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.

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

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?

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.

How exactly could these costs be 0?

Use free software?

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).

That is true. But paying for commercial software doesn't free you from having to maintain said software. So while some software might be easier to maintain than other, I think it is fair to just compare the license prices if you have no additional insight into the organization and how their IT operates.

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.

I think you'll find your experience here is outdated. There are a few good tools for managing Linux systems - puppeteer is one. What sorry if features are you missing?

As for Samba, Gnome has good client built in to the file browser. But I'd have to ask why you're using Samba at all. There are much better network filesystems in the Linux world that don't come with all the legacy cruft and undocumented idiosyncrasies that are part of the SMB protocol. They're harder to set up on Windows, but that shouldn't be a problem if you standardize on Linux.

Samba - or to be precise MS AD is not just about files. On Linux it's limited to files and that's exactly the problem I'm talking about.

Actually with modern clouds like OneDrive it's not about files at all, I haven't seen network drives being used for a decade. It's about privileges to various resources available within the corporate network and about what you can't do with your work computer, and about having the computer auto-configure to play with all the resources on corporate network.

Stuff like - I open my computer and I immediately see the printer that's nearest to me as the first printer in the list. Access to it is authenticated and authorized (with no additional password prompts). I can simply choose a document from SharePoint and send it right there, walk over there and slap my chip card on it and have it printed. It's part of my system's print queue.

I scan a document and it goes directly to my OneDrive which is automatically connected to whatever computer I sit at as soon as I log in, regardless of me using a random terminal that's been sitting in whatever office I'm visiting.

I'm unable to break anything because there is no root to login to, nobody ever uses sudo on the computer, nobody ever needs admin privileges on it (harder to do with devs but common for all other professions). If an app needs to be added the computer is remotely reimaged from an image with the app added (this requires a one-setting change by the admin, nothing else). No user settings or files go missing in the process.

Corporate VPN, firewall, proxy servers, wifi network, wired network - all of it is uses auth and it just takes my user and just works with it. Nothing is available without auth.

Building this kind of system with Microsoft products is as easy as installing a few apps on the corporate server machine. Building it with Linux - well I am pretty skilled with Linux admin but I can't even imagine where to begin.

Unix systems were doing all of this 30 years ago. (I can almost feel all the old Sun Microsystems employees rolling their eyes.) It's literally why NFS and NIS (replaced by LDAP before Active Directory released) existed. But Unix != Linux, the popular parts of the Linux ecosystem don't cater to this, and trajectory continues to diverge away.

There is KDE.

The DE is the least interesting question of this.

Oh, KDE is much more than a desktop environment.

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.

With Starlinks new in-motion service you could have really great connectivity on those trips.

Wouldn't normal cell service suffice as well? Unlike in an RV, you'd presumably never be too far from civilization.

I haven't taken this route specifically, but a lot of Amtrak routes don't follow roads and don't have great cell service.

Almost all long distance Amtrak routes deviate quite far from civilization. Once you’re out of the cities and away from a highway you get cell pockets.

If you can afford a private rail car I'm sure you can also afford a peplink router with dual wan interface, and one of the two way going to starlink, the other to a cradlepoint LTE modem and antenna system for T-Mobile or Verizon.

This seems unbelievably expensive. How is this funded?

We had a very generous group of donors make this once-in-a-lifetime event possible and entirely free for every teenager on board.

The team also really made it happen. It was incredibly difficult to organize, and every person involved went far above and beyond any normal expectation to make the Zephyr so special.

This is super cool. I took a quick look but couldn't see how it was funded... how was it?

Insanely cool.