Hey, as the dollar continues to devalue, you get a bigger pile of cash to burn…….if you can still afford the jet fuel to dump on it………..

Thanks for the words. I do agree that money trickles down in a war economy, just as in any other economy, and technology is definitely a good thing. I’m assuming you’re just playing devil’s advocate, which definitely commendable. My own thoughts are that war spending are the equivalent of taking a pile of cash, dumping jet fuel on it, and burning it. It might provide a little warmth for a few minutes, but how are you going to buy food after it?

But politics as usual. I still agree to some degree. Living in Richmond, you see what the abandonment of the Richmond shipyards after WWII have done to the entire community, and the county at large to an extent.

Anyways, the exposure was about 6min. Motion blur starts to set in at about 5 min, but the longer th ebetter of course. a good 20-25 min exposure will give you a sweet effect, but of course, F-stop should be a good 11 or 13.

Cheers,
jon

As you have more than one follower going by “eric”, I’ll post as workerbee henceforth. Very interesting pic - what exposure time did you use on that image? With the star motion blur I’m assuming 10min+??? Awesome image - I’ve been experimenting quite a bit of late with nigh photography, I’ll share my blog URL via email with you shortly.

Anyway, yes, we spend an enormous amount of money on military/defense. And not to sound like an “old” republican (because I’m not, well not necessarily both anyway), a lot of that money trickles down into the private sector - living relatively close to a military base, I see that in action daily. Being in the bay area close to Alameda and the reserve fleet, I can see that the immediate perception of military spending would have more of a past tense connotation though. Also have to consider that military expenditure is what a lot of high tech industry uses as its R&D budget, especially aerospace - again, perhaps hard to finger an immediate, tangible benefit, but this country would have not aerospace industry left it it weren’t for all the military $ funneled into it.

I thnk another way to restate what you were driving at with the Thomas Friedman reference could be that, military force is used only (if not primarily) when new business for large US corporations stands to be gained, and other means (crippling loans, coup d’etats.. to name a few) fail. I am being a bit cynical of course.

Well done also in trying to raise more awareness of the insanity of our defense spending “A true patriot must always be ready to defend his freedom against his government”.

However, I’m not entirely sure that GDP may be the best measurement. Bigger dollars buy bigger weapons.

I think essentially, what I was trying to get at, though, is that the U.S. is largely the creation of the world-wide arms race that we’re currently going through.

Thomas Friedman has interesting things to say - most notably that a country no longer has reason to invade another country in which they have economically vested interests. He once claimed that no country with a Mcdonald’s in its borders will go at war with another country. I get at what he’s saying. I wish there was a better way of articulating it…