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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Service members deserve the right to repair
gwbas1c wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
I'm stumbling over the example:
> I was overseeing generators in theater, and the one powering the
mortuary facility had failed. ... I didnât have HVAC expertise or the
necessary parts.
> I had two choices: initiate a long contracting process to hire a
civilian technician
It sounds like the author couldn't have repaired the generator even if
they had the right to do so? Or was this the kind of thing where they
could have "figured it out" or carried a few spare parts?
trenchpilgrim wrote 2 hours 56 min ago:
Right to repair by necessity includes access to parts and
documentation.
arh68 wrote 3 hours 46 min ago:
They ought to get source code, too !
Crazy to think we'd pay for software, ask for source to run a Fortify
scan & whatnot, and get told to kick rocks. "Proprietary ... trade
secrets ... &c&c". Just mark it green
giantg2 wrote 3 hours 51 min ago:
A main problem to this is that contractors get money to do repairs and
they use the reputation of their equipment to get future contracts. We
would need to structure the contract so there's some flat maintenance
portion to incentivize the production of easily serviced equipment.
aleph_minus_one wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
Since armament forms a oligopsony market [1] (i.e. there exist few
buyers (countries) for big armament), why don't these buyers simply use
their market leverage and refuse to buy equipment for which the
producer rejects them the right to repair.
This should solve a lot of problems.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopsony
jgeada wrote 3 hours 50 min ago:
In reality, it is not the DoD that contracts out the big stuff, but
Congress. And when the purchaser isn't the actual user, then a whole
bunch of nefarious negative feedback loops come into being. The
Congresscritter mostly only cares about sounding good and their
lobbying (bribery) dollars, everything else is a problem for someone
else, or sometime later.
Jtsummers wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
This isn't about armaments, at least not entirely. For the most part
weapons and weapons systems procurement already has regulations which
should be giving DOD the right to repair (or the data to perform
maintenance and repairs). This is about everything else.
As the saying goes, "An army marches on its stomach". Weapons are
critical, essential for a military to be a military. But everything
else in logistics and support are what actually makes the military
operational. A generator (the example in the article) is not an
armament. And they need so many that there's no way they could lean
on the entire generator industry without the support of law or other
regulations to back them.
XorNot wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
Also that Commercial off the shelf availability for things is a key
way to drive down prices. If consumers buy it and a slightly
modified version is suitable for the military then the thing will
be a lot cheaper to acquire and operate.
Same goes for RtR: it's worthless without a robust spare parts
market, and having that exist in the civilian sector is what you
need to realize savings.
This is related to one of the key reasons F-16 was worth getting to
Ukraine: compared to any other system, there's just a lot of F-16s
in the world and a lot of spare parts for them.
bluSCALE4 wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
Itâd be hilarious if the military industrial complex is why we get
right to repair.
platevoltage wrote 3 hours 37 min ago:
I think it's more likely it would be limited to the military
industrial complex. Schematics would be given out under NDA.
cl42 wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
A few years ago I went to a military museum in Vietnam, where they have
a lot of equipment used by the US military on display -- helicopters,
planes, guns, etc.
What surprised me is how the equipment had labels around where to open
things to rescue people, where to pour fuel, etc... It was labelled
such that someone with limited (or no) exposure to the vehicle model
would know what to do without referencing any sort of manual.
Very different today.
sdeer wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
Could this be because there were a large number of enlisted persons
serving? An all volunteer force might expect all serving troops to be
more familiar with equipment.
rgblambda wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
Small nitpick. You mean conscripted not enlisted.
I have no experience in the matter but I suspect that's not it. A
conscript and a recently recruited professional soldier should in
theory have the same level of training. Many professional soldiers
only enlist for a few years.
