MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Bezos’

When Things Don’t Add Up | Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2021

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/when-things-dont-add-up/

James Howard Kunstler

It was only a week ago that the American Medical Association (AMA) declared that the category formerly known as “sex” must be removed from US birth certificates — replaced, one supposes, by a tacit “to-be-determined” status in the great Progressive rush to extract the human race from the animal kingdom. Of course, that’s only one skirmish in the great Woke Jacobin war on the moiling masses who clutter up planet Earth, cramping the style of its transhuman-seeking ubermanagers, Bill Gates, Bezos, Daszak, Zuck, Jack, Elon, Klaus & Company, et al.

But this was the old redoubtable, white-coated AMA, you understand, not some claque of screeching, size-16, “body-positive,” gender-cryptic freshman hopping up and down outside the Yale faculty lounge to gurn at the sherry-sipping toffs within. Amateur diagnosticians out there might recognize it as another symptom of the hebephrenic toxicosis infecting America’s elites, especially those who work in realms supposedly based on facts, figures, and the general effort to make sense of life in our mysterious universe.

This national freak-show-of-the-mind might account for the many recent instances of science talking out of its booty-hole, led by its very personification, Dr. Anthony (“The Science”) Fauci, proud papa of SARS-CoV-2 (stage-name: Covid-19), with all its fabulous HIV and monkeypox gain-of-function bells and whistles. Dr. Fauci’s mighty, 20-year effort to bring forth this gift to mankind happens to coincide neatly with the collapse of advanced techno-industrial economies, a frightful condition that was already causing enough trouble in the world before Covid-19 marched in. Some suspect that Covid-19 is a contrived cover for all that, perhaps even an attempt to manage the journey down.

The Covid 19 panic, which has been driving formerly civilized societies crazy for eighteen months, prompted the bringing-forth of The Science’s follow-up project: vaccines to stop the spread of the virus. Enter the scene, these vaxes did, like, a day-and-a-half after Covid-19 pirouetted onstage. Hmmmm. Could someone have been working on those vaxes backstage before the dread virus even premiered? Were patents issued for them pre-dating January, 2020? Seems so. But never mind that for now. The vaxes were rolled out to fanfares over a year ago and those moiling masses of America, the superfluous holders of bachelor’s degrees in Oppression Studies — for whom, sadly, the world had run-out of paying positions — lined up like kids at Santa’s throne in Macy’s on Black Sunday for their Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson jabs. Whew…! That was a close call!

Or was it? Naw, not even close, actually. Since now it turns out that the jabs don’t seem to work that well. The official story got murkier last week when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported internally to staff (it leaked) that “fully vaccinated people might spread the Delta variant at the same rate as unvaccinated people.” Whoopsie…. In a Delta variant outbreak on Cape Cod last month, three-quarters of the infected were fully vaxed-up patients. The story got darker because The New York Times, the usually-reliable mouthpiece for The Science and his allies in “Joe Biden’s” public health bureaucracy, let slip that, “The Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated.”

Wuh-oh…! A worm the size of an Amtrak Acela train has turned in the myocarditic heart of our nation’s capital. Things have changed overnight — didn’t they see it coming? — and now the government is freaking out as it appears to have some serious ‘splainin’ to do — and right on the heels, too, of an hysterical month-long campaign to persuade the remaining unvaxed millions to submit to the needle, climaxed by threatening the obdurate “hesitants” with taking away their employment and ability to participate in commerce and social life. All that sound-and-fury for what? For vaccines that don’t work… and which, quite possibly, could leave you seriously ill, even dead?

There’s one beguiling explanation I’ve heard — from Brandon Smith of Alt-Markets.us, and others — for that hysterical campaign of recent days to jab every last hold-out: the need to eliminate what’s called the “control group,” the bunch of people who, in any drug trial, are given no drug, or a fake shot (like saline), or a placebo (mindfuck agent) to see if the real thing actually works. The desperate effort couldn’t have been more idiotic, since there was no realistic hope of gulling the remaining unvaxed into getting a shot, and the effort only made the “Joe Biden” admin look even more dishonest and despotic.

This could be the beginning of the end for POTUS 46 and the Woke-Jacobin derangement he stole in on. The CDC numbers look so bad now, that Ol’ White “Joe” himself will have to step up to the mic and say something like: “We made a mistake with these vaccines. I hope you will forgive us.” Of course, he absolutely won’t rise to the occasion and say that, no way… and, anyway, the government (and POTUS 46) will not be forgiven because they’ve destroyed millions of livelihoods and tens of thousands of going businesses, and allowed a bunch of cities to get burned and trashed, and city-dwellers to be harassed and attacked by their Antifa/ BLM shock troops, and enabled roughly half the US population not-insane to be terrorized, mau-maued, and insulted by every Woke jape from the Drag Queen Reading Hour to Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 “insurrection” circus — with the janky 2020 election right in the middle.

