13 ms·

The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

102 points by ctoth 3y ago

NotYourLawyer 3y ago
Not surprised. So many stories about an organization doing something that’s evidently crazy turn out to be bullshit. The truth is always more nuanced than what gets reported. People are (almost) never as incompetent/crazy/malicious as it might seem on a cursory review.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  The truth is always more complicated and boring than the viral meme.
  - rdl 3y ago
    The "color of money" thing was so obnoxious when I was contracting in Iraq. They could easily spent essentially unlimited amounts for certain kinds of things which weren't needed, but then couldn't pay for other things (with less than a 6-24mo process to get new funds). I understand the fraud/misappropriation that would happen without such systems, it was very cumbersome. And due to "anti-deficiency act", it was illegal to just pay for it out of pocket and give them stuff for free, too.
- Carioca 3y ago
  Reminds me a lot of the million-dollar space pen vs pencil story
  - sam_goody 3y ago
    I understood that anecdote to be true. Fisher spent $1M (of "then" money) creating a "space pen", capitalized on the unique opportunity and publicity, and went from a startup to a $60M company. They knew that the astronauts could use a pencil, but that wouldn't be very profitable for them. For Fisher, it was a capitalist triumph, and symbolized American values. For the U.S.S.R. it symbolized U.S. wastefulness, and was portrayed in a negative light. For the media, if they can portray something as terrible, they will. It sells papers. So that is kind of a capitalist triumph as well. In the end, it turned out to be dangerous to use pencils in space (graphite turns into a floating flammable dust while writing), so eventually both the Soviets and the Americans bought space pens. Which was great, as Fisher recouped about $1K just from NASA! More importantly, that marketing ploy may have saved the entire spacecraft - the law of unintended consequences!
    - logdap 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure regular ballpoint pens work just fine in space. Try writing with one upsidedown in earth gravity; they work fine.
      - hgsgm 3y ago
        They don't work well.
      - Robotbeat 3y ago
        They actually don’t. They work fine for a few words then the ink fades out and is basically gone after the fifth or sixth word. I just tried (go ahead and try it yourself, I used just a regular Bic pen). A similar thing occurs when writing on a vertical surface. Pens also do poorly when cold. Space pens use a pressurized ink cartridge that works independent of orientation and works when hot or cold. They’re cheap. It’d be dumb to NOT use a space pen on a mission now. Before the pressurized ink cartridge of the space pen was invented, they used grease pencils. Actually, the space pen is an example of successful private invention inspired by and then applied to and utilized by NASA.
    - Carioca 3y ago
      The first version I heard went through a long diatribe on how “the US” (implying NASA) spent a long time and a million dollars creating a pen that would work in space and the punchline was “Well, the Soviets just used a pencil”. Glad to see that this version has been losing ground to better retellings. If you check the Wiki article[1], the urban legend is mentioned 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen
    - gpm 3y ago
      The anecdote usually isn't "a private company invested a million of their own dollars into making a 'space pen'", it's "NASA invested a million dollars into making a space pen, while the soviets just used a pencil". And I mean, you clearly know that version isn't true. As you say, fisher only recouped $1k from NASA (I think was just the original order, I believe they're still used today), and the soviets also switched over to the pen (incidentally at the same price, $2.39/pen). You say "eventually", but the soviets only took a year to switch. And while we're at it, NASA used pencils before the space pen just like the soviets did, which makes the "while the soviets did something else" part even less true. > that marketing ploy may have saved the entire spacecraft - the law of unintended consequences I'm reasonably confident that "avoiding flammable substances that tends to give off flammable flakes (graphite)" was an intended consequence, not an unintended one.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  The hot coffee lawsuit is the first thing I think of here. Heck even the name is like… whew.
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    I guess "the dangerously hot coffee that fused a customer's labia" does not have the same punch when trying to argue for tort reform.
    - logdap 3y ago
      That's a myth within a myth. The coffee was industry standard temperature, they still serve coffee that hot today (Wikipedia says as much.) The lawsuit was justified though, because the cup design was defective. It shouldn't have collapsed like it did.
      - fishtoaster 3y ago
        That doesn't seem to match what's in wikipedia: > Liebeck's attorneys argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. The attorneys presented evidence that coffee they had tested all over the city was served at a temperature at least 20 °F (11 °C) lower than McDonald's coffee. Reading through wikipedia's discussion of the trial and verdict, it sounds like the case hinged entirely on the temperature of the coffee being unusually high, and not the cup design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
        emodendroket 3y ago
