And the problem with that is that you have to have that level of regulation everywhere, otherwise regulation is simply an excuse to move the production to places that aren't regulated.
True, but we have no legal basis for insisting that the chinese implement any particular law; the most we can do is refuse to trade with them unless they do things we like, such as perhaps a $7/hour minimum wage. But that would kill their economy, and put tens of millions of people out of work. Sure, US workers would still be employed (at least for a while), but I'm not sure the moral tradeoff is worth it: I don't want a billion starving chinese on my conscience!
What would happen, of course, is that china would NOT implement our standards; they'd have to forgo our export market instead. This would primarily serve to slow the increase in their prosperity (there's that moral twist again).
Also, imagine if apple was a chinese company - they'd be completely patriotic by hiring chinese workers, and national heroes for selling so much to america. We'd still buy just as many iphones, and the profits would go to china instead of america. No one in the US would have anything to complain about (we might complain about a shortage of competitors to apple, but that wouldn't be apple's fault!), yet the situation would be worse (for the US) than the current situation. If we keep hammering companies like apple, this is exactly what's going to happen.
True, but just straight product cost is only part of the equation.
You have to factor in time (because time is money), gas (or wear-and-tear on your shoes plus even MORE time), hassle, etc.
I'm not quite sure whether you think you're making a pro- or anti-capitalism argument. alexgieg was disagreeing with the assertion that capitalism means workers get screwed, so he seem to be pro; you're "true-butting" him, so you seem to be anti. But you've just made the (correct) argument that you need to take into account all of the relevant factors, not just the raw cost. Doing so means somehow converting disparate units (ounces of cheese and gallons of gas) into a common system so that you can easily make an objective decision. Luckily we have a way to do that: MONEY. As long as the cost of each item reflects the sum of the various inputs (including, of course, incenting people to undertake the effort - i.e. profit), the system works pretty well; it's primarily when the gov't skews the system that you get incorrect results.
For example, when the gov't gives tax breaks to oil companies, or funds road construction from sources other than gas taxes, it makes driving SEEM less expensive than it really is, so people end up driving more and we get more pollution, etc. If the price of gas truly reflected the cost of driving (including things like road construction and pollution), gas would cost a lot more and we'd probably drive a lot less. Now granted this might impose a financial hardship or poorer people - but if we (as a society) want to ameliorate that, the correct solution is to give them money, not artificially reduce the actual price of driving.
Laissez-faire capitalism sometimes gets a bad rap, but it's really just about letting the system work properly by not interfering with it.
Wait, so the same people who have enough power/skills/whatever to blow up the towers and send all the witnesses to the gulag are incapable of disappearing a couple of youtube videos? There's that bizarrely incoherent worldview again...
(comment originally replied to wrong post - sorry for the dup)
You tell them that they're installing HVAC equipment or something.
...and that would work, too, because there's no chance that people who install HVAC equipment for a living would notice that the "HVAC" equipment is full of C4. Yes, I know, HVACs are big boxes and you could cram all sorts of stuff in them... this might fool me and you (since we don't know what's supposed to be in that big box), but installing them involves opening all the doors and connecting the innards to gas, power, water, air ducts, temperature control systems, etc.
Oh, and where did these explosive HVAC units come from, anyway? Did bush and cheney build them in the white house basement? Seems to me it would take at least dozens, probably hundreds, of people to acquire and assemble the explosives. And how do you go about recruiting people to commit treason like that? You can't just put an ad in the paper. You've got to ask around, and you've got to expect that most of the people you ask won't want to take part in it - so the pool of people who can't be allowed to expose your plans just grew by another factor of 5 or 10 or something.
The size of the conspiracy just keeps getting bigger, and eventually you have to make a decision. Either:
1) It's totally implausible, and therefore almost certainly did NOT actually happen that way
2) My god - this conspiracy is HUGE! These people have unprecedented powers; the fact that they can cover up such a brazen act proves that they have the power to have committed the act in the first place! It's up to me, and a small but dedicated band of truth-seekers, to find out the truth, make it known, and save the world.
Once you go down road 2, there's no stopping: everything just gets folded into the conspiracy (for example, an article about a DOJ tech project dying 10 years later). There's really not much I can do for people like that, except maybe to suggest that they seek professional help.
