It's a sad indictment of our society that there is always a shortage of money for medical care, infrastructure, housing, food stamps and space exploration but always a surplus of cash for war and tools that purport to replace the workforce.

There will always be a shortage of money for medical care. The dirty secret of social medicine is that a small percentage of the population are essentially unhappy utility monsters [1] who gain little or no benefit no matter how many resources are poured into treating them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster

The opportunity cost to society of performative model training is stunning - 400M for a grok training run to dominate the charts for 2 weeks

> It's a sad indictment of our society that there is always a shortage of money for medical care...

It has nothing to do with society; there is infinite demand for medical care. The upper limit is whatever it takes to live until the universe's heat death in good health. That takes a lot of resources.

However much society spends on medical care, there is always more that could be spent. The modern era has the best, most affordable medical care in history and people are showing no signs of being satisfied at all.

While war spending generally just causes pain for no gain it doesn't change the fact that there will never be enough available to satisfy people's demand for medical care. Every single time people get what they want they just come up with a new aspirational minimum standard.

There isn’t really a shortage of money for those things, just rampant levels of fraud, corruption, and incompetence in the government to make those things artificially expensive. California spends so much money on high speed rail and gets 0 feet of track because they’re not paying for track; the whole thing is a scam where the politicians give taxpayer money to their political supporters in exchange for political support. Defense isn’t immune to this either; Boeing, which builds a shitty heavy lift rocket out of Space Shuttle spare parts and delivers it late and over budget, pulls the exact same bullshit with their defense contracts, and there’s always some shitty Senator siding with them against the American people whenever anyone gets upset.

The current British government should be a shining beacon for you! Its welfare bill actually outstrips national income by far. Britain's pathetic defense capabilities cannot even see off Russian warships that intimidate by deliberately hanging around British waters assessing our vital undersea cabling. The UK government has now asked France if it can help deter these ships. Tangentially - I should add that even with their massive expenditure on the National Health System (NHS) it's not enough and too many people feel that they have to go abroad to get life-saving operations and procedures. If they can afford it of course. But sure, that is another matter. As far as I can tell, there seems to be pretty much an apolitical consensus on both areas.

War accelerated evolution, it’s why it exists.