Probes are dime a dozen in the Philippines. I expect senators and congressmen would milk all the publicity they could out of this, but after a week or so this issue will be forgotten like many other issues where these legislators wasted our taxes on.
I know I'll be totally shocked when it's announced that money went into the pockets of Filipino government officials. For those who don't know, about 40 rich and powerful families (like, say, the Yansons, Tans, Aranetas, or Cojuangcos) pull all the strings in the Philippines and these families all have prominently placed senators, congressmen, mayors, all the way down to barangay officials in their pockets. The entire government is completely and utterly corrupt.
Someone in the government is very corrupt, and I am glad they're not getting away with it. I wish more companies did that.
My home country in North Africa is dominated by this unethical practice, sometimes even worse, people in government and army officials own businesses and don't allow competition.
Note that the person quoted as requesting an investigation (Sar Duterte) is the daughter of the president that was in office when this happened (Rodrigo Duterte).
....it doesn't though. If you think it does, then I invite you to post an example please, for instance of anything that can compete against an M1 MacBook Air or Pro at half price - and by compete I mean anything that offers the same performance, same battery life, all in an aluminum body.
Sure, but Macbooks have retina(their stupid resolution) screens and yet still work 12 hours+ on battery. So it's not like your only options are 1080p(which is very low nowadays, I'd argue it actually limits productivity) and 4K power hungry high-brightness OLED panel. There are options in between those two.
High DPI screens are a godsend when you are reading text on them all day, I’ll never go back to a 1080p screen. And I’d hardly say a MacBook Pro is suffering in the battery life department for the choice.
Besides, the claim was comparable at half the cost. We’re not now going to shift the goal posts by playing “not comparable but I like it better”. It’s comparable or it isn’t.
You very specifically said "cost at least 2x more than comparable.".
So I'd like you to post an example of a laptop that is indeed comparable and costs half the price of an M1 MacBook Pro or Air.
Either stand by what you said, or correct yourself.
>>The luxury laptop market is now an Apple exclusive.
Plenty of extremely expensive(more so than Macbooks) laptops from HP, Dell, Lenovo and Asus. Saying that only apple makes "luxury laptops" is just....not true.
It's hard to find a laptop nowadays with comparable "specs" --- and this I believe is by design. You can't get a "Retina" display anywhere else. Comparable real world "functionality" is a different story --- one based on need.
What is "Retina"?
Only Apple knows but it appears to mean more pixels than your eyes can detect. It is marketing more so than functionality. A lot of the high end Apple "features" or "specs" have little or no impact on real world functionality. They exist mainly to justify added expense and/or bragging rights.
There are plenty of other high-DPI laptops (don’t get distracted by “Retina”). Just search for a 4K laptop. It’ll have the same(ish) pixel density as a MacBook Pro.
Also, saying it has little or no impact on real world functionality is an opinion I strongly disagree with. I will never work on a low-DPI screen again because I vastly prefer the crispness of high-DPI screens.
I think you are just trying to avoid answering the question, because you realized the original quote is just not true in the slightest.
>>Comparable real world "functionality" is a different story --- one based on need.
I will repeat my request for the third time then - please provide an example of a laptop at half price of an M1 Macbook Air/Pro that has comparable "real world functionality" then. Please observe how I'm completely open to working with your terms, so just go ahead and provide something, anything.
>>A lot of the high end Apple "features" or "specs" have little or no impact on real world functionality.
You can get some laptop with an high end i7, and RTX 3070 at half the price with comparable performance while costing ~1300$.
Sure, it doesn't have the same battery life. But at that cost it's a penalty that most are willing to take.
Now, I don't want to extend the rivalry here. For starters, I don't think this comparison makes sense.
What people value depends entirely on their own volition. And to be frank, there are intrinsic penalties you're willing to take when buying Apple products. As such, this debate will never come to a fair conclusion.
I was simply answering the question made by my post's parent.
As for the rest, touchpads have been getting better. Both in hardware and drivers. The latter is true in Linux land, at least. I don't use Windows, so I wouldn't know.
Unless it's under full load, and you've got a GPU mux switch, I don't think your fans will sound as a jet engine either. But either way, at that price, yeah... It'll be bulkier than a Mac. Aaand your fans will spin. Aaand your battery life will be worse, 'cause CISC lol. Still miles better than carrying a desktop though.
