5 ms·

It's a lot like AWS. Yes, the uptime is likely to be better than your on-prem solution. However, unlike when yours inevitably falls over and has zero impact on

It's a lot like AWS. Yes, the uptime is likely to be better than your on-prem solution. However, unlike when yours inevitably falls over and has zero impact on anybody else, when AWS falls over it wipes out entire swathes of the internet. Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak. Smaller organizations means redundancies and options. Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency. Redundancy is good.

bryanrasmussen 1mo ago
inefficiency often creates redundancy, but they are not synonyms. Redundancy may be inefficient, but you can also build redundant systems that looking at from a micro perspective seem inefficient but what you see is only a local inefficiency; if you distribute their effects far enough in space and time you find that they are actually at a macro scale more efficient than not having them because they prevent breakdowns that destroy all the smaller systems held within the bigger one.
forgotaccount3 1mo ago
> Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak. These are two unrelated events though. Other consolidated suppliers have had events in the past, and they did not 'wipe out' our food supply because they identified the root cause and the impacted supplies, initiated a recall, and the rest of their redundant, distributed systems remained intact. The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility. If we had 20 'local' distributors who were all bought by Taylor farms and one of those locations had a significant health issue, there wouldn't be a large issue if Taylor identified which one had the failing and then distributed their other 19 location's product to the area facing the shortage due to it's location's product being recalled.
- CPLX 1mo ago
  > The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility. Right, and the issue with the King of England wasn't the consolidation of all power in his hands, but rather him not taking responsibility for everyone's welfare.
SoftTalker 1mo ago
For the recent cyclospora outbreak, a relatively tiny number of people were affected. Per the CDC[1]: 17,180 cases; 922 Hospitalizations; 2 deaths. Not to diminish this for anyone affected, but the safety of driving cars is far worse than that and most of us do that daily. I never stopped buying or eating lettuce. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/cyclosporiasis/cases/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/cyclosporiasis/cases/index.html
- ansley 1mo ago
  "not to diminish" as you wave away 2 people that have died and make a false equivalency to traffic accidents. This is not a data exercise, this is real life and 1 person getting sick from this stuff is too much.
  - logifail 1mo ago
    > This is not a data exercise, this is real life [...] You may not wish to hear this, but real life is very much a data exercise: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
  - kulahan 1mo ago
    ONE person getting SICK is too much??? We’ve never been within a million miles of this random bar you’ve set. No country has. It’s absolutely insane to try and hold the position that our food must be so perfectly clean that it cannot ever get anyone sick. That would almost certainly be impossible. If you can’t even engage with reality, nobody will take these massive statements seriously.
- timschmidt 1mo ago
  I was one of those affected. The official CDC numbers are underestimates, because they're only counting cases confirmed by culture. My doc asked enough questions to make sure it wasn't your typical stomach flu or food poisoning and got me the antibiotics ASAP which I appreciated. I assume I'm not counted as a result. I have to assume others aren't as well.
stickfigure 1mo ago
From a strictly utilitarian perspective, more redundancy will result in more deaths, since food handling expertise is concentrated in larger organizations. I say this as someone who gets most of my veg from a local CSA. It's not because I think it's safer. It probably isn't.
wahern 1mo ago
> I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak. 1) Why? The source was quickly identified, and it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier. 2) Why only now? Bagged leafy greens are notorious for outbreaks. The extra processing steps means greater opportunity for introducing contamination (more people handling the produce), and greater opportunity for cross-contamination. This food safety expert/activist/litigator has explained both of those points many times: https://www.marlerblog.com/ https://www.marlerblog.com/ Though, being middle-aged and perhaps with better-than-average recollection, I connected the dots to bagged leafy greens years ago, across many news cycles, and to the risk of food poisoning from vegetables generally, through hard, personal experience.
- k_roy 1mo ago
  > The source was quickly identified, and it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier. The mixed messaging certainly didn’t help. One day it’s Taylor Farms and the next the FDA was apologizing. And even once it was found to be Taylor Farms, you can’t control every Taco Bell or anything else. Mostly it just killed any consumer confidence in greens
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - robocat 1mo ago
    > you can’t control every Taco Bell Restaurants and fast-food outlets generally can't/don't avoid their staff making sketchy health decisions. Don't eat at them if you're worried. Read anything about back-kitchens and staff's interesting attitudes towards health risks. I highly recommend Kitchen Confidential - amazing novel writing. Although my intro to the genre was 1933's Down and Out in Paris and London (an upper-middle class хорошо horrorshow). An all-time favorite book.
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
- stouset 1mo ago
thaumasiotes 1mo ago
> Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency. No; you can't have redundancy without inefficiency, but you can have inefficiency without redundancy.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
analog31 1mo ago
A possible issue with consolidation is "too big to fail." The bigger the company, the more likely that the government goes into denial about it rather than meeting the problem head-on.
0xbadcafebee 1mo ago
> when AWS falls over it wipes out entire swathes of the internet Except AWS doesn't fall over, regions do. The problem isn't using one provider, it's that everyone uses one region of that provider. When that region goes down, so many people report outages that it seems like AWS as a whole went down, but it didn't. Same basic deal with Taylor Farms. It was only lettuce sourced from Central Mexico, and it was distributed to the east coast and some central states. Page 18 of this PDF (https://www.taylorfarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/TaylorFarms-impact-report.pdf https://www.taylorfarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Taylo...) shows all the growing regions. Of all 22, only 1 sent out bad lettuce. But popular opinion is that the all of it was bad. So the risk wasn't their scale. If anything, the risk was their customers (the walmarts, costcos, krogers, etc) not labeling where it came from or more stringently tracking these things or planning for an "incident". None of this is new, everybody knows leafy greens are the most likely source of food poisoning. Just like AWS isn't to blame when customer sites we depend on go down from one bad service in one region, we shouldn't be blaming Taylor Farms. We should be blaming the customer-companies we all use who didn't plan for a very predictable failure.
- zbentley 1mo ago
  > Except AWS doesn't fall over, regions do 2020 Kinesis outage has entered the chat
hdgvhicv 1mo ago
AWS doesn’t give higher uptime in my experience, but that’s not the point. The point is that if everyone is down once a year, you as the CTO don’t get blamed. If you are down just once in 10 years but everyone else is up you do get blamed.
aaron695 1mo ago
[dead]

