rather than reverting to Dan Webster and his ilk Im going to plead to everyones common sense
any interpretation of a rule that causes a team to sit and stare at state of the art engineering, design and fabrication tools and NOT use them cannot possibly be in the intended spirit of the rule
because it is comletely against the intended goals of FIRST. We want HS students to experience the magic and wonder of modern science and technology. To tell them they cannot use something as incredible as an SLA machine, because the fluid does not come in one gallon containers, is absurd.
I searched for 'prorated' and 'materials' and found a thread from two years ago, that quoted the previous version of this rule:
Quote:
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• The cost of items purchased in bulk or large quantities may be prorated on the basis of their actual use on the robot. Example: A team purchases a 4' x 4' sheet of aluminum, but only uses 30 square inches of it on their robot. The cost that the team would have to report would be 30 divided by 2304 times the actual cost of the whole sheet.
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Clearly prorated means calculating the proportional cost of the amount actually used, based on the cost of the whole piece of material you acquired (purchased, pulled from stock, received as a donation...).
I submit the addtions to this rule for this year are to address the issues of someone using very large bulk quantity prices to keep the prorated cost of the actual amount they used on the robot to a minimum.
ie, If SLA goop comes in one gallon containers and you only use 4 ounces you must prorate the expense based on the one gallon price. You cant use a 100 gallon price, or a 100,000 gallon price (which would be far lower per gallon). That is what the additions to the rule are addressing.
But if the materail only comes in 55 gallon drums, then that is price and quantity from which you should
prorate your actual usage.
If you ran a small SLA fabrication job in a professsional shop, and put down the cost of 10,000 gallons of material as an expense, when you only used 4 ounces, you could end up in prison for accounting fraud when the auditors check your books. Would you charge a customer for 10,000 gallons, if you used 4 ounces, because that is the smallest container it comes in? Of course not. If you have an SLA machine you are using it 7 days a weeks, for hundreds of different projects.
If the word 'prorated' contradicts your interpretation of the rest of the rule, you cant cross out the word or redefine it. Prorated means proportional to what has been used. If you cancel your car insurance in the middle of the month your next bill will not be for a whole month, it will be prorated for the number of days you were covered.
What makes more sense in the spirit and the purpose of FIRST? To have a rule that takes state of the art technology away from teams who have access to it, and want to use it?
or instead, to have teams lean heavily on new technology to get the best performance from their robots, at the lowest possible cost, within the quickest time frame?
It is clear to me, if your sponsor has an SLA machine, the team is not required to purchase 10,000 gallons of SLA goop in order to use 4 ounces. The sponsor does not have to purchase 10,000 gallons either, because they already have it in stock. All that FIRST is looking for is a reasonable (and logical) accounting for the value of the amount of material used to build your robot - not the initial startup cost for a corporation to purchase the supplys needed for a $1,000,000 machine.
We need to clear this up. It would be tragic if teams are not taking advantage of the resources and technology at their disposal due to a misunderstanding of the rules!