industryterm:piggy bank

Monitoring in the time of Cloud Native
▻https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/monitoring-in-the-time-of-cloud-native-c87c7a5bfa3e

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*J-juPDdH6qupN-4ii4CbWg.png

While we’re still at the stage of early adoption, with the failure modes of these new paradigms still being very nebulous and not widely advertised, these tools are only going to get increasingly better with time. Soon enough, if not already, we’ll be at that point where the network and underlying hardware failures have been robustly abstracted away from us, leaving us with the sole responsibility to ensure our application is good enough to piggy bank on top of the latest and greatest in networking and scheduling abstractions.
No amount of GIFEE (Google Infrastructure for Everyone Else) or industrial-grade service mesh is going to fix the software we write. Better resilience and failure-tolerant paradigms from off-the-shelf components now means that — assuming said off-the-shelf components have been configured correctly — most failures will arise from the application layer or from the complex interactions between different applications. Trusting Kubernetes and friends to do their job makes it more important than ever for us to focus on the vagaries of the performance characteristics of our application and business logic. Application developers now have one job. We’re at a time when it has never been easier for application developers to focus on just making their service more robust and trust that if they do so, then the open source software they are building on top of will pay the concomitant dividends.

Nuclear-Waste Disposal a Growing Fiscal Problem - WSJ.com
►http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904292504576484133479927502.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Quand le Wall Street Journal se remnd compte du coût des déchets nucléaires, et de l’inaction qui entoure cette question...

The fee, which ultimately comes from nuclear-electricity customers as a surcharge of 1/10th of a cent per kilowatt hour, now amounts to about $750 million a year. Counting past expenditures and interest earned, the fund’s balance is about $25 billion.

“It sounds like there’s a piggy bank and there’s all this money that is available for a future [nuclear] repository,” said Richard Stewart, a New York University law professor and co-author of a book on nuclear waste policy. “But there isn’t. Congress has spent it on other things.” The $25 billion, he and others say, amounts to little more than a federal IOU that will need to be repaid.

A group of state regulators and the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade organization, are suing the Department of Energy, seeking to suspend collection of the annual fees utilities pay into the waste fund. “There’s no sense paying a fee if you’re not getting a program for it,” said NEI’s Steven Kraft.

Beyond disposal costs, taxpayers are also potentially liable for damages suffered by the public from a nuclear accident, including those stemming from the spent fuel stored at commercial power plant sites. Under a 1950s law, plant operators currently must carry $375 million of liability insurance for each reactor, after which an industry insurance plan would take over, covering damages up to $12 billion. Any personal injury or property damages in excess of that would be borne by the federal government.