[HN Gopher] The Pentagon's $52k trash can
___________________________________________________________________
The Pentagon's $52k trash can
Author : todd23
Score : 239 points
Date : 2023-06-23 12:04 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (responsiblestatecraft.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (responsiblestatecraft.org)
| localplume wrote:
| [dead]
| NickC25 wrote:
| What people tend to miss is that the likes of Lockheed, Raytheon,
| and Boeing do this shit on purpose because they are public
| companies with few customers, and effectively zero
| accountability. They are literally forced by public markets to
| continually grow profits, and I'd wager Lockheed spends a
| gargantuan amount of money on black projects and research that
| they can't really turn a profit on (let alone disclose much less
| sell off), so they have to resort to making a profit by bilking
| the Pentagon in any way they can.
|
| Since the Pentagon doesn't give a damn about passing an audit,
| and the revolving door between defense companies, industry
| lobbyists, and the Pentagon is so huge, they can just get away
| with it.
|
| Spare me the bullshit about jobs and readiness, it's not good for
| the economy to continually employ people to utilize 30 year old
| tech to prepare for a battle that will never happen. Look at
| Abrams tanks - some senator couldn't face the prospect of not
| being re-elected, so they continually pushed for Abrams to
| receive billions to continually produce tanks, which went out of
| style after Desert Storm....which was in 1993. The Pentagon
| didn't want more tanks, and said as much many times, yet nothing
| happened. Those tanks were produced for years and had no use and
| sat in a massive warehouse. All so that senator could enjoy their
| cushy benefits, nice lobbying kickbacks, and not having to
| actually run a competitive re-election campaign, much less do the
| hard work of saying "look folks, your jobs are irrelevant now,
| here's some money to go re-train in a different industry".
|
| Now, is spending on military tech inherently bad, even on
| unprofitable or pie-in-the-sky ideas? No. Is it a bad thing to
| invest in the engineering sectors? No. Should it be done? Yes. Is
| it good to invest in technology and in education? Yes. Should
| companies that are completely reliant on Pentagon funding be
| allowed to be "private" entities who need to adhere to the whims
| of wall street bankers above all else? Absolutely not. Should
| they be allowed to lobby? No. Should they be allowed to hire tons
| of former military officials to effectively just be
| "relationship" people so the money keeps coming in? Absolutely
| not.
|
| The root cause here is that there's a revolving door between the
| Pentagon and private industry, and we're turning a blind eye to
| it.
| sailfast wrote:
| If we continue to give the Defense department trillions of
| dollars without audits, they have no incentive to be smart with
| the money they spend. There is a huge amount of policy around
| contracting and expenditures but once you're in the door via the
| approved contracting route there are not very many controls.
|
| Further: if they have the budget allocated, they will spend it.
| It's that simple. Doesn't matter what it is on, and going over
| budget in this political climate is a plus because they can
| justify more money for next year's program request.
|
| In this article's case, expensive items are often novel and have
| some weird context or specific change attached (Stinger missiles,
| for example could have a lot of reasons to be expensive now) and
| the trash can is probably a metal galley can that is not cheap to
| produce and deliver to site, but it makes a good argument about
| price gouging generally due to lack of controls across a number
| of products.
|
| Like most things the answer is not that this is completely
| unreasonable but rather that it could be better if we did
| something about it.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| You can understand why any taxpayer of the US, after reading
| this, might question why an increase in the federal income tax is
| justified.
| lesuorac wrote:
| You might not be aware of this, but the USG separately decides
| how much to spend and how much to tax.
|
| The difference commonly comes up every now and then when the
| Gov threatens to shutdown because congress decided to spend
| more than they decided to tax and eventually that difference
| catches up to them as that already approved spending is
| dispersed but there wasn't money to pay for it.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| I dont understand what your point is. My point was clearly
| the government isnt optimizing their spend correctly. If the
| DOD spent $100 on the trash cans instead of $52K, there would
| be less "overspend" and taxes wouldnt need to go up as much.
| cushychicken wrote:
| This is a _reducto ad absurdum_ example of how the US government
| is paying out the nose to keep a bunch of manufacturing and
| development work on-shore in the USA.
|
| Yeah, sure, it's a trash can, there's no reason it should cost
| $50k. We're all agreed that's an absurd amount to pay for a trash
| container.
|
| The government isn't just paying for the trash can.
|
| They're paying for people to design, tool, and maintain that
| design. It's economic investment in people and skills, not
| necessarily just the finished product.
|
| The reason you can buy an OXO trash can for $30 on Amazon are the
| scale and volume at which they're produced. Development costs for
| that can are probably not dissimilar from those in this example,
| as far as paying for human time and effort to make the thing
| reality.
|
| The problematic element of it is when companies charge these
| sorts of absurd fees for a design that was produced decades ago
| (the E-3 is not a new aircraft by any means) and not adding
| meaningful value on top of it.
|
| It's a pretty interesting tradeoff. Should we pay outrageous
| amounts of money for stuff like this? It keeps people employed,
| which generates other positive economic effects, like buying
| houses and groceries. It also creates handy design and
| manufacturing know how, which is a useful thing to have if our
| current cold war with China ever heats up in the South China Sea.
| It's a lot harder to buy war materiel from your adversary when
| lead is flying.
| settrans wrote:
| Rephrasing your argument slightly: "of course the government
| can't pay only $30. They need to pay $30 for the trash can, and
| $49,970 for unaccountable value destruction!"
|
| Keeping people employed for no positive economic benefit is
| literally tantamount to lightning money on fire. You are paying
| people who would otherwise be creating value elsewhere _not_ to
| create that value and instead play a useless role
| intermediating in garbage can manufacture. They would still be
| buying groceries and burning gas in that productive job, but
| the difference is that they would also be creating something
| useful for society.
| jrflowers wrote:
| The government can also buy the $30 trash cans.
| uberman wrote:
| Having worked on projects sponsored by "three letter agencies",
| I also suspect that the cost of the trash cans is potentially
| recovery for unbudgeted and uncompensated requirement changes.
|
| If the navigation station on the plane had to be shrunk by 1/4
| inch due to some 3rd party not being able to meet their
| required tolerances after manufacturing had begun how does that
| get paid for?
|
| The award is fixed but now the requirements have changed. The
| TLA is not going back to Congress to get $200k in additional
| design funding. That phase of the project is done. However, the
| TLA potentially has a large budget for maintenance and
| replacement of parts.
|
| The navigation station gets an emergency redesign and it is
| paid for by no-bid 50K trash cans. There is no corruption here
| just the realities of working with fixed bid contracts,
| hundreds of third parties from every state in the nation and a
| political appropriations process.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| If the SF govt can spend $20k on a non-functioning trash can
| (that is actively defended), is $50k that crazy?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/22/san-francisc...
| cowpig wrote:
| The article goes on in the next paragraph to say that they were
| being charged $300 for the same trash cans only a few years
| ago.
|
| Presumably all the sunk costs were already sunk
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| If this were true, then other countries' militaries would also
| be paying $50k for a trash can, since none of what you wrote is
| unique to the US. Given other countries' military budgets are a
| fraction of the US's, I highly doubt that they're spending
| anywhere near that.
| paganel wrote:
| That's why comparing defence budgets as a measure of a
| country's military capabilities is so problematic.
|
| Yeah, Russia has a defence budget 12 times smaller compared
| to the US, but that means that Russia can now afford to only
| pay ~$4100 dollars for a trashcan and still be America's
| equal in terms of "PPP" defence expenses.
| hef19898 wrote:
| For aircraft parts? Yes, they absolutely do. Up to the point
| where investing a couple of billions for a new fleet is
| cheaper than keeping the old ones airworthy.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I mean seriously, you really believe this?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They're buying four trash cans at a time via a process that
| can take months of paperwork by the contractor. It's simply
| not designed for such low volume scenarios.
|
| It's a bit like doing a custom PCB design and fabrication run
| for personal reasons. It'll be $10 worth of components, but a
| half dozen might cost you $1k if you want someone else to set
| up a run on their machines to make 'em.
|
| The Stinger missile example further down seems more
| egregious. _edit:_ Maybe less egregious than I thought; its
| original microprocessor is now obselete.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger#Replacement
| danhor wrote:
| Bad example, JLCPCB will do PCBA for just a few dollars.
| cushychicken wrote:
| ...in China. Which is where we don't want our
| manufacturing dollars or skill base to go.
| danhor wrote:
| The choose some other manufacturer. E.g. Aisler will do
| assembly for 10 Boards for around 200EUR in Germany, more
| than JLCPCB (this is probably in part due to the scale
| and automation with which JLCPCB operates), but much less
| than 1k.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Every single trashcan shipped from China for military
| purpose in US would have to be pulled apart, inspected
| down to nanolevel and then put back together. That would
| not be just a few dollars...
|
| Edit:
|
| Yes obviously they are concerned about targeted attacks.
|
| And where do you live that hardware store sells trashcans
| that verifiably comply with all requirements to be put on
| a custom military Boeing 707 and not f things up in some
| costly way? By definition any such trashcan is ripe for
| targeted attack because no one except US defence would
| have a use for it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The point actually is, if we are shooting at China for
| one reason or another we would be getting zero trash cans
| from them.
| aeyes wrote:
| You can't be serious. Buy a plastic trashcan, use a
| generic metal scanner and an X-Ray and you are done.
|
| If you are concerned about targeted attacks, head down to
| your local hardware store and buy one of the thousands
| they have in stock.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Just don't put it on an aircraft then.
|
| Funny, HN was up in arms over Titan's use of a logitech
| controller just a few days ago. But somehow using
| something from best buy on a freaking expensive plane
| like an E-3 is a good idea. Well, folks, that way of
| thinking actually sank the Titan and cost five lives.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I don't think the controller would have gotten such a
| strong reaction if it was an X-Box 360 or X-Box One
| controller. Those are reliable, sturdy, and used as
| controllers in industry and military. But instead it was
| some $30 Logitech controller, something you would
| consider the budget choice in the context of somebody
| playing Call of Duty.
|
| I guess the equivalent is putting the flimsy $1.25 trash
| can from Dollar Store in your spacecraft, instead of a $8
| trash can.
| shlubbert wrote:
| A trash can is slightly less essential to a vessel's
| operation than its control surface.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Not if it catches fire.
|
| Good example with pillows causing a (still!) missing
| nuclear weapon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_
| Air_Base_B-52_crash
|
| Are pillows essential to the plane's operation? No, but
| them _not catching fire_ is.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Buy a plastic trashcan... head down to your local
| hardware store...
|
| It's for a highly specialized 707 airliner. It'll be
| metal, rated for fire resistance if someone sneaks a
| smouldering cigarette into it, wheeled for servicing,
| lock into place during flight, etc. You can't buy it at
| Home Depot, and intelligence agencies are constantly
| making smaller and harder to detect devices for bugging
| items.
| [deleted]
| cannonpalms wrote:
| What specifically do you find to be untrue?
| cushychicken wrote:
| I'd welcome your contrary explanation if you have one handy.
| veave wrote:
| Corruption?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| If you analyze how much the product and all associated
| processes can actually cost and then find a discrepancy
| (or find some pointless regulation that drives up the
| cost so much and explain how it was designed for profit
| and not purpose) then you can claim corruption. But
| simply saying "if prices look high to me it must mean
| corruption" is very naive.
|
| If US gov bought cheap plastic stuff from another country
| instead there can well still be corruption expressed in
| their choice of suppliers etc.
| mda wrote:
| "But simply saying "if prices look high to me it must
| mean corruption" is very naive."
|
| Naive or not, this turns out to be true surprisingly
| frequently.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| This is the money quote you can use to argue this is
| actually corruption:
|
| > When the 707 fell out of use in the United States, the
| trash can was no longer a "commercial" item, meaning that
| Boeing was not obligated to keep its price at previous
| levels
|
| So now one can look why it cost "mere" $300 before,
| unless Boeing losing money back then the price hike may
| be shady behavior and then someone should change supplier
| asap.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Single source supplier tend to have incresible bargaining
| power. And 50k per E-3 propably isn't even worth
| mentioning for everyone involved. Peanuts, actually.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| "The sum is low enough so it's not corruption" is also
| naive. Another side of the same coin
| strken wrote:
| An alternate explanation would be that their accountants
| used the average cost method, and the trash can got
| averaged with a bunch of actual E-3 Sentry planes, or
| expensive component systems, or something.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| This was the reason behind the $600 Hammer.
|
| https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-
| the...
| jollyllama wrote:
| It's surprising to see people carrying water for the MIC in
| this way. Boeing already has the machines to make these kinds
| of things. It's just going to be sheet metal and plastic
| molds. Even assuming a one-off custom-fab job, $52k is
| obscene.
| crote wrote:
| The plane was introduced nearly 70 years ago. Why would
| they keep around obsolete machines for which the last plane
| left the factory _literally decades ago_?
| jollyllama wrote:
| That's my point, you don't need specialty machines to
| make trash cans; it's going to be the same types of sheet
| metal benders that are used for other simple fixtures.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| No they don't... they are playing the devil's advocate I
| think or being sarcastic. This is just plain corruption and
| fraud but it's legal because defense sector...
| cushychicken wrote:
| How about you ask me what I think instead of telling me
| what I think.
|
| Because what I think is not what you claim.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| I was being sarcastic, I thought it was obvious. I'm not
| sarcastic on the fact that it is plain corruption though,
| it is.
|
| You defending corruption and fraud is just so far fetched
| it's hard to take your OP seriously.
| moralestapia wrote:
| That's a big load of bs, man. I'm impressed. Are you gonna
| charge all of us for the time you spent writing this as well?
| hef19898 wrote:
| Stuff for old models, like the E-3, is even more expensive.
| Obsolescence, tooling no longer available... A similar
| sotuation happens with spares for classic cars. Try getting
| rubber and plastic parts some old car models, same story: Lost
| tooling, low demand. For aircraft you have to recertify
| production and parts. All of that is actually quite expensive.
|
| Edit: Since the article mentions circuits and such: The
| alternative to paying through the nose for spares for obsolete
| systems and parts is a new development. In which case price,
| and lead times, increase even more. And now contractors are
| obviously abusong that situation, but parts of those high
| prices can be explained by the fact that a lot of current, top
| notch, military hear is running on old, commercially sometimes
| even obsolete tech.
| bombcar wrote:
| Often you can't get the original part, so you have to hire
| someone to take standard rubber and mold it into what you
| need, which can be more or less expensive depending on the
| use.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And now imagine that the person doing that work has to be
| certified according to aerospace standards... And believe
| me, that happens all the time...
