Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The crown jewel of the NSA’s MSFT partnership is the San Antonio, Texas data center. The “5150 Rogers Road” data center was chosen because Texas has cheap electricity, which is an enormous cost outlay for the NSA. Additionally, and the FBI chose San Antonio for a significant presence as well because of this, is Texas has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the US.
Also San Antonio has something like 4 military bases. Ft. Sam Houston where the Army medics train, Lackland Air Force Base (home of cybercommand for the Air Force), Kelley Air Force Base, and perhaps even 1 or 2 I can’t recall.
120 minutes to the north is the recently established Army Futures Command in Austin, along with Ft. Hood in Killeen, the Army’s largest base in the world.
AWS does not currently have a data center in Texas, which has always frustrated the Texas government. They did establish a shipping center in San Marcos, but even GCO is building out in Dallas where IBM Cloud has a data center, and Oracle Cloud has an Austin data center.
This is interesting. The Wikipedia article has this gem:
"The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political, rather than technical reasons"
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-it...
Don't get me wrong, I love Texas and I love many of the Texans I've met for being some of the chillest, most down to earth, pragmatic and welcoming people I have ever met, but they are a bit weird about this particular issue sometimes.
a) Pragmatically, separating from the rest of the United States would be devastating to our economy. Much like the United Kingdom from the EU, but on a much larger scale, because the vast majority of our trade, people, and connectedness come from being part of the U.S. Texans like to trot out the factoid that relatively little land in Texas is owned by the federal government because the feds didn't get any when Texas joined the Union, but the land that is owned by the feds contributes a massive amount to our economy. Metro areas like Killeen and a good chunk of San Antonio would simply cease to exist if the military left. (Never mind that a lot of that oil that Texans are so proud of us dragging out of the ground has to go on pipelines that cross the U.S.)
b) It promotes an "us vs. them" philosophy that's not healthy. Texas tries to hold itself out as separate and, to some extent, "above" the rest of the United States. Yet we get the same two Senators and elect representatives to the same federal House as everybody else. Our way of doing things is not necessarily the right way simply because it's the Texan way. (Our legislature, proudly to some people's way of thinking, only meets once every other year and only for a couple of months. That's a terrible way to govern a state of several million people, especially with a phenomenally weak executive.)
c) When do we move on from trying to live history to remembering it? In order to graduate from college, I had to take courses in both federal and state history (3 credit hours of "HIS 1024 History of Texas I" is on my transcript), just because we're so wrapped up in our own mythology. Yes, Texas was its own country. So was California, and Alaska, and Hawaii. Those are things for the textbooks and to explain weird language on deeds and why so many flags fly over the state capitol. It's not the basis for some inexplicable "independent" streak.
Texas needs to get off its predisposition with its past and look towards its future, preferably being one that doesn't embrace fossil fuels--good job on the wind production, thanks T. Boone Pickens--and a car-focused, sprawling development culture.
I hope it does, though I'm watching from afar, having decamped to Washington State many years ago.
I'm not a Texan but I do see the rationale behind freedom to associate or not associate with people based on shared values or a lack thereof.
I would expect there to be a free trade agreement at least as good as for Canada and Mexico.
Canada has similar population as Texas and does very well outside the US. I don't see why Texas couldn't do the same.
I myself am increasingly of the opinion that while government, national and State (I’m a Californian) has a role, it has unfortunately carved out too big of a chunk and allocated itself too many roles, often on the most specious of arguments.
The idea of a legislature that meets infrequently, and where politician is a hat, not a job title, actually looks pretty ideal from where I’m standing. Why should I be disabused from this notion?
First, the Texas government was designed, post-Reconstruction, to give as little authority as possible to the state government and to move government as close to the citizens as possible. That's all well and good. Had we stuck with that model, I would have few complaints, but we didn't. The Legislature has, over the intervening hundred years or so, routinely chipped away at the ability for cities and counties to run themselves as their citizens see fit. To pick on a popular thing to get riled up about, as soon as Austin and Dallas tried to regulate plastic bags and Uber-style taxi services, the Legislature fell all over itself to prohibit cities from enacting ordinances of such a type. When Denton wanted to regulate (but not prohibit) fracking, the Legislature yanked that, too.
I take the view that there must be some government and that, in a state with as varied of interests and as many moving parts as Texas has, a rural-style, infrequent central government with a weak executive (the Texas Governor has some of the most limited authority out of all 46 states and 4 commonwealths in the United States), and limited home-rule city authority is not a desirable state. Running such a large entity should be a full-time job, both for the executive and the legislative, because a government should be able to react to changing conditions and the needs of its citizens. That stands separate from the scope of authority that a government should or should not have. If the government is not even present most of the time, how does it serve the oversight and governance functions? And if we wish to have limited central government, why should cities not be able to do what their citizenry wants with limited exceptions? Why can Dallas voters not tax themselves for all of the light rail they want (DART can only exercise the tax authority granted it by the state)?
Another example of "we've always done it like this" is the sunset bill. Most Texas agencies sunset after a specified time, usually 10 years. There's always a scramble in the legislative session to reauthorize some minor agency like the Texas Department of Prisons or, my personal favorite, the Railroad Commission (which, despite its name, has not regulated railroads for generations; it is the oil and gas regulator for the state). Yet, somehow this mad dash to get the work done before the Legislature goes sine die is seen as a useful exercise.
I don't understand the thinking that makes the word "politician" a pejorative, nor that it should be something that someone does in his or her spare time. Running a system that directly impacts the lives of almost thirty million people should be the singular focus of the people we send to do it. Maybe not their entire lives, but for sure while they're in office.
I now have near religious reverence for the internet's notion of renewable leases.
I will try to explain my viewpoint succinctly, and note that it isn't exactly applicable to all States everywhere, but it is definitely applicable to the Federal Government.
