[sandworm101]

>>30 person team over 5 years to design a toilet seat for a plane that will be used twice.

Talk to the carpenters and plumbers working on wealthy houses. Once you see people regularly dropping 200k+ to redo a bathroom, those government toilet seats don't seem all that extreme.

[hinkley]

I thought the toilet seat thing was explained long ago. Some of those bills were essentially money laundering for covert ops with extremely high security clearances. $50 for a seat, $1200 to pay salaries.

[lovich]

Some of it is also the logistics chain. A commercial enterprise can get away with purchasing a screw. A military airplane tracks the screw from its lathing, to rod forming, to steel production, to iron production + coke production, to iron ore and coke inputs. All this so that when a certain part fails all related parts can be checked for similar failures.

Apple is the only commercial enterprise I am aware of that attempts to have similar supply chain controls, and their products aren’t cheap.