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Yeah from what I understand the Pentagon was going to
| retire the A-10 at some point due to airframe hours.
| Instead they just paid another company to build new wings
| for it. Although they obviously had to be similar to the
| original ones, the new wings were basically a totally
| separate R&D effort followed by a manufacturing contract
| for them.
| cushychicken wrote:
| Played that game before myself. It's really, really hard! And
| it costs a lot of human effort and time to do right.
| batch12 wrote:
| I think I can deliver a trashcan that matches specs for a mere
| 40k.
| cushychicken wrote:
| I encourage you to submit a coubterproposal! I'm sure you'd
| learn a ton about plane based trash cans.
| jtbayly wrote:
| This is the buried lede in the article.
|
| "As the Government Accountability Office recently reported,
| nearly 20,000 small businesses have bowed out of military
| contracting in the past decade, creating further
| opportunities for price hikes."
|
| Why did 43% of the small businesses that used to do
| business with the government stop? And what has happened
| _since_ 2020?
|
| I know multiple small manufacturing businesses that would
| never consider accepting a government contract. One of the
| many reasons is the way the government force its
| contractors all the way down to the lowest levels
| (contractors of contractors of the big 5 gov contractors)
| to follow a million nonsense Covid rules. I suspect the
| number of small businesses willing to work for the
| government has dropped even more in the last three years.
| scotty79 wrote:
| And about how fake all the documentation is and about mob-
| like web of people involved in all of this.
| Symmetry wrote:
| If you're not already in the business then hiring the talent
| to submit a conforming bid for the contract to deliver the
| trashcan will run you more than $40k.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Beyond designing, tooling, and maintaining, there is an amazing
| time and cost savings to being able to continue to procure
| existing items.
|
| The amount of paperwork/documentation that has to change,
| logistics and inventory tracking, plus the battery of tests to
| check that a new item maintains the same mil standard
| qualifications as the old.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There are benefits to the procurement rules. Little Giant
| ladders are used extensively in the military. That's the only
| reason why they haven't moved all production to Mexico.
| kossTKR wrote:
| Is this comment a joke?
| mda wrote:
| I think it was an attempt of a joke.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Why would it be? Making even consumer products is much harder
| than it seems.
|
| Just look at the myriad failed Kickstarter projects that
| tried to make consumer stuff. Even getting something normal
| made in China can be serious work. And far more if you
| actually want to do a good job of it. Linus Tech Tips put a
| surprising amount of work into making a screwdriver.
|
| Then consider that the military probably has a bunch of
| requirements like "this can't break into sharp shards" and
| "it can't emit toxic smoke if it burns", and they'll want
| that to be proven. Certifying all those things is a whole job
| on its own.
| mda wrote:
| IMO, the claimed price is never to cover these so called
| "testing for requirements", It is a random / maximum amount
| they can charge basically. Sure they could give you a nice
| explanation that looks nice on paper, but it is rarely
| true. It is always the smoke and mirrors bullshit that
| happens for government contracts.
| [deleted]
| cushychicken wrote:
| Excellent corollary example.
|
| Making real, physical goods is very, very challenging, and
| I don't think a lot of the denizens of this site (as SWEs)
| appreciate that.
| ilyt wrote:
| > Just look at the myriad failed Kickstarter projects that
| tried to make consumer stuff. Even getting something normal
| made in China can be serious work.
|
| ....coz they are making 50k of a thing. Not four a year.
| dale_glass wrote:
| 50K is easier in this regard. Things like molds are
| expensive to make and are amortized over thousands of
| copies. So making 5 costs a lot per unit, making 50K is
| cheap per unit.
| mrb wrote:
| _" Should we pay outrageous amounts of money for stuff like
| this? It keeps people employed, which generates other positive
| economic effects, like buying houses and groceries._"
|
| Nonsense. You fell into the Broken Window Fallacy.
| ilyt wrote:
| >The government isn't just paying for the trash can.
|
| >They're paying for people to design, tool, and maintain that
| design. It's economic investment in people and skills, not
| necessarily just the finished product.
|
| I call bullshit on that. There is no "maintenance" on that
| design, it was already done and paid for. It's a trashcan, it
| doesn't require specialized tooling to the cost of $50k. That's
| far above "make the tools to make it from scratch" price. There
| is no "economic investment" needed here to keep the tech of
| making trash cans alive.
|
| > It's a pretty interesting tradeoff. Should we pay outrageous
| amounts of money for stuff like this? It keeps people employed,
| which generates other positive economic effects, like buying
| houses and groceries.
|
| "It's keeping people employed" is terrible excuse to spend tax
| dollars. Any other kind of social service is far more positive
| to the society than throwing more money at military contractor
|
| > It also creates handy design and manufacturing know how,
| which is a useful thing to have if our current cold war with
| China ever heats up in the South China Sea. It's a lot harder
| to buy war materiel from your adversary when lead is flying.
|
| Or just make government-funded stuff the property of the
| government. Government paid for development, government should
| get detailed plans and all of the documentation of it, and any
| inventions made along the way should be put into public domain,
| as the public _paid for it_.
|
| And if government then turn to other company "hey, can you make
| these at reasonable price", well, that's just glorious free
| market at work.
| jimmyswimmy wrote:
| > I call bullshit on that. There is no "maintenance" on that
| design, it was already done and paid for. It's a trashcan, it
| doesn't require specialized tooling to the cost of $50k.
| That's far above "make the tools to make it from scratch"
| price. There is no "economic investment" needed here to keep
| the tech of making trash cans alive.
|
| To understand this you have to appreciate a few things.
| First, these are military-grade trashcans. That sounds
| ridiculous, but there are a whole range of MILSPEC standards
| that must be followed to deliver anything to the military.
| Certain materials cannot be used, certain vendors can't be.
|
| Second, there's always design maintenance. C'mon, this is a
| site of programmers. People here understand the reason you'd
| maintain software: redoing your old, working C code in Rust;
| upgrading applications designed for XP to run on Windows 10,
| etc. TFA quotes the E-3 Sentry, a design based on the 707
| from late 1960's. The trashcan design needs to be updated!
| Certainly material sizes and quality are substantially
| different, rivet part numbers have changed, coatings have
| changed. Dealing with changes means substantial time
| qualifying the new parts.
|
| Third is the issue of scale. If you're making a million cell
| phones you can sell them at the low price of $1k each; but if
| you make just one it might cost $1B. Here, we're talking
| trashcans. If you build a thousand, you hire an engineer to
| oversee the design requirements and master machinist, and
| then a small army of machinists and assemblers to make the
| parts, and a quality guy to inspect them, and some other guy
| to do the documentation. How many of those guys do you need
| if you make just one or two? Well, not as many, just the most
| expensive ones.
|
| Hand waving here: we're going to make 10 trashcans. I'll bid
| 40 hours of engineering time, 80 hours of machinist, and 40
| hours of quality/paperwork guy time. Assuming realistic
| numbers for those guys, you're talking about maybe $30k
| (don't forget to include overhead costs, which are more than
| you think they are). I'd guess a couple $k of parts, but just
| realized I forgot machine time, paint shop time, incoming
| material quality inspection, etc., etc. Amazingly, though, if
| you only bought one trashcan, the price doesn't change all
| that much. Most of that machinist time is setting up.
|
| So, gosh, I mean, there's a lot here. And Boeing is more
| expensive than I am, and has more processes and procedures.
| And they know how to make these trashcans in a way that fits
| the aircraft.
|
| These aren't COTS parts, and they'll never be, because in
| general, COTS parts have short lifetimes. The B-52, for
| example, has been flying since forever and it's still being
| upgraded. There aren't a lot of mainstream items with service
| lives like that. You know where the military gets great
| prices? Where there's a substantial dual-use application:
| guns, bullets, computers, office desks, building HVAC units,
| etc. They can buy from the mass market. As long as they don't
| want excessive service lives out of them, they'll pay the
| same price as you. It's when they want something special that
| costs extra, same as you or me.
| cushychicken wrote:
| This shows very little hands on knowledge of how the US
| government actually works, how it pays for the contracts it
| writes, or the costs of making physical goods.
|
| For example: as other more level headed folks with actual
| knowledge of contract fulfillment have mentioned, this might
| have been a T&M or cost plus procurement. In which case,
| there's very little opportunity for the profiteering that
| most of my replies have stridently claimed is obviously
| occurring - with zero evidence beyond "There's NO WAY it
| could be that expensive!!"
|
| I get that I'm trying to argue with the emotions of a bunch
| of people with a lot of antipathy towards the US government,
| and that's ultimately a losing battle.
|
| End of the day, you can be mad about this if you want, but
| this is the way it is, and it evolved that way for reasons,
| and some of those reasons are to encourage second order
| effects - beyond merely procuring plane trash cans.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I don't think the antipathy is against the government, i
| think it is against the obscenely rich people who own these
| companies, and to a degree the companies themselves.
|
| I also think the excuses made here are dishonest. It
| doesn't keep people employed, it doesn't fund innovation.
| It goes into some billionaire's bank account, gets invested
| in whatever and pushes them up some list of top 100 richest
| people in the US.
|
| The profits don't go to employees, they don't cause more
| hires. They don't create jobs. The trash cans are already
| designed, they're probably already manufactured as well.
| They're not going to hire anyone for this, they're just
| jacking up the price because they can so why the hell
| wouldn't they? Just like they jacked up the price of
| insulin not to mention general healthcare and medicine and
| everything else recently.
|
| The rich have one objective, it is to get richer. They will
| hide research that goes against that interest. Oil
| companies knew CO2 was bad nearly 100 years ago. Teflon
| producers knew teflon was bad decades ago. Until someone
| makes them stop, they will not stop. Because money.
|
| Corporations literally do not give a single ounce of fuck
| about anything except money. If they do something that
| seems selfless it's because seeming selfless is in their
| interest (money). Like how Patagonia made record sales of
| their "Don't buy this jacket".
|
| If you ever fins yourself thinking a corporation is giving
| a shit about something that doesn't make them more money
| it's because you're not seeing their angle.
| adolph wrote:
| For sure, let us understand Chesterton's fence before we
| demolish it. A full appreciation for the problem is not the
| same as making excuses or justifications for it. At a
| minimum if the reason for something is a second order
| effect of said thing, then just take Vienna--make your
| intention a first order effect.
|
| https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
|
| https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Napoleon-say-If-you-want-to-
| ta...
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Only thing I'll mention is that tools wear out. Not that it
| justifies the price.
|
| So the design may not need to be maintained, but if the
| company supplying the material goes out of business, someone
| needs to confirm the new material specs will work on the
| tool.
| mortify wrote:
| > it was already done and paid for. It's a trashcan, it
| doesn't require specialized tooling
|
| The government doesn't spec "a trashcan." They create size
| specs, water-tightness ratings, material durability, etc. The
| exact spec they provide may be met in 90% of areas by an
| existing trash can, but that won't do. If there are
| requirements for some level of waterproofing, you can't just
| seal it or even mold it from a single piece of material, you
| have to PROOVE it. It has to be tested and usually adhere to
| an existing standard so you're going to design several trash
| can, submit them for approval and use the best one that
| passes.
|
| It's mind-numbingly tedious to build anything for the
| government.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| Boeing pays at least on business I know to essentially have
| a complete label printing line with staff available to run
| it. Each label must be hellaciously expensive when they
| need one but my understanding was that some(all?) are part
| of the certification for airworthiness. So a missing or
| damaged label can ground the plane, which is far more
| expensive than the label.
| crote wrote:
| The crucial part is that it is a trash can for a Boeing 707.
| The first one flew in 1954, and the last one rolled out of
| the factory in 1994.
|
| So they are either paying for someone to keep it in a
| warehouse for at least thirty years, paying to keep a
| trashcan factory around for seventy years, or paying someone
| to essentially reinvent the wheel and hand-build the damn
| thing. One-off items are expensive, and one-off _aviation_
| items doubly so.
| pixl97 wrote:
| War is messy when it comes to free market...
|
| Pentagon: "Oh hey, I need special bolt X"
|
| FreeMarket: "Sorry, was too expensive to make that here so
| we're making special bolt X in China"
|
| Pentagon: "Um, but we are shooting China right now"
|
| FreeMarket: "Don't worry I can get a production line setup in
| 3 months for 100 million dollars"
|
| Pentagon: "But I need special bolt X TODAY!"
| Joker_vD wrote:
| During the first World War, the French and the English
| found out that building (and then operating) new state-run
| munition factories was faster and cheaper than buying
| munitions from the privately-owned firms, and the
| production quality was also better, too. Something to do
| with competence transfer or something.
| pauldenton wrote:
| What happened with Winston Churchill politically after
| WW2? Did his war economy footing translate well to peace
| time?
| hayd wrote:
| Presumably the draft also helped. Outside of war-time,
| I'm extremely sceptical state-run factories can compete
| with the free market..
| ilyt wrote:
| _gets some bunch of machinists in a room full of lathes and
| starts cranking_
|
| _now all of them make silicon valley money off their
| skills just because of how bloated military contracting
| is*_
| adolph wrote:
| Maybe given the history of things the concept of "Silicon
| Valley money," in terms of margin, was set by very
| generous terms from the Cold War era military
| procurement.
|
| _The first initial public offering from Silicon Valley
| was in 1956 for a company called Varian, that sold
| microwave tubes for military applications._
|
| https://diginomica.com/who-are-we-kidding-silicon-valley-
| was...
