I bet you didn't put this on your punch list for "reasons not to use the cloud."

Buried under the news from Google I/O this week is one of Google Cloud's biggest blunders ever: Google's Amazon Web Services competitor accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason. 

Of course deleting the account meant, well, "deleted."

Now here's the really ugly part of it:  It appears that Google in fact deleted it all, including across all their regions and they had no independent backups.

To be an independent backup it has to be, well, independent.  That is, for some period of time (usually governed by statutory requirements by the way in the form of the "statute of limitations" for business records and such) the backup has to be segregated such that anything in normal operations (like deleting an account) or even a natural disaster, perhaps not including a nuclear war or similar large-area case of physical destruction does not result in unrecoverable loss.  In a business you might take tapes or backup disks to a safe deposit box.  In a larger installation you might have a second installation to which such backups are sent and then taken offline so that even if you give a command to "delete" them that backup is still there.

Google does not, it is apparent, do this and I must assume neither does Amazon's AWS or any of the others.

This is something I would not have expected as an IT professional going all the way back to literal floppy discs and even cassette tapes.  Here's one of the largest companies in the world when it comes to IT infrastructure and yet the firm has no independent, offline backup strategy.

What the actual fuck?  Google could not restore the customer's data from backups themselves within a few hours as they didn't have any backups?

Oh by the way this sort of coverage, which is a BASIC AND FUNDAMENTAL PART OF IT INFRASTRUCTURE, costs money (and likely quite a bit of it at that sort of scale) and thus finding some justification for not doing it means you show more profit -- and all is well right up until you actually need the backups at which point the customer is screwed.

Let's assume that, for example, DO screws my pooch and The Market Ticker gets deleted due to a similar error.  How fucked am I?

Well, not very.  Why not?  Because I have the software (here) in source form, it can trivially be recompiled so its the "current" rev here at the house and I log-ship all the transactions here too so while it would be a five-alarm pain in the ass to upload that "stack" somewhere else (if you think I'd trust them a second time you're nuts) and reconfigure it all data loss would likely be a matter of a few minutes worth of transactions; whatever was in the last set of log-shipped batch that didn't get here.

"Oh, but what if I have an utterly-huge set of databases that makes this impractical?"

Well then, asshole, outsourcing it is stupid. Its not like your entire business is now at the whim and whimsy of a corporation that has six times as many lawyers as you might dream of, they've certainly managed to make sure you can't successfully sue them and besides, suing when you're smoking hole is pointless anyway!

As I've repeatedly pointed out on the risk curve when it comes to "cloud computing" the problem rests there: You have no accountability within the cloud provider's employee base and operations and no way to obtain it.  If they have a crooked administrator who manages to get something into the hypervisor (or there's a flaw in there already that gets exploited) you are fucked and you have no way to vet the thousands of employees on their end because they're not your employees.  You don't even know if they're Americans (hint: many are not) and thus some unknown percentage are outside of the jurisdiction of the United States and thus impossible to hold accountable in the first place!

Now is this reasonable if the data is intended for public consumption?  Sure!  Thus my running this site on DO is reasonable; the entire point of publishing Tickers is to publish them.  You know, so other people can see them?  Yeah, that's the point so I don't much care; the damage available to an outside party is limited to disruption to the operation, not theft or destruction.

But this sort of application -- where you have a fiduciary and/or legal responsibility to customers and others in the society to not only keep the data safe but prevent it from being stolen or destroyed?

YOU CANNOT DO THAT IN A CLOUD ENVIRONMENT BECAUSE YOU ARE NEITHER IN CONTROL OF NOR ABLE TO ENFORCE PENALTIES AGAINST THE PARTIES WHO MAY ACT INCORRECTLY WHETHER THAT OCCURS OUT OF STUPIDITY OR MALICE.

If you have customer-sensitive (or business-sensitive) data on a cloud system you're out of your fucking mind and you're also out of compliance if there are laws governing your relationship and custody of that data.

EVERY.
SINGLE.
TIME.

