Not practically they're not. They would suffer fines, at worst you'd have the people running the company get fined, at an absolute extreme they'd go to jail (VW/dieselgate). You could argue that prison time is the point that it backed by violence, but I must admit I'm fairly surprised that we're discussing the validity of laws and regulation as a concept in general, in response to regulating industrial pollution.
I used to listen to Libertarian talk shows back in the day. Those people thought all laws, regulation, and taxation were violence (they only work because government will point a gun at you and throw you in prison). They're not exactly wrong, but I no longer find the argument very persuasive.
In the same sense, corporations are committing violence on us also, by destroying the planet that we all live on.
You might be onto something. I know my friends and family hate to watch it, and my gut feelings often contradict my eventual actions. I know there are unhealthy elements at play, and I'm guilty of perpetuating some of it. These relationships aren't one sided.
I think a major complication is that she's somewhat manic in that she has highs and lows. Her lows are extremely low. When she's higher though, she can be very pleasant, kind, good to her family, etc.
I find it very difficult to nail down who she is on that spectrum, or where she might eventually land between those states, and how I can judge her or my decisions based on how things fluctuate so much.
The word gaslighting is absolutely accurate, though. She does this a lot and I wish she didn't. I'm vulnerable to it because I tend to blame myself and hesitate to engage in confrontation when I'm uncertain of myself.
We do have kids. If we didn't, I suspect I would have moved on my now. Perhaps she would have too.
There's an interesting set of perspectives around this type of problem in psychology. Whether you look at popular moderns like Alain de Botton, Jordan Peterson, ancient philosophers, religion, etc. there is a recurring theme that commitment to a person matters, and without it, things kind of fall apart.
I find this interesting and compelling. I don't expect life to be easy, and I think welcoming and anticipating challenges is very healthy. This sort of problem does straddle boundaries that I find difficult to define, though. At which point is enough enough? When do we decide the commitment is no longer warranted? How "easy" should a relationship be? If I leave, will I be foolish for seeking anything different?
Not to drag this on - I find the topic very fascinating for both personal and more general reasons. This is a problem I believe a lot of us face. If I can't sove it for myself, I'd be happy to understand it better if only to serve my friends or children eventually.
> People's characters don't usually change or improve.
I wish you were wrong, but this does seem to generally be true. There are exceptions of course, but it seems inadvisable to ever hope for it to happen. It takes incredible work, and it's work that a lot of people don't have the knowledge or tools to understand or work with. Personal growth is perhaps one of the greater challenges in life.
Anyway, thanks for the discourse. I appreciate the advice. I should make apoint to look out for myself more when I sense gaslighting is occurring.
Looks like Portugal really turned their vaccination program around to be a real success story. As far as I can tell they are not reintroducing lockdowns?
The problem with this view is that the alternative to serverless is not spending money on bare metal servers, but renting actual or virtual servers on a month to month basis.
I only have experience with GCP’s Cloud Functions, but in that environment, “serverless” is only cheaper than virtual servers if your load can’t saturate the lowest end VM GCP has to offer.
Once you have enough load to justify going “unserverless” the prices drop to approximately 1/4 that of Cloud Functions for the same burst performance, and that’s before playing billing games like long-term commitments or using preemptible instances.
What’s truly scalable about “serverless compute” versus VMs is the line item on your bill. Sure, “they manage the auto-scaling” but for the per-unit price you rapidly hit a point where you might as well set up a Kubernetes load balancer and eat the setup costs. The pricing model only works out in your favor if you _don’t_ have load.
It would not surprise me to learn that the same is true of AWS prices.
I dunno... maintaining virtual servers is still a lot of work. You have to
* monitor lots of things like filesystem usage and CPU usage
* build new machine images (as well as possibly new container images!) to keep up with security updates
* tune autoscaling at multiple levels based on whichever server-based systems you're using
* maintain a secure way for production support folks to log into servers to see what is going wrong or perform emergency fixes
* build additional failover automation as well as what you'd already need for serverless
Serverless is a bit more expensive overall and less tunable, but there's just less to go wrong: much of the underlying server SRE work is handled by provider automation and engineers for whom that is their full-time job. So, I'm still pretty happy with it.
