Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / September 2005

Probably.

Fifty buck computers.

The intent was probably to get them into the hands of local students.

Probably a couple of reasons, although I'm guessing here:

1) eBay's not free (and I'm not just talking about fees). It's entirely
possible that the perceived it would be more work/trouble/effort to do
it online. (And if they had managed it correctly, such perception would
have been right.) But if anything that's probably subordinate to...

2) They probably expected the buyers to be local people. After all, it
was their taxes that paid for the things in the first place. And (see
poor implementation comment above) they probably didn't expect the crush
they got. These are 4-year-old models that weren't terribly
well-regarded when they were new; why would someone travel 3000 miles or
more to get one cheap?

That should be /could have sold them/, not /could of/, since you raised
the question of our education system.

DC

No wonder you think government is a failure: you've mistaken it for
business. Money isn't the sole measure of utility.

In particular, since the citizens who paid the taxes for these computers
are the ones who are now using them there is a continuing return on the
tax dollars spent. That utility remains in the community that paid the
taxes, so it's hard to say that they are "losing" the resources that
were purchased. It's also quite possible that the continuing return over
time will be worth more than they could have gotten in a pure sale.

Of course, Ricky will dismiss the above, for two reasons:
(less significant) 1. you can't measure the return, so it doesn't exist.
(primary objection) 2. But only some of the citizens who paid for those
computers got one! People who aren't using a service are paying for it,
and that's wrong in principle!

I've got no sympathy for either position, but this isn't the place or
time for that argument, especially since it's unlikely to change
anyone's opinion on anything. Bye.

Yeah, the school board should've spent $50,000 of the school's money
to hire workers to send off the cheap iBooks to my chop-shop so I
could reauction the laptops on EBay again for a cool $150 profit
apiece. I'm certainly more deseriving than the local community that
actually paid for them. I had a whole LAN running Sniping programs all
set up too...

Then again, whose money is whose is impossible to determine.

Like, totally, Veronicaaa!    Dork.

Yeah public employees have no bosses, no oversight, no competition, no
hiring/firing process, etc.   In fact, the Henrico taxpayers didn't even
hear about this whole situation.  They were under an information
"blackout" enforced by lazy public workers, easily avoiding scrutiny by
their taxpayer employers.

You're obviously just projecting.   Just because you're so lazy and
irresponsible that you can only imagine the most base kind of incentive
doesn't mean everyone else is that way.

hope this helps,
Greg