Because that's the received wisdom: if you don't like a decision, the best way to get it reversed is to yell about how it's going to lead to utter disaster and it MUST be changed at all costs.

Absolutely. It was collected in The Cyberiad. I'll go to the trouble of looking it up.

Here we are: "The First Sally, or, the Trap of Gargantius."

Reminds me of a Stanislaw Lem story in which two competing countries perfect a method of having their robotic armies connect up into supergenius networks, growing smarter as they grew bigger. Until the final day, when they were ready for all-out battle, and each had their army connect up into one big ultimate network before the two met...at which point both armies realized how stupid the whole war was, and simply didn't fight.

They were thinking, "We need people on PCs that are tied to the Google ecosystem."

The problem is that we have Lord Snapcase instead of Lord Vetinari.

Selling it isn't weird if it makes money...which it does, hand over fist.

*Buying* it is totally bizarre to me, but I can't deny people do.

Fruit flies like a BFG.

No. The Department of the Army didn 't "replace" the Department of War,, it *was* the Deparrtment of War. Same secretary (Kenneth Royale), same personnel, same everything. Only the name changed. It can trace its unbroken existence back to its founding in 1794 to the present day. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, got the Secretary of the *Navy* (James Forrestal) as its secretary, all new personnel, and was a totally new organization (with John Sullivan as Forrestal's replacement at Navy).

No, the Department of the Army still exists. It was removed from the Cabinet in 1949 but it didn't go anywhere. There was a recent kerfuffle about the Secretary of the Army leaving his position. You may have seen it in the news. The simple fact is that the Department of Defense was an all-new creation and not a renaming of anything.

Incidentally, the Department of the Army most assuredly still exists to this very day. It's not part of the Cabinet any more, but it surely exists.

The Department of War "ran the Navy" for four whole years, 1794 to 1798. During which time, *there was no Navy*, as the bankruptcy of the federal government had forced the disbanding of the old Continental Navy. By the 1940s this was all irrelevant ancient history.

"The Dept of Defense was a 1949 PR renaming of the Dept of War."

An often-repeated falsehood. The Department of War was renamed the Department of *the Army.*. The Department of Defense was a new creation to unify supervision of the US armed forces, named that because calling it the Department of War would have given the impression that the Navy was being placed under the control of the Army, which would have gone down very badly with the Navy.

"And has nothing to do with "technology" but with economics."

Because technology and economics are totally unrelated concepts that never interact with each other.

That's just a lovely bit of "Heads I win, tails you lose." If you don't complain about Trump, then obviously there's nothing wrong with him. If you do complain about Trump, then you're obsessed with him and he lives rent-free in your head.

They're Pintos!