It’s a bit like doing a custom PCB design and fabrication run for personal reasons. It’ll be $10 worth of components, but a half dozen might cost you $1k if you want someone else to set up a run on their machines to make ‘em.

The Stinger missile example further down seems more egregious.

If you are concerned about targeted attacks, head down to your local hardware store and buy one of the thousands they have in stock.

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.

I guess the equivalent is putting the flimsy $1.25 trash can from Dollar Store in your spacecraft, instead of a $8 trash can.

Good example with pillows causing a (still!) missing nuclear weapon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash

It's for a highly specialized 707 airliner. It'll be metal, rated for fire resistance if someone sneaks a smouldering cigarette into it, wheeled for servicing, lock into place during flight, etc. You can't buy it at Home Depot, and intelligence agencies are constantly making smaller and harder to detect devices for bugging items.

https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...

If US gov bought cheap plastic stuff from another country instead there can well still be corruption expressed in their choice of suppliers etc.

Naive or not, this turns out to be true surprisingly frequently.

> 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.

Because what I think is not what you claim.

You defending corruption and fraud is just so far fetched it's hard to take your OP seriously.

"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.

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 American companies with billion dollar plus valuations.

Building up US based scientific and manufacturing know-how, for another. Plenty of people take the skills they learn at Raytheon or an FFRDC and use them to start profitable small businesses, which in turn employ more people and generate more tax revenue.

Not that I expect many people reading this to care about that. "Military spending bad" is too easy and convenient a slogan.

It doesn't solve every problem - there are a shitload of people in America receiving inadequate education, nutrition, and healthcare, for example. But it certainly helps keep a lot of Americans employed and paying their mortgages, which is a non-trivial benefit.

Spending $50k on a trash can is unlikely to lead to the sort of benefits that are required. Better than unemployment benefits for nothing, maybe. The opportunity costs and time wasted on bureaucracy put even that optimistic spin in doubt. Basic research doesn't need 3% of GDP spent on overinflated contracts. It can't be helping the situation.

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.

“Do more with less” during the Obama administration / Afghan war was a test of this and the things that got cut were the innovative programs while inefficient tent poles remained.

We should reform now while we have the budget so we get more good public innovation and can actually cut effectively and have that muscle memory in leaner years.

What is hard to measure is what could have been done with the money to make the US military stronger but was wasted instead.

The worst part is all these inefficiencies are going to add up over the coming decades when we have to keep up with the PLA/China.

A PLA colonel makes less than a private first class marine and manufacturing anything is an order of magnitude difference.

Just look at the myriad failed Kickstarter projects that tried to make consumer stuff. Even getting something normal made in China can be serious work. And far more if you actually want to do a good job of it. Linus Tech Tips put a surprising amount of work into making a screwdriver.

Then consider that the military probably has a bunch of requirements like "this can't break into sharp shards" and "it can't emit toxic smoke if it burns", and they'll want that to be proven. Certifying all those things is a whole job on its own.

....coz they are making 50k of a thing. Not four a year.

Making real, physical goods is very, very challenging, and I don't think a lot of the denizens of this site (as SWEs) appreciate that.

What fraction of that $50k landed in the hands of the workers, do you think?

I'll direct all the righteously indignant folks claiming "corruption" to you from now on. XD

I'd wager most of the money spent on this venture went to the people designing and making the trashcan, not executive bonuses or admin fees.

Is the opposite of this:

> being bored not doing anything productive

I'm not sure why you claimed to agree with the latter being how government contracts work.

Smart cookies working on tough problems.

Also probably the best radar designers in the whole goddamn world.

I am proud to be even tangentially associated with them.

especially considering the comment was referring to Boeing, a company notorious for their lobbying to get contracts they don't deserve

$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.

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 needed right now.

But keep in mind, those same rules apply to safety critical parts, e.g. engines and wings. And overall, it is easier to just apply the same high standards to everything.

