AWS just really didn't want to, very different market segment. They were doing a pure enterprise play, looking to capture most of the enterprise. We were doing a b2c play that we presumed over time would suck us up into the SMB. My theory was we had like 1% risk from them. From what I could tell Jeff and Jassy had zero interest in our segment. I left just before the IPO but when we started it, the margin was about 60%, after we figured out how many VMs we could comfortable fit on the box, Ben U just did napkin math and said "50% seems like a fine enough margin to start"
Maybe lease is a good idea in this case? Especially if the lease had a "fit for purpose" clause like apartment leases have, that means if the car quits working it's their problem and you quit paying.
Totally cromulent position if it works for you and you can still get hardware that runs it, AND you can keep it offline? No security updates is kind of a big deal.
I don't know. Is it? This is a legit question, even though the tone might come across as sarcastic. But what exactly is the concern?
I guess I don't buy the "outdated operating system will be hijacked" argument, for not having received its security updates and simply being plugged in.
Let's say you have a decent NAT router that doesn't allow inbound traffic. And let's say that you run a reasonably secure web browser and that's pretty much the sum total of your internet traffic. And let's say you're smart and don't download shareware, screensavers, and the like, only trusted applications from reputable vendors. And let's also suggest that you're not using things like Outlook or other vectors for undesirable inbound junk.
What exactly is the threat model here? An operating system isn't going to get hacked over thin air. I don't see the concern, particularly if you are a savvy computer user. I wouldn't want to run grandma on this setup, but still, I feel reasonably safe with this model.
It's the same reason why I don't advocate or believe in running antivirus software. It's just bloatware and introduces an array of vulnerabilities to my computer (c.f. CrowdStrike or any AV vendor hacks).
I think most vulnerabilities you'll see now are not port attacks but browser ones. For example, there was a jpg one a ways back that has probably been in there forever. So any app you run that links with libjpg and opens that image will be vulnerable. If the OS vendor isn't patching those (win7) any more, down you go.
That saying that goes, we are the only species that will become extinct because survival wasn't profitable enough.
To the systems point we really, really really, really really need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels to 7 trillion a year globally. We have to stop making it profitable and encouraged by the system.
I feel like we aren't actually unique in this respect, except in the sense that we are able to see our own doom but still not able to act on it.
In essence, our extinction (if it were to happen) would be because we were unable to solve the collective action problem... each individual choosing their own best course dooms the entire species.
When looked at it this way, lots of species go extinct for this reason; resource exhaustion due to uncapped expansion.
The difference is that we don't expect animals to be able to reason through the situation and realize that individuals would need to sacrifice for the greater good of the species.
I am not disagreeing with this statement, and don't think we can solve the collective action problem by just choosing as individuals to sacrifice (that is what makes is a collective action problem). It would take societal change to happen.
> The vast majority of the “subsidies” are “implicit subsidies,” which include “undercharging for environmental costs.” In other words, they are characterizing governments’ failure to impose a carbon tax as a “subsidy” for fossil fuel use.
Before fossil fuels our cities were ankle-deep in horse shit, and when a horse died the owner dumped the carcass in the river. Some level of pollution is in inescapable price of civilization. We shouldn't be reckless or wanton about it but it's unreasonable and uneconomic to ever clean up all of the mess.
All or nothing fallacy. The argument is not to eliminate pollution, the argument is to stop generating greenhouse gases. You can already see the effects of climate change and it's guaranteed to get worse.
I don't understand why you're making excuses for carbon pollution.
Then the same "implicit subsidy" goes for literally every facet of human activity. Do builders of wind turbines and solar farms also pay commensurately for the pollution in the manufacturing and development process?
Everything is implicitly subsidized because every action that any living being takes affects some other living being and the ecosystem as a whole, because we all live on the same planet. It's a meaningless statement.
> Do builders of wind turbines and solar farms also pay commensurately for the pollution in the manufacturing and development process?