I'm happy for Apple, in all honesty. RISC is the future.
I just hope that bigger and better open firmware projects keep coming, so I can keep tinkering (and having no x86 license to deal with, it does seem that future is bright).
Unfortunately, x86 just has better support right now.
MS, Dell, IBM and I guess a bunch of other companies sell more expensive laptops than Apple with objectively inferior 'specs' (obviously they
have other advantage besides Linux/Windows support, like different screen selection, upgradeable RAM and/or storage (sometimes) etc..) it's just that people seem to rarely buy them compared to Macbooks.
I think the point is that not only is the Apple product multiple times more performant, but it is seen as a luxury brand. So they paid luxury brand prices for cheap junk.
Depending on your use case, a new MacBook Air is probably at least 2x-3x as fast as a Celeron in single core performance and comically more performant in multi-core performance:
Of course your performance on any given application will vary, but I'm willing to bet there are very few applications where the ultra-low-end Celeron would come out on top.
On the quality side, Apple laptops are generally well-built, have higher end screens and construction, good battery life, etc. If you prefer a different brand, that's fine. But you certainly shouldn't be using public money to pay premium prices for junk computers with outdated tech.
It is commonplace here in the Philippines during bidding that the inflated prices are because both the sellers and government officials get their own share of the profit.
I keyed on "fraud probe" and would like on of those for the situation I raised. I was charged and I paid. Next time I pass the store which was more than a year later, I discover they didn't get paid.
This happens a lot in american universities as well.
I was once contracted to help implement oracle for an Ivy League university.
It was shocking to see the preferred minority suppliers overcharging by 200% for same things you could get at Office Depot. Apparently research labs were furious, and went out of their way to game the system to get cheaper office supplies, and so HR needed a custom dashboard to monitor them as well.
I have the same experience. Had to use the preferred providers for some things and was charged with a hefty premium. At some point you had to use the preferred travel provider that was asking for twice the price of a plane ticket you could find by yourself. Thankfully it seems that in the last decade those things got dismantled little by little. For the bids, that's yet another attempt at regulation that in the end proved unable to solve a problem and caused many more.. But if you leave individuals to handle large purchases without oversight you can be certain a lot will take the offer that has personal advantages attached (be it gifts, vacations, additional equipment, your name on a communication...). Even if those are usually banned in state universities, again there are ways around that.
As an immigrant from a country where corruption is more common, I'm amazed (and somewhat delighted) by the level of trust in institution and processes in the US. The amazing part, is that, it somehow works most of the time.
On education though, the corruption is plain to see. But most people don't notice it. It's amazing. And when brought up, it rubs people the wrong way.
What you saw was corruption. The way these "preferred providers" become "preferred" is not by sending the purchasing department clerk a box of chocolates.
> The amazing part, is that, it somehow works most of the time.
Of course. The Western world doesn't operate so well because there's no or even less corruption. It's rather because there's a lot more money floating around enabling some to pocket a lot of it and still have plenty left over for things to work well.
I worked with the people who, in an official capacity, estimate how much money changes hands via acts of corruption in the EU. And I can assure you that while being part of the EU the money which flowed through the corruption pipes in the City of London gave some Eastern European countries' entire GDPs a run for their money.
Way less "small corruption", individuals committing small acts of corruption? Yes. Way less "large corruption"? No. Small corruption means you get ahead in a queue at the doctor's every once in a while. Large corruption changes the nature of society, it means tens of thousands of people are forced to pee in bottles in a fulfillment center and somehow this is just fine.
The London laundromat is a well known issue that the UK government refuses to fix as the people in power benefit from it. Same as all of Switzerland's business logic. But this does not represent the average administration in an average EU country - there is still fraud, favouritism, etc, even in the model countries, but the share of fraud is well below what you find in other countries.
> this does not represent the average administration in an average EU country
You are right, it's mainly the bigger economies. That was actually the point, the bigger the economy, the more money floats around towards pockets it shouldn't be in by virtue of the fact that it's hard to notice. Things work so it's the perfect cover. UK isn't really the exception, it's not like Germany doesn't have similar issues even if little to none of this can be proven formally.