And ANY and EVERY executive who does so should fucking hang for doing it.

I'm talking to employers here.

See, I used to be one.

Thing is this: I didn't care if there were a dozen folks on the floor who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag, so long as they could do the job.  That didn't matter much because there were plenty of those people and the job was easy.  But -- there is a set of core competencies that every business must have and you must enable those who have it to get rid of the idjits on the floor who get outside their lane and think they're hot shit when they're not, because otherwise you're doomed.

No, green hair, six sets of LGBTQRSTVP++ and four pronouns does not make you other than a rote worker.

Boeing got some lessons in this recently, if you recall.  They fired all the assholes, most of which were white men and who gave a shit if the plane actually had the bolts in the doors installed.  If you fucked around on the assembly line one of them would catch it and rip you a new asshole.  Do it more than once and you probably were out on the street.  Bitch about it when your ass got chewed and you were definitely out on the street.

Management supported this and as a result their aircraft doors tended to be properly installed.

Detroit learned this the hard way and nearly got destroyed by refusing to do it.  They fired the assholes and permitted the jackasses who liked to go out for lunch, drink a sixpack between two of them and smoke a joint on top of it -- and then go back to the factory and try to bolt together cars.

To say that was a disaster would be quite the understatement.  Of course smelling like a sixpack and a doobie didn't bother anyone at the turnstile in front of the plant because sir union didn't give a crap about the boozed and doped up employees and neither did management.  Heh, what you do on your own on the weekend is your business but come to work sober because otherwise the cars fall apart inside of 30,000 miles -- if they start at all.  By the way this isn't a baseless allegation either; the local news crews followed these jackwads several times and got them on video going through the drive-through beer place, then going to the local park and guzzling the beer while passing the joint around!

You'd think after the first or second one of those there'd be a steely-eyed dude in a suit sniffing everyone who came through the turnstile after lunch; smell like beer or a joint, fired you are.  Nope.

Then comes Covid.  "Work from home" sounds delightful but it really was arbitrage.  The degree of arbitrage varied from person to person but nowhere was there more of such than in high-cost areas such as California, Chicago and similar.  Housing, transportation, business clothing, lunch -- all costs that went into salary computations and offers but then the employee arbitraged it out and expected the employer to keep their pay the same -- while the employer had a nastily-expensive office building to pay for that was now empty.  The bleating about being "more productive" isn't the employee's decision to make -- but they thought it was and could enforce it.  Well, no.

The basic problem through the last 30 or so years is that management has gotten the idea that everyone is a robot.  Uh, no again.  You can automate a lot of things if its cheaper than paying some schlub but at the end of the day human intuition and observation when it comes to process wins -- if you let it.  The problem is that corporate culture has to be there at that level and if it isn't then the rest makes no difference at all as the insane run the asylum.

Witness the game in play here.  UNC Chapel Hill has several professors who are employees of the State and university threatening to withhold grades earned -- not from rioters for misconduct that is under review by the University for possible sanction up to and include expulsion but against non-participants in said "demonstrations" because the university is not kowtowing to protestor demands.

They not only have no right to do that as the students contracted for a class and a clear representation of their work in the form of a grade it is wild-eyed insubordination as the professors have both a written and profession-based agreement on THEIR performance.  In any employment situation where there is an actual command and control infrastructure along with expected behavior and standards of conduct every single person involved in threatening that would be instantly dismissed with prejudice, for cause, including forfeiture of all benefits including unvested retirement.  No warnings, no apologies, no bullshit -- go ahead and sue you'll lose and we'll counter-sue for malicious destruction of our reputation and take your house.

Instead the university issued a "stern letter."

May I ask how well a "stern letter" will work to keep the water clean and safe in your community, the toilets flushing and the power on?

No folks, "stern letters" are not the way it works.  If you pull something like this you get your ticket punched -- period.

You will want some of us assholes -- like myself -- back I suspect, and probably quite soon.