I don't see politician as a pejorative per se, but I do think that politicians as professionals have strong incentives to find stuff to do so they can show their voters that they are out there doing stuff, whether or not stuff needs to be done. What's great about the three-branch system of government is that even if you have a non-persistent central legislative branch, you can, in theory, have an active and vigorous Executive, or alternatively and practicing the principle of subsidiarity (or just Federalization really), have responsibility over a given thing handled by the lowest level of government capable of dealing with it, to the extent that it needs to be handled by a government at all anyway. Either way, you at least get to have active courtrooms available.
Communities can live, and let other communities live. The extended order of Liberty.
When you have an active and vigorous Legislature, and an active and vigorous Executive, you have two branches of government actively looking for things to do, so they can say to their voters "Hey, I'm out here doing these things and if you like what I'm doing, vote for me the next time around too!"
I have been questioning whether that is actually beneficial for society these last few months though, and to be honest, I'm leaning towards "No." I think the platonic ideal of a well functioning government is that it's there for the things you need it for, and no more. It still has the gun to your head taking tax revenue, but it puts it to use defending the Nation from actual (not abstract) threats, putting people in prison for a shorter list of crimes than we have now, building the roads and railways communities have decided they should have, and keeping the lights on in the Courts. (This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, just give you an idea where my mind is at lately).
When you break it down, for those kinds of jobs, you need construction workers and people signing off on the contracts. You need Judges and their clerks and bailiffs and some form of prison guard in the jails. You need a tax authority which means you need accountants and a Treasurer. You might need an Army at least sometimes, and you almost certainly need an active Navy if you're on the Ocean, and all the soldiers and sailors and airmen and crews this entails. Nowhere in there, do I see a role for an active and vigorous legislature other than to set the budget, raise the taxes it needs to support the budget, and make some bureaucrats very uncomfortable or remove them entirely when they abuse the powers of their office.
That's why we have a Civil Service (and a Military Service, and a Diplomatic Service), and why the President has the power to call Congress into session at the drop of a hat to do something that the President and his entire Executive branch doesn't have the vested Constitutional authority or budget to do on his own. What else is a legislature to do all day other than debate the merits of various lobbyist proposals, and step on the toes of governments lower on the totem pole, and pass out handouts to important power brokers and constituencies in their home districts like candy? I don't think it is meant to be a glorious job, and maybe it's not even meant to be a full-time job the way the Taxman or the Soldier or the Diplomat is supposed to be a full-time job.
I guess the long and the short of it is, it's a matter of incentives. If you're a full-time legislator, you will look for (and find!) stuff to do, even if it isn't the best use of public funds, because this job is what pays your bills. If you're not a full-time legislator, you at least have to consider the impact that legislation has on your own life when the legislature isn't in session.
I will say, I wouldn't wish for the governance structure that Texas seems to have, nor would I wish to inflict California's on anyone else. I appreciate the lessons on Texas tonight, it's given me a lot to think about.
The only reason we have those nice modern things like phones and the internet is specialisation; it makes it possible for people to pursue things other than basic needs to survive. Sadly, that also means that people can pursue things that many people might find useless or repulsive, like being a professional liar as some 'full-time politicians' seem to be called by the various journalistic outlets. (let alone the opinionated internet - look, it's us!)
If we were to leave out the 'politician' and just say "person assigned by people who are busy doing other things, to govern those people that choose them". The politician part that would normally be in there would ideally only be scoped to the candidate phase of things and the interaction between different governing persons/positions to get stuff done. If you put it that way, it suddenly makes much more sense to have someone do a governing job full time as you'd want such a person to actually get stuff done.
It seems you'd be ok with a lot of administrators of the public good who do it as a job and a few politicians who do it on the side.
I now think elected politicians should be full time, full paid, professional service workers, with fully staffed offices.
Before, I was for term limits. Until I started lobbying on my pet issue. Watching the grizzled, wily bureaucrats run circles around the part-time amateur politicians was illuminating. Whereas the longer serving electeds had enough experience, knowledge to hold the bureaucrats accountable.
I know almost nothing about Texas, or its government. But its drive-by policy making concerns me. I'd rather have my elected representatives sitting on the levers of power, keenly aware of what's what.
> Pragmatically, separating from the rest of the United States would be devastating to our economy. Much like the United Kingdom from the EU, but on a much larger scale, because the vast majority of our trade, people, and connectedness come from being part of the U.S.
If Texas seceeded from the United States, it could always do so as part of a customs union, or even single market, with the United States. That assumes the US of course that agreed to that (but it would be in the economic best interests of the US to agree). It would take away Texas' ability to run an independent trade policy, and Texas would basically have to accept various policies being dictated to it by the much more powerful and bigger US. But, there is nothing in principle impossible about such an arrangement. Indeed, the UK could end up with such an arrangement with the EU ("Norway plus customs union") – the latest Brexit deal doesn't have such an arrangement, but that is not because the EU is opposed, it is because the Johnson government is opposed. (If Corbyn was PM, it might actually happen.)
Likewise, freedom of movement of people and absence of border controls could be maintained if Texas and the US agreed. See the Schengen agreement, or the British-Irish Common Travel Area, for existing examples.
> Metro areas like Killeen and a good chunk of San Antonio would simply cease to exist if the military left.
If Texas seceeded from the US, it would need its own military. Given it has roughly 8% of US population, why could it not claim roughly 8% of the US military's assets and personnel? Obviously, the US would have to agree to that; but, it seems plausible to me that in a peaceful and legal secession, the US and Texas governments would sit down and negotiate a transfer of some US federal assets and personnel to Texas, including sections of the US military. Probably, any individual service member who had personal connections with Texas would be given the choice between transferring to Texas or remaining in the US. It wouldn't necessarily be exactly 8%, but it probably wouldn't be 0%. (Obviously certain capabilities, such as nuclear weapons, would be entirely excluded.)
