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Senators Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Guarantee Military Right to Repair Its Equipment

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  • Exactly. This is completely insane. The DoD has the negotiating leverage to write these right to repair requirements into their RFPs, specifications, and contracts. The idea that their procurement offices simply failed to do this boggles my mind.

    Back in the war, if you had a winning design, you were required to license it, full drawings included, to many different manufacturers at fair prices. The Defense Production Act is still on the books, and it contains a lot of power to control the economy. Why is DoD handcuffing themselves?

  • This is important.
    Rossman did an interview with a few military techs, and here are few highlights

    • they couldn't get the router password (that they own) for troubleshooting. Imagine your ISP locked you out of the router?
    • it cost 200k to ship a 100k part because they weren't allowed to fix the broken one. 300k - thats a decent sized home in some areas, just to replace a wire or something. (Look up military pricing too, I remeber seeing something about how the military pays $400 for $4 bag of fuses)
    • they have to fly manufacture service techs that don't get schematics, if they need them, an engineer is flown out who closely guards them.

    Its a complete waste of taxpayer money.
    Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

    We're allowed to fix our own cars (although manufactures are trying to stop that), why can't the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors? Get a foothold in the military sector and the rest will follow.

    So finally they’ve figured out that “privatization” is a shitty idea. Not only does it introduce another point of failure in logistics and operations, but the private sector doesn’t mind trying to make every contract on they can retire off of using taxpayer money.

  • This is important.
    Rossman did an interview with a few military techs, and here are few highlights

    • they couldn't get the router password (that they own) for troubleshooting. Imagine your ISP locked you out of the router?
    • it cost 200k to ship a 100k part because they weren't allowed to fix the broken one. 300k - thats a decent sized home in some areas, just to replace a wire or something. (Look up military pricing too, I remeber seeing something about how the military pays $400 for $4 bag of fuses)
    • they have to fly manufacture service techs that don't get schematics, if they need them, an engineer is flown out who closely guards them.

    Its a complete waste of taxpayer money.
    Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

    We're allowed to fix our own cars (although manufactures are trying to stop that), why can't the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors? Get a foothold in the military sector and the rest will follow.

    Thanks for the type up! I really do appreciate the info, I'm just bitching about the current state of things and how this seems like a distraction compared to the laundry list of other stuff going on.

  • I mean this genuinely is a good concept.

    I completely agree, just bitching because there's tons of other legislature that's just as necessary if not moreso, plus the looming shithead wannabe dictator and all his garbage.

  • Drop the word "military" and I'm onboard.

    I'm on board regardless.

  • Thanks for the type up! I really do appreciate the info, I'm just bitching about the current state of things and how this seems like a distraction compared to the laundry list of other stuff going on.

    It's not though. The current administration can suck and also do good things. Both can be true simultaneously.

  • So finally they’ve figured out that “privatization” is a shitty idea. Not only does it introduce another point of failure in logistics and operations, but the private sector doesn’t mind trying to make every contract on they can retire off of using taxpayer money.

    This has nothing to do with privatization, at least not in the sense you seem to mean. It has everything to do with ownership, and the military wants to actually own the products it buys.

    This isn't going against the private sector as a supplier of goods, it merely says if you sell to the military, the military actually owns that product instead of rents it.

  • How about extending this to cover your humble civilians too

    I imagine it's a lot easier to expand to civilians later than to get a bill through without the military/government benefitting first.

  • I think that's just in the US. They also have franchisees elsewhere that still have to pay for the franchise rights. They're for sure not in the restaurant business though, at least not big time. That's risky and costly so the franchisees get to take that risk.

    At least in the US, most (all?) stores are still franchises, but the property is owned by McDonalds. Basically, a franchise owner rents the building in much the same way that they rent the ice cream machine. Franchise ownership just means you get the right to run a particular building and make whatever the agreed-upon cut is.

  • Service contracts are where the money is at!

    Gotta get that recurring revenue!

  • This is important.
    Rossman did an interview with a few military techs, and here are few highlights

    • they couldn't get the router password (that they own) for troubleshooting. Imagine your ISP locked you out of the router?
    • it cost 200k to ship a 100k part because they weren't allowed to fix the broken one. 300k - thats a decent sized home in some areas, just to replace a wire or something. (Look up military pricing too, I remeber seeing something about how the military pays $400 for $4 bag of fuses)
    • they have to fly manufacture service techs that don't get schematics, if they need them, an engineer is flown out who closely guards them.

