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.
> If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435.
This claim appears to contradict what the story says, as far as I can tell? He's the original:
> The military bought the hammer, Kelman explained, bundled into one bulk purchase of many different spare parts. But when the contractors allocated their engineering expenses among the individual spare parts on the list-a bookkeeping exercise that had no effect on the price the Pentagon paid overall-they simply treated every item the same. So the hammer, originally $15, picked up the same amount of research and development overhead-$420-as each of the highly technical components, recalled retired procurement official LeRoy Haugh. (Later news stories inflated the $435 figure to $600.)
> "The hammer got as much overhead as an engine," Kelman continued, despite the fact that the hammer cost much less than $420 to develop, and the engine cost much more-"but nobody ever said, 'What a great deal the government got on the engine!'"
So the bought an order containing a hammer, an engine, and some other stuff. There weren't itemized prices. So they divided the price evenly between everything in the box. Which is a silly way to do accounting. It's as if I bought a "woodworking kit" containing a hammer, a screwdriver and table saw for $900, and then I decided decided that meant the hammer cost $300.
I think a more accurate analogy is that if you bought those 3 items and they did have proper itemized cost, but the whole package also had a $500 shipping charge. And then it’s not obvious how to distribute the shipping cost across each item. And in both situations it’s probably better to itemize by itself, though maybe some system didn’t allow for non tangible costs like “R&D”
The excuse repeatedly here is that "it was easier/convenient (to merge it into a single line item)" or "its just an accounting artifact", as if that isn't a giant red flag all in itself. It's easy to ignore the $600... but if a hammer line-item could be 10x'd on vague R&D costs only the original accountant really understands... how is that better? That's a recipe for masking waste and never knowing why anything costs as much as it does, without expensive in-person interviews with the people involved.
Can't imagine what it's like trying to compete with companies engaging in this sort of practice. How could you possibly project costs? Why even bother? Just tell them it's a $1 hammer and make it up in R&D hidden away in "accounting artifacts".
Sometimes what's written on paperwork can be silly because it doesn't really matter and the cost to verify or correct stuff that is estimated costs more than an estimate. Other times it has to be more precise than is possible, so you have to figure out a good way to "estimate" it. Being inaccurate isn't always problem if the costs outweigh the benefits of being accurate.
I think there’s an important distinction. It may not add value to whomever is writing the itemized expense, but more accurate data could add value to someone else who needs it for accountability or uses it to benchmark future work. You have to assess the entire value stream.
I acknowledged in my comment that even if the most charitable explanation was assumed, the method of accounting is misleading and makes determining the cost of anything impossible.
How is that? If you buy an engine, do you itemize by: engine block, alternator, water pump and starter? You might include in the requirements that the engine must come with all 4 extra elements, but you will pay for the whole engine. Now, if someone wants to be misleading, they could say the water pump was 1/4 of the price...
If the total R&D cost for all items is split across every single product equally, there's no way to tell how much of the $435 hammer is R&D for the hammer. It's a really weird way to do accounting, almost like they just didn't keep track of how much R&D they did for each item. And that makes you wonder if the amount they are charging is even real in the first place. In general it lowers confidence and makes you think you're probably being ripped off (which, hey, is true).
The article is not quite clear why the contractor had to split the intangible goods cost to the tangible ones, but it does give a hint. Federal accounting is meant to prevent possibly corrupted overspending and that's why charging for intangible services is not allowed or made more difficult than charging for something tangible that can be measured and counted afterwards and compared to market prices.
So to me it sounds like this: you hired me to make a wall of bricks around your garden. I did it and presented you a bill: bricks 100$, mortar 20$, work 300$. Then you say I cannot charge for work as that's intangible and I have to restructure the bill by allocating the cost of work to the tangible objects. So instead of charging for work I split the cost of it by two and charge a bricklaying fee of 150$ divided by the number of bricks for each brick and another 150$ for mixing the mortar. Because I'm pissed off by your awkward and unpractical accounting requirements and not going to start figuring out more complex ways of dividing the cost between the materials, when everybody knows that it's the bricklaying that counts and not the bricks or mortar.
And that's how you get very expensive mortar or 600$ hammers.
