This is a ridiculous statement. Surely you realise that there is a sliding scale.

You can run your own hardware and pull in multiple power lines without establishing your own country.

I’ve ran my own hardware, maybe people have genuinely forgotten what it’s like, and granted, it takes preparation and planning and it’s harder than clicking “go” in a dashboard. But it’s not the same as establishing a country and source your own fuel and feed an army. This is absurd.

Oh that’s weird, because it totally worked for me with “butts” as a euphemism for “people”, as in “butt-in-seat time” — relying on a third-party service is essentially relying on third party butts (i.e. people), and your data is only accessible through those people, whom you don’t control.

And then “your data is in my butt” was just a play on that.

I keep forgetting that I have it on, my brain treats the two words as identical at this point. The translator has this property, which I also tend to forget about, that it will substitute words in your HN comment if you edit it.

But yeah, it's still a thing, and the message behind it isn't any less current.

Ah, yes, I will never forget running a site in New Orleans, and the disaster preparedness plan included "When a named storm enters or appears in the Gulf of Mexico, transfer all services to offsite hosting outside the Gulf Coast". We weren't allowed to use Heroku in steady state, but we could in an emergency. But then we figured out they were in St. Louis, so we had to have a separate plan for flooding in the Mississippi River Valley.