the unstoppable local-biz-swallowing pseudo-monopoly that is AMAZON

I'm sure openly-weeping Amazon employees are nothing new, it's just that those employees never been customer-facing before.

from Jan 2016: keep yer web services like a secret

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/amazon-web-services-data-center/423147/

Wow that got pretty florid by the end :)

And maybe my desire to submerge myself in that sediment, to weave The Cloud into the timelines of railroad robber-barons and military R&D, emerges from the same anxiety that makes me go try to find these buildings in the first place: that maybe we have mistaken The Cloud's fiction of infinite storage capacity for history itself. It is a misunderstanding that hinges on a weird, sad, very human hope that history might actually end, or at least reach some kind of perfect equipoise in which nothing terrible could ever happen again. As though if we could only collate and collect and process and store enough data points, the world’s infinite vaporware of real-time data dashboards would align into some kind of ultimate sand mandala of total world knowledge, a proprietary data nirvana without terror or heartbreak or bankruptcy or death, heretofore only gestured towards in terrifying wall-to-wall Accenture and IBM advertisements at airports.

But databases alone are not archives any more than data centers are libraries, and the rhetorical promise of The Cloud is as fragile as the strands of fiber-optic cable upon which its physical infrastructure rests. The Internet is a beautiful, terrible, fraught project of human civilization. While I make light of language like “pilgrim” to describe this cross-country journey, at the end of the day it has been an affirmation of a kind of faith: faith in the humanity of that beautiful, terrible, fraught project, and in the possibility of being able to see ourselves in all that beautiful, terrible, fraught truth.

"florid" is a nice way to put it

BTF projects for BTF truths man

ateotd count: 1

CAPITALISM: NOT EVEN ONCE

From a decades-long strategy of exploiting state sales tax loopholes to its ongoing “HQ2” sweepstakes, Amazon’s leaders have rarely turned down a chance to use the tax system as the source of their competitive advantage.

The online retail giant has built its business model on tax avoidance, and its latest financial filing makes it clear that Amazon continues to be insulated from the nation’s tax system. In 2017, Amazon reported $5.6 billion of U.S. profits and didn’t pay a dime of federal income taxes on it. The company’s financial statement suggests that various tax credits and tax breaks for executive stock options are responsible for zeroing out the company’s tax this year.

The company’s zero percent rate in 2017 reflects a longer term trend. During the previous five years, Amazon reported U.S. profits of $8.2 billion and paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 11.4 percent. This means the company was able to shelter more than two-thirds of its profits from tax during that five year period.

Incredibly, Amazon’s corporate tax goose egg for 2017 doesn’t include the effect of a second big tax disclosure: the $789 million one-time tax break the company projects it will receive due to the new tax law. While the Trump Administration’s corporate tax cuts generally took effect on January 1st, the law includes a grandfather clause for companies that (like Amazon) have managed to defer or postpone tax liability from prior years.

Instead of paying these deferred taxes at the previous 35 percent rate, Amazon now gets an extra reward for postponing the taxation of this income: a 40 percent discount from 35 to 21 percent. This is the source of Amazon’s $789 million windfall.

This is quite interesting:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/02/money-laundering-via-author-impersonation-on-amazon/

But that didn’t stop someone from publishing a “novel” under his name. That word is in quotations because the publication appears to be little more than computer-generated text, almost like the gibberish one might find in a spam email.

Ian Duncan Smith is available!

I'm expecting a flurry of drug dealers closing their sandwich shops, car-washes etc and suddenly taking the world of e-book publishing by storm.

I can't remember which thread this piece was posted on, but it's quite good:

https://medium.com/s/story/the-singular-pursuit-of-comrade-bezos-3e280baa045c

Well, humanity. We had a good run. pic.twitter.com/BrrlCvaf2D

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) March 7, 2018

What in the absolute hell

The smartest thing Amazon did was build these things without arms and legs. Good luck with the uprising, stumpy.

lol

just a li'l device that sits in your house, listens to everything you say at the behest of the world's richest man, and giggles to itself from time to time, nbd

picturing an Echo jammed in the toilet, burbling laughter endlessly, in an abandoned neighborhood

wot if etc etc

Amazon's latest workplace innovation

At the beating heart of Amazon’s unstoppable ecommerce expansion is a very basic promise: jobs.

When a Fulfillment Center opens, the expectation is that anywhere from 1,000 to 2,200 positions will become available overnight, each providing 40 hours of work week at a minimum. In reality, the labor hours Amazon needs to power its brutally efficient supply chain appear to be far fewer. To reduce overhead but continue to sop up performance-based incentives from the local governments it operates in, Amazon has become increasingly reliant on a work scheduling scheme that often coerces workers into leaving their shifts early or turns them away at the door without notice.

I spoke to 13 of the company’s current and former warehouse workers based in nearly as many states, all of whom were granted anonymity for fear of retaliation. According to their testimonies, the sign that Amazon’s expanding empire may not have the labor needs to support the employment numbers it dangles in front of local politicians is an innocuous sounding acronym: VTO.

https://gizmodo.com/on-amazon-s-time-1826570882

Hamilton Nolan has some thoughts on how to celebrate #PrimeDay:

Fill your WolfWarriorX Military Tactical Assault Backpack with Military Surplus MREs and Purified Drinking Water. Now you’re ready to march. These KARKEIN Military Tactical Boots Army Combat Jungle Boots are suitable for both men and women. Lace em up, gather all your union friends, and march your ass down to Washington, DC. Your destination is Jeff Bezos’ house, at 2320 and 2330 S Street NW. You can’t miss it—it’s the biggest fucking house in town.

