Monthly Archives: October 2025

Why I’ll Never Do Anything in the Cloud

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For as long as I can, nothing of my interactions on the Internet, nothing of my computer storage or backups, will be done in the cloud. The same stricture should, frankly, apply to businesses. Businesses should construct their own cloud—there’s no doubt clouds are deucedly convenient and, when working properly are highly efficient—and isolate that cloud from the Internet.

Here’s an example of why, brought to us by Amazon.

A glitch with an obscure Amazon database disrupted life for millions of people across the US as core internet services failed to function for an array of companies.
Alexa devices couldn’t hear. Corporate Slack messages wouldn’t post. Students couldn’t turn in assignments or access materials from courses. Financial trades were impossible on certain platforms. Users of Zoom, Venmo, Instacart, and a host of other services faced prolonged outages that rippled through homes and businesses.

Some of that is poor design. Alexa needs connectivity with the Internet? To execute an order to buy this, or to give the weather forecast, sure. But to set a timer for cooking? To set a reminder? An alarm clock? Really?

Back to the main subject. That minor database? It got a minor update that scotched the whole affair.

A minor update to what is called the Domain Name System, or DNS—the kind of software tweak that happens millions of times a day on the internet—sent the well-oiled machine that underpins the modern web careening toward a crash.
DNS acts as a kind of telephone directory for the internet, instructing machines on how to find each other. The faulty update gave the wrong information for DynamoDB, an Amazon Web Services, or AWS, product that has become one of the world’s most important databases.
Suddenly, machines on the East Coast that tried to process trillions of requests were getting the internet’s equivalent of a wrong number.

Think about the effects of time-sensitive moves being blocked from execution for hours and hours, often long enough to prevent the move from happening until it’s far too late and by delay, far more costly. That happens in the financial world—think in extremis overnight repos needing to be unwound….

That kind of foul-up could have been worse: computers not knowing how to contact each other could have prevented the computers hosting the DynamoDB database from being contactable by humans working from other computers in their attempts to correct the glitch in that database. That didn’t happen this time, but next time? Or it might have this time, but Amazon had backup systems it could switch into while they took the offender systems off line to correct.

Regardless, it took the better part of a day for Amazon to get their minor update of a minor database corrected and the effects of the repair to ripple across the Internet.

The article’s subheadline summarizes the situation and is why I avoid the cloud as much as possible:

Outage offers reminder of fragility of global internet connectivity

Personal Responsibility

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This is a core tenet of our federal republican democracy—the concept that us American citizens are the ones primarily—and most often solely—responsible for the outcomes of our decisions and our actions. This is a tenet that applies just as firmly in our fundamentally capitalist economy to our businesses. In particular, for this post, it applies to our banks, large, small, and in between.

Or, it should apply. Dangerously, our banks, particularly our small and mid-sized banks, would be relieved of that responsibility under legislation that Tennessee Republican Senator Bill Hagerty, who should know better, and Maryland’s Progressive-Democrat Senator Angela Alsobrooks, who is merely acting on her party’s big and bigger government bent, are proposing. That legislation would raise the FDIC’s deposit guarantee from $250,000 per depositor’s account to $10 million.

The editors of The Wall Street Journal have the right of it on this one.

The truth is that a higher insurance limit will increase moral hazard and make the banking system less sound, which will hurt all Americans.

Because

It would also encourage more risk-taking since banks will have to worry less about runs.

Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren as recently as 2023:

We have to do this because these banks are under-regulated, and if we lift the cap, we are requiring—or relying even more heavily on the regulators to do their jobs.

Here is the monarchist Party’s purpose revealed and now pushed by Alsobrooks: an ever more intrusive and controlling central government.

The proposed legislation is an idea whose time never will be, and the proposed legislation needs to be scotched in committee, if not before.

Wrong Answer

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A study of Purdue’s entering freshmen class of 2018 indicated that women freshmen who didn’t get their preferred class on registration were significantly less likely to graduate in four years than were their women counterparts who got their preferred class on registration. (There was no significant effect for that year’s male freshmen, but that’s neither here no there for this post.) Leave aside the various limitations of this study; focus on the particular outcome.

This is a conclusion of one of the study’s authors, Kevin Mumford:

Our estimates suggest that reducing course shutouts, particularly for STEM courses, can be an effective way to improve female-student outcomes[.]

No. Lowering standards—which is what “reducing course shutouts” amounts to, if only through increasing the class sizes of those courses that are in such demand—is not the way to improve women’s graduation rates.

The answer is insultingly wrong, too, suggesting as it does that women students need to be coddled in order to function in college.

What is necessary is to take steps to help these women overcome a disappointment that doesn’t bother men by helping them identify classes that are effective substitutes of their preferred class, classes that cover the same subject with a different professor, or is in a different section under the same professor, or take the preferred class in a subsequent semester, or….

“Is Britain safe for Jews?”

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That was the opening sentence of the lede—the lede of the lede, if you will (or even if you won’t)—of the opinion piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal. The next sentence laid out the case:

On Thursday authorities in Birmingham, the country’s second-largest city, prohibited the fans of an Israeli soccer team from attending a match next month, even though the threats to cause trouble are coming from locals.

The game in question is scheduled for early next month as part of an international soccer tournament, and the Israeli fans have been barred because they might be victims of violence rather than perpetrators of it. A test, as instructive as it would be interesting to see, is whether British soccer teams and especially the teams’ owners will boycott those tournament’s games that are played in the UK, refusing even to take the pitch until Birmingham undoes its support for thuggery or until the British government overrules Birmingham’s instance of antisemitic bigotry.

Those locals, as the opinion expands, are primarily Islamists. Birmingham, and by extension the British government, through its studied inaction on the ban, so far indicate that they favor Islamist thugs and their thuggery over Israeli soccer fans and British non-Muslim subjects.

If neither government acts, then no, Britain is not safe for Jews, and that would be by British government, both local and national, design.

That would be beyond sad, it would be disgusting and despicable. The cradle of government by consent of the governed and of individual liberty would no longer be fit for civilized or even merely polite company.

Sometimes….

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The subheadline laid out the concern and the potential for misunderstanding:

Attacks in Caribbean, aid cuts for Colombia and pressure on Venezuela blur lines between counternarcotics and regime change

When illegal narcotics are a nation’s major, if not primary, product, and that nation’s primary source of income is smuggling and peddling illegal narcotics, and especially if that nation’s illegal narcotics are killing so many of our children and young adults, then regime change becomes a necessary tool of counternarcotic operations.

The US does poorly at nation-building, which must follow—by someone—regime change. We were successful with Germany, Italy, and Japan after WWII, but our record is very weak since then. Still, sometimes regime change is necessary, and this one, should it come to pass, will need the follow-on very carefully monitored—and guided, if the wrong builders show up.