Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in. Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.

Was this explanation given with a wink and a nod, or did your neighbor always have 16MB of RAM?

Reminds me of the kids in my high school who stole individual 4MB 72-pin SIMMs out of a bunch of computer lab desktop PCs to upgrade their approximately equivalent generation motherboard/CPU home systems to whatever was their max capacity, in an era when a 16MB RAM desktop PC was a high performer. Shortly after all the PCs got locks on them.

This was common at our East coast Amazon site circa 2019 as well, but for monitors.

>Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.

Except that even IT would know that a missing 8MB RAM stick is not a defect, it's (petit) theft, since RAM stick have no legs to just wander around by themselves. If it's gone, then an employee stole it.

Defect is when that 8MB stick would be ... defective.

Was this before IT had the ability to look at all of the machines to see which suddenly had a different RAM config?

The copper theft thing happens in western nations too. There's videos of people driving up in cars, license plates and faces showing and just to add to the stupidity they use bolt cutters to remove live power cables from EV charging stations.

The damage they do is well over $1000 from the multiple they hit so a major federal charge qualifies. The scrap value once you pull out the copper is less than $5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqmythK_b6Y

The amount of effort to reward doesn't come near even a minimum wage job. Similar to the above. The guy sold $7800 over the course of more than a year and not to factor in this was a swap so he bought replacements. Stupid.

Not only in the third world i would say?

Same but for a flexible thin-wall a/c refrigerant line :(

>when I was partially responsible for hardware refreshes in a UK public sector organisation with around a thousand endpoint PCs we budgeted something like £600 a box.

Same here in EU mainland, at every org I worked we used to get budget notebooks to do SW dev on, also in the 600-800 Euro range.

I think because the US is so much wealthier and can afford to spend more on tech without breaking a sweat. Hence the "Europoor" meme where Europeans can't comprehend the material abundance and spending power of the US.

For the same reasons fortune 500s will spec the same for their office workers. Labor is expensive compared to hardware. It is often cheaper to spend a little bit more on hardware to avoid supporting multiple configuration, exceptions, more frequent updates, support tickets from power users, etc

If you pinch pennies buying a spec that exactly meets today’s needs, and next year MS Teams releases a new update that requires more resources, you don’t want to buy a whole building full of new computers.

Customs and Border Patrol has been granted huge budget increases this year.

Bureaucracies generally need to spend all their entire budget to show that they "need" it to avoid losing it next year, so they are certainly going to spend it. (Also, expect increased corruption)

i7 CPUs have been used for all sorts of PC configurations. Your standard library at a university or college, the office worker desktop who does nothing but use web based applications for their job, and so on.

The pricing difference between an i5 and an i7 aren't really that big when you go to Dell and tell them I need 4,000 desktops. DHS isn't paying the same pricing difference as we would be when purchasing a boxed CPU.

At certain point people just don't care about saving money. You get a budget and then get quotes and pick one that matches what you are allowed to spend. If there is multiple with same spend go for one with bigger numbers.

At a certain scale, the relative complexity (both in terms of inventory management and dealing with upgrade requests / approvals / etc) tends itself towards picking a baseline spec that can work for the overwhelming majority of your fleet.

Because it runs Windows hehe

It's just a typical enterprise PC configuration. Probably because nobody writes efficient software these days.

Isn't Palantir a webapp? Full of maps and lists of stuff? Seems like a recipe for "chrome has stopped responding..."

The border guys are there are really aggressive too. I canoed the st croix up around there and you are warned not to paddle north of the halfway line in the middle of the river… agents will literally pop out of the woods and start reproaching you

I'm fairly sure you need to at least be a Permanent Resident to get hired, which makes you a US Person (it's a distinct legal definition). Permanent residents are also able to join the military and have been able to do so for a long time. There's enough of them that during the peak of the Iraq War they even held in-country citizenship ceremonies at major bases for people who had filed and completed their citizenship paperwork.

You have to be a citizen to work for the federal government, with a few exceptions that I don’t think CBP falls under. So the answer is, they aren’t.

For the same reason that foreign nationals can join the military, including the Coast Guard that has an overlapping mission: it's a nation of immigrants and for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.

This does not appear anywhere in this article. Just sowing misinformation?

It’s obviously not about the cost of the parts, there just can’t be any tolerance for criminal conduct in government agency employees.

Sure, that'd be more "cost efficient", and for a small one-off, probably better. But law enforcement and justice is not a profit center.

Merely making the threats like you specify and even having it restored encourages more crime by making the crime effectively zero-risk — either he gets away with it, or simply needs to restore things to the way they were and the only cost to the criminal is the wasted effort. Makes it so crime pays.

And no, the investigation of watching a bunch of videos to observe the perp opening the computer cases, and writing up a complaint, is probably lower cost than the multiple thefts.