappy politician who you wouldn't believe act / say / do the things the news report (I'm Brazilian by the way, I have grounds to say this). Some other times is this crazy sci-fi things no one in a bar conversation would believe you if you told them.
Go ahead, next time you're on bar with your friends (In a few months I think the bar are going to be open - hope) tell them this exactly headline and see how they react to it.
> Go ahead, next time you're on bar with your friends (In a few months I think the bar are going to be open - hope) tell them this exactly headline and see how they react to it.
I don't think many Americans would doubt our military has funded all sorts of crazy stuff. There are confirmed paid studies for mind control and attempting to kill goats using telekinesis by the CIA.
Wow, that's up there with the premise of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I tend to optimistically/pessimistically believe people are rational but devious, and therefore believe that goat-staring is likely a way to launder money that immediately leads people into talking about how silly attempted telecapricide would be, instead of asking, no, really, what did you totally not get compensated for not having done, the other 39 hours of the week?
What did you imagine the 1980's was like for this to be surprising? Hydraulic earthmoving equipment, statically-stable legged walking toys, and cheap computers were all in widespread use around the world by then. This is nothing like Boston Dynamics' robots because of the "dynamics" part.
These are general purpose US funding of research which is done under the "Military spending" banner for various reasons.
I understand how people outside the US might not understand this, but it always surprises me complaints about "military spending" from educated Americans that don't understand these are actually enormous investments by the US government into general applied science.
The Army did not spend millions of dollars on a giant walking robot. The US government, by way of military spending, invested in research of the things required to build such a machine.
You could just as easily manage this funding process somewhere else with different priorities. We've been moving university research funding out of the NSF towards defense budgets quite aggressively over the last two decades, and it's quite palpable how shifting control of this funding from pure science oversight to military oversight has reshaped priorities.
Anybody else thinking of the walkers from star wars when reading the headline? I was a bit disappointed seeing the size as it promises "giant" which does not really live up to star wars size expectations..
To actually deliver a physical, one-of-a-kind, working vehicle of that scale & novel function, for low-digit millions, seems pretty impressive to me - especially if the effort documented enough of their choices/discoveries/limitations to help inform later efforts.
reply