The big picture: U.S. companies raked in a record $2.3 trillion in corporate profits last year, while the country’s total wealth increased by $6 trillion to $98.2 trillion (40% of which went to those with wealth over $100,000). Wealthy households and individuals are pouring money into asset managers, betting on companies that lose $1 billion a year, bonds from little-known Middle Eastern republics, and giving hot Silicon Valley start-ups more venture capital than they can handle. The end result is money that would previously have been split between businesses, workers and the government for projects like schools, health care and infrastructure is instead sitting in corporate accounts earning little to no return.

The below BPF program, taken from the OpenBSD man page and translated into a more readable representation, returns all Ethernet packets between IP addresses 128.3.112.15 and 128.3.112.35. We introduce a new type representing the two possible final states of a BPF program: a return value or an error. Coq programs generally use numbers of type , an inductive type:

Fixed sized binary data – mostly 32-bit ints in our case – are not well represented with .

This page provides status information on the services that are part of Google Cloud Platform. Check back here to view the current status of the services listed below. The network congestion issue in eastern USA, affecting Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube has been resolved for all affected users as of 4:00pm US/Pacific.

With the weak study design and the small sample of Japanese people with blood pressure or cholesterol problems who may not be representative, this overall represents rather poor evidence that tomato juice is good for the heart. This study simply offered free tomato juice to people and measured their blood pressure and cholesterol before and after. The researchers said: “Our study shows that unsalted tomato juice intake could have improved systolic and diastolic blood pressure in Japanese residents who had untreated [borderline hypertension] or hypertension, and also decreased the serum LDL-C level in those who had untreated [raised cholesterol].”

Since there are fewer Open Core companies that have gone public recently I started with those companies and tried to find similar SaaS companies based on the year of IPO (2017-2019), annual revenue, valuation at the pricing of the IPO ($1-$3 billion) and the average customer value ($20-$200k) as a proxy for customer type. Let’s look at R&D costs as a percentage of revenue:

While Mulesoft has very low R&D costs as a percentage of revenue, the other Open Core companies do not, relative to the proprietary SaaS companies. We also saw some data that suggests if Open Core companies could limit the services component of their revenue or if SaaS companies could deliver their solution on-premises to lower their cost of revenue (i.e., hosting expenses), you could have the best of both worlds.

Try answering these questions: if a state were to lower its recidivism rate by 10%, how would that change the number of jail beds they filled each day over a five year period? In an effort to help remedy this, I worked with a brilliant University of Utah student named Sam Nelson to develop an interactive model that shows how changes to recidivism rates could impact more concrete outcomes, like arrests and prison time. In non-geek-speak, this is a simplified version of SimLife for former prisoners, where each of 1,000 “sims” (i.e., simulated people) is tracked over five years to see how changes to the recidivism rate impact the time they spend behind bars.

Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep

Nivi: What’s the difference between wealth, money, and status? People creating wealth will always be attacked by people playing status games

There’s always a subtle competition going on between status and wealth. Wealth isn’t about taking something from somebody else—it’s about creating abundance for the world.

[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal]

A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. You could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments is just going to be a bad idea so I don’t even try. People used to talk about how terrorists must be very poor and uneducated to fall for militant Islam, and then someone did a study and found that they were disproportionately well-off, college educated people (many were engineers).

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Congressional leaders are planning to scrap a provision of an IRS reform bill making permanent the Free File deal between the government and private tax filing companies, torpedoing a long-sought goal by industry giant Intuit, the maker of TurboTax. The development, first reported by Politico Pro and confirmed to ProPublica by a House Republican staffer, comes two months after an outcry sparked by our story on the Free File provision in a bill called the Taxpayer First Act. The IRS said in May that it was launching an internal review of the program, following our stories on how Intuit, HR Block and other companies deliberately hid their Free File editions from search engines, making it harder for taxpayers to find them.

Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep

Nivi: What’s the difference between wealth, money, and status? People creating wealth will always be attacked by people playing status games

There’s always a subtle competition going on between status and wealth. Wealth isn’t about taking something from somebody else—it’s about creating abundance for the world.