P.S. Just make sure the psychiatrist isn't one of the ones who's in on the whole cover-up - he'll probably prescribe some medication to help you, but he'll include some secret markings on the RX which signal the pharmacist (who's also in on it) to give you some pills that land you in an insane asylum. On second thought, seeking professional help is just too risky.
Wait, so the same people who have enough power/skills/whatever to blow up the towers and send all the witnesses to the gulag are incapable of disappearing a couple of youtube videos? There's that bizarrely incoherent worldview again...
Imagine a world where those suffering from BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) spin absolutely preposterous "theories", like the US Gov't blowing up the twin towers. Forget radios - how many people would need be involved? How likely is it that NONE of them will talk? And none of them took pictures of the explosives being planted in the WTC? Oh, wait, maybe those who were about to talk were quietly censored (how exactly does that work) or were detained indefinitely in gulags. Maybe it was those hundreds of Blackwater contractors who went missing right around 9/11... oh wait, no one ever reported any such thing... OK, so their entire families were hauled off, too. That would explain those hundreds of families that simply disappeared from neighborhoods and schools and spousal jobs, etc. Wait, no one ever heard about that either? I guess those evil bastards kidnapped everyone who knew anyone in the families - and everyone THEY knew, too. Oh, and what about the hauler-offers? You can't have them telling embarrassing tales - best to tell THEM to report to the gulag as soon as they're done kidnapping tens of thousands of people.
Look, I'll give you "evil" if you want. Fine, Bush is the devil himself. But no way in hell is the US gov't competent enough to pull off a stunt like that. Believing that "neo-con MORONS" could somehow do all that - and leave no real evidence of their actions - takes "cognitive dissonance" to a whole new level.
The ongoing thingy with CERN's maybe-FTL neutrinos may answer that before the three or four years envisioned for this.
Apparently three or four years from now they'll figure out how to use FTL to make neutrinos travel backwards in time, so they sent us some so we'd know how important it was to continue the research.... now it all makes sense!
1) What sort of life-detection-capabilities should we build into a mars lander?
2) What is the permanent fundamental definition of "life"?
The first is pretty easy to answer - we've got limited resources, so it makes sense to look for the kind of life we know how to look for. True, we might miss other things that (had we not missed them) we'd consider "life" - but what choice do we have? We don't know what "different life" might look like, so we can't build a machine to look for it!
The second is a bit trickier, but luckily it's also irrelevant. We don't HAVE to define "life" once and for all, right now, today: we can leave the definition malleable, and choose what to include as we encounter candidates. For example, people agonize over whether viruses are "alive". It's a non-question; viruses simple "are", and are totally unconcerned with English words; the only question is whether we (humans) want to define "life" in a way that includes viruses, or excludes them. Either outcome is fine, and neither affects the viruses one bit.
Careening from crisis to crisis does not seem like something that works. It has not crashed yet, but it will. Disarmament is what works.
Interesting... you take something that has worked (or at least not failed) for many decades and assure us it will fail... and you take something that's never even been tried, and assure us it will work. There's a word for beliefs which are completely independent of evidence: Faith
I think nuking even "just" a city or two (say, NYC + DC) would count as "significantly" hurting the US. If US planners believed that DPRK had a couple of nukes and a delivery mechanism of some sort (ICBM or suitcase, whatever), I think it would SIGNIFICANTLY discourage them from attacking DPRK, especially w/ nukes.
I seriously wonder what would happen if the US got nukes launched at it... (snip)... We definitely wouldn't want to launch ours back to avoid MAD.
Do you know how MAD works? The whole point is that we are very public about being batshit crazy, and we definitely WOULD launch ours back. Lots of them. So launching a nuke at the US is just a slightly indirect way of committing mass suicide. MAD is insane logic, no question about it - but it's been a big part of keeping the US and USSR from using nukes on each other for over half a century. As insane as it might be, it works.
There's even a MAD argument AGAINST missile defense - as long as the US can't defeat incoming missiles, we're very unlikely to start a nuclear war. Likewise for Russia or whoever. But if anyone COULD defeat missiles, they wouldn't fear a nuclear war nearly as much, and they might even be tempted to start one. So a workable missile defense arguably makes the overall situation MORE dangerous, not less.
Now granted, MAD works better when your enemy is a large country who values their lives - it gets a bit iffy when your enemy is a small band of religious wackos who don't much care whether they're dead or alive, as long as they've made their point.
It's worth it if you can do it cheaply just for the sole purpose of lowering the CO2 in the atmosphere.