> Federal accounting is meant to prevent possibly corrupted overspending and that's why charging for intangible services is not allowed or made more difficult than charging for something tangible that can be measured and counted afterwards and compared to market prices.
Right - so if contractors are doing an end run around those requirements by padding the prices of hammers or whatever, that's a problem.
But there is an additional problem when a congresscritter makes a big song and dance about the “$600 hammer” and uses it as an example of government waste instead of using it as an example of dubious accounting that could be used to hide waste but probably didn’t in this case. This article is about the mythical costs and how they have mundane explanations that don’t really support the song and dance.
I don't see a problem with a congressperson taking the accounting at face value and assuming it means what it says. Our accounting should be trustworthy.
It was purely a stunt for the congresscritter in question; they were not fooled into thinking that the hammer had really cost that much. If they had been honest, they would have talked about how the repair kit cost a lot of money, and tried to figure out if it had been worth it. Along the way they could have discussed the accounting fiction by which the cost of assembling the kits from bulk purchases of common tools such as hammers and screwdrivers had been baked into the prices of the items themselves. But since all they wanted was soundbites for television news shows to repeat over and over, the simpler and more emotional narrative was what worked best for them. They created the myth in order to profit from the outrage that it generated. Sound familiar?
If their point was to protest the poor accounting practices, calling attention to the more ridiculous consequences is a good way to do that.
Likewise, if their point was to protest potentially wasteful spending and fraud. Even if they couldn't be certain there was waste or fraud because of the lack of transparency in accounting, it's fair for them to call attention to the accounting practices by pointing out how they appear to imply waste and fraud.
You’re inventing good motives that didn’t exist. The hammer was merely a bad example of government waste. Government waste certainly exists, but this was a flawed example. The congresscritter found the flaw useful, nothing more.
> It was purely a stunt for the congresscritter in question; they were not fooled into thinking that the hammer had really cost that much.
As far as I can tell the hammer "really did" cost that much in every meaningful sense. The government's accounting said they'd paid $435 for a hammer and they didn't have a problem with that. Whether the government was getting ripped off by some dude buying a hammer at a hardware store for $10 and selling it for $435, or by some lab doing unbudgeted R&D and concealing the cost of it in the hammer invoice, is not really here nor there. It generated outrage because it really was outrageous.
No, it really wasn’t outrageous. It was bad accounting, but not an outrageous waste of money.
They were essentially building repair kits that could be shipped off to military bases and used to maintain particular pieces of equipment. The contractor bought the tools and spare parts in bulk, marshaled them all at some warehouse somewhere, and then broke down the bulk items into individual kits. A palette full of hammers got broken up so that each kit had exactly one hammer. The same has to happen for all of the other tools and items in the kit.
That’s a useful service and it is definitely worth paying money for. If you want a good example, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxBgTDpsUC0. You can see how this would be used: in the 1940s the army was setting up bases everywhere, and they all needed to communicate with each other. So obviously you ship out teletype machines, a repair kit or two, a pile of manuals, and a platoon of Signal Corps engineers to keep the teletypes in working order. The kit is mostly common tools, but if every base had to order every one of those items individually then it would be chaos. Logistics wins wars, and this is a very good example of how.
Then whoever did the bookkeeping recorded it as if they had purchased COTS items each with some normal price, instead of doing it as a contracted service with both material and labor costs. You see how one bookkeeping method can be used to generate outrage for political gain, while the other cannot? It was an entirely cynical manipulation on the part of the politician(s) in question.
> Then whoever did the bookkeeping recorded it as if they had purchased COTS items each with some normal price, instead of doing it as a contracted service with both material and labor costs.
OK, and why was that? Like, they were essentially embezzling this "R&D cost"; even if they were embezzling for the sake of buying useful military equipment, embezzling is still an outrage, I think rightly.
"Embezzlement is [...] where someone takes money or assets that were entrusted to them and uses them for a different purpose than for what they were intended." That would seem to apply just as much to spending funds on useful military equipment that's different from what they were allocated for as it does to spending them on blackjack and hookers. If the funds were being spent correctly then why would they be accounted for falsely?
> If the funds were being spent correctly then why would they be accounted for falsely?
