It is strange how much apologia there is for Boeing in this thread. Why does it have to be somehow the government’s fault or somehow reflective of the actual cost to make the dispensers? Why should Boeing get the benefit of the doubt, especially given their complete failures on their fixed price contracts (Starliner, Air Force One, KC-46 tanker)? They’re so unable to control costs they’re talking about never taking fixed price contracts ever again. Given those failures, it seems safe to assume they’re screwing taxpayers on their cost plus contracts.
> complete failures on their fixed price contracts
In fact, Boeing has stated they will no longer bid for fixed price contracts at all. They are institutionally incapable of making money by simply selling a product to the government for a price agreed to up front. Other companies can, but Boeing cannot. It's a rotten company.
Cost-plus contracts should be emergency measures for wartime only. They should be illegal otherwise. They hurt our country, not just by getting the government scammed by greedy corporations, but also by ruining companies like Boeing that should otherwise be competent and valuable assets to the country.
The international man of mystery would like a word. Those tactical soap dispensers can be a great defense against tactical shoes. Can’t put a price on that.
> "Whoops I made $600 from something that cost me $10"
I've written about this here some time ago - you don't pay for the soap dispenser or trash bin itself, you pay for the paperwork showing that it is safe to install this trash bin, soap dispenser or whatnot into this specific model of aircraft or spacecraft, and you pay for the paperwork that details the entire life of every tiny little piece used to manufacture that component. For flight-critical parts, IIRC that goes as far as to documenting the specific lot of the iron ore that was used to make the metal sheets, so in the event of something cropping up where something got fucked up in the mine or the smelter, you can recall every single part that could be affected. And there's lots of testing (and associated waste) at each part of the step.
Anything that goes into an airplane or spacecraft has ridiculous rules attached to it... rules that were literally written in blood. Aerospace is amongst the safest ways of transportation because of decades of crashes and learning from each and every single one.
Your average Home Depot soap dispenser has none of that, if it breaks it breaks.
Shouldn't risk factor into the equation? If your soap dispenser breaks, yeah that sucks and it's maybe a little gross, but you can just replace it with you land. I struggle to imagine what rule about soap dispensers was written in blood.
Surely there's a more cost-effective happy medium somewhere between "just buy the Home Depot 2-for-1 special" and "we ran a background check on the guy who mined the metal"
Mmmm, this ignores the cause of Boeing's recent failings.
If a piece of military hardware or software fails, one or two or a dozen people die... if they can't eject.
If a piece of civilian hardware or software fails, hundreds of people die. Witness the 737 Max.
The breakdown of the barrier between the military and commercial sides of Boeing has resulted in a catastrophic reduction in quality on the civilian side. So overcharging for soap dispensers on the military side is far more egregious than overcharging for them on the civilian side, because the stakes are actually lower.
I'd actually disagree there. The stakes for military aircraft are higher - assume Russia or China sends a nuclear bomb equipped squad on their merry way to Alaska.
If even one of the US planes has an issue taking it out of the fight, the Russian bomber squad may succeed, dropping a nuke and killing tens of thousands of people.
> If your soap dispenser breaks, yeah that sucks and it's maybe a little gross, but you can just replace it with you land. I struggle to imagine what rule about soap dispensers was written in blood.
The very second you start making an exception because "a soap dispenser is trivial", other stuff will get labeled as exempt (or treated as such), eventually there will be no one knowing what is exempt and what is not, and someone will treat something as exempt that clearly shouldn't have been exempt, causing an incident.
In aircraft and spacecraft design and manufacture, the rule is "safety by design". Treating everything as "needs to be certified by default" is fail-safe, it eliminates entire classes of incident causes.
If there is to be any continuity to the process of aircraft saftey,that adheres to the pricipals learner from aircraft accident investigation, then there must be a lesson learned from the debaucle of $600 soap dispensers,and a way to do better.I think it quite likely that said dispenser and many other components can be
3D printed in metalurgicaly perfect titainium and then subject to NDT ,while saving weight and money.
One of ? the most important lesson learned in aviation to date, is that weight is the enemy, the other is simplicity, : if its not there, it costs nothing, and cant break.
To sum up, simplicate and add lightness.
Any resistance to that is indicative of other problems.
> I think it quite likely that said dispenser and many other components can be 3D printed in metalurgicaly perfect titainium and then subject to NDT ,while saving weight and money.
You'd still need to pay for the certification and audit trail paperwork, and in addition you'd take a part that has already been certified and replace it by a new one that would need to undergo the same certification requirement.
> weight is the enemy, the other is simplicity, : if its not there, it costs nothing, and cant break
Indeed but then you get crews taking their own soaps because they (think they) need to have soap aboard, store them wherever it is convenient for them, and the soap bar then gets loose and flies during the cockpit during a mission because no one thought about securing the soap as it isn't on any checklist.
That is also the reason why even brand new airplanes rolling off the factory line still have ashtrays in lavatories despite smoking being banned for decades now. They account for some dumbass thinking they do need to smoke and better they drop the cigarette in the ashtray (because that's what people do naturally) when the fire alarm goes off, than they dump it in the trash bin, causing the cigarette to set the trash alight and causing a bigger issue.
That is "fail-safe by design". Even if it adds 100 grams per plane to have that ashtray and a bit of work for the attendants to check if it needs to be cleaned out and for the pilots and maintenance crew a bit of work in the MEL check, it is still worth it over losing an aircraft due to a trash bin fire (and yes, that still happens, see the source for this quote!):
> As with just about everything on a plane, it's about safety. "They're there so if someone were to break the rules, they would dispose of the cigarette in the ashtray as opposed to, say, a trash bin full of flammables," says Robert Antolin, chief operating officer at App in the Air. [1]
If what you're saying were the real reason, that soap dispensers from Boeing cost more because of paperwork, then Boeing should be able to calculate what it will cost to do all the paperwork and offer a fixed price up-front that allows them to make a reasonable profit after all that paperwork is paid for. In fact, they cannot. Or they refuse to. Either one, Boeing is rotten.