I reckon it's more that equipment is a lot more complicated now
than in the past. And maybe something to do with literacy levels in
the 1960s meaning you couldn't trust a soldier to have read and
understood a manual.
kev009 wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
It may well have been done for the benefit of experts too - a hot war
is true chaos. Shock, fatigue, sleep deprivation, being under fire
and adrenaline dump. Militaries are very good at forgetting the
lessons learned in the last war while applying the prior status quo
to a novel situation.
runlaszlorun wrote 1 hour 42 min ago:
I agree whole heartedly with your main point but I'd say militaries
are more likely to overreact to the last war. "Generals are always
fighting the last war" is a quote I heard from long ago and it
seems to match up. In Desert Storm it was clear that the lessons of
not getting entangled a la Vietnam were clearly in mind. When I
went in to Bosnia it was clear Somalia was in mind as our RoE
basically said if we were being being fired up on by someone using
civilians as a shield to "aim carefully", and I keep hearing
mention that the US is still trying to shift away from GWOT even
though it's been 10 years since that started slowing down.
lenerdenator wrote 4 hours 57 min ago:
I think that there's a larger problem with defense contractors and the
government just seeing these as ways certain people (usually the people
in the Pentagon and Congress) can get rich or a cushy retirement gig,
with no concern as to what actually happens past the contract being
signed.
Otherwise a lot of this sort of thing would go without saying, and you
wouldn't see problems like those surrounding the Sig Sauer
P320/M17/M18.
jauntywundrkind wrote 5 hours 3 min ago:
They should go further & own (have full license to) the designs
outright for the systems they procure.
There's so much talk about Modular Open Systems Architecture, because
everyone agrees the current system is broken & doesn't allow iteration
& exploration of systems. But it's so unclear technically what that
means, how it happens. Maybe maybe things are a tiny bit better than
they were but it's so hard to know, and it feels so likely to be
lipservice, too hard to do & too little genuine desire to make it
happen.
Amazing lcs report,
URI [1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-lit...
lenerdenator wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
That used to be a lot more of a thing, at least with regard to small
arms. Prior to the 1960s, the US government did a lot of its own work
on designing and producing service rifles.
LatteLazy wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
Would you rather pay up front and get a warranty or sign a long service
contract with high bills?
The answer is the latter because paying more later is a form of
borrowing, but not one you have to declare as debt. So you can announce
a tax cut now and voters will love it despite paying twice as much next
year.
StephenHerlihyy wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
I would argue they need to go even further - warranty. Iâve seen
vehicles 100% maintained by contractors need full engine or power train
replacements after 5000 miles of light driving. Never been off road,
never been deployed, just shuttling people around the base completely
inoperatable after less than 2 years. When you buy a car the
manufacturer has some stake in the game still - even the limited
warranty ensures that a major failure will cost them and not you.
Government contracting doesnât work like this. They sell a product,
sell you service and then sell you parts. If that part is bad you, the
American taxpayer, then has to buy another one. There is no such thing
as returns or lemon laws when it comes to government purchases. You get
what you get and hope for the best.
delfinom wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
I am in the military product industry, the military absolutely
demands we provide them warranty for the purchase, typically 3 years
on our particular products. We sell the same products outside the
military with only a 1 year warranty.
And we absolutely accept US government RMAs and replace product under
warranty as we get it.
Jeez, we even replace product that they've clearly played shotput
with and thrown off cliffs.
lenerdenator wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
My buddy in the Marines was complaining the other day that you guys
wouldn't replace his crayons.
Bender wrote 1 hour 15 min ago:
Eating the crayons voids the warranty AFAIK.
nradov wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
What sort of vehicles are those? I thought that the military
purchased regular civilian vehicles for light duty road transport
outside of combat zones. Do those not come with the regular
powertrain warranty?
giantg2 wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
Even the civilian vehicles tend to go through a different fleet
vehicle process, sometimes even with different features. Many times
fleet vehicles do not get the same consumer grade warranties, even
for civilian companies.
Jtsummers wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
One thing that happens a lot in DOD is that you'll purchase
something that, to an outsider, you'd think you just went to a
store and bought. But no, the DOD goes through a contractor to
procure it and often pushes the warranty/maintenance onto those
same contractors instead of the original producer. It results in
some odd, and often bad, situations.
You buy a bunch of HPE servers from HP? Nope. You buy them from
Fly-by Night Contractor who won some contract and didn't document
the HP support contracts they are wrapping their own support
contract around so when it gets handed off at the end of their
contract, you're SOL and can't get support from FbNC or HP without
going through a lot of red tape. And by the time you succeed in
identifying who is responsible for what, you're out of support
anyways.
