ranrotx's comments

It’s also not so much about RealPage, but the consolidation that has occurred in rental property ownership and management over the years.

Now take what RealPage is doing with apartments and imagine if every major airline used the same revenue management solution (most use their own which are proprietary) to set airline fares. I hope RealPage (and these investor-owned apartment owners) pay dearly for this. Imagine what the size of a class action suit would look like.

Just about every new housing development in the greater Houston area starts like this: Acquire some cheap farmland not too far from a highway, come in and sub-divide the lots, build some kind of neighborhood amenity (pool, rec center, etc.), and creat a Municipal Utility District with on-site well and sewer.

None of this was connected to a more robust regional water system with surface water. Each one of these neighborhoods was planned on its own without any thought into how it fit into the bigger picture of its surroundings.

I’d take a file system that can be indexed by my local operating system (MacOS).

The last MacOS update broke Spotlight indexing for my Google Drive folders. Really annoying not being able to use Spotlight (and by extension Alfred), so the only logical thing to do was move to iCloud.

In the process of moving off of Google Drive, I also decided to move my email to Fastmail and just ditch GSuite (or whatever they are calling it today) forever. I’ll sleep better at night knowing that Fastmail knows their place and (hopefully) won’t try and force a chat function into my web email client as a means to build engagement for a product I don’t care about.

Their apparel brand is a joke. It’s run by Foley’s wife. Unless I messed something, what experience or qualification does she have in apparel?

Never mind the fact that I’ve maybe seen only 3 people in the real world wearing anything that is Peloton branded (no, the free Century t-shirt doesn’t count).

Personally, I find their apparel to be a little loud and obnoxious, but that’s just me. As a consumer, I don’t see what value they bring to the apparel market. Nothing new, just branding.

I personally feel like Kubernetes tries to be all the things, which creates feature and complexity bloat to be able to accommodate any possible workload you can throw at it. “Cloud Native” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s more like trying to run your own cloud versus relying on a service provider.

Sure you can run a stateful, highly available database on k8s. But you’re going to have to manage the complexity of making it work on k8s. Or you could just use a managed database service of your cloud provider (which has existed even before k8s).

By that same logic, I wonder how many times Facebook and Instagram have been reported for making teens so conscious about their self-image that they commit suicide?

You know what else is tilt-up? Most big box stores. Not sure why Amazon is being singled out here as I’m sure this building complied with all local building codes.

PTO is a form of compensation. Every place I’ve worked at has paid me for unused, accrued PTO when I left. But I’ve also never been terminated, so don’t know if that matters.

Fresh food isn’t just more expensive, but it’s also harder to handle and stock. Processed food comes in neat packaging that can be unit priced, and kept frozen or shelf-stable for long period of time.

Fuck Home Depot. First they killed off all the mom-and-pop hardware local stores. Now we shop there because that’s usually the only choice. Are we supposed to feel sorry for them? It’s bad enough that they’ve turned me into their employee with their self-checkout system.

Someone at HD made the calculation that by not employing as many cashiers, the personnel savings will be profitable even in the face of shoplifting. But now, they are just putting another burden on their customers and vendors.

I mean, how else are we supposed to know the CPU is busy?

Apple effectively did the same thing with AirTags and turning everyone’s iOS device into a listening post for the Find My network, but there’s no uproar there.

Yep, this is the thing no one is talking about. Dallas has easily added 10k apartment units in the past 5 years. Almost all of them are all electric (no gas heating).

Considering it’s more energy efficient to cool with Air Conditioning on the hottest summer days than it is to heat with electricity in the winter, it’s no wonder the grid collapsed when the region was below freezing for several days and some generating capacity was lost.

Another thing worth noting: HEB is privately (family, I believe) owned. The difference is night and day between their stores/employees and those of the competing grocer in my area that is owned by private equity.

Yes, sadly so. I worked as a vendor to a retail company. Every time I went to their office (which was attached to one of their facilities that held product) I had to undergo a bag check. I never had to do the bag check if I went to an office that wasn’t attached to a location with product in it.

I’ve been on Southwest flights so sparsely full (maybe 40 people on a plane with capacity for 120) where the flight attendants have to repeatedly tell people to “spread out for weight and balance.” That’s about as scientific as their calculation got.

You don’t need to allocate instances in advance if you use Fargate.

I have this feeling that 5G is more about cheaply deploying faster Internet (ie. comment about these things going up next to people’s bedrooms) versus a more expensive fiber deployment to the premises.

Having driven around Dallas and seen a few of these things in residential areas, I can say that yes they are ugly. Unlike a regular cell site, it doesn’t appear that there is any kind of permitting process around these deployments as they just pop up suddenly.

I’m all for progress, but there are ways to make utility infrastructure less noticeable to the urban landscape. Unfortunately with the approach I’m seeing with 5G deployments, the telecom companies will take the cheap way out.

That’s the problem with a lot of franchise agreements. So many things are set and specified for you that you have no room to optimize your business as an operator.

In a way, you’re almost just like an employee of the franchisor, but without any of the benefits and a lot more liability. But it’s a great relationship for the person selling the franchise.

AWS employee here--thoughts and opinions are my own.

Prior to AWS, I was in IT Operations at a large financial services company. I saw the writing on the wall that over time, companies would not want to manage this part of their IT infrastructure themselves. Keep in mind, I was someone who was responsible for keeping the lights on for a decent number of Linux severs.

For an individual company, there really isn't much value in having to maintain firmware levels on all your hardware, patch hypervisors (and try to coordinate all of the maintenance around a fixed pool of hardware), perform months-long evaluation of new hardware before purchasing, test and validate configurations on new hardware, etc. I used to do all of this. I don't miss it either.

Yes, the items above are important, but doing them right is really table-stakes for any reliable IT Operations department. You can choose to spend time getting these right, or delegate that responsibility to a service provider whose main job is to get that stuff right (and recoups that cost across a much larger customer base).