Little bro came by yesterday, doing an interesting job at the moment, seems one place is being demolished, and a lot of old hard wood is being burnt, inc.some rose wood, teak and oak, burnt? yep gov't won't allow it to be sold, incase someone makes a profit! Good Lord how I hate that kind of waste, typical British Gov't/Royal Navy attitude!
niel.
I guess you couldn't negotiate to take it away for free, saving them the labour? Or would that have involved you having to do the entire job?
No, total destruction on-site required!
Niel: Given the Royal Navy's long record of "enlightened self-interest" re its contractors*, it is easy to understand the origin of the policy. Furthermore, given the great tradition of "too much is not enough" re government's corrective actions, the burn-on-site regulation is also understandable. However, understandable and reasonable are two different things, eh?
Bob
On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 13:28:01 +0100, "njf>badgerbadger
My dad used to work on an Airforce Base. They would hall piles of unused Parachute cord to the dump on base and burn it. If you got caught taking some of it home you were fired. Nice cord too, lots of uses on the farm.
Akin to zero tolerance for those who won't or can't think ... heaven forbid there should be a chance of corruption at any level but the highest.
"njf>badgerbadger
That would make sense in that you could not go into the parachute business and make an unsafe chute and sue the cord provider. I would imagine there is a safe way to make it unusable for a parachute but still be good for cordage.
There was a lawsuit when a manufacturer of auto accessories trashed some defective parts. An enterprising employee took them, sold them at a flea market, and someone had an accident because of them. He sued and won.
That explains Ford punching holes with a fork lift through every panel of any bodies they fail in the local van plant, can't have anyone recovering them for repairing their vans....One Ford rep. took to dancing on panels that had small defects in their dealers bodyshops after he'd approved FOC replacements, one body fitter took exception as he needed a wing for his own car, but couldn't afford a new one, IIRC the rep ended up wearing it!
Std. mil. bullshit!
Most of this goes back to the contracts under which things are purchased. A *lot* of military stuff is purchased at very low prices because of the high volume. The manufacturer knows that much of it will be used a short period of time before being "removed from service". What they want to prevent is someone ordering a bunch of stuff then flooding the market with lightly used material. The military could actually mess up quite a few markets with their waste if they were allowed to. It is nothing more than a price supports thing.
Tim Douglass
If you need some kindling, we still have 3 Upholder class British submarines in Canada that seem to burn quite well.
"Nay never lift up your hands to me There's no clean hands in the trade. But steal in measure quoth Brigantine There's measure in all things made." "King Henry VIII and the Shipwrights" -- Rudyard Kipling
Wonder if anyone would notice if some of that wood just walked off?
--RC
This certainly isn't true in Britain. The military is charged obscene prices by the manufacturers.
If it's true in the U.S., the change has come about in the past month.
Charlie Self "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." George Orwell
And the building concerned is many hundreds of years old!
On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 16:52:42 +0100, "njf>badgerbadger
If it's like the US it depends on the item and the volume and the manufacturer.
For one-offs the prices can be very high due to administrative overhead--we had one guy whose full time job it was to keep up with the changes in the specification for an assembly that one of our techs could make from scratch in a couple of days.
Then there are the small-business set-asides, where a certain amount of contracting has to go to small or minority-owned businesses--some of those businesses are very, very good, but many barely meet the requirements to bid--nonetheless they get the preference on some items because there's a more critical item that they need to procure from a more capable contractor. So they have a lot of costs involved in meeting the spec and keeping up the paperwork that a more established contractor doing larger volume would not.
But if it's something like 100,000 A/N bolts then the price is generally pretty low.
When you hear about things like $600 toilet seats there's generally more to the story.
My Dad was in the RCN, and had a few horror stories. The best one actually was told to me about when he'd been out of the services and teaching for a number of years, and the CAF had ordered a pile of beef carcasses to be rendered into steaks, roasts and such.
The steers had been inspected and marked with special stamps, then pushed to a section of the plant and kept seperate from all the other carcasses. Dad's partner doing the final inspected noticed something about one of the cutters doing the filleting. Soem of the scrap pieces looked to be a bit large.
At the end of the day, Dad and his partner went around to all of the butchering stations, reached under the counters and pulled up boxes full of filet mignon.
Tossing them on the counters, Dad's partner told the people cutting: "Wrap those up as well" and then stood there and watched while the guys did just that.
Dad said that if it had been one or two, they wouldn't ahve noticed, but boxes full of them....
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