Edited by tears ()
This is not theoretical imo, really. It is the stated & public policy of the U.S. federal government, expressed in laws passed by Congress and signed and administered by the White House to the tune of billions of dollars every year, that social media are crucial, nonnegotiable avenues to “foster democracy” abroad that must be defended, and that social media outlets’ loyalty to the U.S. as domestically managed (and thus domestically regulated) companies is a matter of national security. Until and unless state actors can cultivate domestic alternatives to the extent they’ve done it for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. they will protect their investment.
Not that it makes the U.S. government into super-geniuses or anything, though, because the rapid decline of Facebook and Twitter’s public image around the world (and even within the U.S. for Facebook) suggests the state is likely ready to throw good money after bad. Those companies have just become a key part of public-private partnerships to enact U.S. and allied foreign policy, to the degree that the comparisons with Lockheed Martin other people make above are exactly the ones that should be on people’s minds.
cars posted:Until and unless state actors can cultivate domestic alternatives to the extent they’ve done it for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. they will protect their investment.
uphold the sovereignty of niconicodouga
cars posted:Though I doubt it’ll come to this, I also think that if Twitter or Facebook started to falter seriously and the alternatives adopted happened to be a) numerous and fragmented or b) based in Russia, China or any number of other countries, either site would likely be propped up by barely laundered direct funding from the U.S. government. Both companies already receive some of that money under the guise of funding for “freedom of speech” abroad, but the spigot would turn proportionately to address serious capitalization problems, at least as a medium-term solution.
This is not theoretical imo, really. It is the stated & public policy of the U.S. federal government, expressed in laws passed by Congress and signed and administered by the White House to the tune of billions of dollars every year, that social media are crucial, nonnegotiable avenues to “foster democracy” abroad that must be defended, and that social media outlets’ loyalty to the U.S. as domestically managed (and thus domestically regulated) companies is a matter of national security. Until and unless state actors can cultivate domestic alternatives to the extent they’ve done it for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. they will protect their investment.
Not that it makes the U.S. government into super-geniuses or anything, though, because the rapid decline of Facebook and Twitter’s public image around the world (and even within the U.S. for Facebook) suggests the state is likely ready to throw good money after bad. Those companies have just become a key part of public-private partnerships to enact U.S. and allied foreign policy, to the degree that the comparisons with Lockheed Martin other people make above are exactly the ones that should be on people’s minds.
It will be interesting to see what the US does as the technological center of gravity shifts away from them. They've used their privileged tech position to emplace US social media platforms throughout the world, but as those platforms age newer platforms will supplant them, as has already happened with Facebook to an extent. The new platforms will increasingly come from outside the US. They can keep funneling money into the industry, but other states will do the same thing for the same reason, and the US will no longer be able to do it better.
The cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, with lots of international connections, will definitely move to at least some non-American platforms, and social media will go from being a huge US asset to a vulnerability. China knew the score and kicked out US platforms, controls traffic, etc., but it would be hard for the US to exercise the same control without huge changes.
Edit: that's not to say that the US can expect to suffer anything close to what they've done to other countries, but given the freak out over what little happened in the 2016 election I have to think there will be intense hysteria about foreign social media platforms.
Edited by Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ ()
extremely normal and healthy corporation with no problems has its own news agency to tell you Everything Is Fine when you might have doubts because their shoddy space junk keeps exploding
spotify net losses increase to €394 million in q2 2018. that's their biggest quarterly loss ever i think (?)
Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:net losses of 717million for Tesla in q2 2018
stock is 9% up!
cars posted:Musk's best way to keep customers is to turn all the orders into exclusive content for online Gaming.
😬
Edited by tears ()
also their user numbers are flat in north america and down in europe as a whole in their recent update, and that is only raw account numbers i think, i am sure their actual activity numbers must be horrible.
i figure if they are actually out there advertising about fake news, actively joining the concept of fake news to their name in public, which is a huge no-no in advertising, they must be extremely worried. also have you ever seen a facebook ad before?! i'm pretty sure that was the first one i've ever seen
but you know how this shit happens i’m sure. people were starting to ignore facebook anyway, now some people are actively avoiding it, the shareholders demand the execs do something, the execs say “way ahead of you, we hired this great firm to improve our image”, the firm they hired says, “well if you check this PowerPoint you can see your best bet is to weep openly as you pound your fists on the ground”, shares lose 40 points in a single day and the execs start lining up consulting gigs for when they all get fired.
