211–220 of 466 posts
At least it wasn't Oracle. You can't say Azure, AWS, GCP, et al, aren't highly skilled, experienced, cloud infrastructure builders. There was a lot of wining-and-dining of the Trump administration by Safra Kat which gave the impression they'd be magically awarded the contract. Thank goodness the government isn't that corrupt.
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The monetary benefit is one big thing but in the B2B scheme of things , a big success story like this would be very easy to convince other government organisations and government in other countries to adopt Azure if they haven’t moved to the cloud already. It’s the new “No one ever got fired for suggesting IBM”.
Really? Why would a foreign country trust a firm deeply engrained with the US military? Then again, there are only a few military in the world that need this kind of service, and those countries are highly unlikely to go with foreign entities as provider.
> ...unlike, say, New York City or Detroit, whose residents found out the hard way that lots of their power comes from Canada. Interesting that this myth is still alive. It started with Bush falsely claiming the 2003 blackout was Canada's fault before an investigation had even been done. Here is the actual postmortem report. https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandM...
Nowhere does that say that Bush blamed Canada at any time, nor can I find examples through 3 pages of search. (I found " Schumer blames Bush " but nothing the other direction.) Perhaps you confuse Petaki with Bush? He blamed Ontario at one point.
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Azure is a little under 1/2 the size of AWS in terms of revenue, and growing a little faster.
Assuming your 1/2 number is correct (I'm doubtful), an $18B annual revenue company growing at 59% (+$10.6B) is not growing faster than a $36B annual revenue company growing at 35% (+$12.6B)
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Really? Why would a foreign country trust a firm deeply engrained with the US military? Then again, there are only a few military in the world that need this kind of service, and those countries are highly unlikely to go with foreign entities as provider.
Agree that not all countries would do this. But Allies? Also don’t other countries use AWS Gov ( or whatever it is called ) even though it AWS is “deeply embedded” in the US gov scheme of things?
Europe have its own fighter, armor, command systems despite being US allies militarily.
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~ 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…
> Large groups of people are so embarrassingly bad at predicting the future. They are pretty good at creating the future, though. As in - separating the power grid is a step towards separating other things and finally "separating the country". Classic Soros' reflexivity.
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I don’t understand the repulsive feelings towards helping the govt. Would we rather have the people in control of the military and our troops use out-of-date tech?
I would rather the military be less capable, because its current capability is being used for offensive, not defensive purposes. If it's less capable, it's less likely to get embroiled in stupid imperialistic adventures. Edit: I don't understand why so many people are, at the same time, so enthused by the idea of starving government (Because they think most of its services are a waste of money), while at the same tim…
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As a native Texan, it's weird for a few reasons: a) Pragmatically, separating from the rest of the United States would be devastating to our economy. Much like the United Kingdom from the EU, but on a much larger scale, because the vast majority of our trade, people, and connectedness come from being part of the U.S. Texans like to trot out the factoid that relatively little land in Texas is owned by the federal gove…
I doubt Texas is going to secede from the US any time soon. And I honestly wouldn't care either way if it did or didn't. But, I don't know if some of your arguments necessarily work. > Pragmatically, separating from the rest of the United States would be devastating to our economy. Much like the United Kingdom from the EU, but on a much larger scale, because the vast majority of our trade, people, and connectedness c…
Unless the leaving party has a lot of somethings that the party they are leaving from wants, they don't really have much of a position to bargain.
Everyone seems to think that a (relatively) small unit of land and their people can 'take care of themselves', but unless you want to go back to just before the industrial revolution it really doesn't work that way. Almost everything everyone touches every day has some form of link to 'the outside world'.
Giving up interconnectivity really doesn't give anything back in return. (including self-regulation, unless you'd start living under a dome, or on the moon)
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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.
While nuclear plants do have diesel generators for this, it'd still be a good idea to have one or maybe two sections of the country which could bootstrap the rest of the North American grid(s) should there be a continental blackout.
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Haven't followed Bezos too closely, but, never thought of him to be a political person or saw anything where he made political comments. Buying the Washington Post certainly forced the world around him to see him as political...even if he considers himself not.
> Haven't followed Bezos too closely, but, never thought of him to be a political person or saw anything where he made political comments. You never considered the idea that the richest man in the world may be political? It'd be more surprising for me to find out that he wasn't political; you don't accrue that kind of cash without playing political games at at least some point in your portfolio -- even if it's just f…