This is a soap dispenser though. That's not a safety critical component, the soap dispenser breaking isn't going to cause a plane to fall out of the sky, or the weapons system to accidentally go off, it's just a thing for dispensing soap.
> That's not a safety critical component, the soap dispenser breaking isn't going to cause a plane to fall out of the sky
Depends on the failure mode. Assume the screws with which the soap dispenser is installed are spec'd to wrong torque and the installation causes stress fractures as a result that end up propagating through the aircraft...
Yes it sounds far-fetched, but aircrafts have crashed due to microfractures caused by improper torques on other components...
If you say “cost overrun” 3 times in a row, Elon Musk will appear to install the soap dispenser from Home Depo himself, insult some people and then only charge half what Boeing did. The first time it is used in flight it will explode because as it wasn’t rated for pressure, blinding the pilot and leading to the loss of the aircraft. Musk insults trans people before losing interest in the whole thing, and trump assigns RFK Jr to dismantle “big hygiene”.
Yeah nah, paperwork doesn't cost 8000%. Not to mention Boeing is the one (via massive bribes paid to FAA bosses who are usually "ex"-employees) who gets those regulations written to ensure no other party can bid for $600 soap dispensers.
Having someone who goes through a list and cross-references the price of every screw and soap dispenser against the market rate to ensure they're not being scammed incurs a huge cost. Especially since the US government is buying billions of various supplies every year.
A better solution than hiring people to watch for literal scams is to simply not scam people and hold them liable when they're found to have done so.
Your logic is the same as thieves who say, "It's not my fault that I stole their wallet. They should've put it in a slash-proof backpack and locked it with a combination lock that isn't easily picked." Sure, some degree of security and caution is good. But not defending criminal behavior is better.
20 years ago, Boeing had a good reputation. Now it's known as a company that'll pick your pockets and kill you. Quite a downfall.
Fair enough, but I was referencing people taking a Boeing exec’s claim that somehow regulations cause military soap dispensers to cost that much at face value.
> I assume you talk about the government here?
No. Read the whole sentence. I’m referencing Boeing and the tens of billions Boeing has lost on fixed price contracts.
The US has 222 C-17 Aircraft. A single C-17 costs over $300 million.
If you ask Boeing for soap dispenser parts for these, what should they cost? Boeing charged $149,072 for the dispensers. That's $671 per plane. Is that too much?
If you had to make these dispensers, make sure they conform to rules for aircraft parts and Air Force parts, provide formal responses to bids, etc., how much could you make them for?
It seems high to me. The article says 8000%, which is less than $10 per plane. So while it seems high, it's definitely not 8000% high.
Can you imagine even being a one-man shop making 222 bespoke soap dispensers to some absurd spec AND jumping through all the documentation hoops that are required for only $150k? I wouldn't take that job. Sounds awful.
The first year you learn how hard it is, you spend 80% of your time on compliance documentation and 80% of your budget on tooling. You still don't have a satisfactory product or a mastery of filling out the forms. It drags on into the second year, you're living on ramen but eventually deliver it (if there's one thing the government procurement process is tolerant of, it's delays) and get paid.
The third year you take on a additional contract, for 200 toilet flushes or whatever. New manufacturing challenges, but at least you're getting the paperwork down.
After a few more jobs, you've cracked it. You start bidding for all the military's bathroom-related contracts. At five or six contracts a year, you have a million or two rolling in (and low manufacturing costs - remember, the spec is such that you can produce it for 80x lower) and you've hired five employees.
By year five, the only thing you care about improving is sales. You still have 5 machine shop staff, paid well but not enough to make them wealthy. You focus on hiring ex-military brass and making them sales reps and lobbyists. You're into tens of millions of revenue, that is, profit.
Year 8, you sell the thing to Northrop or to a private equity firm and go retire on an island.
If you can pull it off as a worker-owned co-op (and don't ruin it in year 8, but keep on working at the scale you want), that's a really nice business.
Though you might want to also take on some non-government contracts, both to keep everyone busy in between government contract demands on their roles, and to reduce the risk of having "only one customer".
I wonder what's special enough for this to be different from certified aviation grade equipment? It'd be nice it they could either make a bunch of a design (usefully) for the military to fulfill mil-spec, or if they could take an existing design and just make it in a mil-spec compliant way.
Boeing could have specced some weird stuff on the dispenser, just to make it harder to get elsewhere. Things like impact resistance, yield strength in a fire, or counter-rotating threads to prevent it shaking out.
Yeah. People who haven't done manufacturing may laugh, but depending on how many custom parts there are you could easily spend most or all of that $150K just on the molds/tooling.
Now, like you said... the root cause here is probably some absurd spec that prevents them from using some existing commercial soap dispenser whose costs have already been amortized.
Then again, maybe the spec isn't absurd. The C-17 may need to fly in contested airspace. Maybe damage control is a concern. Maybe they can't use commercial soap dispensers because they're plastic and they don't want the plane to fill up with toxic fumes from burning plastic. That is a random guess. I have no idea.
You also can't just drill a couple of holes wherever to mount it and you don't want it turning to a missile if the plane has to do any aggressive maneuvering.
tbh the only solution to the problem is to spend the $250,000 it would probably cost in tooling etc and fill the Boeing ~1,000 order and sell another 99,000 to the public. At $10 each and without paying yourself anything you would probably just about break even.
