not sure how K12 works today considering I last worked for one in 2017 pre-COVID and only for one year, and I don't know how much of this if anything is funded by this plan, but I can attest that there is a ton of waste back then.

1) iPad's galore. Every other classroom had a cart with 30 iPads in them. Most of them filled with learning apps with dubious uses. They were a pain to administer and broke constantly because kids dropped them and even the rugged cases couldn't save them. Although I've heard they switched to Chromebooks because their cheaper and more rugged since then. Speaking of Chromebooks...

2) Chromebooks galore. My Cousin, at a different school, were given Chromebooks post-COVID. She literally has a pile of them in her room because she gets one every other year and the school doesn't want them back. Her mother gave them to me to figure out what to do with them since the school won't even take them to recycle. All of them were unregistered from the school org and I Powerwashed them with no ties back to the school org once I updated them and put them back online. All of them still have 2-5 years of support left. I know Chromebooks are relatively cheap especially when bought in bulk but this seems to be a massive waste to me.

3) Craptastic desktops. Back to the school I worked for. They had ancient desktops that were easily 10+ years old in 2017 and claimed they didn't have the money to replace them. I asked them at the time why don't they replace them with Chromeboxes (or use Cloudready, which Google eventually bought to make Chromebook Flex) since the school was a google shop (they were on the Google for Education system at the time) and their answer was because they needed MSOffice even though none of the kids used Office because they were on Google and were using Google Docs and Classroom for everything. They were too afraid that if they dropped MS that some software would come down the line that was Windows only, and they would be screwed. I can understand that at that time, but it was getting very clear that K12 across the board was going full web based and anything would be better than running Windows 10 on 2GB ram systems on low end Core 2 Duo's.

4) Wifi everywhere. Every single classroom had an AP. This makes sense considering the iPad's everywhere. It didn't make sense to me that it was used so inefficiently at the time. I remember having to run 4 network lines to a classroom 200 feet from the switch to temporarily hook up 3 computers and a phone for a room that already had wifi in it when wifi USB dongles were $20 each and the phones supported wifi connectivity. Students had access to them and would hook their phones to them to watch TikTok all day.

5) Smart boards everywhere. Every classroom had Promethean smart boards. There were projector based connected to a laptop the teacher had. Useful but were very expensive and failure prone. They constantly needed realigned and the projectors would "star-out" since they were all DLP projectors with that faulty TI chip.

6) Bandwidth Galore. The school system I worked for had a 1gbps link at the time which was symmetrical. The busiest we would see it was roughly 750mbps around 11AM to 2PM and vary rarely peaked beyond a minute or two. They were planning to up it to 2gbps but I left there before that happened. Keep in mind that most kids at that point did nothing but Youtube and Tiktok if you put a screen in front of them so even with that amount of Bandwidth usage it never seemed to be an issue. You would be amazed how much you can stretch 1gbps when you actively manage bandwidth correctly.

As for Cellular access points (Might make sense in some rural areas but would probably just put it in a Chromebook or tablet.) and Wifi on school buses (Why? So Billy can Doomscroll TikTok because he ran out of data?) can't comment on that since those weren't around when I worked in K12 (I'm guessing it was a COVID thing) but I don't see why you would need this overlap when there is the subsidized low income broadband initiatives already in place that's supposed to fill in these gaps.

if there's two issues I've found where Red and Blue agree. It's No Flock and No Datacenters.

Me personally, I don't have too many problems with Datacenters outside of where they put them and what they do with them.

1) Put them in Brownfields. In the US there's over 400000+ industrial classified brownfields with somewhere around 5-15 million acres depending on who you ask. Most of these brownfields have access to large amounts of electricity and water and since industries already make a lot of noise most communities next to brownfields will either not notice or care and would welcome any job growth even if it's small long term. Subsidizing datacenters on greenfields just sacrifices more farmland and forest for industrial expansion that will most likely be a brownfield within the next 20-30 years when the speculation money dries up.