But as soon as you burn the carbon, you're back where you started (worse, actually).
Remember, CO2 isn't a minor side-effect of burning carbon that can be scrubbed out at some cost; it's the primary result of that burning.
It's like trying to defeat rising sea levels with sponges - unless you plan on having a near-infinite number of wet sponges laying around forever, you've got to squeeze them out somewhere/sometime, and as soon as you do the water just runs back to the sea again.
Is it even possible to fly a large jet without fly-by-wire? Are pilots really strong enough to move the control surfaces on the wings and tail by muscle power alone? And even if they are, do they have the endurance to do it off-and-on for hours at a time?
Hi, folks - welcome aboard Manual Airlines flight 123. I'm Chuck Norris, and I'll be your pilot today; Arnold Schwarzenegger will be the co-pilot, and Sylvester Stallone will be our navigator.
OK, I give up - your incisive criticism of my thought experiment has convinced me of the error of my ways. Until my spelling and grammar are perfect, I will never again make the mistake of trying to communicate with anyone. The risk of sending someone's life spiraling down the tubes because of a misplaced apostrophe is just too great.
Please note that I'm not necessarily taking a position on the circumstances of Israel's creation, or the tactics used by Israel, or even whether Israel has a "right to exist".
I'm merely suggesting that if you found yourself in such a situation, and reacted as Israel does, and then got called out for "over-reacting", you'd think whoever called you out was either totally disingenuous or a fucking moron.
Again, I'm not saying the GGP is totally disingenuous or a fucking moron - I'm saying that it's totally understandable for someone in Israel's position to think the GGP is totally disingenuous or a fucking moron.
Imagine if your country had been declared war upon (by multiple other countries) the very the day it was founded. Imagine if your country had been in an existential war with most of these countries more or less continuously for over half a century. Imagine if your country suffered an average of about 3 rocket attacks PER DAY for 8 straight years. Imagine if those same countries send suicide bombers into your country about once a month on average, and those attacks intentionally killed many hundreds of innocent civilians, and wounded thousands more. Imagine that your country has nuclear weapons, but refrains from using them against it's enemies.
Now imagine that no matter how you react, someone who doesn't live under these conditions accuses you of overreacting and not having any sort of perspective.
The whole agression vs. retaliation dichotomy is pretty meaningless when talking about two sides that have been trading blows almost continually for decades.
I doubt schools (or any other large gov't org) actually purchases insurance for this or most other risks. Insurance is ALWAYS a losing proposition on average; it exists only to protect smaller entities against large losses which would otherwise overwhelm that entity's financial reserves. Larger entities (i.e.. most large companies, and probably most large gov't orgs) are "self-insured" for things like employee health insurance, employee life insurance, company fleet auto insurance, theft insurance, etc - which means that instead of paying premiums, they just plan to cover any such losses out of general funds. In the case of gov't orgs, that means the taxpayers.
Large companies actually care about not wasting too much money, so they tend to do a semi-reasonable job of assessing risks. Gov't orgs simply pass the costs on to taxpayers, and thus are far less concerned about waste. As long as their actions look/sounds good in theory, the final bill is all but irrelevant to them.
And although they might request a perfunctory third-party "assessment", it's mostly to provide the appearance of due diligence. Any third-party assessor who actually told the gov't it was incompetent would find it got very few contracts in the future. (Note that this conflict of interest only applies when entity A is hired by entity G to assess entity G's plan; if entity A is hired by entity X to assess entity C's plan, a much more honest assessment can be expected)
Dear [Planetary Inhabitants], I am a [wealthy] [royalty] who is in need of your assistance in transferring a large amount of [monetary units] from my planet to yours. Please send me your [monetary management system]'s [identification schema] so that I may complete this transfer
Oh, and then there was the time a bunch of stoners tried to finance their drug habits by selling their math books to some shady guys downtown and then claiming the books were "lost" or "stolen". The school never did get most of the books back, and of course the stoners had no money - so at $600 per book the whole fiasco ended up costing the school over ten grand.
It's not the fault of the concept, per se - but if the school's IT management is incompetent, then making decisions which only work out if they're not incompetent is a recipe for disaster. And let's be honest - most people (in any job) are only marginally competent at best; government IT employees are even less likely to be competent.
Slashdot Mirror
But but .... free trade floats all boats!
Free trade floats the boat-holding business owners, but drowns the boatless individuals that are not business owners.
