fuck if it’s this easy why do they close the goddamn road for like five months shit
all outta soub 😦
I work for the road crew in the summer. Crack sealing (the process you see above) is fairly quick and simple. (Though holding a hose that pumps literal tons of 350F tar into the road in the middle of the summer is NOT easy)
I think what a lot of people underestimate is just how much road there is in your city. And just how many directions the crew gets pulled.
For our city of around 50k people there are 8 of us.
Also, crack sealing is a wholly temporary measure, meant to slow the break-up of the roads, it’s not a permanent fix.
Roads tend to get closed for months on end because we have to tear the whole thing up, then, depending on the class of road, we either have to hammer-drill into concrete to lay rebar and the pour concrete, or we can get straight to paving. If it’s a road requiring concrete we’re required to wait at least 24 hours for it to set.
So after 2 days we’re finally able to pave. But the city allocates one (two if we’re lucky) 5 ton truck to transport material.
A relatively short paving job requires at a minimum of 60 tons. So that’s 12 trips to the asphalt factory and back. Each ton is around $80.
TL;DR
There’s a lot of road, not many of us, and soup is expensive.
Leave the soup men alone.
Leave the soup men alone, and go vote for people who will pay for more soup and more soup people
Why are people still up in arms about AO3 needing donations to run? Their budget is publicly available. You can go onto the website, right now, and read it. If you donate more than a certain amount (pretty sure it’s more than $10), you can vote in their elections, because you’re considered a member, and that’s how memberships work.
It’s a free site to use, but not to run or to maintain, especially not with all these net neutrality battles.
Y’all gotta understand that it’s not just fanworks, there’s a lot more that goes into archiving.
Signal boosting this because it’s important af. OTW is a nonprofit organization, specifically a public charity as classified by the US tax code. That means they file a 990 tax report each year that lets you see all of their finances – what they’re spending money on, where their money comes from, etc. You can see their 2016 990 here if you’re so inclined.
And if you’re not sure about how OTW is using their donations? Ask questions. Get involved. Even if you’re not comfortable with or not in a position to donate, there are lots of opportunities to give your time; it’s an all-volunteer organization that recruits regularly. I know for a fact that I get more value out of what OTW provides than most, if not all, my other paid services combined, so $10 to be a member is more than worth it.
ao3 is routinely used as an example of an excellent digital archive in library and information schools – they’re not just a fansite; they’re held in high regard by people across the industry. they run initiatives to preserve old fansites and groups, in addition to the day to day work of hosting all of our work ad-free to ensure maximum creative freedom. ao3 is not just a place to post your fic; it catalogues and preserves our history and culture.
$130,000 a year though?
Cool.
So…Don’t donate and quit reading any fan fiction off their site if it bothers you so badly?
I don’t get it.
There are other sites out there but they mostly subsidize using ads.
Which particular part of the AO3 budget is it that you object to or would like to cut? Because honestly $130,000 a year is not a lot of money overall. It’s a pretty decent amount if you’re one person maybe, but overall? For an entire site? Not a lot. Not a business major or anything, but it’s not a lot.
And what are they asking for? Ten bucks?
Ten bucks is a fast food meal for two, or a half a movie. Not even a movie ticket. Like. It’s a month of Netflix if you’re cheap but own a television. Or two paperbacks if you buy secondhand but like hard copies. A single translated volume of manga. It’s a pound and a half of meat if you eat meat. Maybe three dozen eggs. Two big boxes of cereal…
It’s an amount you can lose out of your pocket and typically not find too crippling if you have steady work and a few bricks of ramen or a twenty pound bag of rice in the pantry for rough weeks, because a rough week here or there is an inevitability.
Ten bucks.
For a year of fan fiction.
If you feel like being nice and/or have the budget to do so.
For a site that literally has to lay out its budget plan so you can see where the funds are going.
For a site that you already use and enjoy.
…Why is this the hill some of you want to die on?
What am I missing here?
Do you people have any idea how much it costs to just host the fucking fanfic? How much server fees are? How much backup fees are? The amount of data that the OTW has to preserve through fire, flood, and computer failure? How expensive all that equipment is? The money is for buying massive amounts of server space in multiple redundant geographic locations, plus for paying the server companies’ employees to maintain the fucking things. As these things go, $130,000 is a laughably low cost for all that.
you don’t have to donate if you simply don’t got the money, but if you actively speak out against donating, i have news for you: you’re at best an idiot and at worst an asshole and in either case should not be allowed to read any more fanfiction from ao3. Go back to ff.net.
DustAndFundamentalists 