> so they have to have reasonable pricing that actually reflects their costs instead of charging more than free for basic services like NAT
How is the cost of NAT free?
> Cloud services are actually really nice and convenient if you were to ignore the eye watering cost versus DIY.
I don't doubt clouds are expensive, but in many countries it'd cost more to DIY for a proper business. Running a service isn't just running the install command. Having a team to maintain and monitor services is already expensive.
salesforce had their hosting bill jump orders of magnitude after ditching their colocation, it did not save anything and colocation staff were replaced with AWS engineers
nat is free to provide because the infrastructure to have NAT is already there and there is never anything maxing out a switch cluster(most switches sit at ~1% usage since they're overspeced $1,000,000 switches), so other than host CPU time managing interrupts (which is unlikely since all network cards offload this).
sure you could argue that regional NAT might should be priced, but these companies have so much fiber between their datacenters that all of nat usage is probably a rounding error.
I think we’re in violent agreement, but you were ambiguous about what “cost” meant. It seems you meant “cost of providing NAT” but I interpreted it as “cost to the customer.”
It’s not impossible. The UK has a rich history of tech innovation but it’s long since been eclipsed by Silicon Valley and its funding (which the UK can only dream of).
But the UK government's GDS team is a fantastic example of doing tech right in government. I can see an expanded government involvement in tech for bodies like the NHS that is a clear alternative to the Silicon Valley model. The salaries would never reach US levels but could still afford a very comfortable life.
Problem is that it would require the government to spend money on itself and its employees, which successive governments are loathe to do because the press will punish them for it every time.
In many ways the UK is a tragic country: top tier talent in many areas, hamstrung by political, management, financial, and media culture rooted in the 19th century, and wholly colonised by offshore owners and foreign powers.
Many of the country's assets and infrastructure are now literally owned abroad, and run for the benefit of foreign owners.
You regularly get outbreaks of talent like GDS, and they regularly get sidelined/eaten/shut down if they're not aligned with corporate ownership.
Yes, I also think ossified social structures have a lot to do with it. You work up the chain of management and eventually you find the son of the Earl of Tossingham, who turns out to be completely ineffectual.
The US has avoided that fate up until this point but when I look at Larry Ellison’s son buying Paramount with dad’s money, the Trump juniors cashing in on their dads name (and to your point, all of them happily taking investment from the Saudis) I do have a sense of history repeating itself.
Nah, the US has always had the same problem except without titles. Robert F Kennedy Jr. is the same phenomenon. Why is the Earl or RFK in charge? Because of the name. That's what the Roark family in the Sin City stories is about, this happens in major US cities just like anywhere else.
It's worse if it's literally part of the design of the country's civil fabric, e.g. Saudi Arabia or indeed Britain's Royal Family but while Charlie and a handful of his family have that sort of connection a lot of those random Earls and other minor titles are just inherited power, same as a Kennedy or a Roark. And it's barely a century since Britain last had to do the "hard" (it's about an hour of parliament's time) work of just crossing out names on these lists (last century it was because some of our uh, nobles, were actually born and lived in Germany, and had thus become our Enemy in World War I)
To my mind, a big problem is that until extremely recently Britain's two major political parties both agreed on the Protestant Work Ethic, the idea that doing work is a moral necessity for people. There are a lot of scenarios where that breaks down, but neither Labour (because um, clue is in the name) nor the Tories could stomach the idea that maybe working isn't itself a valuable end. We are well past the point where it's mechanically necessary to employ everybody, and we may be approaching the point where doing so is actively harmful, a political party who can't even imagine that is a bad fit.
Do you not think that some DRAM producer isn't going to see the high margins as a signal to create more capacity to get ahead of the other DRAM producers? This is how it always has worked before, but somehow it is different this time?
> Do you not think that some DRAM producer isn't going to see the high margins as a signal to create more capacity to get ahead of the other DRAM producers?
They took the bite during COVID and failed, so there's still fear from over supply.
It only works if they collude on keeping supply steady. If anyone gets greedy for a bigger share of the AI pie, then it implodes quickly. Not all DRAM is made in South Korea so some nationalism will muddy the waters as well.
High margins are exactly what should create a strong incentive to build more capacity. But that dynamic has been tamped down so far because we're all scared of a possible AI bubble that might pop at any moment.
Overseas students are not immigrants. They are on student visas (and most likely from very wealthy families... at least most of the ones I knew at Purdue were).
It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students as they graduate and create a system to promote student visa to green card to naturalization, but only a very few do.
Mostly, foreign students are price gouged by our universities to prop up a failing business model and make it more difficult for citizens to afford higher education.
Sure, it's in the United States' interest to retain the best foreign students (and in many students' interest to study in a country which will permit them to live and work there after their study). That doesn't mean the current administration is necessarily inclined to act this way
International student enrolment is down 17% this year, because the administration chose to take a broadly similar approach to student visas as they did to immigration, with a "pause" on interviews and lots of revocations, plus of course the concern their lawful student visa status isn't a guarantee they won't get taken off to processing centres by ICE thugs with quotas to hit. Other bright ideas the administration proposed with include a four year student visa limit to rule out the possibility of completing a PhD in a normal time frame. That's gonna hurt universities using the foreign students to prop their business up, and citizens who'll have to pick up their tab instead if they want their courses to continue...
One reason foreign enrollment is declining is concern about (mainly) Chinese espionage. That’s entirely reasonable, given the vast amount of stolen engineering and research…
That is the mind hack. People will always assume that the administration has the United States best interest in mind. If people can drop that assumption, they might make a beginning with understanding the firehose of seemingly erratic policy.
The US is a resource to be stripped, the interest in mind is self-interest. "Make us great again!" Back to the gilded age, whatever it takes.
> It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students
Yeah? Tell that to the US government.
As it stands, foreign student enrollment has dropped precipitously year-on-year. The international students are scared, and with good reason.
If ICE happens to roll up to campus, do you really think they'll be checking each student's visa status? Not on your life. They'll just round up everyone who doesn't look white enough, and if they're very, very lucky, they might just get sent back home in a speedy manner. If they're not, they'll get put in camps for indeterminate amounts of time, denied any access to the legal system, and treated worse than animals.
Kids definitely do this. They fill in blanks/context with assumptions, resulting in all sorts of silly responses, for topics of sparse knowledge/certainty. They're not lying, because they think it's true. Sometimes the gap filling is wrong, but usually downright brilliant, within the context of their knowledge.
I replied within the context provided rather than all possible contexts. Would you also like to bring up the interpolation and extrapolation seen during problem solving in the cuddle fish, since it's related?
> Many places would offer you a gigabit pipe directly.
i.e. you don't have redundancy? A gigabit is nothing these days sadly. You can get a surge in traffic (DDoS or not) and be stuck quite quickly. You always need extra capacity to deal with issues unforeseen and that adds to the cost.
How is the cost of NAT free?
> Cloud services are actually really nice and convenient if you were to ignore the eye watering cost versus DIY.
I don't doubt clouds are expensive, but in many countries it'd cost more to DIY for a proper business. Running a service isn't just running the install command. Having a team to maintain and monitor services is already expensive.
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