The myth of the $600 hammer (1998) • Hacker News Board

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#31

Post by karaterobot » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:27 PM UTC

flavius29663 wrote: post #20

unreal37 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I acknowledged in my comment that even if the most charitable explanation was assumed, the method of accounting is misleading and makes determining the cost of anything impossible.

How is that? If you buy an engine, do you itemize by: engine block, alternator, water pump and starter? You might include in the requirements that the engine must come with all 4 extra elements, but you will pay for the whole engine. Now, if someone wants to be misleading, they could say the water pump was 1/4 of the price...

If the total R&D cost for all items is split across every single product equally, there's no way to tell how much of the $435 hammer is R&D for the hammer. It's a really weird way to do accounting, almost like they just didn't keep track of how much R&D they did for each item. And that makes you wonder if the amount they are charging is even real in the first place. In general it lowers confidence and makes you think you're probably being ripped off (which, hey, is true).

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#32

Post by logdap » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:29 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #25

steveklabnik wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hot coffee lawsuit is the first thing I think of here. Heck even the name is like… whew.

I guess "the dangerously hot coffee that fused a customer's labia" does not have the same punch when trying to argue for tort reform.

That's a myth within a myth. The coffee was industry standard temperature, they still serve coffee that hot today (Wikipedia says as much.) The lawsuit was justified though, because the cup design was defective. It shouldn't have collapsed like it did.

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#33

Post by DontchaKnowit » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:31 PM UTC

unreal37 wrote: post #4

The so-called "real" explanation of the $600 hammer doesn't make the story any better. The hammer did indeed cost $435. If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435. Just because the extra $420 was "R&D expense" for something else, doesn't make the hammer any cheaper. Even in the most charitable explanation, this makes it impossible to know the real cost of anythin…

People have entire careers that are like this. 20 years of doing jack shit but cashing pay checks

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#34

Post by logdap » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

sam_goody wrote: post #28

Carioca wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me a lot of the million-dollar space pen vs pencil story

I understood that anecdote to be true. Fisher spent $1M (of "then" money) creating a "space pen", capitalized on the unique opportunity and publicity, and went from a startup to a $60M company. They knew that the astronauts could use a pencil, but that wouldn't be very profitable for them. For Fisher, it was a capitalist triumph, and symbolized American values. For the U.S.S.R. it symbolized U.S. wastefulness, and wa…

I'm pretty sure regular ballpoint pens work just fine in space. Try writing with one upsidedown in earth gravity; they work fine.

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#35

Post by itake » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

A rumor I heard during my internship where I ran MIL-S-901D experiments was that the government spec'd a very specific type of hammer from a supplier to perform this test. The supplier went out of business, but the spec still required the old hammer.

So the cost for just hitting an object with a hammer jumped to $4k+ since there were so few compliant hammers on the market.

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#36

Post by sam_goody » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

A plumber once showed me his $805 wrench.

It cost him $5 on AliExpress, and in the middle of his tightening a bolt with all his weight, it split into two and one half hit him in his tooth.

The co-pay for the tooth implant was $800, hence his "$805 wrench" and a moral not be cheap on your tools.

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#37

Post by rdl » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

HPsquared wrote: post #3

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #2

Not surprised. So many stories about an organization doing something that’s evidently crazy turn out to be bullshit. The truth is always more nuanced than what gets reported. People are (almost) never as incompetent/crazy/malicious as it might seem on a cursory review.

The truth is always more complicated and boring than the viral meme.

The "color of money" thing was so obnoxious when I was contracting in Iraq. They could easily spent essentially unlimited amounts for certain kinds of things which weren't needed, but then couldn't pay for other things (with less than a 6-24mo process to get new funds). I understand the fraud/misappropriation that would happen without such systems, it was very cumbersome. And due to "anti-deficiency act", it was illegal to just pay for it out of pocket and give them stuff for free, too.

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#38

Post by einpoklum » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:36 PM UTC

The kind of justifications we read in the article is how things got to the point they are now. Just last year, the DoD failed yet another audit:

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3740921-defense-departmen...

"After 1,600 auditors combed through DOD’s $3.5 trillion in assets and $3.7 trillion in liabilities, officials found that the department couldn’t account for about 61 percent of its assets, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord told reporters on Tuesday."

So, what a military establishment tool might present as the exigencies of dealing with federal accounting is actually a wedge of Swiss cheese with holes so large, that I shudder to think what those military-cum-intelligence-industrial-complex types have snuck in through them.

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#39

Post by cbsmith » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:37 PM UTC

unreal37 wrote: post #11

ekidd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435. This claim appears to contradict what the story says, as far as I can tell? He's the original: > 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 b…

I acknowledged in my comment that even if the most charitable explanation was assumed, the method of accounting is misleading and makes determining the cost of anything impossible.

> The hammer did indeed cost $435. If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435.

But the above statement wasn't true.

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#40

Post by sverhagen » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:41 PM UTC

meetingthrower wrote: post #30

gumby wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've worked for companies where they took money meant for one thing, and used it for something else. "Can you record your hours on this project under this different expense code?" This stops them from going over budget and having to explain to the client, but takes the money from another project of that client instead. Seems like a whistleblower could put a stop to this, and get a hefty reward as well. It's a felon…

Yes but most of the time in these things the hours billed are internal cost controls, not billed straight through to client. Eg, it's a fixed price contract. But sometimes you have to work more or less so you horsetrade between projects. Agree with you if billing time through, but usually this is pretty strictly tracked. (source: was a consulting partner)

A lot of companies make you track hours to distinguish capital expenses from operational ones, I assume for a different tax treatment, which I don't think has only internal implications.