How should I know? There’s never been any hint that the funds were spent on the wrong items. After all, the military has a rather large budget for spare parts and repair equipment, and Congress doesn’t micromanage how many hammers they are allowed to buy.
Most likely it was just an honest mistake. Someone used form P instead of form Q (or told the contractor to), and accounting didn’t notice. Indeed, if this were evidence of a crime I think the politician in question would have lead with that, rather than pointing it out as an example of government waste (which is bad but not generally criminal).
> There’s never been any hint that the funds were spent on the wrong items.
How would we ever know, if they can be incorrectly accounted for and no-one cares?
> Indeed, if this were evidence of a crime I think the politician in question would have lead with that, rather than pointing it out as an example of government waste (which is bad but not generally criminal).
Proving intent is a lot harder. If the government is overpaying its contractors... there's probably crime going on there too, but it'll be the nudge-wink kind that's very hard to prove. You funnel an overlarge contract to them, then a few years later after you've gone around the revolving door they funnel an overlarge contract to you. That's a crime, but it doesn't leave any evidence except, well, overly large expenditures in the accounts.
> How would we ever know, if they can be incorrectly accounted for and no-one cares?
I am saying that they purchased the correct items. We _can_ know that because there is an itemized list of items that they purchased.
> Proving intent is a lot harder. If the government is overpaying its contractors... there's probably crime going on there too, but it'll be the nudge-wink kind that's very hard to prove.
Don’t misunderstand, I never said that this wasn’t plausible. I just said that there’s no evidence of it. And if there had been evidence, ~30 years ago when this was a current event, the aforementioned politician would have mentioned it. Remember, this guy was looking for soundbites that would make himself look good. Finding government waste made him look good, but finding corruption would have been even better for him.
Worse, even the allegation that this was a wasteful purchase doesn’t really hold up either. A $435 hammer (or a $600) hammer makes for a great soundbite, and plenty of easy outrage from the average voter. But it hinges on nobody looking too closely, because the reality is that they just paid a contractor to purchase COTS parts and assemble them into repair kits. There’s nothing outrageous about that, once you get past the odd bookkeeping.
The most outrageous thing about it is that the politician relied on the “$600 hammer” story for years without much push–back from the media. The media in general should be much more skeptical of things that politicians say. They should check the facts independently, and they should report on the truth or falseness of the statements.
> I am saying that they purchased the correct items. We _can_ know that because there is an itemized list of items that they purchased.
The purchased items were purchased, but apparently a significant chunk of money allocated for purchasing them was instead diverted to this dubious "R&D charge". That's exactly what embezzlement would look like.
> Don’t misunderstand, I never said that this wasn’t plausible. I just said that there’s no evidence of it. And if there had been evidence, ~30 years ago when this was a current event, the aforementioned politician would have mentioned it. Remember, this guy was looking for soundbites that would make himself look good. Finding government waste made him look good, but finding corruption would have been even better for him.
As far as I'm concerned the bad accounting - and the fact that it wasn't corrected for years - is adequate evidence in itself. Yes, it's possible that it was merely monumental incompetence rather than wilfully inflating payments. But the most likely explanation is that it was corruption, of the normalized you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours kind that the participants probably don't even consciously think of as fraud any more.
> almost like they just didn't keep track of how much R&D they did for each item.
That’s often almost the whole point!
Tracking the R&D effort for each item in the repair kit would add an enormous amount of overhead and accomplish essentially nothing. The numbers will be wild guesses and you’re going to have to make tons of ad hoc decisions about allocation anyway. Suppose you tweak the design so it a part can be attached with a special pin rather than a screw and spend an hour testing it. What’s the “right” allocation of time to the pin, hammer, part, and screw (that you’ve eliminated)?
2. guesstimated additional cost of 'very hard to split X'.
So that people looking at the accounting many degrees of separation removed will still be able to understand which is which and the relative proportion.
> almost like they just didn't keep track of how much R&D they did for each item.
so what? Like another commenter has said, you bought the package, it's not your business how much each individual piece is actually worth. You pick the best bid and move on.
I cant help but think how hard it would have been to do that 60 years ago compared to today. It would not be all that challenging or expensive but it would be revealing.
