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The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

responsiblestatecraft.org

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Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#181

Post by ilyt »

pixl97 wrote: post #142
ilyt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 to…

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!"

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*

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#182

Post by suoduandao3 »

cushychicken wrote: post #24

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 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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#183

Post by settrans »

cushychicken wrote: post #24

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…

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#184

Post by david422 »

TrackerFF wrote: post #124

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-…

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".

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#185

Post by asynchronous »

dgrin91 wrote: post #17
niffydroid wrote: post #4

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.

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 backward…

Love that it’s always the three names I think of when I read these articles too.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#186

Post by throwway120385 »

smallerfish wrote: post #113
giaour wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

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.

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#187

Post by ceejayoz »

arp242 wrote: post #173
cushychicken wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some price increase after that would be completely fair and reasonable, because it is harder and more expensive to produce. But 165×? 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 a…

> 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-...

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#188

Post by throwway120385 »

smallerfish wrote: post #168
hef19898 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#189

Post by jtbayly »

cushychicken wrote: post #40
batch12 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I can deliver a trashcan that matches specs for a mere 40k.

I encourage you to submit a coubterproposal! I'm sure you'd learn a ton about plane based trash cans.

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#190

Post by throwaway290 »

mda wrote: post #133
throwaway290 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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.

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.

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