It's more of an emotional reaction to the life-changing impact of $9 million, expressed that way, rather than a literal feeling to be taken word for word.
According to the article, the issue was caused by:
> "engineers had identified DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint for US-EAST-1 as the likely root cause"
Interestingly, we found matching errors in our own logs:
> System.Net.WebException
> The remote name could not be resolved: 'dynamodb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com'
Occurrences were recorded on:
- 2025-04-30
- 2025-05-29
- 2025-06-17
- Yesterday
We had logged this as a low-priority bug since previous incidents only affected our AWS testing environments (and never our production env which is on Azure). At the time, we assumed it was some CI/CD glitch.
It now seems that the underlying cause was this DNS issue all along, and only yesterday did it start impacting systems outside of AWS.
You just made me realize we had random DNS failures using ElastiCache last weeks... Totally randomly, some elasticache endpoints would fail to resolve within our VPC, bringing down some of our services.
Good read, but it stretches "data model" a bit. It's really about the product's conceptual/domain model, the primary entities you elevate and design around, and how that choice cascades into UX, pricing, and go-to-market. The examples (Slack channels, Notion blocks, Figma’s canvas, Toast's menu items) show how a strong model can compound value across features.
Where it blurs things: data model != UX strategy != business model, and success isn't only about a novel model, execution and distribution still matter greatly.
My takeaway: read "data model" here as "core conceptual model", and ask whether your product has a clear center that lets new features inherit context instead of becoming one-offs.
I would still defend the author that in fact once we look at a data model, we can see the limitations of the product. And there is no way to nullify all limitations; it will always be a tradeoff.
The elephants wandered off, and now a bunch of giraffes are drinking from the pond. Some of them even spread their legs wide to keep their feet from getting wet. Very relaxing to watch.
> Some of them even spread their legs wide to keep their feet from getting wet.
I always interpreted the spreadeagle pose of a drinking giraffe to be a way of bringing their head closer to the ground. Do they sometimes not do that?
Leszek, I don’t think your reply invalidates what blargey said. Showing that "down" can also be neutral, impactful or enthusiastic (like "down for" or "get to the bottom of") is useful, but it adds nuance rather than disproving the broader pattern that up = good / down = bad runs deep across languages.
It certainly disproves that it's a pattern without exceptions, and therefore invalidates or at least questions the idea that every instance of up and down (like which way up north is) has to be mapped to good and bad.
It's all just anecdotes vs. anecdotes. The alleged "broader pattern" is not proven by one any more than it is disproven by the other. (For what it's worth, I do think there is a cultural pattern, especially in biblical metaphors, but in general use it's far weaker than what TFA is making it out to be.)
It’s actually more of a win-win situation if you look closely.
Stablecoin issuers earn yield from holding U.S. Treasuries, which sustains their business model. Meanwhile, people in distressed economies get practical access to a digital dollar, often cheaper and faster than navigating restrictive exchange rules or paying steep conversion fees at money-changers. That’s meaningful when local currencies are unstable or losing value.
Of course, not all stablecoin issuers are trustworthy, and some governments under economic distress may ban or limit these instruments. But when the setup works, both sides benefit.
The foreign individual is likely better off in game theory terms, but their country is collectively likely worse off due to a reduction in their central bank's independence and ability to perform seigniorage/print money. Difficult to ban for the foreign nation, and probably results in a greater need for dollars for their government also.
Probably not. You would be right if we were talking about honest, competent central bankers. But most people live in poor countries. Why are those countries poor?
Every country is different, but poor countries are mostly poor because they are governed by kleptocrats, generally including their central bankers, and hyperinflation in particular is a constant menace. When the central bankers aren't directly kleptocratic themselves, they are very often incompetent but loyal, similar to most of Trump's nominees. In this situation, generally speaking, things that put power over individuals' lives back in the hands of those individuals, instead of the kleptocrats' hands, will improve the situation not just of the individuals but of their whole country.
I agree that kleptocracy and incompetence are a important factor, but I'm not sure it's the only one. There's a correlation between corruption indices and low GDP but I'm not sure it's causal. For example the US scores only moderately in corruption index terms, but does quite well in GDP terms. Arguably GDP growth rates are a better measure, in which case there's possibly a inverse correlation.
For example China, India and Malaysia have grown quite substantially are not particularly transparent, but they are alike in their resistance to dollarization. On the other hand Ecuador and El Salvador are examples of countries that have fully embraced dollarization with less than great outcomes. There are examples in the middle as well, but there is not a clear trend that it's necessarily a change for the better of the country and it's citizens.
To me it seems like a continuation of the IMF's dollarization as described by Joseph Stiglitz in 'Globalization and its discontents', in terms of mechanisms and effects on recipient countries. From this perspective it's less like transferring power from kleptocrats to the people, and more like choosing kleptocrats that are offering a better deal.
I don't think corruption indices do a great job of measuring kleptocracy. The PRC's national government, for example, has clearly prioritized enriching the general population through economic development and reducing poverty over lining their own pockets, despite not being transparent or accountable. The indices do provide some information; extremely kleptocratic countries like Venezuela, Eritrea, Yemen, and Nicaragua reliably come out on the bottom of the CPI. But the most damaging effects of kleptocracy are very subtle.
I do agree that dollarization hasn't been resoundingly successful, and that does undermine my thesis somewhat. I agree that cryptocurrencies are like super-dollarization: not only do they remove domestic government control of monetary policy, they remove or weaken domestic government control of and visibility into capital flows, banking services such as savings and lending, and payments. If that would be great, you'd expect dollarization to at least be good. And it isn't clear that it has been. It hasn't been obviously disastrous either—you can make credible arguments that Ecuador or El Salvador would be either better off or worse off without it—but it hasn't been obviously beneficial.
I think "choosing kleptocrats that are offering a better deal" is a good description of dollarization and, for example, Tether, USDC, or CBDCs. But, as a description of Bitcoin and Ethereal, it's comprehensively incorrect; there haven't ever been any credible allegations of corruption in their blockchains, unless you count Ethereal's DAO rollback. They've so far been completely immune to the kind of politically-motivated currency manipulation that is the actual official job of central banks behind fiat currencies like the dollar.
True, but context matters. SBF was running a disruptive crypto startup that drew intense scrutiny, and his operations were so amateurish that proving misconduct was straightforward. Traditional corporations tend to reduce the risk of prison-worthy exposure thanks to tighter compliance and better legal insulation, even when the harm is just as large.
It’s less a shift in power networks and more about Trump using existing presidency tools more aggressively. Harvard didn’t lose influence, it’s being targeted because it's outspoken and symbolic. The immigration authority falls under the executive branch, so the president can act unilaterally, without needing broader support.
China certainly can issue dollar bills more cheaply than the US and it already does in small size, but scaling that up would concentrate currency, rollover and sanctions risk on Beijing while simultaneously reinforcing the dollar system it ultimately wants to escape. The trade-off is therefore asymmetric: the political sting to Washington would be modest and reversible, whereas the balance-sheet, legal and geopolitical liabilities for China would linger long after the bonds are sold.
> Its Western assumption that China wants to escape the USD reserve currency.
Nah, they have a lot of them, they don't want their value to drop.
What the world wants is to escape (at least in the medium term) is the US oversight that forces the USA's enemies to be everyone else's enemies.
From what I can tell, they are going to use (are using) Hong Kong as a ex-USA location to price and trade USD - modeled on the Eurodollar. With a lot of trade-with-China being settled in their e-CNY CBDC.
As a poster alluded to - the big loss for the USA is the insights into pricing and demand.
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