The government shuts down roads all the time.
Amtrack is a federally-owned company. It belongs to you and me. Corporations don't -- and they only want your money. That's capitalism. I'd rather be using something I already pay for and belongs to me.
In Europe, trains are affordable. And in many cases, the prices are offset by taxpayer (i.e. the collective/democracy)'s funding. So the trains belong to the people.
If you are handicapped you can't drive. If you have Alzheimers you shouldn't be driving. Any physical or mental reason -- i.e. sickness -- that makes it unsafe to drive removes your independence in the event you are solely dependent on cars to get from place to place.
The government who built the roads without any means of non-car transportation makes you just as reliant on them -- AND the car companies. I'd rather be reliant on collective benefit rather than a corporation who doesn't care if my car is broken down or I'm old and can't drive or I'm physically incapable of driving. All they want is my money. With public/non-car transportation people have the actual freedom. Reliance on corporations is the opposite.
You can only be independent if you are physically and mentally capable of driving a car, have the financial resources to do so. If you're sick or don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars per month for transportation, then you're not independent. And if your car breaks down, you're not independent. Affordable public transport and trains etc provide true freedom. For example, there's much more freedom to travel in Europe.
Completely dependent on driving is the key here. We're completely beholden to corporations and dangerous, dirty machines to conduct virtually every aspect of daily life -- if you're physically, financially, and legally able to do so. It doesn't have to be this way. Cars suck.
In most cases, vendors like Datadog may still manually say its service is still down, even if it's pretty much up and running just to make sure they don't speak too soon about being up and running again. But our tests can see that they are working even before the vendor is ready to announce they are functioning again. What a vendor reports generally isn't usually a real-time reflection of what's happening in their software. Updating the status page is like a press release about someone important recovering from an illness. We're like the medical equipment that monitors that person's health. The press has to take some time to make craft a message when they know the person is healthy and wait a moment to report to make sure the person doesn't relapse and they report health too soon. On the other hand, medical equipment is just there to measure health and it can show that way sooner than the press release.
In other cases, Metrist mostly monitors essential functions right now and in the demo we monitor them from our point of view. So a minor part we don't monitor could be down but the major parts we do monitor are up. And so a status page may report certain part of the service as down while we just don't monitor that part. Further, since users experience outages differently and the demo is from our experience with the software, other users could be experiencing an outage while we aren't. So it's important for Metrist users to set up personalized monitoring so they know exactly how an outage is affecting them.
Thanks for pointing that out! Since status pages are updated manually, we monitor actual functionality. We often see that pages functionally recover long before the status pages update that everything is in working order. Again, because it's manual and status pages are often more for marketing than development purposes.
And also we're in "Show HN" and may not be 100% perfect ;) but we stick to the above explanation :)
Hi! Thanks for asking. Basically, Status pages get updated manually, and people decide whether and when an outage is sufficiently bad to warrant a status page update. We monitor actual functionality and will capture smaller glitches that either escape human attention altogether or never get escalated to the point where the status page is updated.
In more detail, this can be for three reasons:
1.) We use functional testing so we're simply showing what aspects of the platform are working and what's not. Due to definitions of "outages" and such in SLA's, vendors like Datadog might not disclose/categorize certain dysfunctions as outages and so they won't show them on their status page. In other words, some outages might be more "minor" and they won't include them on the status page.
2.) Status pages are manual, Metrist is automatic. DD might not have updated or even be fully aware of the outage. Our tests are just showing the objective data as it's happening.
3.) Everyone experiences outages differently. This data from the demo is Metrist's experience with Datadog and can be slightly different from other people (another reason why status pages can be vague). That's why we have an orchestrator that allows people to set up personalized monitoring so they can know exactly how a vendor is affecting them in real-time. And if an outage is relevant to and affecting them.
Does that answer your question? LMK if I can follow up with more info. :)
The research Adam Grant presented on the subject is also interesting --there are other more stable, more profitable ways to save money other than layoffs.