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Comment by jeffrallen | Hacker News Reader

Your tax dollars at work!

Having standards is one of the more important functions of government and this work has broad implications for consumer protection. The price is mot even cheap so at least the largest beneficiaries pay to brunt of the cost. If you’re serious about government waste I would suggest looking at larger budget items like Lockheed or it’s partners in the military first.

In fact, it’s specifically called out in the US Constitution. Article I, Section VIII authorizes the government to “fix the standard of weights and measures”.

It looks like they charge for the materials to offset the cost. This whole program, to ensure Americans get what they pay for in consumer items, is a much better use of my tax dollars than, say, paying for rich kids college loans.

Rich kids tend not to have college debt.

https://www.propublica.org/article/university-of-illinois-fi...

Not the only example, simply one of the first that popped up in my brief (~30 seconds) search.

Luckily we can do both

Not without bringing on double-digit inflation, angering the majority of the population with its unfairness, and putting the nation further into debt.

Press x to doubt. I haven’t seen any evidence that student loan forgiveness will cause double digit inflation.

I have seen baseless claims that the current inflation is being exacerbated by the student loan relief which hasn’t occurred yet, but as I said, they are baseless

This is a really good way to spend tax dollars, actually.

Excatly. Keeping instruments calibrated and true.

You would rather have industrial makers have nothing to test and calibrate their impurity detection equipment on? Probably nothing bad will happen if they just wing it

NIST also runs the national time references and the broadcast stations WWV and WWVH that share them with everyone. It's a hell of a good use of tax dollars.

So's the ARPANet.

Remember, kiddo: Microsoft-Orcale-Apple didn't invent the Internet. They just jumped on.

They probably aren't losing money on $800 jars of peanut butter.

They probably are since the methods and requirements are very different to what you buy in the store.

An army marches on its stomach. Without a standards organisation to ensure high-quality peanut butter, the nation will slowly fall to ruin!

Haha, definitely true, but of course the SRMs also help for more serious things (like metal strength for vehicles, which can be the difference between life and death).

I wish my country did 10% of the work that the NIST and USDA make.

Standardization is one of the key enablers for mas production.

This but unironically.

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