That is exactly why there are discretionary spending limits, if the overhead for sending the $40 pizza to a committee isn't priced in, then every cost will blown out.

Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock.

They don't care, destruction of the federal government is the point. Congress needs to do their job.

"Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock."

One day, deep in a build, I was so frustrated I got our CEO and COO and made them walk around the building with me as I fumed "Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" screen" - and our COO looks at me and said "are we really that bad?" and I said "THIS MEETING ABOUT MEETINGS COST US $5,000!!!!!!!!!!!" - sadly, we didn't get any screens, but a company wide email went out and meetings decreased.

>Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock.

Levels.fyi built this btw: https://www.levels.fyi/cost/

This would actually be impossible to use in most companies I worked for, as half of the workforce is usually consultants or contractors from various companies and their hourly rates are trade secret.

Just use a blended rate, it doesn't have to be on the nose accurate, it's just a reminder.

The majority in Congress have — rather obviously — been paid off with luxury trips and RVs and trips to Russia.

We are truly fucked, you know?

Hey man Thomas is totally proud of that RV he paid for …. well didn’t pay for… also didn’t pay to park it…

Yeah, I was telling my wife last night that if we live long enough we might get to read some really interesting books from (to be) former SVR/GRU types about the time they made assets from most of th oval office.

Isn't this job of CIA and the NSA to prevent this shit?

Ultimately voters gotta care too…

Aren’t they about to be fired?

Broadly speaking, it's the job of the executive government to prevent this, of which CIA and NSA are merely tools. However, it turns out that, in America, you can literally buy the executive wholesale as a foreign actor with enough resources and determination.

And we can't even say that this was a surprise. Federalist Papers No 22:

"Evils of this description ought not to be regarded as imaginary. One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption. An hereditary monarch, though often disposed to sacrifice his subjects to his ambition, has so great a personal interest in the government and in the external glory of the nation, that it is not easy for a foreign power to give him an equivalent for what he would sacrifice by treachery to the state. The world has accordingly been witness to few examples of this species of royal prostitution, though there have been abundant specimens of every other kind.

In republics, persons elevated from the mass of the community, by the suffrages of their fellow-citizens, to stations of great pre-eminence and power, may find compensations for betraying their trust, which, to any but minds animated and guided by superior virtue, may appear to exceed the proportion of interest they have in the common stock, and to overbalance the obligations of duty. Hence it is that history furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalency of foreign corruption in republican governments."

At my company we even buy condoms during office parties on company card.

Haha!

That sound exactly out of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual

https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...

Once when I was in consultancy, I was at a 10+ person meeting where they spent 45 minutes debating an hour's worth of charge for a PMs time on the project.

It didn't go down so well when I stated "I don't know how much each of you get paid, but I know the rough hourly rate my firm charges to have me here, and I can pretty confidently state we've just spent more money debating that hour's charge than the hour's charge is worth" -- it did move the meeting on to more important topics though.

"Penny wise but pound foolish" springs to mind.

>>These kinda dumbass middle manager politics sound like they help (to people with no work experience…) but they’re more costly in the end.

I knew a place which did the same for stationary. "Employees are using too many notebooks".

Eventually they would have a staff to stock, approve and disburse. Which Im sure costs darn more than anything the notebooks did.

Either way, its still unclear why you would ration notebooks of the things.

Eventually I guess people just want an illusion of control.

Reminds me of this sketch https://youtu.be/iB1hQkqtNso