        It's strange that despite the research showing that most customers intend to consume the coffee immediately and despite this lawsuit and, apparently, others, McDonald's and other establishments continue to serve coffee at such a high temperature. Every time I buy a hot drink (admittedly, not that often) I can't actually drink it for several minutes.
- oatmeal1 3y ago
  I mean we have a trillion dollar fighter which is still dangerous for pilots. The small things are overblown and the big things even when they hit the news don't get appreciated.
  - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
    >trillion dollar fighter Whut
    - oatmeal1 3y ago
      [dead]
unreal37 3y ago
The so-called "real" explanation of the $600 hammer doesn't make the story any better. The hammer did indeed cost $435. If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435. Just because the extra $420 was "R&D expense" for something else, doesn't make the hammer any cheaper. Even in the most charitable explanation, this makes it impossible to know the real cost of anything. If the contractor can lump all sorts of charges into the cost of the hammer (for unrelated projects), it's a way of hiding the true cost of anything. I've worked for companies where they took money meant for one thing, and used it for something else. "Can you record your hours on this project under this different expense code?" This stops them from going over budget and having to explain to the client, but takes the money from another project of that client instead. The $435 hammer sounds like that. They didn't have R&D budget, but they had a hammer budget. Let's spend the $100,000 hammer budget. About 20 years ago, a friend of mine worked on a contract for the Department of Defense in IT. He told me that he was making $1500 per day, and for the first few weeks, the government didn't have a computer for him. So he sat at a desk, reading "printed manuals" waiting for a computer to arrive. For weeks. Making $1500 per day. The truth is worse than a $600 hammer.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  Wowza, he made 360K a year working for the DoD 20 years ago? Sure hope he was smart with the money, you could use that to really jump start your life early
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Yeah I don’t think this story is a silver bullet for “government doesn’t overspend!” That the author seems to imply
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  > the contractor would have charged them an extra $435. R&D expenses are one time costs, they're not charged multiple times. An extra hammer would have cost $15.
  - unreal37 3y ago
OrvalWintermute 3y ago
There is truth to the uniqueness of certain requirements driving up expenses. When you want a specific toilet seat component https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-air-forces-10000-toilet-cover/2018/07/14/c33d325a-85df-11e8-8f6c-46cb43e3f306_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-... made to very some specific specs with a unit quantity of 1-3 with no inhouse production capability, and you need to reverse-engineer the existing one to make the new one, create a model, test it, research the initial design specs upon which it was based, etc., you're going to pay through the nose for it. Now, if you can 3d print it but have already done all the upfront work and have a great 3d design that has been tested, then you may be able to print it cheaply, but legacy military & aerospace designs may not even exist in CAD designs.
neonate 3y ago
https://archive.ph/xadxb https://archive.ph/xadxb http://web.archive.org/web/20230517204259/https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-600-hammer/5271/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230517204259/https://www.govexe...
arh68 3y ago
The "myth" is quite real, e.g. the $1,000+ coffee cup [1] https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/22/battle-over-air-forces-1300-coffee-cups-heats-up/ https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/22...
- OrvalWintermute 3y ago
  This is not a conventional coffee cup. It is a cup that plugs into the electrical outputs on a military airplane. The more that the DoD stands up 3d printing, the less these kind of things will be an issue, particularly once they start doing more 3d printing in metal.
  - tourgen 3y ago
    [dead]
  - zhobbs 3y ago
    The manufacturing process isn’t the issue, it’s the layers of contractors, subcontractors, and lack of accountability.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    What do you think is special about it? It plugs into an outlet, like every other kettle, and the government keeps paying for manufacturing defects.
  - enkid 3y ago
    I'm not sure 3d printing is going to help that much. Getting something tested and certified for flight seems like a much bigger cost than manufacturing in this instance.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  It seems like a key factor is: > Wilson told Grassley that this cup is specially manufactured to plug into aircraft systems, and because it connects to the aircraft, the replacements need to be certified as airworthy by the FAA. I'm actually curious what goes into certifying the airworthiness of a heated coffee cup. Could faulty wiring in it legitimately damage the plane's power systems or something? Or cause interference of some kind?
itake 3y ago
A rumor I heard during my internship where I ran MIL-S-901D experiments was that the government spec'd a very specific type of hammer from a supplier to perform this test. The supplier went out of business, but the spec still required the old hammer. So the cost for just hitting an object with a hammer jumped to $4k+ since there were so few compliant hammers on the market.
sam_goody 3y ago
