alt Hacker NewsCheaper to tax payers or cheaper to the politicians who end up eating the punishment for accepting a certain level of fraud?
I wish I were such a useful idiot that I could just imagine-away incentives in a system so I could more easily create imaginary solutions :(
On one hand you've got "what we procure needs to work for earthly climates with some error bars so that we don't wind up with a million dollars of stuff that doesn't work in Alaska"
And on the other end of the spectrum you've got "my company makes .001% of widgets that do X but we make 50% of widgets that do X at -200deg F so we'll have our lobbyists wine and dine the brass until that number starts showing up in the technical standards forcing anyone who's submitting an RFP to use our product".
And of course the latter always tries to pretend like it's the former. It's not an easy problem. Sometimes concerns are valid. Sometimes they're bullshit. Usually the peddlers of bullshit believe their own bullshit.