In what might be the only report of its kind in the EU the level of corruption was estimated at well over 100bn EUR. And that's the conservative estimate. The consensus is that the problem isn't with small bribes but with the ties between the political class and industry. The stronger the industry, the bigger the corruption.
Look at representative leaders in the EU. People like Madame Lagarde, convicted of misuse of public funds (the lighter version of a corruption charge which allowed her to walk away because she had too massive strings attached), or Ursula von der Leyen, twice investigated for corruption, twice the evidence was mysteriously destroyed, twice got away. They're all inevitably corrupted by private economic interests that are enabled by the sheer financial power they have. And that financial power comes both from doing a good job, and greasing the wheels where needed with more money than an average person can even imagine. Money begets money.
No, the Western world does a decent job preventing corruption from getting too bad. It's not perfect, but the difference is that if the DoD buys reactive armor for their tanks they get reactive armor, at maybe twice the price, and for more tanks than they think they need. When Russia buys reactive armor for their tanks, they get things that look like reactive armor but are just rubber in a metal shell.
It's not that the West has so much money that companies decide to deliver working products out of the goodness of their hearts, it's that only the less damaging forms of corruption survive here.
You start with a definite "no" but are actually saying exactly what I said, just in other words. Except the last paragraph which seems like a very naive interpretation of what I said.
There's no implication of "kindness of their hearts" but rather that after a lot of money is wasted on corruption there's still plenty of money left to get the job done right. If you can afford to pay 2x the value of the work you can do a good job and pocket the 1x difference. If you can only afford 0.8x the value of the work and 0.1x of it "belongs" in your pocket... you have a problem despite the lower absolute value of the act of corruption.
I'm not sure, though, if it's really doing much more than lining the pockets of the new batch of suppliers. It sounds like they're not building up any expertise or ability in these suppliers. They sound like they're just dropshippers with a higher markup.
I never quite understood how competitive bidding processes usually end up with similar outcomes.
If you personally need a Dell server, you go to dell.com and buy it.
If the government needs a Dell server, they start a tendering and bidding process and will end up paying double for the same server through some middleman who buys the server from Dell and resells to the government for double the price because they're good at writing bids for government projects.
Quite why there isn't competition I don't know. Maybe writing bids really is that expensive? Or maybe there is just collusion?
Usually the bid process is circumvented (say, multiple smaller purchase orders) or the bids are directed.
A directed bid is one that makes very specif requests or weights them in such a way that only a "preferred" supplier/contractor can meet.
Of course, the preferred contractor is provided with the info through different channels. There may even be some back and forth to "tune" the bid before it officially makes its way into the formal bidding process.
But even when the government side of the process is an honest government employee just wanting a dell server and with no kickbacks or preference who supplies it, you still seem to get a substantially inflated price.
The processes designed to enable competition (vs an official just hiring their cousin) become so cumbersome only a small number of organizations can take part.
> The processes designed to enable competition (vs an official just hiring their cousin)
It is important to note that the process is not designed to enable competition. Competition is the default tool used (but there are built-in exceptions for non-competitive processes that are aimed at the same purpose), the purpose is to prevent (and make it easier to detect, when that fails) corruption.
That’s also the reason why the news stories it produces are fairly consistent: it makes corruption that is otherwise routine a noteworthy exception, and even when it fails to prevent it leaves huge piles of evidence around it.
I've worked in government (California), in the past, and this was not my experience.
Most large vendors had contracts with the state which we would use to buy equipment which avoided having to go out for bid. And, competitive bid only came into effect if a purchase price exceeded $50K (and no existing state contract). For equipment purchases, I never saw the bid process used-- the preferred vendor always had a pre-existing contract.
We got very good prices from Dell, much less than their retail pricing (I don't recall the exact percentage off list, but Dell orders were a fraction of the retail pricing the Dell website "build your server" page stated). Cisco would not discount hardware more than 30% for us (software and contracts 40%), but Alcatel Lucent gave us 73% off list. Nobody but giant telecoms buying massive volumes could get an equivalent discount from Alcatel Lucent.
