Focus on Black Lives Matter degrades business performance?

by philg

I am hopeful that readers will notice a more responsive server as of last night. The virtual server behind this site had hit a load average of 21 while simultaneously using only 1-3 percent CPU for user processes. How is that possible? The Unix top command was showing up to 98 percent CPU used for “st”. If you’re a dinosaur like me and most of what you learned about top was learned in the 1980s, this is confusing indeed. “st” is “steal time”, i.e., time that was “stolen” by other virtual machines on the same host and/or the hypervisor. If st is more than 10 percent, that’s a sign that the underlying physical machine is overloaded.

Why hadn’t the hosting service noticed this issue and migrated some of the demanding virtual machines off the physical machine to prevent this kind of overload? What could they be doing if not writing a Perl script to catch problems like this? “We stand with the Black community”:

(The page notes that the company will offer “Paid time off for voting”. Perhaps there will be a few decades of unpaid time off for any employee who shows up with an “All Lives Matter” T-shirt or a MAGA/KAG hat!)

The company is sufficiently committed that a banner reading “Black Lives Matter. Linode is committed to social justice and equality.” appears at the top of every page for a customer’s tech nerds. Want to know the operating system running underneath your server? IPv4 versus IPv6 traffic? See if your server was backed up? The hundreds of pages that show information like this are all headed by a “Black Lives Matter” message.

Readers: On the theory that humans aren’t great at focusing on multiple goals at the same time (witness nearly the U.S., now entirely devoted to the single goal of avoiding coronadeath and the folks who switched attention to BLM immediately abandoned all thoughts of social distancing), is it fair to say that any company that truly commits to Black Lives Matter will also deliver an inferior product and service compared to if they hadn’t made this commitment?

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11 thoughts on “Focus on Black Lives Matter degrades business performance?”

  1. I saw the site go offline for a while there and thought you’d been defriended by NGINX.

    • Haven’t you heard – ngnix is a Russian hack. And Phil, with his skeptical mind is clearly a Russian agent. DNC says so (about people who are less than impressed with their dogmata) and so it must be true.

  3. Virtual machines are so 2020. You need to be using DOCKER this month. Do we still have to call if statements AI?

  5. I don’t know about it degrading business performance, but Black Lives Matter has certainly degraded the practice of doing such ordinary and praiseworthy things like honoring the death of a police officer who was murdered in the line of duty by flying a flag to commemorate the anniversary of his death. This shouldn’t be a political act, and it certainly shouldn’t be controversial, but the town officials in Hingham have tried to stop their fire department from flying a “thin blue line” flag in honor of Sergeant Michael Chesna on the grounds of….what? Of course, it’s Black Lives Matter, but they won’t even say that. So they’re censoring the memorial to this cop and don’t even have the courage to say why.

    “Sgt. Chesna was attacked with a rock and killed with his own gun after responding to a call for an erratic driver in Weymouth on July 15, 2018. An elderly woman who lived nearby was also killed during the incident.”

    https://patch.com/massachusetts/hingham/hingham-firefighters-union-keeps-flying-thin-blue-line-flags

    At least Hingham Firefighters Local 2398 is finding the courage not to knuckle under to this insanity:

    “At this time the Hingham Firefighters of Local 2398 respectfully request the town reconsider their decision to deem these flags as political statements,” Melanson posted on Local 2398’s Facebook page. “Otherwise, we regret to inform you that over the past four days no member of Local 2398 was able to sacrifice his or her moral fortitude in order to remove the flags from the apparatus. As we said before, our support for our brothers and sisters in blue is unwavering. The flags have continued to fly with honor every day. They will have to be removed by someone other than a member of this union.”

  6. Black lives only “matter” when it encourages civil unrest and anarcho-tyranny (i.e., black lives only matter in the context of white people’s actions to incense nonsensical outrage and violence from the low-IQ slave zombies used to destroy the last remnants of their once-functional societies).

    Example: seven year-old black Zamar Jones killed by black Christopher Linder
    Nobody cares, esp. not most blacks, because they are not being told to care (and it doesn’t fit the narrative). And, like good slaves, they only do what they’re told, but they get bored of that eventually and have to be re-invigorated by their masters.

    One can imagine the type that works at Linode and thinks it’s still a good idea to have that banner on their main page and pinned in their Twatter.

    But it really doesn’t matter at the end of these fleeting years of the crash&burn everything, just unfortunate for the sane people who are stuck paying Linode in the meantime.
    Most things will to go downhill in varying degrees as it all fades away. The “new normal”.

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