The B2 bomber case isn't a precise analogy. The hammer really was purely an accounting phenomenon. It's not that the first hammer cost $600. The first hammer was part of a collection of goods, of a wide variety of different values, that were billed as a single line item... and this was resolved, from an accounting perspective, as each item cost $600. In reality, most of the items only cost a few dollars, but a few big ticket items skewed the average.
Think of it like you're buying a car, and you have the dealer add in a half-dozen options & extras, and then they bill you for all of them, as a package, as a single line item. If you then said the cost of each item in the package, including the car, was worth 1/7th the price you paid for the package, that would be the equivalent of what is going on here.
Unfortunately the military has now cottoned onto that trick with the F-35. Every time there's a budget overrun they just order another 100 planes so that "the price hasn't changed".
> The new moral is that numbers, taken as self-explanatory truths by the public and the press, can in fact be the woefully distorted products of a broken accounting system.
So it appears you're just in agreement with the OP that the accounting system is broken, while also being the exact same sort of victim of misunderstanding that the broken accounting fosters.
We don't even know if the system is broken. It's not clear whether this was common case or a one off instance that they didn't really have an appropriate form for.
Your main comment is literally untrue and contrary to the article, and pointing out a separate problem with telling what things cost doesn’t change that.
As a kind of sysadmin, I was fairly ready to go week 1 on most my projects. But in my erp space, developers and testers have to understand business, processes, functional aspects, etc. Whether specifics of clients payroll process or their finances or whatever. So "spend a week reading manuals" is normal. We call it "onboarding". And of course they're getting paid - they're not doing it for fun.
I am a contractor in a niche industry but a little downtime, of up to maybe 2-3 days at the start of a new project is enormously valuable as time to think deeply about the task before you have an overwhelming to-do list. Getting paid $1500 a day to read manuals is not at all surprising when I know people who have gotten almost that much to do little to nothing.
I don't follow. What's the context or meaning of put up or shut up? Did you reply to right thread or did I inadvertently misrepresent anything?
My point is that on all my projects for 25 years now, it's normal for many roles to need a significant amount of studying to become productive. That studying may involve project or client specific material such as design and architecture documents, functional specs, process and procedure documents, business overview, etc. On bigger projects there might be a part or full time training / L&K coordinator who would prepare and maintain training materials for new team members, create on boarding paths for roles etc.
I read on HN about developers who start coding week 1 and I'm always impressed and astonished but also puzzled - coding what? In ERP world all code satisfies a specific business purpose and a random outsider wouldn't understand business functionality to create or fix business code day 1. Is it actually our goal to be interchangeable cogs, knowing only technology stacks but nothing about business or functionality?
Either way, I don't understand what client shoild put up or shut up?
If they are indeed replying to you, I suspect they are coming from a freelance background where it’s sometimes beneficial to have a hard line in order to either get the project moving or drop the client (and move on to more serious ones)
Ah. If so I still think we don't understand each other.
It's not "we don't know what to do with you go read some books". It's "we have 80,000 time and labour business rules that are unique to our public sector organization and you should not code any business rules into our payroll system until you have a vague understanding of how we operate". That IS a serious client and a serious project and that study time IS serious. It's important. It's a success predictor. If you ignore it or are coxky and go "meh I've seen it all before " you'll make an expensive business error. Not necessarily a technical error, not a memory leak or suboptimal sql. But people will get paid wrong or your ledger will be wrong or another business impact.
Again, I may live in different it world than average active HN participant. But developers on my projects speak business to functional analysts. They understand payroll or Financials or hr or whatever in general, and also understand them in particular as it pertains to client. It's not wasted time or inefficiency. Not sure if I'm presenting my case well or persuading anybody - but I'm used to paying people to learn when they join projects, including senior niche experts :-)
The article even points out that an additional B2 Bomber would cost an additional 700 million not the reported cost of 2 billion. Including R&D costs makes sense in some situations, but not when buying one more.
"when the contractors allocated their engineering expenses among the individual spare parts on the list... they simply treated every item the same"
Sounds like an extra hammer would have cost an $15+$420=$435. Anyways, we'll never know.
I will say, the one thing I believe, is that the government had a bucket of money to spend on the project. Let's say it was $1 million. And the contractor was going to get all of it, all $1 million. Not a penny more and not a penny less.