> (Never mind that a lot of that oil that Texans are so proud of us dragging out of the ground has to go on pipelines that cross the U.S.)
International oil and gas pipelines are not unheard of.
To continue the analogy, the United Kingdom has "only" been a member of the EU and its predecessors for 47 years and it retained direct, non-delegated control over far more areas even after joining the EEC. Texas has been completely subservient to United States policy for four times as long and even if such a split were amicable, it would still be very messy.
The United States military has such a large presence in Texas because the United States Military is such a large organization, generally. There would be no reason for Texas to have such a comparatively large military, nor, I think, would an independent Texas be able to afford one. Killeen, for example, would probably still be an incorporated city but its population would be cut by two-thirds at best.
But the point of the thought exercise isn't to say whether or not it could happen; it's that Texans take an outsized view of whether it should happen and hold them/ourselves up on a false pedestal propped up by the idea of Texas being above/different/better-than the rest of the country when we're one of "the several States which may be included within this Union."
Texans already pay the federal taxes that purportedly fund the US military, though. I’m not sure if the US has more military assets in Texas than Texas itself can afford to pay for, but Texas is a big, rich state so I’d say there’s a chance that they’re effectively subsidizing some of the military bases in other states.
Texas could and likely would contribute military forces to various US-led coalition efforts at times.
https://taxfoundation.org/federal-taxes-paid-vs-federal-spen...
As our “very stable genius” of a President likes to point out, Germany and South Korea don’t exactly pay us back for stationing troops there either.
Unless the leaving party has a lot of somethings that the party they are leaving from wants, they don't really have much of a position to bargain.
Everyone seems to think that a (relatively) small unit of land and their people can 'take care of themselves', but unless you want to go back to just before the industrial revolution it really doesn't work that way. Almost everything everyone touches every day has some form of link to 'the outside world'.
Giving up interconnectivity really doesn't give anything back in return. (including self-regulation, unless you'd start living under a dome, or on the moon)
An independent Texas might find that an unequal deal with the US, in which the US gets to make all the major economic decisions and Texas just has to accept them, might actually put them in a better economic position than a more equal deal with greater trade barriers.
It isn't clear that Texas has that much of a say at the present anyway. For the last twenty to thirty years, it has been considered safe Republican territory, which given the nature of the US political system means it gets far less say than a swing state does. (That said, Texas used to be a swing state, and probably is going to become one again at some point, which will restore to it a lot of the political power it currently lacks.)
Absolutely not. The US has a huge military with a budget that exceeds the next top-8 or so military spender states in the world. And - almost all of its activity is foreign deployment for proto/pseudo-colonialism, occupations, pressuring other states with the threat of force etc. Texas wouldn't need any of that stuff. Now, obviously it would not be able to militarily defend itself from the US, so if it seceded at all its military would be mostly focused on Mexico, if at all. So - try 1% of asset and 2% of personnel maybe.
Why is that obvious? Nuclear weapons are state assets like anything else, and if you're going to follow your logic that a seceding state gets its part of the greater federal it should get some proportion of the nuclear weapons stockpile too.
The US is allied with at least three nuclear weapon states whose population is on the order of the population of Texas.
Besides, if you're going to setup a system where states can secede and seceding states have to hand over all their nukes you've created an absurd system where the last state to secede gets all the nukes.
I think it's weird to reject the idea out of hand in 2019. Practically, I doubt there'd be much difference between living in Texas in 2019 and living there one year after independence.
As globalism increases in the wake of colonialism, I actually think this could be a very positive thing. Empires and consolidated power are a problem. Tribalism is a problem. Nationalism is a problem.
Large groups of people are so embarrassingly bad at predicting the future that I'm always impressed when they get it right; but trying to do so often has a lot of positive side effects. Being ready to secede is a stupid one, but as a metaphor for "something goes wrong and we can't rely on people 1,000km away to provide for us" it would lead to some excellent planning.
Modern society is extremely efficient, extremely cheap and profoundly untested. We've had commercial electricity for 15 decades, the internet for 3 decades and quality GPS for 2. These are not long times on the scale that a country's logistics channels operate at; because things so central to how we work need to be ready for 1 in 100 and 1 in 200 year style events. Excessive caution may not actually be excessive.
They are pretty good at creating the future, though. As in - separating the power grid is a step towards separating other things and finally "separating the country". Classic Soros' reflexivity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy
Which can be summed up as "if you think this hard enough it may just come true".
Soros developed this idea after studying under Popper and put it to test in his ridiculously successful hedge fund manager career.
Separate the power system -> people's perception about Texas independence increases -> time passes -> let's separate something new, after all we're Texas, we get special treatment. Perception intertwined with action, so that you can't tell what comes first.
Reflexivity is by no means restricted to securities markets. It's an incredibly broadly applicable concept.
Also, in securities markets it's not just that price goes up so more people buy because the price has gone up, so price goes up even more. It's far far worse than that. It's that (for example) stock prices go up, therefore consumer/executive/banks confidence increases, therefore more credit and more spending in the economy, therefore higher corporate profits, therefore higher stock prices. The point is that it affects reality beyond just the securities markets, it affects the "fundamentals" too. I.e. you can't even trust something like a P/E ratio.
Regarding applying reflexivity to Texans, you'd be better off to recognize the long-standing, consistent cultural values of individualism and independence.
Cultural values are a product of reflexivity. The very fact that they differ between places even in the absence of any difference in genetic material of individuals is very good evidence. After all it's clear there's no "Texan Gene".
And I'm not saying it's bad! It just is a part of reality.
The people with this view are also a big and growing minority: https://texaspolitics.utexas.edu/blog/texan-first-american-s...
> Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 40 percent identify as Texans before they identify as Americans, far outpacing any other age group.