    Its a complete waste of taxpayer money.
    Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

    We're allowed to fix our own cars (although manufactures are trying to stop that), why can't the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors? Get a foothold in the military sector and the rest will follow.

    This is important.

    It's the downstream consequence of decades of outsourcing, kicked off in earnest in the Reagan Administration. "Right to Repair" is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of military privatization.

    Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

    That's the nut of it. This money is being wasted in the general sense. But it isn't wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

    This goes back to the BBB and its rampage through some of the most high efficiency Medicaid programs on offer, in order to shuttle somewhere between $175B and $541B (depending on who is counting) to a national security system that's just legions of badged up bullies harassing locals for the entertainment of a few hooting chuds.

    why can’t the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors?

    Because

    and SaaS is how corporate industry has decided it will continue to grow its profits indefinitely.

  • This is important.
    Rossman did an interview with a few military techs, and here are few highlights

    • they couldn't get the router password (that they own) for troubleshooting. Imagine your ISP locked you out of the router?
    • it cost 200k to ship a 100k part because they weren't allowed to fix the broken one. 300k - thats a decent sized home in some areas, just to replace a wire or something. (Look up military pricing too, I remeber seeing something about how the military pays $400 for $4 bag of fuses)
    • they have to fly manufacture service techs that don't get schematics, if they need them, an engineer is flown out who closely guards them.

    Its a complete waste of taxpayer money.
    Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

    We're allowed to fix our own cars (although manufactures are trying to stop that), why can't the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors? Get a foothold in the military sector and the rest will follow.

    The entire military budget is a massive waste of taxpayers money.

  • How about extending this to cover your humble civilians too

    If this passes for the military, then that will mandate the creation of a parts supply chain, as well as documentation and manuals for maintenance and repair, for whatever the military buys. Once that stuff is created, it'll be a lot easier to mandate that the existing stuff be made available to the public, too.

    That might not make much of a difference for a guided bomb, but it'll make a huge difference for the huge amount of commercial off the shelf stuff that the military buys: laptops, routers, tablets, phones, civilian vehicles, tools, other basic equipment.

  • U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) introduced the Warrior Right to Repair Act of 2025, legislation that would require contractors to provide the Department of Defense (DoD) with access to technical data and materials the military needs to repair and maintain its own equipment.

    perfect example of the tone-deaf left.

    corporate democrats will never get it and are just "republican lite".

    jackasses.

  • U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) introduced the Warrior Right to Repair Act of 2025, legislation that would require contractors to provide the Department of Defense (DoD) with access to technical data and materials the military needs to repair and maintain its own equipment.

    Liberals will fight for the rights of the military, while the military is being used on domestic soil to actively oppress our rights. Predictable as ever.

  • U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) introduced the Warrior Right to Repair Act of 2025, legislation that would require contractors to provide the Department of Defense (DoD) with access to technical data and materials the military needs to repair and maintain its own equipment.

    That wasn't a thing already? Not a requirement for military orders?

    You mean they could ship something into the military without proper documentation and bill it every time maintenance has to be done?

    Some things in your land of the free seem to confuse me.

  • This is important.
    Rossman did an interview with a few military techs, and here are few highlights

    • they couldn't get the router password (that they own) for troubleshooting. Imagine your ISP locked you out of the router?
    • it cost 200k to ship a 100k part because they weren't allowed to fix the broken one. 300k - thats a decent sized home in some areas, just to replace a wire or something. (Look up military pricing too, I remeber seeing something about how the military pays $400 for $4 bag of fuses)
    • they have to fly manufacture service techs that don't get schematics, if they need them, an engineer is flown out who closely guards them.

    Its a complete waste of taxpayer money.
    Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

    We're allowed to fix our own cars (although manufactures are trying to stop that), why can't the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors? Get a foothold in the military sector and the rest will follow.

    Look up military pricing too, I remeber seeing something about how the military pays $400 for $4 bag of fuses

    That "military pricing" is called "corruption". Despite everyone knowing that it happens in most militaries (or big b2b), it still is that.

    Its a complete waste of taxpayer money. Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

    I mean, you had a truly magnificent military budget for already 30 years after the nation which was supposed to be the problem solved by it started asking for food aid and falling apart into pieces.

    When the funds are provided and it's certain they won't have to be used, the tasks existing expand to fill the budget.

    The US military budget is so over the top that even things that it achieves are not so significantly different from what Russian military budget with Russian corruption achieves, yet its size utterly dwarfs that.

    If US military budget were used as efficiently as that of, say, Poland, US military would have colonized most of the Solar system already. With actual people as colonists.