We did however favor local contractors for services (somewhat rural area), and often times, those contractors were less competent / did poorer work than out of area alternatives at similar cost. The last contractors that expanded the fiber plant were complete clowns, and took 30 times longer to do the equivalent amount of work (they had to redo a lot of their work that failed testing, and they were just plain slow) compared to a great contractor, from LA, that we used previously (before the 'use local companies' mandate was handed down).
and resells to the government for double the price because they're good at writing bids for government projects.
We're a major supplier to government agencies, and I personally wrote our pricing engine. Obviously I see the inputs to the pricing, and I can assure you that this is very far from the truth.
First, margins on products like this are very, very thin. Like, it's not unusual for the state to make more in sales tax from an order than we're taking in margin.
Second, specifically relating to US public sector contracts, there's a federally-negotiated contract that any public sector entity can buy off of - look up "GSA contract"[1]. The way pricing is arrived at is defined here, and it would really stupid for some government entity to go off the ranch and buy something at a higher price than this would dictate. They may well negotiate their own contract that is better (we have tons and tons of customers who do this), but why would they pay more if the GSA contract dictates a lower price?
>Like, it's not unusual for the state to make more in sales tax from an order than we're taking in margin
Is that supposed to be notable or surprising? I've assumed lots of retail businesses that sell to the general public at full price only make a fraction of the sales tax.
Absolutely the first possibility I thought of is Best Buy, and the first Google response is net profit margin is 3.2%. Sales tax in my area is 8%.
Even if that's a bogus number, it feels truthy?
If the government does get a big discount, it would be interesting to explore where that comes from.
>>Like, it's not unusual for the state to make more in sales tax from an order than we're taking in margin
>Is that supposed to be notable or surprising?
Well, specifically, I was responding to the absurd claim that someone "resells to the government for double the price".
But more generally, yes, I think it's pretty surprising that the government should get a greater cut of the sale than we, the sellers, do. Is there some way that the state and local government is creating more value, or contributing more to the transaction, than we are?
> I never quite understood how competitive bidding processes usually end up with similar outcomes.
Its not competitive bidding processes; government contracting before competitive bidding became the norm with exceptions requiring justification was much more prone to this kind of failure (to the point where it wasn't even a newsworthy failure.)
> If the government needs a Dell server
IF the government needs a Dell server, there are generally exceptions to bidding requirements that would allow a sole-source purchase, direct from Dell. While this might have has much bureaucratic overhead as bidding arrangements, its completely different bureaucratic overhead.
OTOH, Dell mostly sells commodity servers; and the government rarely just wants to buy a server, it wants to but a server with specified forms of support. So, what actually happens even if the government official for whom the purchasing is being done expects that a Dell server with first party support from Dell would be the best option is that there is competitive bidding processes where vendors able to provide a commodity server with the necessary functionality and support bid.
Actually, that’s not really true either, because basically no government is doing competitive bids for a server. What they actually do for many things, and commodity servers and associated support would usually fall into it, is a have master contracts that are either sole-source or competitive bid with set prices and schedules for a high level part of government (GSA does this at the federal level, and some of them can be used by tribal, state, and local government as well, either generally or for specific uses; most states also do it at the state level, and individual state agencies and local governments also do it), and individual programs that need something just buy off the master contracts made above them. At the scale of a single server, if it wasn't off a master contract, they wouldn't have a high-formality post and bid, though if they didn't have a sole source justification they'd probably need to solicit quotes from multiple vendors.
> Quite why there isn’t competition I don’t know. Maybe writing bids really is that expensive?
It’s expensive for a genuine competitive bidding process, which tends to be long, drawnn out, and have a hard requirement for at least three bidders, at least two of whom will fail. Maybe not considered over the long term, with multiple opportunities, some of which succeed, put you have a lot at risk, and a long time between putting resource in and getting sales out, so not every business can do it.
From my experience working with various governments, the issue comes from control provisions. The logic always goes something like this:
Problem: a fraud occurs, e.g. someone was bribed to favour one contractor
Solution : strict must-be-respected rules are put in place to ensure that the process is competitive and transparent.
Problem 2: now the process is very cumbersome and complex to set up for the administration as each field (e.g. document management consultant vs external study vs external auditor vs IT hardware vs contractor for the canteen vs medical services vs ...) has very different requirements but each has to respect the same general process. For some it works well for others it doesn't.
