I just figured that it's his way of saying that if you're building distributed systems that lose prodigious amounts of data because you (a) don't implement the

I just figured that it's his way of saying that if you're building distributed systems that lose prodigious amounts of data because you (a) don't implement the right algorithms, and (b) don't appear to have been influenced by the literature, then you might as well be playing with dolls. IOW, his version of "databases are hard; let's go shopping"