Tag: Amazon.com

The Curse of Bigness

 

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A portrait of Louis Brandeis on the cover of Time magazine on October 19, 1925.

Before he was an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939, Louis Brandeis was a progressive lawyer fighting the big monopolies, or trusts, of Gilded Age America. He termed the corrosive effect on democracy of unrestrained business practices “The Curse of Bigness”, and after he joined the Supreme Court he maintained his interest in restraining business interests from trampling the rights of ordinary citizens.

Now President Biden has appointed Lina Khan to the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and her appointment signals a return to the principles of Louis Brandeis. Lina Khan is an antitrust lawyer and legal scholar who, as a student at Yale Law School in 2017, wrote an article called Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox. The article drew widespread attention for her ideas about how the conventional wisdom of the past 50 or so years regarding regulation of the marketplace based on consumer prices no longer applied in the age of Amazon, a company willing to engage in predatory pricing and use vertical integration in order to stifle competition and monopolize the marketplace.

A profile of Lina Khan in Time from October 17, 2019.

 

Prior to Ms. Khan’s appointment, another antitrust lawyer and legal scholar, Tim Wu, joined the Biden administration as a Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy on the National Economic Council. Mr. Wu is known for helping to write the first network neutrality rules in work for the Federal Communications Commission in 2006. In 2018, he wrote The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, a book which paid homage to Louis Brandeis and his antitrust work of the Progressive Era.

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A Climate Strike protester with an anti Bezos sign in London on February 14, 2020. Photo by Flickr user Socialist Appeal.

With these two people now in key positions in the federal government, perhaps efforts to rein in, or even bust up, big technology companies such as Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, will finally be undertaken seriously and with persistence. In the past, these Big Five technology companies have largely escaped with slaps on the wrist after fitful investigations into their practices.


Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg answered questions from Brandeis University students at an event in January 2016 commemorating the 100th anniversary of Louis Brandeis being nominated to the Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson.

 

As Louis Brandeis understood, and as is apparent from the writings of both Lina Khan and Tim Wu, setting regulatory boundaries for these behemoth businesses not only ensures they act fairly in the marketplace, but protects democracy from their tendency to squash individual liberties when they conflict with their self-interest. And the bigger and less competitive these companies become, the more their self-interest consumes everything in their vicinity, like a beast that can’t stop growing and must swallow anything in its way.
— Techly


An unofficial remix of the 2021 songs “Bezos I” and “Bezos II”, written and performed by Bo Burnham for his album and Netflix special, Bo Burnham:Inside. Warning: foul language.

 

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The Web

 

“Near the Day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky.” — a Hopi Prophecy

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has sent hundreds of internet communications satellites into low Earth orbit, and has plans to launch thousands more such satellites in the near future. Other companies, among them Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, have similar plans. Within the span of several years, the number of satellites launched into orbit could double from the amount that have been launched since the beginning of the Space Age in 1957. The clutter could interfere with astronomers’ observations and measurements, and even with casual enjoyment of the night sky by lay people.

 

A fleet of East Indiamen at sea
“A Fleet of East Indiamen at Sea”, an 1803 painting by Nicholas Pocock (1740-1821).

There are terrestrial alternatives to webbing near Earth space with tens of thousands of satellites in order to get internet service to rural communities around the world. in the United States, rural electric cooperatives have worked steadily for years to overcome infrastructure and regulatory obstacles to provide internet service along the last mile to their members. It is the big telecommunications and cable television companies, with their friends in big government, that have often made operations difficult for alternative internet service providers. Even when the local governments of towns and small cities try to cooperate with small internet service providers, their efforts are often undercut and overruled by larger government entities working at the behest of large corporations that will brook no competition.

Now comes SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, backed by their founders’ deep pockets and enabled by their existing links to big government, links that will only strengthen and deepen as the companies take over near Earth space and provide launching and communications services to government agencies. The partnership with government may even prove to be the primary consideration for both companies, and providing internet service to private individuals a secondary, though lucrative consideration. The partnership could develop into a Space Age equivalent of the British East India Company’s close association with the British Empire, which saw the two entities merging in so many areas public and private that eventually one could hardly tell where one left off and the other began.