Maybe contacting to a custom shop was an option but would take an extra week, and they needed those E3s in the air ASAP. I don't know what specific circumstances were at play, and neither does anyone in this thread.

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.

It would really suck to lose an air crew because a trash can of all things made by some rando in their garage flew out of its mount in a wing over maneuver on a training exercise.

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 customer’s requirements? Note that this extends to more than just PN, QTY and ship-to. Failure to read and heed those pesky T&Cs (the Terms and Conditions on a typical PO or RO) is a frequent NCR.
    Who signed your C of C/Material Cert? Are they authorized to do so (cross checked to the Roster)?
    Where was the part obtained from? Are they on the Approved Suppliers List?
    Did you send the part to a repair station/AMO? Are they on the Approved Suppliers List?
    Whomever you claim to have trace to, is the chain of custody acceptably documented?
    Are part numbers, serial numbers, and condition in harmony?
    If there were any deviations from what the customer required, was there reasonable documentation in the record showing the customer’s acceptance of the deviation? 

Anyway, good luck with your metal shop business and running parts through the folder-thingy. Please bear in mind that the link I provided is just a small look at the regulations that govern Civil Aircraft and that Mil-Spec is an entirely different beast, but I am sure you know that already!

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.

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.

If the process changes, you have to go back and re-certify. If the technology changes, you have to go back and re-certify. In some places, if you change the machine the part is run on, you have to go back and re-certify.

So if you take a part that was stick welded, move it to a tig welder and then move it to an automated spot welder, you have to certify 3 times.

Not to mention, a tig weld may behave differently under stress than a stick weld so make sure that you do a part analysis too!

Last but not least, the regulations have changed from the last time this aircraft was produced. Are your parts governed by the new regulations or the old?

This is what got Boeing in so much trouble with the MAX, they didn't want to re-certify the aircraft so they kept making changes to the design. Do you think they are getting more or less scrutiny now when they say "It's an old design, everything is cool!"

The FAA got beat up, badly, justifiably so over their handling of that. Congress mandated them to regulate more strictly: https://www.reuters.com/article/boeing-737max-congress-idAFL...

Up-thread, comment was to farm it our to a local machine shop with one guy. Here is the FAA on Counterfeit parts: >Counterfeit Parts: These are unapproved parts manufactured and sold without FAA >approval. You should report them to the FAA as a SUP. There may be obvious, or >not so obvious, visual clues to help you spot these parts. The FAA aggressively >investigates these cases and works closely with the Office of Inspector General >(OIG) and law enforcement officials to ensure proper adjudication. There are >cases of this nature that have resulted in significant civil penalties and/or >jail time for those involved. https://iflyamerica.org/safety_suspected_unapproved_parts.as...

Adding: I have found an older(2022) AMCOM Spares SAR Guidance Document. This will show you what you need to do in order to apply to manufacture parts for American Military Aircraft. https://www.avmc.army.mil/Portals/51/Documents/SAR%20Guidanc...

I think the problem is that they're so disconnected from the value of money that they are willing to pay that much.

Imagine you have four multimillion dollar aircraft that can't fly because some small part that is out of production broke. You need those planes to fly missions. How much would you pay to put them back into service?

I think in many societies we’ve lost the wiggle room that allows for pragmatic solutions in the name of safety.

Maybe the risk reduction was worth it? Maybe not. But arguments for risk averse behavior tend to win more than 50% of the time in democratic societies which accumulates a kind of “risk-avoidance-debt”.

I'd much rather fly on a plane that's regulated and certified out the nose than one that's not.

I'd rather live in a country that invests in people's skills and knowledge than one th t doesn't.

Fun fact, if parts are around 30k they can be treated as not worthy of repair. Instead, discard them and nuy a new one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_corrosion

Mercury versus aluminum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrdYueB9pY4

In an earlier life, I shipped items requiring this particular hazmat label on packaging: https://www.safetyemporium.com/12332

Presumably all the sunk costs were already sunk

The amount of paperwork/documentation that has to change, logistics and inventory tracking, plus the battery of tests to check that a new item maintains the same mil standard qualifications as the old.