It's dumb, and happens way too often. DOD should be purchasing
straight from those major vendors instead of purchasing through a
contractor.
HeyLaughingBoy wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
Not only the DoD by a long shot. I remember idly mentioning in a
meeting that the same $50 USB thumb drives that we were buying
from our vendor could be purchased at Office Depot for < $10 and
without the paperwork and signoffs of generating a Purchase
Order.
No one, including the Buyer cared. That was when I learned that
buying from an Approved Vendor had nothing to do with what they
charged.
nradov wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
In the case of light duty vehicles if the contract includes
maintenance services then those are rolled into the contract
price, which is presumably the lowest bid. What's the problem?
Jtsummers wrote 3 hours 45 min ago:
> which is presumably the lowest bid
Exactly, what's the problem. I know more things on the IT side,
and there the lowest bidder is always the best at failing, but
also the one selected most often because they check enough of
the right boxes.
ghurtado wrote 4 hours 17 min ago:
Not GP, but I suspect the "100% maintained by contractors" part of
the sentence has something to do with the explanation to an
otherwise absurd situation.
When you consider the sheer size of the US defense budget, and the
nature of government contracts in the first place, it would be more
surprising if this sort of thing didn't happen at all.
fn-mote wrote 6 hours 8 min ago:
> initiate a long contracting process to hire a civilian technician
It isn't clear that this is about what we call "right to repair" on HN.
(Essentially, no DRM on physical parts.)
Maybe it really is if I read the bill, but reading the article did not
clarify that for me.
pavon wrote 5 hours 28 min ago:
Yeah, and frankly a lot of it is the military's fault for outsourcing
too much service and repair to contractors to begin with. If you look
at the proposed law, all it is doing is requiring the military to
write contracts in a manner that they should have been doing all
along.
URI [1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/220...
TimorousBestie wrote 5 hours 18 min ago:
Blaming the military for the state of federal contracting reverses
the cart and the horse. Congress has a heavy hand in dictating how
military appropriations operate; likewise, the large prime
contractors have no difficulty lining Congressâ pockets (legally,
of courseâcampaign and PAC contributions are basically fungible
for cash from a congresscritterâs perspective.)
alphazard wrote 6 hours 9 min ago:
It doesn't seem like this is really related to a "right to repair".
Even if no RtR legislation was passed, it would still be in the
military's interest to require user serviceability for everything they
purchase. They are a large enough consumer that they could make this
requirement and the market would work to accommodate them.
s_dev wrote 3 hours 25 min ago:
> they could make this requirement and the market would work to
accommodate them.
US millitary is truly a monopsony.
dfxm12 wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
Hey, I agree, but if this is what it takes to get it into the regular
lexicon, or to get a foot in the door in Washington, then OK.
prasadjoglekar wrote 5 hours 31 min ago:
Yeah, the title is nonsense. The military is sufficiently large as a
buyer to demand RtR in every contract.
Perhaps they just don't want to fight for those clauses.
jameshart wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
Military-industrial-complex: So, do you wanna buy some widgets?
Lt. Milo Minderbender: well the Army can sure always use more
widgets! Weâll need to lock in a contract for spare parts too, so
you have to agree to supply spares at a reasonable cost.
MIC: how about instead you take this extended service contract
where you pay us to do any necessary repairs?
MM: well that doesnât seem like a great deal - weâd be on the
hook for arbitrary costs forever and youâd have no incentive to
make widgets that work.
MIC: we really donât want to agree to a fixed parts cost
schedule. That would annoy our shareholders.
MM: well, we are the US Army, so you can take it or leave it. Who
else are you going to sell widgets to?
MIC: ah, but Milo - we can call you Milo, right? - have you
considered that youâre coming up on the end of your service?
