My company is going through a cost cutting phase. And somehow cutting disk space ended being one of the priority items. One of my servers utilized 50% of the a

My company is going through a cost cutting phase. And somehow cutting disk space ended being one of the priority items. One of my servers utilized 50% of the allocated space and the "low disk space" alert was set to go off at 80%. Management came up with an idea - why not reduce it to used space + 20% of used space. That way we save a lot of space. I had to explain them simple math - if the space is 100GB and I utilize 50GB then the proposal was to have 60GB on the server. But 50/60 is already beyond the 80% alert. And if the target was lower at say 70% alert then we needed at least 22GB i.e. used space + 44% of used space to make it work. It was mind boggling that people can't understand simple ratios. The most maddening part was that no one could explain the savings if the space was reduced. People making noise said we could "avoid costs" while forgetting that used space is already cost, you cannot "avoid" it.