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The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

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Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#261

Post by nmca »

david422 wrote: post #184
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…

I too worked for Google once.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#262

Post by culi »

mcdonje wrote: post #145
lesuorac wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or the government can pay people to build better infrastructure instead.

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

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#263

Post by xxpor »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #180
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-…

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.

And yet, things like the Patriot missile system get built. It's pretty wild what an 800 billion dollar budget will paper over.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#264

Post by hospitalJail »

hef19898 wrote: post #238
hospitalJail wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 stup…

>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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#265

Post by Ironchefpython »

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 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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#266

Post by culi »

athenot wrote: post #218

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.

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#267

Post by xxpor »

roenxi wrote: post #99
cushychicken wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ameri…

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 T…

>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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#268

Post by renewiltord »

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-…

Remember: Regulations are written in blood.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#269

Post by danbruc »

pc86 wrote: post #253
ajmurmann wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cus…

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…

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#270

Post by xxpor »

kcatskcolbdi wrote: post #114
kylecazar wrote: post #13

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...

>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 devel…

It's still a story of people getting mad about something they don't understand.
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