You just, without a hint of irony, compared killing service personnel with civil service office work. Giving someone a job isn't what wasted tax money looks like.
The point about government waste is that some of the things government does save lives. So money wasted equates to lives that could have been saved. See value of a statistical life etc.
I don’t know what your first sentence means. Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”? I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.
If your second sentence is correct, then let’s allocate taxes to digging holes and filling them in? Ad absurdum but I think it applies? Like it seems reasonable to have an opinion on whether a function should continue to be funded by tax dollars. In a properly operating economy this would open up skilled labor to work somewhere more useful. Unless they weren’t actually skilled, in which case yes you have a problem hmm…
> Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”?
No. They mean killing as in ordering a pilot to fly an airplane with less cautious testing resulting in a crash and the death of the crew.
> I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.
It is there. This is what stackskipton said “Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed.” They even use the example of the F-4U Corsairs mentioning how during the program pilots died.
This is the comment potato3732842 replied to and this is the context their message should be interpreted in. They compared “fractional lives wasted” which they define as “man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor” with “whole lives”. They don’t define what they mean by whole lives lost, but since they wrote it as a response to stackskipton‘s comment from context i think they mean pilot deaths.
To me it seems they are arguing that if we accept more mangled pilot bodies pulled out of burning wreckages then we can do the program cheaper. And to understand where they stand on the question they call the work needed to prevent those pilot deaths “unnecessary paper pushing”. Is your reading of the comment different?
Oh wow I completely misread that, I missed the subroot comment of that subtopic and my reading of the exchange in isolation produced a different but still coherent interpretation.
I withdraw my comment, I don’t feel that way, sorry everyone.
The argument was literally about pilots dying because of war-time cutting of costs to ensure fast deployment of new tech. Then somebody misread the room and suggested office work was just as much of a waste of life as dying in a horrible accident due to canning of safety testing.