<OT> A plumber once showed me his $805 wrench. It cost him $5 on AliExpress, and in the middle of his tightening a bolt with all his weight, it split into two and one half hit him in his tooth. The co-pay for the tooth implant was $800, hence his "$805 wrench" and a moral not be cheap on your tools.
- systems_glitch 3y ago
  The first time you get to drill and extract a stripped fastener on-site because you had a cheap tool in your box really ought to be the last day you spend on cheap tools! I'd imagine a personal injury would really reinforce that sentiment.
  - pxmpxm 3y ago
    But harbor freight has all those deals though!
    - systems_glitch 3y ago
      And now you've got a hardened screw extractor broken off inside your stripped out fastener :D
      - pxmpxm 3y ago
        Ha, someone else has shopped there before! "More-hardened hardened screw extractor-extractor $3.99 this weekend only!"
        systems_glitch 3y ago
        "Why are we EDMing out a $4 tool?" "Because it's stuck in a $60K casting."
- m463 3y ago
  My friend showed me his $700 jacket once (a long time ago). It was given to him while gambling in atlantic city, when he lost $700.
einpoklum 3y ago
The kind of justifications we read in the article is how things got to the point they are now. Just last year, the DoD failed yet another audit: https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3740921-defense-department-fails-another-audit-but-makes-progress/ https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3740921-defense-departmen... "After 1,600 auditors combed through DOD’s $3.5 trillion in assets and $3.7 trillion in liabilities, officials found that the department couldn’t account for about 61 percent of its assets, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord told reporters on Tuesday." So, what a military establishment tool might present as the exigencies of dealing with federal accounting is actually a wedge of Swiss cheese with holes so large, that I shudder to think what those military-cum-intelligence-industrial-complex types have snuck in through them.
Throw73849 3y ago
[flagged]
- NegativeK 3y ago
  That's both illogical reactionism and false.
koobock 3y ago
What about the $2,043 nut that turns in both popular directions (clockwise AND counterclockwise)? https://www.amazon.com/Pentagon-Catalog-Ordinary-Products-Extraordinary/dp/0894800361 https://www.amazon.com/Pentagon-Catalog-Ordinary-Products-Ex...
- pests 3y ago
  What are the unpopular directions?
  - csours 3y ago
    Anti-spinward
- kstenerud 3y ago
  Complete with a 1-star review that sounds oddly familiar: "Author managed 60 pages of crap with no understanding of the government's accounting methods, which is under ambitious, I think. If you're just making it up, you should be able to get a solid 200-300 pages."
treeman79 3y ago
My dad was in purchasing for various aircraft manufacturers, including McDonnell Douglas and Boeing. It was literally his job to try and keep this nonsense under control. It was extremely frequent that the engineers would request some screw with hyper specific requirements and would end up costing dozens of dollars or so per screw. Even more for the specialized tooling that would go with it. From his perspective, the engineers loved designing new things rather than looking up, if anything previously existed. So he would try and take the requirements and see if there was some off-the-shelf substitution that would meet the requirements. Saved companies a fortune again and again.
- codeisawesome 3y ago
  This sounds rather familiar, in Software :)
  - roflyear 3y ago
    More software companies need this role. I tried to make this my role recently (with cloud services and whatever) and succeeded somewhat but not entirely.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    Very different in software. Many engineers can get away with spending many hours of their time on building software they need, but sure as heck can't unilaterally get the company to shell out a few hours worth of their salary buying the equivalent for them.
    - kmoser 3y ago
      The more relevant problem being alluded to by the parent of your post is that engineers would rather write their own code than find an existing library (which is more often than not free) that does the same thing.
throwaway743 3y ago
This happened at my last employer all the damn time. One time that employer charged the DSNY $500k-$700k to do a "site migration". I ended up doing 99% of the job (not exaggerating), having to remote into their old locked down windows server that runs their busted CMS by HP, and format the html and inline css for every page then paste into the new template. It was long (number of pages and slow as hell load times) and tedious, but easy as shit. Guess what I got as a raise. Jack shit, while they made out like bandits. My salary was 5 figures, they pulled the same shit with NYC Dept of Health right after that project, and once again I got stuck with it and didn't get a raise. Additionally, they internationally outsourced nearly every government project. I was the only dev there and they didn't want to hire any others, even though it seemed like a security risk and the shit we got in return was well... shit. Bitching aside, government should be more stingy with contractors, scrutinize them and every line item, and change how they handle budgets from a "if you don't spend it by fiscal end you don't get a budget increase or rollover, rather a decrease" approach to something more efficient.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
harry8 3y ago
Everything in a set of financial statements that the auditor refuses to sign off should be considered bullshit. So that would be the financial statements of every bit of pentagon funding, which will no doubt continue to increase. An assertion of a $600 hammer (or a $6 one) should be considered equally as a billion dollar unicorn in those financial statements. You don't have to like it. But you cannot trust any of it.