Analogies are like glass - when you push them too hard, they break.
And the problem with that is that you have to have that level of regulation everywhere, otherwise regulation is simply an excuse to move the production to places that aren't regulated.
True, but we have no legal basis for insisting that the chinese implement any particular law; the most we can do is refuse to trade with them unless they do things we like, such as perhaps a $7/hour minimum wage. But that would kill their economy, and put tens of millions of people out of work. Sure, US workers would still be employed (at least for a while), but I'm not sure the moral tradeoff is worth it: I don't want a billion starving chinese on my conscience! What would happen, of course, is that china would NOT implement our standards; they'd have to forgo our export market instead. This would primarily serve to slow the increase in their prosperity (there's that moral twist again).
Also, imagine if apple was a chinese company - they'd be completely patriotic by hiring chinese workers, and national heroes for selling so much to america. We'd still buy just as many iphones, and the profits would go to china instead of america. No one in the US would have anything to complain about (we might complain about a shortage of competitors to apple, but that wouldn't be apple's fault!), yet the situation would be worse (for the US) than the current situation. If we keep hammering companies like apple, this is exactly what's going to happen.
True, but just straight product cost is only part of the equation.
You have to factor in time (because time is money), gas (or wear-and-tear on your shoes plus even MORE time), hassle, etc.
I'm not quite sure whether you think you're making a pro- or anti-capitalism argument. alexgieg was disagreeing with the assertion that capitalism means workers get screwed, so he seem to be pro; you're "true-butting" him, so you seem to be anti. But you've just made the (correct) argument that you need to take into account all of the relevant factors, not just the raw cost. Doing so means somehow converting disparate units (ounces of cheese and gallons of gas) into a common system so that you can easily make an objective decision. Luckily we have a way to do that: MONEY. As long as the cost of each item reflects the sum of the various inputs (including, of course, incenting people to undertake the effort - i.e. profit), the system works pretty well; it's primarily when the gov't skews the system that you get incorrect results.
For example, when the gov't gives tax breaks to oil companies, or funds road construction from sources other than gas taxes, it makes driving SEEM less expensive than it really is, so people end up driving more and we get more pollution, etc. If the price of gas truly reflected the cost of driving (including things like road construction and pollution), gas would cost a lot more and we'd probably drive a lot less. Now granted this might impose a financial hardship or poorer people - but if we (as a society) want to ameliorate that, the correct solution is to give them money, not artificially reduce the actual price of driving.
Laissez-faire capitalism sometimes gets a bad rap, but it's really just about letting the system work properly by not interfering with it.
Wait, so the same people who have enough power/skills/whatever to blow up the towers and send all the witnesses to the gulag are incapable of disappearing a couple of youtube videos? There's that bizarrely incoherent worldview again...
(comment originally replied to wrong post - sorry for the dup)
You tell them that they're installing HVAC equipment or something.
Oh, and where did these explosive HVAC units come from, anyway? Did bush and cheney build them in the white house basement? Seems to me it would take at least dozens, probably hundreds, of people to acquire and assemble the explosives. And how do you go about recruiting people to commit treason like that? You can't just put an ad in the paper. You've got to ask around, and you've got to expect that most of the people you ask won't want to take part in it - so the pool of people who can't be allowed to expose your plans just grew by another factor of 5 or 10 or something.
The size of the conspiracy just keeps getting bigger, and eventually you have to make a decision. Either:
1) It's totally implausible, and therefore almost certainly did NOT actually happen that way
2) My god - this conspiracy is HUGE! These people have unprecedented powers; the fact that they can cover up such a brazen act proves that they have the power to have committed the act in the first place! It's up to me, and a small but dedicated band of truth-seekers, to find out the truth, make it known, and save the world.
Once you go down road 2, there's no stopping: everything just gets folded into the conspiracy (for example, an article about a DOJ tech project dying 10 years later). There's really not much I can do for people like that, except maybe to suggest that they seek professional help.
P.S. Just make sure the psychiatrist isn't one of the ones who's in on the whole cover-up - he'll probably prescribe some medication to help you, but he'll include some secret markings on the RX which signal the pharmacist (who's also in on it) to give you some pills that land you in an insane asylum. On second thought, seeking professional help is just too risky.
Wait, so the same people who have enough power/skills/whatever to blow up the towers and send all the witnesses to the gulag are incapable of disappearing a couple of youtube videos? There's that bizarrely incoherent worldview again...