And so you can't really trust the invoice is accurate except for the total being the budget available to spend.
If they needed 2 hammers then both hammers would have cost less. Thus rather than 2 * 435$ hammers + other junk you get 2 * 430$ hammers + other junk which is also 5$ cheaper (or whatever the actual number works out to.) Net result a total that’s 15$ higher and a different set of otherwise meaningless numbers.
> 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.
Seems like a whistleblower could put a stop to this, and get a hefty reward as well. It's a felony.
The same thing happens in the private sector (law firms, management consultants, etc) but there's little control over that.
Yes but most of the time in these things the hours billed are internal cost controls, not billed straight through to client. Eg, it's a fixed price contract. But sometimes you have to work more or less so you horsetrade between projects. Agree with you if billing time through, but usually this is pretty strictly tracked.
A lot of companies make you track hours to distinguish capital expenses from operational ones, I assume for a different tax treatment, which I don't think has only internal implications.
> The hammer did indeed cost $435. If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435.
What are you basing this on? If I buy a gaming console bundled with a game, you're saying that implies I have no other option to purchase the game separately? Is there a leap of logic here or did I miss something in the story?
Is this truth worse? I have a completely different reaction to your story.
There's a guy, who is a contractor (not an employee), who was hired to do work for the defense department. They hire and fire thousands per day. There needs to be a basic policy that guarantees a certain level of training and skill level, before you work on Defense for crying out loud. No one is going to spend days trying to figure out what you know and don't. Here's the training - some is easy, some you know, some is new to you. Get through it, then you start work.
This is the same with private companies. Whenever I switch the major vendor I work for, I have to get some certs, get some training, and most of the stuff I already know. Last time this happened a couple of years ago, I spent at least a month, just watching training videos and taking little quizzes at the end. This guarantees that before they send me to a customer, I have the base training for my role.
I already knew 95% of the stuff. I put the 2 hour videos on play muted, read the pdf a couple of times a day apart (30min of my real time), and passed the quiz at the end.
Your friend didn't have to watch useless watered down videos, and was just given the manuals. I wish I had those PDFs I read printed for me, but I didn't want to waste a whole tree worth of paper.
Yes, the training needed to get your baseline is part of your job. That's why people don't like it when they hire you and leave after a few months - because they have to pay you to certify your baseline skills those months.
No, you don't get paid less or more, depending on the type of work you are doing. If I have to come out to a DC and debug raw fiber channel dumps, or sit on the toilet at home and draw a visio - I get paid the same. You get paid per hour, not per type of task. That is literally every job that exists.
The $600 hammer is theft and billing fraud. Getting paid the same rate while the company certs you with training for your job, as you get paid for the rest of the job, is called employment.
That $1500/day contact with no computer for a week is an extreme case but paying people to do nothing because the environment its not ready is fairly typical for large companies/governments.
I have done many contracts like these and it went smoothly only once. I arrived first day in the morning, my contact came to meet me, gave me my badge, brought me to the IT department so I could pick up my laptop, on it was a post-it note with my identifiers, I then went to a desk that was cleared for me. An hour later, I was at work. Usually, I consider myself lucky to get to that point in a day. So normal and yet so rare, as if these companies like to pay people for nothing.
In Independence Day (1996), as President Thomas Whitemore and company are being led into the secret government alien lab, he wonders aloud where the funding for the lab came from, to which Julius Levinson (the father of Jeff Goldblum's character) quips, "You didn't think they actually paid $5000 for a hammer, or $30,000 for a toilet seat, did you?" Indicating those sums were actually being secretly diverted to fund black-budget initiatives like the alien lab.
Nice to see truth is not that far off from Independence Day.
The point of the piece would seem to be not "all is well" but that the real problem is the accounting practices used to direct programs. You've posed this like a counterpoint to the piece but there's significant overlap between what you're saying and the arguments it makes.
> 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.
To be fair it’s the same in private companies.
Last time I was consulting at a big international corporation all it consultants (including those from big 5) on the project was asked (against company policy) to bring our own laptop and use the guest WiFi, since that particular PM didn’t have the patience or budget to wait a week for laptops to be acquired and setup.
I met someone who spent six months in a SCIF waiting on a project to start. Go in every day and wait for 8 hours for some indication that work was available.