zippyman55 3y ago
I needed a stupid knob for a rotary switch. I would have loved to have gotten one at the local Radio Shack. No, I had to submit paperwork, and the minimum quantity the buyer would get was 25 I think. Anyway, it cost $225 in total. It still pisses me off.
m3kw9 3y ago
Just put LV on it
- passvagrsvcowrd 3y ago
  This
tafda 3y ago
Similar to hospital pricing Her screenshots, taken earlier this year, speak for themselves. What they show are price hikes ranging from 575% to 675% being automatically generated by the hospital’s software. The eye-popping increases are so routine, apparently, the software even displays the formula it uses to convert reasonable medical costs to billed amounts that are much, much higher. For example, one screenshot is for sutures — that is, medical thread, a.k.a. stitches. Scripps’ system put the basic “cost per unit” at $19.30. But the system said the “computed charge per unit” was $149.58. This is how much the patient and his or her insurer would be billed. The system helpfully included a formula for reaching this amount: “$149.58 = $19.30 + ($19.30 x 675%).” https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-12-10/column-healthcare-billing-markups https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-12-10/column-hea...
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  There's a slight difference here. In the Hammer case what's happening is the government is negotiating the totality of a deal, so yes there are expensive hammers, but there's cheap other stuff. The hammer isn't important, the total contract is. In the hospital case something much more nefarious is happening - the hospital negotiates discounts with the insurance companies, but in order to make money they inflate their costs in the first place so they can negotiate back down to a reasonable number with the insurance companies. Someone in an insurance company somewhere gets a good pat on the back for getting a great discount. But on the back side of this now if you don't have insurance the hospital is going to hit you with ridiculous costs forcing you to buy insurance. It's collusion between the hospital and the insurance company to screw the consumer.
wombatpm 3y ago
I worked for a small business that did work for the DOD. Our sales guy explained the rules of government contracting. Rule 1: get the money. The government is always talking about contracts that are coming. Rule 2: keep the money -the government is always looking for ways to charge back to your contract for things they need to do. Rule 3: get more money- use your current work to the inside track on future work. At the end of they day the contract is a fixed amount for a defined statement of work. How you get there is a shell game of billing hours, equipment, overhead and allowed profit. (Cost plus contracts are a different animal altogether)
brippalcharrid 3y ago
The bureaucracy- and accounting-related points of the article aside, though, the Department of Defense must regularly buy non-ferrous, non-sparking hammers with list prices of more than $600 (adjusted for inflation).
r3trohack3r 3y ago
A few years ago my buddy worked construction on a military project. Every morning he’d wake up before sunrise and drive 3 hours out into the middle of no where to work what looked like a gulag. They ran huge capacity wires out to no where. They’d build a structure, tear it down, and build it again 20 feet to the left. They did this for months. Then he was fired for no reason. It seemed common knowledge that they rotated contractors like that and it wasn’t a long term gig. The uncharitable explanation is that this is a massive exercise in fraud funneling tax dollars into someone’s friend’s pocket. The charitable explanation is that there are 14 or so other sites doing exactly the same thing, with the same numbers on the books, and the same raw materials being shipped in. And at one of those other sites is an actual base they’re trying to keep secret.
- roflyear 3y ago
  The truth is somewhere in the middle - there are bidding systems to avoid issues, but there's also calling up your buddy and saying "everyone else bid $nnnk, if you bid $nnnk-$999 you'll win it." Etc.. almost every system can be gamed.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    That wouldn't explain why someone would pay to build a structure, tear it down, build the same thing again 20 feet away, over and over.
    - roflyear 3y ago
      Could be a lot of things. Maybe they were testing something.
black_13 3y ago
[dead]
mberning 3y ago
Anyone that ever worked for a sufficiently large organization knows that $600 hammers are common, and in the grand scheme of things, one of the smallest grifts possible. I don't want to call it "corruption", but the scale of "questionable waste" within large enterprises and goverment agencies is absolutely breathtaking.
- kmoser 3y ago
  When I worked a company that regularly purchased computers and office supplies from large vendors, the prices were significantly higher than what we could get them for by going down the block to the local chain store.
ergonaught 3y ago
Haven't read the story. Have actual, first-hand, real-world experience of US government architects repeatedly putting high end and very expensive faucets/fixtures/etc into housing projects, which where immediately torn out and pawned/re-sold/etc. Usual explanation, when offered, was the typical "Budget is $X, and if we don't spend at least $X, they reduce the budget next round, so we spend every dollar and request an increase."

