Barron
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The Jeff Bezos Thread
Billionaire Jeff Bezos, net worth $81 billion, best known as the founder, chairmen and CEO of Amazon.com as well as the owner of The Washington Post newspaper (as of 2013).
But that's not all, Bezos won a contract worth $600 million allowing Amazon Web Services to develop "cloud based software" for the CIA. Not surprisingly, he hates Donald Trump.
Why does Jeff Bezos hate Donald Trump?
The battle started last December with a series of tweets from Trump. “The Washington Post, which loses a fortune, is owned by Jeff Bezos for purposes of keeping taxes down at his no-profit company, Amazon,” Trump wrote. “If Amazon ever had to pay fair taxes, its stock would crash and it would crumble like a paper bag. The Washington Post scam is saving it!”
"He thinks I'll go after him for antitrust," Trump said at the time. "Because he's got a huge antitrust problem because he's controlling so much, Amazon is controlling so much of what they are doing."
"He's using the Washington Post, which is peanuts, he's using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust." Trump’s campaign later reiterated this narrative in a statement claiming that the Post was being used as political leverage so Amazon doesn’t “get sued for monopolistic tendencies that have led to the destruction of department stores and the retail industry.”
With Billions of dollars, an influential propaganda arm and massive financial and personal connections with the world's most powerful spy agency, Bezos has become one of the newest additions to the Globalist Club (ZeroHedge has a good breakdown on the current Russia boogeyman narrative).
two scoops
two genders
two terms
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| 05-22-2017 03:03 AM |
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Paracelsus
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RE: The Jeff Bezos Thread
Your alternative to Amazon is simple: navigate direct to the manufacturer of the commodity good you want and buy direct from there. If the manufacturer says to you "Sorry, you have to go to Amazon because we signed an exclusive deal with them," then find one of their competitors right away, because they deserve to die a financial death for Darwinian stupidity.
Don't go to Amazon's supposed competitors. Amazon is highly likely to have at least a part share in some of them. Bookdepository.co.uk in particular is owned outright by Amazon and has an unfair advantage because you get free postage whenever you buy from them, thanks to Elizabeth II's government.
Amazon is an Internet middleman. It is a contradiction in terms. It cannot undercut the manufacturer of a good. It survives -- as with Google -- only so long as people are dumb enough to keep using it en masse. I suspect it also survives because when it first went big the world economy wasn't quite sophisticated enough to allow for many manufacturers to distribute over the Internet. Now it is. Any manufacturer that doesn't allow orders to be filled over the Internet is too stupid to deserve to survive, as I said.
As for Jeff Bezos, he's the sort of guy willing to lie flat out to a court:
https://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-...om-anymore
Quote:Amazon entered into a contract with Toys R Us to sell Toys R Us toys, games, and baby products on the Amazon Web site. To do the deal, Toys R Us had to shut down its own Web site. Over time, Toys R Us complained that Amazon was selling toys from competing companies on the Amazon Web site. Toys R Us said that violated their agreement with Amazon and sued them. A judge agreed. Not only did she agree, but she had a number of damning things to say about the integrity of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his company.
In a 3/15/06 Wall Street Journal article, Lee Gomes said,
“Time’s Man of the Year for 1999, one of the Web’s legendary entrepreneurs, behaving like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar? Jeff Bezos, say it isn’t so. Alas, it is, at least according to a New Jersey judge.”
On 3/2/06, New Jersey Superior Court judge Margaret Mary McVeigh declared Toys R Us the winner of the lawsuit and invalidated the contract between Amazon and Toys R Us. According to Gomes, “The judge portrayed the company as being secretly contemptuous of its business partners and slippery, bordering on mendacious, in dealing with the court.” Associated Press said the judge called Amazon executives, “obstinate, arrogant, and even childish.”
The court decided that the contract made Toys R Us the exclusive seller of toys on the Amazon Web site. Bezos testified that such a thing never occurred to him. When Toys R Us’s lawyer showed him a contrary email in court, the judge wrote in her opinion, “in a rather childlike fashion, he tried to convince the court that he was unaware there was a problem.”
The judge also said Bezos’ memory was selective and that he changed the definitions of words depending on whether he was talking to Toys R Us when they signed the contract or the court. “Mr. Bezos’ understanding of the exclusivity granted to [Toys R Us] would not be any different than what Jeff Bezos wished exclusivity to be.” The judge all but called Bezos a liar saying, “This court has no doubt his knowledge and understanding went deeper than revealed.”
Gomes said the court’s decision is a how-to guide for violating a contract.
The judge said Amazon stopped adhering to the agreement very gradually in an apparent attempt to prevent Toys R Us from noticing or having much to complain about at any given time. But both Toys R Us and the court saw the cumulative effect and Amazon did not get away with it.
Gap, Inc., Circuit City, and Drugstore.com previously got fed up with Amazon and ended their partnerships with them.
Another Wall Street Journal article on 3/3/06 by Mylene Mangalindan quotes Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpru as saying, “There are now a lot of retailers who are very, very skeptical of any attempt to get into bed with [Amazon]. Their terms [for retailers] aren’t as favorable as they’d like them to be, and Amazon is known to be a tough negotiator.”
The Associated Press article said Amazon is also in trouble with many on Wall Street because it is too secretive for a publicly-traded company. David Garrity, director of research at Hapoalim Securities USA Inc. said, “Jeff’s gotta be a stand-up guy in the eyes of not only potential business partners, but investors.” Apparently Mr. Garrity never heard the old saying, “You can’t teach a young, dot.com billionaire new tricks.”
Never forget: Bezos is nothing more than a failed dotcom millionaire who still makes his money bilking people. The only difference is that he bilks suppliers dumb enough to trade through him and not build their own online presence, and indirectly bilks consumers dumb enough to buy through him when every manufacturer is now online.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm
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| 05-22-2017 06:01 AM |
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Transsimian
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| 05-22-2017 05:19 PM |
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Handsome Creepy Eel
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| 05-23-2017 04:02 AM |
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Transsimian
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| 05-23-2017 02:18 PM |
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Transsimian
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| 05-25-2017 01:27 AM |
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Transsimian
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| 05-25-2017 07:24 PM |
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Blaster
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RE: The Jeff Bezos Thread
Here's an anecdote accidentally made public by an ex-Amazon employee, from 2011: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
Quote:Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4. It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6. Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
7. Thank you; have a nice day!
Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Army Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word "hardened interface" a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.
After the thing went viral and he got embarrassed, he posted a follow-up nice story about Jeff Bezos. Would feel dishonest not to include it also: https://plus.google.com/1109810300617128...aygmbzVeRq
(This post was last modified: 05-26-2017 02:18 PM by Blaster.)
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| 05-26-2017 02:17 PM |
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Transsimian
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| 05-26-2017 11:23 PM |
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| 05-27-2017 06:03 AM |
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Transsimian
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| 05-27-2017 02:59 PM |
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