That might be the case for some companies and corporate profits, but certainly not all or even most. To give one example, Facebook's profits in 2015 were almost $4 billion. They share their carbon footprint details, and other environmental impact details at https://www.facebook.com/green/. Their environmental impact is small, and their profits enormous.
"Rockefeller was relentless in ferreting out ways to cut costs. During an inspection tour of a Standard Oil plant in New York City, for instance, he observed a machine that soldered the lids on five-gallon cans of kerosene destined for export. Upon learning that each lid was sealed with 40 drops of solder, he asked, "Have you ever tried 38?" It turned out that when 38 drops were applied, a small percentage of the cans leaked. None leaked with 39, though. "'That one drop of solder', said Rockefeller,...'saved $2,500 the first year; but the export business kept on increasing after that and doubled, quadrupled--became immensely greater than it was then; and the saving has gone steadily along, one drop on each can, and has amounted since to many hundreds of thousands of dollars"' (Chernow 1998, pp. 180-81). Over the course of his career at the helm of Standard Oil, "Rockefeller cut the unit costs of refined oil almost in half" (Ibid., p. 150).
Well federal can be as high as 28%. The US likes to point at various "socialist" countries in Europe but when you talk to someone from the UK or some of the Nordic countries you realize the difference is nominal. The difference is that you get health care and affordable university for those taxes on the other side of the Atlantic.
Yes there's no VAT in the US but when you add up all the "soft taxes" - toll roads, hotel tax, unemployment tax(unique in that you pay tax on money have already paid tax on) not to mention the other quasi/hidden taxes and fees like the following: gas tax, cell phone tax, electricity and natural gas, cable tv and alcohol the lack of a VAT in the US doesn't account for much.
Please see the various links I found below, in case you're not aware of comparable taxes in the UK. In addition, my state doesn't have toll roads (only a few major bridges are tolled) or congestion charges like parts of London. Your point on unemployment tax is duly taken, however.
EDIT: To put that into perspective, the tax in the UK of "£2.19 per U.S. gallon" is far more than a gallon of gas costs most Americans right now. In addition, there's a 20% VAT on the gas price AND the duty, so Britons are being taxed at 20% on that duty.
Electricity tax on certain usage levels: "The Climate Change Levy is a p/kWh tax on certain electricity use. Exempt supplies include domestic supplies and supplies using less than the de minimis threshold of 1,000 kWh / month" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_billing_in_the_UK)
Since you are building off of GeoLite which has a ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), does that mean you are distributing your modified database under the same terms?
It's a good question. I've been in touch with Maxmind's legal team before and they were happy with what we were doing, but that was before we had started building out our custom data.
My thoughts are:
1) We're not modifying the maxmind DB. We download their MMDB file and leave it completely untouched. Our code basically does something like this:
if ip in custom_db
return custom_db[ip]
else
return maxmind_db[ip]
2) Our database is openly available via our API. Anyone can access it without needing to signup etc.
They're the principles I've been operating under, but I'm not a lawyer, and I'll definitely go consult with one to get a definitive answer on where I stand with this. If it turns out that we're not meeting the license terms then we'll certainly make whatever changes necessary to ensure we do.
That's one of the raw sources that go into the network data. There's also the routing tables (without which you can't always match ASNs to netblocks), other datasets, and a bunch of custom scripts that post-process the data, performing cleanup, heuristic matching and more. And then putting it all into a data format that supports handling 250 million requests a day, and serving over 90% of them in less than 10ms.
So you use your own BGP tables or use HE or some other service to do it for you ?
250 mil requests is just ~2800 req/s. Serving 90% of them in 10 ms using api is not really any achievement, considering what kind of data you are serving. I've worked on api with 1 bil requests a day and 97% of them are below 10 ms (And the best is that only 2 machines are needed for that).
An amazing journey from the distant edges of the universe (10^24) right down to subatomic particles (10^-16). A great demonstration of orders of magnitude, and a reminder of how small a part of space (both big and small) we occupy.
"This lonely scene, the galaxies like dust, is what most of space looks like. This emptiness is normal. The richness of our own neighborhood is the exception." - at 100 million light years
