I like Lance Mannion’s blog, but he seems to discount anything with women in it. A lot of middle-aged men do; they can’t seem to help it. Since the protagonist of The Hunger Games isn’t even a woman, really, but is a teenage girl (though an extremely capable and whip-smart teenage girl), I was expecting that from him.

However, that’s not what I want to write about. Instead, I want to rant about this idiotic rat turd of a comment.

After a little more thought I know why I turned this off (having not read the book, which probably represents the vast majority of the movie audience) – it was right after they mention that it was the 75th annual Hunger Games, and I thought, WHAT? You mean this miserable farce has been going on that long? The population of the Districts, having once had enough spirit to rebel, is now subjecting themselves to poverty, squalor and serving up their kids every year to a slaughter? While the other half of their world lives in modern affluence? Surely you jest. I couldn’t possibly care less if you think I can even accept that premise in the first place.

Let’s see — we live in a country where income inequality has been rising for nearly forty years. Where there are 45,000 extra deaths every year due to no health insurance. Where global warming is denied, which will lead to vastly more deaths. Where living standards are falling for many, and that fall is accelerating.

And furthermore, we live in a world where a single country — Germany — singlehandedly and in an automated, industrially efficient fashion exterminated six million people not all that long ago. Where 800,000 were killed less than two decades ago in Rwanda by their former friends and neighbors. Where the Brazilian favelas exist (remind you of anything, like, say, the Districts?) A world where women are routinely “honor-killed” and have their faces burned with acid.

Compared to that, the deal that those people got, I’d rather compete in The Hunger Games. I’d have a better chance of coming out alive.

And this goddamn idiot commenter finds something like the premise of The Hunger Games implausible.

Fuck me.

I’m even choosing to ignore all the facts that she got wrong in her comment, as I don’t want to write a 3,000 word screed.

By the way, the Roman-era gladiatorial games — which I might remind you really, actually happened in our history and were more brutal than anything in Collins’ novels — went on for something like 800 years.

By the standards of what I’ve written above, to me The Hunger Games actually seems pretty tame. There, you have a one in 24 chance. In the Holocaust, in Rwanda, or as one of the 45,000 every year who dies from lack of health insurance in the US, what goddamn chance do you have?

And about that commenter, how do people live such cosseted, clueless lives? How do you fit so much dumbass in so little space?

These days, I try to avoid flinging insults like confetti at a ticker-tape parade, but sometimes it is just warranted. Not doing so would be wrong. This is one of those times.

I find it implausible how obtuse and uneducated and that commenter is, but nevertheless, there it is.

I stopped reading the New York Times article about data center power use after the second page, as I realized that the reporter(s) did not have the first damn clue what they were writing about.

I have built data centers. I run data centers. Not really large ones, at the moment, but the ones I run are getting bigger by the day. And running a small DC is in some ways harder than running a large one as you often lack the resources (financial and other) to make use of capabilities that large ones are able to tap. By the way of credentials, I am the US infrastructure manager for the largest company in the world who does what my company does (which is still pretty small), so I know just a little something about it.

The Times article could not be more clueless, really. I don’t regret not reading all of it. Running a data center – even a small data center – in a 24/7 operation is incredibly difficult. I am not saying that to make me seem noble, or my job harder. That’s just a fact. Here’s one reason why.

This isn’t just an incredibly inaccurate representation of the dedication and hard work of eng/ops everywhere in the computer industry, I know for a fact it’s also inaccurate in what regards to Facebook itself. I imagine Facebook engineers (and that of any other website really) reading this article, thinking about the times they’ve been woken up in the middle of the night to solve problems that no one has ever faced before, for which no one has trained them, because no university course and no amount of research prepares you for the challenges of running a service at high scale, and having to solve all that as fast as possible, regardless of whether it’s about making sure that someone can run their business, do their taxes, or that a kid halfway around the world can upload their video of a cat playing the piano.

I worked on a problem in our NYC DC for five hours on Friday, on a product that before I started I knew almost nothing about. The product is set up in a non-standard way (by a previous IT team), is unsupported by the vendor – though I cajoled them into assisting anyway – and is also very complicated to administer and to use.

So, let’s summarize. No one knows how to use it, no one knows how it is set up, the vendor doesn’t support it and the configuration status is unknown. Oh yeah, and who gets to fix it? Me, the “owner” of the data center.

Sound like a job you want to do? Yeah, didn’t think so. You’d be crazy to want to. (What does that say about me?)

I’ve sort of strayed away from the main point as I am still frustrated from Friday, but it’s always amazing to me how absolutely wrong articles can be when they are written by people who don’t know the field and who buy figures from clueless consultants*.

*As a rule, consultants are nearly always clueless.