Speaking of which election, evidence is likely to emerge soon that the numbers really don’t add up. And in a big way. The max-vax campaign may have been an attempted smoke screen for all that trouble coming down the line, but the max-vax move is obviously flopping now. And, by the way, do you suppose that the not-insane half of the nation has failed to notice that upward of half-a million people from other lands (all over the world!), many carrying Covid-19, have been jumping our border with Mexico… and that the US government has deliberately assisted them… and distributed them by bus, and even on airplanes, to distant points all over the USA… and now these government rogues have the nerve to put the squeeze on American citizens to vax up against a virus they are seeding around the country! Is it really too much to declare that this regime has got to go, and go as soon as possible?


Be seeing you

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FckdEx 🚚 | No Mercy / No Malice

Posted by M. C. on December 22, 2019

Will Bezos run his package delivery service better than his news delivery service WaPo?

https://www.profgalloway.com/fckdex

Scott Galloway
Scott Galloway

In the next 24 months, FedEx will either be acquired or lose an additional 40%+ in value. The likely acquirer is Walmart. The gangster move: a merger with Shopify.

In July 2017 we predicted, “If Bezos tomorrow said, ‘We see overnight delivery as a huge opportunity,’ the $150 billion of market cap of DHL, FedEx, and UPS would begin leaking to Amazon.”

This has happened. Since the launch of Amazon’s delivery service in February 2018, FedEx has lost $25 billion (39%) in value, despite the S&P’s 24% gain. Amazon has added $240 billion (33%). In less than two years, Amazon captured nearly one-fifth of the market for e-commerce deliveries in the U.S.

Since 2014, U.S. e-commerce has increased 84%, creating a massive opportunity for the delivery industry. But instead, there has been a transfer of wealth from FedEx, UPS, and the U.S. government to Amazon. Amazon enters high-friction, low-margin businesses as a means of differentiating low-friction, high-margin businesses (AWS and AMG).

How We Got Here — Featurizing 

Network effects, cheap capital, idolatry of innovators, and a feckless DOJ/FTC have resulted in a monopoly era where a wildly profitable business (phones, digital marketing, loyalty programs, cloud, Yoda dolls) can generate such staggering value (“antimatter”) that entire industries become loss leaders (“features”) to differentiate and protect the antimatter. Netscape, the fastest-growing software firm in history, went from antimatter to feature when Microsoft began bundling Internet Explorer with Office.

I served on the board of a visual commerce SaaS firm (Olapic) until we sold for $130 million in 2016. There was a great deal of discussion on whether to sell. I urged the founders, naturally optimistic about the firm’s prospects, to sell. The difference between $1 million and $10 million in wealth is meaningful (go big), but the difference between 0 and $1 million is profound (sell). Every entrepreneur should bank enough money to provide economic security for their family … at any opportunity. For every CNBC story on Spiegel and Zuck turning down offers and going on to capture billions, there are dozens of founders who should have sold.

Pro tip: your VCs will encourage you to “be in it to win it,” and to keep going, as they are already rich. Assume you are not Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaking of Zuck, I think he’d be happier if he’d sold to Microsoft (I don’t know him, so this is pure speculation). A powerful algorithm for happiness is to be wealthy but anonymous. Perhaps as a coping mechanism for realizing the significant damage he levies on the world, Zuck has developed the attributes of a sociopath. At some point, he’ll likely be criminally charged. Instead, he could have worked in Seattle for 27 months, retired to Hawaii, invested in rockets, owned a football team, and produced Cats for the big screen.

With any software start-up, there is a non-zero probability that you wake up the next day and find that a better-resourced firm (Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe) has deployed 200 engineers to copy your product, bundle it with their stack for free, or near free, and … welcome to zero. I believe this is happening to Slack, but more slowly than Netscape, as Microsoft’s General Counsel has likely coached Satya to charge a nominal fee for Teams and let Slack bleed out, instead of putting a bullet in its head and stirring the DOJ from a 3-Ambien slumber.

FedEx is in the midst of being featurized by Amazon, who can make investments across their vertical stack that FedEx can’t match, as Amazon has antimatter (Prime, AWS, AMG). The Memphis firm’s most recent earnings were a sh*t-show with top- and bottom-line misses, drivel about a slowdown in air freight, and (my favorite) an unfavorable calendar — a Kabuki dance attempting to distract investors from the fact they’re being featurized by Amazon.

FedEx shareholders have woken up in an M. Night Shyamalan nightmare. Instead of seeing dead people, investors are haunted by Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans with an arrow the shape of a smile on their side. Everywhere. They might as well be German Panzer tanks fighting a white-and-purple cavalry of FedEx trucks. There will be a lot of macho battle cries from FedEx, some heroism, and an increasing stench of death. (Can’t help it, I love WWII war metaphors.)

The Monopoly Algorithm: Innovation, Obfuscation, Exploitation

Innovation

To be fair, Amazon is a better-run company than FedEx,

Read the rest of this entry »

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Jeff Bezos Is Doing Huge Business with the CIA, While Keeping His Washington Post Readers in the Dark

Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2017

http://www.alternet.org/media/owner-washington-post-doing-business-cia-while-keeping-his-readers-dark

WaPo has always had the rep of being the CIAs mouthpiece. But then if you get your news from WaPo you would not know that.

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