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we’re not talking about the nature of the system here, we’re talking about this specific instance.
If I buy a million lotto tickets that have a 50% payout, it would be incomplete if not deceptive to point at one ticket and say “Well you might win 100 bucks, we don’t really know” instead of “the reason they’re selling you those tickets is because the risk and expense is greater than the payout.”
Hiring people is extremely expensive and having those people do nothing between projects is even more so.
That’s still an example of NASA eating an expense of R&D while Lockheed gets the profits.
Over the last decade, police in America have killed at least between 950 and 1250 people a year.
The actual numbers are probably higher because police don’t report all the people they kill, so statisticians are limited to searching news stories that contain the relevant data.