It's remarkable how government is able to commit these harms without suffering repercussions. Normally the law covers damages. Well, the water disaster in flint caused billions in damages. The state government should be broke from the damages.
I don't much care what happens to individuals. First concern is the victims. But the victims were cared for somewhat, but nowhere near the point where they'd not suffer damage.
Instead, the law was modified to minimize what the government paid ...
I don't get why you'd do this. This sounds like a false choice. If you want a company to deliver racks with hardware to you, plenty of companies do exactly this. You don't need cloud for that.
The choice is not between "do all hardware and building" and "cloud". There's a whole spectrum in between. In fact, it's quite hard to do the building. You can go colo (building + power + electrical done by vendor, optionally network), dedicated (servers done by vendor), hybrid hosting, hyperscaler (you get VMs), ...
As soon as you move above colo, you don't have the hardware issues mentioned here. Or, well, you do have issues, but you "just" file a ticket.
1) It's not like cloud databases are problem free. You can have very non-trivial issues, and they especially have nonstandard (and very nontrivial) transaction semantics. I'm not saying this is necessarily a problem, but unless you're on top of it. You need someone with real database administration experience.
You especially CANNOT "START TRANSACTION; SELECT * FROM products; SELECT * FROM five_other_tables; UPDATE sales ...; COMMIT TRANSACTION" (so all product prices and ... are included in the transaction "and nothing goes wrong"). It does not scale, it does not scale on postgres, it does not scale on Aurora, it does not scale on Spanner, it does not scale anywhere. It will scale on MySQL and MariaDB because it will just ignore your SELECT statements, which will cause a disaster at some point.
2) The big problem with cloud databases is the same as with normal databases: let bad developers just do what they want, and you'll have 40 queries per pageload, each returning 20-30 Mb of data. You NEED to optimize as soon as you hit even medium scale. And, sorry, "just slap a cache in front of it" is very likely to make the problem worse.
Cloud Hyperscalers salivate seeing this, have simply said: "don't pay an annoying database/system admin to tell you to FIX IT, simply pay us 10x what you pay that guy".
There's 2 kinds of people. There's people who look at the $10 pageload as both a technical embarassement and a potential business disaster. And there's business people who build hyperscalers, dine the CTO and hold a competition for a $100 pageload, while ordering their next Ferrari.
3) There's nothing automatic about automatic sharding. And if you "just shard UUID", your query performance will be limited. It will not scale. It just won't, you need to THINK about WHAT you shard, and HOW. No exceptions.
4) you'd be surprised how far ansible + k8s + postgres operator goes (for both CI/CD and distributed databases)
I would argue this measures governments services available to the poorest for free + to some extent how successful those government services are in fixing social issues (like teen pregnancy, "checked out" NEET youngsters, ...)
This Doesn't seem to me to at all measure how likely you are to get ahead if you try hard enough.
You don't give enough credit to organization chart and project driven engineering.
When developing anything:
1) you don't get to touch anyone else's code. And another department's code? Something another manager's team manages ... that amounts to treason. Never for any reason. MAYBE if they've totally abandoned it and you absolutely need it (but only during unpaid overtime)
2) you don't get to spend ANY time on anything outside of the current project or JIRA ticket. Any time at all. So really, NOT optimizing anything is faster and cheaper. Just look at all the spreadsheets made!
There's a LOT of different organisations that all had to contribute to create a result this bad. Cops, yes, but that's just step 1. Social workers, of at least 2 different organisations. The justice system, including prosecutors and judges ... because if they wouldn't back the social workers there's nothing they could have done.
... which adds up to a lot of people that could have stopped this if they wanted to. NONE of them did.
I had some serious incidents in High School, mostly with other kids, and while my grades dropped, I never lost the ability to make up for weeks, sometimes months of doing nothing for school in a matter of hours.
Didn't stop me from getting bad grades for those weeks/months and making stupid mistakes like not completing assignments and the like.
It's very easy. It's just that in a depressed/anxious/... state people aren't capable of sustaining even the most basic levels of effort after a while. Frankly, I bet that if it was a lot harder, that would have helped me.
So what people do is you build the "ugly" way (usually large panels, maybe even prefab, I doubt 3d printing is working that well right now), then cut bricks into 5 slices and stick those slices on top with glue. You can't tell it's not a brick wall except when you're standing right against it.
And of course, you only do this on visible walls. It can even be done on top of wood.
But it doesn't stop with the cards. ATMs, Tax Fraud, ... almost all businesses within banks have to deal with fraud and there is some threshold that they just allow to happen.
Both the EU and US have internal controls on food quality and sanctions.
Contrary to the impression your post gives, the EU has much more "sanctions" against food (esp. imports) than the US does, and is generally taxing much heavier and restricting many more things. Importing essentially any milk product into the EU is only possible on an exception basis. Trump has a LOT more work before extra sanctions in the US will become comparable to the EU ones.
What is often not said is that the EU not only has sanctions on its borders against food products, it actually has internal sanctions and regulations that are purely political in nature.
For example "champagne" in the EU can only be made within a particular region in France. Which leads to funny, in a sad way, consequences:
For your other part of your comment, I am unwilling to give a real answer. Obviously the US checks it's food quality. It's made different choices than the EU, famously the US allows hormone "enhanced" meat, but it does check food quality and safety. There are heavy penalties for breaking them.
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