102 points by ctoth 3y ago

Not surprised. So many stories about an organization doing something that’s evidently crazy turn out to be bullshit. The truth is always more nuanced than what gets reported. People are (almost) never as incompetent/crazy/malicious as it might seem on a cursory review.

HPsquared 3y ago
The truth is always more complicated and boring than the viral meme.
- rdl 3y ago
  The "color of money" thing was so obnoxious when I was contracting in Iraq. They could easily spent essentially unlimited amounts for certain kinds of things which weren't needed, but then couldn't pay for other things (with less than a 6-24mo process to get new funds). I understand the fraud/misappropriation that would happen without such systems, it was very cumbersome. And due to "anti-deficiency act", it was illegal to just pay for it out of pocket and give them stuff for free, too.
Carioca 3y ago
Reminds me a lot of the million-dollar space pen vs pencil story
- sam_goody 3y ago
  I understood that anecdote to be true. Fisher spent $1M (of "then" money) creating a "space pen", capitalized on the unique opportunity and publicity, and went from a startup to a $60M company. They knew that the astronauts could use a pencil, but that wouldn't be very profitable for them. For Fisher, it was a capitalist triumph, and symbolized American values. For the U.S.S.R. it symbolized U.S. wastefulness, and was portrayed in a negative light. For the media, if they can portray something as terrible, they will. It sells papers. So that is kind of a capitalist triumph as well. In the end, it turned out to be dangerous to use pencils in space (graphite turns into a floating flammable dust while writing), so eventually both the Soviets and the Americans bought space pens. Which was great, as Fisher recouped about $1K just from NASA! More importantly, that marketing ploy may have saved the entire spacecraft - the law of unintended consequences!
  - logdap 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure regular ballpoint pens work just fine in space. Try writing with one upsidedown in earth gravity; they work fine.
    - hgsgm 3y ago
      They don't work well.
    - Robotbeat 3y ago
      They actually don’t. They work fine for a few words then the ink fades out and is basically gone after the fifth or sixth word. I just tried (go ahead and try it yourself, I used just a regular Bic pen). A similar thing occurs when writing on a vertical surface. Pens also do poorly when cold. Space pens use a pressurized ink cartridge that works independent of orientation and works when hot or cold. They’re cheap. It’d be dumb to NOT use a space pen on a mission now. Before the pressurized ink cartridge of the space pen was invented, they used grease pencils. Actually, the space pen is an example of successful private invention inspired by and then applied to and utilized by NASA.
  - Carioca 3y ago
    The first version I heard went through a long diatribe on how “the US” (implying NASA) spent a long time and a million dollars creating a pen that would work in space and the punchline was “Well, the Soviets just used a pencil”. Glad to see that this version has been losing ground to better retellings. If you check the Wiki article[1], the urban legend is mentioned 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen
  - gpm 3y ago
    The anecdote usually isn't "a private company invested a million of their own dollars into making a 'space pen'", it's "NASA invested a million dollars into making a space pen, while the soviets just used a pencil". And I mean, you clearly know that version isn't true. As you say, fisher only recouped $1k from NASA (I think was just the original order, I believe they're still used today), and the soviets also switched over to the pen (incidentally at the same price, $2.39/pen). You say "eventually", but the soviets only took a year to switch. And while we're at it, NASA used pencils before the space pen just like the soviets did, which makes the "while the soviets did something else" part even less true. > that marketing ploy may have saved the entire spacecraft - the law of unintended consequences I'm reasonably confident that "avoiding flammable substances that tends to give off flammable flakes (graphite)" was an intended consequence, not an unintended one.
steveklabnik 3y ago
The hot coffee lawsuit is the first thing I think of here. Heck even the name is like… whew.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  I guess "the dangerously hot coffee that fused a customer's labia" does not have the same punch when trying to argue for tort reform.
  - logdap 3y ago
    That's a myth within a myth. The coffee was industry standard temperature, they still serve coffee that hot today (Wikipedia says as much.) The lawsuit was justified though, because the cup design was defective. It shouldn't have collapsed like it did.
    - fishtoaster 3y ago
      That doesn't seem to match what's in wikipedia: > Liebeck's attorneys argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. The attorneys presented evidence that coffee they had tested all over the city was served at a temperature at least 20 °F (11 °C) lower than McDonald's coffee. Reading through wikipedia's discussion of the trial and verdict, it sounds like the case hinged entirely on the temperature of the coffee being unusually high, and not the cup design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
      - emodendroket 3y ago
        It's strange that despite the research showing that most customers intend to consume the coffee immediately and despite this lawsuit and, apparently, others, McDonald's and other establishments continue to serve coffee at such a high temperature. Every time I buy a hot drink (admittedly, not that often) I can't actually drink it for several minutes.
oatmeal1 3y ago
I mean we have a trillion dollar fighter which is still dangerous for pilots. The small things are overblown and the big things even when they hit the news don't get appreciated.
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  >trillion dollar fighter Whut
  - oatmeal1 3y ago
    [dead]