He said by the end of the "project" (which never involved any actual work) he had a complete space invaders clone written in Microsoft Excel with multiple levels, different game modes, difficulty levels, high scores, etc.
> 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.
You should have seen the massive number of very large enterprise IT projects in the late 1990s that were justified, approved, budgeted and accounted for under the famous Y2K umbrella.
Every reasonably smart business or IT manager figured out ways to connect their pet project to Y2K and after that the approvals were almost automatic.
Because what VP, CEO, board member or even shareholder dared to question the necessity of preventing the potentially catastrophic events if Y2K bugs weren’t properly eradicated.
I don't know man, custom bespoke anythings probably need to cost a few hundred dollars to make it worth the time of the company, who needs to pay the workers and all the useful and useless management alike, and still turn a profit as well. The fault really lies with whoever in the government decided that a COTS hammer just couldn't work.
When I was a consultant, I had private companies do that at a cost to them of $2200 a day.
I had one project where this went on for 5 months. This was a private company with massive ill-gotten gains, which wasn't shy in spending that money frivolously. Whatever man, I guess.
I was playing poker with an old High School classmate who worked in Washington. I mentioned my consulting company chared 15% - 25% overhead for project management over what our Engineers got hourly.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Since Liebeck, McDonald's has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee. McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C) [...] Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C).[citation needed]
Any of this coffee can give you life changing injuries. That's why it is important that it be served in sturdy cups with safety warnings.
Of course the plaintiffs attorney argued coffee should be lower temperature - it literally was their case.
And no, there is no coffee professional (organization, individual, whatever) brewing coffee at 140*F.
Additionally - 140*F water is still going to burn if you spill it all over your clothing. Lastly, the customer removed the lid of the coffee while between her legs, which is how the cup was crushed and coffee ran all over her.
The case was not absurd. Even if you think they should be fine to serve it at such a high temperature, she just wanted them to pay $20,000 for her medical bills, but McDonald's used it as a way to cast absurdity onto supposed tort abuse and it worked with most of the population still saying things like "you can even sue someone if you spill your own coffee".
That's not an industry standard either though. With a lot of equipment it would be technically impossible, because the pre-heated brew water is what's keeping the standing coffee hot.
Why? All this debate on how hot you like to drink your coffee etc. is completely irrelevant.
You don't chug your coffee on your way from the counter. You probably have some other items that you consume before you even start sipping on the coffee.
If someone serves me coffee at the perfect consumption temperature I'm going to be annoyed that it is way too cold and it is for sure going to be disgustingly cold at the time I actually consume it.
The correct temperature is supposed to be way too warm for consumption. Then you can sip at it while it is still too warm to drink comfortably while you "wait" until it is at your preferred consumption temperature (which varies wildly due to personal preference).
> You don't chug your coffee on your way from the counter. You probably have some other items that you consume before you even start sipping on the coffee.
See Table 5, which includes "After dilution or cooling".
> You don't chug your coffee on your way from the counter. You probably have some other items that you consume before you even start sipping on the coffee.
The same article says McDonald's own research showed the opposite.
> McDonald's claimed that the reason for serving such hot coffee in its drive-through windows was that those who purchased the coffee typically were commuters who wanted to drive a distance with the coffee; the high initial temperature would keep the coffee hot during the trip.[12] However, it came to light that McDonald's had carried out research finding that customers intend to consume the coffee immediately while driving.[22]
The [22] source doesn't say anything about that research. But a commuter is a very specific customer and hardly represents all customers.
Further, I'm guessing but doubt that commuters wouldn't go to mcd just for coffee, whatever breakfast(?) maybe didn't last long enough for it to cool down. Sure, but that all depends.
And apparently, commuters didn't mind enough to find something else.
Part from safety issues I haven't really seen any convincing argument against "too hot" coffee.
Do you apply this standard to tea, which is generally prepared and served much hotter than 140 F (with the understanding that you wait until it cools down to drink)?
In any case, here's the facts: when I make coffee at home, it is brewed at 200ish F. That is true. When I make tea tho it's like 170ishf. By the time I am ready to consume (post brewing) both are still not, but consumable, so I think it is safe to say that they won't burn me, at least very badly, if spilled on me.
