Jeff Bezos has come out in favor of increased corporate taxes to help pay for Biden’s infrastructure plan.
Few things are more unpopular topics than raising taxes. With the administration’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan, however, raising taxes on the rich and corporations is one of the proposed ways of paying for it.
Jeff Bezos, as one of the most influential CEOs, has lent his support to the idea of raising corporate taxes, in a statement on Amazon’s website.
We support the Biden Administration’s focus on making bold investments in American infrastructure. Both Democrats and Republicans have supported infrastructure in the past, and it’s the right time to work together to make this happen. We recognize this investment will require concessions from all sides—both on the specifics of what’s included as well as how it gets paid for (we’re supportive of a rise in the corporate tax rate). We look forward to Congress and the Administration coming together to find the right, balanced solution that maintains or enhances U.S. competitiveness.
It remains to be seen if the infrastructure plan will pass, but it appears it is already gaining support from powerful allies.
Police are reporting that white supremacists and other fringe groups are increasingly targeting cell phone towers.
A report by the New York City Police Department, obtained by The Intercept, found that white supremacists and conspiracy theorists “increasingly target critical infrastructure to incite fear, disrupt essential services, and cause economic damage with the United States and abroad.”
In addition to the high-profile case of Anthony Quinn Warner, who bombed the AT&T building in Nashville, The Intercept also cited a case where individuals broke into a cell tower in Tennessee, cutting fiber-optic cables and destroying other equipment.
According to the NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau, infrastructure sites are increasingly high-profile targets for these groups.
“In recent months, white supremacist extremists, neo-Nazis, far-right Telegram groups, and online conspiracy theorists have all emphasized attacking valuable critical infrastructure targets.”
The attacks come at a time when carriers are racing to deploy 5G and when companies and individuals are relying on internet connectivity more than ever.
Facebook is warning that its business is being “adversely affected” by the coronavirus pandemic that is sweeping the globe.
In a blog post, Alex Schultz, VP of Analytics, and Jay Parikh, VP of Engineering, lay out the challenges the company is facing. With unprecedented numbers of people quarantined, sheltering in place or practicing social distancing the company is experiencing a major uptick in usage. In many countries, especially the hardest hit, “total messaging has increased more than 50% over the last month.” Similarly, in those places “voice and video calling have more than doubled on Messenger and WhatsApp.” Italy has likewise “seen up to 70% more time spent across our apps since the crisis arrived in the country.”
Facebook previously warned its ad business was likely to take a hit, but today’s post highlights the additional issues the company is facing. Because the increased usage is on services that are free, Facebook is not benefiting monetarily by the uptick. At the same time, the company’s infrastructure still has to bear the burden of the increased load. The two executives laid out the challenges:
“We have received questions about revenue, so want to provide some context here too: Much of the increased traffic is happening on our messaging services, but we’ve also seen more people using our feed and stories products to get updates from their family and friends. At the same time, our business is being adversely affected like so many others around the world. We don’t monetize many of the services where we’re seeing increased engagement, and we’ve seen a weakening in our ads business in countries taking aggressive actions to reduce the spread of COVID-19.”
The executives did provide assurances Facebook is doing everything possible to make sure their infrastructure can deal with the days ahead.
“Maintaining stability throughout these spikes in usage is more challenging than usual now that most of our employees are working from home. We are working to keep our apps running smoothly while also prioritizing features such as our COVID-19 Information Center on Facebook as well as the World Health Organization’s Health Alert on WhatsApp. We’re monitoring usage patterns carefully, making our systems more efficient, and adding capacity as required. To help alleviate potential network congestion, we are temporarily reducing bit rates for videos on Facebook and Instagram in certain regions. Lastly, we’re conducting testing and further preparing so we can quickly respond to any problems that might arise with our services.”
Facebook is just the latest example of how companies, even those without traditional supply chains, are being negatively impacted by the pandemic.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Akamai has announced it’s going to start slowing down video game downloads during peak times.
As millions of people shelter in place and work from home, networks are being tested like never before. Internet providers, social media platforms and wireless companies alike are having to make adjustments to ensure their infrastructure can keep up with demand.
