Tag: Amazon

TECHNOLOGY: DISTRACTING, DISTURBING, DECEIVING & DELUDING OURSELVES TO DEATH

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Image result for huxley amusing ourselves to death

Something as mundane as using the restroom at work sometimes ends up triggering deeper thoughts about technology – its benefits, deficiencies and danger to our culture. I’ve been using the same restroom at work for the last twelve years. They remodeled the restroom a few years ago with the latest technology – automatic flushers, automatic soap dispensers, automatic spigots, and automatic towel dispenser. This technology is supposed to make things better, but from my perspective the technology just added complexity, glitches and unnecessary complications.

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Clearing Out A Walmart Then Reselling It On Amazon Can Make You Millions

Authored by Ian Lecklitner of MEL Magazine

Turns out, clearing out a Target or Walmart, then reselling it all on Amazon, can make you enough money to pay off your house.

On one of my more recent voyages down a YouTube wormhole, I was introduced to a suspiciously profitable practice called retail arbitrage. The concept is fairly simple: You purchase products from a retail store, like Walmart or Target, and then you sell them somewhere else, like Amazon, for a higher price.

Here’s an example: In one video that I stumbled upon, an arbitrager purchases 182 ‘Monopoly for Millennials’ board games from several local Walmarts, for $19.82 each. Then, within less than 24 hours, he managed to sell 131 of them on Amazon for $77.29 each, which leaves him with an impressive profit of $2,500, even after deducting shipping costs and fees (he presumably sold the remaining 51 board games on a later date for even more profit).

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Capitalists vs. Capitalism

Guest Post by John Stossel

Capitalists vs. Capitalism

It’s bad enough when leftists smear capitalism. I hate it more when capitalists do it, too.

I’d hoped for more from the world’s current richest man, Jeff Bezos.

I love the service he created. Amazon lets me buy Christmas gifts right from my couch. Its prices are so low that the Fed chairman says Amazon probably lowered America’s inflation rate.

Entrepreneur Jeff Bezos is a hero. He created lots of jobs and better service, and he and his investors pay billions in taxes.

So I got angry when I saw Sen. Bernie Sanders’ opportunistic fundraising letters condemning Bezos because some of his workers are eligible for food stamps. “In ten seconds,” whined Sanders, Bezos makes “more money than the median employee of Amazon makes in an entire year.”

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A Veritable Feast of Reality, Choice, and Consequences

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

Someone I care about got into some trouble the week before Thanksgiving. They asked for my help, and I wasn’t raised to say “no” in such situations. What ensued were a series of unfortunate events that staggered my mind and challenged my previously naive vision of a moderately benevolent universe.

By any definition, any knowledgeable neutral party would say I did everything right, in spite of the dire turn of events that, fortunately, resulted in only a minor loss of time and money on my part; with a still positive outcome for the party I helped.

Even now, looking back, I realize I’d have made all the same decisions with the same information I had at the time. Yet, the mostly-positive denouement of the entire affair resulted in a conclusion I never dreamed possible at the start.

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It’s Not Just Amazon’s Fault

Guest Post by Vitaliy Katsenelson

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Retail stocks have been annihilated recently, despite the economy eking out growth. The fundamentals of the retail business look horrible: Sales are stagnating and profitability is getting worse with every passing quarter.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon get most of the credit, but this credit is misplaced. Today, online sales represent only 8.5 percent of total retail sales. Amazon, at $80 billion in sales, accounts only for 1.5 percent of total U.S. retail sales, which at the end of 2016 were around $5.5 trillion. Though it is human nature to look for the simplest explanation, in truth, the confluence of a half-dozen unrelated developments is responsible for weak retail sales.

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Happy Birthday America: 144 Revelations from June, 2018

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

Just as destination is determined by direction, so too are transitions roads to revelations.  In other words, today’s trends are tomorrow’s historical markers.  With that in mind, and for the purposes of cataloguing news articles in outright defiance against increasing internet censorship and memory-holed search engine results, the following disclosures occurred between the dates of June 1-30, 2018.

Although the list may be overly comprehensive for some, this blogger desired encyclopedic documentation for posterity, as well as to compare tracking from previous months.

For the reader’s convenience, the revelations are again sorted into the same category headings that were utilized for May, 2018; and, for those in a hurry who wish to bypass the entire “trifling minutia”, there are some concluding comments and questions at the end:

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The Wages Of Parasites

Guest Post by The Zman

According to this story in the Wall Street Journal, Sears is on the verge of finally going out of business. For people under the age of forty, this is a meaningless event, as Sears has not been a part of the public consciousness for decades. For those old enough to remember, the early 1990’s was the last time Sears was an anchor store at malls and shopping centers. I think the last time I had a reason to shop at Sears was at the old Natick Mall in the 1990’s. I think I bought a kitchen item, but I no longer recall exactly.

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Jumping The Great White Shark Of Bubble Finance

Guest Post by David Stockman

Wall Street has now truly jumped the shark—the one jockeyed by Jeff Bezos.

Last night Amazon reported a whopping 41% plunge in free cash flow for the March 2018 LTM period compared to prior year. Yet it was promptly rewarded by a $50 billion surge in market cap—-with $10 billion of that going to the guy riding topside on the Great White Shark of Bubble Finance.

That’s right. Amazon’s relatively meager operating free cash flow for the March 2017 LTM period had printed at $9.0 billion, but in the most recent 12 months the number has slithered all the way down to just $5.3 billion.