2) Ban Mining Datacenters. China Banned them so all of the Yuan billionaires are building them here now. All they are are slot machines that eat wattage instead of money. They serve no constructive purpose and should be banned before they run out of control and waste energy and computing power that could be used for more constructive computing purposes.

Been on Firefox since Quantum and got rid of Chrome when they blocked ublock origin a year ago when they forced you to turn on the flag.

Edge still supports it and it's sunset status is still TBD. If they're smart they'll keep it that way, since they can gain some share from this debacle.

I get what you're saying and believe me this college was anything but normal, but from what I seen it wasn't much different regardless of the college, it's size or student target.

Our college president at the time was nuts about studies and data. He did tons of studies and research of how students perceived us vs other colleges/universities. One of the studies I saw focused within a 250 mile radius of us and came back that we were the "safety college" when other colleges wouldn't accept them and we would be either their second or third choice. When you dug deeper into it, the students that did come to us didn't get accepted by 1 of 3 close to us large universities which I though was very odd because 1 of them (a very large Big10 state university) had satellite campuses all over the state (4 were in that radius alone) that was in the same boat we were in and were way under-enrolled, would accept anybody, and these satellite campuses were basically back doors to get into the main campus once you passed through freshman year.

Out of 40+ college and universities in that radius, only 5 were either at enrollment or were over-enrolled to the point where they were in a position to turn down students. 3 were large state universities and 2 were specialty universities larger than us. 2 colleges merged into 1 college due to dwindling enrollment. All of the rest were under-enrolled and ranged from being extremely small community colleges to state funded colleges easily 5 times our size. Price wise we were below average for our size and were best value ranked in US News and World Report at the time so cost wasn't considered a factor vs other colleges in our region.

The response by the president armed with all of this data was that we needed to stand out more from the crowd, offer incentives and postgraduate degrees and ultimately expand and focus on our strengths similar to a specialty university. Unfortunately the faculty heard him say the U word, freaked out, and he was gone by the end of that year.

Harvard is the exception. not the norm.

First off, they have a huge endowment. They could literally run their college for almost a decade on their endowment alone.
Second They have huge donors. Big shocker. Lawyers make a lot of money. And they like tax write offs. So they tend to donate to schools either directly or through scholarships to save tax money.
Third. Everybody and their dog that wants to be a lawyer wants to graduate from Harvard. They have a huge line of applicants at their door, so huge that only 4% of applicants get accepted. That way they can cherry pick the best of the best students to maximize both #1 and #2 and since it's such a privilege to get accepted there, nothing short of a nuclear holocaust will make a student drop out and lose his coveted spot forever, thus ultimately affecting final graduation rate.

That being said, very few colleges and universities have the luxury that Harvard (or Yale, Princeton, ETC) has when it comes to applicants. The college I worked for was a small religious oriented college with relatively large donors with at the time approximately 1000 students (out of 1500 max capacity) and declining. 25% of income spread across endowment, donations + scholarships, freshman students and all other students. When I left early 2010s their tuition was $30000 per year, with scholarships and student loans paying much of the tuition costs. Just about everyone that applied got accepted and the only reason they didn't enroll is because they got enrolled at the college they really wanted to go to. Most other competing colleges around us was in the same state we were, all competing for the same small number of undecided students left in the pool and would bend over backwards to attract them.

So if a student want's to pay $30000 a year so him and his basketball can get a well rounded college education, more power to him.

I'm sure the home automation / security wing will go bye bye as soon as this is finalized. At least you can go to Wyze since they were basically rebranded Wyze devices anyway.

Personally, I tended to recommend Roku streamers to my friends and family, primarily because they were stupid proof and had a long shelf life since they tend to support the older streamers for at least 10 years, unlike Google which reinvented their streaming platform 4 times (Google TV, Chromecast, Android TV, NEW Google TV) in the span where Roku finally stopped supporting their Roku 2's. Nvidia shields are way to expensive vs the other platforms. Fire sticks are an app desert unless you jailbreak them because of Amazon's insistence of supporting their archaic dead app store, and smart TV's (except for Roku's TV) tend to never see another update after their 2nd or 3rd year.