Most importantly, the procedures are usually slow as you need to give everyone time to do their part and be transparent and predictable. And everyone is busy - e.g. you might get five 200 page offers (much of which is boilerplate to respond to boilerplate pieces of the tender itself) and several staff need to read those, capture their observations, agree on a rating for each tender, ...
You also need to be transparent, so you need to communicate very openly - e.g. some governments have an obligation to allow all bidders to be present when the bids are opened, so it is obvious that all are treated fairly. Also all the documents you write must later be publicly accessible/can be seen by all bidders, so you need various internal reviewers to ensure you don't get sued. Even if a bid is obviously bad you still have to go through the motions for that bid as every government has at some point been sued by a bidder for discrimination/non-respect of some rule and then had to seriously pay out..
All this is complex and there are many rules, so many smaller bidders are from the beginning excluded. Moreover, the effort to make such tenders is high, so the bidders calculate that into their offer price (and they have to cross-subsidise other offers where they put in the work but lost the bid).
Not to forget also that you usually need to define precisely what you need and often those precisions are written by non-experts or copy pasted from previous similar tenders (such as I bet happened in this case...) .
Solution 2: all have an interest to find ways to get faster contracting with more flexibility. For instance a common solution is something like a 'framework contract' (different names in different places) - essentially a contract with one or more parties that they will swiftly give you a certain kind of service/good (an external auditor, some laptops, air conditioning repair, office moving services, ...). So you tender for someone to provide you potentially in the future repeatedly at time X one or more products of type Y. The contract will run for 3 or 5 years or so (to be worth the effort) and provides more or less a monopoly to that one party, in return for flexibility in getting what you ask for without new tendering.
Problem 3: the tendering for such a framework contract is in the abstract, i.e. you (as government employee) might be asking for services/goods that you (or anyone in your building or even in other government bodies!) may want 3 or 5 years in the future and you have no clue what those will be. So you define as far as you can, but you'll always get it wrong. Maybe when you tender a celeron was good enough and the price is great, but when you actually take action to make use of the contract the technology is outdated and the (locked-in) price far too high. Or you tender thinking of the minimum viable need, but the power users are left in the cold. Or as the tendering rules are so complex you are sitting in a specialised procurement department that knows nothing of actual business practice and so you have been told to tender this thing but just have no clue on the substance (procurement department is the least attractive place to be in, so don't expect the creme-de-la-creme of employees to do that work) and so get the trainee to write the tech specific...
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadMy home country in North Africa is dominated by this unethical practice, sometimes even worse, people in government and army officials own businesses and don't allow competition.
Besides, the claim was comparable at half the cost. We’re not now going to shift the goal posts by playing “not comparable but I like it better”. It’s comparable or it isn’t.
So I'd like you to post an example of a laptop that is indeed comparable and costs half the price of an M1 MacBook Pro or Air.
Either stand by what you said, or correct yourself.
>>The luxury laptop market is now an Apple exclusive.
Plenty of extremely expensive(more so than Macbooks) laptops from HP, Dell, Lenovo and Asus. Saying that only apple makes "luxury laptops" is just....not true.
What is "Retina"?
Only Apple knows but it appears to mean more pixels than your eyes can detect. It is marketing more so than functionality. A lot of the high end Apple "features" or "specs" have little or no impact on real world functionality. They exist mainly to justify added expense and/or bragging rights.
Also, saying it has little or no impact on real world functionality is an opinion I strongly disagree with. I will never work on a low-DPI screen again because I vastly prefer the crispness of high-DPI screens.
>>Comparable real world "functionality" is a different story --- one based on need.
I will repeat my request for the third time then - please provide an example of a laptop at half price of an M1 Macbook Air/Pro that has comparable "real world functionality" then. Please observe how I'm completely open to working with your terms, so just go ahead and provide something, anything.
>>A lot of the high end Apple "features" or "specs" have little or no impact on real world functionality.
Like what? Please name one.
Now, I don't want to extend the rivalry here. For starters, I don't think this comparison makes sense.
What people value depends entirely on their own volition. And to be frank, there are intrinsic penalties you're willing to take when buying Apple products. As such, this debate will never come to a fair conclusion.
But that's another conversation entirely.
The Windows laptop will likely be bulky, have a terrible touchpad and sound like a portable jet engine (as long as it’s Intel at least).
