The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

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.

Nonsense. You fell into the Broken Window Fallacy.

>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.

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.