MM: Not for a few yearsâ¦
MIC: Sure, but I mean, when you get out⦠itâd be nice if there
was a job at a military widget contractor waiting for youâ¦
bell-cot wrote 4 hours 54 min ago:
If anyone doubts the reality of such things -
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darleen_Druyun
ghurtado wrote 4 hours 14 min ago:
Honestly, that sounds like a more benign version of what I
picture, which has the military not even giving enough of a
shit to ask the questions in the first place.
lenerdenator wrote 5 hours 4 min ago:
Or perhaps them not fighting for those clauses is a part of the
culture of how the US government - or, more specifically, brass in
the Pentagon - deals with defense contractors.
Jtsummers wrote 5 hours 15 min ago:
This would make it a requirement, right now it's not (for all
procurements, at least; tech data is expected in large systems
acquisitions like a new jet fighter but that's very different than
buying a generator). This also brings down the weight of the law,
in contrast to a "My commander said so" which can change from one
unit to another or even over time.
jedberg wrote 6 hours 23 min ago:
If getting right to repair passed requires justifying it via the
military, I'm ok with that. I just hope they push to make it apply to
civilians as well.
platevoltage wrote 3 hours 1 min ago:
I don't see any scenario where the rest of us would receive any
benefits from this. I would imagine that mechanics in the military
have access to everything they need to keep their Humvees running
(I'm sure they're called something else now, I don't care). That
doesn't mean that the software to fix a 2026 Mercedes won't cost
thousands of dollars, if it's even available by a non-dealer at all.
The military can demand this, we can't.
catigula wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
I'm not. The notion that you only earn basic rights if you join the
military is literally the premise of absurd comedy Starship Troopers.
evanjrowley wrote 4 hours 4 min ago:
It's not great, but worth recognizing that it's a notion as old as
democracy itself. See ancient Athens, Greece. Among the many other
requirements that made voting exclusive, only men who had completed
military service were granted the right to vote.
runlaszlorun wrote 1 hour 35 min ago:
I think it would be interested if only those who had completed
military service could vote to go to war since I think you'd def
see less of them. That said, I don't see this actually happening.
catigula wrote 4 hours 2 min ago:
Right, but comparing the American army and strategic military
positioning as a nation to those societies is more than a little
comical.
These societies literally couldn't have existed without military
service.
America has a very difficult time making a similar case, and,
often, the case is really difficult to make that they aren't
actively harmful.
esseph wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
You didn't read the article and don't understand the premise.
It's not about giving classes "rights", at all.
WillAdams wrote 6 hours 3 min ago:
The requirement for a voting franchise was that one joined the
Federal Service, of which the military was a very small part ---
the protagonists best friend was working as a science researcher on
Pluto and the young lady who joined at the same time might have
become part of the Skywatch if she hadn't qualified as a pilot.
mwcremer wrote 6 hours 9 min ago:
For the record, the movie was comedic but the book was not.
bigstrat2003 wrote 5 hours 1 min ago:
Nor was "you have to join the military to have basic rights" the
premise of the book. One of the themes of the book (I wouldn't
call it the premise, just one theme among them) was that to wield
authority over others one must first demonstrate that they are
capable of acting for the good of the whole even if it is not in
his own personal best interest. Military service was one way, not
the only way, to demonstrate that ability to act selflessly.
I think Heinlein actually has a very interesting point. To wield
the power of the government (which is what voting is), it is
important to be able to act selflessly. If someone can't do that,
even for a couple of years of their life, why should they be able
to wield that power over others? The universal franchise is not a
religious dogma, it's good to ask these questions and think about
whether our society could be better if we organized it
differently. Unfortunately, a lot of people completely missed the
point and just rounded it off to "Heinlein thinks the military
should run society", which isn't at all true.
catigula wrote 4 hours 2 min ago:
The book also includes strong racist themes.
like_any_other wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
> Nor was "you have to join the military to have basic rights"
the premise of the book.
It was not even the premise of the film - only one right was
conditioned on service, the right to vote (and possibly hold
political office). I.e. actions that wield authority over
others. I argue that is not "basic".
bigstrat2003 wrote 4 hours 4 min ago:
Fair enough - I've only read the book, so I wouldn't try to
speak for the movie.
542354234235 wrote 4 hours 15 min ago:
This [1] lays out pretty conclusively that even though the book
plays lip service to "federal Service", the entire rest of the
book makes clear that it is only military that get the right to
vote, not "government workers".
