Posts by guavatree

Going green Hertz: Rental giant axes third of EV fleet over lack of demand

This.

It actually happened to me last year, I was offered an upgrade to an EV (a Polestar IIRC). However, tired after the flight , strange city and driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, I decided not to add my first EV experience to the mix.

UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill

Re: It can be done.

"having the cost of recycling paid up-front is NOT an individual civic duty but a central-government-imposed rule"

TLDR; I agree, I think you have conflated two parts of my post.

The Swiss governmental bodies have created the rules, i.e. You pay for non recyclable waste, recyclable waste is disposed of for free (actually, not all recyclable waste is designated recyclable yet, so you do pay for some recyclable waste), shops that sell electronic goods have to provide recycling for them and the recycling charge is at sale.

The social aspect is that even though most people could pay for all waste to be taken away as 'non recyclable' and not even notice, this is considered shameful. This means even though LESS material is collected here than in the UK, the recycling rates are higher. Maybe this would work in the UK. I mean I would imagine there is less options for corruption if you are taking the recycling back yourself.

From your post it seems the corruption is mainly in the collection of waste not the actual recycling. It is also directly related to the UK's push to move everything to the private sector.

In the case of waste collection, either it is a government job covered by taxes and RUN by the government. Or it is private, and the collector only get paid for what they collect. In this case people living in the backend of beyond would be screwed as their collection charges would be sky high. This would lead to rubbish not being disposed of correctly and so lead to a social cost. Hence, waste disposal is something that needs to be run by the government. Privatisation is just not a good fit for this. Now I'm just waffling.

It can be done.

I live in Switzerland and here we have very high recycle rates for electrical goods. This comes from a mixture of government policies and culture.

Firstly recycling electrical goods is free, paid for when you buy the item. "Thanks to the advance recycling fee, you already paid for the disposal of your appliance when you bought it." This adds the cost of recycling to the cost of the goods, the correct way to assign the costs. As others have already pointed out, you don't want this financed by a government tax where careful consumers will subsidise extravagant ones. I thought this scheme was already in place in the UK, but it seems I was mistaken.

Small electrical items are collected by our postal service. You can pick up a small recycling bag at most shops that you put the items in and hang outside your letterbox. The postman will simply take this away when he delivers letters.

All 'large' shops selling electrical goods have to accept items for recycling, so you don't have to go to the tip to return items. I am not sure if you can do this for a fridge, but I have dropped off a large TV without problem. Edit : I found the rules here https://www.erecycling.ch/en/wissenswertes/wissensblog/fach73.html , "Retailers have a legal obligation to take back all the electrical and electronic equipment that they stock themselves. If, for example, you can buy a toaster in an electrical store, you can hand in your old appliance there for disposal – free of charge. You do not have to provide proof of purchase to show that you have already paid the advance recycling fee, nor are you obliged to buy a new device in the shop.", so it seems this would work for a fridge too :-)

The cultural difference seems to be that here recycling is seen as a civic responsibility, the government helps but it is an individuals responsibility. Everyone just thinks that way. For some archaic reason only paper and compost are collected from home addresses. All metal and plastic recycling requires a trip to the shops or the local recycle points. People make it part of their schedule to recycle stuff. Sometimes it's a bit of a pain in the arse, but you do it, because everyone does it.

There is also a very active, not for profit association that manufacturers can join, https://www.swico.ch/en/ , I'm not sure how effective this is but is is another option for increasing recycling rates.

It seems to work quiet well here, but maybe I am being naive, I usually am.

Chinese companies evade sanctions, fuel Moscow’s war on Ukraine, says report

When did this site go from snark to out right hate for the US? There is a war in Europe, Russia is the aggressor, China is maneuvering to increase its global power base, and supporting Russia is part of this. If the US are trying to stop/limit this then I support this. I don’t give a shit if the military suppliers are lobbying, or that the US is also trying to increase its power base. Russian aggression needs to be opposed and if the US are helping in this I am happy.

I am expecting a torrent of downvotes, but I really think the tone of this comment thread needed to be challenged.

Attackers hit Bitcoin ATMs to steal $1.5 million in crypto cash

“ If you see someone using one a crypto ATM, ask them gently if they are being pressured to buy Bitcoin and encourage them to contact the police.”

Great advice! Why did you not do this when you saw the woman who you were 90% sure was being scammed?

Singapore software maker says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

Re: Why are these people in charge?

"Do you really think that an org with such a large AWS footprint isn't going to know the difference between OnDemand, Reserved, and Spot pricing."

I have now read the full article and yes they do know. They where using 3 year reserved instances, so I take it back (I should have read to the end).

"They call have costs in AWS, too."

Yes they do, I was referring to maintenance costs, these drop drastically, sorry if that was not clear.

I am not employed by a cloud provider. I am however responsible for architecting systems. This involves almost exclusively Private and Public Cloud solutions currently, but in the past I have worked on a lot of in house solutions.

All of our cloud migrations I have been involved with have saved the customer money. Before you 'bark' again, the private clouds are based on local data centres and a setup not dissimilar to the one in the article, but all of these are hybrid now and more workloads are heading to the public cloud.

Note: in the short term 'lift and shifts' have ended up horrible expensive. It is my job to ensure that this is rectified quickly.

I guess I actually do agree with Mr. Mirochnik as he say's this in conclusion.

"Also, abandoning a cloud infrastructure due to higher costs may not be what the engineering team wants. They may rightly view a cloud as a much easier and more flexible environment compared to old-fashioned brick-and-mortar data centers with physical servers."

My customers are the engineering team. They are focused on creates an environment where the business can grow and be flexible. If Mr. Mirochnik does not consider these engineers his customers, I can see why we disagree.

I see a great deal of fear in some of the workplaces I enter, they simply don't trust AWS or any of the other providers. But Cloud Computing is here to stay, make the best of it.

Why are these people in charge?

Comparing straight EC2 costs to the cost of physical hardware is nonsense.

As has been posted, he does not mention whether he has used OnDemand, Reserved or Spot prices, which makes me think he maybe he has not investigate the possibilities.

On AWS you only need to provision what you need at any given time (an over simplification but sufficient here), the on prem hardware has to handle peak load comfortably, which means much of it will be idle most of the time. I have spent a lot of time (and money) balancing workloads so that hardware is used efficiently, this takes time and need constant monitoring, get it wrong and one day a vital process will crash/not complete. A 'data centre operations exec' should be aware of this and include it in any 'analysis'.

Then the CTO should be involved, because what about Kubernetes clusters, messaging, queues, notification services, CDN, managed database services ... , these all have to be configured and managed. Availability, scalability, load balancing, disaster recovery, are all much easier on AWS. They will all cost you in your on prem solution.

And then there is Serverless, this is very hard to provide on prem.

I could go on, but the red mist has started to disperse.

BTW: the 37 Signals story has largely been discredited, the use of AWS in that case was almost criminally negligent IMHO.

So if you cannot use cloud services efficiently , then yes go on prem. But stories like these that just put irrelevant numbers in your face are not helpful.