As for the rest, touchpads have been getting better. Both in hardware and drivers. The latter is true in Linux land, at least. I don't use Windows, so I wouldn't know.
Unless it's under full load, and you've got a GPU mux switch, I don't think your fans will sound as a jet engine either. But either way, at that price, yeah... It'll be bulkier than a Mac. Aaand your fans will spin. Aaand your battery life will be worse, 'cause CISC lol. Still miles better than carrying a desktop though.
I'm happy for Apple, in all honesty. RISC is the future. I just hope that bigger and better open firmware projects keep coming, so I can keep tinkering (and having no x86 license to deal with, it does seem that future is bright). Unfortunately, x86 just has better support right now.
Depending on your use case, a new MacBook Air is probably at least 2x-3x as fast as a Celeron in single core performance and comically more performant in multi-core performance:
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-2022
[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15907690
Of course your performance on any given application will vary, but I'm willing to bet there are very few applications where the ultra-low-end Celeron would come out on top.
On the quality side, Apple laptops are generally well-built, have higher end screens and construction, good battery life, etc. If you prefer a different brand, that's fine. But you certainly shouldn't be using public money to pay premium prices for junk computers with outdated tech.
It was shocking to see the preferred minority suppliers overcharging by 200% for same things you could get at Office Depot. Apparently research labs were furious, and went out of their way to game the system to get cheaper office supplies, and so HR needed a custom dashboard to monitor them as well.
On education though, the corruption is plain to see. But most people don't notice it. It's amazing. And when brought up, it rubs people the wrong way.
What you saw was corruption. The way these "preferred providers" become "preferred" is not by sending the purchasing department clerk a box of chocolates.
Of course. The Western world doesn't operate so well because there's no or even less corruption. It's rather because there's a lot more money floating around enabling some to pocket a lot of it and still have plenty left over for things to work well.
It's technically less corrupt but the drag on society is still very much there.
Way less "small corruption", individuals committing small acts of corruption? Yes. Way less "large corruption"? No. Small corruption means you get ahead in a queue at the doctor's every once in a while. Large corruption changes the nature of society, it means tens of thousands of people are forced to pee in bottles in a fulfillment center and somehow this is just fine.
You are right, it's mainly the bigger economies. That was actually the point, the bigger the economy, the more money floats around towards pockets it shouldn't be in by virtue of the fact that it's hard to notice. Things work so it's the perfect cover. UK isn't really the exception, it's not like Germany doesn't have similar issues even if little to none of this can be proven formally.
In what might be the only report of its kind in the EU the level of corruption was estimated at well over 100bn EUR. And that's the conservative estimate. The consensus is that the problem isn't with small bribes but with the ties between the political class and industry. The stronger the industry, the bigger the corruption.
Look at representative leaders in the EU. People like Madame Lagarde, convicted of misuse of public funds (the lighter version of a corruption charge which allowed her to walk away because she had too massive strings attached), or Ursula von der Leyen, twice investigated for corruption, twice the evidence was mysteriously destroyed, twice got away. They're all inevitably corrupted by private economic interests that are enabled by the sheer financial power they have. And that financial power comes both from doing a good job, and greasing the wheels where needed with more money than an average person can even imagine. Money begets money.
It's not that the West has so much money that companies decide to deliver working products out of the goodness of their hearts, it's that only the less damaging forms of corruption survive here.
There's no implication of "kindness of their hearts" but rather that after a lot of money is wasted on corruption there's still plenty of money left to get the job done right. If you can afford to pay 2x the value of the work you can do a good job and pocket the 1x difference. If you can only afford 0.8x the value of the work and 0.1x of it "belongs" in your pocket... you have a problem despite the lower absolute value of the act of corruption.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2021/05/12/princeton-adopts-p...
I'm not sure, though, if it's really doing much more than lining the pockets of the new batch of suppliers. It sounds like they're not building up any expertise or ability in these suppliers. They sound like they're just dropshippers with a higher markup.
If you personally need a Dell server, you go to dell.com and buy it.
If the government needs a Dell server, they start a tendering and bidding process and will end up paying double for the same server through some middleman who buys the server from Dell and resells to the government for double the price because they're good at writing bids for government projects.
