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Kansas is Trying to Unload $10M in Unused Computer Equipment (apnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:
Kansas Governor Jeff Colyer's administration is seeking a way to donate or sell at a steep discount as much as $10 million in unused computer equipment that has been stored in a state office building since 2016. The state still owes $2 million on the equipment, which it bought in 2016 as part of a failed plan to develop a centralized storage system, call Kansas GovCloud, for computer information. That idea was canceled by state IT officials who said it was too expensive. Instead, the state contracts with an outside company to store data on remote servers.
Attempts to sell the equipment failed to attract bidders, leading to discussions about finding someone to take the equipment before its value dropped to the level of scrap metal, The Topeka Capital-Journal reported. Sen. Tom Holland, D-Baldwin City, said the state allocated $17 million, including $10 million for the equipment, before dropping the storage idea. Selling it for pennies on the dollar or donating it to someone has merit, he said. "The point is, equipment after a while just becomes obsolete. If somebody can use it, great. If you can get some money out of it, fine," Holland said.
Attempts to sell the equipment failed to attract bidders, leading to discussions about finding someone to take the equipment before its value dropped to the level of scrap metal, The Topeka Capital-Journal reported. Sen. Tom Holland, D-Baldwin City, said the state allocated $17 million, including $10 million for the equipment, before dropping the storage idea. Selling it for pennies on the dollar or donating it to someone has merit, he said. "The point is, equipment after a while just becomes obsolete. If somebody can use it, great. If you can get some money out of it, fine," Holland said.
$17 million is cheap compared to the cost of data breaches on "third party clown" systems, and the cost of giving private data to the likes of Scumazon and Scroogle to play with.
State had $17 million to waste on useless computers while their teachers were getting paid so little they had to work second and third jobs. I read about some teachers working at McDonalds after they finished teaching school. Keep in mind Kansas had a budget surplus before a trickle down economic ideologue became a governor. After what happened in Kansas should be death knell for myth of trickle down economy.
And the geniuses at the state level have or have not considered donating this to other public entities in the state, e.g., the public school systems, state universities, etc. that probably all receive some level of state funding?
Sales pitch: Quick! Buy it before it becomes worthless.
more, paid by Kansas, there are a couple of companies willing to take 2+ year old electronic scrap away.
As soon as they accepted delivery, the equipment had probably lost 1/2 it's value, so following Generally Accepted Accounting Practices, they should have depreciated the value of most of this junk already.
I'd suggest that diseconomies of scale bite everyone. I had the doubtful pleasure of dealing with large merchant banks and computer software providers in a previous life, and they were actually more dysfunctional than my city government. Scary stuff!
davecb@spamcop.net
It's just dust in the wind.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Same contractor for healthcare.gov seems they are trying to unload the equipment to a school . https://www.seattletimes.com/n...
Back in the early/mid 80's my company bought 4 DEC PC clones for something like $3500 each (PC at the time were about $2k, depending on options). They sucked on multiple levels. The one I remember is the OS (MS-DOS) didn't come with the format program, you had to buy formatted discs from DEC for like $2 each. Or get one of your engineers to format a $0.25 disc at home and bring it in. Whatever. The managers that got them soon gave them to senior engineers, who soon gave them to team leads, who soon realized nobody wanted them. At that point every engineer worth a damn had their own PC at home that cost half as much and was twice as powerful.
Company ended up donating them to a charity or school, and deducted the full purchase price from their taxes. How do I know this? The president of the company, in a company wide meeting, said so.
If they pay the shipping I'll find room for it. I just upgraded the disks on my NAS but I could always use more storage space.
Incompetent goes without saying. If they were halfway competent, the state's economy wouldn't be in the toilet and they might not have had to commit election fraud to stay in power.
You are welcome on my lawn.
'Computer equipment' could mean anything. If it were practical things like disk drives, SSD, or tons of memory that could be easily used in other hardware then I think they could have gotten some decent bids on it. The fact that they couldn't attract any bids tells me either it is all junk, or they are not giving out proper information so they can unload it for pennies on the dollar to some crony friend who will make a killing on the deal at taxpayer expense.
any 10G switching in there? I can use some stuff to build out an new ceph + VM cluster.
So build some Beowulf machines.