My terms will be simple: None of this bullshit will be tolerated, you'll put it in writing, and if you violate your representations to me in that regard no matter the reason and yes, that includes alleged "government mandate" you'll be paying me a huge severance immediately sufficient to cover every single penny I would have otherwise expected to earn for a period of many years, in cash, right here and now.

No?  You decline?

Fine with me -- may your toilet back up and your own shit run all over the floor.

By the way if you wait until the shit is running all over the floor or the lights are not working, thinking you can get away with refusing said terms my wage demand to come back and make it work again will have tripled.

Yes, I said stupid:

Like Edwards and her husband, a vast majority of adults over age 50 prefer the idea of remaining in their own residences as long a possible, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. But staying put is becoming less of a choice. Some baby boomers and older members of Generation X are locked into low mortgage rates too good to give up. Skyrocketing housing prices fueled by lean supply further complicate the calculations of moving house.

Selling a bubble and buying another one is a wash.  You get an outsized price but you pay an outsized price.  That's a net zero.

If you have a mortgage and are nearing or beyond retirement you're an idiot.  Oh, I get it, "shit happens" but most of the time the "shit" is your "need" to have fancy cars, a boat or just a few vacations, so you engaged in serial refinance.

Which, I might remind you, means that you built basically zero equity because on a 30 year loan if you only hang onto the property for 7 years you have only paid about 10% of the principal!

All the rest of the money went to the bank and they kept it, which is why doing a 30 year if you are going to be "average" and move after 7, which is incidentally the average tenor of said loans, is stupid.

Advising you to do that violates every standard of fiduciary responsibility and is an intentional act but, of course, we don't hold mortgage lenders and bankers to said fiduciary standard nor is it applied to Realtors either -- otherwise we'd have to throw them all in prison.  Thus you ought to consider what the appropriate punishment is for the repeated assrape perpetrated upon you and exact  said penalty yourself.

But, you say, "oh that's terrible!" and "someone has to fix it for me!"

Well, stupid has a price.  The simple fact of the matter is that you should structure your finances during your earning and child-raising years (when it does make a lot of sense to have continuity) around having said residence paid off by the time the kids are grown.  Now if the market is a bubble you still eat the commission and other selling/buying expenses, which are not trivial, but you don't give a crap about rates and you're immune to being locked in one way or another.

Likewise if the market crashes while your house value goes down so does the one you would trade into, so it matters not once again.  You are, once again, immune from said effects.

Attempting to argue that "well prices always go up so I'm going to do this because I want the appreciation" is fucking stupid beyond words and you deserve to get a 2' long horsecock up your ass, because as noted in said bubble where appreciation is occurring it is happening across the board and thus you actually make nothing from said appreciation since you must overpay for the new place as well.  Never mind that if you're "fortunate" enough to exceed the tax-free limit in said "appreciation" you will get it in the ass from Uncle Sam on the transaction as well and you really don't want that to happen.

The only way to "win" in a housing bubble is to die and then your heirs get the windfall but in that case you're dead, asshole, so it matters not to you.  You too can be the subject of the large auctioneer's Estate Sale (yes, including the house and car) sale currently down the road from me to the benefit of your kin.

Ten years from now there are going to be an utterly-huge number of people who are permanently screwed or dead:

The latest KFF Health Tracking Poll finds that about one in eight adults (12%) say they have ever taken a GLP-1 agonist – an increasingly popular class of prescription drugs used for weight loss and to treat diabetes or prevent heart attacks or strokes for adults with heart disease – including 6% who say they are currently taking such a drug.

Six percent of the adult population is currently using this crap?

Oh fuck.

Yes, I know, they've existed since 2005.  But widespread use only came after a 2017 trial end for Ozempic so we really have about five years of clinical, widespread use and of course originally few people did use it simply because it takes time, so let's call it five years.

Reality is that there is a zero-side-effect risk way to get the same result: Stop eating fast carbohydrates and seed oils.

We do not understand the endocrine system sufficiently to safely tamper with it in this way on a widescale basis.