Quite why there isn't competition I don't know. Maybe writing bids really is that expensive? Or maybe there is just collusion?
A directed bid is one that makes very specif requests or weights them in such a way that only a "preferred" supplier/contractor can meet.
Of course, the preferred contractor is provided with the info through different channels. There may even be some back and forth to "tune" the bid before it officially makes its way into the formal bidding process.
"... shall be capable of tracking 48 separate points per system and storing 13,287 individual records per point..."
Just copy-pasted from a certain supplier's specs sheet in 1995 and never updated.
I was also still seeing requirements for dot-matrix printers and color monitors in 2015.
It is important to note that the process is not designed to enable competition. Competition is the default tool used (but there are built-in exceptions for non-competitive processes that are aimed at the same purpose), the purpose is to prevent (and make it easier to detect, when that fails) corruption.
That’s also the reason why the news stories it produces are fairly consistent: it makes corruption that is otherwise routine a noteworthy exception, and even when it fails to prevent it leaves huge piles of evidence around it.
Most large vendors had contracts with the state which we would use to buy equipment which avoided having to go out for bid. And, competitive bid only came into effect if a purchase price exceeded $50K (and no existing state contract). For equipment purchases, I never saw the bid process used-- the preferred vendor always had a pre-existing contract.
We got very good prices from Dell, much less than their retail pricing (I don't recall the exact percentage off list, but Dell orders were a fraction of the retail pricing the Dell website "build your server" page stated). Cisco would not discount hardware more than 30% for us (software and contracts 40%), but Alcatel Lucent gave us 73% off list. Nobody but giant telecoms buying massive volumes could get an equivalent discount from Alcatel Lucent.
We did however favor local contractors for services (somewhat rural area), and often times, those contractors were less competent / did poorer work than out of area alternatives at similar cost. The last contractors that expanded the fiber plant were complete clowns, and took 30 times longer to do the equivalent amount of work (they had to redo a lot of their work that failed testing, and they were just plain slow) compared to a great contractor, from LA, that we used previously (before the 'use local companies' mandate was handed down).
We're a major supplier to government agencies, and I personally wrote our pricing engine. Obviously I see the inputs to the pricing, and I can assure you that this is very far from the truth.
First, margins on products like this are very, very thin. Like, it's not unusual for the state to make more in sales tax from an order than we're taking in margin.
Second, specifically relating to US public sector contracts, there's a federally-negotiated contract that any public sector entity can buy off of - look up "GSA contract"[1]. The way pricing is arrived at is defined here, and it would really stupid for some government entity to go off the ranch and buy something at a higher price than this would dictate. They may well negotiate their own contract that is better (we have tons and tons of customers who do this), but why would they pay more if the GSA contract dictates a lower price?
[1] https://www.gsascheduler.com/gsa-contract/gsa-schedule-prici...
Is that supposed to be notable or surprising? I've assumed lots of retail businesses that sell to the general public at full price only make a fraction of the sales tax.
Absolutely the first possibility I thought of is Best Buy, and the first Google response is net profit margin is 3.2%. Sales tax in my area is 8%.
Even if that's a bogus number, it feels truthy?
If the government does get a big discount, it would be interesting to explore where that comes from.
>Is that supposed to be notable or surprising?
Well, specifically, I was responding to the absurd claim that someone "resells to the government for double the price".
But more generally, yes, I think it's pretty surprising that the government should get a greater cut of the sale than we, the sellers, do. Is there some way that the state and local government is creating more value, or contributing more to the transaction, than we are?
Its not competitive bidding processes; government contracting before competitive bidding became the norm with exceptions requiring justification was much more prone to this kind of failure (to the point where it wasn't even a newsworthy failure.)
> If the government needs a Dell server
IF the government needs a Dell server, there are generally exceptions to bidding requirements that would allow a sole-source purchase, direct from Dell. While this might have has much bureaucratic overhead as bidding arrangements, its completely different bureaucratic overhead.
OTOH, Dell mostly sells commodity servers; and the government rarely just wants to buy a server, it wants to but a server with specified forms of support. So, what actually happens even if the government official for whom the purchasing is being done expects that a Dell server with first party support from Dell would be the best option is that there is competitive bidding processes where vendors able to provide a commodity server with the necessary functionality and support bid.
