Amazon: The Half Has Never Been Told

You have security cameras behind you at all times, they’re looking at you 24/7; and if you don’t meet standards or their rates, you’re out the door.

You’re just disposable.

People who’ve worked in warehouses for decades, say this is different. This is not the same.

Watching the Frontline Documentary on Amazon, I was reminded of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told. A book about the brutal practices that arisen from the tremendous growth of the cotton trade in the 19th-century.

In the cotton kingdom, “white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.”

[H]istorians like Sven Beckert, Robin Blackburn and Walter Johnson have emphasized that cotton, the raw material of the early Industrial Revolution, was by far the most important commodity in 19th-century international trade and that capital accumulated through slave labor flowed into the coffers of Northern and British bankers, merchants and manufacturers. And far from being economically backward, slave owners pioneered advances in modern accounting and finance….

Violence, Baptist contends, explains the remarkable increase of labor productivity on cotton plantations. Without any technological innovations in cotton picking, output per hand rose dramatically between 1800 and 1860. Some economic historians have attributed this to incentives like money payments for good work and the opportunity to rise to skilled positions. Baptist rejects this explanation.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon are Bad Neighbors

εἶπεν δὲ αὐτῷ Ὀρθῶς ἀπεκρίθης· τοῦτο ποίει καὶ ζήσῃ.

~ Luke 10 : 28

New Book Coming Soon

And a lawyer stood up and put Him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

And He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How does it read to you?”

And he answered, “YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND; AND YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.”

And He said to him, “You have answered correctly; DO THIS AND YOU WILL LIVE.”

~ Luke 10 : 25 – 28

Amazon, the Democrats and the Fallout From the Harvey Weinstein Scandal

Jeff Bezos and Harvey Weinstein

It’s absurd that the working families of this country subsidize the wealthiest people in the United States of America.

Amazon is a radically new kind of monopoly with ambitions that dwarf those of earlier empires

AMAZON GETS TAX BREAKS WHILE ITS EMPLOYEES RELY ON FOOD STAMPS

Amazon Retail Sucks as a Business

It took Amazon 12 years to develop it most profitable entity, while after 25 years there is no indication that the retail aspect of Amazon will ever become a good business.

[Apple] is generating more profit every quarter than Amazon has done in double their entire history.

~ Scott Galloway

Professor of Marketing

NYU Stern School of Business

The Jackson Administration will ensure that local businesses compete effectively against tech giants such as Amazon.

We have about $30 trillion in Americans’ long-term savings in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, pension funds, and life insurance funds. Yet less than 1 percent of these savings touch local small businesses—even though roughly half the jobs and the output in the private economy come from local businesses.

If our capital markets were functioning efficiently, roughly half of our $30 trillion savings or about $15 trillion would be going into the half of the economy that is local small business.

Ask, and it will be given to you;

Seek, and you will find;

Knock, and it will be opened to you.

~ Matthew 7:7

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A rough draft of Seven Magazine.

Amazon can now borrow money for less than the cost of what China can borrow money

Scott Galloway: So people ask what Amazon’s core competence or advantage is, relative to the other members of the four and it comes down to storytelling. And that is Jeff Bezos’ essential rap has not changed in 15 years and it’s a pretty intoxicating visionary rap, where they’re gonna invest massively across some consumer truisms that aren’t perishable: value, convenience, selection, speed.

And the marketplace keeps bidding up the stocks. As a result, they have access to cheaper capital than any company in modern history. Amazon can now borrow money for less than the cost of what China can borrow money. As a result, they are able to throw up more stuff against the wall than any other firms. If the phone doesn’t work, if it fails, if auctions don’t fail, it’s a speed bump for them, whereas, other companies will probably be either put out of business or see their stock cut in half.

Jeff Bezos Tinkering in the Dark

The Power of Tinkering, Community, and the Unconscious

We humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing.