I think that isolating their relationship to a single transaction like this is disingenuous. Our government pays this company many billions per year. They likely or should have had extra of these laying around for replacements. It’s not unreasonable to expect them to charge a reasonable amount for everything.
But for some reason Boeing continually gets away with being Boeing for some reason.
I mean it doesn't cost $157K it costs $671. They ordered a couple hundred of them.
This one from CB2 is $40 and it doesn't conform to FAA rules and it's not MIL-SPEC. [1]
I suspect if I wanted a limited run of soap dispensers, I was only willing to buy 300 made-to-order, tested and conformant to niche military specifications and aviation specifications, I'd probably end up paying a decent chunk more than CB2.
How much does the entertainment system in your car cost vs an iPad? Is that a rip-off, or is it a niche, custom part that has to be made from automotive grade components?
How much does the soap dispenser cost in a 777 bathroom? That's the real point of comparison, not CB2.
> How much does the entertainment system in your car cost vs an iPad? Is that a rip-off, or is it a niche, custom part that has to be made from automotive grade components?
You can't say it's a niche part when the item is being manufactured in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. Car companies reuse components between models and sometimes even between brands.
And that's without mentioning that the average 7-8" screen or CPU in a car's entertainment system isn't a custom made part, they are bought at bulk from other manufacturers that produce (tens of) millions of units per year.
You can find entertainment system replacements for most cars that cost a fraction of what the car manufacturer charges consumers.
I struggle to see how a mass-produced, way more expensive (for the customer), lower-quality product isn't simply a rip-off.
I did, yes, lol. I mean the most expensive one on sale at CB2 which is kind of a mid-range home furnishings store. I'm confident I can find a soap dispenser that costs more than $671 for home use, though.
[edit] Here you go, just under $845. I present you the Labrazel Discus Brown Pump Dispenser available at Nieman's. Only $77 per month thanks to the magic of Affirm. Good news is thanks to Black Friday you get a $125 gift card. Still not MIL-SPEC though.
> The finest natural materials and the most exceptional quality of craftsmanship converge at Labrazel due to a singular focus—the design and creation of luxury accessories for the bath
It’s $150k for 222 dispensers, not just one. At $671 it’s overpriced but depending on what custom spec they had, maybe not by a whole lot. I’m imagining the metal soap dispensers in airline bathrooms maybe with some additional military specs.
> What about designing the plane to use a common soap dispenser that doesnt cost $150k?
Which one? Whichever you pick you need to stock that exact same one for the next 50 to 100 years. By the time you finish exactly defining it, you are back where you started.
(Also it's not 150k each - that's the price for the entire fleet.)
They apparently aren't really any different from the sort you see in public restrooms and those are so cheap the supply companies give them to you for free when you buy a case of soap.
The issue is the outmoded and excessively specific system of procurement used by the US Military - one more or less mandated by congress.
We can chose to alter how we procure, but there are good reasons why the system is as it is, so a careful effort to understand why it is like it is before we reform must be undertaken.
Congress does not stop the US military from "keeping a database of historical prices, obtaining supplier quotes or identifying commercially similar parts."
Those procedures do not happen because generals retire into cushy barely-show jobs at defense contractors
Congress does not dare force the US military to do any of the above because the US military is a giant pork barrel welfare program for red states, especially the midwestern ones, feeding them endless useless manufacturing work and keeping all their unskilled-labor high school graduates out of unemployment - sending them into the military where they learn some semblance of how to be an adult and some skills
> "We are reviewing the report, which appears to be based on an inapt comparison of the prices paid for parts that meet aircraft and contract specifications and designs versus basic commercial items that would not be qualified or approved for use on the C-17," the Boeing spokesperson sought to explain in a statement.
I was thinking that it would make sense in future contracts to try to define a class of parts that are allowed to be 'unapproved' by the manufacturer and still be used, but then I tried to think of what all those parts would be and it doesn't seem like it would be that large of a list of items. I wonder if the juice isn't worth the squeeze to try to prevent this. What a strange world.
"The Inspector General also noted it could not determine if the Air Force paid a fair price on $22 million of spare parts because the service did not keep a database of historical prices, obtain supplier quotes or identify commercially similar parts."
There's no excuse for this. There should be a watchdog group in the federal government, staffed with people who make .01% commission on every dollar of waste they find and eliminate on shit like this.
Based on the ole' joke about outfitting custom planes, "If you want to do anything to a plane... /anything/..., it's 250. New coffee machine? 250k. Rotate the sofa? 250k." -- $149,072 for a soap dispenser might well be a screaming deal.
Would like to know the numbers built and how different from a regular airline soap dispenser. If you ask any manufacturer to build something custom made with unusual specs and you buy only 5 pieces, you will get pretty steep quotes vs the nearest approximation on amazon.
> “The Air Force needs to establish and implement more effective internal controls to help prevent overpaying for spare parts for the remainder of this contract, which continues through 2031,” said Inspector General Robert Storch.
I wonder if these egregious examples of expenses are due to lack of controls or intentional corruption.
I had assumed that they were there to hide costs for things that would not bear scrutiny but that still needed to be paid for. Not just speaking expenses for ex generals, but also supplies provided for operations that many of us would be horrified to find out about.
Considering the things the US funds in the open, even when doing so directly violates US human rights law, I shudder to think what would be covered up.
Well the thing to note here is that "grift" is a count noun. (Their definitions as verbs is not what's relevant here!) You can't say "grift is occurring here"; you can say "a grift is occuring here". Meanwhile, "graft", in the sense of the abuse of an office for personal gain, is a mass noun. Perhaps the commenter's mistake was leaving out an article rather than using the wrong word? The latter seems more likely to me, however.