Imagine a world where those suffering from BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) spin absolutely preposterous "theories", like the US Gov't blowing up the twin towers. Forget radios - how many people would need be involved? How likely is it that NONE of them will talk? And none of them took pictures of the explosives being planted in the WTC? Oh, wait, maybe those who were about to talk were quietly censored (how exactly does that work) or were detained indefinitely in gulags. Maybe it was those hundreds of Blackwater contractors who went missing right around 9/11... oh wait, no one ever reported any such thing... OK, so their entire families were hauled off, too. That would explain those hundreds of families that simply disappeared from neighborhoods and schools and spousal jobs, etc. Wait, no one ever heard about that either? I guess those evil bastards kidnapped everyone who knew anyone in the families - and everyone THEY knew, too. Oh, and what about the hauler-offers? You can't have them telling embarrassing tales - best to tell THEM to report to the gulag as soon as they're done kidnapping tens of thousands of people.
Look, I'll give you "evil" if you want. Fine, Bush is the devil himself. But no way in hell is the US gov't competent enough to pull off a stunt like that. Believing that "neo-con MORONS" could somehow do all that - and leave no real evidence of their actions - takes "cognitive dissonance" to a whole new level.
The ongoing thingy with CERN's maybe-FTL neutrinos may answer that before the three or four years envisioned for this.
Apparently three or four years from now they'll figure out how to use FTL to make neutrinos travel backwards in time, so they sent us some so we'd know how important it was to continue the research.... now it all makes sense!
I think it's a reference to the movie Event Horizon
(Pretty creepy movie, BTW)
WinRT? I prefer WinRG
But I'd bet for all MS's faults that the code for Norton Antivirus is 10x worse.
<cheap-shot>
NAV could only have that much dead code if MS actually fixed some of the security holes in Windows
</cheap-shot>
It seems to me there are two separate questions:
1) What sort of life-detection-capabilities should we build into a mars lander?
2) What is the permanent fundamental definition of "life"?
The first is pretty easy to answer - we've got limited resources, so it makes sense to look for the kind of life we know how to look for. True, we might miss other things that (had we not missed them) we'd consider "life" - but what choice do we have? We don't know what "different life" might look like, so we can't build a machine to look for it!
The second is a bit trickier, but luckily it's also irrelevant. We don't HAVE to define "life" once and for all, right now, today: we can leave the definition malleable, and choose what to include as we encounter candidates. For example, people agonize over whether viruses are "alive". It's a non-question; viruses simple "are", and are totally unconcerned with English words; the only question is whether we (humans) want to define "life" in a way that includes viruses, or excludes them. Either outcome is fine, and neither affects the viruses one bit.
Careening from crisis to crisis does not seem like something that works. It has not crashed yet, but it will. Disarmament is what works.
Interesting... you take something that has worked (or at least not failed) for many decades and assure us it will fail... and you take something that's never even been tried, and assure us it will work. There's a word for beliefs which are completely independent of evidence: Faith
I think nuking even "just" a city or two (say, NYC + DC) would count as "significantly" hurting the US. If US planners believed that DPRK had a couple of nukes and a delivery mechanism of some sort (ICBM or suitcase, whatever), I think it would SIGNIFICANTLY discourage them from attacking DPRK, especially w/ nukes.
I seriously wonder what would happen if the US got nukes launched at it ... (snip)... We definitely wouldn't want to launch ours back to avoid MAD.
Do you know how MAD works? The whole point is that we are very public about being batshit crazy, and we definitely WOULD launch ours back. Lots of them. So launching a nuke at the US is just a slightly indirect way of committing mass suicide. MAD is insane logic, no question about it - but it's been a big part of keeping the US and USSR from using nukes on each other for over half a century. As insane as it might be, it works.
There's even a MAD argument AGAINST missile defense - as long as the US can't defeat incoming missiles, we're very unlikely to start a nuclear war. Likewise for Russia or whoever. But if anyone COULD defeat missiles, they wouldn't fear a nuclear war nearly as much, and they might even be tempted to start one. So a workable missile defense arguably makes the overall situation MORE dangerous, not less.
Now granted, MAD works better when your enemy is a large country who values their lives - it gets a bit iffy when your enemy is a small band of religious wackos who don't much care whether they're dead or alive, as long as they've made their point.
It's worth it if you can do it cheaply just for the sole purpose of lowering the CO2 in the atmosphere.