It is true that GLP-1 is naturally produced in the body.  However, the naturally-produced hormone breaks down very rapidly and this is the natural cycle in your digestive and endocrine system from that substance.  The entire point of these artificially-produced GLP-1s is to not break down rapidly, and these are not actually GLP-1 because that won't work (for this reason); instead they are drugs that bind to the receptor that GLP-1 normally attaches to but unlike GLP-1 they are designed not to break down rapidly.

Now there is a second set of these drugs that binds to both GLP-1 and GIP receptors.  Again, they're designed not to break down as the naturally-produced substances do.

Where have we seen problems with this approach in other things?

Oh, like in everything that has ever been used in the human body and designed to not degrade!  Like, for instance, hydrogenated oils and the covid shots which used pseudo-uridine to prevent the immune system from targeting it because unlike uridine the immune system didn't tag it as "not self" -- in other words, designed to not degrade.

I'll make the prediction now: This is going to utterly horsefuck a huge percentage of people who take this crap, we won't know how badly for another five to ten years -- and more for the continuing evolution of new ones that are in the pipeline -- and most of those bad effects, if they get you, will be PERMANENT (or worse -- fatal.)

Cholera.

There is a "severe gap" in the number of available vaccine doses compared to the level of current need, said UNICEF on its website.

"Between 2021 and 2023, more doses were requested for outbreak response than the entire previous decade," UNICEF noted.

Outbreak response?

You don't vaccinate into an outbreak of anything.  Of course we knew this decades ago and then immediate forgot it when Covid showed up.

Also note they try to blame "climate change" (bullshit); cholera is a bacterial disease that occurs as a result of eating shit.  Literally eating shit, typically through water source contamination.

The answer to the problem is not "vaccination" it is clean water sources and sewage or septic disposal of human feces.

That's why we don't typically have a problem with it in the United States today; there is no routine shot given for it in the US because there is no value to it.  Don't eat shit and you won't get it.  In fact this is why polio is basically gone too; it, like cholera, is transmitted through consumption of feces.

Was IPV (Salk's vaccine) even relevant in the evolution of that disease in the United States and worldwide?  Not really, because it is not sterilizing.  That is you could get it and transmit it to others but just as with cholera how you got it is the same -- to get it you have to eat shit.

Interrupting the transmission is thus a function of first-world water and waste handling.  Succeed at that and there is no cholera -- or polio for that matter.  Fail at it and you have a problem.

Further, since cholera is caused by a bacterium for those places that still use communal wells as a water source personal or household, at-point-of-use water filtration is both sufficient and effective.  This is typically not true for viruses (e.g. polio) but a decent filter is good enough to prevent bacterial contamination.  Filters of sufficient quality for consumption are inexpensive.

Bacterial contamination is serious business for people like me who enjoy back-country hiking.  Getting the craps is bad if you're at home and have an effectively-unlimited water supply to make up the fluid loss, and ready access to salt (electrolytes.)  In the back-country that same case of the trots can kill you if you're effectively immobilized by it and get severely dehydrated.

Cholera is on the smaller side of bacteria but a 0.2-.0.5 micron filter is effective.  I also carry Chlorine Dioxide as a secondary treatment and use it because viruses can also be present and while they're not much of a "in the wild" problem they are when people are around, and, well, people are around these days in the so-called "back-country" and some of them are disgusting and do not keep their bodily waste away from water sources adequately -- or at all.

Nonetheless the issue here is not (as Faux Snooz's headline claims) a function of immunization.

The problem is clean drinking water sources and insuring human waste does not get into the water system.

We didn't end cholera in the US and the rest of the western world with "vaccination" and those who claim this is the proper approach or try to use this as an example of "medicine good, go get more stabs" are lying and said lies get people killed.  The answer to these problems is, as we know in the western world, to stop shitting in the road and resolve clean and sanitary water access issues.  That in turn means stop living like fucking apes and that means society has to produce more than it consumes so the surplus can go to basic infrastructure -- like flush toilets and segregated water and waste systems.

Again you can't vaccinate out of an outbreak.  We've known this for over 100 years and the people peddling this crap are badly in need of being skullfucked.