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Aye, SV was a hub of Navy research and activity since
| before WWI. Moffett Field, the early version of NASA, and
| Stanford all made it a thing long before some 90s dotcom
| asplosion.
| pc86 wrote:
| Why should Silicon Valley people be the only ones to make
| Silicon Valley money off their skills?
|
| There's nothing inherent or ontological about tech that
| demands the money it does. It's needed, and the money is
| available, so that happens. If you know how to work a
| lathe, and the money is available, you deserve to be able
| to get it.
| kodah wrote:
| Sure there is. Anyone who has served an had to fill out an
| Equipment Repair Order (ERO) has seen the every day screw or
| bolt that costs over $150.
|
| I was really annoyed by this at my shop and asked S-4
| (supply) why this was. What it comes down to is that when
| military vendors sell a plane, radio, tank, etc to the
| military they aren't selling one product. They're selling a
| product list (called an SL-3). Each product on that list must
| be specified, routinely tested (eg: certain amount each
| batch), and then manufactured. As time goes on, the screw is
| used in less things that are in production so the batch sizes
| for production are reduced, which inflates the overhead test
| cost. A lot of products have pretty interesting test
| standards; for instance we had a truck that after every
| significant change had to be blown up a minimum of four
| times. The base truck was $400k and then the equipment inside
| - which was the actual configuration that was being tested -
| cost millions per vehicle.
|
| I think the military could benefit from part standardization
| and longer lifetimes on component production.
| abeppu wrote:
| > I think the military could benefit from part
| standardization and longer lifetimes on component
| production.
|
| Years ago in a history class it was asserted that in WWII,
| because the US had a greater degree of part standardization
| (I think they were talking about stuff that could be used
| across multiple tanks and truck models) than the Germans,
| the US supply lines for keeping everything running could be
| more effective. A German vehicle was more likely to be out
| of commission for want of a part.
|
| I'm not sure if that's true, or how difficult part
| standardization is in complex modern equipment. But when
| the Russians are possibly harvesting chips from home
| appliances, and when we're all acutely aware of how tangled
| global supply chains are, I wonder if there will be a push
| for greater standardization from a strategic motivation
| rather than a cost one?
| giantrobot wrote:
| > I'm not sure if that's true, or how difficult part
| standardization is in complex modern equipment.
|
| Part standardization isn't just bolts and major
| assemblies but also things like test stands, jigs, and
| everything else needed to repair something.
|
| Every repair bay needs for example a shop crane. Every
| division will have X number of shop cranes all their
| maintenance units. If there's a particular model shop
| crane that works with every engine for every vehicle in
| the division that's awesome. They just need X shop
| cranes.
|
| But then they get assigned a new type of truck. Its
| engine is bigger and better than the old model.
| Unfortunately the existing shop cranes are too small to
| handle lifting this new engine. Now the division needs a
| mix of shop cranes and enough where every motor pool has
| every shop crane necessary to fix any vehicle that comes
| in.
| goodoldneon wrote:
| "Military spending is good for the economy" is basically the
| same as the broken window fallacy. There's a massive
| opportunity cost
| giaour wrote:
| Just think what the private sector could have accomplished if
| the military didn't waste its time developing ARPANET and
| early internet standards. Lot of good those ever did us.
| cushychicken wrote:
| There's also massive benefits which are hard to directly
| measure.
|
| Doing advanced, completely unprofitable basic research, for
| one thing. These are the sorts of projects that spawned GPS,
| the Internet, and IC manufacturing. Wasn't super profitable
| at the time of conception, but the military doesn't care.
| They need capability, irrespective of price. All of these
| technologies are now keystones of numerous gigantic American
| companies with billion dollar plus valuations.
|
| Building up US based scientific and manufacturing know-how,
| for another. Plenty of people take the skills they learn at
| Raytheon or an FFRDC and use them to start profitable small
| businesses, which in turn employ more people and generate
| more tax revenue.
|
| Not that I expect many people reading this to care about
| that. "Military spending bad" is too easy and convenient a
| slogan.
|
| It doesn't solve every problem - there are a shitload of
| people in America receiving inadequate education, nutrition,
| and healthcare, for example. But it certainly helps keep a
| lot of Americans employed and paying their mortgages, which
| is a non-trivial benefit.
| itairall wrote:
| I am sorry but this is a ridiculous argument.
|
| What is hard to measure is what could have been done with
| the money to make the US military stronger but was wasted
| instead.
|
| The worst part is all these inefficiencies are going to add
| up over the coming decades when we have to keep up with the
| PLA/China.
|
| A PLA colonel makes less than a private first class marine
| and manufacturing anything is an order of magnitude
| difference.
| roenxi wrote:
| The US is at risk of being out-competed by nominal
| communists and practical authoritarians. They've already
| been knocked down to 2nd biggest economy adjusted for PPP
| and US government spending appears to be in a death-debt
| spiral where it pays for itself with donations from
| foreigners. The real burden of that is probably going to
| land on the middle class sometime soon and cause political
| hiccups that go beyond mere Trumpism.
|
| Spending $50k on a trash can is unlikely to lead to the
| sort of benefits that are required. Better than
| unemployment benefits for nothing, maybe. The opportunity
| costs and time wasted on bureaucracy put even that
| optimistic spin in doubt. Basic research doesn't need 3% of
| GDP spent on overinflated contracts. It can't be helping
| the situation.
| xxpor wrote:
| >death-debt spiral where it pays for itself with
| donations from foreigners.
|
| That's not how it works. As long as the trade deficit
| exists, and the reserve currency is the dollar, there
| will be huge demand for treasuries.
| Jochim wrote:
| I think the point is that you could fund all those things
| without putting it directly into the pockets of defence
| contractors, or physically/psychologically traumatising the
| people who feel the need to sign up.
| sailfast wrote:
| It can be good! That said, as someone who has spent time in
| the five sided puzzle palace I would argue the time has
| long passed for a harder look at how the dollars are spent
| and how procurements are happening so we improve the
| process, open to more domestic competition and open
| ourselves up less to single points of failure for our key
| defense elements (see F35 program).
|
| "Do more with less" during the Obama administration /
| Afghan war was a test of this and the things that got cut
| were the innovative programs while inefficient tent poles
| remained.
|
| We should reform now while we have the budget so we get
| more good public innovation and can actually cut
| effectively and have that muscle memory in leaner years.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > The reason you can buy an OXO trash can for $30 on Amazon are
| the scale and volume at which they're produced.
|
| I could make 1 plastic trashcan at home for less than $50,000.
| And probably less than $30.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I have a 3D printer, and I made a desk trash can.
|
| I even gave it a fancy pattern.
|
| I used FreeCAD.
|
| It took 5 minutes to make the trashcan, and 2 nights to learn
| the pattern tool.
|
| Total cost was 1.50 for my fancy color changing filament.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And you did, at least, go through full ISO 9100
| certification, as the minimum to make the long list of
| suppliers for flying parts.
|
| It is becoming so frustrating to read all those tech bro
| comments, believing that doing some messy 3D printing is
| the same thing as manufacturing. Ignoring that the whole
| field of mechanical engineering exists.
|
| Thinking like that, a bunch of millions, get you the Titan
| and five dead people. Add some billions and it gets you FSD
| and a bunch of dead people.
|
| Oh, and accounting and cost calculation seems to be a black
| art as well...
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I'm talking about a desk trashcan though, at $100 an
| hour, it cost $400 to design.
|
| By the way I'm a (real) engineer and I did design
| mechanical engineering for 5 years and electrical design
| engineering for 3 years. (and other fields of engineering
| for 4 years total as well)
|
| Yes, you get your specs and you design to them.
|
| I got real engineering parts certified and I believe the
| total cost, including tooling was under 600k. Heck, back
| when I made airbags, I don't think we spent anywhere
| close to 1 million dollars between design, tooling,
| testing, and manufacturing.
| hef19898 wrote:
| All nice and dandy. And now imagine doing all that
| according to some obscure military aviation certification
| standards from the 50s. For a handful of parts. When you
| are the only reasonably available supplier.
|
| Aerospace is different from automotive, just how
| different is only apparent by actually suffering through
| it. And as I said elsewhere, 200k to keep four highly
| specialized military planes in the air is, as stupid as
| it sounds, almost a no brainer.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| >200k to keep four highly specialized military planes in
| the air is, as stupid as it sounds, almost a no brainer.
|
| That implies that the trashcan designed for less would
| cause failures.
|
| Also the cost of the program was 1.3M or something.
| hef19898 wrote:
| That actually depends on how you define failure.
|
| Now we come to a peculiarity of aerospace, so excuse the
| tangent. All aircraft have to be airworthy to be allowed
| to fly. Those airworthiness criteria are set during
| initial Type Certification, and more or less set in
| stone. Changing them requires various amounts of testing,
| re-certification and abton of paper work nobody in their
| right minds does voluntarily. One reason one does it is
| obsolescence of parts or technology.
|
| One of things I insist on, for that very reason, is in
| being smart in defining begnin things like BoMs and
| maintenance plans. Because deviating from those grounds a
| plane.
|
| So, if (I have no idea of the E-3 specifics as those arw
| most likely classified to a certain degree) said trash
| bins are part of the airworthiness requirements, not
| having them (and them being up to spec) grounds the
| plane. Because the _absence_ of said trash bin is a
| defect in itself.
|
| Whether or not the trash bins are a signigicant safety
| problem is, decades after the E-3 got certified, no
| longer relevant.
|
| Aerospace is fun sometimes.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| My background is medical devices (21CFR), not aerospace.
| The "story" I like to tell about how much procedures
| matter is the stack of $1,200 single board computers I
| was offered because when they arrived on the loading
| dock, the person from Receiving didn't follow the proper
| procedure, so they couldn't be sent to Manufacturing to
| be assembled into the $700,000 instrument we sold but
| were instead heading for the dumpster.
|
| $12,000 in perfectly working hardware that had to be
| scrapped because someone didn't fill out the proper
| paperwork. Luckily, we (software dev) intercepted them
| and found other uses for them.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Can you guarantee it's not going to move around and dump
| its contents or crush a crewmember when the military plane
| it's in does evasive maneuvers?
|
| Can you guarantee a fire started in it won't spread to the
| rest of the aircraft and fill it with noxious fumes?
| [deleted]
| sailfast wrote:
| True! That said, the monopoly plays a role. I bet if you gave
| these specs to an open bid sheet metal fabricator somewhere in
| the US they'd replicate it for less than 52K shipped, no?
| giantrobot wrote:
| It's still not going to have a non-trivial cost after testing
| and certification. Even if it's not 52k it's not going end up
| a small fraction of that. Certifications can be expensive and
| can cover the entire process of manufacturing from materials
| to how it's packaged for shipment.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > It keeps people employed, ...
|
| What fraction of that $50k landed in the hands of the workers,
| do you think?
| koolba wrote:
| Are we counting tips for the masseuse when the CEO goes to
| the spa?
| cushychicken wrote:
| [flagged]
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| Why don't you ask Boeing why exactly they need to charge
| $50k per trash can, before justifying them with an
| imaginary explanation of how their economy works?
| cushychicken wrote:
| [flagged]
| Symmetry wrote:
| Most of it, probably. These sort of contracts operate on a
| cost plus basis where the profit margin that Boeing takes
| home is fixed ahead of time. I hear from people doing
| software for defense contractors that they spend a lot of
| time being bored not doing anything productive, but by
| collecting their salaries they increase the cost of the
| software, which is the only way for the defense contractor to
| increase its profit.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| it's still a net negative to society due to the
| inefficiency, having presumably skilled people sitting
| around doing nothing due to bureaucracy instead of
| producing things of value. The opportunity cost is massive
| and the result is DC area codes being some of the richest
| in the nation off the backs of tax payers
| Symmetry wrote:
| Oh, yes. In terms of societal impact its far worse to pay
| people with valuable talents to not be productive than it
| would have been for the defense contractor to just pocket
| the money and pay it out as bonuses and dividends. But
| the system has its own logic and inertia.
| cushychicken wrote:
| This commenter understands how contracts work.
|
| I'll direct all the righteously indignant folks claiming
| "corruption" to you from now on. XD
| jtbayly wrote:
| You do realize that paying people to do nothing in order
| to take home more profit as a corporation, and charging
| both the worthless employee time and the extra profit for
| the corp that allows to the taxpayers is the definition
| of corruption, right?
| cushychicken wrote:
| Paying people to learn how to make plane parts - even
| trash cans - is not corrupt. It's investing in
| manufacturing skills and knowhow.
|
| I'd wager most of the money spent on this venture went to
| the people designing and making the trashcan, not
| executive bonuses or admin fees.
| jtbayly wrote:
| > Paying people to learn how to make plane parts
|
| Is the opposite of this:
|
| > being bored not doing anything productive
|
| I'm not sure why you claimed to agree with the latter
| being how government contracts work.
| Symmetry wrote:
| See my first reply to the topic for more details, but
| over a decade ago I worked for Group 33 at Lincoln Labs
| and we considered trying to keep Boeing from overcharging
| the government too much to be an unwritten part of our
| mission. But the problem is that the problem is genuinely
| complicated. It's a situation worth some outrage but
| outrage without understanding won't accomplish anything
| useful.
| cushychicken wrote:
| Love the Lincoln Labs folks.
|
| Smart cookies working on tough problems.
|
| Also probably the best radar designers in the whole
| goddamn world.
|
| I am proud to be even tangentially associated with them.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| charging the government to have employees do nothing(to
| the extent they complain about not having any work to do)
| is corrupt. It's the type of stuff you see in African
| countries with government funds being handed out for work
| that never happens
|
| especially considering the comment was referring to
| Boeing, a company notorious for their lobbying to get
| contracts they don't deserve
| dtx1 wrote:
| As a German, it always suprises me how pedantic americans can
| be when it comes to Letter of the Law vs Spirit of the Law
| situation. Yes, for Warplane Parts this whole Idea of keeping
| it inside america and enable local companies to continuously
| produce parts is reasonable. Having to receive bids for
| contracts as a public entity is also reasonable. But is there
| no one in government that can see that a 50k trashcan is just
| pointless? Is it really impossible to apply some level of basic
| human reason and common sense to such situations?
| Kalium wrote:
| Usually the real answer is that it isn't actually $50k for a
| trash can. In something like an airplane, there's a whole
| bunch of costs that are overhead on the plane itself without
| being attached to any particular part (delivery, integrated
| testing, R&D, whatever). The accounting convention is that
| the overhead gets spread out amongst the individual items.
| The side effect of this convention is that if you view a line
| item without context, you get something utterly nonsensical.
|
| It's absolutely possible to apply some level of basic human
| reason and common sense to such situations. A different
| accounting convention is probably in order.
| Symmetry wrote:
| They see that it's stupid and they have all the same reason
| and common sense as anyone else. They just worry that if they
| don't follow the rules they'll go to jail.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| What's the alternative? If a trashcan of that specification
| is needed to allow the airplane's mission to begin, then it's
| grounded until the trashcan is in place.
|
| The alternative is to find a less costly supplier that can
| meet that specification. Now you've (a) held up the missions
| and (b) more than likely used up any cost savings in your
| procurement & supplier evaluation process.
|
| At some point, the intelligent thing to do is shrug, grumble
| under your breath, and write the check so you can get on with
| life.
| goodpoint wrote:
| You forgot the "/s".
| Lolaccount wrote:
| If that's right, why don't they clarify it and call the excess
| spend a 'grant'?
|
| At least it's then clear and people can decide on whether that
| grant is value for money or not.