riding straight to hell
Tesla just dropped back 3% again after Musk's illegal price pumping, but he's going to keep trying to inflate the share price while bondholders like Soros convert into stock, then he's probably going to be like whoops haha my magical leprechaun deal fell through, now prove i did something illegal. Tesla's business model is now securities fraud and the only hope they have is the Saudis
cars posted:i don't know what's going to be funnier, finding out he never had the funding, finding out he had the funding but lost it when he shit the bed on twitter, or finding out he still has the funding and watching him ride the company into the ground until they're making puzzle games on Android
hey android is a perfectly reasonable platform on which to release a puzzle game
watching a billionaire be publicly crazy in realtime is more entertaining than i thought it would be. rosebud
Edited by drwhat ()
The Harman plan never actually went through and when that was announced the stock fell 24%. (Then they changed CEOs, did some acquistions and diverisified and whatever, and got bought by Samsung recently.)
I think if anyone, Elon Musk might be the one to push people into some multi-billion snap privatization of an entire public corp, just because, but if this becomes a thing you can actually consider and do, it's going to be a weird fucking risk to owning shares and seems likely to discourage institutional investment in companies where that could ever happen ...
Today the @NYCCouncil passed a first-in-the-nation, historic bill that establishes minimum wage standards for ride-share drivers. Despite intense misinformation campaigns by @Uber and @lyft, the @DrivingGuild got the bill passed. Uber/Lyft would rather see fulltime workers starve pic.twitter.com/ZAesphENMi
— Jesse Rubin (@JesseJDRubin) August 8, 2018
https://economicsofimperialism.blogspot.com/2017/07/amazon-becoming-market.html posted:
Amazon has moved very far from being just a US-based book, CD and DVD warehouse, into many other markets and other countries. Its financial resources have helped it undertake more than 70 mergers and acquisitions since 1998, principally in the US but also in the UK, Germany, Israel and China. It has also expanded into India with its own investment. The largest recent deal was to buy Twitch, a live streaming and gaming platform, for $970m in 2014. But the biggest ever Amazon deal is currently under way and subject to regulatory approval, its purchase of Whole Foods Market Inc, a US-based premium grocery chain, for $13.7bn. If finalised, this deal would add to Amazon’s other forays into groceries, such as Amazon Fresh. It goes against the company’s normal business model, being based in stores on the street, but this is seen as a useful physical footprint from which to pressure other premium retailers.
Such expansion helps Amazon sell more or less everything, presumably creating openings for new business from anyone attracted by just one of its many tentacles. But the data (see the previous table) show that the bulk of its earnings come from its web services arm, AWS, not from the more visible retail business.
AWS was built from the core commercial online business that also depended upon an effective technology infrastructure of software and computer servers. It now has a very strong position in the ‘cloud’, that euphemism for the physical, very much on the ground set of computer facilities, often located in the US, which is accessed via the Internet, and which has become an important source of services for everything from data storage to building applications and website development. AWS reportedly has a million customers, including not just General Electric, Kellogg’s, McDonalds and Netflix in the US, but also BMW, Canon, Nokia, Philips, Siemens, Sony, Tata Motors, the UK’s Guardian and the UK Ministry of Justice.
Recent surveys show Amazon has around 40% of cloud business, well ahead of Microsoft, Google/Alphabet and IBM. Amazon’s business revenue and profits from this source have also grown very rapidly in recent years. As with most other areas of new markets in the global economy, this is one in which only the largest companies, with the best access to finance, can compete. A Wall Street Journal story reported that Amazon, Microsoft and Google/Alphabet alone spent $31.5bn in capital expenditures last year on cloud-related items.
Amazon Is One Step Closer To Taking a Cut on Literally Every Economic Transaction
In a $5.5 billion sweetheart deal, Amazon has inserted itself between local businesses and local governments.
Cities and states could end up overpaying for basic supplies, with Amazon profiting on the back end.
The paper the forms are printed on at City Hall. The desk your child sits at in math class. The books in your local library. Amazon has begun to profit from all of these products, extending its business from consumer retail into government procurement, according to a new report released today.
As detailed by Stacy Mitchell and Olivia LaVecchia of the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), Amazon won a nationwide contract last year to supply up to $5.5 billion in commercial items for states, cities, and school districts through its Amazon Business platform. Already over 1,500 jurisdictions have adopted the contract, despite the fact that it doesn’t guarantee fixed-rate prices or volume discounts, as is typical with government purchasing agreements. This means cities and states could end up overpaying for basic supplies, with Amazon profiting on the back end.
Local and regional office suppliers (an under-the-radar industry that pioneered many customer conveniences, such as next-day delivery, more commonly associated with Amazon) can still sell to municipal governments under the deal—but only if they join Amazon’s platform, and pay the 15 percent share of revenue that Amazon takes for access. This underscores Amazon’s real goal—to levy a tax on all economic activity, as market analyst Ben Thompson put it last year. Businesses large and small are induced into joining the Amazon marketplace when there’s no other way to reach customers. Whoever makes the sale, Amazon takes a cut.
