CompassRed

I hear where you are coming from, but I think your criticisms are misdirected. For the majority of businesses, using an infrastructure provider is a sensible decision that leads to greater security and stability in the long run for less money than trying to build the same thing on their own. This isn't a decision made out of stubbornness, laziness, or ignorance about IT. It's simply that it's the better option for each individual business.

But when most companies make the decision to use an infrastructure provider, outages and risks are centralized. As you pointed out, the services you rely on are likely to use a provider even if you don't use one, so this isn't a problem that a business can solve by buying a server and hiring an IT team. These massive failures aren't a sign that businesses need to make different decisions. It's a sign that the infrastructure providers must work harder and spend more money to improve their internal isolation.

When a bridge collapses because the pedestrians happen to walk in step with the resonant frequency of the bridge, we don't blame the pedestrians for walking incorrectly or for deciding to take the bridge instead of a boat. We blame the designer of the bridge for failing to account for the mundane stresses that the bridge is expected to sustain.

Source: trust me bro

Middle managers don't get to pocket any of the unspent budget. That's crazy talk.

That's also true. To be honest, I don't know of any examples in which a government shutdown directly resulted in non-economic legislation being passed, if that's what you mean. That's not to say I agree that the best you get out of a government shutdown is for one party to carry more blame than the other--I'll have to spend more time looking into it.

Ending a shutdown is an act of legislation, so every past government shutdown in history has resulted in legislation being passed.

The point is you don't have to look it up. Fibonacci is really easy to compute in your head.

It is good enough. I wouldn't have cared if they did make paid users opt out. I think it's a courtesy to their paid users, not an attack on their free users, that they allow paid users to opt in instead of opting out.

Also, there's no way they developed a whole separate system for this. It's likely a single line boolean check.

That's fair, but that's just a service quality complaint. It doesn't sound to me like you are claiming they are doing "a bad thing", as a moral value judgement.

I disagree about what the bare minimum is. It's not uninformed. They tell you about it, and tell you you can opt out. I don't really see how that would be them doing it without permission.

The right thing is to make it opt-in for everyone

How is that the right thing? I'm directly challenging this claim.

All I said was that free users cost them money, so it's reasonable for them to try to recover those costs. I never claimed that free users are a drain on them, so I won't even respond to the rest of your comment.

This may be controversial, but trying to collect the data of your free users to offset the costs of the infrastructure/resources needed to support the free users is not a bad thing - especially when you give those users an option to opt-out.

You make it sound like their goal is to do bad things. That's not true. Corporations are not good or evil, they are amoral. They don't care if what they are doing is good or bad - it just matters if they make money.

they're free to just do the right thing completely

What exactly would that entail?

A more charitable interpretation is that they are arguing that we don't need to impose any new traffic regulations to stop that specific incident from happening because running red lights is already against the law. Not that I agree

Propositional logic as a system is both complete and consistent.