|
| The thing appears ludicrous.
| Ironchefpython wrote:
| > It keeps people employed, which generates other positive
| economic effects, like buying houses and groceries.
|
| Let's be honest here. With that $50,000 trashcan we're paying
| mid-level managers $30, downstream suppliers $1, and $49,967 in
| stock buybacks that drive income inequality just so we can pay
| a factory worker $2 of that $50k. We are literally just
| shoveling tax dollars into the pockets of the already wealthy.
| mda wrote:
| Or, a simpler explanation: "corruption".
| foweltschmerz wrote:
| Reductio ad absurdum is a misnomer here. Apagogical argument is
| a completely valid mode of argumentation that's used by
| philosophers and mathematicians throughout history. What you're
| accusing this article of is cherry-picking.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That explanation doesn't hold water.
|
| The issue in government contracting is very simple. You need
| competitive procurement to ensure reasonableness of price.
| Period. In the 90s, we allowed major defense contractors to
| consolidate at the prime level and diversify at the
| subcontractor level.
|
| So Lockheed Martin has some component of every system in 300
| congressional districts - some little company is fabricating
| magical bolts to get congressional support.
|
| So now these giant companies are all sole source vendors. Guess
| what happened to price?
| nickstinemates wrote:
| If that's the case the floor should be much higher. I'm all for
| a $1m trash can.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| Explain then how Boeing managed to stay afloat when it was
| forced to charge "only" $300 per trash can.
| giaour wrote:
| $300 probably represents the amortized proportional cost of
| the original design, certification, and manufacturing run.
|
| $50K for a crash can is absurd, but $200K to spin up a
| production facility and get the output certified to whatever
| aviation safety standards apply to trash cans sounds about
| right.
| smallerfish wrote:
| They don't need to spin up a production facility for a run
| of four trash cans. I guarantee there are ad hoc metal
| shops aplenty. Cut some sheet metal on the CNC, run it
| through a folder-thingy, rivet/weld it up, add some hinge
| hardware. You're talking one guy and 2-4 days, including
| the CAD work.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Having been through this process with "some pieces of
| sheet metal" and "a design" $200k sounds reasonable if
| you want something produced to an actual specification.
| It costs a lot of money to pay "a guy in a metal shop" to
| build tooling to reproduce a design to a specification. I
| could probably get it done for a 5-figure NRE in certain
| quantities but the per-unit price goes up as the NRE goes
| down.
|
| You should probably consider that these cans have to be
| tested to some minimal standard to make sure parts don't
| shear off under the stresses they encounter during their
| service life. These stresses are probably more
| significant for parts inside of a military aircraft, as
| it may be required to take evasive action or perform
| higher-stress maneuvers even though this is basically a
| 707 fitted with expensive electronics. It sounds dumb in
| isolation because it's a trash can, but if you want
| predictability and low failure rates you really do have
| to test everything.
|
| I personally lack the imagination to consider all the
| failure modes of the can but that lack of imagination
| doesn't mean that the failure modes aren't real risks.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > It sounds dumb in isolation because it's a trash can,
| but if you want predictability and low failure rates you
| really do have to test everything.
|
| It would really suck to lose an air crew because a _trash
| can_ of all things made by some rando in their garage
| flew out of its mount in a wing over maneuver on a
| training exercise.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Sure. And all of this needs to be peoperly certified, to
| whatever standard the E-3 was certified against, in order
| to be mounted on the plane. Your comment tells me you
| were never involved in any of this.
|
| Alternative: Those trash cans set in stock somewhere, the
| 300 buck price guarantee ran out, and the alternative was
| to not fly or develop new cans. Well, that wpupd also
| justify 50k per can if said E-3s are actually needed
| right now.
| smallerfish wrote:
| And your comment tells me you're too deep into the system
| to realize how ridiculous this is. Your guy in a metal
| shop can do this for $5k with plenty of padding. Hire
| your certification consultant for $15k, and so on. If
| being efficient with taxpayer money was a priority, you
| could do one-off jobs a hell of a lot more efficiently
| than this was handled.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| There's a reason the Navy runs their own service and
| repair shops for submarines, and it's exactly to produce
| custom parts and tooling for overhauls and repairs.
| giaour wrote:
| Assuming your numbers are accurate, that's still _$5K per
| trashcan_. Aviation is stupidly expensive.
|
| Maybe contacting to a custom shop was an option but would
| take an extra week, and they needed those E3s in the air
| ASAP. I don't know what specific circumstances were at
| play, and neither does anyone in this thread.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I never said it wasn't somewhat ridiciulous, did I? I
| just try to explain the status quo, and some reasons why
| it is not as easy as buying some trash can from
| AliExpress or wherever.
|
| But keep in mind, those same rules apply to safety
| critical parts, e.g. engines and wings. And overall, it
| is easier to just apply the same high standards to
| everything.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Is your metal you are using NIST certified and traceable?
|
| How about your welds? One guy, so yours saying he
| inspected his own work and no sign-off?!
|
| You gonna retain those records? ASA-100, Distributor
| Quality System Standard, paragraph 12: "The distributor
| shall maintain documentation of traceability for at least
| 7 years...
|
| Here is a small non-exhaustive list I found of what you
| need: Did your shipment meet all the
| customer's requirements? Note that this extends to more
| than just PN, QTY and ship-to. Failure to read and heed
| those pesky T&Cs (the Terms and Conditions on a typical
| PO or RO) is a frequent NCR. Who signed your C of
| C/Material Cert? Are they authorized to do so (cross
| checked to the Roster)? Where was the part
| obtained from? Are they on the Approved Suppliers List?
| Did you send the part to a repair station/AMO? Are they
| on the Approved Suppliers List? Whomever you
| claim to have trace to, is the chain of custody
| acceptably documented? Are part numbers, serial
| numbers, and condition in harmony? If there were
| any deviations from what the customer required, was there
| reasonable documentation in the record showing the
| customer's acceptance of the deviation?
|
| https://www.aviationsuppliers.org/the-importance-of-
| aircraft...
|
| Anyway, good luck with your metal shop business and
| running parts through the folder-thingy. Please bear in
| mind that the link I provided is just a small look at the
| regulations that govern Civil Aircraft and that Mil-Spec
| is an entirely different beast, but I am sure you know
| that already!
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| You think Boeing didn't already have all those processes
| and shops in place?
|
| If it still costed them tens of thousands to produce a
| trash can, I'd argue they're doing their job really
| inefficiently. Not really what you'd call an economy of
| scale.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > You think Boeing didn't already have all those
| processes and shops in place?
|
| For parts likely not manufactured in decades? No. They
| likely didn't have _current_ paperwork for that. Boeing
| wasn 't sitting around just waiting to replace some trash
| cans _just in case_ the Pentagon was going to order some.
|
| Trash cans for a plane whose commercial counterpart has
| been out of service for decades is literally not an
| economy of scale. An order for replacement trash cans at
| this point is a specialty boutique order.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| They had to diversify into non-trash cans.
| igammarays wrote:
| Even if what you're saying is true, then the cost of
| maintaining the production line should be billed separately
| from the trash can itself.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It's interesting to contrast this with all the complaints about
| the Titan sub using off-the-shelf components.
| immibis wrote:
| They are red herrings. For the price of one of these trash
| cans the Titan could've had perhaps three complete
| independent control systems including Logitech gaming
| controllers.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I somehow thought it would be much more expensive than $50k
| to produce a small number of custom controllers, especially
| if you were to do the proper thing and have them pass
| certifications.
| t0suj4 wrote:
| > The problematic element of it is when companies charge these
| sorts of absurd fees for a design that was produced decades ago
| (the E-3 is not a new aircraft by any means) and not adding
| meaningful value on top of it.
|
| I think the problem is that they're so disconnected from the
| value of money that they are willing to pay that much.
| giaour wrote:
| Planes get grounded when they have missing or nonfunctional
| parts. E.g., commercial jets can't fly if the toilets don't
| work, even though the toilet is not critical to aviation
| safety.
|
| Imagine you have four multimillion dollar aircraft that can't
| fly because some small part that is out of production broke.
| You need those planes to fly missions. How much would you pay
| to put them back into service?
| mcdonje wrote:
| >Until 2010, Boeing charged an average of $300 for a trash
| container used in the E-3 Sentry, a surveillance and radar
| plane based on the 707 civilian airliner. When the 707 fell out
| of use in the United States, the trash can was no longer a
| "commercial" item, meaning that Boeing was not obligated to
| keep its price at previous levels, according to a weapons
| industry source who spoke to RS.
|
| That's the 2nd paragraph of the article that you apparently
| didn't read.
| [deleted]
| cushychicken wrote:
| Also means that there are way fewer airframes to spread
| development costs across.
|
| Looks like we both read it, but not all of us understood the
| implications of it.
| jabradoodle wrote:
| They had already developed it. How much do you think it
| costs to design a bin..
| ceejayoz wrote:
| How much do you think it costs to restart the production
| line for a component of an aircraft last made in 1979?
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| It's. A. Trash. Can.
|
| This isn't some specialized part that the plane requires
| to fly. It's just a trash can.
|
| Hell, just go to Target and buy one that's similarly
| sized. It would be cheaper to fly across the country to
| find one at this point.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It is a trash can that must contain a waste fire so it
| doesn't burn through the wall of the plane or suffocate
| the crew.
|
| It is a trash can that must not fly around the E-3's
| cabin if they're making evasive maneuvers.
|
| It is a trash can that must fit in a specific spot in a
| plane first made in 1957 and ended production in the
| 1970s.
|
| It must have been confirmed via a vigorous process to
| fulfill all these requirements and approved for aviation
| use.
|
| _You can not buy one of these at Target._ They are not
| putting little plastic bins by the workstations in an
| AWACS plane.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > You can not buy one of these at Target
|
| This is a site apparently populated by fairly bright
| people. I'm struggling to understand why no one seems to
| get this.
| seabird wrote:
| This is a site populated by a group of people that
| society massively overestimates the intelligence and
| competence of, and it very often goes to their head. The
| amount of software developers that actually have any real
| idea of what rigorous engineering actually is is
| vanishingly small and those that do usually only "get it"
| because they worked adjacent to disciplines that take it
| more seriously.
|
| Not to say the average user here is an idiot, but it's
| pretty clear that cribbing together code in extremely
| low-risk environments doesn't impart any understanding of
| how designing, manufacturing, and supporting critical
| products over a 5+ decade lifespan is actually done.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| > You can not buy one of these at Target. They are not
| putting little plastic bins by the workstations in an
| AWACS plane.
|
| You do realize there are multiple trash cans available,
| right? Some that are metal. Of many different sizes.
|
| It would take less time to go store to store across the
| country and source 4 trash cans than it would to do this
| ludicrous process.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > You do realize there are multiple trash cans available,
| right?
|
| Certified for use on 707s? Again, this is not the sort of
| trash can you have in your office. It'll be rated for
| fire, it'll be in a special cart that fits into a special
| locking spot in the plane, it will have been tested to
| _stay_ in that special locking spot if the plane crashes,
| etc.
|
| It's like trying to buy Commodore 64 parts at Best Buy.
| Not going to happen.
| Jochim wrote:
| > You can not buy one of these at Target. They are not
| putting little plastic bins by the workstations in an
| AWACS plane.
|
| Apparently you _could_ buy one for $300 though. I own a
| bin that isn 't far off that price, and I'm sure many
| people on the site have much fancier ones.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Apparently you could buy one for $300 though.
|
| Yes, when they were being commercially manufactured for
| many users.
|
| Now that 707s are no longer in service outside the
| military, they're not running production lines for parts
| except when needed; that $200k includes all the paperwork
| to win the contract, the lawyers who review it, un-
| mothballing whatever tooling they use, etc.; the _fixed_
| costs far outweigh the costs to make each individual
| trash can. For similar reasons, I can buy a part for my
| Corolla much cheaper than I can for a Model T.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mcdonje wrote:
| I see you're moving on to a different argument now. Before
| it was about R&D, but now that it's been established that
| we're talking about trash cans for a plane that's been
| built since the 1950s, the argument is now about economies
| of scale. For trash cans that each cost roughly the median
| income of a US full-time worker.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > a plane that's been built since the 1950s, the argument
| is now about economies of scale
|
| There _used_ to be economies of scale. It 's a 707; they
| stopped being made in 1979. If you want 707 parts now,
| there's a good chance they're gonna be produced on a very
| small scale custom job for you.
|
| (It's also a _very special_ 707, inside and out. Cabin
| designs can vary significantly from airline to airline,
| let alone civilian to military.)
| mcdonje wrote:
| Yes, that's essentially their argument about economies of
| scale.
| culi wrote:
| Ok, well just a few more paragraphs down is:
|
| > The investigation also revealed that Raytheon
| Technologies had raised the price of Stinger missiles from
| $25,000 to more than $400,000 per unit. "Even accounting
| for inflation and some improvements, that's a seven-fold
| increase," Shay Assad, a former Pentagon acquisitions
| official, told 60 Minutes.
|
| The US ramped UP how many stinger missiles it bought so how
| could your explanation lead to an increase in price?
| Especially one so dramatic?
| jtrip wrote:
| Development costs of what? The trashcan? What could
| possibly have cost them 50,000xplane frames to develop it
| in the first place?
|
| The reading of the article implies the contract set prices
| for commercial items and Boeing simply started charging the
| army whatever as soon as it technically wasn't
| 'commercial'.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Which is exactly how it works. And one of the main
| reasons why airplanes get more expensive to operate with
| age. Because it is not just trash cans, but also engine
| parts, electronics, structural parts...
| oefrha wrote:
| Hey, you must retain the rare talent capable of
| developing military-grade trash cans at all costs.
| arp242 wrote:
| Some price increase after that would be completely fair and
| reasonable, because it _is_ harder and more expensive to
| produce. But 165x? Colour me skeptical on that. At $50k you
| can hire a craftsman to custom fit something (at a $500k
| income a year they 'd have about a month for it).
|
| There's also some foresight involved here. I used to work
| for a company that delivered computers for industrial
| applications such as ASML and FEI (lithography machines and
| electron microscopes). They had _very_ precise
| requirements: "we want Intel Xeon 5119 Rev 3 CPUs for the
| next 4 years, not Rev 2, not Rev 4, the revision shall be 3
| and 3 shall be the number of the revision. Revision 5 is
| right out". The same applied with mainboards, memory, etc.
| There was also an entire testing procedure involved for
| many of these things and not all components passed.
