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I don't know how to help you see it but I hope you don't do anything for a living that involves risk mitigation (I suspect you do not...) I ran you through a b

I don't know how to help you see it but I hope you don't do anything for a living that involves risk mitigation (I suspect you do not...) I ran you through a bunch of cases where you need information from your email urgently and there are painful consequences when you don't get it. Do you see how each one of these cases involves a painful loss of money/productivity/time? Can you visualize how someone can blow a multi-million dollar sales presentation because a key piece of data doesn't reach them in time? Do you consider that acceptable risk? Are you able to understand that the problem isn't "an hour of downtime a year" but the risk of that hour happening at a time that absolutely fucks you over? It's like saying "who cares if there's an hour a year that my car doesn't work?" It doesn't sound important except if that hour happens to be when you are getting your wife to the hospital to give birth, or when you're on your way to the airport for a flight you need to make, or if you're driving through the desert and breaking down for an hour is terrifying.

colechristensen 5y ago
>I hope you don't do anything for a living that involves risk mitigation (I suspect you do not...) Quite the opposite, I have worked a long time very closely with reliability and have done no small amount of time studying failure. Everything fails sometimes, there are always unknowns that aren't accounted for. >It's like saying "who cares if there's an hour a year that my car doesn't work?" This is often the case? Oh no, you have a flat tire, a dead battery, or whatever. It's not world ending, get to your destination another way or reschedule. >Can you visualize how someone can blow a multi-million dollar sales presentation because a key piece of data doesn't reach them in time? Do you consider that acceptable risk? If millions of dollars are on the line and you can't figure out how to work around a simple communications issue, you deserve to lose the deal. Not being able to handle failure or insisting on 100% uptime for dependencies is a sign that you have no idea how to handle risk.
- xyzelement 5y ago
  > Not being able to handle failure or insisting on 100% uptime for dependencies is a sign that you have no idea how to handle risk. Like I said 8 messages up this thread, I agree that people should have more resilient methods for handling these needs, the point is that this is often not existent.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    People don't have text messages, phone calls, messaging apps, in person conversations, USB thumbdrives, somebody else's email at a different provider... you're not a brain in a vat connected to the universe with email, you can figure out how to communicate without it for a while if it goes down.

colechristensen 5y ago

>I hope you don't do anything for a living that involves risk mitigation (I suspect you do not...) Quite the opposite, I have worked a long time very closely with reliability and have done no small amount of time studying failure. Everything fails sometimes, there are always unknowns that aren't accounted for. >It's like saying "who cares if there's an hour a year that my car doesn't work?" This is often the case? Oh no, you have a flat tire, a dead battery, or whatever. It's not world ending, get to your destination another way or reschedule. >Can you visualize how someone can blow a multi-million dollar sales presentation because a key piece of data doesn't reach them in time? Do you consider that acceptable risk? If millions of dollars are on the line and you can't figure out how to work around a simple communications issue, you deserve to lose the deal. Not being able to handle failure or insisting on 100% uptime for dependencies is a sign that you have no idea how to handle risk.

xyzelement 5y ago
> Not being able to handle failure or insisting on 100% uptime for dependencies is a sign that you have no idea how to handle risk. Like I said 8 messages up this thread, I agree that people should have more resilient methods for handling these needs, the point is that this is often not existent.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  People don't have text messages, phone calls, messaging apps, in person conversations, USB thumbdrives, somebody else's email at a different provider... you're not a brain in a vat connected to the universe with email, you can figure out how to communicate without it for a while if it goes down.