It's absolutely possible to apply some level of basic human reason and common sense to such situations. A different accounting convention is probably in order.

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.

The issue in government contracting is very simple. You need competitive procurement to ensure reasonableness of price. Period. In the 90s, we allowed major defense contractors to consolidate at the prime level and diversify at the subcontractor level.

So Lockheed Martin has some component of every system in 300 congressional districts - some little company is fabricating magical bolts to get congressional support.

So now these giant companies are all sole source vendors. Guess what happened to price?

That's the 2nd paragraph of the article that you apparently didn't read.

Looks like we both read it, but not all of us understood the implications of it.

This isn’t some specialized part that the plane requires to fly. It’s just a trash can.

Hell, just go to Target and buy one that’s similarly sized. It would be cheaper to fly across the country to find one at this point.

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 and approved for aviation use.

You can not buy one of these at Target. They are not putting little plastic bins by the workstations in an AWACS plane.

You do realize there are multiple trash cans available, right? Some that are metal. Of many different sizes.

It would take less time to go store to store across the country and source 4 trash cans than it would to do this ludicrous process.

Certified for use on 707s? Again, this is not the sort of trash can you have in your office. It'll be rated for fire, it'll be in a special cart that fits into a special locking spot in the plane, it will have been tested to stay in that special locking spot if the plane crashes, etc.

It's like trying to buy Commodore 64 parts at Best Buy. Not going to happen.

Apparently you could buy one for $300 though. I own a bin that isn't far off that price, and I'm sure many people on the site have much fancier ones.

Yes, when they were being commercially manufactured for many users.

Now that 707s are no longer in service outside the military, they're not running production lines for parts except when needed; that $200k includes all the paperwork to win the contract, the lawyers who review it, un-mothballing whatever tooling they use, etc.; the fixed costs far outweigh the costs to make each individual trash can. For similar reasons, I can buy a part for my Corolla much cheaper than I can for a Model T.

This is a site apparently populated by fairly bright people. I'm struggling to understand why no one seems to get this.

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.

The article seems to imply they where selling at a normal price until 2010, though it isn't terribly clear.

There used to be economies of scale. It's a 707; they stopped being made in 1979. If you want 707 parts now, there's a good chance they're gonna be produced on a very small scale custom job for you.

(It's also a very special 707, inside and out. Cabin designs can vary significantly from airline to airline, let alone civilian to military.)

The reading of the article implies the contract set prices for commercial items and Boeing simply started charging the army whatever as soon as it technically wasn't 'commercial'.

There's also some foresight involved here. I used to work for a company that delivered computers for industrial applications such as ASML and FEI (lithography machines and electron microscopes). They had very precise requirements: "we want Intel Xeon 5119 Rev 3 CPUs for the next 4 years, not Rev 2, not Rev 4, the revision shall be 3 and 3 shall be the revision. Rev 5 is right out". The same applied with mainboards, memory, etc. There was also an entire testing procedure involved for many of these things and not all components passed.

So, we charged them more for this then $random_person buying a component, obviously, but we also talked to them beforehand and knew roughly how many they needed, overbought components in bulk beforehand before they were EOL, and sold the rest afterwards fairly cheaply (because by then they were pretty old components). The volumes for these kind of machines is low (on the order of dozens or hundreds a year) so this was all practical. We made a fair but far from exuberant profit from this.

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".

I don't know which party failed on this part, but someone did. Possibly both. Even ordering two new-price trash cans leaves you with 250 of them at the old price. Storage isn't free either so let's assume 150 of 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-...

Unfortunately, both of those things frequently happen simultaneously.

4 extra =/= hundreds extra

---

And why did the government spend $8M(!!) in unused solar panels? I could have gotten 26,000+ trash cans at $300 each!