unreal37 3y ago

The so-called "real" explanation of the $600 hammer doesn't make the story any better. The hammer did indeed cost $435. If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435. Just because the extra $420 was "R&D expense" for something else, doesn't make the hammer any cheaper. Even in the most charitable explanation, this makes it impossible to know the real cost of anything. If the contractor can lump all sorts of charges into the cost of the hammer (for unrelated projects), it's a way of hiding the true cost of anything. I've worked for companies where they took money meant for one thing, and used it for something else. "Can you record your hours on this project under this different expense code?" This stops them from going over budget and having to explain to the client, but takes the money from another project of that client instead. The $435 hammer sounds like that. They didn't have R&D budget, but they had a hammer budget. Let's spend the $100,000 hammer budget. About 20 years ago, a friend of mine worked on a contract for the Department of Defense in IT. He told me that he was making $1500 per day, and for the first few weeks, the government didn't have a computer for him. So he sat at a desk, reading "printed manuals" waiting for a computer to arrive. For weeks. Making $1500 per day. The truth is worse than a $600 hammer.

no_wizard 3y ago
Wowza, he made 360K a year working for the DoD 20 years ago? Sure hope he was smart with the money, you could use that to really jump start your life early
asynchronous 3y ago
Yeah I don’t think this story is a silver bullet for “government doesn’t overspend!” That the author seems to imply
bryanlarsen 3y ago
> the contractor would have charged them an extra $435. R&D expenses are one time costs, they're not charged multiple times. An extra hammer would have cost $15.
- unreal37 3y ago

OrvalWintermute 3y ago

There is truth to the uniqueness of certain requirements driving up expenses. When you want a specific toilet seat component https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-air-forces-10000-toilet-cover/2018/07/14/c33d325a-85df-11e8-8f6c-46cb43e3f306_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-... made to very some specific specs with a unit quantity of 1-3 with no inhouse production capability, and you need to reverse-engineer the existing one to make the new one, create a model, test it, research the initial design specs upon which it was based, etc., you're going to pay through the nose for it. Now, if you can 3d print it but have already done all the upfront work and have a great 3d design that has been tested, then you may be able to print it cheaply, but legacy military & aerospace designs may not even exist in CAD designs.

neonate 3y ago

https://archive.ph/xadxb https://archive.ph/xadxb http://web.archive.org/web/20230517204259/https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-600-hammer/5271/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230517204259/https://www.govexe...

arh68 3y ago

The "myth" is quite real, e.g. the $1,000+ coffee cup [1] https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/22/battle-over-air-forces-1300-coffee-cups-heats-up/ https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/22...

OrvalWintermute 3y ago
This is not a conventional coffee cup. It is a cup that plugs into the electrical outputs on a military airplane. The more that the DoD stands up 3d printing, the less these kind of things will be an issue, particularly once they start doing more 3d printing in metal.
- tourgen 3y ago
  [dead]
- zhobbs 3y ago
  The manufacturing process isn’t the issue, it’s the layers of contractors, subcontractors, and lack of accountability.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- hgsgm 3y ago
  What do you think is special about it? It plugs into an outlet, like every other kettle, and the government keeps paying for manufacturing defects.
- enkid 3y ago
  I'm not sure 3d printing is going to help that much. Getting something tested and certified for flight seems like a much bigger cost than manufacturing in this instance.
crazygringo 3y ago
It seems like a key factor is: > Wilson told Grassley that this cup is specially manufactured to plug into aircraft systems, and because it connects to the aircraft, the replacements need to be certified as airworthy by the FAA. I'm actually curious what goes into certifying the airworthiness of a heated coffee cup. Could faulty wiring in it legitimately damage the plane's power systems or something? Or cause interference of some kind?

itake 3y ago

A rumor I heard during my internship where I ran MIL-S-901D experiments was that the government spec'd a very specific type of hammer from a supplier to perform this test. The supplier went out of business, but the spec still required the old hammer. So the cost for just hitting an object with a hammer jumped to $4k+ since there were so few compliant hammers on the market.

sam_goody 3y ago

<OT> A plumber once showed me his $805 wrench. It cost him $5 on AliExpress, and in the middle of his tightening a bolt with all his weight, it split into two and one half hit him in his tooth. The co-pay for the tooth implant was $800, hence his "$805 wrench" and a moral not be cheap on your tools.

