And we will let you because no one cares.

Hey look Neatnit’s corpse is getting eaten by birds. Well… they’ve got to eat something. What was it he died for again?

The tiktok prank videos are about to get hotter

Yeah but all of the other Wall-Es were left broken by a mandatory Tuesday Windows Update

A few years ago I posted in a reddit advice thread about how I banned my kid from roblox because of that exploitation-by-design and everyone freaked the fuck out at me and told me I was a terrible person.

“well the military was ultimately responsible for holding those contractors accountable,”

This is arguably one of the worst aspects of contracting any kind of service. The contractors act like they don’t have a duty to listen nor are they willing to be held accountable. Once the contractor and the signor shake hands then the contractors just go and do the worst fucking job possible with no one to steer the ship. The money has been spent, and accountability is nowhere to be found.

I see what you did there.

For real though it’s going to be hard to undo all of this. The political process for all public services is being hung by a noose made by contractors and GOP voters.

No my point is they offload too much to corporations and thus are beholden to the same concerns of those corporations by proxy.

Honestly I didn’t even realize until now how good the cropping is on lemmy compared to redd*t. holy shit the number of memes that came from screenshots of twitter screenshotted on insta screenshotted on whatever the fuck but this one was profile.

I’ve been in PTA fights over this and yelled at superintendents in multiple school district meetings now. The real answer of where the money is going? Contractors.

Everything is done by contractors now because it’s easy to sever and it allows organizations to focus on one thing they’re good at. Do you need janitorial staff or do you need to keep things clean? Well the answer is you need to keep things clean - so how? Just pay the contractors because the school board got bribed. Sure, it turns out the contractors cost 3x the cost of a dedicated janitorial staff in the long run, but they were quicker to set up and the board wanted a turnkey solution.

That’s the approach that every school board uses to answer that question. Need X - ok well we don’t want to hire anyone because that makes people mad about how we use money… so we’ll spend MORE money on Y over the long run for something that will be a permanently reoccurring cost. Anyone go to a school cafeteria recently? Did you get food served on disposable styrofoam treys or were you given a melamine tray and plate with reusable utensils? Just kidding I know the answer to that already. Do we provide school supplies to students at the district level? No, every man for themselves go to walmart and pay $60 for school supplies for each child with all the markup instead of letting the district buy them by the pallet and distribute at the cost of wholesale for 15% the total price of everyone wastefully purchasing their own.

Don’t forget that school boards are notoriously easy to corrupt. Usually it’s something relatively benign like a board member has a family member that owns a company that does contract work and they were recommended to the rest of the board. But often it is outright bribes.

But this short sighted view of how to run things is making everything expensive in America. Everything has ten fucking middlemen between you and what you want. And they’re all goddamn contractors now. Cheap in the immediate but far more expensive over time. Why? Because we aren’t allowed to have honest conversations about government expenses anymore. We aren’t allowed to ask for real services for our children because of the short term demands of the bottom line. And when we do open up those conversations, the calculus shows the quarterly expense of hiring a permanent employee is more than maintaining the contract even though that employee is cheaper at the 5 year mark. We aren’t allowed to dig ourselves out once we’re stuck in the pit bought by contracts.

Edit: To expand on the list of contractors that now handle (BADLY) the same work done by roles that were traditionally employees who gave a shit and were held to a standard of care and duty:

• Cafeteria food preparation (dont even get me started on the quality and cost of aramark dog prison cafeteria food)
• Cafeteria cleanup
• Bathroom sanitation
• Basic plumbing like unclogging fucking toilets
• landscaping
• replacing lightbulbs (!)
• basic IT services

I’ve heard rumblings of replacing:

• student counselors
• school nurse
• bus drivers
• HR

About the only jobs safe are the principals and teachers and the football coach and that is only true while unions exist.

School board officials are frequently bribed to hire expensive contractors.

Honestly it’s not the administrators. They usually reduce overall headcount by performing the tasks of multiple other dedicated people with one role.

The answer of where is the money going? Contractors. Everything is done by contractors now because it’s easy to sever and it allows organizations to focus on one thing they’re good at. Do you need janitorial staff or do you need to keep things clean? Well the answer is you need to keep things clean - so how? Just pay the contractors because the school board got bribed. Sure, it turns out the contractors cost 3x the cost of a dedicated janitorial staff in the long run, but they were quicker to set up and the board wanted a turnkey solution.

It could crawl elements within the DOM to save a word cloud of visible text for each bookmark as metadata for later searches. I think it’s doable. Separating nonvisible and visible stuff is very difficult though.

I’m seeing mini pcs for sale for basically the same price as the windows license that comes installed on the system. They must be quite literally giving them away at this point to compete with Linux.

I switched over all my devices to 24 hour - phone, computers, cars, etc. I even change the settings on my wife’s phone sometimes. It’s so much easier to mentally read.

I used to use former child labor.
I still do, but I used to as well.

I had a decently awarded account on SO because I joined it in 2012. I asked and answered questions. For the first few years it was fucking awesome as a professional developer. Then it’s popularity on google search results ended up making it too well known and the comment quality dropped substantially. Then the fucking powerusers popped up and started flagging almost everye one my questions as duplicates while pointing to unrelated questions. The last I really used SO was around 2017. I got too fed up to participate in the platform because when I spent the time to make a well formed question, it would just got shut down and my time wasted.

Is that a jim kb comic? Where’s the author’s signature?

I just uninstalled it on my work pc. I got fed up when certain applications saved a cache to somewhere in %APPDATA% that got backed up every Tuesday. The apps then saw the cache changed and attempted to reconcile the changes and corrupted my work.

Never again.

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