No, it's not. "Grift" is a count noun. You can't say "grift is occurring here"; you can say "a grift is occuring here", or "grifts are occurring here", but not just "grift is occurring here". Meanwhile, "graft", in the sense of the abuse of an office for personal gain, is a mass noun and can be used this way. Perhaps the commenter's mistake was leaving out an article rather than using the wrong word? The latter seems more likely to me, however.
> „The US military the mightiest fighting force at the time fell in one swoop when the president and command staff all died dud to the unwashed hands of a marine preparing the burgers on Airforce One.“
- Encylopedia Galactica 2424
One can make ridiculous arguments about both values and costs if one goes to extremes. It is instructive to study actual modern warfare. Sophisticated weapons only matter if there is a sufficient number. Meat attacks only work if weapons are of sufficient quality. Neither is one of the extremes.
I thought the deal with all these things is that the unit prices on items don't mean anything, and that they tend to be a negotiated total price (for whatever DoD is buying --- not "soap dispensers" but like "the entire C-17 program for FY2024") that's just weirdly spread over everything, so you end up spending like $15/screw, but everyone knows the actual game.
Percentage values in the range of thousands are somewhat pointless. A usual factor, not normalized to 1/100, would be a better fit, but would probably not make such a catchy headline.
It's fraud. Both on the part of Boeing and on the part of whoever in government approved that.
800x markup doesn't just happen. You can sneak 10% or 20% surcharge but 800x is so obvious that it's only possible because everyone involved is in on the grift.
It's not a surprise to anyone at the Air Force, they just been getting away with this for so long that they don't even care to hide it. The corruption has been normalized.
Which is why Democrat's obsession with rising taxes and the "pay your fair share" rhetoric pisses me off so much.
Let's start by eliminating 800x waste, 100x waste, 20x waste, 10x waste, 5x waste, 2x waste from government spending and then let's how much money we need to run government. I suspect it would be much less than what US currently takes in taxes.
Yes, but how are you going to get that cushy job in the industry once you retire from your government position if you start acting "tough" on too-big-to-fail companies?
Them revolving doors need to keep turning to line your own bank account.
"an inapt comparison of the prices paid for parts that meet military specifications and designs versus basic commercial items that would not be qualified or approved for use on the C-17"
This is the problem--the government heavily regulates (which the big contractors encourage) all the parts and suppliers until Boeing becomes the sole-source supplier and can charge arbitrary prices. There is a reason for it at times, i.e. to answer does someone die if this part fails or can we just stock a few spares? But obviously many many things being vastly over-specced most of the time.
> But obviously many many things being vastly over-specced most of the time.
And sometimes they are appropriately specced.... for 1951, and no-one bothered to update the spec. They just ask for more of part 46-18432, please, and since the spec becomes more and more outdated, it becomes harder and more expensive to provide a part to that spec.
$600+ is excessive if you are not familiar with the cost of airplane parts and accessories. Add to that cost of compliance (done by humans, the most expensive aviation accessory) and you get that number.
Excuse the potential tin-foil hat but this be "cooking the books" to mask other purchases that are not suppose to be public eg. secret/top secret projects? 8000% seems obscene even for government billing...
It is strange how much apologia there is for Boeing in this thread. Why does it have to be somehow the government’s fault or somehow reflective of the actual cost to make the dispensers? Why should Boeing get the benefit of the doubt, especially given their complete failures on their fixed price contracts (Starliner, Air Force One, KC-46 tanker)? They’re so unable to control costs they’re talking about never taking fixed price contracts ever again. Given those failures, it seems safe to assume they’re screwing taxpayers on their cost plus contracts.
It’s always really frustrating when the facts of a specific situation don’t conform to our preconceived notions and biases.
> complete failures on their fixed price contracts
In fact, Boeing has stated they will no longer bid for fixed price contracts at all. They are institutionally incapable of making money by simply selling a product to the government for a price agreed to up front. Other companies can, but Boeing cannot. It's a rotten company.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/boeing-says-it-cant-ma...
Cost-plus contracts should be emergency measures for wartime only. They should be illegal otherwise. They hurt our country, not just by getting the government scammed by greedy corporations, but also by ruining companies like Boeing that should otherwise be competent and valuable assets to the country.
It's strange how much some people are assuming this is as a result of a mistake or incompetence instead of simple corruption.
"Whoops I made $600 from something that cost me $10"
True. That’s really a bridge too far for people who believe a Boeing executive who says tactical soap dispensers really do cost $700.
The international man of mystery would like a word. Those tactical soap dispensers can be a great defense against tactical shoes. Can’t put a price on that.
> "Whoops I made $600 from something that cost me $10"
I've written about this here some time ago - you don't pay for the soap dispenser or trash bin itself, you pay for the paperwork showing that it is safe to install this trash bin, soap dispenser or whatnot into this specific model of aircraft or spacecraft, and you pay for the paperwork that details the entire life of every tiny little piece used to manufacture that component. For flight-critical parts, IIRC that goes as far as to documenting the specific lot of the iron ore that was used to make the metal sheets, so in the event of something cropping up where something got fucked up in the mine or the smelter, you can recall every single part that could be affected. And there's lots of testing (and associated waste) at each part of the step.
Anything that goes into an airplane or spacecraft has ridiculous rules attached to it... rules that were literally written in blood. Aerospace is amongst the safest ways of transportation because of decades of crashes and learning from each and every single one.
Your average Home Depot soap dispenser has none of that, if it breaks it breaks.
Shouldn't risk factor into the equation? If your soap dispenser breaks, yeah that sucks and it's maybe a little gross, but you can just replace it with you land. I struggle to imagine what rule about soap dispensers was written in blood.
