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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

One hears stories about researchers with unspent grant money scrambling madly to find something, anything, to spend it on before the grant expires. Use it or lose it.

My Dad told me how back in the 1970s he worked at a government-funded research lab. One time they called up a laboratory glassware supplier and said "We'd like to order $10,000 worth of glassware". The supplier asked "Sure, what specifically would you like to order?" The lab replied "We don't care, whatever you have in stock, so long as it costs us $10,000 and we pay you today – if we don't spend the money today we lose it forever".

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I came across a similar thing in the 90s; one department had an expensive piece of equipment with a three year lifespan.

They weren't allowed to amortise that, and any budget increase every three years would have been denied, so they had to include the whole replacement cost in every budget, and find ways of spending that money every year, or lose it.

Uh, I mean, of course I don't know any better than you, but I think parent wasn't entirely serious... obviously. Was he?

I have zero proof of this, but I've heard of the US Navy having jets fly out, dump fuel, and come back to refuel minutes later, just to fill out a budget. Lose it or lose it is not uncommon unfortunately

He was absolutely serious. It's complete nonsense, of course, but this is also reality.

It sounds like there is a missing incentive to go under budget. There's something wrong with the system if people feel like they just have to burn money.

> It sounds like there is a missing incentive to go under budget.

Other way around. Right now there exists a negative incentive to go under budget, being that if you need extra budget next year you suddenly don't have a buffer.

The correct way to fix things is to simultaneously prohibiting end-of-FY budget-keeping purchases (e.g. by mandatory reviewing of purchases) while at the same time allocating a company/organization wide buffer for stuff that needs immediate / projected stuff that was not in the planned budget.

I like how google did employee travel. They calculated a cap = 2/3 * historical employee data + 1/3 * current cost of business flight.

Obviously for common routes such as Sf to la, nyc to sf...etc they hard coded values.

for every $1 under the cap you received 50cent to use on a future travel plan over the calculated cap.

You could fly economy on an international flight saving money, then bank 50% of savings to buy a first class ticket some other time.

This created a negative feedback loop keeping travel costs in check.

Yep, back in the day when I worked for an IT dealer/distie, at certain times of the year, the client conversations went:

"How many <Brand> laptops can I get for £xK?"

"What kind of spec are you looking for?"

"Don't care, just as many as I can get of 'something' for £xK."

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