Akamai, as the world’s largest content delivery network, is working with major video game distributors, such as Microsoft and Sony. Since a single video game download can be the equivalent of 30,000 web pages worth of traffic, game downloads during peak times can have a crippling effect. As a result, Akamai will begin throttling game downloads during peak times, resuming normal speeds late at night when traffic is less.
“Playing video games enables people all over the world to connect with friends and family and enjoy much needed entertainment during these uncertain times. Our goal is to partner with other leaders in the industry to help ensure gamers are able to enjoy engaging experiences,” said Jim Ryan, President and CEO, Sony Interactive Entertainment.
“As people look to gaming for play and social connection, we’re seeing record engagement across Xbox Game Pass, Xbox Live, and Mixer. We’re actively monitoring usage and making temporary adjustments as needed to ensure the smoothest possible experience for our gamers. We appreciate the collaboration with partners like Akamai to deliver the joy of games in these unprecedented times,” said Dave McCarthy, Corporate Vice President, Xbox Product Services.
While gamers may not be happy with Akamai’s announcement, it’s understandable given the challenge the pandemic is posing for internet companies around the world. Akamai’s main goal is to make sure critical network infrastructure remains fully functional and performs at the necessary level.
“It’s important to note that Akamai fully expects to maintain the integrity and reliability of website and mobile application delivery, as well as security services, for all of our customers during this time,” writes CEO Tom Leighton. “In particular, Akamai customers across sectors such as government, healthcare, financial services, commerce, manufacturing, and business services should not experience any change in the performance of their services.”
Grab, a Singapore based Uber type service, is so popular that if their IT infrastructure didn’t remain stable during peak usage transportation would literally ground to a halt. Grab is the leading ride sharing service in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.
“Grab is the leading ride sharing service in Southeast Asia,” says Ditesh Kumar, Director of Engineering at Grab. “We do 1.5 million bookings (a day). If we are not running basically transportation comes to a standstill.”
Kumar says that Grab has the biggest land fleet in Southeast Asia and that they are very concerned about uptime both for their passengers and their drivers, who he says depend on them for their livelihoods.
“With this comes two challenges, because of the tremendous amount of demand we need to scale, but because so many people depend on us, we need to stay stable.”
Scale and Stability are Two Opposing Forces
Kumar notes the difficulties of keeping your IT infrastructure stable while simultaneously scaling platform usage. “You can scale easily if you don’t have to be stable, and you can be very stable if you don’t have to scale.”
He says that the answer to this huge problem, after a lot of reflection, is addressing their infrastructure fundamentals.
“If we can make sure that our infrastructure is built not just for the needs of today, but also meets the needs of the future, it completely changes the types of conversations we have,” says Kumar.
That’s why Grab decided on the AWS infrastructure from the start. All of the AWS components he says are built to allow infinite scaling and are also extremely reliable.
Grab started out using a basic AWS setup but as they expanded they added the full gamut of AWS services in order to support their scaling needs. “We needed to start thinking about caching layers so we started using Amazon ElastiCache,” said Kumar.
They also started using Amazon Redshift, which is s petabyte-scale data warehouse service based in the cloud.
“It’s huge, it’s massive,” exclaimed Kumar. “Everybody in the company uses it. It’s not just the engineers, the product guys, the marketing team and the ATM team all use it.”
Real-Time Computation Requires Real-Time Data Streams
“In addition to that, we are doing real-time computation, and in order to do real-time demand and supply matching we need to have real-time data streams,” says Kumar.
“The end result is that our drivers will be told the demand is at this place right now, because with this high demand the drivers will be paid more.”
Building Predictive Models
Moving forward the company wants to build predictive models to make their service even more efficient for both passengers and drivers.
“In two hours time this area will have high demand and if you want to take advantage of that move to this area,” explains Kumar. “The way we can do that is by taking into account multiple factors, building data models around it and using the infrastructure to compute those models and come up with an actionable item.”
Why Grab is on AWS
Their are many benefits to being on the cloud,” says Kumar. “Such as not having to deal with physical issues, going down to a data center at 3am to the change a failed hard disk or deal with a server that is overheating because a fan has stopped rotating.”
