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I worked with a Federal Contractor once (you, as a rule, have to go through a middleman to work with US Govt, and that's where most of the profit ends up). Thei
by m0zg 5y ago
I worked with a Federal Contractor once (you, as a rule, have to go through a middleman to work with US Govt, and that's where most of the profit ends up). Their requirement was that we use their hardware in their datacenter to do our work and never move data out of there. So they asked us for configs. I priced it out, it came to something like $120K in total, sent them the specs. They tore it up and bought $1.2M worth of hardware instead. Insane CPUs, maxed out RAM, Infiniband, you name it. We didn't need any of that. Literally 10x the price. Ever since then I have extra bad taste in my mouth when filing my taxes, and I know for a fact that merely passing money through the government makes most of it disappear into a black hole.
- hooande 5y agoThe tax dollars didn't completely disappear. They were used to pay you and hundreds of thousands of others
- m0zg 5y agoThis is the classical "broken window fallacy", for which there are multiple convincing refutations. I'm sure you can find them yourself. But besides that, wouldn't you want most of your tax money spent on the things it is purportedly spent on (setting aside even whether spending it on those things makes sense in the first place, which is something we the people have zero control over), without leaving most of it in the pockets of whoever owns the federal contractor?