And if you served them to a guest, right after preparing for yourself, it will be before it’s cooled down enough to drink. That doesn’t make it your fault if they spill it on themselves and fuse their labia.
And it doesn’t make the grossness of the accident into prima facia evidence of the culpability of any one party up the line, as it’s always presented in these discussions.
I can’t speak for the other guy but I don’t pour tea for myself or others until it’s cooled down considerably, and also in this scenario we’re not giving the guest the beverage in a paper cup they’re meant to consume in their car.
We're not talking about idiosyncratic special cases here, we're talking about the norm. That's why I provided a citation rather than building a case off of a particular individual's routine. From the link:
"Black and oolong teas are generally steeped in hot or boiling water (about 210º F) and brewed for about 4-5 minutes. Green tea is steeped at a slightly lower temperature 180º F from 4-15 minutes. The longer tea steeps, the stronger the flavor with bitter notes."
And I don't think anyone recommends you put hot beverages in your crotch area.
OK but that tells me nothing about serving? Do you expect a plate of pasta to be served in boiling water?
It also seems clear to me that one should take into account that someone is having the drink in the car and not at the table if you’re operating a drive-through restaurant.
For reference, your Keurig pours coffee into your cup at 192*F. McDonald's coffee wasn't even this hot when that lawsuit happen.
Additionally - the detail often left out of all the armchair analysis is the customer placed the fresh cup of coffee between her legs while in her car, and removed the lid. Her legs crushed the now-unstable cup... and she was unsurprisingly burned.
Yes, the kitchen has many hazards that are not expected in a drive-through restaurant, and your point about how she held the coffee is presumably why the jury found the plaintiff 20% liable rather than 0%.
I think I agree with you on principle, but temps higher than 100 are totally fine in a lot of cases. Hot tubs are at 102-106. 120°F takes you like 10 minutes to suffer serious burns. But 140° will cause burns in seconds. I've seen cooks handle stuff waaay hotter than 140 for a half secondish (grab a noodle from a pot of boiling water, poke a 160+° burger on a grill, etc). Obviously makes a big difference if you splash yourself a bit vs get a whole cup on you too.
The warning was made more prominent and, probably more importantly, they switched to rigid styrofoam cups that are less likely to buckle as happened in that incident. Furthermore, the Wikipedia article shared in the thread elsewhere details how such burns take substantially more contact with skin to happen if the coffee is not served so hot.
Sorry, I really couldn't tell what side you're arguing for here. But the hot coffee lawsuit was a good example of something that seemed crazy on first look, when on further examination... it still seemed crazy?
It's an example of people assuming a bureaucracy got something glaringly and obviously wrong, but when you dig into it, the bureaucracy probably got it right.
So much lawyers' propaganda. We are engineers here. We are aware that coffee is water that boils at 100 degrees centigrade and gets no hotter than that. Every damn idiot and those more intelligent know full well that writing "Caution: contents hot" in microscopic text does absolutely nothing to make recently boiled water more safe.
Sure we should all feel sorry for someone who is badly burnt. Absolutely we should. It is inhuman not to feel so. And who can fee sorry for a corporation? Nobody should.
And we've let the lawyers use that sympathy to run riot writing themselves cheques on society's labor. As engineers we look at it and cry "Tort reform now!" and it is further and further away? Is it what killed Carter's presidency? Dunno. Last time it was anywhere near having anything done and that was 4 decades ago?
But go ahead and keep repeating it like the water was super heated to a 1000 degrees and writing text on the foam cup stops anyone from being burnt by boiled water.
Or don't. Really, just don't. Just because something sounds insane doesn't mean to say it actually isn't.
We are engineers here. We are aware that coffee is water that boils at 100 degrees centigrade and gets no hotter than that.
An engineer should know that the temperatures being used in this context are in Fahrenheit, and that on the Fahrenheit scale the boiling point of water is 212 degrees...
But go ahead and keep repeating it like the water was super heated to a 1000 degrees and writing text on the foam cup stops anyone from being burnt by boiled water.
McDonald's knew that the design of the cup and lid were defective, given that they had received several hundred reports of burned customers prior to the woman in the Hot Coffee lawsuit.