|
| So, we charged them more for this then $random_person
| buying a component, obviously, but we also talked to them
| beforehand and knew roughly how many units they expected to
| sell, overbought components in bulk beforehand before they
| were EOL, and sold the rest afterwards fairly cheaply
| (because by then they were pretty old components). The
| volumes for these kind of machines is low (on the order of
| dozens or hundreds a year) so this was all practical. We
| made a fair but far from exuberant profit from this.
|
| I see no reason why this couldn't have happened here: "oh,
| your trash cans are going EOL; we expect to need 40 of them
| in the next 30 years, please produce them before you EOL
| them".
|
| I don't know which party failed on this part, but someone
| did. Possibly both. Even ordering two new-price trash cans
| leaves you with 250 of them at the old price. Storage isn't
| free either so let's assume 150 of them.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > I see no reason why this couldn't have happened here:
| "oh, your trash cans are going EOL; we expect to need 40
| of them in the next 30 years, please produce them before
| you EOL them".
|
| Congress. The big stink would go from "we bought four
| $52k trash cans" to "we bought hundreds of trash cans we
| won't need for a decade, if ever!"
|
| Examples:
|
| Rand Paul complaining about things like $8M in unused
| solar panels: https://www.paul.senate.gov/news-sen-rand-
| paul-highlights-18...
|
| Bobby Jindal saying "Instead of monitoring volcanoes,
| what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of
| spending in Washington, D.C.":
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/bobby-
| jindal-...
| vanchor3 wrote:
| > Congress. The big stink would go from "we bought four
| $52k trash cans" to "we bought hundreds of trash cans we
| won't need for a decade, if ever!"
|
| Unfortunately, both of those things frequently happen
| simultaneously.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Hyperbole. Orders of magnitude different.
|
| 4 extra =/= hundreds extra
|
| ---
|
| And why did the government spend $8M(!!) in unused solar
| panels? I could have gotten _26,000+_ trash cans at $300
| each!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The article says they needed another 11 the next year.
| Buying a couple hundred seems sensible if (as I suspect
| it is) most of the cost is at the project level rather
| than the unit level.
|
| > And why did the government spend $8M(!!) in unused
| solar panels?
|
| Spares? A lower than expected defect rate? Who knows?
| Paul doesn't provide useful specifics, just the
| politically sexy top-level numbers.
|
| In an organization with a multi-trillion dollar annual
| budget, $8M in unused solar panels is a bit like you
| throwing away a ream of paper that got some water damage.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Presumably that would be for the Dept of VA to clarify.
|
| > In an organization with a multi-trillion dollar annual
| budget, $8M in unused solar panels is a bit like you
| throwing away a ream of paper that got some water damage.
|
| And yet a fraction of that amount is front page HN.
|
| Clearly a lot of other people believe differently.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > And yet a fraction of that amount is front page HN.
| Clearly a lot of other people believe differently.
|
| A lot of people believe incorrect things about stuff they
| don't understand, yes. HN most certainly isn't immune.
|
| Outrage bait is hardly a new phenomenon. The unit cost
| looks insane because it's a side effect of the fact that
| a defense contractor won't get out of bed without a
| minimum of a couple hundred grand in the contract to
| cover the _program_.
| crote wrote:
| You don't know in advance that you need 4 extra. Maybe
| the planes get replaced quickly and you're left with a
| hundred trash cans, maybe they keep using them for a
| century and you need a thousand more.
| lobochrome wrote:
| Agreed. Alas, there is an aspect of over regulation. Does the
| trash can need to be certified to an extreme level of depth or
| can some solider in the machine shop quickly throw something
| together?
|
| I think in many societies we've lost the wiggle room that
| allows for pragmatic solutions in the name of safety.
|
| Maybe the risk reduction was worth it? Maybe not. But arguments
| for risk averse behavior tend to win more than 50% of the time
| in democratic societies which accumulates a kind of "risk-
| avoidance-debt".
| cushychicken wrote:
| As a timely counterexample: someone is dropping five wreaths
| off a boat in the North Atlantic today because of an under
| regulated experimental transportation craft that failed
| catastrophically.
|
| I'd much rather fly on a plane that's regulated and certified
| out the nose than one that's not.
|
| I'd rather live in a country that invests in people's skills
| and knowledge than one th t doesn't.
| Asdrubalini wrote:
| This is a trash can, not an aircraft's engine
| sofixa wrote:
| It's still on the plane. If nobody tested it at the
| pressure a plane is at, and it turns out it explodes and
| injures the crew, that's not great.
| Asdrubalini wrote:
| It's just a piece of metal, how can it explode?
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| If it is the wrong metal, or wrong enough alloy, merely
| by touching the things it is in contact with can cause a
| galvanic reaction. Several airplanes have crashed due to
| damage caused by galvanic corrosion. The FAA is
| frequently called a "tombstone agency" because they tend
| to only take action _after_ a bunch of people die.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_corrosion
|
| Mercury versus aluminum:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrdYueB9pY4
|
| In an earlier life, I shipped items requiring this
| particular hazmat label on packaging:
| https://www.safetyemporium.com/12332
| ilyt wrote:
| So borrow a vaccuum chamber, throw it there and certify
| new company doing trash cans. It won't cost 50k
| hef19898 wrote:
| No, including profit it costs peopably somewhere around
| 200k for a run of 5 trash cans.
| ilyt wrote:
| sure buddy, trashcan costing as much as building a custom
| car
| hef19898 wrote:
| In military aviation, including overhead amd profits?
| Yes.
|
| Fun fact, if parts are around 30k they can be treated as
| not worthy of repair. Instead, discard them and nuy a new
| one.
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| It has been tested. It has been sold and used
| commercially and by the government for $300 before. This
| is not an example of actual costs being $50k. It is an
| example of massive incentives on the seller's side to rip
| off the one who pays (the US pop), and no incentives on
| the buyer's side to care about it.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > They're paying for people to design, tool, and maintain that
| design. It's economic investment in people and skills, not
| necessarily just the finished product.
|
| Wrong - almost all of the profits go to the shareholders of
| those contractors. The people who are actually doing thew work
| do not get paid more.
|
| Shit like this is the tip of the iceberg. [1]
|
| [1] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/11/22/why-cant-the-
| do...
| [deleted]
| tgv wrote:
| I see a people riding their libertarian hobby horse of blaming
| the government for overspending, but only yesterday it turned
| out that a few devs managed to raise $50M for a glorified
| terminal emulator.
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| >It's a pretty interesting tradeoff. Should we pay outrageous
| amounts of money for stuff like this? It keeps people employed,
| which generates other positive economic effects, like buying
| houses and groceries.
|
| It's certainly true that much of the US military industrial
| complex is a publicly funded jobs program, and that tightening
| the purse strings would cause widespread economic distress. But
| that isn't better than a UBI - in fact, a modest UBI plus a
| market that needs a better trash can would probably lead to
| much better trash cans than a contract of this nature.
|
| But I think it doesn't really stop at being a jobs program - US
| military spending also seems like an important part of how the
| sausage is made at the congressional level. Arbitrary sums can
| be assigned to different districts, which makes it a convenient
| method to broker deals between high ranking politicians. I
| suspect that's the real reason it can't be reformed.
| athenot wrote:
| This is similar to hospitals sometimes billing $300 for a simple
| saline IV bag. Creative accounting where the cost of highly
| scrutinized items is reduced, so other items are inflated to
| essentially make up for the difference.
| culi wrote:
| I think this idea is disproven in the first couple paragraphs
| by simply comparing markup over previous payments:
|
| > Until 2010, Boeing charged an average of $300 for a trash
| container used in the E-3 Sentry, a surveillance and radar
| plane based on the 707 civilian airliner. When the 707 fell out
| of use in the United States, the trash can was no longer a
| "commercial" item, meaning that Boeing was not obligated to
| keep its price at previous levels, according to a weapons
| industry source who spoke to RS.
|
| > In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four of
| the trash cans, translating to roughly $51,606 per unit. In a
| 2021 contract, the company charged $36,640 each for 11 trash
| containers, resulting in a total cost of more than $400,000.
| The apparent overcharge cost taxpayers an extra $600,000
| between the two contracts.
|
| > In another case, Lockheed Martin hiked the price of an
| electrical conduit for the P-3 plane as much as 14 fold,
| costing the Pentagon an additional $133,000 between 2008 and
| 2015.
|
| > Jamaica Bearings -- a company that distributes parts
| manufactured by other firms -- sold the Department of Defense
| 13 radio filters that had once cost $350 each for nearly
| $49,000 per unit in 2022. The apparent markup cost taxpayers
| more than $600,000 in extra fees.
| Symmetry wrote:
| If you haven't worked in the government it can be hard to
| appreciate how many rules there are around procurement and how
| complex and sometimes crazy they are. At one project I worked on
| we used Red Hat enterprise Linux because the rules prohibited
| "freeware" and Red Hat was nice enough to charge us money for the
| CDs the operating system came on. It was going on a classified
| machine so taking advantage of the features that differentiated
| it from the free Fedora version was out of the question but rules
| are rules. But generally the rules that applied to me working at
| an FFRDC were much less burdensome than some of those my friends
| who have worked at defense contractors have had to deal with.
|
| All of which is to say that while it's absurd for a trash can to
| have a price of $50,000, we can't be sure that this doesn't
| actually reflect changes in the actual cost structure of
| providing it. The rules are different for providing commercial
| off the shelf (COTS) goods versus specially procured goods. There
| are a lot of rules and regulations that would apply to the later
| but not the former. What if the old version was made in Mexico,
| for instance? Then you might have to go to a US company and get
| them to analyze the old version to figure out what composition
| the plastic is, create new molds to the exact specifications as
| the old shape, and have your new parts certified as identical to
| the old parts while being produced 100% in the US by US people.
|
| Which isn't to say that defense or other contractors can't be
| huge sleazeballs who try to gouge the government sometimes. And
| sometimes this is outright corruption like the time that one guy
| in the DoD who was leaving for a job at LabView soon said another
| group where I worked was going to have to redo our work in
| LabView and we should get in bed with a corporation too. But this
| was on a recorded meeting so we were able to get that decision
| reversed. But often the way it works is that defense contractors
| working on cost-plus contracts do their best to interpret
| regulations in such a way as to maximize their costs so that they
| maximize their profits.
|
| Preventing outright corruption like with the LabView guy is
| really important but the complicated rules we write to try to
| prevent that sometimes end up producing requirements documents
| that let a defense contractor claim with a straight face that the
| $47,000 they spent producing the trash was all legally mandated
| expenses and then they get to sell it to the government for
| $52,000 and pocket the standard 10% of the $5,000 difference.
|
| I don't have a good solution for how to fix this in defense
| specifically, but Alon Levy's work on why transit costs are ten
| times larger in the US than in Spain or Italy seems like a good
| starting point. Or I'm currently reading ReCoding America which
| promises to give some insight on government software porcurement.
| tptacek wrote:
| Didn't we just recently run a story here about how these prices
| aren't real, but are rather an accounting artifact of a whole
| package of services being billed out _pro rata_ across a bunch of
| line items? That 's also reminiscent of how hospital pricing
| works: the line-item billing you see is shocking, but bears
| little relationship to the actual accounts payable process the
| insurers deal with.
| wmeredith wrote:
| So that's a different problem than a $50k trashcan, but it's
| still a huge problem, and the headline is just as enraging. The
| military-industrial complex is evil.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't disagree that there's a problem, but thinking about
| $50,000 trash cans isn't getting us any closer to solving it,
| because we're not actually buying $50,000 trash cans. If my
| understanding is accurate.
| pphysch wrote:
| Whether or not that is true in this particular case, it is
| indefensible that the most consequential spending (PUBLIC funds
| for MILITARY & MEDICAL supplies) can't be properly itemized.
|
| As another top comment describes, they can afford 9 months to
| fix a minor bug in military software but they can't afford
| spending a little more time with proper itemization? I don't
| buy it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Define properly itemized.
|
| How do you allocate the e.g. design and testing and molding
| one-time costs when you have no idea if you'll ultimately
| manufacture 5 for a prototype or 5,000 if Congress places a
| big order?
| pphysch wrote:
| The government paid a lump sum for a bunch of stuff. They
| should be able to verify that the items received represent
| the lump sum. To do that, they need to itemize the
| purchases. 1 trash can costs $300, etc.
|
| There are many obvious reasons for this. For example,
| avoiding fraud and record-keeping (we need 4 more trash
| cans; how much did we pay last time?).
|
| If we paid $300/can last year, and now Boeing wants
| $52000/can, we should say "no" and demand Boeing bring down
| their price or else we will entertain other bidders, to
| which we can provide exact specifications and retired
| examples of the required product.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > To do that, they need to itemize the purchases.
|
| It'll be something like:
|
| Paperwork / contract negotiation: $50k
|
| Legal review of paperwork: $20k
|
| Project management: $50k
|
| Activating mothballed production line: $39,400
|
| Trash cans (4): $1200
|
| Mothballing production line: $39,400
| pphysch wrote:
| This does not make the picture better.
|
| Here are two models of production:
|
| 1. You mostly make the thing yourself and pay the R&D +
| production costs in-house (i.e. public sector). There is
| little to no profit-waste. You need the thing, and so you
| created the thing. In this case, you are aware of the
| personnel, R&D, production costs. AFAIK this was mostly
| the state of play during WW2, or at least a lot more
| common.
|
| 2. You notify the market that you want a thing, and pay a
| profit-seeking vendor for the finished thing. You need
| the thing, so you bought it. _The price breakdown beyond
| the product itself is opaque._ You should _not_ need to
| be aware of the personnel, R &D, production costs of
| BigContractor Inc. Does it _actually_ cost $40K to
| produce a trash can? Fine, then that+profit will be the
| lowest bid.
|
| You are describing a corrupted third model, where you
| essentially manage the entire production process, but
| also give extra money (profit) to a third-party. To say
| nothing of the massive waste of involving unnecessary
| middlemen.
|
| This third model may or may not be how the government
| actually procures stuff, but again, it does not improve
| the picture of enormous government waste here.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 1. You mostly make the thing yourself and pay the R&D +
| production costs in-house (i.e. public sector).
|
| I would love to see the US return to this in a variety of
| realms, but I doubt that's coming anytime soon. It would
| still involve paperwork, lawyers, production lines, etc.;
| making four very specialized trash cans every few years
| will _always_ be costly.
|
| > 2. You notify the market that you want a thing, and pay
| a profit-seeking vendor for the finished thing.