The first couple episodes of Jericho were tantalizing. The interesting part was the world and the geopolitical situation, but then so little about that actually changed over the course of the following episodes, it was just a bunch of small town politics and side stories among a few uncompelling characters.
I'll catch hell for this, but Battlestar Galactica was the same way. The mini-series and the first episode of season one are a completely different animal from the rest of the show. The rest of the show was just the writers releasing dribs and drabs of what the Cylons actually were and actually were planning, among a bunch of side stories between characters (okay these were more compelling characters for the most part, though largely unsympathetic).
I just rewatched the mini-series and first few episodes of Season 1 of BSG. While, I remember thinking the same thing at the time, it was very obvious the second time around that for large arcs, the writers didn't have much of a plan. If I remember correctly though, there was always a lot of uncertainty about how many seasons they show would have, so it was difficult to plan more than a season at a time. It was also SciFi's most expensive show at the time, IIRC. They had a similar problem with Farscape... it was a big (and expensive) show, which stressed the network financially.
BSG is a great premise, but hard to come up with an overarching story arc that makes sense or offers closure. But sometimes you just have to let the writers go with things to see where they end up. There were some really good episodes later in the series, even with the filler.
This is particularly bad for “conspiracy” type shows where the protagonist uncovered some massive conspiracy in the first six episodes. The rest of the show usually ends up escalating the conspiracy to the massively absurd. “Oh this goes way above the President... it’s a shadowy cabal with an underground lair in Biarritz that is manipulating the entire world for... reasons.”
The key seems to be recognizing the season-long and multi-season arcs, making them both satisfying, but never getting to an "Oh, what do we do next?" point.
Well, it and of course Babylon 5.
And maybe Lost. I know it gets nerd hate, but I respect it from a show-running perspective.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/06/20/texafornia-drea...
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2019/06/20/californ...
It's a running joke for sure, but being fiercely independent does not mean we actually want to secede from the Union.
All of America used to be independent. Especially Hawaii and Alaska. Should they secede?
And by the polls ~50% of Catalonians don't want independence.
Also, you can tell the polls are not that favorable or the central govmt would have made a referendum on the issue.
It began with the Texas Revolution and independence from Mexico. (Remember the Alamo!)
Texas immediately wanted to be annexed by the U.S., but the U.S. was reluctant about a potential war with Mexico. (Which when Texas was finally annexed, is exactly what happened.)
It may be non-sensical to people outside of Texas, but inside Texas there are a significant number of people who believe in, let's call it, "Independent Texas".
And it would actually make a lot of sense for more states to have completely independent grids. Problem of course, is that most states are far too poor for such an extravagance.
In Europe most of our grids are already connected and there are plans to create a supergrid that stretches all the way from Finland down to North Africa (mainly to get connected to the future Saharan solar plants).
Usually the bigger the grid the more resilient it is and the less dispersion there is in demand.
Like the 2003 Northeast blackout, for instance. [0] Things like that, where an error in one part of the grid cascades into massive issues elsewhere - those don't ever happen.
Sometimes, being big is a danger. Even when that's not the case, it can be worth accepting the same risk of each individual point on the map losing power if it means that (for instance) Ohio still has power while Indiana's in the dark and vise versa. I'd rather have one state in the Northeast lose power each year than have every state lose power at the same time every 15 years, if that makes any sense.
There is indeed risk for cascading failure but it is very rare (how long have the US grids been interconnected vs. how many times has there been a massive, multi-state blackout?) and with EU countries higher attention to infrastructure maintenance the risk is even less.
(And sometimes a system being extremely stable just means it's brittle, not strong)
The design of electrical power grids is such that their control systems are by their very nature suppose to keep frequency and voltage within tolerances no matter the unpredictability of the grid. This is the definition of stability and resiliency that you're talking about. And the design takes into consideration failures of any device on the grid.
That being said, even being a minor power grid, it isn't actually isolated. Its just not subject to FERC regulations. But for the most part, its own regulations are similar to that of what other grid operators are doing, because it makes sense to do for grid stability reasons.
"The Texas Interconnection is tied to the Eastern Interconnection with two DC ties, and has a DC tie and a VFT to non-NERC systems in Mexico. There is one AC tie switch in Dayton, Texas that has been used only one time in its history (after Hurricane Ike).
On October 13, 2009, the Tres Amigas SuperStation was announced to connect the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections via three 5 GW superconductor links.[2] As of 2017, the project was reduced in scope and only related infrastructure was constructed for nearby wind projects connecting to the Western Interconnection."
The main benefit from having one ISO in the US would be a reduction of rules. If you wanted to build solar or gas or wind in California, it would be subject to the same grid rules as Texas (e.g. how to handle a fault on a line - how quickly it recovers from fault, from frequency or voltage deviations, etc.). The fact that a particular power grid is isolated from others means they can't benefit from cheaper power due to overproduction of say wind power in Kansas. That electricity goes to someone else or goes to waste.
Finally if anyone here cared to read, the FERC doesn't regulate the Texas grid.. it's ISO has its own rules (which I'm pretty sure are similar to the rest of the ISOs in the US which are subject to meeting the FERC regulations or going beyond them). The Texas grid is connected to other grids.
"The Texas Interconnection is tied to the Eastern Interconnection with two DC ties, and has a DC tie and a VFT to non-NERC systems in Mexico. There is one AC tie switch in Dayton, Texas that has been used only one time in its history (after Hurricane Ike).
On October 13, 2009, the Tres Amigas SuperStation was announced to connect the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections via three 5 GW superconductor links.[2] As of 2017, the project was reduced in scope and only related infrastructure was constructed for nearby wind projects connecting to the Western Interconnection." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection
I worked next to a power plant that shared some network components with my employer at the time. They did an emergency shutdown minutes before we were impacted by blaster. Some of our upstream providers operating backbones in NY also were impacted and had capacity issues due to the worms. At least one of those providers had issues for days after the initial incident.