> And why did the government spend $8M(!!) in unused solar panels?

Spares? A lower than expected defect rate? Who knows? Paul doesn't provide useful specifics, just the politically sexy top-level numbers.

In an organization with a multi-trillion dollar annual budget, $8M in unused solar panels is a bit like you throwing away a ream of paper that got some water damage.

> In an organization with a multi-trillion dollar annual budget, $8M in unused solar panels is a bit like you throwing away a ream of paper that got some water damage.

And yet a fraction of that amount is front page HN.

Clearly a lot of other people believe differently.

A lot of people believe incorrect things about stuff they don't understand, yes. HN most certainly isn't immune.

Outrage bait is hardly a new phenomenon. The unit cost looks insane because it's a side effect of the fact that a defense contractor won't get out of bed without a minimum of a couple hundred grand in the contract to cover the program.

> The investigation also revealed that Raytheon Technologies had raised the price of Stinger missiles from $25,000 to more than $400,000 per unit. “Even accounting for inflation and some improvements, that’s a seven-fold increase,” Shay Assad, a former Pentagon acquisitions official, told 60 Minutes.

The US ramped UP how many stinger missiles it bought so how could your explanation lead to an increase in price? Especially one so dramatic?

Nonsense. You fell into the Broken Window Fallacy.

>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 tools to make it from scratch" price. There is no "economic investment" needed here to keep the tech of making trash cans alive.

> 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 keeping people employed" is terrible excuse to spend tax dollars. Any other kind of social service is far more positive to the society than throwing more money at military contractor

> It also creates handy design and manufacturing know how, which is a useful thing to have if our current cold war with China ever heats up in the South China Sea. It's a lot harder to buy war materiel from your adversary when lead is flying.

Or just make government-funded stuff the property of the government. Government paid for development, government should get detailed plans and all of the documentation of it, and any inventions made along the way should be put into public domain, as the public paid for it.

And if government then turn to other company "hey, can you make these at reasonable price", well, that's just glorious free market at work.

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!"

now all of them make silicon valley money off their skills just because of how bloated military contracting is*

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...

There's nothing inherent or ontological about tech that demands the money it does. It's needed, and the money is available, so that happens. If you know how to work a lathe, and the money is available, you deserve to be able to get it.

So the design may not need to be maintained, but if the company supplying the material goes out of business, someone needs to confirm the new material specs will work on the tool.

I was really annoyed by this at my shop and asked S-4 (supply) why this was. What it comes down to is that when military vendors sell a plane, radio, tank, etc to the military they aren't selling one product. They're selling a product list (called an SL-3). Each product on that list must be specified, routinely tested (eg: certain amount each batch), and then manufactured. As time goes on, the screw is used in less things that are in production so the batch sizes for production are reduced, which inflates the overhead test cost. A lot of products have pretty interesting test standards; for instance we had a truck that after every significant change had to be blown up a minimum of four times. The base truck was $400k and then the equipment inside - which was the actual configuration that was being tested - cost millions per vehicle.

I think the military could benefit from part standardization and longer lifetimes on component production.

Years ago in a history class it was asserted that in WWII, because the US had a greater degree of part standardization (I think they were talking about stuff that could be used across multiple tanks and truck models) than the Germans, the US supply lines for keeping everything running could be more effective. A German vehicle was more likely to be out of commission for want of a part.

I'm not sure if that's true, or how difficult part standardization is in complex modern equipment. But when the Russians are possibly harvesting chips from home appliances, and when we're all acutely aware of how tangled global supply chains are, I wonder if there will be a push for greater standardization from a strategic motivation rather than a cost one?

Part standardization isn't just bolts and major assemblies but also things like test stands, jigs, and everything else needed to repair something.

Every repair bay needs for example a shop crane. Every division will have X number of shop cranes all their maintenance units. If there's a particular model shop crane that works with every engine for every vehicle in the division that's awesome. They just need X shop cranes.