He noted how companies of his size in the past had to have dedicated operational teams to deal with these sorts of issues. He sees little value in that for the organization and is not a great use for an engineering team. Grab gives every engineer an AWS account to run “full-blown experiments in their sub account” to look for potential problems.
“They would find things that might be a problem 3 months from now or six months from now, and giving engineers that ability is unparalleled,” he says. “I estimate that we have saved 30-40% of our resourcing and manpower that then went to serving our core focus, and our core focus is about serving our customers.”
He says this allowed our team to move significantly faster. “In the startup environment that is make-or-break!”
Dropbox just unveiled its own custom-built infrastructure, where the company stores and serves their users’ data.
“With more than half a billion users and over 500 petabytes of data (over 60 times the data stored in the Library of Congress), the company is continuing to invest heavily in building the very best collaboration tools to simplify peoples’ lives,” a spokesperson tells WebProNews.
The company says with its new infrastructure it’s storing and serving over 90% of user data. In all, Dropbox stores two kinds of data: file content and metadata about files and users.
“We’ve always had a hybrid cloud architecture, hosting metadata and our web servers in data centers we manage, and storing file content on Amazon,” explains Dropbox’s Akhil Gupta in a blog post. “We were an early adopter of Amazon S3, which provided us with the ability to scale our operations rapidly and reliably. Amazon Web Services has, and continues to be, an invaluable partner—we couldn’t have grown as fast as we did without a service like AWS. As the needs of our users and customers kept growing, we decided to invest seriously in building our own in-house storage system.”
The company says having its own custom infrastructure enables it to improve performance for its own use case and that it enables them to leverage their scale to customize hardware and software, and “provide better unit economics.”
More on how Dropbox put this together can be found here.
At 5:30 AM Wednesday, a 911 dispatcher in Wisconsin received a call from a motorist in which he reported that “There’s a part that’s sagging,” referring to a section of the Leo Frigo Bridge. Another caller would add even more mystery to the situation: “That bridge is sagging in the center. I came over with a tractor trailer and she jumped that, the wheels came off. There’s something that’s not quite right.”
When police arrived on scene at the bridge, they discovered that the callers were very apt in their descriptions – a 400 foot long, 20 inch-deep dip had formed in the bridge at some time during the night. As of now, investigators believe that the dip in the bridge has been caused by a settling of one of the bridges piers.
The Leo Frigo Bridge was built in 1980. It is 1.51 miles long, making it the second longest bridge in Wisconsin. Daily traffic on the bridge is around 40,000 vehicles per day.
In August 2012, inspections revealed slight cracks in several piers. However, engineers said that these were signs of normal wear and tear of a concrete bridge of such an age. Websites which access federal bridge data had rated the structure of the bridge to be “good” or “satisfactory” throughout the 2012 year.
Engineers have stated that they believe the pier will have to be replaced in order to correct the issue plaguing the bridge. Due to the unique failure of the bridge, officials do not know how long repairs will take. Motorists in the area hope that the issue is resolved quickly: “It’s a big hassle, because of all the construction that’s going around town. The downtown bridge was closed for how long? Now this one is out? It’s just like it’s a never-ending problem here.”
Bridge deficiencies have been plaguing America for some time, now. In 2007, Minnesota experienced a deadly bridge failure which led to 145 injuries and 13 deaths. Washington saw a bridge collapse earlier this year after a truck hit one of its support structures.
The 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure rates US bridges at a C+, quite an astounding rating considering the current state of our bridges. One out of every 9 bridges (11%) in the US is rated as structurally deficient, with the average age of a bridge being 42 years. The Federal Highway Administration estimates that in order to fix every structurally deficient bridge in the US, the country would have to spend $20.5 billion annually. Currently, the US spends $12.8 billion.
The infrastructure of the US saw its last great overhaul during the New Deal from 1933-43. FDR set up a program called the Public Works Administration, which sought to construct roadways, dams, and public buildings. President Obama has announced intentions several times to start similar infrastructure programs, but no efforts have yet prevailed. In a country which is struggling to increase its federal revenue and provide employment to its citizens, it seems as if a newer New Deal program would prove extremely beneficial. However, all hopes of doing so will prove impossible if the government does indeed shutdown.
