Fire sale, insider trading, stock manipulation, price manipulation... pick a scam/con. It's at least one of them.

As an older American from the deep south, it's just a holdover from cheap high calorie/high carb foods to start the day back when America was mostly agrarian.

Then when the 50s rolled around it got combined with nutrition concepts of a "balanced breakfast" by cereal marketing firms and romanticized to sell even cheaper products to children/parents; sugared cereal.

For me, breakfast is bacon, eggs and biscuits or toast. And maybe grits if I'm feeling like it. I like hash browns but I don't like making them.

It's just leftover marketing. Eat what makes you happy.

Blue MAGA baby, they can't help it.

Cons:

It HAS to be made out of prohibitively expensive and difficult to acquire titanium.

Not a rocket scientist so I can't say.

But I'm betting a room full of them and NASA engineers thought through all of their options based on the criteria and current tech.

That's like other drug dealers cheering the biggest drug dealer getting gutted.

Correct.

You're not wrong, but post WWII Republicans were more than willing to play along so long as big business got theirs.

IMO, it was when the CRA, the EPA and other "anti-business" initiatives came into existence that "small government" because a buzz word for them.

They made a completely wrong turn when they teamed up with Evangelicals in the 80's and let them into positions of power in the party in the 90's culminating in the bat-shit-crazies we have now.

Mea culpa, you're right. I was misremembering.

So with the original titanium heat shield the Columbia crew wouldn't have died such gruesome deaths. All because Congress was cheap.

To answer your question, it's not.

The Republicans, as proxies for the 1% and Evangelicals, have been trying to break the Federal government at least since Reagan, if not longer.

Again, completely agree.

But like the A10, sometimes tech just passes you by.

And swing wings are like biplanes. Old obsolete tech.

Except the US doesn't have a cheap, easily available source of titanium.

The stuff we used for the SR-71 and F-14 had to be gotten surreptitiously from the Russians.

That's why the Space Shuttle didn't have the titanium heat shield it was designed with and had to rely on the newly invented, much more delicate, ceramic heat shields. Which, it can be argued, resulted in the all of the deaths of the Challenger crew.