systems_glitch 3y ago
The first time you get to drill and extract a stripped fastener on-site because you had a cheap tool in your box really ought to be the last day you spend on cheap tools! I'd imagine a personal injury would really reinforce that sentiment.
- pxmpxm 3y ago
  But harbor freight has all those deals though!
  - systems_glitch 3y ago
    And now you've got a hardened screw extractor broken off inside your stripped out fastener :D
    - pxmpxm 3y ago
      Ha, someone else has shopped there before! "More-hardened hardened screw extractor-extractor $3.99 this weekend only!"
      - systems_glitch 3y ago
        "Why are we EDMing out a $4 tool?" "Because it's stuck in a $60K casting."
m463 3y ago
My friend showed me his $700 jacket once (a long time ago). It was given to him while gambling in atlantic city, when he lost $700.

einpoklum 3y ago

The kind of justifications we read in the article is how things got to the point they are now. Just last year, the DoD failed yet another audit: https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3740921-defense-department-fails-another-audit-but-makes-progress/ https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3740921-defense-departmen... "After 1,600 auditors combed through DOD’s $3.5 trillion in assets and $3.7 trillion in liabilities, officials found that the department couldn’t account for about 61 percent of its assets, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord told reporters on Tuesday." So, what a military establishment tool might present as the exigencies of dealing with federal accounting is actually a wedge of Swiss cheese with holes so large, that I shudder to think what those military-cum-intelligence-industrial-complex types have snuck in through them.

Throw73849 3y ago

[flagged]

NegativeK 3y ago
That's both illogical reactionism and false.

koobock 3y ago

What about the $2,043 nut that turns in both popular directions (clockwise AND counterclockwise)? https://www.amazon.com/Pentagon-Catalog-Ordinary-Products-Extraordinary/dp/0894800361 https://www.amazon.com/Pentagon-Catalog-Ordinary-Products-Ex...

pests 3y ago
What are the unpopular directions?
- csours 3y ago
  Anti-spinward
kstenerud 3y ago
Complete with a 1-star review that sounds oddly familiar: "Author managed 60 pages of crap with no understanding of the government's accounting methods, which is under ambitious, I think. If you're just making it up, you should be able to get a solid 200-300 pages."

treeman79 3y ago

My dad was in purchasing for various aircraft manufacturers, including McDonnell Douglas and Boeing. It was literally his job to try and keep this nonsense under control. It was extremely frequent that the engineers would request some screw with hyper specific requirements and would end up costing dozens of dollars or so per screw. Even more for the specialized tooling that would go with it. From his perspective, the engineers loved designing new things rather than looking up, if anything previously existed. So he would try and take the requirements and see if there was some off-the-shelf substitution that would meet the requirements. Saved companies a fortune again and again.

codeisawesome 3y ago
This sounds rather familiar, in Software :)
- roflyear 3y ago
  More software companies need this role. I tried to make this my role recently (with cloud services and whatever) and succeeded somewhat but not entirely.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  Very different in software. Many engineers can get away with spending many hours of their time on building software they need, but sure as heck can't unilaterally get the company to shell out a few hours worth of their salary buying the equivalent for them.
  - kmoser 3y ago
    The more relevant problem being alluded to by the parent of your post is that engineers would rather write their own code than find an existing library (which is more often than not free) that does the same thing.

throwaway743 3y ago

This happened at my last employer all the damn time. One time that employer charged the DSNY $500k-$700k to do a "site migration". I ended up doing 99% of the job (not exaggerating), having to remote into their old locked down windows server that runs their busted CMS by HP, and format the html and inline css for every page then paste into the new template. It was long (number of pages and slow as hell load times) and tedious, but easy as shit. Guess what I got as a raise. Jack shit, while they made out like bandits. My salary was 5 figures, they pulled the same shit with NYC Dept of Health right after that project, and once again I got stuck with it and didn't get a raise. Additionally, they internationally outsourced nearly every government project. I was the only dev there and they didn't want to hire any others, even though it seemed like a security risk and the shit we got in return was well... shit. Bitching aside, government should be more stingy with contractors, scrutinize them and every line item, and change how they handle budgets from a "if you don't spend it by fiscal end you don't get a budget increase or rollover, rather a decrease" approach to something more efficient.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

harry8 3y ago

Everything in a set of financial statements that the auditor refuses to sign off should be considered bullshit. So that would be the financial statements of every bit of pentagon funding, which will no doubt continue to increase. An assertion of a $600 hammer (or a $6 one) should be considered equally as a billion dollar unicorn in those financial statements. You don't have to like it. But you cannot trust any of it.