The "Hot Coffee" moniker is actually propaganda from far-right Koch-funded tort "reformers" who have spent tens of millions to convince people that this case was about just about someone spilling hot coffee (it was not) instead of a poorly designed product being kept in the market despite the business knowing of its flaws and choosing not to fix them (like the Ford Pinto).
From Wikipedia... "McDonalds had received more than 700 reports of people burned by their coffee to varying degrees of severity". I remember reading a lot about this. It was the fact that McDonalds knew they had a dangerous product but wanted to keep it "hot" at the drive-thru so it would still be drinkable after people finished their car rides. That was a large factor of why the courts found McDonalds 80% liable in the case.
yeah if you want to argue the cups were rubbish and negligently so, fine. Go right ahead, there /may/ be a sensible discussion to be had there somewhere. It is at least possible
"Caution contents hot" Does not seem to be any way an engineering fix for this though, does it? Like seriously, why do you think that is written there? People expect cold? That fixes it? The mind boggles. So many legal fees on garbage like this.
But yeah, the lawyers got everyone jumping to their BS and so the zeitgeist will go into wikipedia.
I think a lot of the case focused on the temperature of the coffee. McDonalds brewed it above 135F and that put it in the category of "burn risk". They could have brewed it slightly cooler, but McDonalds thought it would detract from the taste.
Having "caution hot" was probably not enough of a warning. They should have put "caution burn risk" or something like that on the cups.
A purchaser has zero right to assume that a freshly brewed cup of coffee can't burn them. I mean seriously wtf? Children should know better and do.
A purchaser has no right to blame anyone else for putting a freshly brewed cup of coffee between their legs while driving a car. That is dangerous and reckless driving and they should be charged for not taking the proper regard for others safety.
You can hate mcdonalds and I /really/ do and see this BS for what it is. Exploiting your sympathy for a burn victim to accrue a mass of lawyers fees. This case and all the other legal actions on the same principle.
You don't have to be a "rugged individualist championing personal responsibility above all things" (aka libtard) to see it. You can even be a a massive socialist and still see the incredible damage to ordinary people engendered by this frankly insane interpretation and enforcement of the law. Nobody is safer, but the existing lawyers get richer and their highly productive segment of the economy grows. The effect on insurance premiums across the entire economy has been profound and immense.
Add up all the legal fees and flow on then compare to "caution: contents hot" written in tiny print on a cup that cannot be seen without holding said cup. Include all the additional legal fees from just this kind of nonsense for any small business trying to grow that come out of this. That is the outcome.
It's such an idiotic "AKHTUALLY it's not what it seems."
AKHTUHALLY it's not crazy like it sounds because it's really good for lawyers who have a huge interest in avoiding the necessary legal reforms and have done a truly stellar job pursuing those interests.
If there was nothing wrong and nothing that could be done how come they switched to a different, more rigid cup that was less likely to spill in the same way after they lost the lawsuit?
There can be no improvement of anything with safety implications without an admission of guilt?
Writing "Caution: contents hot" in tiny writing that cannot be seen until after the cup is picked up is not a safety improvement so no admission there.
I can hold two things in my head at once. I can be desperately sorry that a lady spilled coffee down her crotch and got burned and have a great deal of sympathy for her, I could have done something as idiotic as that, easy. There but for the grace of $deity go I. At the same time I can think that really isn't anyone else's fault that she put a cup of takeaway coffee between her legs driving a car. Making decisions as poorly as that should preclude you from having a license. A rigid cup could have had the same result and while in agonizing pain she could easily have run down children.
Writing "caution: contents hot" in tiny writing is just flipping daft and deserves to be scorned for the nonsense from awful lawyers that it is.
This idiotic thing that looks idiotic because it is gets the AKTUHALLY treatment to defend lawyers and stop tort reform. Bleh. Oh, btw, I hate mcdonalds.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
Anything electrical can cause interference. The cost of certification is proving that it doesn't. There's also other factors, like what happens if cabin pressure suddenly drops? Will its heating mechanism overheat and start a fire? Will it explode killing the pilot then the plane comes crashing down on an orphanage?
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.
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.
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.
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%).”
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.
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.
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.
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-... 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.
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.
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.
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)
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."
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."
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.
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).
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.