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Comment by throwaway_yy2Di | Hacker News Reader

Did I understand this correctly: the DoD subsidized several million dollars of military jet fuel, to a shell company owned by Page and Schmidt, under a NASA research contract, which they used mostly for business and vacation travel?

(Seriously, did I read the story accurately -- it's confusing).

edit: I found the documents of the NASA contract:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/business/foia/H211_LLC.html

Apparently these were disclosed by a FOIA filed by the New York Times:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/a-new-fighter-jet-f...

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It sounded like the fuel was not subsidized by the DoD but that H211 was avoiding some consumer/commercial cost that the government is not subject to.

lol Are you a lawyer?

Are you an ad man?

Also, I got the impression that the Googlers are allowed to fly their jets out of Moffett while other billionaires aren't allowed to at any cost.

> Did I understand this correctly

No. According to the article the DoD charged google what it cost them, so it was null to them. There might be some savings of local tax, but google is supposed to pay that separately (don't know if they did).

This is mostly a non-story.

That's not quite what the article says:

>The agency says it recently charged H211 on a cost-plus basis, and before that charged a standard budgetary price that was infrequently reset but over time reflected the government's costs.

So at least for some time the government was charging a standard accounting price that wasn't updated with rising fuel costs. This won't necessarily compensate over time. If you're smart when the government is below market you buy and when above do what they're doing now:

>Since the fuel cutoff, the Google executives' planes have been coping by flying back to Moffett with extra fuel purchased elsewhere, Mr. Ambrose said.

The reference to cost-plus does seem to imply they fixed this hole at some point.

It's a subsidy because they're selling at below market rates (see the chart). Exxon doesn't sell "at cost".

It's unclear what the costs in the article describe, but the price difference (>$1/gallon) is much greater than the tax rate (21.9 c/gallon) [1].

The article also says DoD fuel isn't allowed to be sold for non-government flights, regardless of costs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...

Looks like H211 pays NASA over $113K/month to rent the hangars.

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