Jokes aside - I understand the difficulty to adequately defend against meltdown/spectre. When the exploits were released I was running a service which definitely needed protection from this type of attack. Ironically we had just finished a set of optimizations that would have reduced our cpu costs quite nicely, the mitigations ate all those wins and more.

I guess I'm still bitter - I no longer own that system but it really frustrated me to hear that it apparently was still vulnerable to spectre style attacks.

At least you still have a relative advantage: if you had not optimized, the CPU costs would have increased even more.