In addition to the Space Age, the modern era has come to be known as the Information Age. The internet via the world wide web has become the chief vector of information in these times and, as many have often observed, information is power. In the days when the British East India Company held sway along with equivalent companies sanctioned by other European powers, trade goods from far off lands were the valued currency that governments sought to procure and protect. Governments guarded the trade routes to and from the far off lands as well as the lands themselves. Over time, the various East India Companies adopted their own paramilitary arms to protect their interests. Similar relationships could develop in the coming years as companies seek the help of government in protecting their interests in space in return for providing essential services.

Why should SpaceX, for instance, invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the infrastructure needed to establish colonies in space with the potential for enormous profitability in the long run without being assured tens of billions of dollars in government contracts in the short term and the perpetual cash cow of providing internet service to billions of people every day? Look up in the night sky for answers and soon enough you’re likely to see the winking reflections off tens of thousands of satellites, glinting like dew along the strands of a spider’s web.
— Techly



The last scene of the 1982 meditative documentary Koyaanisqatsi, directed by Godfrey Reggio, with cinematography by Ron Fricke and music by Philip Glass.

 

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You Don’t Have to Do This

 

Shop for a new smartphone and the choice of operating system appears limited to Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android. The choice of wireless carrier network for the new smartphone is limited to five or six companies, and while there are more than a dozen smaller carriers, they all lease their networks from the larger carriers. Mergers of technology companies and globalization of supply chains have made it difficult for consumers to entertain enough options to simultaneously suit their desires for reasonable prices, efficient service, and in the best case scenario, ethical marketplace behavior.

 

To be a large player in the technology industry, as in many other industries, it seems engaging in horrible practices is simply a necessary cost of doing business. It’s as if economies of scale and ethical behavior are mutually exclusive. Apple iPhones are manufactured under terrible labor conditions in China, and the cobalt required for manufacture of those iPhones is mined using child labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Google, Facebook, and Twitter all sell their users’ information to advertisers while double-dipping by generating enormous ad revenues from the wide use of their services. That’s the cost of “free” to the users. As an online retailer, Amazon’s reputation for egregious labor practices is as bad or worse than that of its major brick and mortar competitor, Walmart.

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U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) speaking in December 2018 to about 200 workers protesting conditions at an Amazon workplace in Shakopee, Minnesota. Photo by Fibonacci Blue. Protests by workers in this country against unfair labor practices by giant companies like Amazon would get a slingshot-like boost if lawmakers would repeal the anti-union legislation passed in the last 50 years at the behest of corporations.

That is by no means a comprehensive list of all the technology companies with reputations for treating customers, workers, suppliers, or the environment badly. Just as Americans are becoming more concerned with what is in their food and how it’s produced, they can devote some time and attention to how their technology products are produced and how companies are using the personal information they hand over in the course of using their services. It may seem like there are few to no alternatives to some technology products and services, but there are alternatives, and it may require effort put into research to find out about them, and then some sacrifices as it turns out they don’t offer absolutely everything consumers are used to getting from Microsoft’s Windows operating system, for instance, or Facebook’s one-stop social media and news sharing platform.

Some people simply won’t care, of course, and will remain interested only in what’s easiest and most convenient for them. This is not for them. Others who are concerned about voting with their dollars, however, should know there are ways to find alternatives to signing on with the big technology companies, and that informing themselves doesn’t have to suck up an inordinate amount of their time and energy. Currently there is almost no labeling on technology products and services such as there is on food for sale in supermarkets, informing consumers of organic and non-GMO options, and of nutritional content. There should be similarly easily apparent labels for technology, listing ratings from an impartial source, if such is possible, on a company’s treatment of workers, suppliers, and the environment. The companies are now required by law to enumerate the ways they use customer information, but that is for the most part buried in fine print legalese that few consumers bother to read.

In episode #1938, “Theresa Syndrome”, from the radio show Car Talk, the portion of the show relevant to this post starts at the 10:45 mark with a call from Brian in Harrisonville, Kentucky. Questions of ethics come up every day in everyone’s lives, and in this case as in many others, arguments of efficiency that mask motives of self-interest are all too common.