bryanrasmussen 1mo ago

inefficiency often creates redundancy, but they are not synonyms. Redundancy may be inefficient, but you can also build redundant systems that looking at from a micro perspective seem inefficient but what you see is only a local inefficiency; if you distribute their effects far enough in space and time you find that they are actually at a macro scale more efficient than not having them because they prevent breakdowns that destroy all the smaller systems held within the bigger one.

forgotaccount3 1mo ago

> Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak. These are two unrelated events though. Other consolidated suppliers have had events in the past, and they did not 'wipe out' our food supply because they identified the root cause and the impacted supplies, initiated a recall, and the rest of their redundant, distributed systems remained intact. The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility. If we had 20 'local' distributors who were all bought by Taylor farms and one of those locations had a significant health issue, there wouldn't be a large issue if Taylor identified which one had the failing and then distributed their other 19 location's product to the area facing the shortage due to it's location's product being recalled.

CPLX 1mo ago
> The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility. Right, and the issue with the King of England wasn't the consolidation of all power in his hands, but rather him not taking responsibility for everyone's welfare.

SoftTalker 1mo ago

For the recent cyclospora outbreak, a relatively tiny number of people were affected. Per the CDC[1]: 17,180 cases; 922 Hospitalizations; 2 deaths. Not to diminish this for anyone affected, but the safety of driving cars is far worse than that and most of us do that daily. I never stopped buying or eating lettuce. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/cyclosporiasis/cases/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/cyclosporiasis/cases/index.html

