In the news today are two disasters. Trumps trickle-down economics speech and Delta Airlines "Outage" which shut down takeoffs of airliners for 6 hours today and left tens of thousands of customers stranded. This post is made at 3PM CDT and apparently flights and operations have been resumed. Link to WSJ on Delta flight Outage
I am no expert on information technology or airlines, but a shutdown like this when there was apparently no actual power outage on the airports electric utility strongly suggests the need for more robust systems with more redundancy. This system collapse strongly suggests that terrorists wishing to disrupt our economy and services probably have easier targets than any of us might have guessed.
I know that Donald J. Trump claimed in his speech today that in addition to trickle-down tax breaks, he took off on a scheduled flight into the GOP fantasy land of fewer regulations on business being a wonderland for economic growth. This and other data system collapses recently suggest to this non-expert that more regulations of industries is absolutely necessary when an "$80 Billion" company can't or refuses to put more resources into system reliability, robustness, and redundancy.
Let me know if you have better ideas for improving huge information systems and how to get congressmen with their heads up their partisan rears to actually start working on real problems instead of voting for the 64th time (or whatever) to repeal Obamacare or squandering more money on military boondoggles.
***Stay tuned even if you are flying very low today waiting for a Trump trickle-down. ---- Doug Wiken
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