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

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.

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 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.

Well the whole bit about backing out the nut is to cause it to fail in a manner that looks more like a maintenance problem and not a driver problem. Even when stuff like that only happens on one cab, it’s not enough to point at a singular driver.

And yeah all of that advice comes with the rider that “you may be unemployable” afterwards.

Those Solera devices you’ve got are relatively common automotive IoT fleet trackers. They usually have gps antennas. They talk to the engine and transmission directly over canbus. Then they process that data and report what they see over a cell network. If they see nothing, they report that too with a heartbeat signal and various error codes.

Depending on the model, they sometimes have external cell antennas connected with a mini coaxial cable. Find it and unscrew it all the way, then re-screw it in by only 1 and a half rotations so it’ll hang on but barely. Then clip the nearest ziptie so the cable wobbles free. It’ll cause the nut on the coax to get a stress fracture in under a year. They will have to replace the gps/cell antenna module and those are like $300 a piece through Samsora. In the meantime you’ll get iffy signal responses. Don’t let them catch you cutting the zip tie on camera or you WILL lose your job.

Your truck will be in the maintenance shop relatively frequently at the request of whoever reads the reports for repair of that cell module. They won’t find anything wrong with it, scratch their butts, then just screw it back down and replace the ziptie.

Unscrew it and clip it again.