But then they get assigned a new type of truck. Its engine is bigger and better than the old model. Unfortunately the existing shop cranes are too small to handle lifting this new engine. Now the division needs a mix of shop cranes and enough where every motor pool has every shop crane necessary to fix any vehicle that comes in.

To understand this you have to appreciate a few things. First, these are military-grade trashcans. That sounds ridiculous, but there are a whole range of MILSPEC standards that must be followed to deliver anything to the military. Certain materials cannot be used, certain vendors can't be.

Second, there's always design maintenance. C'mon, this is a site of programmers. People here understand the reason you'd maintain software: redoing your old, working C code in Rust; upgrading applications designed for XP to run on Windows 10, etc. TFA quotes the E-3 Sentry, a design based on the 707 from late 1960's. The trashcan design needs to be updated! Certainly material sizes and quality are substantially different, rivet part numbers have changed, coatings have changed. Dealing with changes means substantial time qualifying the new parts.

Third is the issue of scale. If you're making a million cell phones you can sell them at the low price of $1k each; but if you make just one it might cost $1B. Here, we're talking trashcans. If you build a thousand, you hire an engineer to oversee the design requirements and master machinist, and then a small army of machinists and assemblers to make the parts, and a quality guy to inspect them, and some other guy to do the documentation. How many of those guys do you need if you make just one or two? Well, not as many, just the most expensive ones.

Hand waving here: we're going to make 10 trashcans. I'll bid 40 hours of engineering time, 80 hours of machinist, and 40 hours of quality/paperwork guy time. Assuming realistic numbers for those guys, you're talking about maybe $30k (don't forget to include overhead costs, which are more than you think they are). I'd guess a couple $k of parts, but just realized I forgot machine time, paint shop time, incoming material quality inspection, etc., etc. Amazingly, though, if you only bought one trashcan, the price doesn't change all that much. Most of that machinist time is setting up.

So, gosh, I mean, there's a lot here. And Boeing is more expensive than I am, and has more processes and procedures. And they know how to make these trashcans in a way that fits the aircraft.

These aren't COTS parts, and they'll never be, because in general, COTS parts have short lifetimes. The B-52, for example, has been flying since forever and it's still being upgraded. There aren't a lot of mainstream items with service lives like that. You know where the military gets great prices? Where there's a substantial dual-use application: guns, bullets, computers, office desks, building HVAC units, etc. They can buy from the mass market. As long as they don't want excessive service lives out of them, they'll pay the same price as you. It's when they want something special that costs extra, same as you or me.

For example: as other more level headed folks with actual knowledge of contract fulfillment have mentioned, this might have been a T&M or cost plus procurement. In which case, there's very little opportunity for the profiteering that most of my replies have stridently claimed is obviously occurring - with zero evidence beyond "There's NO WAY it could be that expensive!!"

I get that I'm trying to argue with the emotions of a bunch of people with a lot of antipathy towards the US government, and that's ultimately a losing battle.

End of the day, you can be mad about this if you want, but this is the way it is, and it evolved that way for reasons, and some of those reasons are to encourage second order effects - beyond merely procuring plane trash cans.

https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Napoleon-say-If-you-want-to-ta...

I also think the excuses made here are dishonest. It doesn't keep people employed, it doesn't fund innovation. It goes into some billionaire's bank account, gets invested in whatever and pushes them up some list of top 100 richest people in the US.

The profits don't go to employees, they don't cause more hires. They don't create jobs. The trash cans are already designed, they're probably already manufactured as well. They're not going to hire anyone for this, they're just jacking up the price because they can so why the hell wouldn't they? Just like they jacked up the price of insulin not to mention general healthcare and medicine and everything else recently.

The rich have one objective, it is to get richer. They will hide research that goes against that interest. Oil companies knew CO2 was bad nearly 100 years ago. Teflon producers knew teflon was bad decades ago. Until someone makes them stop, they will not stop. Because money.