Surely there's a more cost-effective happy medium somewhere between "just buy the Home Depot 2-for-1 special" and "we ran a background check on the guy who mined the metal"
Mmmm, this ignores the cause of Boeing's recent failings.
If a piece of military hardware or software fails, one or two or a dozen people die... if they can't eject.
If a piece of civilian hardware or software fails, hundreds of people die. Witness the 737 Max.
The breakdown of the barrier between the military and commercial sides of Boeing has resulted in a catastrophic reduction in quality on the civilian side. So overcharging for soap dispensers on the military side is far more egregious than overcharging for them on the civilian side, because the stakes are actually lower.
> because the stakes are actually lower.
I'd actually disagree there. The stakes for military aircraft are higher - assume Russia or China sends a nuclear bomb equipped squad on their merry way to Alaska.
If even one of the US planes has an issue taking it out of the fight, the Russian bomber squad may succeed, dropping a nuke and killing tens of thousands of people.
> If your soap dispenser breaks, yeah that sucks and it's maybe a little gross, but you can just replace it with you land. I struggle to imagine what rule about soap dispensers was written in blood.
The very second you start making an exception because "a soap dispenser is trivial", other stuff will get labeled as exempt (or treated as such), eventually there will be no one knowing what is exempt and what is not, and someone will treat something as exempt that clearly shouldn't have been exempt, causing an incident.
In aircraft and spacecraft design and manufacture, the rule is "safety by design". Treating everything as "needs to be certified by default" is fail-safe, it eliminates entire classes of incident causes.
If there is to be any continuity to the process of aircraft saftey,that adheres to the pricipals learner from aircraft accident investigation, then there must be a lesson learned from the debaucle of $600 soap dispensers,and a way to do better.I think it quite likely that said dispenser and many other components can be 3D printed in metalurgicaly perfect titainium and then subject to NDT ,while saving weight and money. One of ? the most important lesson learned in aviation to date, is that weight is the enemy, the other is simplicity, : if its not there, it costs nothing, and cant break. To sum up, simplicate and add lightness. Any resistance to that is indicative of other problems.
> I think it quite likely that said dispenser and many other components can be 3D printed in metalurgicaly perfect titainium and then subject to NDT ,while saving weight and money.
You'd still need to pay for the certification and audit trail paperwork, and in addition you'd take a part that has already been certified and replace it by a new one that would need to undergo the same certification requirement.
> weight is the enemy, the other is simplicity, : if its not there, it costs nothing, and cant break
Indeed but then you get crews taking their own soaps because they (think they) need to have soap aboard, store them wherever it is convenient for them, and the soap bar then gets loose and flies during the cockpit during a mission because no one thought about securing the soap as it isn't on any checklist.
That is also the reason why even brand new airplanes rolling off the factory line still have ashtrays in lavatories despite smoking being banned for decades now. They account for some dumbass thinking they do need to smoke and better they drop the cigarette in the ashtray (because that's what people do naturally) when the fire alarm goes off, than they dump it in the trash bin, causing the cigarette to set the trash alight and causing a bigger issue.
That is "fail-safe by design". Even if it adds 100 grams per plane to have that ashtray and a bit of work for the attendants to check if it needs to be cleaned out and for the pilots and maintenance crew a bit of work in the MEL check, it is still worth it over losing an aircraft due to a trash bin fire (and yes, that still happens, see the source for this quote!):
> As with just about everything on a plane, it's about safety. "They're there so if someone were to break the rules, they would dispose of the cigarette in the ashtray as opposed to, say, a trash bin full of flammables," says Robert Antolin, chief operating officer at App in the Air. [1]
[1] https://www.travelandleisure.com/why-airplanes-have-ashtrays...
If what you're saying were the real reason, that soap dispensers from Boeing cost more because of paperwork, then Boeing should be able to calculate what it will cost to do all the paperwork and offer a fixed price up-front that allows them to make a reasonable profit after all that paperwork is paid for. In fact, they cannot. Or they refuse to. Either one, Boeing is rotten.
This is a soap dispenser though. That's not a safety critical component, the soap dispenser breaking isn't going to cause a plane to fall out of the sky, or the weapons system to accidentally go off, it's just a thing for dispensing soap.
> That's not a safety critical component, the soap dispenser breaking isn't going to cause a plane to fall out of the sky
Depends on the failure mode. Assume the screws with which the soap dispenser is installed are spec'd to wrong torque and the installation causes stress fractures as a result that end up propagating through the aircraft...
Yes it sounds far-fetched, but aircrafts have crashed due to microfractures caused by improper torques on other components...
How to tell a "real honest paperwork" apart from a money laundering scheme pretending to be justified by some opaque rules in a monopolized domain?
> literally written in blood
Where can we see this literal blood writings?
If you say “cost overrun” 3 times in a row, Elon Musk will appear to install the soap dispenser from Home Depo himself, insult some people and then only charge half what Boeing did. The first time it is used in flight it will explode because as it wasn’t rated for pressure, blinding the pilot and leading to the loss of the aircraft. Musk insults trans people before losing interest in the whole thing, and trump assigns RFK Jr to dismantle “big hygiene”.
Yeah nah, paperwork doesn't cost 8000%. Not to mention Boeing is the one (via massive bribes paid to FAA bosses who are usually "ex"-employees) who gets those regulations written to ensure no other party can bid for $600 soap dispensers.
> Why does it have to be somehow the government’s fault
Because they bought it.
> They’re so unable to control costs
I assume you talk about the government here?
Having someone who goes through a list and cross-references the price of every screw and soap dispenser against the market rate to ensure they're not being scammed incurs a huge cost. Especially since the US government is buying billions of various supplies every year.
A better solution than hiring people to watch for literal scams is to simply not scam people and hold them liable when they're found to have done so.
