60
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 39 points 1 day ago

I recently helped work on a firetruck at a shop that works on existing trucks. They repair/rebuild their bodies, and do a lot of custom work. It's common for firestations to buy decommissioned trucks from other stations, and have this shop rebuild them rather than buying a new truck.

The truck I was working on had a light tower on it, with 6 led lights. During the work, one of the employees there asked me how much I thought the individual lights on the tower cost. An equivalently bright LED light would normally cost around $100, but because it was going on a firetruck I guessed it would have a premium price and guessed $300-400. Instead he told me each light was about $1500, making the set of 6 lights worth $9000.

The whole job was interesting, basically everything they had to buy new was way overpriced compared to the non-firetruck versions of the parts.

[-] Etterra@discuss.online 19 points 1 day ago

So manufacturers are milking those juicy government contracts. Isn't America the fucking best.

[-] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 8 points 21 hours ago

But capitalism told me that private contracts were the least wasteful and most efficient?

Why would the people who profit from lying, lie to me?

[-] faintwhenfree@lemmus.org 7 points 1 day ago

So are you telling me it's like the wedding tax but for firetruck?

this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
60 points (100.0% liked)

Hacker News

2099 readers
1122 users here now

Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.

The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.

founded 10 months ago
MODERATORS