Who would Amazon’s boss be more thrilled to see on #PrimeDay than a cadre of his own employees? Probably nobody. When you’re sure he’s home, use this Neiko 02845A Electric Demolition Jack Hammer to systematically tear the pavement around his house into large, jagged chunks. Pile the concrete chunks into a barrier encircling his entire block, interspersed with crude checkpoints made by wrapping Hitachi 115445 Folding Sawhorses with ample amounts of Fence America Razor Wire. Stud barrier with LEPOWER Solar Flood Lights and Kaya Bamboo Torches. Then put up your Coleman Instant Cabin tent and get some shut eye! While playing The Internationale on repeat through several dozen evenly spaced Pyle 1600W Heavy Duty Speakers.

https://splinternews.com/the-only-amazon-prime-day-guide-you-need-1827624247

had to laugh when I saw they were funding mike leigh's peterloo film

give this a watch later (note to self)

https://gizmodo.com/amazons-aggressive-anti-union-tactics-revealed-in-leake-1829305201

Can't watch it, just read the article. As they say: "Gizmodo has opted to not publish the video itself in order to maintain source anonymity."

fun

Despite an uprising of Amazon employees over the use of the company's AI facial recognition program ("Rekognition") in law enforcement, the company is actively courting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the hopes that it will use the wildly inaccurate technology.

Thanks to work by McKinsney, ICE and Amazon's sales team met over the summer to discuss how Amazon's facial recognition could help the agency, which has cemented its reputation for performative xenophobic cruelty with a program of stealing babies from immigrant parents, dooming thousands of babies and children to never see their parents again.

ICE could use facial recognition as part of its illegal surveillance of medical facilities and houses of worship.

https://boingboing.net/2018/10/23/oppenheimers-ai.html

oh good:

Democrats rank Amazon as the institution they have the most confidence in https://t.co/OVGAajPsWD

— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) October 24, 2018

ah being discussed elsewhere I see

Colleges and Universities at 2 seriously

most likely people thought "well I usually get my packages on time so I guess I trust Amazon"

what does "having confidence in" mean for a company like amazon anyway? I mean, they are very reliable, doesn't mean they aren't shitty in ways that don't affect customers

on the other hand google and facebook can sometimes be deceitful in a way that actually does affect their end users, so I'm not surprised they are lower (though google at #4 is higher that I would have thought)

Amazon’s algorithmic pricing and self-serving search results are pretty untrustworthy from a user perspective

wtf, Amazon is now considered "an institution"?

as of 2016 they controlled 31% of the global market in cloud computing infrastructure, and when they have problems it immediately creates many problems for many people. https://gizmodo.com/how-one-little-amazon-error-can-destroy-the-internet-1792828399

so yeah, i guess they are, now. whoooops!

We gotta fuck this shit up. https://t.co/BUZzgbrCMj

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) November 6, 2018

man I would've bet a lot of money on Boston

glad I didn't!

DC area is so obvious in retrospect, I feel dumb for not realizing that earlier

pretty happy it isn't boston

Arlington is my hometown and already has been through cycles of gentrification/development/displacement in my lifetime but efforts for denser development and affordable housing have been playing out with some success in the last 10 years so maybe it won't be an immediate disaster for housing affordability and the latinx communities living there and in Alexandria and Falls Church

Silby, Arlington has been pretty good about affordable housing, diversity,
density, and transit. I wish those things weren't luxury goods, but we do what we can here.

Crystal City has loads of vacant space; it would be cool to see it used rather than watch it crumble.

this is weird: Booksellers Protest Amazon Site’s Move to Drop Stores From Certain Countries

On Saturday night, in response to a query from a reporter, AbeBooks issued a statement saying it was dropping the countries because “our third-party payment service provider is closing at the end of the year.” It added that, “We regret that we cannot continue to serve all sellers.”

Asked how many booksellers and countries were affected, Richard Davies, an AbeBooks spokesman, said, “I am not adding anything else to that statement.”

Mr. Brown, one of the dealers organizing the protests, said that for many of the booksellers, AbeBooks’ actions underlined both Amazon’s power and its refusal to be accountable for it.

“The biggest e-commerce giant in the world apparently finds it too complicated to do business in Prague,” he said. “You have to wonder who’s next. We’re all vulnerable to Amazon’s capricious actions.”

The complete lack of information makes it hard to understand what’s going on here. It’s not clear whether they are withdrawing from specific markets or cannot service specific sellers. I don’t really understand how a change in payment provider or system would affect specific countries. I guess it’s possible that some seller systems may not report in a way compatible with the new software or platform. But they also seem to be citing unspecified complexities and expenses associated with named markets.

The complete lack of notice and public comms from Abebooks are both very poor.

r.i.p. jokes pic.twitter.com/aYgsPE5xN1

— Miriam Bale (@mimbale) November 13, 2018

idk what that was but: i hate amazon

amazon more like amazin(g)

Oh she deleted it for some reason, anyway someone listed a variety of "joke" demands for Amazon (e.g. keep worker fatalities under 40/year), then in a followup about an hour later it was announced that NY was paying out some ungodly sum to Amazon for the privilege (unclear if it was a literal payout or just tax incentives)

Might actually make sense to incentivize the Crystal City site, that office space has been emptying iirc

*this* is the thing they come together to do. https://t.co/1uNWiaMcIk

— Vinson Cunningham (@vcunningham) November 13, 2018

Can't they just build a barge for them in the Hudson River. All of this makes no sense. Amazon needs NYC more than NYC needs them. But sure give them shitloads of money to fuck up the infrastructure.

The inflatable rat industry is going to be popping.

the most humiliating thing i read recently was how Andrew Cuomo said "i'll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if they come to NY."