Your logic is the same as thieves who say, "It's not my fault that I stole their wallet. They should've put it in a slash-proof backpack and locked it with a combination lock that isn't easily picked." Sure, some degree of security and caution is good. But not defending criminal behavior is better.
20 years ago, Boeing had a good reputation. Now it's known as a company that'll pick your pockets and kill you. Quite a downfall.
> Because they bought it.
Fair enough, but I was referencing people taking a Boeing exec’s claim that somehow regulations cause military soap dispensers to cost that much at face value.
> I assume you talk about the government here?
No. Read the whole sentence. I’m referencing Boeing and the tens of billions Boeing has lost on fixed price contracts.
> somehow regulations cause military soap dispensers to cost that much at face value
MILSPEC is a thing - but unless the soap dispenser involves electronics, I don't think that applies here.
(If someone had bought an IoT enabled soap dispenser for a military plane, that would have been their own stupidity.)
The US has 222 C-17 Aircraft. A single C-17 costs over $300 million.
If you ask Boeing for soap dispenser parts for these, what should they cost? Boeing charged $149,072 for the dispensers. That's $671 per plane. Is that too much?
If you had to make these dispensers, make sure they conform to rules for aircraft parts and Air Force parts, provide formal responses to bids, etc., how much could you make them for?
It seems high to me. The article says 8000%, which is less than $10 per plane. So while it seems high, it's definitely not 8000% high.
Can you imagine even being a one-man shop making 222 bespoke soap dispensers to some absurd spec AND jumping through all the documentation hoops that are required for only $150k? I wouldn't take that job. Sounds awful.
Sounds interesting!
The first year you learn how hard it is, you spend 80% of your time on compliance documentation and 80% of your budget on tooling. You still don't have a satisfactory product or a mastery of filling out the forms. It drags on into the second year, you're living on ramen but eventually deliver it (if there's one thing the government procurement process is tolerant of, it's delays) and get paid.
The third year you take on a additional contract, for 200 toilet flushes or whatever. New manufacturing challenges, but at least you're getting the paperwork down.
After a few more jobs, you've cracked it. You start bidding for all the military's bathroom-related contracts. At five or six contracts a year, you have a million or two rolling in (and low manufacturing costs - remember, the spec is such that you can produce it for 80x lower) and you've hired five employees.
By year five, the only thing you care about improving is sales. You still have 5 machine shop staff, paid well but not enough to make them wealthy. You focus on hiring ex-military brass and making them sales reps and lobbyists. You're into tens of millions of revenue, that is, profit.
Year 8, you sell the thing to Northrop or to a private equity firm and go retire on an island.
If you can pull it off as a worker-owned co-op (and don't ruin it in year 8, but keep on working at the scale you want), that's a really nice business.
Though you might want to also take on some non-government contracts, both to keep everyone busy in between government contract demands on their roles, and to reduce the risk of having "only one customer".
You also need to provide exact replacement parts for 50 years so you should probably make 666 of them just to be safe.
But you also get paid for those
I wonder what's special enough for this to be different from certified aviation grade equipment? It'd be nice it they could either make a bunch of a design (usefully) for the military to fulfill mil-spec, or if they could take an existing design and just make it in a mil-spec compliant way.
Boeing could have specced some weird stuff on the dispenser, just to make it harder to get elsewhere. Things like impact resistance, yield strength in a fire, or counter-rotating threads to prevent it shaking out.
Yeah. People who haven't done manufacturing may laugh, but depending on how many custom parts there are you could easily spend most or all of that $150K just on the molds/tooling.
Now, like you said... the root cause here is probably some absurd spec that prevents them from using some existing commercial soap dispenser whose costs have already been amortized.
Then again, maybe the spec isn't absurd. The C-17 may need to fly in contested airspace. Maybe damage control is a concern. Maybe they can't use commercial soap dispensers because they're plastic and they don't want the plane to fill up with toxic fumes from burning plastic. That is a random guess. I have no idea.
I couldn't find pictures of the soap dispenser, but here's apparently a urinal from some version of the Globemaster. I get the feeling these parts are kinda custom... https://www.flickr.com/photos/morganone/122375474/in/photost...
You probably also really don't want slippery floors at a critical (or any) time.
You also can't just drill a couple of holes wherever to mount it and you don't want it turning to a missile if the plane has to do any aggressive maneuvering.
Also, every material that goes into them needs to be tracked (with paperwork) since it was mined/smelted.
the article believes they should cost $10 though
They probably would if they were made in china, and sold in Walmart by the millions.
tbh the only solution to the problem is to spend the $250,000 it would probably cost in tooling etc and fill the Boeing ~1,000 order and sell another 99,000 to the public. At $10 each and without paying yourself anything you would probably just about break even.
I think that isolating their relationship to a single transaction like this is disingenuous. Our government pays this company many billions per year. They likely or should have had extra of these laying around for replacements. It’s not unreasonable to expect them to charge a reasonable amount for everything.
But for some reason Boeing continually gets away with being Boeing for some reason.
What about designing the plane to use a common soap dispenser that doesnt cost $150k?
Why not just use existing solutions like a soap dispenser that is found on common commercial passenger planes that Boeing already has and makes?
There is no world where a simple soap dispenser is $150k.
They seemingly design them like this so they can bilk the US government aka tax payers with these absurd prices for simple objects.
I mean it doesn't cost $157K it costs $671. They ordered a couple hundred of them.
This one from CB2 is $40 and it doesn't conform to FAA rules and it's not MIL-SPEC. [1]
I suspect if I wanted a limited run of soap dispensers, I was only willing to buy 300 made-to-order, tested and conformant to niche military specifications and aviation specifications, I'd probably end up paying a decent chunk more than CB2.
