The Top 1 Percent Paid a Lot of Taxes in 2021 – Economist Writing Every Day - ”In 2021 the top 1 percent of taxpayers in the United States paid 36 percent of all federal taxes (they have 21.1 percent of income). This figure had been below 20 percent until the mid-1990s, and as recently as 2019 it was just 24.7 percent (they had 15.9 percent of the income that year).”
Why So Few Matt Levines? - There’s not enough news with the same types of events that happen over and over with clear, public records.
McDonald’s touchscreen kiosks were feared as job killers. Instead, something surprising happened - If you can come up with other ways staff can spend time, automation could be good for workers and customers. For example, come up with more complex products that require more human touch, speeding up delivery, or just busing tables. But, yeah, if you’re not going to change your business, then automation probably means firing people.
OpenAI Is Growing Fast and Burning Through Piles of Money - That’s what you call “real money”: “OpenAI’s monthly revenue hit $300 million in August, up 1,700 percent since the beginning of 2023, and the company expects about $3.7 billion in annual sales this year…. it expects to lose roughly $5 billion."
Cheese wedge mindfulness
(1) What seems to you like an everyday, boring experience may be totally foreign and inaccessible to other people. It can be delightful and helpful for them to see it, even if you’ve seen it for nine years everyday. This is one of Noah’s stated principles. (2) I like Dutch Golden Age still life paintings. Big wedges of cheese, glassy eyed herring and equally glassy grapes, glowing wine glasses, walnuts, and Instagram-purposefully draped tablecloths.
Using app architecture constraints and templates in platform engineering
Platforms have many opinions, app architecture is one of themThis is an excerpt from a new blog post of mine covering a recent panel with platform engineers from Charles Schwab. I’ve made some slight changes.
Ensuring platform scalability and resilience starts with making sure applications are architected appropriately. Nowadays, that usually means using a cloud native architecture. The guidelines for creating cloud native applications are well-known and proven. “Generally speaking, follow the 12 factor app pattern, have a stateless application, and deploy it as a microservice to PCF, that is our guidance,” Anis says, “It’s pretty simple.
Enterprise Philosophy and The First Wave of AI - AI is (too) expensive for what it does, and thus far clunky, so it will need to start in the enterprise space where companies can get good ROI.
3 Key Practices for Perfecting Cloud Native Architecture - Some notes on cloud native architecture and app patterns. That is, apps you want to run in container platforms like Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes.
Beyond Infrastructure as Code: System Initiative Goes Live - “In practice, as Jacob has pointed out, this has led to unwieldy, hard-to-update and difficult-to-understand systems built on static definitions. The tools are tightly tied to a version control, making them brittle and difficult to work with. And only elite companies, such as Google, can deploy multiple times in a day with this approach as Jacob (and others) have argued."