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We all have our favorite coffee cups. Mine is my hand-thrown Ben Medansky<\/a> ceramic mug I splurged on the first time I went to Go Get Em Tiger<\/a> in Los Angeles. Or most accurately, WAS<\/em> my favorite mug, until my least favorite dog knocked it off a table and broke it. Ooooo I was soooo maaaaaad, but luckily my wife replaced it with my new favorite mug, another Medansky piece that looks strikingly similar (and from one of the last batches<\/a> he made before moving onto more art-forward projects). Needless to say, I keep that dumb dog far away from my new mug because I\u2019m a responsible person that doesn\u2019t want my things to break due to carelessness.<\/p>\n But say I wasn\u2019t so careful and I let the dog break a second mug. Would I be lucky enough to receive another replacement from a benevolent spouse? Probably not. Now, say I did it 389 more times and that each mug costs $835 on average. Sounds like I probably shouldn\u2019t be allowed anywhere near a coffee receptacle, right? Well, that\u2019s what the US Air Force did, who have reportedly spent over $300,000 on special coffee mugs they keep breaking. Your tax dollars hard(ly) at work.<\/p>\n According to USA Today<\/a>, the Air Force has spent $326,785 since 2016 on buying and replacing special mugs that can \u201creheat liquids\u00a0aboard air refueling tankers in flight.\u201d Costing $693 in 2016, the mugs have almost doubled in price to $1,280 due to \u201cdecreased parts production\u201d and \u201cincreased material prices.\u201d You\u2019d think a $1,280 mug made specifically for military use would be exceptionally rugged, and yet you\u2019d be wronger than you ever were in your entire life. Tech. Sgt. James Hodgman, spokesman for a squadron at Travis Air Force base in California\u2014who have racked up $56,000 of that bill on their own\u2014tells Fox News<\/a>, \u201cUnfortunately, when dropped, the handle breaks easily leading to the expenditure of several thousand dollars to replace the cups as replacement parts are not available.\u201d<\/p>\n This expenditure caught the eye of Republican senator and real life Grandpa Simpson impersonator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who described it as \u201cyet another report of wasteful spending in the Department of Defense.” Luckily Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson has a solution: 3D print the handles. According to the article, creating a replacement handle via 3D printer would cost roughly $.50 each, as opposed to, you know, buying a brand new $1,280 mug.<\/p>\n It\u2019s still not as cheap as my suggestion, though: keep using the damn mug without a handle. It\u2019s not exactly integral to the primary function of a mug: holding liquid. It\u2019s not like the handle is keeping you from dropping it anyway, so clearly it\u2019s not an essential element of the design.<\/p>\n Though I have to say, after all this, I feel a little bit better about my dog now. He may be a big fat sausage that barks at everything and jumps all over the furniture and sheds and licks constantly, but at least he isn\u2019t the US Air Force. I\u2019m gonna go give my guy some snuggles until he annoys the shit of out me.<\/p>\n Kingsley, the mug-breaking, sad-eyed sausage<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Zac Cadwalader<\/a>\u00a0is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas.\u00a0Read more Zac Cadwalader\u00a0on Sprudge<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Top image\u00a0\u00a9 Nito\/Adobe Stock<\/em><\/p>\n The post The US Air Force Can’t Stop Breaking Their $1,280 Coffee Cups<\/a> appeared first on Sprudge<\/a>.<\/p>\n Source: Coffee News<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We all have our favorite coffee cups. Mine is my hand-thrown Ben Medansky ceramic mug I splurged on the first time I went to Go Get Em Tiger in Los…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26],"tags":[63,27,65,33,61,32,59,31,30],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/sprudge.com\/file\/2018\/10\/sad-eyed-sausage.jpg\")
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