ansley 1mo ago
"not to diminish" as you wave away 2 people that have died and make a false equivalency to traffic accidents. This is not a data exercise, this is real life and 1 person getting sick from this stuff is too much.
- logifail 1mo ago
  > This is not a data exercise, this is real life [...] You may not wish to hear this, but real life is very much a data exercise: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
- kulahan 1mo ago
  ONE person getting SICK is too much??? We’ve never been within a million miles of this random bar you’ve set. No country has. It’s absolutely insane to try and hold the position that our food must be so perfectly clean that it cannot ever get anyone sick. That would almost certainly be impossible. If you can’t even engage with reality, nobody will take these massive statements seriously.
timschmidt 1mo ago
I was one of those affected. The official CDC numbers are underestimates, because they're only counting cases confirmed by culture. My doc asked enough questions to make sure it wasn't your typical stomach flu or food poisoning and got me the antibiotics ASAP which I appreciated. I assume I'm not counted as a result. I have to assume others aren't as well.

stickfigure 1mo ago

From a strictly utilitarian perspective, more redundancy will result in more deaths, since food handling expertise is concentrated in larger organizations. I say this as someone who gets most of my veg from a local CSA. It's not because I think it's safer. It probably isn't.

wahern 1mo ago

> I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak. 1) Why? The source was quickly identified, and it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier. 2) Why only now? Bagged leafy greens are notorious for outbreaks. The extra processing steps means greater opportunity for introducing contamination (more people handling the produce), and greater opportunity for cross-contamination. This food safety expert/activist/litigator has explained both of those points many times: https://www.marlerblog.com/ https://www.marlerblog.com/ Though, being middle-aged and perhaps with better-than-average recollection, I connected the dots to bagged leafy greens years ago, across many news cycles, and to the risk of food poisoning from vegetables generally, through hard, personal experience.

k_roy 1mo ago
> The source was quickly identified, and it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier. The mixed messaging certainly didn’t help. One day it’s Taylor Farms and the next the FDA was apologizing. And even once it was found to be Taylor Farms, you can’t control every Taco Bell or anything else. Mostly it just killed any consumer confidence in greens
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- robocat 1mo ago
  > you can’t control every Taco Bell Restaurants and fast-food outlets generally can't/don't avoid their staff making sketchy health decisions. Don't eat at them if you're worried. Read anything about back-kitchens and staff's interesting attitudes towards health risks. I highly recommend Kitchen Confidential - amazing novel writing. Although my intro to the genre was 1933's Down and Out in Paris and London (an upper-middle class хорошо horrorshow). An all-time favorite book.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
stouset 1mo ago

thaumasiotes 1mo ago

> Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency. No; you can't have redundancy without inefficiency, but you can have inefficiency without redundancy.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

analog31 1mo ago

A possible issue with consolidation is "too big to fail." The bigger the company, the more likely that the government goes into denial about it rather than meeting the problem head-on.

0xbadcafebee 1mo ago

> when AWS falls over it wipes out entire swathes of the internet Except AWS doesn't fall over, regions do. The problem isn't using one provider, it's that everyone uses one region of that provider. When that region goes down, so many people report outages that it seems like AWS as a whole went down, but it didn't. Same basic deal with Taylor Farms. It was only lettuce sourced from Central Mexico, and it was distributed to the east coast and some central states. Page 18 of this PDF (https://www.taylorfarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/TaylorFarms-impact-report.pdf https://www.taylorfarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Taylo...) shows all the growing regions. Of all 22, only 1 sent out bad lettuce. But popular opinion is that the all of it was bad. So the risk wasn't their scale. If anything, the risk was their customers (the walmarts, costcos, krogers, etc) not labeling where it came from or more stringently tracking these things or planning for an "incident". None of this is new, everybody knows leafy greens are the most likely source of food poisoning. Just like AWS isn't to blame when customer sites we depend on go down from one bad service in one region, we shouldn't be blaming Taylor Farms. We should be blaming the customer-companies we all use who didn't plan for a very predictable failure.

zbentley 1mo ago
> Except AWS doesn't fall over, regions do 2020 Kinesis outage has entered the chat

hdgvhicv 1mo ago

AWS doesn’t give higher uptime in my experience, but that’s not the point. The point is that if everyone is down once a year, you as the CTO don’t get blamed. If you are down just once in 10 years but everyone else is up you do get blamed.

aaron695 1mo ago

[dead]