While nuclear plants do have diesel generators for this, it'd still be a good idea to have one or maybe two sections of the country which could bootstrap the rest of the North American grid(s) should there be a continental blackout.
Except when it isn't.
The entire purpose of states is not to be independent, the purpose of states is to provide a level of government closer to the People. The United States is an agreement between the States.
Secession from the United States is against the law. It was ruled on in 1869. There is nothing in the Constitution allowing for secession, as opposed to Article 50 in the EU law that is specifically about how a member State can leave the EU after joining.
But it's irrelevant in modern warfare anyway. The right play is to just flatten most of our states outright. You don't fight hot wars with amphibious landings anymore.
Hot wars between major powers would be over in a matter of hours these days.
But again, completely irrelevant anyway, because total war means total war.
If it weren't for the fact that most of them would be dead at the time, I'd argue that people who think in terms of occupations would be disagreeably surprised after the next war between great powers. A pretty common mistake in military thought has always been "fighting the last war" so to speak.
But my point is that even if you allow, for the sake of argument, that the “great power” phase of the war entails a two-week blitzkrieg, that still doesn’t get you out of the counterinsurgency business. And Texas is land that an enemy would definitely want to hold just for natural resources and logistics.
As for fighting the last war, the last great-power war had blitzkriegs that resolved themselves within weeks, protracted operations along broad fronts, irregular partisan warfare, and every other form of conflict one could envision. The Battle of France is just as much “the last war” as the Eastern Front was. I think the only sure thing is that we don’t know what the next great power war will look like, unless it’s merely a catastrophic nuclear exchange.
That's exactly what the next great war will look like, because you just nuke enemy formations and flotillas. Then you move on to nuking their cities when you realize they did the same to you and you no longer have an army or navy to fight with. Like I said, maybe a matter of hours. Days if we get lucky. No way it would last 2 weeks though.
That's kind of why our entire discussion is irrelevant. It would never happen. You don't really fight against nukes, you just die.
But for the sake of our hypothetical discussion:
As far as sending helicopters to Minnesota, those better be fairly long range helicopters. And then what's your attrition getting there? That's on top of the attrition getting enough helicopters for an invasion force into position to even be launched. Texas, you just take the attrition getting into position, but the beaches you can hit easily and with everything at your disposal without taking much additional attrition.
Minnesota, North Dakota, all that northern stuff is just bad business. Take the coastlines, and starve the midwest out, that's the best course of action. Going to Minnesota to fight through to Washington is just really bad business. If you can't even handle Texas, Minnesota will literally freeze you to death.
The range needed to fly helicopters from the Gulf of Mexico to Minnesota is fairly comparable to the range needed to fly helicopters from the Arabian Sea to Afghanistan, which has been done. This would require air supremacy and effective SEAD, but so would an amphibious landing in Texas (though admittedly, you need air supremacy and SEAD over a smaller area if you're only invading Texas). You might even end up using helicopters even for your "amphibious landing" in Texas; landing in boats like Normandy these days can be a dubious notion. Even so, you have the exact same set of questions re. landing craft that you do re. helicopters.
I dunno about Minnesota, but an enemy would occupy North Dakota for the same reason they would occupy Texas and the Gulf Coast: to secure the oil and gas supply. Even if Washington has already surrendered, The Bad Guys would need oil, and that means they would need Bad Guys on the ground to secure it. But they would need a lot of Bad Guys, because there are a lot of Texans with the inclination and ability to fight back.
MS business has long been built around large corporations and government yes, but this is putting the cart before the horse.
This is an overstatement.
I think the DoD's decades long reliance on AD and Windows in general gave MSFT a pretty huge advantage as well. Imagine trying to shift away from that Windows only world in any meaningful way in an organization and bureaucracy of that size. What a nightmare.
I imagine it is the same for the DoD.
1) The San Antonio data center: yes, it's a big and shiny one, but you don't pick MSFT vs AWS because of a shiny data center. AWS has amazing DCs across the US, and if you talk to people in the industry, AWS and Google have the most advanced DC technology out there, with Microsoft lagging a bit (but not too far off).
2) San Antonio has 4 military bases: not much to do with picking MSFT, again. The only argument for "human proximity" is Langley Virginia, and it is still a weak one. You don't need physical proximity, actually you try to avoid it (in case of an attack, you don't want to wipe out both the DC and the smart security people using it for the government).
3) Texas has a separate electrical grid: true, but most modern data centers NEED to have built-in redundancy in relation to: power grid, flood plains, supply routes, etc. Which means this is not really a big advantage anymore.
If the assessment of 2 vendors finds them equal in most regards wrt the requirements, that’s when you look at somewhat unrelated factors to make the call. In this case, it’s entirely plausible that the DoD considered the fact that MSFT would be pliable to their concerns as a deciding factor.
There's several other contracts mentioned in the post. It's a good reminder of how much money goes into the military–industrial complex. The JEDI contract was by far the largest contract awarded in this round. The rest of contracts total roughly 1.5 billion dollars.
Curiously, how long do you think it should take and at what cost?
I certainly agree that the scale and longevity of some defense projects can be difficult to justify, let alone comprehend. However, a project that may not seem pragmatic from the outside doesn't make it unnecessary.
FYSA, from this FY18 report[1] under Programmatics - Static Structural and Durability Testing:
ACTIVITY: The program suspended testing of the F-35B ground test article (BH-1) after completing the second lifetime of testing in February 2017. Due to the significant amount of modifications and repairs to bulkheads and other structures, the program declared the F-35B ground test article no longer representative of the wing-carry-through structure in production aircraft, deemed it inadequate for further testing, and canceled the testing of the third lifetime with BH-1. The program secured funding to procure another ground test article, which will be production-representative of Lot 9 and later F-35B aircraft built with a re-designed wing-carry-through structure, but to date does not have the procurement of the test article on contract. The program has not completed durability testing of the aircraft with the new wing-carry-through structure to date.
