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Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

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Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#171

Post by FpUser »

knowa42 wrote: post #73
kick wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answer to the first question: in the United States, yes. Whether that is a bad thing is debatable and not suited for the site we're on; try a philosophy subreddit. The United States military has lost its privilege to play any form of moralism or rational justification after their actions over the past 30-50 years. It's no longer defense in most cases, it's assault. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, the second Iraq, invading Afgh…

If you think that the only thing the U.S. military does is "assault" then you haven't really done any research at all, have you? Read up on force-projection, specifically as it relates to soft-power.

Assault - direct attack

Force projection - do as we say or else.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#172

Post by FpUser »

aianus wrote: post #139
FpUser wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer that to be a UN. This "ensured piece and prosperity" - you can try to explain it to a Middle East, Vietnam etc.

Vietnamese are friendly to Americans and see America as an ally in their struggle against Chinese imperialism. The hatred of China in Vietnam is near-universal and explicit. I've lived there but if you don't believe me, ask a few Vietnamese yourself, they're not shy about it.

I actually met couple of Vietnamese (not in Vietnam though). They were not very fond of Americans to speak softly. No real hatred either (well they're very polite and I do not really now what their actual feeling were). I do believe that modern Vietmamese people are tolerant and welcomed to a tourists including the Americans. Tourists are income and people that actually did suffer war effect and immediate aftermath are mostly dead now.

Also the US did not bring "the piece and prosperity" to Vietnam unless you mean withdrawing from that murderous war that they started in a first place. What brought a relative prosperity was that their communist government did soften their stance towards market based economy. And feeling some guilt US probably contributed few pesos.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#173

Post by tracker1 »

kick wrote: post #55
tracker1 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you'd rather we keep spending too much, using too little information, and putting too many innocent people at risk? I mean, it's not like we dropped more ordinance under Obama than every president before him combined, or that the trend didn't decrease by very much after him or anything. Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced. I also think most federal…

How is Obama relevant, here? I don't believe I mentioned him. HN has always leaned libertarian, and just because Ron Paul isn't running right now doesn't mean suddenly every argument that's against authoritarianism is liberal.

The point was that drone strikes / bombings were dramatically increased under Obama and never really stopped. I also noted that it didn't decrease with Trump.

In either case, offering cloud services to the Government isn't really an authoritarian position.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#174

Post by tracker1 »

kec wrote: post #77
tracker1 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you'd rather we keep spending too much, using too little information, and putting too many innocent people at risk? I mean, it's not like we dropped more ordinance under Obama than every president before him combined, or that the trend didn't decrease by very much after him or anything. Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced. I also think most federal…

The end result of your stance is essentially arguing that the only problem with American intervention in the Middle East is that it isn't efficient enough.

My point was, the subject at hand isn't really necessarily about what is happening with DoD, and if anything would more likely be reduced harm.

I'm not a proponent of our foreign engagements at all... however, this isn't the place where such a line should be drawn. I find that anywhere the government can more effectively reduce costs and/or improve it infrastructure should generally be preferred.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#175

Post by tracker1 »

kec wrote: post #77
tracker1 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you'd rather we keep spending too much, using too little information, and putting too many innocent people at risk? I mean, it's not like we dropped more ordinance under Obama than every president before him combined, or that the trend didn't decrease by very much after him or anything. Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced. I also think most federal…

The end result of your stance is essentially arguing that the only problem with American intervention in the Middle East is that it isn't efficient enough.

Did you miss the part where I specifically said, "Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced."

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#176

Post by tracker1 »

ericd wrote: post #158
tracker1 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you'd rather we keep spending too much, using too little information, and putting too many innocent people at risk? I mean, it's not like we dropped more ordinance under Obama than every president before him combined, or that the trend didn't decrease by very much after him or anything. Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced. I also think most federal…

Do you have a source for that quote about dropped ordnance? I’d be very surprised if he beat out the strategic bombing and artillery shelling of WW2.

Here's an article with stats from 2015 and 2016... I spent a few minutes trying to find an article I recall from around 2014 or so, but unable to find it. There's a lot of information out there, and the number of drone strikes are incredibly large. I think the record under Trump has been roughly the same, but it's a dramatic change over before Obama. The kiloton size may or may not be smaller. More targeted drone/missile strikes vs bombs. But I believe the number of drops is much larger.

Frankly, I'd love to see most of our foreign deployments dramatically scaled back. I just don't think the mentality that nobody should provide any kind of technical services to the government would only make things worse, not better overall, and that specific criticisms shouldn't be part of decisions of infrastructure use.

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/artic...

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#178

Post by shadowgovt »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #168
shadowgovt wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison since one of them was impeached for lying to a grand jury (about a topic that was outside the scope of the investigation and more than a little irrelevant to any questions of high crimes and misdemeanors) and another was impeached for abuse of the power of his office to solicit aid from a foreign country in collecting damaging information on a political rival. Intent and…

That's my whole point. Increasingly, people's idea of the rule of law is their subjective opinion of this person . Trump could have been impeached for the exact same offense, and 99% of people opinions of what should happen next wouldn't change.

I believe if Trump were impeached for the same offense, with the same fact pattern, your assertion is not true.

The offenses and fact patterns in question are quite different in these two cases.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#179

Post by snowwrestler »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #119
snowwrestler wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The federal government cannot compete with private industry salaries and benefits for rare technical talent because of caps on federal salaries. Federal salaries are capped because attacking "government waste" and "lazy overpaid government workers" is popular with politicians and the electorate. So instead the government outsources technical projects to private contractors... which means ultimately the government is…

I've worked with federal government, and I can say is if rather that they pay private contractors. I used to find all paid government devs sleeping in toilet cubicles all the time. If rather Amazon or the squeeze on its employees to perform than shirt unmotivated public sector management. And this comes from an unabashed hard left big government voter.

For AWS, Amazon does not hire employees that it needs to "squeeze" in order to get acceptable performance. Amazon [1] aims to recruit and keep the best employees, who are talented and driven to build the future. It deploys the resources necessary to do so, and operates in a way that empowers them to innovate and find success.

The federal government, in the name of cutting waste and fighting corruption, largely is forced to do the opposite in the IT space (with a few rare exceptions).

[1] Not implying Amazon is alone on this; all the big cloud operators do.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#180

Post by kec »

tracker1 wrote: post #175
kec wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end result of your stance is essentially arguing that the only problem with American intervention in the Middle East is that it isn't efficient enough.

Did you miss the part where I specifically said, "Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced."

I didn't, I was trying to point out that the unintended and inevitable outcome of making war cheaper to wage (either in dollars or lives of your own soldiers) is more war.
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