this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
450 points (98.9% liked)

Technology

72610 readers
3606 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) introduced the Warrior Right to Repair Act of 2025, legislation that would require contractors to provide the Department of Defense (DoD) with access to technical data and materials the military needs to repair and maintain its own equipment.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 16 points 21 hours ago

What about the civilian right to repair.

Why can’t we all just be allowed to fix all of our shit. Sell me parts, let me open up things and poke around without illegals saying I violated the warranty.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago

Don't worry. We prioritize the military over healthcare, wealth disparity, hunger, homelessness, cost of living, climate change, etc. This issue will be resolved right quick.

But fuck veterans. They can go fuck off and die.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is really going to confuse MAGA. Pro-military but anti-corporate profits…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago

your first mistake was thinking anyone associated with maga will think this critically, lol

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago

While this isn't as far as I'd like them to go, this is extremely big news. The amount of money spent on absolute bullshit fees by defense contractors is bonkers. Us taxpayers are shelling out billions of dollars to buy a single jet that we then have to spend millions of dollars per year to maintain, simply because we aren't allowed to maintain it ourselves.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That wasn't a thing already? Not a requirement for military orders?

You mean they could ship something into the military without proper documentation and bill it every time maintenance has to be done?

Some things in your land of the free seem to confuse me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

The free part was an oversight they're been working to remove.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Liberals will fight for the rights of the military, while the military is being used on domestic soil to actively oppress our rights. Predictable as ever.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

perfect example of the tone-deaf left.

corporate democrats will never get it and are just "republican lite".

jackasses.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What is tone deaf about this?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

instead of pushing for a right to repair for all US citizens, including military, they instead opt for right to repair for military only.

this sends the message that corporate interests are far more valuable to political leaders than the needs of their constituency.

Warren looks great on paper, but given the opportunity she fails to deliver to the American public what is needed. she's no different than Joe Biden, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, etc. At the end of the day they serve their corporate masters and not the public.

if they did serve the public this wouldn't even be news because everyone would have had the right to repair decades ago.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Drop the word "military" and I'm onboard.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

It might have some side effects of affecting more than just the military, but codified right to repair into law is never going to be a bad thing IMO.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

Any legal precedent for this has to be a win right?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Boy oh boy really putting through the important shit huh? God damn do I hate our current politicians.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

This is important. Rossman did an interview with a few military techs, and here are few highlights

  • they couldn't get the router password (that they own) for troubleshooting. Imagine your ISP locked you out of the router?
  • it cost 200k to ship a 100k part because they weren't allowed to fix the broken one. 300k - thats a decent sized home in some areas, just to replace a wire or something. (Look up military pricing too, I remeber seeing something about how the military pays $400 for $4 bag of fuses)
  • they have to fly manufacture service techs that don't get schematics, if they need them, an engineer is flown out who closely guards them.

Its a complete waste of taxpayer money. Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

We're allowed to fix our own cars (although manufactures are trying to stop that), why can't the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors? Get a foothold in the military sector and the rest will follow.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Look up military pricing too, I remeber seeing something about how the military pays $400 for $4 bag of fuses

That "military pricing" is called "corruption". Despite everyone knowing that it happens in most militaries (or big b2b), it still is that.

Its a complete waste of taxpayer money. Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

I mean, you had a truly magnificent military budget for already 30 years after the nation which was supposed to be the problem solved by it started asking for food aid and falling apart into pieces.

When the funds are provided and it's certain they won't have to be used, the tasks existing expand to fill the budget.

The US military budget is so over the top that even things that it achieves are not so significantly different from what Russian military budget with Russian corruption achieves, yet its size utterly dwarfs that.

If US military budget were used as efficiently as that of, say, Poland, US military would have colonized most of the Solar system already. With actual people as colonists.

That's about that fiscal discipline the Republican party was supposedly in favor of, until it wasn't.

OK, I live in Russia, so shouldn't probably blabber too much about US politics.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

The entire military budget is a massive waste of taxpayers money.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is important.

It's the downstream consequence of decades of outsourcing, kicked off in earnest in the Reagan Administration. "Right to Repair" is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of military privatization.

Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

That's the nut of it. This money is being wasted in the general sense. But it isn't wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

This goes back to the BBB and its rampage through some of the most high efficiency Medicaid programs on offer, in order to shuttle somewhere between $175B and $541B (depending on who is counting) to a national security system that's just legions of badged up bullies harassing locals for the entertainment of a few hooting chuds.

why can’t the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors?

Because

and SaaS is how corporate industry has decided it will continue to grow its profits indefinitely.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

But it isn’t wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

Which is also why people active against this will be killed many times before the stream made dry out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Thanks for the type up! I really do appreciate the info, I'm just bitching about the current state of things and how this seems like a distraction compared to the laundry list of other stuff going on.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

No problem. I'm not happy with the current state of things either, but crossing one thing off the list, even if its lower priority to us, is still good for someone.

I find it interesting that some of the other comments go on picking apart my thing, that basically boil down to military = bad, so right to repair = bad and its not a problem because they are already wasting money. Be glad something good is moving toward.

Consumer rights have been increasingly stomped on by the mega corporations for years now, and they continuasly push the boundries. The very concept of a terms of service "contract" that can be changed anytime by 1 party (and heavily in their favor) is insane. The more control we get back the better.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

It's not though. The current administration can suck and also do good things. Both can be true simultaneously.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

So finally they’ve figured out that “privatization” is a shitty idea. Not only does it introduce another point of failure in logistics and operations, but the private sector doesn’t mind trying to make every contract on they can retire off of using taxpayer money.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Just informing you that good old USSR had a similar problem, except not just with the military.

It, of course, had planning inefficiency problems, but the reason some stuff costed and was funded orders of magnitude more than the Western alternatives (sometimes being clones of those alternatives) was just that industries producing this stuff were closer to important interests in internal politics. Soviet production lines were not that much less efficient.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

This has nothing to do with privatization, at least not in the sense you seem to mean. It has everything to do with ownership, and the military wants to actually own the products it buys.

This isn't going against the private sector as a supplier of goods, it merely says if you sell to the military, the military actually owns that product instead of rents it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I mean this genuinely is a good concept.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I completely agree, just bitching because there's tons of other legislature that's just as necessary if not moreso, plus the looming shithead wannabe dictator and all his garbage.

load more comments
view more: next ›