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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

This is overloading the meaning of the phrase "right to repair". Usually on HN it means some kind of obligation on suppliers, to provide access to documentation or parts. Here it's something else: the client actually signed a contract agreeing not even to attempt to repair their own devices, which they bought:

> "six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves"

It's a very different flavor of "right to repair", so I wanted to highlight the language ambiguity.

(Tangentially, food service on a different US aircraft carrier was one of the targets of the "Fat Leonard" contractor bribery ring,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal (C-f "Former Food Service Officer for the aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington and the Seventh Fleet Command Ship, the USS Blue Ridge")

)

View on HN

> This is overloading the meaning of the phrase "right to repair".

I think this is the correct usage. It is the legal right to be able to repair something. Whereas access to docs and parts is more about making repairability doable. But without the former, the latter is moot.

“Right to repair” is commonly understood to refer to a broader political movement that’s about allowing /everyone/ to repair the things they own. Not just large commercial clients with the leverage to demand custom contract terms.

Large clients negotiating their own rights is nothing new. This is just contract dispute.

The US Navy stance seems to be less "let's negotiate this" and more "this is so goddamn stupid and we're never putting up with it again."

The philosophy does seem to be "let everyone repair their stuff by default."

> "six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves"

The Government person who signed this contract should be fired. While this is somewhat forgivable on fixed bases where the company maintains a support office and can have people on site to fix problems, for a ship that might be at sea for months this is an outright travesty. This goes double when you consider that it might be wartime and the ship could be suffering battle damage. Even if the captain decides "screw the contract, we need to feed the sailors", if they have no parts and no manuals that decision may be moot.

Ships need to be self sufficient to a large degree and a part of that is being able to maintain and repair the equipment on board. Large ships have extensive machine shops for a reason.

> The Government person who signed this contract should be fired.

They've probably left the job and can now be found working for the supplier of the aircraft carrier. If by "working" we mean playing golf. (Idle speculation based on my understanding on how this kind of shit works.)

This doesn't seem too different than John Deere tractors, which weigh heavily in most right to repair discussions.

I think the essential difference is that, with John Deere, you don’t have the choice between a repairable and a non-repairable tractor.

Here, the navy (very likely. Even if this provider didn’t give them the option, they could have gone with a different one) had a choice.

Did the Navy really have a choice at the time, though? Politically, I mean.

Yes, the Navy can select a higher bid as long as there is justification, and here the justification is long-term value and readiness…but a significant portion of the voting public is incapable of properly weighing long-term versus short-term effects.

All they’d understand—and they’d be helped along to this conclusion by plenty of politicians who just want to use the situation to score points—is, “The government paid twice as much for an aircraft carrier than it needed to!”

Maybe they even saw handing over to a provider all repair responsibilities as a major advantage. No need to have this capability in the crew with the associated logistics, and the accountability is also outsourced.

This comes at a cost but looking around at comparable outsourcing situations, everyone follows the same line of thinking. Sell my responsibility for (someone else’s) money.

Maybe they are an aircraft carrier that is deployed in places that no reasonable human can expect a service technician to visit, and this level of imbecility should generally be avoided.

nice way to blame "stupid public" for this internal Navy contract

The voting public never sees these costs.

They are sometimes told about it, tenth-hand, such as the fabled $10,000-hammer and the gold toilet seat.

Congress itself sees these costs, or more precisely, teams working for congressmembers see them. Congress members approve bills that are not lowest-cost when there is personal benefit for their careers: pork-barrel. It's very hard to justify not-lowest-cost without a pork-barrel angle.

Deere has a massive service network that makes it extremely rare for a farmer to get stranded during planting or harvesting. To keep this network around year after year, they lock people into using it and charge a lot of money.

The Navy should probably contract with Deere, as they’d probably think they’re getting a good deal.

And Caterpillar relies on customer loyalty, based on best-in-class service. Caterpillar has been known to rent equipment from their competitor and fly it by helicopter into remote mining locations while their equipment is inoperable. (Admittedly, mining is not a John Deere market, but this is about Caterpillar's service attitude.)

John Deere's model is successful, but ultimately monopolistic.

The Caterpillar model might work better for the Navy. Not a huge number of ships, used year-round.

I’m not condoning Deere, BTW. Just pointing out that there are tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands?) of farms that get very busy twice a year and much less busy the rest of the time. Having the capacity to make sure a farmer gets service quickly during those busy times is really hard. And expensive. If anyone had a better idea on how to do it they’d be a billionaire. I mean, there probably aren’t enough helicopters available for Deere to do what Caterpillar does.

In The Merchant of Venice, a malicious contract (demanding the famous pound of flesh) is itself viewed as a criminal act worthy of punishment. If this is the kind of language vendors are sneaking into contracts, that would be a fitting solution to the problem.

“Sneaking” a service agreement into a contract that the US Navy willingly signs?

Right to repair is for the people. The Navy, however, can just adopt a policy of uhhhh reading the contracts they sign.

The Navy being sloppy does not make the contract any less malicious.

Note that it's not the contractualism, but the fact that Shylock is Jewish:

    Tarry, Jew:
    The law hath yet another hold on you.
    It is enacted in the laws of Venice,
    If it be proved against an alien
    That by direct or indirect attempts
    He seek the life of any citizen,
    The party 'gainst the which he doth contrive
    Shall seize one half his goods; the other half
    Comes to the privy coffer of the state;
    And the offender's life lies in the mercy
    Of the duke only, 'gainst all other voice.

("Alien" means any non-citizen, but it's clear that it's specifically because Shylock is Jewish.)

Because it was done in a contract, it counts as an "indirect attempt", but it's the same law as if it were a physical assault.

(Also note: nobody else in the room seems to have ever heard of this law, and nobody brought it up. Portia is not, in fact, a lawyer. Nobody bothers to check the texts. Antonio's life is already safe; there is no need to heap additional punishment on Shylock. I believe that Portia is just making it up, and everybody goes with it.)

> Antonio's life is already safe; there is no need to heap additional punishment on Shylock.

By this logic, attempted murder should carry no jail term after the assailant is disarmed.

To me it looks like the same thing as why there are so many broken ice cream machines at McD

the ice cream machines are not broken, they just say it, so they don't have to clean it

There's a lot more to it than that:

Johnny Harris "The REAL Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4

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