    That's about that fiscal discipline the Republican party was supposedly in favor of, until it wasn't.

    OK, I live in Russia, so shouldn't probably blabber too much about US politics.

  • This is important.

    It's the downstream consequence of decades of outsourcing, kicked off in earnest in the Reagan Administration. "Right to Repair" is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of military privatization.

    Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

    That's the nut of it. This money is being wasted in the general sense. But it isn't wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

    This goes back to the BBB and its rampage through some of the most high efficiency Medicaid programs on offer, in order to shuttle somewhere between $175B and $541B (depending on who is counting) to a national security system that's just legions of badged up bullies harassing locals for the entertainment of a few hooting chuds.

    why can’t the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors?

    Because

    and SaaS is how corporate industry has decided it will continue to grow its profits indefinitely.

    But it isn’t wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

    Which is also why people active against this will be killed many times before the stream made dry out.

  • So finally they’ve figured out that “privatization” is a shitty idea. Not only does it introduce another point of failure in logistics and operations, but the private sector doesn’t mind trying to make every contract on they can retire off of using taxpayer money.

    Just informing you that good old USSR had a similar problem, except not just with the military.

    It, of course, had planning inefficiency problems, but the reason some stuff costed and was funded orders of magnitude more than the Western alternatives (sometimes being clones of those alternatives) was just that industries producing this stuff were closer to important interests in internal politics. Soviet production lines were not that much less efficient.

  • I'm on board regardless.

    Any legal precedent for this has to be a win right?

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    Zuck can't be too excited to be suddenly and harshly cut out of the Oval Office Data Pipeline...
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  • Why doesn't Nvidia have more competition?

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    It’s funny how the article asks the question, but completely fails to answer it. About 15 years ago, Nvidia discovered there was a demand for compute in datacenters that could be met with powerful GPU’s, and they were quick to respond to it, and they had the resources to focus on it strongly, because of their huge success and high profitability in the GPU market. AMD also saw the market, and wanted to pursue it, but just over a decade ago where it began to clearly show the high potential for profitability, AMD was near bankrupt, and was very hard pressed to finance developments on GPU and compute in datacenters. AMD really tried the best they could, and was moderately successful from a technology perspective, but Nvidia already had a head start, and the proprietary development system CUDA was already an established standard that was very hard to penetrate. Intel simply fumbled the ball from start to finish. After a decade of trying to push ARM down from having the mobile crown by far, investing billions or actually the equivalent of ARM’s total revenue. They never managed to catch up to ARM despite they had the better production process at the time. This was the main focus of Intel, and Intel believed that GPU would never be more than a niche product. So when intel tried to compete on compute for datacenters, they tried to do it with X86 chips, One of their most bold efforts was to build a monstrosity of a cluster of Celeron chips, which of course performed laughably bad compared to Nvidia! Because as it turns out, the way forward at least for now, is indeed the massively parralel compute capability of a GPU, which Nvidia has refined for decades, only with (inferior) competition from AMD. But despite the lack of competition, Nvidia did not slow down, in fact with increased profits, they only grew bolder in their efforts. Making it even harder to catch up. Now AMD has had more money to compete for a while, and they do have some decent compute units, but Nvidia remains ahead and the CUDA problem is still there, so for AMD to really compete with Nvidia, they have to be better to attract customers. That’s a very tall order against Nvidia that simply seems to never stop progressing. So the only other option for AMD is to sell a bit cheaper. Which I suppose they have to. AMD and Intel were the obvious competitors, everybody else is coming from even further behind. But if I had to make a bet, it would be on Huawei. Huawei has some crazy good developers, and Trump is basically forcing them to figure it out themselves, because he is blocking Huawei and China in general from using both AMD and Nvidia AI chips. And the chips will probably be made by Chinese SMIC, because they are also prevented from using advanced production in the west, most notably TSMC. China will prevail, because it’s become a national project, of both prestige and necessity, and they have a massive talent mass and resources, so nothing can stop it now. IMO USA would clearly have been better off allowing China to use American chips. Now China will soon compete directly on both production and design too.
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    Back in the day I just assumed everyone was lying. Or trying to get people worked up, and we called them trolls. Learning how to ignore the trolls, and not having trust for strangers on the internet, coupled with the ability to basically not care what random people said is a lost art. Somehow people forgot to give other the people this memo, including the "you don't fucking join social networks as your self". Anonymity makes this all work. Eternal September newbies just didn't get it.