[QuarterReptile]

You always have a sense of a ton of money sloshing around in these sorts of things; in college we used to get symphony orchestras to fly our group out to collaborate on performances. But, it's a different matter to see it enumerated.

For anyone not wanting to read through, I found ~$160,000 in private train car payments, and somewhere around $40,000 in fees and tickets to Amtrak.

[bombcar]

That’s $5k per kid or $500/day per kid. Not bad at all considering.

[pooper]

I always get the feeling that I am not good with big numbers.

Like a public library spending USD 50k+ per month(?) to Oracle seems outrageous to me but I guess it isn't so outrageous given the annual budget is over USD 100M?

[bombcar]

Here's my trick - convert the number to $ per family per year.

So for a public library, you'd take 50k and multiply by 12 and get 600k/yr. Then you'd find the number of families served by the library, and divide that out. 600 families? That's 1k per family per year, too much. 6000 families? 100 per family per year, still high but not insane. 60000 families? Now we're down to $10. And if it were Chicago with 1 million families (or households which can be an easier number to find) we're at 60 cents per. Not bad.

You can do similar things at state and national levels to get a ballpark feeling. Student loan forgiveness will cost $400 billion over 30 years, let's say. There are about 122 million households, so forgiveness costs $3300 per household over 30 years, or $110 a year. At this point you can decide how much it's worth worrying about.

[moooo99]

I always feel like Software licenses are a different beast. For example, 300k in Windows license costs might not be mulch out of a 50M budget, but it is much when you think about the fact that these costs could also be zero.

[differentview97]

How exactly could these costs be 0?

[dmos62]

Use free software?

[notpushkin]

I'm absolutely pro-FOSS but also want to point out that just the licence cost comparison here isn't too meaningful. Licence + maintenance cost fould be a much more sensible figure (and much less likely to be zero).

[differentview97]

What free software offers the enterprise features of Windows? AFAIK not even Red Hat is anywhere close to the central management features of Windows domains. Samba on Linux/Mac is severely backwards and using it is pain.

[tucnak]

There is KDE.

[differentview97]

The DE is the least interesting question of this.