ASSESSMENT: Based on durability testing, the service life of early-production F-35B aircraft is well under the expected service life of 8,000 flight hours, and may be as low as 2,100 flight hours. Fleet F-35B aircraft are expected to start reaching their service life limit in CY26, based on design usage. The JPO will continue to use Individual Aircraft Tracking (IAT) of actual usage to help the Services project changes in timing for required repairs and modifications, and aid in Fleet Life Management.
Back of the envelope sanity check: assuming this was all technical labor at a conservative enterprise rate of $125/hr in FY20 dollars, that's roughly $12.5MM/yr or 50 unabused man-yrs per annum at face value--nevermind the time-value of money, infrastructure, materials, tooling, turnover, all the unknown unknowns spanning a period of performance in excess of a decade, etc.--for the Navy to purchase a quantifiable level of predictability still 13 years ahead of its time based on an execution plan that doesn't yet exist, using bespoke equipment and new methods that have yet to be developed, on arguably the most complex variant of the platform (at a unit cost which currently exceeds $100MM) whose tech integrations are effectively riding on the bleeding edge state of the art.
Given the limiting speed of government contracting and the high stakes on the table, 12 years doesn't strike me as unreasonable.
[1] https://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2018/pdf/dod/2018f35j...
This is huge.
<3
The fact that google employees could revolt and change a big decision says something.
Tons of stories on why google is evil and microsoft and amazon are the toast of the town. I would rather have google in that position vs amazon/microsoft/oracle because there is a soul and heart at the core of google. The core of Microsoft is different same with Amazon.
The DoD drives a lot of the US economy and a lot of companies have DoD contracts. This win, gives Microsoft an advantage n trying to get these companies on Azure and solidifies Windows and Office 365 positions at these companies. The follow on effects will likely be worth many multiples of this contract.
/s
"Microsoft said that its “Intelligent Cloud” segment recorded revenue of $10.8 billion, higher than the average analyst estimate of $10.42 billion. Microsoft said that Azure grew by 59%; the company does not break out Azure revenue nor operating income specifically, as Amazon does with AWS."
I'm sure Azure is a strong business, but, if they wanted to brag about it, why wouldn't they would break out those numbers? Intelligent cloud includes Azure + 0365 + other stuff.
Google does this with GCP as well. They report Google Docs/Gmail/G Suite + GCP +other combined.
"Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes was $11.1 billion and increased 13% (up 15% in constant currency), with the following business highlights:
- Office Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 13% (up 15% in constant currency) driven by Office 365 Commercial revenue growth of 25% (up 28% in constant currency)
- Office Consumer products and cloud services revenue increased 5% (up 6% in constant currency) with continued growth in Office 365 Consumer subscribers to 35.6 million"
"Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $10.8 billion and increased 27% (up 29% in constant currency), with the following business highlights:
- Server products and cloud services revenue increased 30% (up 33% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 59% (up 63% in constant currency)
- Enterprise Services revenue increased 7% (up 8% in constant currency)"
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q1...
What really matters long-term is who is acquiring the new-to-public-cloud customers as they move away from on-prem and who is attracting the new high-value workloads (AI). These are not growth of existing customer base which is why I think raw numbers are more useful in understanding the state of cloud market as we come to the end of the beginning of the public cloud era.
Granted, I chose those numbers to arbitrarily get that result. But, it also demonstrates the other reason to use percentage growth, inflation on a large customer bases implies growth where none exists.
PS: I realize they both have large and small customers, my point was not about AWS vs Assure but % vs $.
Not that it's relevant, but I actually signed up with Azure a couple months ago just to build an open source project on a cloud copy of Windows 10 with Visual Studio. I still ran into a bunch of problems with licensing type stuff, and wound up getting calls & e-mails from a sales rep. I'm glad there's some decent competition, but definitely prefer Amazon.
Edit: Corrected percentage, thanks to statguy.
Then again, there are only a few military in the world that need this kind of service, and those countries are highly unlikely to go with foreign entities as provider.
Europe have its own fighter, armor, command systems despite being US allies militarily.
Five Eyes: USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand
Then you have all the other wealthy countries with close ties to the US: Germany, Japan, etc.
I doubt this is the end. I'm assuming AWS will seek litigation given the circumstances.
They just seemed to let go of New York and JEDI wayyy too easily for being one of the wealthiest companies in the world. When someone like that bows out of such large projects so easily, something's off. And I have to take it at face value that they maybe just want revenue and not politics. Because no other reasons seem to present themselves here.
But I got your point on politics, that is something pretty unpredictable.
But, it is a maximum of $10Billion ...over 10 years. Th at is the key thing to focus on. I'm sure both companies have private sector customers right now that pay a quarter to half-billion a year right now.
I think the greater damage is optics vs financial..and optics can cost a lot.
Let's say AWS makes $30-Billion this year. So, losing $1-billion this year is 3.33%? (Though I'm sure the contract starts not this year?)...How much will AWS be making in 10 years?
Once all of the pentagon is integrated with Azure, after the 10 years are up, it will be very unlikely for Pentagon to want to switch, not only due to costs, but everyone will have been trained specifically for handling Azure.
This gives Microsoft a massive lead in terms of government infrastructure and all but guarantees we'll be seeing more and more contracts handed to Azure.
https://www.wired.com/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/
How? AWS already has 3 entire regions dedicated to the US government and those aren't going away anytime soon.
