I'm from NM. We used to have a saying here when it came to education, "Thank God for Mississippi," because we were always competing with them to not be dead last. In ~ten years they've gone to 34th (or higher depending on the source). If they can keep that trend even level, I'd imagine the other stats will start to follow suit.

Honestly, it's the same phenomenon as with technology platforms: enshittification. There was a great original concept. It was implemented on a tight budget, but done well. It was compelling and relatable to the end-users/viewers. It got some traction, some additional budget, and scaled with the original concepts in mind. It eventually gets acquired by big money, and now it's a capital asset. Now the requirements/story are being dictated by Harvard Business School types and getting focus groups.

I think the timescale is just more drawn out with tv/movies than with software.

Former executive in charge of a large (25,000+ user) Oracle ERP implementation for a public-sector entity. Inherited the system four years after go-live with no reconciliation between the ledger and the bank. I've done the signing paper checks to schools while looking really sorry on the news thing. A large part of the 'bespoke' is self-inflicted. Yes, everyone uses GAAP, or some such. But, when you have a ton of semi-autonomous agencies in the cabinet each defining custom processes, their own component systems requiring integrations (and lobbyists for each with varying political pull), a plethora of federal agencies each with non-homogenized reporting requirements, and 'democratically' defined field names and reports . . .

In the end, it took two third-party integrators (one for FIN, one for HCM), a third-party PM organization, a technical system owner that was six-sigma talented relative to her colleagues -- willing to walk instead of negotiating with terrorists, and absolute (ruthless, even) support of the enterprise CFO to pull it off. Oh and another contractor just to handle licensing and represent us during audits.

Yeah, but, who picks up the credit-card processing fees? The costs of achieving the necessary PCI compliance for the card readers? The decision to only use an app was possibly influenced some by just how messy funding and maintaining those POS devices would be at every charger location. Not to mention the hassle of dealing with card skimmers at locations that aren't necessarily 'manned.'

This is *so true.* It must be one of the more important feature from a sales perspective, because every year the new fleet of police cars roll out, they are like an order of magnitude more covered in LED lights, each somehow more bright than the ones the year before. If you come over the hill at night onto an accident scene with multiple vehicles, it's instant visual wash-out from the lights.

Parsecs

When I worked at very senior levels of state government, we used to joke that anyone applying for top-level (appointed) positions should be immediately disqualified for displaying a lack of judgement.

At least in the US, years of growing up with 3-5 law firms begging you to find someone to sue on the TV for hours every morning has probably hasn't helped #2 very much. . .

Maybe this is already being done at some level, via proxy, and they're just post-socializing the idea. . .

Well, at least not using that particular form of the English transliteration. Yehuda, Judah, and the unable-to-be-rendered-in-this-encoding Hebrew equivalent (YHVDH) still seem to be fairly common.

This, but it's so terribly subjective. Having done a 120 mile round-trip commute for eight years, where most of the drive was on a 75mph interstate (90mph, really), along with ~6,000 other commuters all making the same drive to the state's capitol every day, I've seen it all. First year was rough. By the third year, I could probably have made the drive steering with my knee and reading a book while eating a breakfast burrito. At the same time. I saw plenty of other people that did. The seasoned commuters that had done the drive enough to have developed a keen sense of awareness, knew the danger spots/how to read traffic, even if they were 'distracted' in one way or another, weren't really the concern. It was the day-trippers, out-of-state-platers, 15mph-under-the-limit-people, passing-lane hoarders, where's-the-fire-buddy people, and, well, actually distracted drivers. I guess that's my way of saying, there's a lot to be said for driving within your limits and personal responsibility that so many of these types of laws just diminish.

My personal favorite: crashes that happened because of the you-must-be-new-here people rubbernecking at the carnage of a wreck in the opposite lanes.

Yeah, but if you've ever been involved in one of those bids, sometimes with hundreds-of-thousands (or even millions) of capital invested in writing a thousand page document, you can bet you're going to want the team using the same version of MS Word, open standard format or not. There's nothing worse than collaborating on a document like that, with most the technical team using LibreOffice or some such, and then having to basically redo the entire thing so the formatting is consistent. The deadlines are too tight, and whether the appearance and formatting consistency is explicitly scored, it's just not worth the risk.

Personally I'd love to see LaTeX, but well, yeah, you know.

Microsoft Project. Also, Microsoft Project. Don't Forget, Microsoft Project.

And then there's Microsoft Project . . oh and Vizio.

Because wearing masks sucks, that's why. It's uncomfortable. It makes my ears look funny. It's gross after a few hours of smelling your own breath. It's completely defeating in the context of trying to have normal social interactions, run meetings, etc. It makes going to the gym just that much easier to skip. Never mind getting screamed at by a self-appointed hall monitor in the parking lot of a store when you're in a hurry and just forgot to grab your mask when you jumped out of the car.

In saying that, I'm not coming from a 'muh freedoms, Tucker-Carlson right-wing tribalism,' because for some valid points here and there, they get lost in hyperbole and well, fake news. There's tribalism from the other side as well, and I think some valid points about civic-duty, etc., get lost in the same kind of hyperbole with, well rules-for-me-and-not-for-thee type hypocrisy (cf.: this list).

It's not like wearing masks is so great and so cool that we would decide to do it all the time, pandemic or not -- it's a burden. It's a burden I agree we should be willing to bear so long as it's effective in combatting the pandemic, but I think we can be honest in saying that it sucks.

I also think it's safe to say most people agree that it sucks because many elected officials couched the vaccination push in explicit terms of "if we meet this vaccination level, you'll get to drop the masks and go back to living your normal life." While I'm sure their primary concern is the health and public safety of their constituents, you can bet a close second is polling data showing that even the compliant base is getting restless.

In my state, this same rhetoric and tight-coupling of reopening to vaccination levels was augmented with millions in vaccination sweepstakes prizes, only to have that on the way to being countermanded weeks after meeting those goals, and well, it starts to feel like playing monopoly with the kid that changes the rules constantly (cf.: this. Again, I'm not arguing from a an anti-mask perspective here, I'm just answering your question.

I don't envy the people having to navigate and lead us through this mess, but heaven help us if in a year we're on to the sixth booster shot for the second wave of the omicron variant during WFH 3.0.

I'd agree for the most part, but office politics still have play in process. I've been in plenty of meetings (especially when you have cross-division issues) where my goal in the meeting wasn't solving the stated problem, but identifying the actual problem and who the players are that I could work with to actually get it solved quickly and without stepping on toes. That's where the informal meeting comes into place, at least for me. And perhaps it's exacerbated by that most of our work is quasi-government that the bureaucracy adds a layer of well-defined, but often ineffectual policy that's outside of our control.

We've been remote for over a year, but are going back (research division at a university, so in-person is still important on the academic side). It's gone quite well, but I have noticed that no amount of telepresence niceties replace being in a room where you can read people. I'm hoping we'll get to a balanced compromise between WFH and in the office.