With annual spending of close to $2 trillion, state and local government procurement is a logical next market for Amazon. Says Mitchell, one of the report’s co-authors, “ Jeff Bezos’ vision comes out of Wall Street: How can I make a bit of money on everything?”
The contract is part of a broader strategy by Amazon to grab a chunk of public spending. The company hired Anne Rung, once the Chief Acquisitions Officer for the White House, to head up its government division. An “Amazon amendment” in last year’s defense authorization bill would allow defense procurement officials to use the platform for off-the-shelf commercial items. Amazon’s rivals have warned that the Defense Department is poised to award the company a $10 billion cloud computing contract.
A contract tailor-made for Amazon
In January 2017, Amazon secured the five-year contract, which carries the potential for six more years of renewals, through U.S. Communities, which facilitates joint purchasing agreements for its 55,000 members, in exchange for a small piece of the revenue. Through this setup, government agencies of any size pool their purchasing power and get better terms on long-term contracts.
Or, at least that’s the theory. But it only works if there’s a competitive bidding process to extract the most favorable deal. In this case, the request for proposal (or RFP) for the contract was so specialized that only one company appeared able to meet it. “We thought, ‘This is absolutely spec’d to Amazon,’” said Gordon Thrall of Guernsey, an office supplier that was part of the coalition that won the previous U.S. Communities contract in 2010.
U.S. Communities solicited bidders who could run online marketplaces offering 10 different product categories, something only Amazon was able to meet. The RFP attracted only five eligible bids, three from companies that only sell specific items like musical instruments or commercial printing services. A normal RFP attracting so few responsive bids would often get redone; but Amazon won the contract.
Who needs price controls? Trust the free hand of the Amazon marketplace
One-stop shopping for every item a local public agency might need is certainly attractive. But governments gave up plenty to Amazon in the exchange. At the heart of these deals is usually a fixed price guarantee, which allows for consistent budgeting. “It’s the bedrock of public procurement,” says Mitchell. “Typically a city would say, here are the 1,000 items we buy the most of, you have to guarantee the price. The risk is on you if the price goes up.” Suppliers accept that risk in return for a long-term, high-volume contract.
This contract gave no pricing instructions at all; no guaranteed fixed rates, no volume discounts. Instead, U.S. Communities asserted that, because Amazon Business is a “marketplace” with numerous sellers, competition would ensure the lowest price. Purchasers can freeze the price on any item they order for seven days. But otherwise, as U.S. Communities wrote in a response to the report’s authors, “Pricing on Amazon Business is dynamic through their competitive marketplace.”
An Amazon spokesperson tells In These Times that the contract provides “features and benefits that help simplify the procurement process and increase efficiency for buyers.” The company also noted that public agencies will be able to “ensure competitiveness and best-value pricing ... we have seen great progress to date.”
According to the report, however, U.S. Communities didn’t appear to test whether prices were actually lower on Amazon with anything more rigorous than a spot-check. In webinars to public agencies, Amazon and U.S. Communities have stressed the upside of this arrangement. But prices also can increase, and often do; After all, that’s what inflation is.
The report compared 57 goods purchased by a California school district over two weeks in January to prices on Amazon. The school district paid $1,205 with free next-day delivery; Amazon would have charged at least 10 percent more—12 percent with comparable shipping speeds. A separate study from the Naval Postgraduate School of items purchased by the Air Force found that the current e-commerce platform created by the General Services Administration beat Amazon on price for “most items.”
This makes sense, because sellers on the platform have to pay that 15 percent fee to Amazon. It’s impossible for them to do that and also offer the lowest price, especially on a public agency contract, where discounts are usually guaranteed and profit margins are very slim.
Though we think of Amazon as the unparalleled leader in speedy delivery, this contract also offers worse service. Independent office suppliers have provided free next-day shipping for decades, and that was guaranteed in the previous U.S. Communities contract. Amazon offers no guarantee on shipping, and only provides two-day shipping if cities sign up for Amazon Business Prime for $499 a year.
Finally, Amazon altered the contract’s terms and conditions, including giving itself the ability to intervene in and redact public records requests to ensure that information sought by the public about the contract never gets disclosed. The RFP’s original terms stressed that all communications related to the contract “shall be open to the inspection of any citizen, or any interested person, firm or corporation.”
In other words, Amazon landed a contract where they will offer worse service at a higher price than independent supply stores. “Amazon waltzed into this sector and secured a contract not by out-competing, but by using its power and pull,” Mitchell says.
