I mean seriously, Amazon is so superior to the competition that they're left trying to use institutionalized violence to stop them; that can only make things worse on the economics side. Why are we forgetting that?
And before you talk about how Amazon acts monopolistically by promoting their own or favorite products, it's their platform, they have a right to do that and they're not forcing sellers to use them. The sellers, if they really think they have a better chance elsewhere, can leave. And Amazon doesn't owe them the best possible service. It might make it worse for users, but again no one is forcing you to use Amazon. Use Walmart all you want!
Amazon can be an evil empire, AND their opposition can also be evil corporations that do evil things like organize fake grassroots campaigns. These are not mutually exclusive ideas.
> Amazon is so superior to the competition that they're left trying to use institutionalized violence to stop them
"Violence" is a word with a meaning, and it isn't happening here. No one has been so much as bruised. If you have to resort to this sort of sophistry to make your point, your point is probably not correct.
Amazon isn't winning because they're superior to the competition. Lots of online sellers manage to not sell counterfeit goods, have better prices, and give more of the profit to the people actually producing products. Amazon is winning because of first-to-market advantages, pre-existing infrastructure, and monopolistic practices.
> And before you talk about how Amazon acts monopolistically by promoting their own or favorite products, it's their platform, they have a right to do that and they're not forcing sellers to use them. The sellers, if they really think they have a better chance elsewhere, can leave. It might make it worse for users, but again no one is forcing you to use Amazon. Use Walmart all you want!
It's clear that you do not understand the concept of a monopoly.
You also make it seem like all the infrastructure that they use very efficiently to their advantage is something that they just found in the woods one day. They built all that, and are using the advantages gained from that, which are, again, earned and a part of Amazon's merit.
And further, I don't think explaining away a corporation's dominance by using monopolistic practices is very convincing when they rose to power so recently: how did Amazon get so big in the first place? Also, most of the monopolistic practices, of the kind that would allow a company to maintain dominance in spite of merit, are things Amazon is not doing. It's monopolistic practices are limited to it's own platform.
I'm perfectly aware of that. The point is that everybody is echoing with the message, and not really worried about the delivery at all. Furthermore, if the delivery is suspect here I'm trying to suggest we should examine why we hate Amazon so much, and whether it's justified.
> "Violence" is a word with a meaning, ... If you have to resort to this sort of sophistry to make your point, your point is probably not correct.
I'm aware of that, thank you. If you have to resort to such sophistry maybe your point isn't correct! (Although I'm not actually saying that yet lol)
> and it isn't happening here. No one has been so much as bruised.
Not right now, obviously. But where does the government's power to enforce things come from? Violence. Whenever you are trying to use the government to force people to do things, it's from a position of the threat of violence. That's the nature of the beast. That's also why I qualified it with "institutionalized", which you seem to have conveniently ignored. The government represents an implied threat of violence used to back the power of an institution that abstract actual violence away (most of the time). This is why people often can't see the violence; and because of that I find it helpful to point it out more explicitly.
> It's clear that you do not understand the concept of a monopoly.
I know what the government defines as a monopoly, and would say Amazon skirts that line VERY closely. But I'm trying to get people from just saying, "it's a monopoly" and leaving it at that. That lets the connotation of the word do all the legwork, when we should be examining exactly what the real behavior is and whether it's actually wrong and something we should be attacking them for. It's all well and good to talk about the Law, but sometimes we have to talk about ethics and rights, too.
It really does bother me when the facets of the complaints against the giants boil down to basically, they're too good at that, or they can do things that others can't. At a blunt level, isn't that the point?
Isn't it what we want? When we talk about services, not petroleum, I find it difficult to see nearly the deep damage that their market positions would cause in a different line of business.
when they start to be so influential and market shaping that the 'things they can do that others cant' threatens to be 'sell products effectively enough to survive independently' or 'compete in this space at all, even with massive backing' then no, this is not what we want.
granted, I don't think amazon is there yet, but they are certainly making impact.
It's exactly what many of Microsoft's peers did in the 1990s. They waged a large, persistent campaign across years to convince the government to pursue and break up Microsoft. Larry Ellison went so far as to basically purchase trash from a cleaning company to get at info related to lobbyists supporting Microsoft's position.[1] Some of it was spot on, Microsoft was doing what they claimed; some of it was nothing more than ugly, base envy, jealousy, greed.
Jeff Bezos, as a human being, has intrinsic and inalienable human rights recognized by the Constitution of the United States and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The ability to run his business under the aegis of a limited-liability corporation is not one of them.
