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Comment by tetromino_ | Hacker News Reader

If you sign up for electrical service for your house, and your shithead neighbor taps your line to power his array of grow lamps and crypto mining rigs, the power company will happily charge you thousands of dollars, and you will need a police report and traverse many layers of customer service hell to get a refund. If you sign up for water service and a tree root cracks your pipe, the water company will happily charge you thousands of dollars for the leaked water, and will then proceed to mandate that you to fix the broken pipe at your own expense for a couple tens of thousands more; and yes, that may well bankrupt you, water company don't care. So why do you expect different treatment from a computing utility provider?

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You're right, but even if I cut the water pipe right after the meter and run it for a month I might get a few thousand dollar charge.

You can ring up tens of thousands+ overnight with AWS. The scale of potential damages is nowhere even close.

> If you sign up for electrical service for your house, and your shithead neighbor taps your line to power his array of grow lamps and crypto mining rigs, the power company will happily charge you thousands of dollars

Unlike cloud services, your electrical service has a literal circuit breaker. Got a regular three-phase 230V 25A hookup? You are limited to 17.25kW, no way around that. If that shithead neighbor tries to draw 50kW, the breaker will trip.

If it were the cloud, the power company would conveniently come by to upgrade your service instead. A residential home needing a dedicated 175MW high-voltage substation hookup? Sure, why not!

Water leaks, on the other hand, tend to be very noticeable. If a pipe bursts in the attic you'll end up with water literally dripping from the ceiling. It is very rare to end up with a water leak large enough to be expensive, yet small enough to go unnoticed. On the other hand, the cloud will happily let your usage skyrocket - without even bothering to send you an email.

There are plenty of compute service providers working with a fixed cap, a pre-pay system, or usage alerts. The fact that the big cloud providers don't is a deliberate choice: the goal is to make the user pay more than they wanted to.

In addition to everything that's already been mentioned, another obvious difference is that energy and water are finite resources that are already provided at relatively low margins. Cloud services are provided at obscene gross margins. The numbers are all made-up and don't reflect the actual costs in providing those services.

I don't know in US, but having limits on how much electricity a house is able to take from the gride is absolutely something in some countries out there.

Definitely in the US too, I'm not resident either, but your 100A or whatever supply is a hard limit on what it can cost you per time period.

At least in my country the metering is done _in_ the house so my neighbour has to break and enter to tap the line behind the meter. I would probably notice well before bills would pile up. If he taps it outside, probably no one would ever notice if done right. The grid looses energy all the time. Not every kWh that goes into the network is billed in the end.

As always, it just doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to compare physical and virtual worlds. As in leaving your front door unlocked in rural areas vs not securing your remote shell access.

The first instance is difficult to fix as crime can often involve substantial losses to people and often there's no route to getting a refund.

The broken water pipe should be covered by buildings insurance, but I can imagine it not being covered by some policies. Luckily a broken water pipe is likely not as expensive as not having e.g. third party liability protection if part of your roof falls off and hits someone.

For your scenarios, I have the police, the public service commission, utility regulators, my elected officials and homeowners insurance to potentially help. Not that it always works, not that it's easy, quick or without pain, but there are options.

For the cloud, I have the good will of the cloud provider and appealing to social media. Not the same thing.

The difference is this actually happens, a lot, unlike your straw man. It happens enough that there's a website dedicated to it.

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