They do mention their OS being out of date. One possible interpretation is they are using packages provided by a Linux distro, and getting up to date may have required a full OS update.
If that's were case, it would be easy to see how they might want to tie their OS upgrade to a hardware refresh rather than taking servers offline for a reinstall.
When I was there NBNCo hadn't really moved into the inner city yet. We did have some kind of financial agreement with the building developer/management to install our VDSL DSLAMs in their comms room. It wouldn't surprise me if those payments got shadier and more aggressive as the NBN coverage increased.
To clarify, NBN is a monopoly on the last mile infrastructure which is resold to private ISPs that sell internet services.
The history there is that Australia used to have a government run monopoly on telephone infrastructure and services (Telecom Australia), which was later privatised (and rebranded to Telstra). The privatisation left Telstra with a monopoly on the infrastructure, but also a requirement that they resell the last mile at a reasonable rate to allow for some competition.
So Australia already had an existing industry of ISPs that were already buying last mile access from someone else. The NBN was just a continuation of the existing status quo in that regard.
> They even have a grey fibre box that looks identical to the NBNCo box except it's labelled LBNCo with the same font
Early in my career I worked for one of those smaller telcos trying to race to get services into buildings before the NBN. I left around the time they were talking about introducing an LBNCo brand (only one of the reasons I left). At the time, they weren't part of Opticomm, but did partner with them in a few locations. If the brand is still around, I guess they must have been acquired at some point.
I was a little confused about this as well - until I realised they don't actually specify that this is the Linux kernel. I suspect what they're talking about here is the Windows kernel.
In that case you would bundle a copy of the CLI utility into your docker container, with the correct version. This also applies to any system libraries your code might be compiled against. Things like shared libraries or CLI utilities are part of the "operating system", but not part of the "kernel".
This does mean that you end up with multiple copies of the same utilities and libraries on the system - although docker does have a mechanism to avoid duplication between different docker containers. It also means that if you take your docker container and move it over to a different system with a newer operating system (or a different distribution) all the parts of the operating system it cares about come with it.
The Linux kernel - the part that gets shared between containers - is mostly just responsible for process and memory management, networking and interacting with the computer hardware.
In our case, the payout is defined as 4-12 weeks of salary (plus 1-4 weeks notice), based on length of tenure. Since this scales with what people earn, there's little need for tech companies (or other well-paid fields) to offer anything extra.
On a related note, Australians are also entitled to 4 weeks paid leave per yer, which accrues if not taken. Employers are also required to pay out any leave balance (even if the employee leave voluntarily), which means most workers will have at least a couple of additional weeks paid out on top of the severance.
It's the same here, in that you get the full amount regardless of how long you're unemployed after they let you go.
In Australia it's not negotiable. Our employment laws dictate what severance payment is required if a company is letting people go to reduce costs. Those laws don't apply if the employee leaves of their own accord, or if they are fired for other reasons.
First thing to keep in mind is that the Case Shiller data you linked to only has data up to February. The FSI data is more up to date, but the big upswing was only getting started in late Feb with it being more visible in March/April figures.
The other thing to consider is that housing prices are likely to lag behind financial stress. If people are in financial stress, they are likely to sell off a second car or other luxury possessions before selling their house. Also selling a house takes time, so even when people do start selling they won't be on the market or closing sales straight away.
It's a different approach to managing risk -- minimizing impact of failure rather than minimizing the likelihood of failure.
It's nice to know that you can kill a process and the only impact is that in-flight requests fail, rather than having a more significant outage if a process crashes and the failover doesn't work, or the process doesn't automatically restart, etc.
If you accept that requests will fail you can build retries into the system. It's a lot harder to make a system more resilient if you avoid testing the failure scenarios.
The caveat working that way is that you can end up working towards a local optimum, and lose sight of the forest for the trees when it comes to making the bigger algorithmic changes.
If that's were case, it would be easy to see how they might want to tie their OS upgrade to a hardware refresh rather than taking servers offline for a reinstall.