1: A corporation's legally defined powers are generally described as "rights" because people tend to be sloppy in their use of language, do not appreciate correction, and often mistake precision for pedantry.
That's not exactly true. Corporations have many of the same rights. For example, in Citizens United vs FEC, the Supreme Court wrote that:
"The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations (...) The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not 'natural persons'."
(page 25 in https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf )
If the First Amendment is the recognition of a right, then corporations have that right, just like natural persons. This concept in the US is called "corporate personhood" and it has long been recognized by courts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Case_law_...
> In 1818, the United States Supreme Court decided Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (...) Beginning with this opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court has continuously recognized corporations as having the same rights as natural persons to contract and to enforce contracts.
This is the problem nowadays. We can't really trust anybody. The threats to our privacy and freedoms are coming from every quarter.
And the worst part is,
that some of the people and organizations telling us about the threats to our freedoms and privacy, are, in fact, likely the biggest threats to our freedoms and privacy.
Perhaps people really feel that Amazon is an evil empire regardless of this competitor's actions.
Or even worse, they're all equally terrible. Which would mean that no matter what we do, we lose privacy and freedoms.
The public is being manipulated into taking actions directly contradictory to its own good either way.
One road to death and despair, the other to disease and destruction.
You could say, "choose wisely", but it doesn't really look like it matters.
The idea predates the astroturfing effort, which glommed on to it because the idea was popular, resilient, and convenient.
The fact that it serves certain other companies’ interests to promote the idea doesn't invalidate it.
I'm not sure I agree with your définition of superior.
Just like Windows was Microsoft's platform and anyone was free to install whatever browser they wanted... Use Netscape all you want!
I think too much efficiency in retail allows people to over-consume, and is a net negative for the environment and mental health... so i would support initiatives like this from a purely philosophical worldview.
progress isn't always progress.
On the environmental side, I think climate change is real, but I don't think it's nearly as bad as everyone says it is, and I find it odd that the solution to every upcoming crisis is always more socialism, and then we get more socialism but it doesn't help and then the date of the crisis passes and we go on to a new one.
Yes, I'm calling marketers and advertisers propagandists. As far as I'm concerned, marketing and advertising are nothing but private-sector psyops.
Case in point: how much negative media coverage of Peter Thiel do you see after he sued Gawker into the ground for dragging him out of the closet?
Thiel claimed that being exposed as gay "ruined lives", but involuntary public exposure prominent closeted individuals has long been an effective tactic in non-violent combat against conservative public officials and religious leaders who use their position to infringe on the rights of LGBT individuals. A man of Thiel's wealth and influence is surely fair game for similar treatment.
(Ok, not corps, but definitely psyops.)
Some Stephenson gets close, most especially the Snowcrash / Diamond Age arc.
(Which I'd like to see him continue.)
I can use scary words to describe mundane things too.
Far more interesting imho:
>The grass-roots support cited by the group was also not what it appeared to be. The labor union says it was listed as a member of the group without permission and says a document purporting to show that it gave permission has a forged signature. The Boston professor says the group, with his permission, ghost-wrote an op-ed for him about Amazon but that he didn’t know he would be named as a member. The California businessman was dead for months before his name was removed from the group’s website this year.
> Service Employees International ... was named as a member [of the fake grass roots org] without permission...Marathon [PR firm for the fake grass roots org] emailed to the Journal a membership agreement that the agency said had been signed by Gilda Valdez, the chief of staff for the union local, dated July 23, 2018. But Ms. Valdez said that the signature on the documents provided by Marathon was not hers.
And the article shows Ms. Valdez' real signature and the one on the document for comparison, and one is clearly a clumsy copy of the other. IANAL, but isn't this fraud?
I don't believe the "poor Amazon" angle for a moment though. A lot of the "campaign" against Amazon takes place in EU courtrooms where no rival company is focusing our attention on their transgressions. A lot of stuff Amazon chooses to do is morally unjust and should be illegal - they choose to include bathroom break time with productivity calculations that determines who gets fired. Bezoz just clawed back 1900 workers' healthcare to indistinguishably enrich himself.
France fined them for abusing vendors -
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/09/04/france-fines-ama...
EU is investigating them to see if they abuse vendors with the vendors' own sales data -
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/19/eu-probing-amazons-use-of-da...
Reversing corrupt tax deals -
https://www.newsmax.com/Finance/StreetTalk/amazon-apple-tax-...
It seems unlikely that competitors have no influence on what the EU chooses to pursue in courts.
