I just read an interesting article providing a nice contrarian perspective on airline travel domestic and abroad. It compares the cost of a life saved relative to money spent in other areas. Keep in mind, I’m writing this at the airport so I am painfully considering the implications of the points I am making. While this may seem ludicrous at first, the idea of making something less safe, I realized that this might help me make an interesting point effectively, one that I struggle to articulate. The article points out how more effective spending on vaccines, safety belts in cars, and other areas of our lives relate to the money spent on aviation safety. Because of very effective FAA regulations, poor countries spend a lot of money on aviation safety while school children are unvaccinated and traffic deaths occur at significantly higher rates.

So what point, relating to data centers, could I be getting at? Are we spending money in the most effective manner to realize high availability. Much like the net loss of life in poor countries would be lower if they allocated resources where they have the most impact, so too we can improve our loss of compute by investing where impacts are highest.

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