How much does the entertainment system in your car cost vs an iPad? Is that a rip-off, or is it a niche, custom part that has to be made from automotive grade components?
How much does the soap dispenser cost in a 777 bathroom? That's the real point of comparison, not CB2.
[1] https://www.cb2.com/ramsey-calacatta-gold-marble-soap-pump/s...
> How much does the entertainment system in your car cost vs an iPad? Is that a rip-off, or is it a niche, custom part that has to be made from automotive grade components?
You can't say it's a niche part when the item is being manufactured in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. Car companies reuse components between models and sometimes even between brands.
And that's without mentioning that the average 7-8" screen or CPU in a car's entertainment system isn't a custom made part, they are bought at bulk from other manufacturers that produce (tens of) millions of units per year.
You can find entertainment system replacements for most cars that cost a fraction of what the car manufacturer charges consumers.
I struggle to see how a mass-produced, way more expensive (for the customer), lower-quality product isn't simply a rip-off.
Your example is a marble soap dispenser. Did you go on Google and search for the most expensive one you could find?
I did, yes, lol. I mean the most expensive one on sale at CB2 which is kind of a mid-range home furnishings store. I'm confident I can find a soap dispenser that costs more than $671 for home use, though.
[edit] Here you go, just under $845. I present you the Labrazel Discus Brown Pump Dispenser available at Nieman's. Only $77 per month thanks to the magic of Affirm. Good news is thanks to Black Friday you get a $125 gift card. Still not MIL-SPEC though.
https://www.neimanmarcus.com/p/labrazel-discus-brown-pump-di...
> The finest natural materials and the most exceptional quality of craftsmanship converge at Labrazel due to a singular focus—the design and creation of luxury accessories for the bath
Maybe the Pentagon should check these guys out.
Also I assume they are still using regular soap refills for these things or are they?
It’s $150k for 222 dispensers, not just one. At $671 it’s overpriced but depending on what custom spec they had, maybe not by a whole lot. I’m imagining the metal soap dispensers in airline bathrooms maybe with some additional military specs.
> What about designing the plane to use a common soap dispenser that doesnt cost $150k?
Which one? Whichever you pick you need to stock that exact same one for the next 50 to 100 years. By the time you finish exactly defining it, you are back where you started.
(Also it's not 150k each - that's the price for the entire fleet.)
Whoever wrote the article has never had to replace a cup holder in their car.
They apparently aren't really any different from the sort you see in public restrooms and those are so cheap the supply companies give them to you for free when you buy a case of soap.
The issue is the outmoded and excessively specific system of procurement used by the US Military - one more or less mandated by congress.
We can chose to alter how we procure, but there are good reasons why the system is as it is, so a careful effort to understand why it is like it is before we reform must be undertaken.
Chesterton's Fence applies here for sure.
Congress does not stop the US military from "keeping a database of historical prices, obtaining supplier quotes or identifying commercially similar parts."
Those procedures do not happen because generals retire into cushy barely-show jobs at defense contractors
Congress does not dare force the US military to do any of the above because the US military is a giant pork barrel welfare program for red states, especially the midwestern ones, feeding them endless useless manufacturing work and keeping all their unskilled-labor high school graduates out of unemployment - sending them into the military where they learn some semblance of how to be an adult and some skills
You’ve got that backwards, at least in some instances. The military pretty regularly tells Congress it doesn’t want something and Congress keeps buying it to keep constituents happy: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/18/congress-agai...
You also wrong about where the money goes. It mostly goes to coastal states (and DC). The Midwest gets less money from those contracts than most states: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
The only free curriculum in a right wing world. Army or prison.
From https://www.cbsnews.com/news/air-force-overpaid-8000-percent...
> "We are reviewing the report, which appears to be based on an inapt comparison of the prices paid for parts that meet aircraft and contract specifications and designs versus basic commercial items that would not be qualified or approved for use on the C-17," the Boeing spokesperson sought to explain in a statement.
I was thinking that it would make sense in future contracts to try to define a class of parts that are allowed to be 'unapproved' by the manufacturer and still be used, but then I tried to think of what all those parts would be and it doesn't seem like it would be that large of a list of items. I wonder if the juice isn't worth the squeeze to try to prevent this. What a strange world.
Also in a military context it's probably worthwhile to heavily scrutinize your supply chains and nog just install soap dispensers from Amazon.
Only a few months ago we saw an example of a intelligence agency implanting and blowing up bombs in equipment
"The Inspector General also noted it could not determine if the Air Force paid a fair price on $22 million of spare parts because the service did not keep a database of historical prices, obtain supplier quotes or identify commercially similar parts."
There's no excuse for this. There should be a watchdog group in the federal government, staffed with people who make .01% commission on every dollar of waste they find and eliminate on shit like this.
Based on the ole' joke about outfitting custom planes, "If you want to do anything to a plane... /anything/..., it's 250. New coffee machine? 250k. Rotate the sofa? 250k." -- $149,072 for a soap dispenser might well be a screaming deal.
Would like to know the numbers built and how different from a regular airline soap dispenser. If you ask any manufacturer to build something custom made with unusual specs and you buy only 5 pieces, you will get pretty steep quotes vs the nearest approximation on amazon.
They just need to break down the invoice.
People love those stories.Filling out paperwork would be the line item that balloons costs.
Pumping up their dividends would be the line item that balloons costs.
> “The Air Force needs to establish and implement more effective internal controls to help prevent overpaying for spare parts for the remainder of this contract, which continues through 2031,” said Inspector General Robert Storch.
I wonder if these egregious examples of expenses are due to lack of controls or intentional corruption.
