#pournelle — Public Fediverse posts

@TerryHancock

My favourite #debunking of the "government paid $EXCESSIVE for $THING" kind of story was by Jerry #Pournelle. It's currently offline, and archive.org is still recovering, so I can't link it. Actual numbers below are made up because I don't remember the exact figures, but the gist is correct.

It was the "#Pentagon paid $17,000 for a #toilet seat" one. What actually happened was that the Pentagon needed to procure more toilet seats for the B-52 bomber - the planes were (and still are!) old and stuff wears out or gets damaged. There was no remaining stock of parts.

The problem was that the #manufacturer had long ago junked the tooling used to make the parts (they were metal, requiring tool & die etc). Making that tooling is quite expensive - it's difficult, skilled work. Other costs involved in getting a #manufacturing line set up are also expensive. And they couldn't justify buying and storing tons of extra toilet seats.

So what you get is a high fixed #cost to rebuild a line, divided by a relatively small number of finished articles, giving an apparently absurd price per unit. Say, a million dollars to make 60 replacement toilet seats to original spec.

And that gives... $16,667 per seat. And a great, totally #misleading #headline.

#B52 #B52Bomber #ToiletSeat #GovernmentWaste #waste #procurement

#Pournelle - perhaps most widely #famous for being a great science-fiction #author, frequently in collaboration with Larry #Niven and Stephen #Barnes - was a bit of a polymath. He invented the 2-axis scale now known as a "Pournelle chart" in his political science Ph. D. dissertation, in 1963.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pournelle_chart

A 1-axis chart misrepresents views or policies so badly you end up with, for example, #communists, #socialists, and #liberals all close together. (edit: thinko)

2/x

#SciFi

Apologies, as this will be a bit #rambling, but it will come back to #Canadian #politics, I promise.

First, the #categorization of #political views along a single left-right #axis is almost #useless. This has long been known, and alternatives exist that present a much more accurate picture, but the traditional #media is #addicted to "#left this" and "#right that" and is lazy, so they'll probably never get better.

One #alternative was developed by Jerry #Pournelle.

1/x

#celebrity #polymath

@jgcarpenter

The first 3 #Foundation books, in publishing order. By #Asimov.

The #Mote in God's Eye vol 1+2. By #Niven and #Pournelle.

The #Hyperion series vol 1, 2, 3. By #Simmons.