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Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

nytimes.com

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Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#71

Post by rgrieselhuber »

meddlepal wrote: post #51
gtirloni wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Texas has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the US. This is interesting. The Wikipedia article has this gem: "The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political, rather than technical reasons" https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-it...

Core to many Texans identity is a belief that someday Texas is going to secede from the Union again and become its own independent country. Don't get me wrong, I love Texas and I love many of the Texans I've met for being some of the chillest, most down to earth, pragmatic and welcoming people I have ever met, but they are a bit weird about this particular issue sometimes.

Why is that weird?

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#72

Post by selimthegrim »

ArtWomb wrote: post #52

Somewhat related to the ancillary debates around DoD contracting. A very well written longread "In Defense of the War on Terror" I'm certainly in no position to validate its truth claims. But in the current climate. With Google withdrawing its bid at behest of its employees. Protests at AWS conferences over involvement with ICE. Peter Thiel arguing Silicon Valley companies should "do more" in the form of defense part…

Mr Church is entitled to his opinion but I take issue with two of his points.

As far as his list of Al Qaeda heavies killed by strikes goes, it had become even a staple of late night comedy routines at that point that the newest "Al Qaeda No 2" had been blown up. It felt like the military was writing the press releases for Stars and Stripes and distributing them to everyone.

And with regard to his link about the Muslim Brotherhood and settlement and civilizational jihad, the last I heard about Hizb ut-Tahrir in America they were trying to buy some 40 acre dairy farm in Wisconsin and failing miserably (no word about any mules)

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#73

Post by roenxi »

meddlepal wrote: post #51
gtirloni wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Texas has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the US. This is interesting. The Wikipedia article has this gem: "The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political, rather than technical reasons" https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-it...

Core to many Texans identity is a belief that someday Texas is going to secede from the Union again and become its own independent country. Don't get me wrong, I love Texas and I love many of the Texans I've met for being some of the chillest, most down to earth, pragmatic and welcoming people I have ever met, but they are a bit weird about this particular issue sometimes.

~ I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

Large groups of people are so embarrassingly bad at predicting the future that I'm always impressed when they get it right; but trying to do so often has a lot of positive side effects. Being ready to secede is a stupid one, but as a metaphor for "something goes wrong and we can't rely on people 1,000km away to provide for us" it would lead to some excellent planning.

Modern society is extremely efficient, extremely cheap and profoundly untested. We've had commercial electricity for 15 decades, the internet for 3 decades and quality GPS for 2. These are not long times on the scale that a country's logistics channels operate at; because things so central to how we work need to be ready for 1 in 100 and 1 in 200 year style events. Excessive caution may not actually be excessive.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#74

Post by [deleted] »

zucker42 wrote: post #42
Zaheer wrote: post #19

Original post from U.S. DoD: https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Contracts/Contract/Article/... There's several other contracts mentioned in the post. It's a good reminder of how much money goes into the military–industrial complex. The JEDI contract was by far the largest contract awarded in this round. The rest of contracts total roughly 1.5 billion dollars.

From the link, could anyone explain why there is a $148 million dollar contract for F35 testing expected to be completed in 2032? Why would it take 12 years to perform testing?

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#75

Post by jorvi »

bilbo0s wrote: post #60
gtirloni wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Texas has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the US. This is interesting. The Wikipedia article has this gem: "The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political, rather than technical reasons" https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-it...

The separate grid is pretty much purely political. It may be non-sensical to people outside of Texas, but inside Texas there are a significant number of people who believe in, let's call it, "Independent Texas". And it would actually make a lot of sense for more states to have completely independent grids. Problem of course, is that most states are far too poor for such an extravagance.

Why does it make sense to have independent grids?

In Europe most of our grids are already connected and there are plans to create a supergrid that stretches all the way from Finland down to North Africa (mainly to get connected to the future Saharan solar plants).

Usually the bigger the grid the more resilient it is and the less dispersion there is in demand.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#76

Post by rayiner »

meddlepal wrote: post #51
gtirloni wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Texas has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the US. This is interesting. The Wikipedia article has this gem: "The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political, rather than technical reasons" https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-it...

Core to many Texans identity is a belief that someday Texas is going to secede from the Union again and become its own independent country. Don't get me wrong, I love Texas and I love many of the Texans I've met for being some of the chillest, most down to earth, pragmatic and welcoming people I have ever met, but they are a bit weird about this particular issue sometimes.

One if my favorite season finales ever: https://youtu.be/xFgNZG3gmqc

The people with this view are also a big and growing minority: https://texaspolitics.utexas.edu/blog/texan-first-american-s...

> Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 40 percent identify as Texans before they identify as Americans, far outpacing any other age group.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#77

Post by alhirzel »

gtirloni wrote: post #37
rshnotsecure wrote: post #26

Since the early 2000s, Microsoft has done a significant amount of work for the NSA. AWS has had GovCloud, and it is true the CIA uses AWS, but MSFT has built out quite well some of the more exotic requests of the NSA. The crown jewel of the NSA’s MSFT partnership is the San Antonio, Texas data center. The “5150 Rogers Road” data center was chosen because Texas has cheap electricity, which is an enormous cost outlay f…

> Texas has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the US. This is interesting. The Wikipedia article has this gem: "The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political, rather than technical reasons" https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-it...

My buddy described it like this: Texas is a bootloader.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#78

Post by torstenvl »

jorvi wrote: post #75
bilbo0s wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The separate grid is pretty much purely political. It may be non-sensical to people outside of Texas, but inside Texas there are a significant number of people who believe in, let's call it, "Independent Texas". And it would actually make a lot of sense for more states to have completely independent grids. Problem of course, is that most states are far too poor for such an extravagance.

Why does it make sense to have independent grids? In Europe most of our grids are already connected and there are plans to create a supergrid that stretches all the way from Finland down to North Africa (mainly to get connected to the future Saharan solar plants). Usually the bigger the grid the more resilient it is and the less dispersion there is in demand.

An assessment of resilience requires an assessment of the threat model. The U.S., as a superpower and direct rival to both Russia and China, as well as a country with comparatively low regulatory oversight of cyber security, has a very different threat model than Europe.

Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

#80

Post by empath75 »

bilbo0s wrote: post #35
tanilama wrote: post #22

Owning Post seems to cost Bezos quite a fortune.

Just speculation, but I'm thinking, just like with New York, Bezos and Amazon are happy to be rid of JEDI. Too much politics for 10 bill in revenue easily made up elsewhere in the world. They just seemed to let go of New York and JEDI wayyy too easily for being one of the wealthiest companies in the world. When someone like that bows out of such large projects so easily, something's off. And I have to take it at face…

They made a lot of noise about building a new hq in Arlington. I can’t imagine they’re going to build it out at any scale now.
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