by Dave
In a recent interview with Richard Dolan, CAF talks about the missing money and a bunch of other things. But buried in the interview was her oft-made observation about how the theme of Mr Global’s operation: centralizing profits.
And that’s what Amazon has done. They’ve centralized the profits. Same with Google. Same with Facebook. Same with Wal-Mart.
The net effect is to strip customers and profits from local businesses, and turn what used to be small business owners with agency into cogs working for The Big AI Machine.
If we project this forward, in 20 years, Amazon will have turned into The Company Store, and it will have destroyed local retail, and it will also be in position to strip profits from all the providers of the actual products, since Amazon will utterly control the delivery channel to the customer.
In this situation, product-providers will have to pay some variable percentage of their profits to Amazon, the only channel that remains in existence. Amazon’s AI will calculate what you must pay with unerring accuracy, since it will know your balance sheet and income statement, and the AI will leave you just enough profit to limp by. They will also personalize prices to the customer – because they know just how badly each customer wants whatever-it-is. Like facebook, Amazon (Alexa!) will know you better than your mom. The Amazon AI will be fantastically good about stripping the maximum amount of profit from both ends of the chain, handing it over to Jeff Bezos.
Oh and Bezos, Richest Guy In The World, owns his very own propaganda site, The Washington Post. I suspect this is just the first site of many. Perhaps the New York Times will be next. Or maybe CNN.
Clever fellow, Bezos.
To my mind, Amazon needs to be taken down. It is way too powerful.
So while I suspect New York probably missed out on a reasonably big gravy train, the larger question is, should such a gravy train even exist? For me, the answer is no. New York already has one such gravy train – the collection of banksters downtown – which it assiduously protects from harm. Armstrong goes on and on about how you can’t hope to win any sort of lawsuit against the banksters in any New York court. He should know, he’s had personal experience.
Anyhow, that’s just my Amazon Thought For The Day.
I humbly submit a new tagline for the Bezos WAPO:
“Democracy Dies When The Press is Owned By The Oligarchs”.