Note: Pentagon != all US govt agencies
Politics nowadays are just way too unpredictable and destructive. Just best not to be anywhere near it when, say, cost overruns on this project happen and you still haven't delivered anything the DoD is actually using.
it is a maximum of $10Billion ...over 10 years
But, government contracts are pretty beholden to a tight, static budget. Once the money is gone, it's gone. You can't necessarily go ask for additional taxes and budget for the year. Many times, you literally cannot go over budget no matter what. The pay-as-you go, variable pricing you get in the cloud, is actually a challenge in government budget.
In the private sector, when you go over budget..funds can be found elsewhere in the company, etc.
(They seemed to like the idea of New York a little bit. Probably because of multimodal transport connections to NoVA and the Europe/Africa side of the world. But even that fell through. And as far as I can understand, that too was because of politics.)
Also, Amazon has a tremendous footprint here already. Their largest region is located in Ashburn (~25 miles east), CIA is roughly 5 miles for Crystal City, Herndon and Ballston have large AWS sales/engineering offices, and Richmond (roughly 1.5 hours south) hosts one of their largest distribution centers on the east coast. In short, they were committed to this area long before HQ2, let alone JEDI. They cannot be happy about losing the contract award, but it was only one of many things Amazon/AWS are going in NoVA.
Ask Frank Underwood says: When the tits are that big, everybody gets in line.
And 10 billion over 10 years is what? Maybe 3 to 5% of Amazon's yearly revenue? You really want to be at the epicenter of the shitstorm that will happen if the project goes over budget and you still haven't delivered anything anyone in the DoD actually uses? (Maybe I shouldn't have said "if the project goes over" but "when"?) Especially being a big tech firm nowadays?
And you're gonna step into all that unnecessary drama for access to a 10 year / 10 billion project?
I don't think so. Not for a billion a year in revenue when you're already sitting at over 230 billion a year in revenue. (Or even just the over 30 billion a year that AWS alone is sitting at.)
Admit it man, politics being what they are these days, particularly for big tech firms, it's just not worth it.
That's the point.
It's the shitstorms that generate the tweetstorms that impact their larger bottom line.
With the above sentiment, giving Wash Post owner a 10 bln dollar Gov contract for work with military -- would have be borderline absurd. It is difficult to separate these types of discussion from political bias of commenters, but you would have to create your own views (if you do not have them already)
For pro-president, anti-Coup views on the topic, search for:
To find some examples of Wash Post collusion with the coup crowd, just use:
- "Washington Post forced to correct"
- "Washington Post fabricated" in non-Google non-Yahoo search engines.
- "Washington post Covington no apology"
- "Washington post sandbagged"
As I noted, 10s of millions of tax payers consider Washington Post is not a newspaper, but a propaganda agent actively involved in to the coup attempt against a constitutionally elected President of US.
Just chucking it of to 'president does not like a news paper' -- is diluting the tremendous affects these things have on the well-being of the country and its citizens, and, (given US position in the world stage) , on the rest of the world.
Additionally, anti-president spying and evidence manufacturing was, in part, orchestrated by leaking to these 'newspapers' and then referencing the generated articles as 'potential evidence' that warrants the investigation.
(eg, leaking the dossier [1] and other fabrications through news organizations )
Some think the anti-president coup attempt in US, is good for the country and for the world.
Some do not.
That probably, defines a big part of person's view, where they stand on awarding contract to AWS vs MS.
(Unless there is tremendous technical evidence that MSs offer will not be competent compared to AWS, or that financial burden on tax budget will be enormously different)
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/fisa-memo-scarier-wat...
Washington Post referred to the now dead head of the terrorist organization as: 'austere religions scholar'.
I guess, for Washington Post, Hitler was a dog loving vegan and a self-taught artist.
(they have changed the article by now).
Giving Pentagon business contracts to owner of this 'esteemed news publication', hosting these 'journalists' would, definitely would be absurd.
They also have the capability to detect massive file copies/deletions for special locations, etc (i forgot the technical term)
I love AWS, but I have seen some benefits with integrating O365 and Azure.
https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/03/analysts-pe...
It shows that Azure is moving up to challenge AWS's throne. Interesting times to come!
We can glimpse a world-wide stack-ranking system: "Echelon [0], who are the 1000 individuals most threatening to our strategic position and what will be their whereabouts today?". "Matrix [1], please dispose of these individuals at these locations". Let's pray there will still be some humans between step 0 and step 1. Worse, by the logic of MAD, it is possible we are going to end up with 2 such systems, one for USA and one for China, caught in a new cold war. Think distributed Vietnam.
I think most of your description is coming form a high-ranking general's wet dream though. When it comes to actual engineering, it would be between the simple solution that works - or complex solution that doesn't work.
Having worked in a predictive analytics role before, I can guarantee that '1000 individuals most threatening to our strategic position' would consist of 500 innocent villagers, 30 kids playing around and 1 hospital.
[1]: https://www.intelligence.gov/ [2]: https://www.fedscoop.com/cia-confirms-multi-cloud-procuremen...
If anything I don't know if $10 billion is going to be enough for the level of crazy that can go on in the government.
“Were not going to do that,” Mattis later told other Pentagon officials, according to the excerpt. “This will be done by the book, both legally and ethically.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/25/reuters-america-update-5-mic...
Mattis resigned December 2018, his successor put Amazon's contract up for review in August.
But maybe Amazon dodged a bullet here, Microsoft employees would have many tales to tell about how their government customer users and their requirements onto Microsoft itself. Assuming this decision stays.
xoxo,
Oracle”
Oracle and IBM are engaged in a race for irrelevance.
https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/
China's government makes companies store Chinese data in China and under different privacy and security laws than other nations. In particular, China makes companies enter into joint ventures with a Chinese company and comply with laws related to CCP oversight. (Not saying I agree, just stating the facts).
It's the same as Apple's iCloud for China being under the control of a joint venture company based in China.
https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT208351
AWS's "gov" cloud is a seperate set of regions in the US that are specifically for US government and contractor use and accounts in those regions are separated from the rest of AWS's infrastructure.