|
| They will need to charge you for all the same things, and
| they don't have a mothballed production line to start
| with, either.
| Symmetry wrote:
| The current cost-plus model actually worked pretty well
| for a time. When it was first introduced defense
| contractors hadn't figured out how to use the rules to
| their advantage and really it's pretty counter intuitive
| for a businessperson to try to maximize their costs.
|
| But the big historical problem with (2) is that if you
| give people discretion they can just choose to award the
| contract to their cousin Joe and end up paying $600 for a
| $300 trash can.
|
| What kept graft in check under the old system was fear of
| being found out and fear of being fired after
| embarrassing an elected official who might fear the
| voters getting angry.
|
| In the current system everybody is following the letter
| of the rules. Boeing has really managed to structure
| their costs so that they can charge $52k. They really did
| win the bid according to the rules. The bureaucrats who
| awarded the contract to Boeing followed the rules. And
| while elected officials might bitch and moan there's
| nothing they can do to disrupt the careers of officials
| who follow the rules - by very intentional design.
| tptacek wrote:
| Just a pedantic note here: if my understanding is correct,
| the dollars on these trash cans might have nothing to do
| with design and testing of the trash can, or anything
| whatsoever to do with the trash can; they might instead
| just be a pro rata category that a larger procurement gets
| spread into, and the meaningful number is that larger
| procurement number. Like, the trash can could be an
| abstract pro rata line item for, I don't know, a stealth
| bomber.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Absolutely. I was sticking to a simpler example of there
| being no right answer to how to itemize costs for just a
| single type of item -- and then when you add in fixed
| costs that are shared among multiple types of items
| there's even less of a right answer.
|
| If you have $100,000 of design costs for something made
| of three components, and each component is equally
| difficult to _design_ but they 're all designed together,
| and the manufacturing cost of each component is $500,000,
| $10,000, and $100... then how do you itemize the design
| costs?
| culi wrote:
| I mean it's obvious. Regulatory capture
|
| > About half of the Biden administration's $842 billion Pentagon
| budget request goes to contractors. In 2022, roughly 30 percent
| of military spending went to the "big five" weapons makers, which
| include Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and
| Northrop Grumman.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| The optimist in me was hoping it was one of those bomb-proof
| trash cans, like the kinds designed as a result of the 2004
| bombings in Madrid.
| esprehn wrote:
| San Francisco keeps the inefficient toilet spending crown with
| the $1.7m toilet:
|
| https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-mill...
| renewiltord wrote:
| Also has a $20k trash can as it so happens so we're competitive
| there too.
| InTheArena wrote:
| Part of the problem here is that the mechanism designed to
| protect tax-payers (the incredibly complex framework around
| government procurement) shield players from competition (Aka, the
| same effect as healthcare market in the USA.
|
| This is why modern USA subs use Xbox controllers for joysticks.
| You can walk out and expense them. The same, if subject to the
| program, would be a $1k unit cost based on the twin reasoning of
| adherence cost, and more importantly contractors charging what
| the market is willing to pay (when the market is incredibly
| inefficient).
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Subs use Xbox controllers to control the periscope because they
| found that the controllers were far more intuitive to learn and
| operate.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| And that's not surprising, considering the operators had been
| using them since they were children.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I'm starting to suspect that Microsoft may have had a hand in
| sinking that Titanic sub as a promotional move, because people
| have been dragging the damn xbox controller into every possible
| discussion since.
| zweifuss wrote:
| The Logitech F710 wireless gamepad used in the Titan was
| similar to a PlayStation 4 controller and not at all similar
| to a MS-Xbox-Wireless-Controller. I don't think it was the
| point of failure.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I had the pleasure of being involved in a software project where
| the contractor was one of the usual suspects (Raytheon, Lockheed,
| etc.).
|
| Prior to this, I had no idea why defense projects were so
| expensive and slow. You have to understand, there are so many
| levels of negotiation, over the smallest changes imaginable.
| There's no such thing as "open source code" in these projects,
| everything is either modified off-the-shelf, or completely
| boutique stuff, and of course implemented in such a way that the
| clients (that would be us) can't just access the code themselves,
| or that clients can just build upon or make wrappers.
|
| The contractor will send you their own techs or engineers - even
| if it's across the world - to fix the most trivial bugs. And it
| will take months or planning, budgeting, and what not.
|
| In once instance, one contractor tech spotted a bug in the code,
| which some user had reported about - it was a one character fix,
| just a typo, really. So he fixed it on the spot, along with the
| rest of the stuff he came for.
|
| A couple of weeks later he comes back, and reverses the bug. He
| had told his manager about the bug fix, and was berated for
| fixing in. In order to fix that bug, it had to be reported
| correctly, go through software update meetings, go through
| budgets, and the whole nine yards.
|
| The bug was reported the correct way, and many months later he
| came back to fix it (again).
|
| The whole process of specs and updates was like pulling teeth.
| david422 wrote:
| So I worked for a company that had loads of process for even
| the smallest changes. It was frustrating, but what I came to
| realize was that the company was not interested in fixing bugs
| or building features - they were primarily interested in not
| breaking things/keeping the status quo. This was an established
| business that was concerned with keeping the business running,
| not chasing the latest and greatest. Perhaps a lot of it was
| just CYA, but also means it was pretty hard to "move fast and
| break things".
| DropInIn wrote:
| That sort of business sounds like what we want in milsec and
| government suppliers, no?
|
| Reliable even down to the bug behaviors...
| ben_w wrote:
| I imagine it depends on the specifics. Closest I got[0] to
| the defence industry was all the anecdotes my dad had about
| Plessey and GEC Marconi.
|
| I'm sure it's important to have a stable technology to
| train on in the military; at the same time, I remember one
| of their open-days they were showing off a civilian in-
| flight entertainment system that was so clearly overpriced
| for what it was that I knew even as I saw it that I
| could've done better for lower unit-cost. This isn't to
| show off, even despite my having not yet finished secondary
| school at the time -- my solution would've been little more
| than "glue laptop to chair/wall in front", as tablets
| weren't something people discussed much around me in the
| 90s -- it's just that the business solution was really
| unimpressive.
|
| I assume there's secret military equivalents to that public
| project.
|
| [0] if you exclude the job interview at Lockheed Martin for
| the year in industry paid work experience part of my
| degree, which didn't go further than an interview
| deelly wrote:
| Not only. Also some software for financial sector, for
| suppliers, for maintenance too. Basically, anything that do
| not crash a system could be a feature. And sometime even
| have logical and good reason to exists.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| The reliable bug behavior is an underappreciated point and
| can be hard to understand. I work on software that gets
| deployed on-prem by customers and had very powerful
| capabilities for deploying your own code to it etc. There
| have been a few discussions about some bug fixes and in
| particular security fixes being appropriate in a patch
| release when following SemVer. Something might be
| unintentional or insecure, but customers might be building
| on the broken behavior and now deploying a patch breaks
| their apps. The line can become quite blurry.
| fivre wrote:
| I have had this concern raised, and I'm unclear how, if
| you adhere to that model of compatibility, that you don't
| effectively dispense with semver altogether and make
| every release a major version bump, as every change is
| breaking if you relied on broken or insecure behavior in
| earlier versions.
|
| IMO it makes more sense to communicate the expected
| impact of the changes, so that downstream can read a
| patch bump as unlikely to cause issues.
| pc86 wrote:
| This sounds like more a deployment/release process
| problem than anything else. If the customers are
| essentially deploying untested code straight to
| production, they're doing something wrong. It might not
| be their fault, maybe they don't know they should have a
| staging environment first, or maybe your pricing model
| makes it prohibitively expensive. It's not as simple as
| "your customers are doing it wrong," but if you upgrading
| a package breaks their production environment, someone
| somewhere is - or more likely, many people are -
| definitely doing something wrong.
| danbruc wrote:
| It is not necessarily about breaking the production
| system, just breaking the system because it depends on
| some bug or contains workarounds that break if the bug is
| gone. Even if it breaks before production it is still
| broken and might - depending on how old or central the
| bug was and how much code was build on top or around it -
| require substantial effort to fix.
| pc86 wrote:
| 100% agree it just sounded like in this instance the
| first time they'd hear about it breaking a customer's
| workflow[0] would be in that customer's production
| environment. I've been on both ends of solutions where
| customers are either technically or financially incapable
| of having robust test environments for even critical
| software, especially if they're relying on someone else
| to write it.
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/1172/
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Yes this happens all the time, I've seen it everywhere
| I've every been an engineer. Bug fix roll back due to
| causing an outage because it broke the defacto API being
| depended on.
| nmca wrote:
| I too worked for Google once.
| rurp wrote:
| That kind of slow and steady approach actually sounds pretty
| reasonable for some cases. Sure it won't win the market for a
| trendy new consumer app, but a lot of software is basically
| feature complete and should prioritize stability over
| whatever's currently cool and exciting.
|
| I have an old account with a bank that has hardly changed its
| website design in well over a decade. It's great! The
| information is clearly laid out in tables and everything
| loads super fast. Every other financial web app I'm familiar
| with has a much more "modern" design and is categorically
| worse to use. One site literally takes over a dozen clicks to
| get to basic information and evey single page load is
| slooooow.
| pradn wrote:
| Bank webpages don't need to be more than HTML tables, with
| perhaps a bit of JS thrown in to ease element collapsing,
| etc.
| [deleted]
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| It's a broken system for sure...
|
| HOWEVER when your acquisition system is designed to ensure that
| a nuclear detonator and a LAMP application go through the same
| process, these kinds of "overkill" or "nonsense" requirement
| responses happen.
|
| We're long overdue for fixing the FAR and federal acquisition
| process, which is the root problem. The legal system and
| processes built over the last 50 years, and as a result the
| people inside it, doesn't allow for simple and efficient
| differentiation between projects legally so you end up with the
| same hammer meets mail approach.
| numpad0 wrote:
| But you'd be just as upset as his employer if you'd come across
| a binary release built from one commit ahead the GitHub repo.
| The absurdity is in the amount of overhead, not the fact that
| there are overheads at all.
| asylteltine wrote:
| [dead]
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > A couple of weeks later he comes back, and reverses the bug.
| He had told his manager about the bug fix, and was berated for
| fixing in. In order to fix that bug, it had to be reported
| correctly, go through software update meetings, go through
| budgets, and the whole nine yards.
|
| What do you mean you went and just fixed it!?
|
| We need all of middle management to charge for the fix!
| jliptzin wrote:
| I have encountered a situation a few times where a bug that
| went unnoticed for a while was actually keeping another, more
| serious bug from surfacing. So when the first bug was fixed, it
| caused more serious problems elsewhere in the system. I could
| see where they're coming from where any kind of "fix" needs to
| trigger a careful reevaluation of the whole system. That being
| said, I don't see a need for the Kafkaesque months of planning
| and budgeting that follow.
| syntheticcorp wrote:
| I've also encountered that a few times where a fairly anodyne
| bug in a codepath prevents a serious security bug from being
| reachable. With my attacker hat on it is very tempting to
| just report the first one...
| sneak wrote:
| > _That being said, I don 't see a need for the Kafkaesque
| months of planning and budgeting that follow._
|
| It's a method for transferring billions of dollars from
| public tax revenues to private companies which are cozy with
| the state. It has nothing to do with safety or reliability.
|
| All other methods of stealing tax money are illegal.
| jliptzin wrote:
| Would be nice if we spent some time cracking down on that
| kind of tax theft rather than wasting time on drag shows
| and the 3 dozen teens in the whole country on puberty
| blockers
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| you got it mon ami. that's the whole point of making a
| kerfuffle about drag shows. or gay marriage. or even
| abortion.
|
| ain't no one talking about tax cuts, or getting after the
| rich, cuz of that.
| Solvency wrote:
| Ok but...why. Why is it like this.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| [dead]
| renewiltord wrote:
| Remember: Regulations are written in blood.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I worked on a radar system that could see precipitation- think
| doppler radar map view. The ability to do this was in the
| contract but there was no way to view it. We had Matlab scripts
| so we the devs could view it and the weather people wanted
| them. We weren't allowed to hand them over without a contract.
| They'd pop in multiple times a day to view our doppler.
|
| The adversarial nature that defense companies treat our
| military is appalling. I'm convinced that refactoring a lot of
| this BS could get us way more with less $
| JamesBarney wrote:
| A lot of this adversarial nature comes down to how projects
| are awarded. Government employees have very little discretion
| to choose projects, so they always go with the cheapest bid.
| But no large software project ever has had 0 change orders.
|
| So the only profitable way to win these contracts is offer
| the cheapest bid by delivering as little as possible while
| being in spec, and then pillaging on the change orders.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| What about the "new defense" companies, who use VC money to
| build demos? Surely they eventually want to build moats and
| sell razor blades, but for now what they're doing seems
| different?
| mortify wrote:
| If the viewing software was provided, the support would be
| included and that will cost money in the long term. That is
| something that the company didn't agree to provide nor the
| government to pay for. In this case, the adversary wasn't the
| contractor, it was the users in the government and the
| government employees holding the purse strings. No contractor
| will turn down the chance to extend the contract.
| bentxt wrote:
| Do you have an opinion whether this kafkaesk bureaucratism is
| especially well established in the domain of software or is it
| a broader pattern? Where does this come from?
| jasmer wrote:
| [dead]
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| My experience has been that you can use open source software,
| but security considers that to have a high risk and you need to
| make a business case for it.
|
| What isn't a security risk? A closed source vendor supplied
| application that has its headquarters in the US.
|
| You can sometimes find pockets of innovation in the defense
| sector, but it's mostly filled with bureaucrats with engineer
| in their title.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| To be fair, securing the OSS supply chain is a tough task,
| especially when pulling in new versions.
| xxpor wrote:
| And yet, things like the Patriot missile system get built.
| It's pretty wild what an 800 billion dollar budget will paper
| over.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Modern defense contracting has become, first and foremost, a
| process to transfer government funds to private hands. The fact
| that any useful products or services happen is purely
| incidental.
| oneTbrain23 wrote:
| People kept talking corruptions in Russian military. Remember
| they have only about 60B usd a year and able to hold off entire
| NATO offensive in Ukraine while USA got defeated by Talebans on
| near 10T usd budget. Who has more corruptions problem? Seriously
| why I get taxed by IRS while they get to spent corruptly and
| still keep telling me how bad Russians misused their 60B and had
| to fight with some kind of shovels? Look at those Generals and
| contractors living. A lot of them earning way more than those in
| senior position of sillicon tech. So many of American weapons
| fall flat in ME and Ukraine. If you guys know people working in
| military maintenance, the amount of fixing are just mind boggling
| for such expensive weaponry and yet still fail in real war.
