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The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

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Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#291

Post by red-iron-pine »

jliptzin wrote: post #279
sneak wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#292

Post by ceejayoz »

shlubbert wrote: post #287
hef19898 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A trash can is slightly less essential to a vessel's operation than its control surface.

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#293

Post by lesuorac »

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.

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#294

Post by tptacek »

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#295

Post by red-iron-pine »

adolph wrote: post #198
ilyt wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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*

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...

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#297

Post by notatoad »

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#298

Post by pphysch »

tptacek wrote: post #294

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.

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#299

Post by crote »

ilyt wrote: post #128
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…

>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…

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.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#300

Post by crazygringo »

pphysch wrote: post #298
tptacek wrote: post #294

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.

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.

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?

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