Roku as a company however was a dumpster fire. Between jailing their platform to starting quasi carriage disputes with app providers, their leadership brought them to the point where YouTube's app went dark and Smart TV companies threatened to all jump ship to Google's dumpster fire TV platform of the day until they finally backed off. So TLDR, they'll fit perfectly with Fox Execs.

Because the College doesn't care but the kid. They care about the kid's money.

Most freshman don't get past their freshman year (over 50%) but since there's so many of them, they account for over 1/4 of the typical college budget. Considering that on average each freshman is worth about $40000 all you have to do is recruit 4 freshmen and you pay for an adjunct professor's salary.

My favorite story from my old college work days is how our college recruited a horse. Seriously. There was this freshman who was a valedictorian that was interested in our school because we (supposedly) had an equestrian program (we didn't but My Little Pony was all the rage at the time so we were working on it) but the student couldn't be away from their horse. So the college on the college dime transported the Horse from 5 states away and the College president's secretary boarded and fed the horse (again on the college dime) so they could recruit this student. Next year when the student also needed their dog in their dorm room on top of the horse the school finally put the hammer down and the student left for another school that apparently allowed their students to have animals everywhere. The horse of course had to be bussed back home again at school expense but they still broke even after transporting and feeding a horse. So as far as I'm concerned, the college recruited a horse.

And don't even get me started on Spalding, The world's most educated basketball.

Honestly, I'm not concerned on Datacenters doing AI. Love it or hate it AI at least has a somewhat constructive purpose. And obviously Cloud Server and storage is useful for businesses that don't want to deal with managing systems on premises or needs an off-site backup solution.

"Datacenter's" doing Bitcoin Mining do not have any purpose other than being a slot machine that eats wattage instead of money. These are usually the ones that give datacenters a bad name and should be either banned or heavily regulated.

Also. Using underdeveloped or undeveloped land for a Datacenter also should be banned or heavily regulated. There is literally miles of brownfield in rust belt Ohio complete with water and large grid electricity access. Building a Datacenter in these zones not only repurposes the land, but usually mitigates the noise problem since most brownfields are away from residential areas or are already close to industries making more noise than the center would ever make. The only issue would be cleaning the land to remove waste like lead, asbestos and PCB's but it's not impossible and they're rolling in dough anyway so...

I'm pretty sure that whoever at Microsoft wrote that response won't have a job too much longer.

I'm sure that every Citrix and Terminal Server admin running multiple users on their server will sleep well at night knowing that there's absolutely no way Karen from HR will open an resume attachment that uses a PDF exploit to further exploit a windows privilege escalation vulnerability that opens the door to steal half of your 5000+ employees' stored browser passwords hours before they perfectly time their ransomware payload drop so can sneak in and steal all of your companies money from their bank's website (as well as some of the employee's bank accounts as well because who doesn't do banking at work amirite) while you're too busy panicking from the ransomware chaos to notice.

I guess on the bright side it wouldn't be as bad if you were running VDI and disabled browser password storage like you should.

Musk aside, the #1 change that absolutely destroyed X as a platform was by default sorting a users feed by likes rather than by post date.

The entire point of Twitter was to see what that account is doing right now and not what the most popular thing that account ever did was.

And no. I don't want to login to sort by date and then be tracked by some algorithm so it screws up my random feed like YouTube does when all I want to do is look at a tweet from a news article. Especially when I didn't have to do that before the X changeover. I also don't want it to be a walled garden like Facebook where I have to login to see anything.

To be fair this is the correct play.

Most of those communities are used to the noise from a steel mill and would welcome any tax revenue even if it's low. Electric grid is either already in place or worse case needs to be refurbished rather than completely built and rezoned for large line runs, Truck and Rail lines are usually available for large scale shipping if necessary and most brownfields are close to a water source such as a river or municipal plant which can be further filtered if necessary.

The Youngstown/Warren and Akron/Canton areas alone could provide miles of usable brownfield for data center space.