The cities that resist
Pushing into state and local procurement expands the number of transactions upon which Amazon can levy a tax. But some cities have other ideas. Though cities already use Amazon for various off-contract purchases, some to disturbing extremes (Denver’s public schools spent $1.6 million on odds and ends in 2016), Phoenix only spent $700 on the platform in 2016. The City Council instead created a Local Small Business Enterprise Program in 2012 to prioritize its purchasing. Spending with small business jumped from $50,000 to $2.3 million in two years. And those dollars circulated within the local economy, rather than Amazon’s corporate treasury. A spokesperson for the city financing department told In These Times that Phoenix hasn’t signed onto the Amazon contract because of concerns about its small business program.
Mitchell believes that, with local businesses already being so dramatically undercut by Amazon, cities should resist handing them public purchasing as well. “Not only is Amazon setting up a contract to take advantage of public dollars, but they’re inserting themselves as a gatekeeper between local government and local businesses,” she says. “This is a way for local officials to talk about the dangers of monopoly.”
tears posted:if u havent read this one already, its good, heres the best bit
https://economicsofimperialism.blogspot.com/2017/07/amazon-becoming-market.html posted:
Amazon has moved very far from being just a US-based book, CD and DVD warehouse, into many other markets and other countries. Its financial resources have helped it undertake more than 70 mergers and acquisitions since 1998, principally in the US but also in the UK, Germany, Israel and China. It has also expanded into India with its own investment. The largest recent deal was to buy Twitch, a live streaming and gaming platform, for $970m in 2014. But the biggest ever Amazon deal is currently under way and subject to regulatory approval, its purchase of Whole Foods Market Inc, a US-based premium grocery chain, for $13.7bn. If finalised, this deal would add to Amazon’s other forays into groceries, such as Amazon Fresh. It goes against the company’s normal business model, being based in stores on the street, but this is seen as a useful physical footprint from which to pressure other premium retailers.
Such expansion helps Amazon sell more or less everything, presumably creating openings for new business from anyone attracted by just one of its many tentacles. But the data (see the previous table) show that the bulk of its earnings come from its web services arm, AWS, not from the more visible retail business.
AWS was built from the core commercial online business that also depended upon an effective technology infrastructure of software and computer servers. It now has a very strong position in the ‘cloud’, that euphemism for the physical, very much on the ground set of computer facilities, often located in the US, which is accessed via the Internet, and which has become an important source of services for everything from data storage to building applications and website development. AWS reportedly has a million customers, including not just General Electric, Kellogg’s, McDonalds and Netflix in the US, but also BMW, Canon, Nokia, Philips, Siemens, Sony, Tata Motors, the UK’s Guardian and the UK Ministry of Justice.
Recent surveys show Amazon has around 40% of cloud business, well ahead of Microsoft, Google/Alphabet and IBM. Amazon’s business revenue and profits from this source have also grown very rapidly in recent years. As with most other areas of new markets in the global economy, this is one in which only the largest companies, with the best access to finance, can compete. A Wall Street Journal story reported that Amazon, Microsoft and Google/Alphabet alone spent $31.5bn in capital expenditures last year on cloud-related items.
Amazon Web Services is one of those things that most people have barely heard of, but is HUGE if you're in software engineering or web development. If you're a full stack or back end engineer, knowing how to deploy sites on AWS is almost a required skill
Amazon is not an internet retailer, it's a cloud computing company that uses its enormous market share to subsidize their long term plan to create a privatized Cybersyn
Elon Musk and Tesla Inc. were sued for manipulating share prices with the chief executive officer’s bombshell tweet that he was thinking about taking the company private and that funding was secure.
Musk lied about funding so he could push shares higher and ambush short sellers betting against the company, according to the shareholder complaint, which was filed Friday as a securities-fraud class action in federal court in San Francisco.
Musk set off a firestorm with the 53-character post Aug. 7 on Twitter: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding Secured.” The stock initially shot up 11 percent to almost $380. Then it fell back, losing about 7 percent over two days, as doubts mounted about the feasibility of the going-private idea -- and about Musk’s declaration that funding was already in place. Neither he nor anyone else has supplied evidence that it was.
“Musk’s statement that he had secured funding was especially material and significantly moved the market,” shareholder Kalman Isaacs said in the complaint. “Because Musk has not secured financing, and has issued false and materially misleading information into the market, short sellers of Tesla stock were forced to cover their positions by purchasing shares at artificially inflated prices after 12:48pm on August 7, 2018. Obviously, all purchasers of Tesla securities were injured as well.”