Cloud Services
The concept is as old as rent vs. buy. I haven't bought a house; I haven't had to worry about selling a house in a down market, say, to take a job in another state; for the most part, I don't need to worry about various repairs like appliance failures and various household repairs, a broken water heater, lawn maintenance, clearing walks and driveways of snow, etc. If I have disagreeable neighbors or want to move to a safer community, I can do so at the end of my lease. On the other hand, I have no equity in the property, no tax advantage; what I can do with my apartment is limited to my lease's clauses. I generally have limited, even assigned parking. At my Arizona complex, for instance, guests for other residents or business vans would steal my spot and I would arrive from a swing shift having to drive halfway around the complex to find another spot; heaven forbid I had bags of groceries in the car.
Cloud services is an analogous concept. For instance, you rent vs own online storage for your data. As a professional database administrator, I'm rather anal-retentive about backups. I have multiple PCs and a chromebook, external drives, flash drives, etc., all set up to allow me to get up and running ASAP if my workhorse computer would ever fail. And I plan, among other things, for oddball situations, like geographic risk, where cloud computing shines. This is often exemplified with one experience I had as a contractor at a NASA location. One database I managed was deployed in a Data Guard configuration, basically a redundant server and database configuration where if the primary production system failed, I could failover to the secondary server/database with no data loss. The "is the emperor wearing clothes" question? The two servers were physically located next to each other in the same rack. So what would happen if some catastrophe hit the server room affecting both servers? I got nowhere with the government bureaucrats trying to explain the risk. There are related concepts with disk storage which often operate in a redundant array. In RAID-5, one of these disks serves as a spare in such a way that if one disk fails, the spare regenerates as its replacement. But this is sort of like driving your car with your spare. You better replace it ASAP because you can't afford a second blowout. So one day I'm in the server room and I notice one of my government disks in the array has an amber light (i.e., failed). I'm like, "Server room dude, couldn't you have reported this?"
Cloud computing is more than just storage space on the Internet. I've often mentioned how I moved to Houston to work in the APL computer timesharing industry. We sold premium-priced computer time, sort of a bridge solution to companies like Exxon or Shell between the acquisition of another expensive mainframe. APL is a rapid prototyping computer language that allowed quick application development which drove the sales of computer time. It was metered usage, very analogous to cloud computing services today on platforms like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc.
However, for this segment, I was interested in cloud storage, in part as a hedge against geographic risk. I also liked the ability to access key files, say at work or on the road with just an Internet connection. So you have a number of players in this space, including the pricey but marvelous Dropbox, Google Drive/One, Microsoft (which bundles 1 TB with its 365 Office subscription), Amazon, etc. But one service caught my eye: a too-good-to-be-true lifetime 1 TB for about $100. Now prices vary, but a typical rate among the big names might be roughly $60/year for a terabyte so the lifetime deal might pay for itself within 2 or 3 years.
I'm not going to go into specifics here; I do have a 100 GB account with a big name. There were certain usability problem with the lifetime vendor I never had with my smaller account. What really raised my eyebrows was how the former vendor tried hard to sell me a subscription service, say, $20/year for an improved client, premium tech support, that sort of thing. I passed. Long story short, they dropped their "lifetime" business over the last several weeks; I'm not sure I ever got past the breakeven point. In hindsight, I should have known better. I would recommend readers to stick with the bigger names, even if they are a bit pricier.
COVID Shutdown Diary
It looks like we're back to panic buying like during wave 1. It's weird how you notice these things. In my case I was running low on an all-purpose household cleaner. The last time I shopped for them at Walmart there were literally hundreds of bottles for sale, I'm fairly sure just a few weeks back. And they were totally stripped bare except for maybe 1 bottle of Soft Scrub (no thanks). Now they did have a small stock of Pine-Sol, and I grabbed a bottle of that. But what the hell? I know there's still a run on disinfectant wipes and sprays, but cleaners? I did manage to score a bottle of Lysol spray (maybe a half dozen available) on a recent run to Shoprite and noticed they had posted a purchase limit sign which I probably hadn't seen since the spring.
I hate the politics of desperation, but the lockdowns, mask mandates, etc. rub against the grain. Several contributing skeptics to lewrockwell.com have railed against Statists using "science" to rationalize their lust for power; Tom Woods is obsessed with the topic and has run many related podcast episodes, including yesterday's which I embedded in last night's post, which featured a discussion of intimidating tactics by the media on those commenting on the virus data without epidemiology credentials. He also includes snippets in his daily emails (yes, he'll include some sales promotion at the tail end, e.g., for his supporting listeners group or his subscription lecture series, etc., but it's not that bad). Of course, Woods does his own appeals to authority as I learned in a rare email exchange in which I made a passing critical comment to stuff the scientifically illiterate Trump said. I've blogged about how some libertarians have a soft spot for Trump in the sense he's the target of the nefarious Deep State which counters his impulses to draw down troops in the Gulf Region, etc. So Woods went on an ad hominem mini-rant directed at me, citing his Harvard Medical School contributor (you can't get more elitist than that, although Woods himself earned his degrees from Ivy League schools, including Harvard). To quote that sage Shania Twain, "That don't impress me much."