| immibis wrote:
| What NATO offensive in Ukraine? There is no NATO offensive in
| Ukraine. It kept getting shot down by vatniks claiming it would
| start World War 3.
| [deleted]
| pcurve wrote:
| Air force has been asking the congress to retire these 50+ year
| old planes, and replace them with more modern ones that Boeing
| has already been selling to other countries at $400 million each.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_AEW%26C
|
| Cricket cricket.
| cwillu wrote:
| Link returns "403 Forbidden" for me.
| einpoklum wrote:
| The problem is not the Pentagon's $52,000 trash can, but the US'
| $858,000,000,000 trash heap which is the defense budget:
|
| other than massive corruption and unaccountable-for assets - the
| actual delivery of this budget is military intervention,
| occupation and war-mongering all over the world. Not to mention
| the danger of nuclear holocaust.
|
| And - almost all members of the congress vote for these
| monstrosities. Here are the Senate results:
|
| https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/12/16/moral-and-polit...
|
| https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
|
| very few righteous people in Soddom, and even those - who knows
| how they would vote if their Nay actually had a chance to block
| the bill.
| lesuorac wrote:
| US Military is one of the largest (the largest?) Jobs Creator
| in the US.
|
| Cities can literally be made or break by the Military (and
| other Gov functions) moving there or leaving.
|
| A vote against the military is a vote for more unemployment in
| your district.
| thallium205 wrote:
| Ah yes the ole Broken Window Fallacy rears its ugly head once
| again.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Broken windows are indeed great business for window
| repairmen.
|
| If your district has a bunch of window factories; it's
| probably in your best interest to keep crime high.
| mcdonje wrote:
| Or the government can pay people to build better
| infrastructure instead.
| lesuorac wrote:
| A vote of Nay on the military budget is not directly a vote
| of Aye on infrastructure spending.
|
| Also jobs are not really transferable. So all the military
| people need to be less mad at you than the infrastructure
| people are now happy with you; otherwise you lose at re-
| election.
|
| Like you need to figure out what the transition is from
| using military as an employment welfare to construction as
| an employment welfare and why the US will stick to that
| transition at each phase. That's a lot of work; much easier
| as a politician to not rock that boat.
| culi wrote:
| Yes but you can never sell this to the right. You have to
| package it up into something like "fight the war" or "build
| a wall" (another useless project that's only meant as a job
| creation program to boost support in areas where the
| president needs it). Conservatives and liberals alike agree
| on job creation programs
| einpoklum wrote:
| > _Yes but you can never sell this to the right._
|
| Just don't delude yourself that "the right" is the
| Republican parties. Both large political parties in the
| US are staunchly right-wing parties by most criteria.
|
| > Conservatives and liberals alike agree on job creation
| programs
|
| No, they do not. I mean, they agree on funding large
| corporations and the military as though that's a job
| creation program.
| activiation wrote:
| War is better of course /s
| einpoklum wrote:
| Your approach worked rather well for the Germans getting over
| the economic crisis in the 1930s. The events of the early
| 1940s, however, gave them cause to reconsider this course of
| action.
| [deleted]
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Where's Harry Truman when we need him?
|
| https://www.npr.org/2023/05/11/1175403633/truman-committee-b...
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I was studying to do military software at university, and the
| amount of deliberate inefficiency is insane. I worked on reducing
| software bugs and increasing quality, but the more bugs delivered
| the more money is made so such improvements were actively
| resisted. Plus pay at Raytheon and Lockheed was really really bad
| so I went to Silicon Valley instead.
|
| I actually do sell software to the military now so I do know what
| it's like. Part of it is the customers fault, they make it so
| expensive to do business with them that you lose money in
| overhead if you're not ripping them off somewhere else. I wish I
| could put a line item that shows them just how expensive their
| stupid paperwork is. But part of the reason the customer is like
| that is because they're routinely getting ripped off. Maybe if
| people in the military were smarter they could figure things out
| but in my experience it seems that McNamara's Project 100K never
| ended and the military serves as an alternate welfare program for
| people who would be unable to get a job anywhere else. I'm not
| even sure I'm mad about it, the US still loves war too much
| despite how ruinously expensive it is. I worry if it was cheaper
| the US would do even more of it. Unfortunately it's becoming
| cheaper anyway with all this drone warfare so we still have that
| dystopia to look forward to.
| wisty wrote:
| How do people feel about the submarine disaster?
|
| I think they sailed too close to the wind, but there's always
| going to be an element of risk in some things. Saving thousands
| of dollars by using a PlayStation controller might be smart, and
| even make the sub safer (if you put savings towards a hull that
| won't implode). Some people might say that you should never cut a
| corner if lives are on the line, and if that's the case they
| can't complain about a $52,000 trash can, or that 5 major
| contractors are now the only ones able to compete for contracts.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Something tells me they've changed their trash can build pipeline
| to microservices.
| mcdonje wrote:
| "Trash cans" is a simplification, IMHO. They're containerized
| garbage collection utilities orchestrated by a cloud-native
| Dumpster Swarm service.
| markwalllberg wrote:
| its legal
| notatoad wrote:
| i'm not convinced boeing is price-gouging here. how many
| customers are there for this trash can? in 2020 the pentagon
| bought four of them. if nobody else bought any, and boeing had to
| set up a production line just to make four of them, there's a
| real possibility that process actually costs something on the
| order of $200k once you factor in the time of all the people who
| had to be part of that decision-making process, testing it meets
| specs, procurement of materials to meet the spec of a ten-year-
| old production, etc.
|
| the air force has machinists and qualified people who can repair
| their old planes, so presumably if this was just something you
| could bang together out of sheet metal they would have.
| a2tech wrote:
| Have you ever tried to actually work with the government? Even
| with internal champions the paperwork is staggering. Even with
| all the laws that are supposed to encourage smaller companies to
| work with the government, the paperwork and systems you have to
| navigate to land, let alone, complete a contract is insane. It's
| driving the smaller, more focused contractors right out of
| business/government contracts. When those small, honest, firms
| close all that is left are the huge firms. And those companies
| are quite adept at wringing every dollar out of the government
| and establishing contracts that pay over years and years.
|
| It's so frustrating.
| mhoad wrote:
| Would you believe that this topic is actually more complicated
| and nuanced than it seems based on this clickbait headline?
|
| If anyone wants to see a proper non bullshit breakdown
| explanation of this topic from professionals I would highly
| recommend this video:
|
| How Procurement Destroys Armies - Requirements, Risks &
| Development gone wrong https://youtu.be/bBQVR4epfBQ
| boredumb wrote:
| If only everyone paid their fair share!
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| [flagged]
| medo-bear wrote:
| the US government never dropped an atomic bomb on civilians
| westmeal wrote:
| Depends which civilians you're talking about.
| FpUser wrote:
| Some of us are more civilian then the others
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Allende never existed
| juujian wrote:
| Neither have I, but what does that have to do with anything?
| mc32 wrote:
| Also curiously members of the intelligence community never
| wrote letters to the editor suggesting one candidate was a
| compromised asset of a foreign government but not quite
| outright lying about it...
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Aren't these kind of odd prices usually just laundering money for
| black projects?
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| If by black projects you mean "Cayman bank accounts controlled
| by a shell company owned by a few Magnates and Government
| higher-ups", yes, sure they are.
| audessuscest wrote:
| black pocket ;)
| mc32 wrote:
| They would have to be making quite a bit of these to be able to
| get necessary funds. Mostly it's just custom parts and the mfg
| is adding large margins but again on very low numbers of
| widgets.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Sometimes, but not always. People tend to underestimate how
| much costs are coming from certification, testing and
| corresponding warranties.
|
| The F-117 so did canabalize quite some "spares" bought for the
| F-16 and F-15 fleets.
| junon wrote:
| A trash can needs to be tested and certified for use in the
| Pentagon?
|
| ... holding a small collection of waste is that intense eh?
| breischl wrote:
| They go into airplanes, not the Pentagon, which is right at
| the beginning of TFA.
|
| So they are probably weirdly shaped.
| hef19898 wrote:
| If it goes on a plane, not as cargo but as part of the
| equipment: yes. Inflameable, certification paper work,
| corresponding risk for the supplier, obligations to provide
| said waste bin for, sometimes, 50 years after last serial
| delivery... That stuff adds up very quickly. Throw in low
| quantities, and the high NRC ammortized per unit, and that
| explains a bunch of said prices.
|
| Plus obligatory surcharge for being aerospace, plus
| obligatory surcharge for being military.
| sesuximo wrote:
| This doesn't add up to 50k. Maybe 300. Probably not even
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > This doesn't add up to 50k.
|
| It's a procurement project to purchase _four_ very
| specific aviation trash cans for an aircraft that 's no
| longer made.
|
| The cans themselves aren't the cost. The project manager,
| the paperwork expert who does the thousands of pages of
| documents, etc. all cost before they even think about
| setting up a production line (for an hour's run!) to
| actually make the things. They're also factoring in the
| cost of keeping the 707 trash can making machinery
| sitting around for the next time they need a few more of
| them.
|
| Four trash cans cost $52k. Forty probably would've cost
| $53k. The military should probably buy four _hundred_ so
| they never have to buy another one for the remaining few
| years the E3 exists, but then Congress calls that
| wasteful spending too.
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| Then they'd be spending thousands every year to store
| them at a secure facility :P
| hef19898 wrote:
| Last time I calculated storage costs, it was around 50
| cents per day per cbm. Add in military security and so
| on, and your not far from it.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Well, you can take that from someone who does it for a
| living (not for Boeing or the Pentagon, bit still), or
| not. Your choice. Whether or not 50k is actually
| justified or not, no idea. But the price for a new, low
| volume, production of obsolete aircraft spares is orders
| of magnitude more expensive than the original high volume
| one. And even it if is old stock, as soon as the low
| contractual prices are running out, everyone is paying
| market prices. And those mean: either you pay, you don't
| fly or you certify an alternative.
| jtbayly wrote:
| There is only one buyer for these parts. "Paying the
| market price" means that Boeing charges whatever they
| want, and that's the market price, take it or leave it.
| hef19898 wrote:
| The upside of being a single source supplier.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Ah. So the system _is_ corrupt. Got it.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Being a single source supplier has nothing to do with
| corruprion. How do you read that into my comment?
| arethuza wrote:
| There was a major incident with nuclear weapons caused by
| pillows on a B52 catching fire:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_cr
| ash
| sesuximo wrote:
| The pillows were the fires fuel. The original cause was
| heater/cooler systems malfunctioning (at least based on
| the page you linked)
| arethuza wrote:
| I probably could have worded that better but my point was
| that if the pillows hadn't been inflammable then the
| bomber probably wouldn't have crashed?
| jtbayly wrote:
| "obligations to provide said waste bin for, sometimes, 50
| years after last serial delivery"
|
| This is obviously not a problem since you can charge
| literally whatever you want after the initial purchase.
| hef19898 wrote:
| It obviously is a serious problem. Because all money in
| the world doesn't miraculiously materialize the needed
| production facilities over night.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Do realize that you are a justifying these late-in-the-
| contractual obligation parts being expensive because they
| might have to provide the parts for a long time?
|
| If the fact that they will have to provide them for a
| long time is the reason for a high cost, then that is why
| they charged $300 per trash can back in the day. That
| cannot _also_ be the justification for $56k per trash can
| today. It 's a circular argument.
| hef19898 wrote:
| It as, since the initial spare part contract ran out, and
| thus the old price of 300 bucks no longer applied.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Filing government levels of paperwork, especially for the
| defense sector is incredibly expensive. All that is reflect
| into the price of equipment.
| bluGill wrote:
| It is for a specific airplane, not a generic trash can
| sitting by someone's desk. It has to be a specific size,
| shape, weight, fire resistance, and probably other factors
| I can't think of.
| ramses0 wrote:
| The traditional response is "over-specification" with a
| coffee pot on a commercial airliner needing to be certified
| against becoming a dangerous missile in the event of a
| plane crash (shatter, break, etc).
|
| Yes, it may be that the trash can or plastic had to be
| certified against breaking in a weird way since it's a
| military plane and you don't want plastic shrapnel in your
| soldiers (or whatever).
|
| It _could_ be that Boeing made 100 trash cans, threw away
| the mold, and had to re-make the mold in order to fulfill
| the order for 4 more trash cans.
|
| If not Boeing, potentially _their_ trash can supplier threw
| away the mold and you end up with the same price.
|
| So there MAY be a reasonable explanation, but it seems very
| egregious that the "before" and "after" prices are so
| dramatically different.
| hef19898 wrote:
| You should have a look at the prices for aircraft
| _spares_ , even re-used ones, and how much the same item
| costs when sourced for production. And that is without
| adding another 50% to the price in orser to get lead
| times down from 15 weeks to 15 days, from 15 days to 15
| hours.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > ... holding a small collection of waste is that intense
| eh?
|
| If it catches fire on the $330M plane it's made for,
| potentially.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_cras
| h involved a ~$80M (adjusting for inflation) lost B-52,
| another $80M in cleanup costs, and a _still missing_ 1.1
| megaton nuclear weapon, over a couple pillows that caught
| fire.
| Symmetry wrote:
| No. My understanding is that if its something the agency is
| buying from an external contractor that's too easy to get
| flagged in an audit and they use other sorts of expenses for
| shifting money to black projects. At least that's what I get
| form reading descriptions of the practice in books like _Blind
| Man 's Bluff_.
| andai wrote:
| Thought it was going to be about a decked out Mac Pro!
| [deleted]
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Ha, I'm not surprised. Boeing basically owns everything about the
| E-3, including the software. I guess technically the 4Pi is an
| IBM creation, but still, it's mostly a Boeing thing.
|
| Fun fact: An E-3 takes around 3 times as long to get off the
| ground as a typical modern airliner. It's a bit disconcerting the
| first time you experience it. The 707 is really, really old. And
| as I recall, it's somewhat normal for an E-3 to be loaded to over
| max takeoff weight during normal operation. But my experience is
| 25 years out of date, so maybe that's changed.
|
| Isn't the USAF just about the only organization still operating
| 707 in any capacity? KC-135 (sorta), E-3, what else? I think the
| KC-135 at least got re-engined, that probably helps a bunch.
| niffydroid wrote:
| If its going on an aircraft and it's no longer made or stocked,
| then yes there will be extra cost as it has to go through
| certification, testing, flammability, tooling and various other
| things. So while the top line price may be high for the bin, but
| a breakdown of costs would indicate where the money is going.
