Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

responsiblestatecraft.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 387 posts

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#351

Post by [deleted] »

rurp wrote: post #345
david422 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That kind of slow and steady approach actually sounds pretty reasonable for some cases. Sure it won't win the market for a trendy new consumer app, but a lot of software is basically feature complete and should prioritize stability over whatever's currently cool and exciting. I have an old account with a bank that has hardly changed its website design in well over a decade. It's great! The information is clearly laid…

[deleted]

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#352

Post by giantrobot »

pastacacioepepe wrote: post #322
themaninthedark wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your metal you are using NIST certified and traceable? How about your welds? One guy, so yours saying he inspected his own work and no sign-off?! You gonna retain those records? ASA-100, Distributor Quality System Standard, paragraph 12: “The distributor shall maintain documentation of traceability for at least 7 years… Here is a small non-exhaustive list I found of what you need: Did your shipment meet all the cu…

You think Boeing didn't already have all those processes and shops in place? If it still costed them tens of thousands to produce a trash can, I'd argue they're doing their job really inefficiently. Not really what you'd call an economy of scale.

> You think Boeing didn't already have all those processes and shops in place?

For parts likely not manufactured in decades? No. They likely didn't have current paperwork for that. Boeing wasn't sitting around just waiting to replace some trash cans just in case the Pentagon was going to order some.

Trash cans for a plane whose commercial counterpart has been out of service for decades is literally not an economy of scale. An order for replacement trash cans at this point is a specialty boutique order.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#353

Post by seabird »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #348
ceejayoz wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a trash can that must contain a waste fire so it doesn't burn through the wall of the plane or suffocate the crew. It is a trash can that must not fly around the E-3's cabin if they're making evasive maneuvers. It is a trash can that must fit in a specific spot in a plane first made in 1957 and ended production in the 1970s. It must have been confirmed via a vigorous process to fulfill all these requirements an…

> You can not buy one of these at Target This is a site apparently populated by fairly bright people. I'm struggling to understand why no one seems to get this.

This is a site populated by a group of people that society massively overestimates the intelligence and competence of, and it very often goes to their head. The amount of software developers that actually have any real idea of what rigorous engineering actually is is vanishingly small and those that do usually only "get it" because they worked adjacent to disciplines that take it more seriously.

Not to say the average user here is an idiot, but it's pretty clear that cribbing together code in extremely low-risk environments doesn't impart any understanding of how designing, manufacturing, and supporting critical products over a 5+ decade lifespan is actually done.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#354

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

dtx1 wrote: post #98
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…

As a German, it always suprises me how pedantic americans can be when it comes to Letter of the Law vs Spirit of the Law situation. Yes, for Warplane Parts this whole Idea of keeping it inside america and enable local companies to continuously produce parts is reasonable. Having to receive bids for contracts as a public entity is also reasonable. But is there no one in government that can see that a 50k trashcan is j…

What's the alternative? If a trashcan of that specification is needed to allow the airplane's mission to begin, then it's grounded until the trashcan is in place.

The alternative is to find a less costly supplier that can meet that specification. Now you've (a) held up the missions and (b) more than likely used up any cost savings in your procurement & supplier evaluation process.

At some point, the intelligent thing to do is shrug, grumble under your breath, and write the check so you can get on with life.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#355

Post by dendrite9 »

mortify wrote: post #332
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…

> it was already done and paid for. It's a trashcan, it doesn't require specialized tooling The government doesn't spec "a trashcan." They create size specs, water-tightness ratings, material durability, etc. The exact spec they provide may be met in 90% of areas by an existing trash can, but that won't do. If there are requirements for some level of waterproofing, you can't just seal it or even mold it from a single…

Boeing pays at least on business I know to essentially have a complete label printing line with staff available to run it. Each label must be hellaciously expensive when they need one but my understanding was that some(all?) are part of the certification for airworthiness. So a missing or damaged label can ground the plane, which is far more expensive than the label.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#356

Post by immibis »

ajmurmann wrote: post #229
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 interesting to contrast this with all the complaints about the Titan sub using off-the-shelf components.

They are red herrings. For the price of one of these trash cans the Titan could've had perhaps three complete independent control systems including Logitech gaming controllers.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#357

Post by pauldenton »

Joker_vD wrote: post #167
pixl97 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

During the first World War, the French and the English found out that building (and then operating) new state-run munition factories was faster and cheaper than buying munitions from the privately-owned firms, and the production quality was also better, too. Something to do with competence transfer or something.

What happened with Winston Churchill politically after WW2? Did his war economy footing translate well to peace time?

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#358

Post by immibis »

oneTbrain23 wrote: post #260

People kept talking corruptions in Russian military. Remember they have only about 60B usd a year and able to hold off entire NATO offensive in Ukraine while USA got defeated by Talebans on near 10T usd budget. Who has more corruptions problem? Seriously why I get taxed by IRS while they get to spent corruptly and still keep telling me how bad Russians misused their 60B and had to fight with some kind of shovels? Loo…

What NATO offensive in Ukraine? There is no NATO offensive in Ukraine. It kept getting shot down by vatniks claiming it would start World War 3.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#359

Post by pc86 »

danbruc wrote: post #269
pc86 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

100% agree it just sounded like in this instance the first time they'd hear about it breaking a customer's workflow[0] would be in that customer's production environment. I've been on both ends of solutions where customers are either technically or financially incapable of having robust test environments for even critical software, especially if they're relying on someone else to write it.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1172/

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#360

Post by JamesBarney »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #210
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-…

I worked on a radar system that could see precipitation- think doppler radar map view. The ability to do this was in the contract but there was no way to view it. We had Matlab scripts so we the devs could view it and the weather people wanted them. We weren't allowed to hand them over without a contract. They'd pop in multiple times a day to view our doppler. The adversarial nature that defense companies treat our m…

A lot of this adversarial nature comes down to how projects are awarded. Government employees have very little discretion to choose projects, so they always go with the cheapest bid. But no large software project ever has had 0 change orders.

So the only profitable way to win these contracts is offer the cheapest bid by delivering as little as possible while being in spec, and then pillaging on the change orders.

Post reply on HN