News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Nelson testifies cost-plus contracts have been a “plague” on NASA. Parent comment

Re:Nelson testifies cost-plus contracts have been a “plague”... by jiggawatts on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @05:35PM (#31266140)
The same madness happens here in Australia too. Just recently I did an IT project for a local electric utility company and they were blowing $200K on firewalls for a system used by 10 people. Similarly they “upgraded” a perfectly good 10 Gbps fixed line to 200 Gbps for the same group of users. They can utilise maybe 1 Gbps on a busy day.

They also get a fixed profit ratio relative to capex. So they burn giant piles of money to get their percentage from the government…

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Nelson testifies cost-plus contracts have been a “plague”... by bcrl on Thursday May 05, 2022 @07:14PM (#31279398)
Electric companies tend to be regulated monopolies, and suffer from the same perverse incentives with models like being allowed a 10% profit. The more they spend replacing poles and building new pole lines, the bigger the profit the regulations allow.
[ Parent | on HN ]