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My father was a business manager for a few different school corporations. In at least one of them, the busses were all used - none were purchased new. It just w

My father was a business manager for a few different school corporations. In at least one of them, the busses were all used - none were purchased new. It just wasn't worth it, and much cheaper to simply have an extra bus. You needed the mechanics regardless just to maintain them. You needed an extra driver anyway as well because people get sick. These aren't really the costs you are leading folks to believe they are, but part of overall cost savings. One of the most wasteful (and expensive) things about school busses is that they are only used for school, which means they sit idle for much of the day. My father tried to work with at least one city to combine city busses with school busses - but state law (Indiana) forbid this since school busses were required by law to be the classic yellow with black markings. I'll also add that outsourcing isn't without challenges, and the employees are often worse off. (I don't remember as many specifics right now: My father, who died 9 or 10 years ago, generally worked with custodial and cafeteria outsourcing.)

daniel-cussen 5y ago
> I'll also add that outsourcing isn't without challenges, and the employees are often worse off. (I don't remember as many specifics right now: My father, who died 9 or 10 years ago, generally worked with custodial and cafeteria outsourcing.) (In the following post I use "you" rhetorically, not talking about Broken_Hippo directly.) Yeah. The body rental place makes it look like the killerest deal imaginable, like you get all the benefits of having human workers, minus actually having to deal with any human problems. No unions or strikes, if the body rental you're using gets organized it dies without the collateral damage to the renter, you just switch outsourcing unit. And there's tons of other human problems, and those human problems require other humans's help. They ought to get real, people are expensive, life is expensive, if something is more expensive than life we replace it with life. There is this deal you can get where you pay about half market wages, almost exactly half, and there's no unionization or anything. Just have to worry about emigration. Called slavery, these days people focus on the whipping and the coercion, they forget if you're a slave your master will be disgustingly cheap with the things you need he must provide for you, because he knows it's literally painful to ask. If you want something cheap and rather your money ends up spent on electricity than food, like who cares a joule's a joule, go, go and fire 100% of your workers and replace them all with machines. Sure to make a lot of money! What will you spend it on, alternating current or direct current? What voltage are you compatible with?
andrepd 5y ago
>One of the most wasteful (and expensive) things about school busses is that they are only used for school, which means they sit idle for much of the day. In my country's capital there is a plan of using a fleet of school mini-buses (as "taking kids to school" is among the top reasons why people say they still use a car for their daily commute), but also of putting these to work outside the narrow band of school start/end in other uses: taking old people to their doctors appointments, and commercial on-demand uberpool type transport.

daniel-cussen 5y ago

> I'll also add that outsourcing isn't without challenges, and the employees are often worse off. (I don't remember as many specifics right now: My father, who died 9 or 10 years ago, generally worked with custodial and cafeteria outsourcing.) (In the following post I use "you" rhetorically, not talking about Broken_Hippo directly.) Yeah. The body rental place makes it look like the killerest deal imaginable, like you get all the benefits of having human workers, minus actually having to deal with any human problems. No unions or strikes, if the body rental you're using gets organized it dies without the collateral damage to the renter, you just switch outsourcing unit. And there's tons of other human problems, and those human problems require other humans's help. They ought to get real, people are expensive, life is expensive, if something is more expensive than life we replace it with life. There is this deal you can get where you pay about half market wages, almost exactly half, and there's no unionization or anything. Just have to worry about emigration. Called slavery, these days people focus on the whipping and the coercion, they forget if you're a slave your master will be disgustingly cheap with the things you need he must provide for you, because he knows it's literally painful to ask. If you want something cheap and rather your money ends up spent on electricity than food, like who cares a joule's a joule, go, go and fire 100% of your workers and replace them all with machines. Sure to make a lot of money! What will you spend it on, alternating current or direct current? What voltage are you compatible with?

andrepd 5y ago

>One of the most wasteful (and expensive) things about school busses is that they are only used for school, which means they sit idle for much of the day. In my country's capital there is a plan of using a fleet of school mini-buses (as "taking kids to school" is among the top reasons why people say they still use a car for their daily commute), but also of putting these to work outside the narrow band of school start/end in other uses: taking old people to their doctors appointments, and commercial on-demand uberpool type transport.