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Pressure Is On IBM To Forgive Millions In IT Debt

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the highly-unlikely dept.

coondoggie writes to tell us that several California state legislators are pressuring IBM to release the Costa school district from some $5 million of long-standing debt as a charitable donation. "The back story on this tale is that the school district owes IBM for computers ordered in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For one reason or another the computers were never used and no one now seems to be able to locate either the paperwork or the hardware. The school district experienced hard financial times and ultimately never paid Big Blue for the computers. In 1993 the district and IBM negotiated a long-term settlement that said the school district would pay the first of four $1.25 million installments beginning in 2008. Payments were deferred until then because 2008 was the year the district was scheduled to finish making state loan repayments under its previous loan plan, according to the Contra Costa story."

3 of 458 comments (clear)

  1. Most stock investors... by Colin+Smith · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Not all stock investors are rich, fat, white, dudes who nobody has pity for. Are your pension funds... They're the biggies anyway.

    Those rabid capitalist CEOs? They work for little old ladies.

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    Deleted
  2. Re:No... by smittyoneeach · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    We kinda had a civil war over this kind of thing.
    Aye, and the states lost. And, nearly 150 years later, we've at least partially overcome the bogusness of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_compromi se
    If you were to model the government as a pure software application (and it's clearly not, but bear with me), you would want nice layers of abstraction, encapsulation, and data hiding, so that the main logic (the Fed) doesn't have to "bicker and argue over who killed who", or fret about individual citizens.
    That civil war occurred when information systems were implemented in pure people-ware, with paper storage. So concentrating power made sense, particularly in light of things like WWI, WWII, and the cold war.
    Yet now you have all of this IRS, SSA, and other entitlement programs, and it's all in one giant, nearly inert codebase executing (everything but itself), within the beltway. Your vote is drowned out in the cacophony of voters.
    But we can be confident that Lessons Learned only beget opportunities to repeat themselves.
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    Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  3. Re:No... by QuantumG · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Well obviously I've heard of ignorance of arithmetic :)

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.