Sure, that timeline looks bad when you leave out the 14 updates between 12:11am PDT and 8:04am PDT.
The initial cause appears to be a a bad DNS entry that they rolled back at 2:22am PDT. They started seeing recovery with services but as reports of EC2 failures kept rolling in they found a network issue with a load balancer that was causing the issue at 8:43am.
I didn't say they fixed everything within those 14 updates. I'm pointing out it's disingenuous to say they didn't start working on the issue until start of business when there are 14 updates of what they have found and done during that time.
George Vaccaro was a Verizon customer who, in early December 2006, had a customer service phone call where Verizon had a legendary "math fail" as it would have been dubbed at that time. This is a viral tale from the early/modern internet age of the oughts. In the calls, the Verizon employees repeatedly fail to acknowledge the distinction between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents because they think "0.002 cents" is $0.002; in other words they think $0.002 is 0.002 cents simply because the 002 comes after the decimal point.
"The parable of the earring was not about the dangers of using technology that wasn't Truly Part Of You, which would indeed have been the kind of dystopianism I dislike. It was about the dangers of becoming too powerful yourself."
As I said in a comment on that post, 13 years ago:
"any parable that's about being too powerful is almost necessarily also about technology, because it's technology that allows the average person to get that power"
But before stating that intent, he admits "well, that parable didn't work". The strongest interpretation of which is that the parable he wrote didn't succeed in being about "the dangers of becoming too powerful".
We have to read "was about" as "was (supposed to be) about".
What the parable ends up being about is any consistent interpretation well supported by the actual text of the parable!
In the parable, the Whispering Earring is a kind of character. It has autonomy and agency; a mind of its own, separate from that of the wearer. It generates ideas and suggests them to the wearer, eventually rendering most of their brain unnecessary. (The implication being that the individual, as a sentient being, has wasted away and has been effectively replaced by the host, as if possessed in the classical sense).
Someone who could be just as powerful in making all the right decisions guaranteed to make them happy, but using their own brain instead of taking suggestions from a whispering daemonic oracle, would not waste away and be replaced; their brain would have to be doing remarkable work and developing in the process rather than atrophying.
I suspect that it would actually be very difficult to repair the parable, while retaining the key element of the Whispering Earring as an autonomous entity, into being about "the dangers of becoming too powerful oneself". (Has the author tried?)
What does it say about me that I stopped reading the article to play with the progress bar down at the bottom right?... And now I'm writing this comment before finishing the article.
iirc the Dandelions we know are are native to Eurasia and are considered invasive across the US. They were brought over by early settlers for their health benefits
i have heard they were a garden plant but i dont know if that was an informal "spread the seeds and harvest where they pop up" or more of a row crop kind of thing...
You have a good point. I live in Michigan and recently traveled down to Austin, Texas. The roads didn't seem all that much better but all of the road markings really stuck out to me. Reflectors in all the lines separating lanes, soft bollards surrounding cross walks and parking areas, extra curbs built in for bike lanes.
It makes things look a lot nicer but my first thought was, "could you imagine trying to plow around those bollards, or those reflectors would get ripped up on the first pass."
Northern Europe gets more than enough snow and bollards and reflectors are a thing all the same. It's not a problem if you plan for it ahead of time and design and build things with that in mind.
Austin didn't even have snow plows until 2022, the year after snowmageddon. If I remember correctly, they tried using road graders and sand. Even then, it's generally ice, not snow in central tx, even after removing snow in 2021 there isn't/wasn't much to do about all the ice.
I imagine there is another group that would claim the 2010 blizzards in the midwest/mid-Atlantic as the, snowmageddon. However, I would argue both 2010 & 2014 as snowpocalypse--and with over 290 official (and estimated 700+) deaths the 2021 Texas storms as a better fit for snowmageddon. (not that its a competition, it was simply far more tragic)
The initial cause appears to be a a bad DNS entry that they rolled back at 2:22am PDT. They started seeing recovery with services but as reports of EC2 failures kept rolling in they found a network issue with a load balancer that was causing the issue at 8:43am.