> Though part of it is the usual finance trick, moving capex to opex. They'd probably pay less if they just bought them. But finance guys just loooove reducing

> Though part of it is the usual finance trick, moving capex to opex. They'd probably pay less if they just bought them. But finance guys just loooove reducing capex. Years ago I worked for a state university where senior management was doing the mirror image trick - they weren’t able to get any more money for opex but plenty of money for capex. So they padded out all these projects with contractors, such that our project’s budget was paying 100% of the contractor’s hours but only actually getting 50% of them, and they spent the other 50% doing day-to-day “keeping the lights on” stuff. I suppose public sector finance can have very different fundamentals from private sector.