So you want to build your own data center

Come to my office and tell me how it’s not actually my office because it’s leased by my company from the investment vehicle for institutional investors that owns the building that stands on land owned by someone else again that was stolen by the British anyway and therefore calling it “my office” makes me a fool and a liar and I should just “say what I mean”.

The british are always the ones to blame :')

It's more like saying you built the building. (I've bootstrapped datacenters to t2)

Yes. (except for when it's the Vatican, etc)

When you invite a girl/guy over, do you say "let's meet at my place" or "let's meet at the place I'm renting"? The possessive pronoun does not necessarily express ownership, it can just as well express occupancy.

But if I said I’m building an office, would you assume I’m furnishing an empty rented space, or constructing the building?

> Come to my office and tell me how it’s not actually my office (...)

I think you're failing to understand the meaning and the point of "building your own datacenter".

Yes, you can talk about your office all you'd like. Much like OP can talk about there server farm and their backend infrastructure.

What you cannot talk about is your own office center. You do not own it. You rent office space. You only have a small fraction of the work required to operate an office, because you effectively offloaded the hard part to your landlord.

I wouldn't oppose telling a client "we can meet at your data centre". I would not tell my wife "we need to discuss building our apartment complex" when we are planning interior decorations in our flat.

I’d imagine you were recently elected and hiring staffers.

Let’s chat about inferring meaning from pragmatic context at your data.

If I said to my wife, “let’s build a home together”, she would be halfway done with engaging a promising firm of radical young architects and negotiating for April delivery of pre-stressed concrete, Italian art glass, and Japanese tatami mats by close of business.

Haha fair enough

I think the word GP is objecting to isn't "your own" but rather "build".

For people who have taken empty lots and constructed new data centers (ie, the whole building) on them from scratch, the phrase "building a datacenter" involves a nonzero amount of concrete.

OP seems to have built out a data hall - which is still a cool thing in its own right! - but for someone like me who's interested in "baking an apple pie from scratch", the mismatch between the title and the content was slightly disappointing.

It doesn't matter which word. Which I should confess makes my remark above appear, in retrospect, to be something of a trap; because when parsing ambiguity, it's a matter of simple courtesy and wisdom to choose the interpretation that best illustrates the point rather than complaining about the ones that don't.

I say this not merely to be a pompous smartass but also because it illustrates and echoes the very same problem the top-level comment embodies, viz. that some folks struggle with vernacular, nonliteral, imprecise, and nonlinear language constructs. Yet grasping this thistle to glark one's grok remains parcel-and-part of comprehension and complaining about it won't remeaningify the barb'd disapprehensible.

Your disappointment, nevertheless, seems reasonable, because the outcome was, after all, a bait-and-route.