Corporations literally do not give a single ounce of fuck about anything except money. If they do something that seems selfless it's because seeming selfless is in their interest (money). Like how Patagonia made record sales of their "Don't buy this jacket".

If you ever fins yourself thinking a corporation is giving a shit about something that doesn't make them more money it's because you're not seeing their angle.

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.

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 piece of material, you have to PROOVE it. It has to be tested and usually adhere to an existing standard so you're going to design several trash can, submit them for approval and use the best one that passes.

It's mind-numbingly tedious to build anything for the government.

Wrong - almost all of the profits go to the shareholders of those contractors. The people who are actually doing thew work do not get paid more.

Shit like this is the tip of the iceberg. [1]

[1] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/11/22/why-cant-the-do...

Yeah, Russia has a defence budget 12 times smaller compared to the US, but that means that Russia can now afford to only pay ~$4100 dollars for a trashcan and still be America's equal in terms of "PPP" defence expenses.

I could make 1 plastic trashcan at home for less than $50,000. And probably less than $30.

I even gave it a fancy pattern.

I used FreeCAD.

It took 5 minutes to make the trashcan, and 2 nights to learn the pattern tool.

Total cost was 1.50 for my fancy color changing filament.

It is becoming so frustrating to read all those tech bro comments, believing that doing some messy 3D printing is the same thing as manufacturing. Ignoring that the whole field of mechanical engineering exists.

Thinking like that, a bunch of millions, get you the Titan and five dead people. Add some billions and it gets you FSD and a bunch of dead people.

Oh, and accounting and cost calculation seems to be a black art as well...

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 600k. Heck, back when I made airbags, I don't think we spent anywhere close to 1 million dollars between design, tooling, testing, and manufacturing.

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 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.

Now we come to a peculiarity of aerospace, so excuse the tangent. All aircraft have to be airworthy to be allowed to fly. Those airworthiness criteria are set during initial Type Certification, and more or less set in stone. Changing them requires various amounts of testing, re-certification and abton of paper work nobody in their right minds does voluntarily. One reason one does it is obsolescence of parts or technology.

One of things I insist on, for that very reason, is in being smart in defining begnin things like BoMs and maintenance plans. Because deviating from those grounds a plane.

So, if (I have no idea of the E-3 specifics as those arw most likely classified to a certain degree) said trash bins are part of the airworthiness requirements, not having them (and them being up to spec) grounds the plane. Because the absence of said trash bin is a defect in itself.

Whether or not the trash bins are a signigicant safety problem is, decades after the E-3 got certified, no longer relevant.

Aerospace is fun sometimes.

$12,000 in perfectly working hardware that had to be scrapped because someone didn't fill out the proper paperwork. Luckily, we (software dev) intercepted them and found other uses for them.

Lucky for you so being able to reuse that hardware!

That's not what he said was making it expensive though, was it? He said it was economies of scale. Furthermore, if an ISO 9100 certification is taking a $10 trashcan and making it $50,000 then we shouldn't insist on an ISO9100 certification.

Can you guarantee a fire started in it won't spread to the rest of the aircraft and fill it with noxious fumes?

At least it's then clear and people can decide on whether that grant is value for money or not.

The thing appears ludicrous.

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.

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.

If the navigation station on the plane had to be shrunk by 1/4 inch due to some 3rd party not being able to meet their required tolerances after manufacturing had begun how does that get paid for?

The award is fixed but now the requirements have changed. The TLA is not going back to Congress to get $200k in additional design funding. That phase of the project is done. However, the TLA potentially has a large budget for maintenance and replacement of parts.

The navigation station gets an emergency redesign and it is paid for by no-bid 50K trash cans. There is no corruption here just the realities of working with fixed bid contracts, hundreds of third parties from every state in the nation and a political appropriations process.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/22/san-francisc...

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.