zippyman55 3y ago

I needed a stupid knob for a rotary switch. I would have loved to have gotten one at the local Radio Shack. No, I had to submit paperwork, and the minimum quantity the buyer would get was 25 I think. Anyway, it cost $225 in total. It still pisses me off.

m3kw9 3y ago

Just put LV on it

passvagrsvcowrd 3y ago
This

tafda 3y ago

Similar to hospital pricing Her screenshots, taken earlier this year, speak for themselves. What they show are price hikes ranging from 575% to 675% being automatically generated by the hospital’s software. The eye-popping increases are so routine, apparently, the software even displays the formula it uses to convert reasonable medical costs to billed amounts that are much, much higher. For example, one screenshot is for sutures — that is, medical thread, a.k.a. stitches. Scripps’ system put the basic “cost per unit” at $19.30. But the system said the “computed charge per unit” was $149.58. This is how much the patient and his or her insurer would be billed. The system helpfully included a formula for reaching this amount: “$149.58 = $19.30 + ($19.30 x 675%).” https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-12-10/column-healthcare-billing-markups https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-12-10/column-hea...

SilverBirch 3y ago
There's a slight difference here. In the Hammer case what's happening is the government is negotiating the totality of a deal, so yes there are expensive hammers, but there's cheap other stuff. The hammer isn't important, the total contract is. In the hospital case something much more nefarious is happening - the hospital negotiates discounts with the insurance companies, but in order to make money they inflate their costs in the first place so they can negotiate back down to a reasonable number with the insurance companies. Someone in an insurance company somewhere gets a good pat on the back for getting a great discount. But on the back side of this now if you don't have insurance the hospital is going to hit you with ridiculous costs forcing you to buy insurance. It's collusion between the hospital and the insurance company to screw the consumer.

wombatpm 3y ago

I worked for a small business that did work for the DOD. Our sales guy explained the rules of government contracting. Rule 1: get the money. The government is always talking about contracts that are coming. Rule 2: keep the money -the government is always looking for ways to charge back to your contract for things they need to do. Rule 3: get more money- use your current work to the inside track on future work. At the end of they day the contract is a fixed amount for a defined statement of work. How you get there is a shell game of billing hours, equipment, overhead and allowed profit. (Cost plus contracts are a different animal altogether)

brippalcharrid 3y ago

The bureaucracy- and accounting-related points of the article aside, though, the Department of Defense must regularly buy non-ferrous, non-sparking hammers with list prices of more than $600 (adjusted for inflation).

r3trohack3r 3y ago

A few years ago my buddy worked construction on a military project. Every morning he’d wake up before sunrise and drive 3 hours out into the middle of no where to work what looked like a gulag. They ran huge capacity wires out to no where. They’d build a structure, tear it down, and build it again 20 feet to the left. They did this for months. Then he was fired for no reason. It seemed common knowledge that they rotated contractors like that and it wasn’t a long term gig. The uncharitable explanation is that this is a massive exercise in fraud funneling tax dollars into someone’s friend’s pocket. The charitable explanation is that there are 14 or so other sites doing exactly the same thing, with the same numbers on the books, and the same raw materials being shipped in. And at one of those other sites is an actual base they’re trying to keep secret.

roflyear 3y ago
The truth is somewhere in the middle - there are bidding systems to avoid issues, but there's also calling up your buddy and saying "everyone else bid $nnnk, if you bid $nnnk-$999 you'll win it." Etc.. almost every system can be gamed.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  That wouldn't explain why someone would pay to build a structure, tear it down, build the same thing again 20 feet away, over and over.
  - roflyear 3y ago
    Could be a lot of things. Maybe they were testing something.

black_13 3y ago

[dead]

mberning 3y ago

Anyone that ever worked for a sufficiently large organization knows that $600 hammers are common, and in the grand scheme of things, one of the smallest grifts possible. I don't want to call it "corruption", but the scale of "questionable waste" within large enterprises and goverment agencies is absolutely breathtaking.

kmoser 3y ago
When I worked a company that regularly purchased computers and office supplies from large vendors, the prices were significantly higher than what we could get them for by going down the block to the local chain store.

ergonaught 3y ago

Haven't read the story. Have actual, first-hand, real-world experience of US government architects repeatedly putting high end and very expensive faucets/fixtures/etc into housing projects, which where immediately torn out and pawned/re-sold/etc. Usual explanation, when offered, was the typical "Budget is $X, and if we don't spend at least $X, they reduce the budget next round, so we spend every dollar and request an increase."