There.com being bought by Yahoo?

heh.

the $5 bullets I was talking about are tank rounds.

At least I think they are tank rounds.

I doubt it. Unless it's $5 blanks, I doubt a tank round is that cheap.

The '10,000 dollar hammers' isn't exactly an urban legend. As I recall they weren't ten grand, but several thousand dollars each.

The story of course ignores that these hammers had to be custom designed and built for the military for working on vehicles with reactive armor.... (highly explosive, and impact detonated.)

Stories like this generally have one of two explanations. Either somone's lining the pockets of their buddies in the defense contractor industry.... or we're getting a shining example of how the military's needs are frequently very different from the civilian world. The trick is to read enough about it to get the whole story.... or at least enough of it to know which answer applies. (Even I have to admit the 'lining friends' pockets' option isn't always the right one.)

Another reason the military spends more on ordinary stuff is different quality control requirements. A civilian operation can, for example, certify that a batch of 100,000 bolts meets spec by testing 100 of the bolts to destruction. If all of the 100 meet spec, the remaining 99,900 bolts in the batch are considered ok. The military requirement is that every one of those 100,000 bolts passes. Consequently, you need to use a more expensive, non-destructive test, and you need to test a lot more bolts.

This is where those stories of $4 for a part you can get at a hardware store for $0.04 come from.

Yeah, you really have to have high tolerance toilet seats when you are "taking care of business" at the speed of sound.

You can take it as a given that in these large government contracts pockets of friends (and even relatives) will get lined. Thats human nature. If you have a need to buy plumbing from your friend or a total stranger what do YOU do?

Current rules for government contracting do very little to prevent favoritism in selection of vendors. The process is subjective enough that it can be hard to tell all the factors that go into such a decision. If the decision is totally nutso, the losers have a chance to protest the award, and it is not uncommon to have an award overturned in this way. Vendors who protest too much (again very subjective) mysteriously don't do well in the future. Government contractors are expected to speak when spoken to and not make waves for the lifers.

Something you missed though is the "make it up in volume" business model. If the Pentium processor didn't already exist and you asked Intel to build just ONE of them the cost would of course be millions of dollars. Once they are set up to make one though, they can make that second one for quite a bit less, the third one for even less. You spread your production cost out among your early customers and may not actually make a profit for several years, assuming nobody comes along to steal your customers before then.

Since the toilet seat (and wrench, ashtray, and other) story government has put a greater emphasis in using COTS (common off the shelf) products as much as possible rather than designing and manufacturing everything from the ground up. There is still PLENTY of waste in government, but I would guess that much less of it is due to over user of specialized parts.

IMHO the biggest waste in government comes from the actual funding process. Departments estimate how much money they need each year. They of course pad their estimates to allow for cost overruns and quite often end the year with money still in their accounts. The current system actually PUNISHES a manager for having money left over. First they are not allowed to keep it,and second their estimate for the next year is more closely looked at for padding.

So, guess what... at the end of the year the Federal government has a spending spree. Venders know this too and make sure to have a grab bag of special projects and services all lined up for the Federal Christmas stockings. Maybe its to replace last years desktops with slightly newer ones, maybe half the staff gets digital cameras, whatever it takes to zero out that account before the end of the year. Your tax dollars at work.

Heard anyone talk about reforming this lately? I didn't think so. Political and media estimations of our attention spans won't allow such issues to be heard over accusations of draft dodging, resemblance to Hitler and other non-sensical "sound bites". Tune out TV, or go on a CSPAN only diet for a few weeks and get informed. Do the country a favor.

In a fighter, where literally every GRAM of weight matters.... making a toilet seat LIGHT is important.

In the aforementioned hammer, a regular ballpeen hammer from the hardware store would detonate the highly explosive armor it was being used on, and most likely kill the user.

Etc.

Etc.

Etc.

Off the shelf components work for some things, but the military has and always has had different needs and priorities from the civilian sector. Addtionally, filling those needs frequently requires custom fabrication, in small quantities. This is always more expensive than the mass produced products that are found on the civilian market.

hotdamn! Does a fighter jet have a toilet?! lol. Most probably not.

I can see a toilet in a transport plane or a cargo plane but not a fighter.

Other than that, good points Corwin.

Yeah, I would think that you would "go" before you took off, right? I never asked a fighter pilot if there is a built in toilet, that's too silly for even I to imagine.

Although I guess if there's an autopilot that could take over, and enough room to move a little...maybe there could be some kind of special seat that opens up and...

nevermind.

Actually yes, they do. It's built into the seat.

What exactly are they going to do? Go outside? They can be in those things for hours.

I was kind of afraid I'd read a response like that here.

Kind of an ugly image.

Does it get stored, or does it get "bombed" out of the plane onto the enemy forces? That would make a GREAT WMD!