Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

This is just one small example of waste. Not much different than the $10,000 hammer or the $100,000 toilet seat. No accountability, that is what is to blame. The current president may suck, but this can't be blamed on him.

Our government is an animal without an anus. It can't take a dump, so it is literally full of sh!t. We pass laws to feed the government and make it grow, but we never remove anything. It's our nature. We need to change government to work with our nature. It needs an anus. I would propose we add expirations to all laws. Any law allocating money would expire more quickly. No law, other than the constitution, would have an expiration greater than 50 years. No law allocating money would have an expiration greater than 10 years. So in effect, if after 10 years we don't care enough to renew the law, we stop spending money on it.

At some point we need to realize we can't trust everyone in government to spend money intelligently. Maybe it's time we have a small group of folks who are basically the personal shoppers of government. They get the requests and send back the products. They can question and deny requests for unreasonable products or products that should require additional justification by the requester.

For federal we can start the EESA (Efficient and Effective Spending Administration.)

I think the most likely answer is that they devised a system for approving routers, and some people in the bureaucracy got lazy, and approved this router for sites of 1-2,000 users, instead of coming up with a different solution for, say, 1 to 100 and 101 to 999. They went with one size fits all. Obviously, these people should lose their jobs, and it should teach the IT industry a lesson: Yes, you CAN get fired for buying Cisco.

Wow, I agree with your entire post. I believe this is a first. If they fire someone (and not a scapegoat) and make a change that prevents it from happening, I'm cool with forgiving a government screw up from time to time.

It's the lack of a suitable reaction that causes outrage.

There is no doubt in my mind that this happened because of someone's laziness. Everybody figured they were just following the rules, and nobody needed to rock the boat. Somebody is responsible for this kind of incompetence. Government stop needs to acting like it's the employer of last-resort for screwups. If you worked in private industry and wasted money like that, you'd be fired, and government should be no different.

Not sure how Cisco is to blame.

There is no doubt in my mind that this happened because of someone's laziness. Everybody figured they were just following the rules, and nobody needed to rock the boat. Somebody is responsible for this kind of incompetence. Government stop needs to acting like it's the employer of last-resort for screwups. If you worked in private industry and wasted money like that, you'd be fired, and government should be no different.

Do those "in-the-know" bear any sense of responsibility? Not legally, of course, but morally or societally? That Cisco rep had to know this solution was overkill. Their boss had to know it was overkill too but they both saw the $$ and didn't care. Wealth redistribution at it's finest (worst?).

Do those "in-the-know" bear any sense of responsibility? Not legally, of course, but morally or societally? That Cisco rep had to know this solution was overkill. Their boss had to know it was overkill too but they both saw the $$ and didn't care. Wealth redistribution at it's finest (worst?).



This was laziness all around. The Cisco rep was being lazy too and just threw together the simplest plan they could think of: buy all the best shit we got that gets me the biggest commission check.

I posted a pretty accurate comparison.. but apparently you disregarded it. If a car salesman sees your income should he refuse to sell you cars with to great of a price tag? Maybe that's how thinks should work at stores.. to purchase certain items you should have to show your recent pay statement.. maybe your tax return.. (just so the seller isn't morally held accountable)

Do those "in-the-know" bear any sense of responsibility? Not legally, of course, but morally or societally? That Cisco rep had to know this solution was overkill. Their boss had to know it was overkill too but they both saw the $$ and didn't care. Wealth redistribution at it's finest (worst?).

A better analogy: A 75 year old grandmother goes to the car dealership and asks for a car to use once or twice a week to go to the grocery store. She has a ton of money and is ignorant about cars. The salesman sells her a Maserati.

I posted a pretty accurate comparison.. but apparently you disregarded it. If a car salesman sees your income should he refuse to sell you cars with to great of a price tag? Maybe that's how thinks should work at stores.. to purchase certain items you should have to show your recent pay statement.. maybe your tax return.. (just so the seller isn't morally held accountable)

Depends what is the truth. According to the Cisco rep there were certain requirements that had to be met and an actual study in terms of needs for the State was never done by the State or the GIT. Certainly the rep could have insisted he thought the routers were overkill, but if what he said was truthful, it seems there should be more blamed placed on the GIT and the State then Cisco IMO.