Is compensation really strictly less with a 20% pay cut? I'm from the midwest and I have a hard time wrapping my head around the compensation differences. Google-able "cost of living" calculators give me an 80k range for my midwest city salary, that works out to 35-62% cut.
The cost of living adjustment doesn't include things like savings rate and is at best an apples-and-oranges comparison for housing. In my target city I could easily buy a house 50% larger than I currently rent: but the schools, parks and such would be worse. Think of it like social classes: to get access to equivalent schools and other county provided services (parks, libraries) I'd have to live a level (or two) above my Bay Area lifestyle, negating a lot of the base COLA adjustment. Also my savings rate would plummet: to save the same amount at typical incomes in my target city I'd have to increase my 401k rate by a factor of 1.5 or more, use more of my post-tax income for diversification, etc.
I worked at a dining hall at a state university all 4 years, just graduated this spring. Some food was really good, some was mediocre, never inedible. If the hot line didn't have anything good there were always well stocked sandwich/salad bars and flat top grills open to students. I definitely ate better then than I do now.
As far as pricing went, it worked out to about $9/meal. Kind of high, but also unlimited spinach/quinoa/berries/fruits/yogurts vs. burgers and panda express.
I heard they nerfed some of the benefits, but as a "student supervisor" I got $9/hr and 15 meals/week for working 15 hours/week.
I think they would definitely also want to send ~5 seconds of the plain audio. Freely available speech to text probably wouldn't recognize local business names. But either way it's pretty inconvenient to ring a doorbell and wait ~30 seconds. You never realize how valuable a receptionist is until you don't have one.
This is the approach I've taken, albeit at the "top level" of the program. Since I know I don't have to deal with Windows I much prefer simply piping to parallel instead of xargs, or calling make -j8, or similarly letting some shell wrapper handle it over dealing with the overhead inside of python, especially multiprocessing.
However, where I think having this stuff available inside of python is useful is that it's cross platform and consumable from "higher levels" of python. A library can do some mucky stuff internally to speed computation but still present a simple sync interface, all without external dependencies.
I Grew up near a rez in ND, my dad worked at the tribal college for as long as I can remember. Open enrollment does help. A sizable chunk of the local public school population lived on the rez. The tribal highschool looks more like a prison (not a single window on the outside) and teachers rarely last more than a couple years.
On the note of the sad state of diversity initiatives, I recall a particular quote from a local restaurant owner: "If their last name has a verb or an animal in it I throw it in the trash"
I think I know which one you mean (opened in 1985, it does have a sky light, one window behind the concrete towerish thing, and a door on the 3rd floor boiler room). Amazingly, its a "celebrated" design from Texas. The "how do we vent a gas leak" was hilarious, not to mention how fast strep throat traveled.
Oh yeah, that place was a horrible place since it was half public (high school), half BIA (elementary). I am told they have improved, but it was not great when I went there. They finally got rid of the BIA.
Yeah, some of the "border" towns have some really, flat out racist people. The "safety inspections" on the first of the month positioned to stop all cars coming off the rez were some serious BS. Talk about hitting people when they are already down.