If it's less capable, it's less likely to get embroiled in stupid imperialistic adventures.
Edit: I don't understand why so many people are, at the same time, so enthused by the idea of starving government (Because they think most of its services are a waste of money), while at the same time, insisting on spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Same here, that’s why I’m glad this contract went to MS instead of AWS, as I see the latter as being technologically better than MS’s cloud solution.
While the US military expenditures are ridiculously high, they're only ~34% of worldwide expenditures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
I don't trust or rely on any infrastructure that largely uses microsoft products...I'm sure there's some minor stuff hidden away here and there within systems. MSFT has a software philosophy, which is reciprocated in their culture, that can only be described as byzantine and unpredictable. They are basically 00's Oracle at this point.
They may yet right the ship as time goes on and their growing revenue points in the direction that they will, but anyone who's used all three major cloud-providers knows they're still at the bottom of the totem pole.
Satya Nadella has been on a long-term campaign to transform the culture in some pretty inspiring ways, to be honest. It's led to the departure of long-time fixtures in leadership--the most shocking of which was the head of the Windows team (remember the agonizingly pushy nature of the Windows 10 rollout?). Today, there is no "Windows" team anymore, as they've been absorbed under the "Experiences and Devices" group. And increasingly, open source and embracing of other technologies has become a shocking priority (the decision to move to Chromium-based browser was especially shocking, but on further thought, consistent with Satya's philosophy).
So, yeah! I'm pretty optimistic of Microsoft's future. It's going to take some time to shed a lot of the old image it earned under Bill Gates in the 90's and Steve Ballmer more recently. But in my opinion, I think the company has by now earned what will likely take a few more years to become more apparent to the rest of the world. Basically, the CEO didn't just transform the company from a Windows-based business to a Cloud service provider; he absolutely moved to change the culture as the foundation for that move.
Azure, sure, but Windows and Office are at this point very mature products. They're not going to win awards, but they get the job done.
I imagine there will be a lot of unrest inside the company about this, and I think things are about to get tricky for Nadella. Up until now he's been largely able to be above a lot of the labor disputes that have been roiling the other FAANGs recently, but that's mostly out of luck: Microsoft's business doesn't involve arbitrating culture war disputes on social media or search reuslts, nor employing underpaid warehouse workers. But now there's going to be no way to wiggle out of the fact that this money is coming from Trump's DoD, and $10 billion isn't a paltry sum that they can just wave off to claim the moral high ground.
Satya's next "fireside chat" is going to be tremendously awkward, I think.
Not saying decision is good or bad but in terms of setting clarity this was really critical.
So of course this invites the question of whether petty politics influenced a $10B govt deal.
Trump rather openly has it in for Jeff Bezos because of the existence of WaPo, which has spilled over into attacks on Amazon more than once before.
Buying the Washington Post certainly forced the world around him to see him as political...even if he considers himself not.
You never considered the idea that the richest man in the world may be political?
It'd be more surprising for me to find out that he wasn't political; you don't accrue that kind of cash without playing political games at at least some point in your portfolio -- even if it's just for the opportunity to reduce your tax burdens.
My point is, I don't think he bought the Post to be political or political reasons. I think he bought The Post because he's a rich collector of nice/novel/rare things..and it seemed like a fun hobby. At the time.
If someone wanted to sell me The Post or let's say WSJ for what I consider pocket change, I would most certainly be interested. Good journalism is something that is going away, but, the obscenely rich can curate and prop up.
TL;DR: Bezos thinks the Post is an important institution for our democracy, and he believed he could help it recover financially by taking advantage of the internet.
If you think this site has a Republican slant, your own political perspective must be very badly skewed.
I'm certainly in no position to validate its truth claims. But in the current climate. With Google withdrawing its bid at behest of its employees. Protests at AWS conferences over involvement with ICE. Peter Thiel arguing Silicon Valley companies should "do more" in the form of defense partnerships. And given the historical roots of the Valley. It helps to stay deeply informed and philosophically consistent in figuring out where you stand ;)
https://areomagazine.com/2019/10/25/in-defense-of-the-war-on...
As far as his list of Al Qaeda heavies killed by strikes goes, it had become even a staple of late night comedy routines at that point that the newest "Al Qaeda No 2" had been blown up. It felt like the military was writing the press releases for Stars and Stripes and distributing them to everyone.
And with regard to his link about the Muslim Brotherhood and settlement and civilizational jihad, the last I heard about Hizb ut-Tahrir in America they were trying to buy some 40 acre dairy farm in Wisconsin and failing miserably (no word about any mules)
Interesting that this myth is still alive. It started with Bush falsely claiming the 2003 blackout was Canada's fault before an investigation had even been done. Here is the actual postmortem report.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandM...
Perhaps you confuse Petaki with Bush? He blamed Ontario at one point.
Developing story. There are just two paragraphs in the article so far. I can copy paste it here if you'd like but archive.fo is probably more authoritative (should be done archiving in a minute)
It's antithetical to open discussion and analysis.
Come on it's hacker news, they specifically say workarounds are ok. I figured the paywalls were just a test honestly. If you're determined you should be able to find a way to read it.
Perhaps this proposal should have been called Synchronised Information Technology Holdings.
Given your feelings about the US Military, you probably also don't like the police. The Jedi order were a law enforcement organization, a police force. I'm not sure you would have liked them much if you were living in the Star Wars universe.
I would not align myself with the Jedi or the Sith, if I were lucky enough to be living in the Star Wars universe. I'd rather be a trader in some far flung system, quietly going about my business and exploring the universe.
Wondering if its Jeff Bezos v. Trump or the Office 365 possibility that did it (my bet is on O365)
Also, the contract is going to the largest company in the world now...isn't that just "same same"?