Does it actually mean anything though?
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I’m still not going to buy a Cybertruck.
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How bout half of one?
Dirt cheap for sure!
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I’m wondering how long the lawsuit about firing FTC commissioners will take to go through the courts. That came up in this video from Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse when they interviewed FTC Commissioner Slaughter:
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So I just visited Venice during my brief but blissful escape from the realities of, well, everything, and then I was repeatedly reminded of Musk when I started seeing “Doge” stuff all over town as that was the title of Venice’s supreme ruler for over 1000 years:
I doubt that Musk had this in mind as a deeper, secret meaning to DOGE, as the reference to the meme coin is probably about the most sophisticated attempt at humor/cleverness that he could be capable of, but I can’t help thinking that yes, absolutely he would want to be Doge himself.
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What did they have their race or gender wrong in the file or something? Were they erroneously thought to be women? Jewish? Did they fire people by drawing numerical lots? Did they just have big balls tea bag a list of names and fire anyone whose name got smeared with his ass sweat?
Inquiring minds want to know how the smart manly men of doge planned this smartly with their smarts.
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Ask your favorite archivist / records retention specialist what a boneheaded move this is.
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Fucking idiots.
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They’re probably replacing the tape with ZipDisks.
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I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out, click click click click click click click…
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More like undocumented, unsecured S3 buckets that will be deleted once they fire the person who was in charge of paying the bill
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Oooh, oooh, I do this for a living!
First of all, conversion isn’t free. There is a cost involved and almost always that cost is a negative ROI. Often a HUGE negative ROI. I looked at converting a few hundred boxes of paper that I need to keep for 50-80 years to digital and using a vendor that gave me crazy good prices meant it cost me ~$40k to do with the very high certification requirements that US federal regs require I do. Meanwhile, it will cost me ~$3/yr to store them, which is about 13 thousand years. I’d have to recall over 20% of them annually to break even.
Tapes (and other electronic media) do require environmentally controlled storage, but that environment is basically “comfortable room temp”, which I pay $1-$3/month for a box, so let’s say $36/year.
And that was just simple paper scanning. Transfer of media is both easier and harder PLUS requires specific equipment. It should surprise zero people that the government uses old stuff, which is not what consumers use. In the early 2000’s, I worked for the state handling tax collection and we were using dumb screen amber terminals still.
And then said conversion takes time - there’s zero chance 14,000 of them are done already - and then you have to fully verify said item, per federal law (I know, laws are barely suggestions to these people).
And then you have to now store that digital copy. Digital storage is cheap, but you need to ensure backups and so on; again build/expand infrastructure. So, not free.
And lastly, you have to dispose of the tape. The government actually has a standard for this, developed by the military. For tapes, they get melted/broken down into elements that can be resold…by the person breaking it down. You simply pay. There’s a whole side business for people who destroy stuff, where they resell the destroyed items in material form that’s actually really cool. But anyway, tape destruction isn’t cheap. Depending on tape size and so on, you usually have 20 (maybe 50 if they are small) tapes in a box. So 700ish boxes, maybe $10000 for destruction if you’re lucky, again using federal requirements on destruction which is different from “toss them in the garbage”.
As a bonus, I also know exactly where those tapes are stored - I’ve been into the storage area. I use the same place. I’ve met some of the government archivists who work there, and they are all awesome.
There’s no way they were paying $1M for the storage. I pay a few million annually for storage and I have over a million boxes. Again, I’ve literally seen the storage. Amusingly, it’s stored just down the hall from the original copies of Shrek 3 and the raw recordings of American Pie.
And if they are doing the conversion, it will cost them a huge pile of money, take a few months of work, and create a new problem, requiring new processes to maintain/review/store.
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The word ‘permanent’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there! What do they think digital records are stored on?
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The cloud! It’s a virtual world so exists independent of our own. 
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