I work for a small nonprofit which claims to run grassroots advocacy campaigns. We are in the environmental sector, but I'm sure it is similar in other areas. A solid 70% of our funding comes from large foundations. We pick an issue, get people fired up on social media about it, then call it grassroots just because a bunch of people supported it.
And really, that should I guess be the default way one consume's news in general, no matter what its about. (Even the parent article!)
Competitors might be piling in it and pushing it under the spotlight、even exaggerate parts of it, but of lot of Amazon’s operations is still provably shitty.
For instance what part of the warehouse working condition do you think is completely fabricated ?
Warehouse work is hard and low paid. Working for Amazon is working for one of the best warehouse jobs but that doesn’t make it easy work. I’ve seen article about long days and injuries and such and they never bring up industry hours or wages or injury rates. So I suspect they are negative PR.
So I don’t think they are fabricated, but they are misleading.
So the campaigns are real but the scale is faked.
What I hate most about the 21st century is how almost nothing feels genuine anymore. The news, any sort of campaign, even “science” in a lot of cases are just people using money to tell us what to think. Maybe it’s been like this for decades and we’re just now waking up to it, but regardless it just makes it all feel hollow
When communication was one-to-one, you could hire someone to visit a target in person and advocate your position, which made sense only if your revenue from the advocacy was greater than the cost of the employee. Most of the time you wouldn't even start to do this because it would be dumb.
But now communication is now one-to-thousands and it's even cheaper to publish an idea than it used to be. If you can spend $100 to influence 10,000 people to give you $0.10 on average, that will be stupidly profitable, and greedy/amoral corporations will spend that money until the ROI is down to break-even.
It's come to the point where I seriously toy with handing off most of my decision making process to statistics. Mathematics has derived an algorithm for a lot of real world decision making that is superior to what the vast majority of humans can do, and I'm not sure which group I'm in: the ones that make really poor emotional decisions (although "luck" and emotions are tied together, according to more research I've read; luck might just be a way of thinking), or if I'm able to make well informed decisions based on data.
But I'm sure there is some science behind it, might be the case that marketing whent - lets target the average IQ and go for the masses and with that. We get lots of cheese.
As an aside - some aspects of today's marketing remind me in part of an old TV show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)
The majority of content is sponsored in some shape or form, and all content is biased towards the interests of the publishers and authors.
Sure you may not buy a certain car because of the music in the commercial, or positively view some corporate ambassador saying “80% of our cocoa does not come from child labor!” but there is much more to corporate propaganda than that.
but at the meta level, I think most people growing up with the internet know to a fundamental level that they are being manipulated and tracked.
Alas they may be resigned to it as a reality, but people in the older generations are so gullible to frighteningly basic propaganda.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-21/amazon-hires-army-...
I typically like the WSJ's reporting, but this honestly feels like a topic they should be recusing themselves from.
[1] - https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/112615/wall-street-...
No they don't. You're thinking of the Washington Post.
I think you're confusing WSJ and The Washington Post. The later is owned by Jeff Bezos.
Amazon paid NO income taxes last year. I am against Amazon for that reason alone.
Fixating on massive corporations not paying tax is actually making the problem worse, because it takes attention away from the only thing that can fix the problem which is changing the law. Anything less is just asking companies to hurt themselves for no reason.
Just like how most people would pay lower taxes if it was legal, the same goes for companies. That's not saying I don't completely agree they need to pay their fair share - I do!
You can do both. In many if not all cases the tax loopholes are a result of an amazon-like company lobbying politicians, they’re not innocently taking advantage of a neutral situation.
Telling people to stop complaining about abuse of the law is one of the best ways of preventing the law from ever being fixed.
This is not true. They paid no federal income tax which is not the same as no income tax. In 2018 they paid $1.2 billion globally[0] and I don't understand how much they paid domestically because deferred income tax is confusing to me.[1]
Taxes are extremely complicated and a lot of people (politicians especially) will pick one or two numbers that support their narrative. They know most people won't spend the time researching the context surrounding their "statistics" and they also bank on how people will misunderstand what they're reporting.
You just said "NO income taxes last year." The people popularizing the "no federal income taxes" meme know a lot of people will think it means "no income taxes."
[0] - https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials [1] - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deferredincometax.asp
Amazon didn’t break any laws when they paid whatever amount they did or didn’t pay. Also I’m not sure which oligarch you’re talking about.
And they’re not the only ones who did this. It’s just convenient to flash Amazons name next to this headline since there are enough companies out there who refuse to compete or do anything innovative but want you to blindly give them your money.