It's not anarchy, but Democrats swept the Kansas statewide office elections.
To give you an idea of how bad the Kansas GOP is, the people of Kansas elected a Native American lesbian to Congress over a Republican guy that Donald Trump campaigned and did rallies for and endorsed, and in a district that has been Republican for just about ever.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Let's see....they paid $10 million for it two years ago. Since they are the government, they probably paid 3 times what it was worth by going through 'approved vendors' who are used to soaking it to the taxpayer. Computer equipment tends to depreciate at a quick pace, so it could easily lose half its value in a couple of years. Still, it should be worth a couple million dollars to somebody if there was any decent hardware in there that wasn't so specialized that it doesn't have any practical use outside of its original intent (e.g. anything built by NASA).
and not median. I suspect the numbers are heavily cooked. I make good money in IT and I don't spend my evenings at McDonalds. Yet we know for a fact many teachers in Kansas are doing just that. Too many for it to be the occasional workaholic.
I know that in my neck of the woods schools in wealthy neighborhoods have much, much better pay. That's because schools are funded by property taxes, so wealthy districts have wealthy schools. That would, of course, screw up the averages. I can't find any sources for the $44k and $56k figures being but I wouldn't be surprised to find University research professors mixed in there with their $100k+ salaries. Again, anything to inflate the average.
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and they're trying to cover that up. e.g. it was all just a grift. Kansas has gotten really, really corrupt these last 8 years or so.
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I work for a couple non-profits who've been hit hard by budget cuts; is there a list of what they're trying to get rid of and any way to apply for it even if the non-profit has to pay for shipping it probably would be well worth it for some items?
The Kansas public education budget is $4.9 billion. It works out to almost exactly $10,000 per student, with about 39% of that going to instructor salary, 12% to instructor benefits.
With 41,243 teachers, that works out to an average (mean) salary of $46,300 plus $13,800 in benefits.
This compares to a statewide average (mean) income of $43,953. Searching through those labor stats for "education" confirms that the mean for most teaching jobs is right around the $45k mark.
If your claim that teachers have to work second or third jobs just to get by is true, that would mean more than half of Kansas citizens have to work second or third jobs just to get by.
Incompetent. Just like the government of whatever blue state you live in.
Kansas is particularly bad though. The drooling fool Brownback pretty much bankrupted the joint with his "aggressive experiment in conservative economic policy".
It shows just how stupid Republicans are when it comes to running an economy.
I wonder which politicians got bribes campaign donations from the company they ultimately bought cloud service from? I would feel pity for the Kansas taxpayer, but they voted Republican, so they had to expect huge deficits and corruption.
Maybe you missed it but Kansas is a red state already taking hand outs from blue states
+ "Let's upgrade our stores to use hand scanners at checkout!"
+ "Let's buy the equipment used at auction!"
+ "Let's read the manual and put the inventory on the computer ourselves!"
+ "Let's forget the whole damn thing!"
10 years later...Clerks still put price stickers on items and ring things up manually.
The equipment is still in their warehouse gathering dust.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
$10 million should buy about 73,000 TRS-80s, if you figure $100 each plus $37 shipping. At an estimated weight of 44 lbs each, that comes to 3.2 million lbs, or 1605 tons. Here's yer first shipment. Cmon back. Cmon back.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Where's the actual list of equipment to be disposed of? Personally, I can't see the Kansas state government knowing it's hole from an ass in the wall, so I doubt if the equipment is up to snuff. But who knows? Maybe they accidentally ordered a Cray or something.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
(Take one Geek point for seeing the Beowulf in the "Subject:" line. )
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
If they want them to accidentally fall into a hole, they should be sent to Oklahoma or Florida.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
freedom of information act (KSA 45-215 et seq) requests if GovCloud data was not able to be exported in some format for review and redaction? Looks like conservatives weren't interested in news media looking over their shoulder and second guessing their performance and decisions of state departments. That would go along with conservative's overzealous implementation of digitization of governmental functions even when they betray asserted fiduciary motives to sell them while hidden political motives to reduce civil servant union headcount is the prime motivator regardless of lower end user service levels, failed state and federal compliance, and rising technology/technical labor costs in over-the-horizon years which vastly exceed the cost of file cabinet/file folder systems.