| Overcharging? perhaps and possible, but more info needed.
| bluedino wrote:
| You also have requirements that are very different than other
| industries. Make a part for Boeing? All the plans, production
| records, testing and certifications, need to be kept for _50
| years_
| hypeatei wrote:
| Umm, no. A 17,000% increase in price for a _TRASH CAN_ is not
| justified under any circumstance. That is straight up robbery
| that Boeing knows they can get away with.
| onos wrote:
| Blame Boeing or the government willing to pay it?
| hypeatei wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| Boeing shouldn't be exploiting the system and the
| government shouldn't be buying at those prices.
|
| But alas, here we are with an inflated military budget that
| has leeches and mismanagement at every corner. Just to make
| number go up in bank account...
| cannonpalms wrote:
| I believe that Boeing is doing what any rational economic
| actor would do in this situation. To the extent that
| there is a problem here, I see it as a regulatory
| problem.
| DanTheManPR wrote:
| I'm guessing that what's happening here is that Boeing could
| be making more money doing something other than building
| trash cans, and so is sending an absurdly exorbitant quote to
| their customer to communicate "stop buying this".
| dgrin91 wrote:
| All the certifications for all that were done well before. This
| price change only began in 2020. Boeing had been charging $300
| for the trash can for at least a decade prior. The current
| change is just exploiting the system.
|
| Moreover the 707, which is basically what these trash cans were
| made for, entered service in _1957_.
|
| Sometimes a spade is just a spade, greed is just greed and you
| don't need to bend over backwards to find an excuse for
| bigcorp.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Short answer: obsolescence. The article hints at that, prices
| increased once the 707 was no longer considered a commercial
| product. I guess here, but the initial contract stipulated
| prize stability for a certain period after the last 707
| delivery and them something about retirement of the 707
| fleet.
|
| Getting small quatities for obsolete aircraft parts, even in
| the civilian world, costs fortunes.
|
| And yes, if it was (speculation) a new production run, all
| the manufacturing most likely needed re-certification: new
| production site, new production tech and so on. Maybe even
| certification to whatever standard was used for the original
| 707 / E-3, which might even be impossible (surface treatment
| that is now illegal due to EHS reasons, material norms being
| obsolete requiring new certification of the part using e.g.
| plastics with another norm...).
|
| Plus the obligatory surcharge for the endless pockets of the
| litteral Pentagon.
| asynchronous wrote:
| Love that it's always the three names I think of when I read
| these articles too.
| i-use-nixos-btw wrote:
| That's all well and good, but as soon as the mass
| manufacturing of the item halts, it's no time at all before
| the assembly machinery is dismantled, the people reskilled,
| software updated, supply chains cut, etc.
|
| So when they're approached to make some more, what are they
| going to do? The easy answer is turn down the request, and I
| wouldn't be surprised if they did. Then they'd have said
| something like "the person who made these retired three years
| ago, the machinery is now scrap metal, the software for that
| machinery is on a floppy disk in a recycling centre
| somewhere, I don't even know how who sold us the materials,
| and whatever we can do to replicate it would be considered a
| new product that has to go through testing again. So if you
| want this it'd take a lot of resources, and cost hundreds of
| thousands of dollars."
|
| To which the response would have been: "get it done."
|
| I'm sure there was some added on to sweeten the deal, mind,
| but that isn't the outrageous thing, nor would it be as
| dramatic as it sounds. The outrageous thing is that Boeing
| would have specifically outlined the end of production of
| components years in advance, and that would have been
| opportunity to buy and stockpile while the price was
| reasonable. Of course, some middle manager would have said
| "lol no it's just a bin, we will just get one from Walmart",
| and the complications would have only been realised when it
| was too late.
| jimmychoozyx wrote:
| must be some kind of advanced stealth trash can
| nyjah wrote:
| In the early days of automated billing at the defense department
| there were a couple of ladies that figured out they could way
| over bill for small things like nuts and bolts. There's an
| American Greed episode about it. They eventually got caught
| because they accidentally sent the same invoice twice and that
| flagged the system and triggered an investigation. Episode is
| from 2010
|
| https://imdb.com/title/tt2378874/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov_pl
| aurizon wrote:
| Same as Russian corruption, albeit on a smaller scale. Why do
| they do it? Because they can escape retribution. Recourse -
| possibly, after they fight and defeat warrior lobbyists(in mortal
| combat BTW, as they see an existential threat to their golf club
| membership at mar-a-largo)
| gary_0 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230621222550/https://responsib...
| kvnnews wrote:
| Can only imagine what complex parts of the aircraft cost. If an
| empty metal/plastic box is 50k, what does it cost to replace a
| hydraulic pump or an electronic board in the avionics?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Aviation parts are always expensive, but if you're flying a
| plane designed in 1950s and now only used by a handful of
| militaries, it's gonna be more.
|
| Boeing is mass producing parts for 737s. They are no longer
| doing so for 707s.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| While defense spending is the most egregious, governmental
| budgets are inflated across the board in the US. For instance,
| the US spends far more per capita on infrastructure and education
| than other industrialized countries, for at best comparable (and
| often worse) results.
|
| I wonder how much of this is due to the US's unique ability to
| essentially endlessly deficit spend. If the supply of
| governmental funding is effectively infinite, there is absolutely
| nothing controlling costs.
| Symmetry wrote:
| A few reasons. The US was very corrupt back before the
| Progressive Era and to clean that up in a hurry we got a bunch
| of very prescriptive rules around procurement that prevent the
| use of common sense and make bidding for government contracts a
| hard to master skill that reduces competition.
|
| We have a federal structure and use a common law framework so
| the interaction of law, precedent, and agency rules create a
| confusing thicket of regulation that's hard to deal with.
|
| Finally, outsourcing of planning to consultants means frequent
| shifts in direction and makes it harder to exercise control
| over costs.
| afterburner wrote:
| > US's unique ability to essentially endlessly deficit spend
|
| This is not unique to the US, nor even unique to countries.
| Almost all countries deficit spend endlessly, which is fine as
| long as it's offset by economic growth. And that deficit
| spending can speed up that economic growth.
|
| The US's uniqueness is being massively wealthy, so its deficits
| are bigger.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| The US has the fourth highest debt:GDP ratio amongst OECD
| countries; only Japan, Greece, and Italy are higher, whose
| high debts are mainly due to severe economic problems, and
| are not offset by growth.
|
| The US is unique in that (thus far) its massive deficit
| spending has been offset by growth, although it remains to be
| seen how long that's sustainable.
| afterburner wrote:
| > The US is unique in that (thus far) its massive deficit
| spending has been offset by growth
|
| That's not unique either. The UK had massive debts in its
| history but outgrew them. Or were you not considering
| history?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Debt to GDP is a useless metric. The US has a uniquely low
| interest on its debt. Interest payments as a fraction of
| GDP are less than 2%, in the middle of the post-War range
| of 1.1 to 3.2% of GDP.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Where are you getting 2% ? I'm seeing much higher:
|
| https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/interest-
| payments-...
| jeffbee wrote:
| That's as a fraction of revenue which is distorted due to
| our fragmented federal system and relatively low national
| tax rates. Interest as a fraction of GDP is
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S
|
| If you had gone to the primary source of the data in your
| link you would have seen the prominent limitation, to
| wit: "Because budgetary accounts may not include all
| central government units (such as social security funds),
| they usually provide an incomplete picture. In federal
| states the central government accounts provide an
| incomplete view of total public finance."
| scotty79 wrote:
| Is it that much worse than $999 monitor stand?
| aerodog wrote:
| https://youtu.be/QdmH47VNiS4?t=61
| smitty1110 wrote:
| That's chump change, I once saw a $22 million hard drive. I held
| it in my hands, and even plugged it in to grab data off it. And
| it wasn't even FOUO, it was fully unclassified.
| kylecazar wrote:
| There was an interesting article going around explaining
| accounting artifacts in the DoD from the late '90s. See 'the myth
| of the $600 hammer':
|
| https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...
| culi wrote:
| I don't understand why the article is titled "the myth [...]".
| It's exactly what it sounds like. The US "spent" (imo: handed
| out) $600 per hammer. It doesn't matter if it was one hammer or
| the average price of many hammers.
|
| This is a repeating pattern. See also the $10k toilet seat:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-...
|
| Even from this article we see a pattern:
|
| > In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four of
| the trash cans, translating to roughly $51,606 per unit. In a
| 2021 contract, the company charged $36,640 each for 11 trash
| containers, resulting in a total cost of more than $400,000.
| The apparent overcharge cost taxpayers an extra $600,000
| between the two contracts.
|
| > In another case, Lockheed Martin hiked the price of an
| electrical conduit for the P-3 plane as much as 14 fold,
| costing the Pentagon an additional $133,000 between 2008 and
| 2015.
|
| > Jamaica Bearings -- a company that distributes parts
| manufactured by other firms -- sold the Department of Defense
| 13 radio filters that had once cost $350 each for nearly
| $49,000 per unit in 2022. The apparent markup cost taxpayers
| more than $600,000 in extra fees.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Thanks, that's what this article reminded me of.
| culi wrote:
| A quick look at an example of the big-ticket items immediately
| shows that's not what's going on here. From the article:
|
| > The investigation also revealed that Raytheon Technologies
| had raised the price of Stinger missiles from $25,000 to more
| than $400,000 per unit. "Even accounting for inflation and some
| improvements, that's a seven-fold increase," Shay Assad, a
| former Pentagon acquisitions official, told 60 Minutes.
|
| See also,
|
| > Experts say much of that contractor price gouging has
| worsened over the past few decades as the military sector has
| experienced dramatic consolidation. In the 1990s, there were
| more than 50 "prime" DoD contractors capable of competing for
| major contracts. Now, there are only five.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| In the case of the Stinger, it's also because they have to
| reengineer it a bit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger#Replacement
|
| > The original Stinger's reprogrammable microprocessor has
| become obsolete in 2023, and a service life extension will
| keep the Block I in service until 2030... Raytheon Chief
| Executive Greg Hayes said on 26 April: "Some of the
| components are no longer commercially available, and so we're
| going to have to go out and redesign some of the electronics
| in the missile of the seeker head. That's going to take us a
| little bit of time".
|
| (I'd imagine that process comes with a whole big round of
| destructive testing, certifications, tooling changes,
| acceptance testing, etc.)
| kcatskcolbdi wrote:
| >The military bought the hammer, Kelman explained, bundled into
| one bulk purchase of many different spare parts. But when the
| contractors allocated their engineering expenses among the
| individual spare parts on the list-a bookkeeping exercise that
| had no effect on the price the Pentagon paid overall-they
| simply treated every item the same. So the hammer, originally
| $15, picked up the same amount of research and development
| overhead-$420-as each of the highly technical components,
| recalled retired procurement official LeRoy Haugh. (Later news
| stories inflated the $435 figure to $600.)
|
| "we didn't ACTUALLY spend that much on a hammer, we just
| averaged it out across a bulk purchase! See, we aren't terrible
| with money."
|
| Framing something as 'the myth of the $600 hammer' is
| implicitly pointing to external sources (congress, journalists)
| and messaging that they 'invented a myth' that the military
| spent $600 on a hammer. They didn't invent anything. They
| worked with the information that was provided to them by the
| military.
|
| If you wanted to discuss the same issue, but under a framing
| that wasn't disingenuous, you could title it something like
| 'the reality of abysmal and misleading accounting throughout
| the military and their contractors'.
| xxpor wrote:
| It's still a story of people getting mad about something they
| don't understand.
| kcatskcolbdi wrote:
| If someone shoots me in the foot I don't need to understand
| the mechanics of a gun to get upset about it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If someone has a _good reason_ to shoot you in the foot,
| your being upset about it doesn 't necessarily make it
| the wrong choice.
| fiestaman wrote:
| What's the good reason for this type of pro rata
| accounting?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Given "a bookkeeping exercise that had no effect on the
| price the Pentagon paid overall", I'd propose "it saved
| time, which costs taxpayers money".
|
| Given the hammer was actually $15, there's presumably a
| corresponding item that's also listed at $600 for ease of
| accounting that normally costs something like $1,200.
| "Pentagon gets 50% off computer monitor" is a less
| exciting headline, though.
| culi wrote:
| (2023) $52k trash can:
| https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/20/the-pentagons-5...
|
| > In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four of the
| trash cans, translating to roughly $51,606 per unit. In a 2021
| contract, the company charged $36,640 each for 11 trash
| containers, resulting in a total cost of more than $400,000. The
| apparent overcharge cost taxpayers an extra $600,000 between the
| two contracts.
|
| > In another case, Lockheed Martin hiked the price of an
| electrical conduit for the P-3 plane as much as 14 fold, costing
| the Pentagon an additional $133,000 between 2008 and 2015.
|
| > Jamaica Bearings -- a company that distributes parts
| manufactured by other firms -- sold the Department of Defense 13
| radio filters that had once cost $350 each for nearly $49,000 per
| unit in 2022. The apparent markup cost taxpayers more than
| $600,000 in extra fees.
|
| (2018) $10k toilet seat:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-...
|
| > U.S. Air Force paid about $10,000 each to replace toilet seat
| covers on the C-5 Galaxy, a Vietnam-era military cargo plane that
| is still in service, at least three times and as recently as last
| year.
|
| (1985) $34,560 for 54 toilet covers ($640 each) by Lockheed:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20081017195946/http://www.time.c...
|
| > President Ronald Reagan held a televised news conference in
| 1987, where he held up one of these shrouds and stated: "We
| didn't buy any $600 toilet seat. We bought a $600 molded plastic
| cover for the entire toilet system."
|
| (1983) $435 hammer (supposedly an accounting error): https://sci-
| hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/41635361
|
| > Questioning the $435 cost, the chief petty officer made agency
| inquiries. This led to several agency investigations and an audit
| conducted by the Naval Audit Service, which determined that the
| Gould contract contained "excess costs of about $729,000." The
| Pentagon responded by issuing a public announcement that Gould
| had overcharged the Navy and that not only was the DoD seeking
| immediate repayment from Gould, but also that the DoD needed to
| make "major changes" in the way it procured spare parts. Although
| Gould believed that the Navy's audit was flawed, it agreed to
| make a good faith repayment of $84,000 in August 1983 to appease
| the DoD.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Ripping off the federal government has been an American tradition
| since the Civil War -
| https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...
| jsjohnst wrote:
| It was a tradition long before that.
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