URI [1]: https://www.nitrosyncretic.com/pdfs/nature_of_fedsvc_1...
mwigdahl wrote 2 hours 52 min ago:
The military could not vote either. You had to _complete_
Federal Service before you earned the franchise.
bigstrat2003 wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
I don't think that is correct at all. I read the book and it
was very clear to me that it wasn't just lip service, you
could do your federal service in many different ways.
snerbles wrote 4 hours 32 min ago:
> Military service was one way, not the only way
In the book it was said that if a blind deaf person in a
wheelchair volunteered for service, the state would find
something for them to do. Maybe tediously counting hairs on a
caterpillar, or testing chairs in Antarctica.
Now for me the asspull from Starship Troopers that I still
think about every now and then was the notion of mathematical
proofs of morality at a high school level (or any academic
level, for that matter). This was a society that somehow
discovered provable objective morality, and I really wish that
idea could have been fleshed out more by Heinlein.
Jtsummers wrote 4 hours 17 min ago:
It was one of his juveniles (what would now be a "young
adult" novel). I don't think it was ever going to get fleshed
out.
You see him put much more thought into political systems and
economics in other books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,
Stranger in a Strange Land, or For Us, the Living.
lstodd wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
Absolutely.
ecshafer wrote 4 hours 42 min ago:
Heinlein isn't even saying anything completely new in starship
troopers. It is in essence an evolution of the Active vs
Passive Citizen distinction. Merely living in a society doesn't
necessarily give all of the responsibilities of governing, aka
voting. A citizen aught to have be an active citizen within the
society to gain that privilege. The US Constitution was
originally for only Land Owners (ignoring the other race and
sex based stipulations). Heinlein is treating that active -
passive distinction as being based on service instead of
property.
reactordev wrote 6 hours 11 min ago:
I donât think predicating it on joining was the point. The point
was if it takes the military to push for its passage, Yeyâ¦
jedberg wrote 6 hours 11 min ago:
Don't let good be the enemy of perfect. If we get the right to
repair, great!
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote 5 hours 15 min ago:
Letting perfect be the enemy of good is the liberal self-own way.
catigula wrote 6 hours 7 min ago:
I'd prefer we never get the right to repair to making precedent
that rights are contingent on military service.
ghurtado wrote 4 hours 11 min ago:
Luckily none of this has anything to do with the false
dichotomy that you've presented.
esseph wrote 3 hours 54 min ago:
Yet, here we are multiple comments through because a couple
of people read a poorly designed title and jumped to
conclusions.
:-(
jedberg wrote 6 hours 4 min ago:
I think you are completely misreading this. No one is saying
that it's ok if military service is a requirement.
What we're saying is that if the military gets it first, that's
ok, because it's a stepping stone to all of us getting it.
lotsofpulp wrote 5 hours 57 min ago:
Fracturing a population is a time honored way to maintain
oppression.
For example, letâs say you want to prevent wealth
redistribution, but there is lots of popular support for it.
Then you give it to some, for example old people, and it
removes wealth redistribution as a priority for them.
Now, you can more easily withhold the benefit from the
remaining population. Or give them all various tiers, such
as white collar and government workers with more employer
subsidies, and lower paid workers with few or no subsidies.
At the end, the opposition group will waste a ton of energy
trying to make their cause a priority, and will probably
never achieve the full goal. The more politically important
will get theirs, and the less politically important will
suffer without. That stepping stone becomes a barrier.
In the example, you can change age to skin tone, gender,
religious tribe, military status, and even arbitrary
geographic boundary. See the recent tax benefits Alaskans
received in exchange for their Senatorâs vote.
Jtsummers wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
That's not what's happening here. Being in the military
won't magically give you a right to repair your iPhone.
This law puts a requirement on DOD procurement (beyond
what's already present, as I mentioned in another comment)
to acquire tech data (or whatever's required) to make
purchased systems maintainable by the military itself. So
you buy a Generac for your house and you're in the military
you get the same manuals the rest of us get. If the DOD
buys a Generac for a facility, they can get more data.
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