It’s not a goal post shift. I mentioned it in my opening statement that Bezos doesn’t compete with anyone and is the biggest dick to the US.
You mentioned some customer review that included companies that weren’t even in the same industry as Amazon. A strange Tangent.
For that hole.
There are lots of successful retailers that have minimal B&M presence. BHphotovideo has a store in NY, but mostly sells online. Coolstuffinc has a store somewhere, but mostly sells online. They both have excellent customer service. Is their success just “luck”?
Both of them directly compete with Amazon, BTW.
I get it. Pictures when words fail you. Take a break, and come back with an argument. I’ll wait.
No need to rush back.
It’s crazy to say Amazon doesn’t have competitors. Keep it up. You don’t seem to know anything about the topic you’re talking about which is why you can’t actually support your position with any supporting data because there isn’t any. You just pick one line out of mine, list their competitors and then come up turn around in the same breath and claim they don’t have competitors.
Just keep sitting back and telling everyone how rich you or someone else would be if you were just lucky. It’s a sure election winner there. Democrats are going to fuck this up again, again. And we’ll be stuck in GOP hell for a long time because of shit like this.
Despite what he says, Amazon has a lot of competitors, and one of the reasons they have a ton of competitors is they are in more than one market. They’re competing all over the place in several industries. It’s ludicrous to claim they have no competitors and to even try and reduce them something as a single website, an e-tailer, to begin with. Just the word Amazon and groceries sent that market into a panic and hit stocks because when Amazon shows up, heads tend to roll. That does not happen because they’re lucky. It happens because they show up ready to play and play hard.
If Bezos follows through with this I will feel slightly less bad about him:
You could just not use Amazon.
Now that is a good argument on why they won, but hindsight is 20/20. No one knew that would be the secret ingredient (Bezos in 1999 thought membership offers would be more important, which maybe they are?), no one knew MS, AOL or other incumbents wouldn’t step in (which is why tech companies buy/sue everything in sight now), there’s many reasons why it might not have worked.
I won’t say they didn’t work hard, but so did a lot of competitors of a lot of other potential alternatives to our power 4, or even those between themselves. Some fumbled, some hit the right mix at the right time.
In a small segment in one of the markets, and in the same way Gamersgate competes with Steam - it doesn’t matter.
Just because one person or one business worked hard to be successful does not mean the others that did not make it also didn’t work hard. Successful efforts does not equate to lack of efforts by others.
Acknowledging someone or some thing changed the world also does not mean you have to say it it was for the best or that something else might not have come along and changed the world latter because maybe that might’ve happened but it would not look exactly like it did today.
None of this discussion though means you have to demonize people with money and wage warfare against them when you can just… tax the money. And if certain behaviors are abhorrent enough, you can regulate it. Like, if retail doesn’t pay enough, that’s what raising a minimum wage can address.
Well, sure. But that’s like saying that in 1930, nobody knew that the Big Bang model would outperform the Steady State Model, because nobody had yet discovered cosmic background radiation.
No question that others worked hard in anonymity, and things could have turned out differently. But I think it’s fair to give credit to the person who actually proved their theory was valid. Penzias and Wilson got a Nobel Prize for providing evidence for the Big Bang model, and Bezos deserves at least a nod for demonstrating how well an e-commerce model can perform.
I don’t really disagree with your reply. I’m just trying to add to the discussion in a few (not really that important) points, but I understand that it looks as if I’m supporting the extreme viewpoints on “my side”, which I don’t think are workable. Which is weird, because I’m usually the radical in a political conversation.
Right. Just saying he’s not a genius above all (although certainly above me) and that a winner take all is probably not the best we can do. Which also applies to the nobel, I hope pop science doesn’t remember only the winners of the prize, there’s a ton of great people to recognize.
Did I miss anything of interest in the election news? Last post I saw was the bit about Mayor Pete’s interview this weekend. The many dozens of posts since are all the billionaire tangent, far as I can tell.
Thank you for saying this. It is an especially obnoxious part of the leftist agenda and combined with the disdain of anybody who doesn’t hold.progressive opinion, it is enough for many people to say just screw them.
To be fair, there are only like one, maybe two people arguing that. There’s a much larger contingent that has nothing against Bezos, and would be happy to see him and his family enjoying the best food, housing, healthcare, iphones, etc. etc. until the end of their lives. The problem is that his wealth goes far, far beyond what is needed for that, and becomes so large and self re-enforcing that it begins to pervert the larger economy and political system. That is the problem that Warren is trying to fix.
I’m glad you’re starting to understand the Bernie-or-Bust people. :D
I don’t disdain people that are against making a better society. I do think that the half measures of Moderates is weak sauce. As someone that Campaigned for, and voted for Hillary, I personally thing progressive policies, although far superior to anything on the right, are a non starter in this country.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t want them. Especially when a lot of what is proposed is rather common in other Western Nations across the world and aren’t even considered all that progressive. Free education and Free Healthcare are just table stacks in other countries. Heck, many nations support their citizens in retirement.
And what does this get them? Besides higher rates of happiness, longer life spans, and more economic movement.
But lets be clear, the goals espouses by Bernie and Elizabeth far exceed the reality of much of the rest of the word. I have a Canada friend who declare medical bankruptcy, after the Canadian government negligence resulted in her son getting hepatitis C via blood transfusion, and then tried to cover it up, I know another Canadian girl in her late 20s who struggles to pay for her medicines for her bipolar disorder, and much less afford Lasik or even contact lens. Another friend immigrated from England, even though he is obese he had no trouble getting a hip replacement. His twin sister back in England was denied the same operation unless she lost 50’lbs even though, she is less obese.
Now I’m not saying that US healthcare is superior, it clearly isn’t, just lets not kid our-self, that giving everyone health insurance, will prevent medical bankruptcies as Bernie and Elizabeth claim.
As to the specific proposal of a wealth tax. It is been tried at far smaller scale in numerous countries in Europe and repealed, because it failed to generate anywhere near the revenue projected. Switzerland wealth tax tops out at .3% of your wealth that is 1/20 the level that Warren is proposing. You think it is possible that 20x higher wealth tax might work differently?
We choose to go to the moon and do these other things, not because they are easy, but because someone else is beating us to it.
Ok, to actually add value, current day austerity-filled Europe shouldn’t be the comparison point. Giving coverage to run-of-the-mill diseases should pay for itself in productivity increases over a lifetime, both directly and in stress relief.
I think it’s fair to compare current-day Norway. Virtually everything about daily life there is superior. Just got back from a few days in Oslo last month. Even the grocery store bread and the tap water are way better, but more importantly they have a very solid social safety net with good pensions and good public housing and no one needs to pay out for medical expenses. Per capita income is $63k in Norway vs. $60k in the US, so wealth is about the same.
But they are so homogeneous - it’s easy for white people to help pay for healthcare that is used on other white people. Besides, Norwegian still get cancer and the flu so there really isn’t much point in changing to their system.
The world is in a sad state of affairs when it took the second sentence to realise you were joking.