And that’s where the real insanity begins. A year ago Amazon’s market cap towered at $425 billion—meaning that it was being valued at a downright frisky 47X free cash flow. But fast forward a year and we get $780 billion in the market cap column this morning and 146X for the free cash flow multiple.

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The Donald’s Blind Squirrel Nails An Acorn

Guest Post by David Stockman

It is said that even a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn, and so it goes with the Donald. Banging on his Twitter keyboard in the morning darkness, he drilled Jeff Bezos a new one—or at least that’s what most people would call having their net worth lightened by about $2 billion:

I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!

You can’t get more accurate than that. Amazon (AMZN) is a monstrous predator enabled by the state, but Amazon’s outrageous postal subsidy—-a $1.46 gift card from the USPS stabled on each box—-isn’t the half of it.

The real crime here is that Amazon has been exempted from making a profit, and the culprit is the Federal Reserve’s malignant regime of Bubble Finance. The latter has destroyed financial discipline entirely and turned the stock market into the greatest den of speculation in human history.

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Trump: “Amazon Pays Little Or No Taxes, Puts Thousands Of Retailers Out Of Business”

The main driver behind yesterday’s latest FANG plunge, was a report in Axios, according to which it was not Facebook that Trump wants to go after, but rather Amazon:

“He’s obsessed with Amazon,” a source told Axios. “Obsessed”, and added that Trump has allegedly talked about changing Amazon’s tax treatment because he’s worried about mom-and-pop retailers being put out of business. Another Axios source said that POTUS has “wondered aloud if there may be any way to go after Amazon with antitrust or competition law.”

Trump’s deep-seated antipathy toward Amazon surfaces when discussing tax policy and antitrust cases. The president would love to clip CEO Jeff Bezos’ wings. But he doesn’t have a plan to make that happen.

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Friendly Reminder That Jeff Bezos Is Trying To Take Over The Universe

Guest Post by Caitlin Johnstone

Jeff Bezos, currently the wealthiest human being on planet Earth, did not purchase the Washington Post in 2013 because he was expecting newspapers to make a lucrative resurgence. This self-evident fact doesn’t receive enough attention.

I will say it again for emphasis: Jeff Bezos, who has used his business prowess to become the wealthiest person in the world, did not purchase the Washington Post in 2013 because he was expecting newspapers to make a profitable comeback. That did not happen.

What did happen is the world’s richest plutocrat realizing that he needed a mouthpiece to manufacture public support for the neoliberal corporatist establishment that he is building his empire upon. This is why WaPo ran sixteen smear pieces on Bernie Sanders in the span of sixteen hours at the hottest point in the Democratic presidential primary battle. It is also why it continues to publish filth like this:

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BULL IN A CHINA SHOP

“So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

I had read Nassim Taleb’s other best-selling tomes about risk, randomness and black swans – Fooled by Randomness & The Black Swan. They were not easy reads, but they were must reads. He is clearly a brilliant thinker, but I like him more because he is a prickly skeptic who scorns and ridicules academics, politicians, and Wall Street scumbags with gusto. There were many passages which baffled me, but so many nuggets of wisdom throughout each book, you couldn’t put them down.

When his Antifragile book was published in 2012, the name intimidated me. I figured it was too intellectual for my tastes. When I saw it on the shelf in my favorite used book store at the beach, I figured it was worth a read for $9. I’m plowing through it and I haven’t been disappointed.

His main themes are more pertinent today than they were in 2012. He published The Black Swan in 2007, just prior to one of the biggest black swans in world history – the 2008 Federal Reserve/Wall Street created financial collapse. His disdain for “experts” like Bernanke, Paulson, and Wall Street CEOs, and their inability to comprehend the consequences of their actions and in-actions as the financial system was blown sky high, was a bulls-eye.

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GOOGLE & NOW AMAZON

I wasn’t expecting the email below when I came back from lunch today. Somehow I seemed to have pissed someone off at Amazon. I have no idea what violation they are talking about and, of course, there is no appeal process. The only thing I can think is they thought my donation appeal below the Amazon button was somehow related to clicking on the Amazon button. We’ll never know.

All I know is that my largest stream of modest revenue is now gone. The ad revenue had been sufficient so that I haven’t felt the need to solicit for donations, but it is no longer sufficient for the amount of work I put into this website day in and day out, 365 days per year.

So, here is my solicitation for donations. I think it’s a pretty good site. I try to keep it interesting. I try to keep it a sanctuary of free speech. I’ve now been banned by the two biggest ad revenue generators – Google & Amazon. If you want to keep it alive, please consider donating something through my donation button, or sending something to my PO Box. I thought it was a nice touch by Amazon concluding their termination email with Warmest Regards. 🙂

I didn’t make me feel warm.

Hello from the Associates Program,

We are writing to tell you that effective as of today’s date, Amazon is terminating your Associates account. Under the terms of the Operating Agreement, we may terminate your account at any time, with or without cause. This decision is final and not subject to appeal.

It is important that you immediately remove all Amazon Content from your Site(s). Please be aware that any other accounts you have, or may open in the future, may be closed without payment of any fees. Amazon reserves all other rights and claims.

Because you are not in compliance with the Operating Agreement, Amazon will not pay you any outstanding advertising fees related to your account. Amazon exercises its right under the Operating Agreement to withhold fees based on violations, which include the following:

-You are incentivizing others to visit the Amazon Site via your Special Links by offering rebates, discounts, points, donations to charity, or other incentive.

Thank you for your participation in the Amazon Associates Program.

Warmest Regards,

Amazon.com