In creative endeavors, tinkering is key as Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Antifragile, tells us in a Forbes article called “You Can’t Predict Who Will Change The World:”

“It is high time to recognize that we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing. But we don’t know it. We truly live under the illusion of order believing that planning and forecasting are possible. We are scared of the random, yet we live from its fruits.”

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original

I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. But we do know is that if you are not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong.

And by the time that they become adults most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frighten of being wrong. And we run our companies this way, we stigmatizes mistakes. And we are now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing that you can make.The result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Picasso once said this “all children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.

You cannot invent and pioneer if you cannot accept failure.

Jeff Bezos, pending his upcoming divorce, is the world’s wealthiest person. He became the world’s wealthiest person on July 27, 2017. That lasted for a few hours until October 27, 2017 when Bezos again became the world’s wealthiest person when Amazon share prices went surging after an earnings report.

Shopping at Amazon is Bad for Your Health

The first thing that we need to understand is that community has a profound effect on who we are and on our health.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in Outliers which The New York Times printed the first chapter:

We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested.

The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under 55 died of a heart attack, or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over 65, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was something like thirty or thirty-five percent lower than it should have been….

[Y]ou couldn’t understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about their individual choices or actions in isolation. You had to look beyond the individual. You had to understand what culture they were a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town in Italy their family came from. You had to appreciate the idea that community — the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with — has a profound effect on who we are. The value of an outlier was that it forced you to look a little harder and dig little deeper than you normally would to make sense of the world. And if you did, you could learn something from the outlier that could use to help everyone else.

In Outliers, I want to do for our understanding of success what Stewart Wolf did for our understanding of health.

There is also a national study by sociologists at LSU and Baylor University that supports the health benefits of locally-owned businesses:

Counties and parishes with a greater concentration of small, locally-owned businesses have healthier populations — with lower rates of mortality, obesity and diabetes — than do those that rely on large companies with “absentee” owners.

Loving your neighbor is good for your health, but we only need to read the headlines to determine that Amazon is a very bad neighbor.

Jeff Bezos and Harvey Weinstein

Amazon is a radically new kind of monopoly with ambitions that dwarf those of earlier empires

Amazon’s HQ2 was a con, not a contest

Amazon Will Pay a Whopping $0 in Federal Taxes on $11.2 Billion Profits

Why Jeff Bezos is So Amazingly Successful

Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time.

On July 27, 2017, Jeff Bezos became the world’s wealthiest person. That lasted for a few hours until October 27, 2017 when Jeff Bezos again became the world’s wealthiest person when Amazon share prices went surging after an earnings report.

Thomas Edison, one of the greatest innovators of all time, said: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Like Thomas Edison, Bezos is so amazingly successful because he and his team at Amazon fail big and often. In Amazon’s 2016 annual shareholder letter, Bezos writes:

One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.

Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there. Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten.

We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.

$6 Billion in 20 Minutes

I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally billions of dollars of failures. You might remember Pets.com or Kosmo.com. It was like getting a root canal with no anesthesia. None of those things are fun. But they also don’t matter.

What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence. Whereas companies that are making bets all along, even big bets, but not bet-the-company bets, prevail. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets. That’s when you’re desperate. That’s the last thing you can do.

~ Jeff Bezos

According to Fast Company, on Thursday, April 28^th, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made $6 billion in 20 minutes, after reported earnings beat expectations. Most people know Amazon as an online retailer but it’s collection of cloud computing services, Amazon Web Services or AWS, is Amazon’s new profit engine. The unit’s $1.9 billion in operating profit in 2015 was close to the $2.8 billion operating profit of the entire $99 billion retail business even though AWS constitutes only about 10% of Amazon’s overall revenues.

It is important to understand that AWS started off as a bit of an industry joke. How could an upstart bookseller possibly compete with real data specialists or persuade companies to outsource data storage? Yet that’s what has happened. In Jeff Bezo’s 2016 annual letter to shareholders, he wrote:

This year, Amazon became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales. Also this year, Amazon Web Services is reaching $10 billion in annual sales … doing so at a pace even faster than Amazon achieved that milestone….