A fourth option would be "we want to keep Boeing in business, but can't offer direct subsidies per trade agreements"
I had assumed that they were there to hide costs for things that would not bear scrutiny but that still needed to be paid for. Not just speaking expenses for ex generals, but also supplies provided for operations that many of us would be horrified to find out about.
No the black budget is a line item in the overall budget. Very few things go into it: even advanced weapons will be separated line items outside it.
Considering the things the US funds in the open, even when doing so directly violates US human rights law, I shudder to think what would be covered up.
"I'm shocked--shocked!--that grift is occurring in this establishment!"
I have to point out here, I think the word you're looking for is "graft".
Both potentially apply, but it can be hard to prove which:
Well the thing to note here is that "grift" is a count noun. (Their definitions as verbs is not what's relevant here!) You can't say "grift is occurring here"; you can say "a grift is occuring here". Meanwhile, "graft", in the sense of the abuse of an office for personal gain, is a mass noun. Perhaps the commenter's mistake was leaving out an article rather than using the wrong word? The latter seems more likely to me, however.
> You can't say "grift is occurring here"
Sure you can; "grift" can be used as an abstract noun, much like "crime", e.g., "Crime is occurring here" vs. "A crime is occurring here".
No, it’s “grift”: https://www.wordnik.com/words/grift
No, it's not. "Grift" is a count noun. You can't say "grift is occurring here"; you can say "a grift is occuring here", or "grifts are occurring here", but not just "grift is occurring here". Meanwhile, "graft", in the sense of the abuse of an office for personal gain, is a mass noun and can be used this way. Perhaps the commenter's mistake was leaving out an article rather than using the wrong word? The latter seems more likely to me, however.
> „The US military the mightiest fighting force at the time fell in one swoop when the president and command staff all died dud to the unwashed hands of a marine preparing the burgers on Airforce One.“ - Encylopedia Galactica 2424
One can make ridiculous arguments about both values and costs if one goes to extremes. It is instructive to study actual modern warfare. Sophisticated weapons only matter if there is a sufficient number. Meat attacks only work if weapons are of sufficient quality. Neither is one of the extremes.
I thought the deal with all these things is that the unit prices on items don't mean anything, and that they tend to be a negotiated total price (for whatever DoD is buying --- not "soap dispensers" but like "the entire C-17 program for FY2024") that's just weirdly spread over everything, so you end up spending like $15/screw, but everyone knows the actual game.
Is that not what's happening here?
Maybe they are special dispensers that keep working in sudden and unplanned low pressure conditions?
And they stop working in high-pressure situations?
Percentage values in the range of thousands are somewhat pointless. A usual factor, not normalized to 1/100, would be a better fit, but would probably not make such a catchy headline.
"overcharged" is such an euphemism.
It's fraud. Both on the part of Boeing and on the part of whoever in government approved that.
800x markup doesn't just happen. You can sneak 10% or 20% surcharge but 800x is so obvious that it's only possible because everyone involved is in on the grift.
It's not a surprise to anyone at the Air Force, they just been getting away with this for so long that they don't even care to hide it. The corruption has been normalized.
Which is why Democrat's obsession with rising taxes and the "pay your fair share" rhetoric pisses me off so much.
Let's start by eliminating 800x waste, 100x waste, 20x waste, 10x waste, 5x waste, 2x waste from government spending and then let's how much money we need to run government. I suspect it would be much less than what US currently takes in taxes.
Yes, but how are you going to get that cushy job in the industry once you retire from your government position if you start acting "tough" on too-big-to-fail companies?
Them revolving doors need to keep turning to line your own bank account.
For clarity, a 8000% markup is 80x more expensive, not 800x.
Not denying that that still should be unacceptable on the buyer side, if you want to have any semblance of a functioning market.
> 800x markup doesn't just happen
Isn't it 80x? Title says 8000%
It all goes into the GDP I guess
"an inapt comparison of the prices paid for parts that meet military specifications and designs versus basic commercial items that would not be qualified or approved for use on the C-17"
This is the problem--the government heavily regulates (which the big contractors encourage) all the parts and suppliers until Boeing becomes the sole-source supplier and can charge arbitrary prices. There is a reason for it at times, i.e. to answer does someone die if this part fails or can we just stock a few spares? But obviously many many things being vastly over-specced most of the time.
> But obviously many many things being vastly over-specced most of the time.
And sometimes they are appropriately specced.... for 1951, and no-one bothered to update the spec. They just ask for more of part 46-18432, please, and since the spec becomes more and more outdated, it becomes harder and more expensive to provide a part to that spec.
$600+ is excessive if you are not familiar with the cost of airplane parts and accessories. Add to that cost of compliance (done by humans, the most expensive aviation accessory) and you get that number.
Well yeah, tactical soap dispensers do cost 8000% more than soap dispensers because they have tactical in the name
How much is the “overcharging” in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries?
I mean.. they are really nice soap dispensers.
Pix? I don't think Boeing ones are luxury branded ones, but I might be wrong.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/air-force-overpaid-8000-percent... has a picture and it's a pretty standard run of the mill pump dispenser.
That's interesting cause this reddit album[1] has this picture: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
[1] https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1al24h7 (images #9 and #10)
That looks like it might be a hand sanitizer that was added due to covid? My work has those command strip stuck all over the building.
It's possible the soap dispenser is to the left of the sink and just hidden by the angle.
Hey those were „military grade soap dispensers” those pesky reporters always twist the truth /s.
Anyone knows is just fallout from other investigations, like „hey let’s double check everything from Boeing just in case”.
[dead]
Excuse the potential tin-foil hat but this be "cooking the books" to mask other purchases that are not suppose to be public eg. secret/top secret projects? 8000% seems obscene even for government billing...