Actually, that’s not really true either, because basically no government is doing competitive bids for a server. What they actually do for many things, and commodity servers and associated support would usually fall into it, is a have master contracts that are either sole-source or competitive bid with set prices and schedules for a high level part of government (GSA does this at the federal level, and some of them can be used by tribal, state, and local government as well, either generally or for specific uses; most states also do it at the state level, and individual state agencies and local governments also do it), and individual programs that need something just buy off the master contracts made above them. At the scale of a single server, if it wasn't off a master contract, they wouldn't have a high-formality post and bid, though if they didn't have a sole source justification they'd probably need to solicit quotes from multiple vendors.
> Quite why there isn’t competition I don’t know. Maybe writing bids really is that expensive?
It’s expensive for a genuine competitive bidding process, which tends to be long, drawnn out, and have a hard requirement for at least three bidders, at least two of whom will fail. Maybe not considered over the long term, with multiple opportunities, some of which succeed, put you have a lot at risk, and a long time between putting resource in and getting sales out, so not every business can do it.
https://aws.amazon.com/partners/programs/distribution-resell...
https://aws.amazon.com/partners/programs/solution-provider/
Problem: a fraud occurs, e.g. someone was bribed to favour one contractor
Solution : strict must-be-respected rules are put in place to ensure that the process is competitive and transparent.
Problem 2: now the process is very cumbersome and complex to set up for the administration as each field (e.g. document management consultant vs external study vs external auditor vs IT hardware vs contractor for the canteen vs medical services vs ...) has very different requirements but each has to respect the same general process. For some it works well for others it doesn't.
Most importantly, the procedures are usually slow as you need to give everyone time to do their part and be transparent and predictable. And everyone is busy - e.g. you might get five 200 page offers (much of which is boilerplate to respond to boilerplate pieces of the tender itself) and several staff need to read those, capture their observations, agree on a rating for each tender, ...
You also need to be transparent, so you need to communicate very openly - e.g. some governments have an obligation to allow all bidders to be present when the bids are opened, so it is obvious that all are treated fairly. Also all the documents you write must later be publicly accessible/can be seen by all bidders, so you need various internal reviewers to ensure you don't get sued. Even if a bid is obviously bad you still have to go through the motions for that bid as every government has at some point been sued by a bidder for discrimination/non-respect of some rule and then had to seriously pay out..
All this is complex and there are many rules, so many smaller bidders are from the beginning excluded. Moreover, the effort to make such tenders is high, so the bidders calculate that into their offer price (and they have to cross-subsidise other offers where they put in the work but lost the bid).
Not to forget also that you usually need to define precisely what you need and often those precisions are written by non-experts or copy pasted from previous similar tenders (such as I bet happened in this case...) .
Solution 2: all have an interest to find ways to get faster contracting with more flexibility. For instance a common solution is something like a 'framework contract' (different names in different places) - essentially a contract with one or more parties that they will swiftly give you a certain kind of service/good (an external auditor, some laptops, air conditioning repair, office moving services, ...). So you tender for someone to provide you potentially in the future repeatedly at time X one or more products of type Y. The contract will run for 3 or 5 years or so (to be worth the effort) and provides more or less a monopoly to that one party, in return for flexibility in getting what you ask for without new tendering.
Problem 3: the tendering for such a framework contract is in the abstract, i.e. you (as government employee) might be asking for services/goods that you (or anyone in your building or even in other government bodies!) may want 3 or 5 years in the future and you have no clue what those will be. So you define as far as you can, but you'll always get it wrong. Maybe when you tender a celeron was good enough and the price is great, but when you actually take action to make use of the contract the technology is outdated and the (locked-in) price far too high. Or you tender thinking of the minimum viable need, but the power users are left in the cold. Or as the tendering rules are so complex you are sitting in a specialised procurement department that knows nothing of actual business practice and so you have been told to tender this thing but just have no clue on the substance (procurement department is the least attractive place to be in, so don't expect the creme-de-la-creme of employees to do that work) and so get the trainee to write the tech specific...
I have no relation to the subcontractor, they joined a hardware enthusiast discord server, but all their information checked out.
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/96m-laptop-contracts-went-to-tory-...
http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/218211-geo-geobook-1e...