What was actually damaged/destroyed

The damage was Additional revenue-generating opportunities normally enabled by AWS were lost.

For example: If because of an outage your Ecommerce website is down for an hour -- there is a certain volume of sales: Revenue opportunity: which you lose.
You calculate that loss by using past data to estimate your expected revenue during the particular hours of the day times the number of hours that you were down leading to an estimated number and dollar sales volume lost.

Given that the outage was claimed to be in Eastern US, why did I suffer multiple service outages in Idaho?

Clearly bc you used services that dependent on the affected network.

US-EAST-1 outages also have a way of cascading to the other sites, because it's the most populated region with the largest amoutn of resources.
When East-1 has issues.. the other regions will receive a huge volume of additional load. They had EC2 launch issues, and throttled ---- slowed down new launches deliberately; likely because every other customer in the US-East-1 region attempting to deploy instances into other regions due to the outage impacting their east-1 resources. This surge in activity in other regions caused by customers attempting to shift traffic around to get past East-1 outage has a chance of causing major network degradation across all regions.

the correct accusation is: "you shouldn't outsource your critical business infrastructure to a huge megacorp that can survive without you."

Perhaps you should not, but most businesses DID NOT and Will not build a resilient in-house infrastructure that provides nearly the average uptime as AWS.

For example.. 99% of companies' -- even large corporations' internal Email the whole company relies on would typically be on a single MS Exchange 2016 server. You would have a hard drive crash, and the server would be down for days while the backup restores.

Before you start complaining that companies shouldn't outsource critical business Infrastructure... I think you should take a study on what exactly that infrastructure looks like Not outsourced.

The in-house schlop is in general more susceptible to outages, but of course it has the advantrage that your outage will typically not happen at the exact same time as a thousand other corporations' outages.

The thing is it cost billions In revenue Amazon created opportunity to earn in the first place

It is not as if AWS centralization is this critical threat that caused billions in damage. They caused many billions in revenue generation which was slightly reduced during a short outage -- which is extremely minor compared to the value AWS provides. I mean a 24-hour outage is not even a concern.. come back when they have a real catastrophe and it's a major 7-day outage. Even that, quite honestly, may not be enough for projects to justify picking a different provider in the long term, however.

wait a week or two and the details will change completely.

Trump is nothing if not mercurial. His fans will tell you he's playing 11 dimensional chess... I have my doubts, but let's say that's true. The problem is that when it comes to the economy it's not chess. It's more like basketball, and the President is the point guard calling plays, except the play being called keeps changing before the players can execute the last call. It's a tough time to be running a business, you can't plan out more than a couple of weeks.

Right, the economist refer to this as "externality". Fossil fuels aren't cheap, if you factor in the costs that people using them transfer to third parties. Theoretically, if the true cost of using fossil fuels were factored into every pound of coal or gallon of gasoline consumed, then we would use *exactly the right amount* of fossil fuels. Probably not zero, but not as much as we do when we pretend pollution isn't a cost.

While I agree that I don't understand how this is price fixing, I'm not sure your argument is valid. Standard Oil is a pretty well-known example of producers colluding to keep the price up, but they still kept it low enough that people found a ton of ways to make use of oil from transportation to heating to labor productivity. Using the "loss of demand" measurement we would probably have missed it.

I think the issue here isn't collusion per se, but rather that an information disparity exists and disadvantages tenants and is being perceived as "price fixing" because there really isn't any other mechanism currently to deal with the problem.

One alternative solution would be to level the playing field by finding some way to make tenants and landlords alike have access to the same level and quality of information. I would suggest perhaps all rents and rent offers should be published in a way that anyone can apply their own algorithm on either side of the negotiation.

That's what they've done. Or rather they've bought the politicians who create the regulatory frameworks. But if people woke up and realized they've been frog-boiled into giving away their privacy, then that would be prohibitively expensive.

I essentially made the argument that if we want capitalism to work the way we were taught in civics class it is supposed to, companies must be forced by regulation not to undermine the basic assumptions that lead to efficient operation of the free market.

I am neither here nor there on a basic income. I think it depends on circumstances, which of course are changing as more and more labor -- including routine mental labor -- is being automated. We are eventually headed to a world of unprecedented productive capacity and yet very little need for labor, but we aren't there yet.

Anybody who is pushing AI services, particularly *free* AI services, is hoping to mine your data, use it to target you for marketing, and use the service to steer you towards opaque business relationships they will profit from and you will find it complicated and inconvenient to extricate yourself from.

The question is -- ideas that are bad for *who*? This may be a very bad idea for you and me, but it is a very good idea for Microsoft, especially as, like their online services, they will make money off of us and it will be very inconvenient for us to opt out.

In civics-lesson style capitalism, which I'm all in favor of, companies compete to provide things for us that we want and we, armed with information about their products, services and prices, either choose to give them our business or to give our business to a competitor.

Not to say that stuff doesn't *ever* happen, but it's really hard to make a buck as a business that way. So what sufficiently large or well-placed businesses do is earn money *other* ways, by entangling consumers in business relationships that are opaque and which they don't have control over, may not even be fully aware they're signing on to, and which are complicated and awkward to extricate themselves from. In other words a well placed company, like Microsoft or Google or Facebook, will constantly be looking at ways to make money outside the rigorous demands of free market economics.

You forgot the most ridiculous part of the E. Jean Carroll story, which was the extending of the statute of limitations to allow her to file her complaint, and then promptly shutting the window right back down. That totally created the appearance of above board behavior by the NY legislature.

At which point it will hallucinate that every building is a McDonald's only to get you murdered by a drug cartel gang.

Lying to you to give you that terrible restaurant recommendation. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06105 is a white paper mathematically proving that LLMs will lie.

I have said this all along- most of AI is GIGO- Garbage in, Garbage out. LLMs were trained on the largest garbage producer in our society today, Web 2.0. Nothing was done to curate the input, so the output is garbage.

I don't often reveal my religion, but https://magisterium.com/ is an example of what LLMs look like when they HAVE curated training. This LLM is very limited. It can't answer any question that the Roman Catholic Church hasn't considered in the last 300 years or so. They're still adding documents to it carefully, but I asked it about a document published a mere 500 years ago and it wasn't in the database, but instead of making something up like most LLMs will do, it kindly responded that the document wasn't in the database. It also, unlike most AI, can produce bibliographies.