And the bottom drops out
The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, November 4-17, 2025
… I’m faded, flat busted
I’ve been jaded, I’ve been dusted
I know that I’ve seen better days
One foot in the hole, one foot gettin’ deeper
Crank it to eleven, blow another speaker and
I ain’t got, I ain’t got much to lose, ‘cause
… I’ve seen better days
I’ve been the star of many plays
I’ve seen better days
(And the bottom drops out)
Comments of the Week
Robots and Chips on Microsoft Azure cloud outage knocks down Microsoft 365, Xbox, Minecraft, Capital One, Alaska Airlines, and Starbucks: The timing of back to back AWS and Azure outages really exposes how centralized our cloud infrastructure has become. When Microsoft calls it an inadvertent configuration change, that’s basically corporate speak for someone pushed a bad DNS update to produciton without proper testing. The fact that everything from Minecraft to Capital One banking services depends on Azure staying up shows why we need better redundancy architectures across providers.
You are correct; back-to-back AWS and Azure outages really expose how centralized our cloud infrastructure has become. And they expose that the marketers can call this “cloud” all they want; it’s just jumped-up client-server with jacked-up pricing. The fact that a DNS change in Azure can take down Capital One shows that this “cloud” is actually a giant step backwards. What happened to The Internet Routes Around Damage? It CANNOT route around damage if you jam in a bunch of single points of failure. A true cloud would be distributed, not this mess.
Lynn W Gardner on The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot Com stock collapse? Great point, a lot of companies over hired to meet expected needs. Now the lay offs are occurring. Additionally as you well know the biggest controllable expenses in a business is payroll. Look at Amazon, instead of having hundreds of order pickers in the warehouses they are using automated machines. Thirty years ago when I started in retail we had people to assist customers in every department. Now you can not find an employee in a department store. And at the low end, Family Dollar or Dollar General will have one employee working alone in the store when the manager is off. Just like your news room does not need 100’s of beat reporters. Same thing with tech companies. Meet the new normal.
Cynics are saying that customer service is currently boilerrooms filled with reps reading from scripts without understanding your problems, who are now being replaced by chatbots reading from scripts without understanding your problems.
Steve Ross The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot Com stock collapse? Absolutely correct, except that X revenue peaked at about $5 billion in 2021 and was only half that in 2024. That drop was worse than the national trend for all then-major social media aside from TikTok, but yeah, almost everyone has been heading down. Those are trade publication (Investing.com, etc) estimates, when it comes to years after Musk took it over.
I had many friends in medium-high places (high enough to have a LOT of T-W shares in their retirement funds) when the AOL deal happened. EVERY ONE of them told folks in the high-high places the deal was insanely stupid. Every internal analysis the loons at the top commissioned said just that -- AOL had no role in a world where the internet was beginning to dominate all private data carriers except Tier 1 phone companies. And this was still before smartphones were conceived! And AOL folks knew it in great detail, as they were headquartered next to the world’s largest internet hub, near Dulles Airport in northern Virginia. Time-Warner top execs did not know this!
Who wanted this? The investment firms that would make amazing commissions from the merger/sale. What do you think THEIR reports concluded?
I haven’t really looked at X’s revenue since Musk took it over; I was more commenting on the fact that if, say, Amtrack or Southwest Airlines laid off 80 percent of their workforces, the trains would stop rolling and the planes would stop flying. So when Musk laid off 80 percent or so of Twitter’s workforce and it kept chugging along, a lot of senior tech execs started looking at their crowded workplaces and saying Hmmmmmmm...
And I don’t think revenue is the point anymore for X, if it ever was. Now that it has been bought by xAI, it may have been a play to get a Large Language Model training ground all along.
Steve Ross redux: Ha! Most of the real X workforce folks are the folks (and bots) who post. Real companies need real people to run them....
Perfecting Equilibrium Stories
Feola Elsewhere on the Internet
The Pentax 17 is creating new generations of Pentaxians
Hundreds of Millennials and Gen Z’rs jammed the Dallas Film Meetup
By cjfeola in Photography on Nov 13, 2025
Two things were obvious when hundreds of film aficionados jammed the Odd Muse Brewary for the Dallas Film Photography Meetup:
There were hundreds of Millennial and Gen Z film fanatics there, and roughly a dozen folk with graying hair: 11 vendors, and one entirely gray Pentax Forums staff writer
The Pentax 17 was the belle of the ball
Everyone had a film camera. There was a wild variety of gear: classic SLRs, massive medium format rigs, Twin Lens Reflex cameras with their waist-level viewfinders.
And dozens and dozens of Pentax 17s.
Easter Eggs
My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Friday November 21 - Foto.Feola.Friday
Sunday November 23 — Fly Me To The Moon(drop); When my Sony Xperia Pro-I smartphone died this summer I replaced it with the Nubia Z70s Photographer Edition with its 35mm main lens and large (for a smartphone) sensor. And I’ve been happier than I expected with it as a compact camera. But the Sony also had a high-end Digital Audio Converter for music; without that, my Moondrop Space Travel earbuds have lost some of their oomph. So…time to go shopping! How would a DAC dongle and wired In Ear Monitors spice things up?