Sure, we can assign those costs to builders, why not? There's already lots of discussion about the true cost of EV batteries and how they're subsidized.
> Everything is implicitly subsidized because every action that any living being takes affects some other living being and the ecosystem as a whole, because we all live on the same planet.
Actions don't all have the same effect so I think it's totally fair to consider their true costs.
I think where it gets a little tricky is how you decide to assign costs to people that have children or are children. But that's really getting in the weeds.
> Then the same "implicit subsidy" goes for literally every facet of human activity
No, we generally pay for pollution. If I litter I pay. If I have to throw stuff away I pay (via taxes). If I have to dump dangerous chemicals I pay.
Oil industry can dump whatever they want into the air and they don't pay. You, and I, pay. We don't actually know how profitable oil is because of this.
Well because other species don't manage to break the barriers as efficiently as we do.
The way regulation works is that species are limited by their environment. If there are many antelopes, there can be many lions. But if there are two many lions, the population of antelopes goes down to the point where not all the lions can survive, right? This is simplistic, but that's the idea (the higher the population, the bigger the impact of a disease, etc).
Because we are really good at changing our environment in order to be more individuals who consume more resources, we escape those regulation mechanisms. By doing this, we destroy most species, including ours.
Now let's not pretend that ants would be better: if they somehow escaped those mechanisms, they wouldn't suddenly vote and stop growing (presumably). The fact is that they haven't escaped them, and we have. Well for a while. Now it's very likely that some kind of mechanism will end up regulating us. Maybe it will finish destroying most species, and it will take thousands of years to "recover" (with some definition of "recover").
What's interesting with us is that we do know we are destroying ourselves and the biodiversity (which is arguably one of the enjoyable things in life), but we can't seem to find a way to fix it.
Most of what you've said is true but what exactly does it mean to "break barriers"? We can not escape the laws of chemistry, physics, and thermodynamics because we live on a compact manifold with finite resources which must be recycled eventually by the surrounding ecology. This is why plastics are now found in all newborns, the chemicals produced by our factories are recycled back into the ecology and our internal biomes.
Totally. I just meant that those are less direct. Species usually don't reach a point where they change the climate because they are stopped by other mechanisms long before. Our cycle is slower, which gives us time to destroy more stuff before we "get regulated", I suppose.
Sometimes it's pretty visible. Some slime molds (dictyostelids) form multicellular bodies when food is scarce and they have to hunt, and then go back to single-celled life when conditions are more favorable.
Other species don't call it profit because they don't have language, but if you broaden this to "We are the only species that will become extinct because short-term individualistic concerns trump ecological stability" ... it isn't true. Predator/prey dynamics and ecosystem collapse are common to a lot of ecosystems; I remember studying them in calculus at the same time as exponential growth and logistic curves. Locusts are a very familiar example where they act like common grasshoppers when food is abundant, but then start a swarming behavior that destroys whole ecosystems and kills off the vast majority of locusts once they detect that there isn't enough food to go around.
I'm reading "The Unthinkable". It's a great book about diaster response at the personal and policy level.
One thing that stands out is that well intentioned policies often cause diaster if they don't simply trust the ability of humans (and by extension communities) to adapt and incorporate new information as it comes.
I believe that these subsidies are a prime example. They intend to help by alleviating the shock of world events, and it's only through an increase in trust/courage at all levels that we can overcome this tendency.
> stop subsidizing fossil fuels to 7 trillion a year globally
We need to stop bandying about this $7T figure. 80% of it is "implicit subsidies", meaning made-up numbers based on carbon pricing and environmental impacts and whatnot. It's like saying we implicitly subsidize solar power by not accounting for the environmental impacts of covering up square miles of land under panels, or of the pollution from the production of panels. If you go back far enough, it's like telling the caveman not to light sticks on fire to keep himself warm, because of the carbon emissions that aren't being priced in.