But I finally snapped when some female doctor who's apparently appeared on CNN on Twitter started bashing skeptics, pointing out a big drop in cases which she attributed to public policies in mask wearing, etc. First of all, let me point out I instinctively distrust people who put credentials like 'MD' on ..their Twitter handles. I don't do it, although if you're interested in my profile, you'll discover I've got 3 graduate degrees, including a PhD and I'm a former university professor (untenured/junior, but still...) I've published peer-reviewed empirical studies; I've served as a reviewer for journals and national conferences as part of my university service, e.g., I was listed/acknowledged in MISQ (way back during my university days). So, no, I don't have a health sciences background, but I understand research design and data; the relevant scientific constructs are applicable across contexts, including standardized treatments, randomization, statistical power, and so on. Having an exhaustive knowledge of the context may certainly be helpful in theory building (e.g., detailed knowledge of comparisons and contrasts of the novel coronavirus vs. other viruses), but it doesn't justify going beyond the limitations of the data.
So this doctor simply asserted in effect, the data are in; we competent researchers consider it settled science. The skeptics are uninformed, even dangerous. I KNOW that's not the case and so I called her on her bullshit explicitly. I usually don't flame other professionals, not have I been targeting others like Fauci, but let me point out that an MD is a professional degree, not a researcher degree. (There are some who pursue both; the one time a sibling and her husband tried to fix me up, it was with one of those. Let's just say, it didn't work out. Long story; I was visiting my sister, and let's just say everyone drank a little too much that night (my BIL topped off my beer every time my back was turned). So this young woman barges into the apartment and snaps at me, "A gentleman knows to stand up when a lady enters the room." I wanted to say, "Fine. Let me know when one comes in," but bit my tongue. I think BIL was convinced she was totally cool because she owned a Corvette.)
Some of these ideologues go after anyone who hints of skepticism. I mentioned an RN went after me, using her 30 years as a health professional like that was supposed to impress me. And I'm hardly as aggressive as Tom Woods on the issue.
So why did I snap at the MD? Let me start with a seemingly unrelated point: Obama's claim that he got us out of the recession.
The partisans to this day want to blame Bush and "unfettered capitalism" for the economic tsunami of 2008. And in fact Bush was President during the first 14 of 19 months of the recession. But let's point out that Bush had a Democratic-controlled Congress during those 14 months. Now yes, the 111th Congress had a super-majority control and spent a lot of money but in terms of a $14.6 T economy it was modest, and very little was spent during the actual recession. Obama and his apologists always want to start keeping score, not when Obama took office but when the economy bottomed out several months later. In the meanwhile the Dems wanted to run up the score during the biggest one-party majority in recent American history. But the fact of the matter is that Obama drove up economic uncertainty with his high tax./regulation agenda, not to mention industrial policy. We have emerged from recessions, even depressions (end of WWI) with little or no federal macroeconomic policies in play, never mind a typical lag of several months on stimuluses and other macro measures. The economy improved on its own, just like it's always done in the past, DESPITE politicians, not because of them. If anything, Obama's agenda delayed and minimized economic growth. His agenda correlated with the recovery but it was a spurious one.
Here's the point: viruses spread on their own and tend to dissipate for largely unknown reasons, e.g., weather changes, maybe herd immunity in saturated areas, etc. And let's note quite often there is a lag between the start of the pandemic and the adoption of certain mitigation strategies like quarantines, face masks, and social distancing. The point is that it's difficult to know what, if any, impact one or a combination of these strategies had on the virus spread or simply coincided with the virus' own cycle. Here's what we do know in the real world: most people's face masks offer negligible protection against airborne microns, even when they are worn correctly, which they often aren't. And not to mention among the few scientifically rigorous research projects before the novel coronavirus, face masks offered little significant protection.
I don't know if it was Woods or some other source I read, but at least one pro-mask research project has withdrawn its earlier published study, unable to explain the virus' resurgence in areas where mitigation strategies were already in high compliance.
I'm not trying to fear-monger here; personally I continue to wear face masks in public, even though as Woods might say, "Viruses are gonna virus." I still believe in protection of the elderly and those in poor health, in the benefits of widespread testing, and in vaccinations when they become available. I just don't like so-called heath experts setting false expectations; I'm sure that many infected people were following all the mitigation strategies and still got infected anyway. And I worry about the unintended consequences of Draconian public policy.
Entertainment Notes
- WWE. Well, I knew as soon as they had McIntyre cut a promo with Smackdown Universal champ Roman Reigns last week, they were going to have Randy Orton job the WWE title back to McIntyre. On its face, it makes sense for babyface McIntyre vs heel Reigns, vs. heel Orton vs. Reigns. (Of course, you don't have to have a champ vs champ match or you could have Orton turn babyface.) It's almost as if they didn't know how to set up a program with Orton; they hinted a program with quasi-face the Fiend, or possibly MITB holder Miz. And they are teasing a feud between McIntyre and old partner Sheamus.
- Cable Holiday Movies. I'm not into most of the new cable holiday movies on Hallmark or Lifetime with the exception of "Holly and Ivy", about the two daughters of a dying single mother, who befriends a struggling new library science graduate. The new neighbor agrees to adopt the girls but faces challenges fixing up her house, getting a good job, etc., to support the girls. I did see an old favorite on Lifetime, "The Road to Christmas", about an engaged photographer who hitches a ride with a widower, a former artist/sculptor, and his teen daughter on the way to getting married in Colorado. I'm still hoping to catch "The Christmas Hope", the last of the Christmas Shoes trilogy, about a couple estranged over the death of their only son and hosting a newly orphaned little girl over the holiday, but I have the movie on DVD. I still haven't seen "Farewell, Mr. Kringle" yet on Hallmark. For some reason, I don't think they ever put that movie on DVD because I've been searching for it.