But as soon as you burn the carbon, you're back where you started (worse, actually). Remember, CO2 isn't a minor side-effect of burning carbon that can be scrubbed out at some cost; it's the primary result of that burning.
It's like trying to defeat rising sea levels with sponges - unless you plan on having a near-infinite number of wet sponges laying around forever, you've got to squeeze them out somewhere/sometime, and as soon as you do the water just runs back to the sea again.
Is it even possible to fly a large jet without fly-by-wire? Are pilots really strong enough to move the control surfaces on the wings and tail by muscle power alone? And even if they are, do they have the endurance to do it off-and-on for hours at a time?
Hi, folks - welcome aboard Manual Airlines flight 123. I'm Chuck Norris, and I'll be your pilot today; Arnold Schwarzenegger will be the co-pilot, and Sylvester Stallone will be our navigator.
OK, I give up - your incisive criticism of my thought experiment has convinced me of the error of my ways. Until my spelling and grammar are perfect, I will never again make the mistake of trying to communicate with anyone. The risk of sending someone's life spiraling down the tubes because of a misplaced apostrophe is just too great.
Please note that I'm not necessarily taking a position on the circumstances of Israel's creation, or the tactics used by Israel, or even whether Israel has a "right to exist".
I'm merely suggesting that if you found yourself in such a situation, and reacted as Israel does, and then got called out for "over-reacting", you'd think whoever called you out was either totally disingenuous or a fucking moron.
Again, I'm not saying the GGP is totally disingenuous or a fucking moron - I'm saying that it's totally understandable for someone in Israel's position to think the GGP is totally disingenuous or a fucking moron.
Imagine if your country had been declared war upon (by multiple other countries) the very the day it was founded. Imagine if your country had been in an existential war with most of these countries more or less continuously for over half a century. Imagine if your country suffered an average of about 3 rocket attacks PER DAY for 8 straight years. Imagine if those same countries send suicide bombers into your country about once a month on average, and those attacks intentionally killed many hundreds of innocent civilians, and wounded thousands more. Imagine that your country has nuclear weapons, but refrains from using them against it's enemies.
Now imagine that no matter how you react, someone who doesn't live under these conditions accuses you of overreacting and not having any sort of perspective.
The whole agression vs. retaliation dichotomy is pretty meaningless when talking about two sides that have been trading blows almost continually for decades.
Decades??? Try Millenia!
I doubt schools (or any other large gov't org) actually purchases insurance for this or most other risks. Insurance is ALWAYS a losing proposition on average; it exists only to protect smaller entities against large losses which would otherwise overwhelm that entity's financial reserves. Larger entities (i.e.. most large companies, and probably most large gov't orgs) are "self-insured" for things like employee health insurance, employee life insurance, company fleet auto insurance, theft insurance, etc - which means that instead of paying premiums, they just plan to cover any such losses out of general funds. In the case of gov't orgs, that means the taxpayers.
Large companies actually care about not wasting too much money, so they tend to do a semi-reasonable job of assessing risks. Gov't orgs simply pass the costs on to taxpayers, and thus are far less concerned about waste. As long as their actions look/sounds good in theory, the final bill is all but irrelevant to them.
And although they might request a perfunctory third-party "assessment", it's mostly to provide the appearance of due diligence. Any third-party assessor who actually told the gov't it was incompetent would find it got very few contracts in the future. (Note that this conflict of interest only applies when entity A is hired by entity G to assess entity G's plan; if entity A is hired by entity X to assess entity C's plan, a much more honest assessment can be expected)
I heard it was something like:
Dear [Planetary Inhabitants], I am a [wealthy] [royalty] who is in need of your assistance in transferring a large amount of [monetary units] from my planet to yours. Please send me your [monetary management system]'s [identification schema] so that I may complete this transfer
Oh, and then there was the time a bunch of stoners tried to finance their drug habits by selling their math books to some shady guys downtown and then claiming the books were "lost" or "stolen". The school never did get most of the books back, and of course the stoners had no money - so at $600 per book the whole fiasco ended up costing the school over ten grand.
It's not the fault of the concept, per se - but if the school's IT management is incompetent, then making decisions which only work out if they're not incompetent is a recipe for disaster. And let's be honest - most people (in any job) are only marginally competent at best; government IT employees are even less likely to be competent.
But mostly, chill out, dude - it's just a joke!