Fossil fuels are, with present-day technology, the best source of energy for humanity to develop and maintain high living standards. It's easy to stop using them if we're OK with dialing back our living standards two hundred years. It will be easy to stop using them at some point in the future when we have abundant, clean, cheap energy from a proliferation of nuclear power, or some battery technology breakthrough that will let us economically harness wind and solar energy. However, currently, it's not easy. Oil and gas is profitable because it makes us all richer, let's not forget that.
The internet you use to transmit this message wouldn't exist without fossil fuels - and I am not talking about energy, but computer and networking materials.
Ditto the fertilizer and many other things that keep you alive to type on here too.
It's very hard to maintain modern civilization without oil/gas products. Unless you want to be Amish.
I think reducing fossil fuel use is separate from petroleum product use. We can have petroleum products without burning fossil fuels. Costs of petroleum extraction might go up, though, I imagine.
And while I agree it's hard, I think that keeping an industrial society should be possible. (although it means reworking almost all the production apparel to be carbon neutral (concrete/steel/fertilizer production, transports, agriculture, ...). Not going to happen in the short-term without an extremely strong political push and more research, on the world scale)
Actual production may become lower than today, but I'd like to believe we don't have to go full Amish.
Another part is that Gibson was the first to put together cyberpunk as a genre and an aesthetic and a little dystopian futurism. It was truly the first that spawned a number of now familiar ideas like AIs battling firewall and attack and VR as a UX method.
They didn't quite hit the right tone in their other markets either. It's hard to pay rent selling $2 packs of components. Computers were ok for a while, especially at the beginning, but not selling. They didn't want to compete on TVs. Hifi gear seemed a shrinking market. I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.
I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.
I remember some buzz around carrying Arduino not long before they went out of business. They drifted away from the DIY scene into cellphone kiosk territory. Maybe if they shuttered a bunch of stores and leaned into the new era of DIY (Arduino, 3D printing, drone parts) they might have survived.
Yeah ours had an Arduino branded section for a year or two at the end. Some starter kits, proto boards, a few relays and servos, that kind of thing. Not enough to pay the rent obv but fine for jumpstarting hackers.
Right plus that was the transformation that was happening that they didn't follow - electronics and gadgets out of the mall and into big box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City.
Tough too to get by on small parts for minor repairs when things break rarely and then aren't worth fixing. Time was grocery stores had little tube tester kiosks, you know. That said, Batteries Plus seems to have a business.
Ballistic missile warheads have flown at these speeds for many years. The term "hypersonic" when it refers to missiles is frustratingly imprecise; hypersonic in the sense you're using it refers to more modern weapons capable of substantial maneuvers and not restricted to a ballistic trajectory. Iran is incapable of producing these types of weapons.
Note that plain old ballistic missile warheads are quite challenging to intercept. Past operational systems used nuclear warheads on the interceptors.
"Hypersonic" is a misnomer, most long range rockets hit hypersonic speeds. "Hypersonic" refers to steerable hypersonic glide vehicles that can turn to make them harder to intercept. There is no evidence yet that any of them were used in this attack.
I doubt it, Iran has such capabilities themselves. Apart from their insane regime they have a lot of smart people. Ballistic rockets burn a few seconds and then just follow their ballistic path, which is quite predictable.
Cruise missiles are harder to intercept because you don't know where they will hit. They can change course on short notice which ballistic missiles cannot do after burning their fuel.
Supersonic as a novelty refers to supersonic cruise missiles. Ballistic missiles are something different. Larger range but unguided after they burned all their fuel. But they do reach supersonic speeds.
Cruise missiles have a lower range but can change course. This makes interception more difficult since you don't know for sure where they will hit. The difficulty in intercepting ballistic missiles is that they are very fast and supersonic cruise missiles would make up for the weakness of being generally slower.
The only guided munitions in WW2 I know of were naval torpedoes, I think everything else was still unguided.
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