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:
I’ve heard rumblings of replacing:
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 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.
Removed by mod
The only part required by the govt is the electronic logbook. It doesnt need gps. It doesnt need ai. It doesnt need cell. It only needs the electronic logbook. So yeah - blow it up
Look, Jim, I know you don’t like the explosive collar we bolted to your neck, but you’ve GOT to stop messing with company property
-you
Well no, but actually yes.
Can’t we just rake the sun?
Microsoft doesn’t own it, they didn’t program it. They paid a license fee to the developer to include it in Windows XP.
This is what lawyers are for. They knowingly conspired to break TOS over the span of a decade after being politely prompted to pay for the service they stole. I love FOSS but the service side is not free and should not be the whipping boy of for profit companies. Fight back FFS.
You do me proud by copypastaing my shitpost
I want the LLMs to be able to determine their source works during the query process to be able to pay the source copyright owners some amount. That way if you generate a Ms Piggy image, it pays the Henson Workshop some fraction of a penny. Eventually it would add up.
It used to be the worst app because Netflix was so damn good. Then Netflix took a shit all over their user experience and jacked prices to the tits so we cancelled them. And HBO got bought by Time Warner who is actively antagonistic towards streaming because the CEO just looks at their entire catalog as a tax writeoff - so the max app is fucking dreadful.
Then Apple decided to make things suck less and they succeeded. The one thing they screwed up is there is no way to disable that obnoxious auto-play bullshit at the end of each episode. All of the other apps are now so bad that we exclusively subscribe through the appletv app. My wife likes giving money to paramount for some reason - but at least if we do it through the apple app there are no ads.
No my point is they offload too much to corporations and thus are beholden to the same concerns of those corporations by proxy.