Until the technology industry catches up with at least the halting steps the food industry has taken to inform consumers about what they are buying and what kind of ethical or unethical behavior they in turn support with their purchases, it will remain up to individual consumers to inform themselves. Globalization has made it easy to hide the ugly details of technology manufacturing halfway around the world. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s not as if things were far better 100 years ago, though, because at that time for most Americans a sweatshop on New York City’s Lower East Side was as much on the other side of the world as a sweatshop in Bangladesh is today. Speed of travel and communications have changed the seeming size of the world, but sadly not the willingness of businesses and governments to exploit the less fortunate, and of the more fortunate to turn a blind eye.
— Techly

Editor’s note: Bonus points to readers who note advertising on this site for the products of one of the companies criticized in this post. It’s hard, maybe impossible, to exist in the modern world without some compromises, and like everybody else, writers have to eat. With a little effort and attentiveness, people do what they can to make the world a better place, but no one is without faults, and as Joe E. Brown said at the end of the movie Some Like It Hot, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

 

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Nearly as Good as New

 

The past thirty years have been a golden age of film restoration, starting with the 1989 restoration of the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. Robert Harris led that work, and he has had a hand in restoring many films since then, including Vertigo (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964). It’s a shame that great movies need restoration at all, a state of affairs principally due to neglect by the very studios that made them, often at a cost of millions of dollars. Hollywood studios were far less concerned about art or historical preservation than they were about business, and movies retained little value for the studios after their initial theatrical release.

Peck Moby Dick
Publicity still of Gregory Peck from the 1956 film Moby Dick. Photo courtesy of Warner Brothers.

 

Indeed that was the situation for movies until home video opened a new and lucrative avenue for the studios in the 1970s and 1980s. Until then, to the extent the movie studios kept original film elements at all, they kept them in slipshod conditions which allowed the films to deteriorate to one degree or another. By the time demand returned for some of the better movies, restoration was necessary to have a salable product. VHS (Video Home System) tapes could skate by with no restoration because of the low resolution of the format, but laser disc was several steps above VHS in quality and created the first push to restore old films.

Laser disc never caught on the way VHS did, however, and its appeal was limited to cinema buffs. The biggest nudge toward film restoration came in the 1990s with the popularity of DVD (Digital Video Disc), an improvement in quality over VHS at about the same price for content and playback equipment. With that change in the market, movie studios saw the value in packaging their backlog of films in the new format, creating a greater need to restore at least some of those in highest demand. Since the turn of the century, high definition televisions and further improvements in home video resolution have brought the home theater experience into the mainstream, and the demand for quality restorations of old films is at a peak and will probably stay on a plateau hereafter.

There is a limit to how much detail the human eye can discern in the limited space of the typical home theater. DVD was a huge improvement over VHS, and Blu-ray was almost as big an improvement over DVD. 4K resolution is not quite as great an improvement over Blu-ray as numbers alone would suggest, simply because the law of diminishing returns starts to take effect. In the confines of a home theater, even using the best equipment, viewers are less able to discern the finer detail there on the screen. 8K resolution is overkill for all but the most dedicated home video enthusiasts with deep pockets.

Another reason for home video improvements driving film restorations less in the future is the switch by consumers from owning content on physical media, such as a Blu-ray disc, and streaming content in a rental agreement over the internet. Already the rollout of 4K discs has slowed to the point that many good old movies may never be remastered for the format. The potential sales aren’t high enough to interest the major movie studios. As to streaming 4K content, that is subject to the vagaries of the consumer’s internet connection. Some of the 4K content may not be as advertised because of the huge bandwidth requirements, and streaming true 8K content would probably require a 5G internet connection and an actual unlimited data plan from a viewer’s Internet Service Provider (ISP).


In any event, these are good times for fans of old movies. Some classic films, like director John Huston’s 1956 version of Moby Dick, which have long deserved restoration but were nonetheless neglected for whatever reason by the major studios, have been restored by smaller distributors of home video content who have determined it would be worth their time and effort. The movie studio Paramount last year restored It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and remastered it in 4K, though in a sign of the times they have released the new version only for streaming and have not pressed discs of it. Another classic film, Life with Father (1947), awaits true restoration, and viewers should meanwhile beware the versions for sale which trumpet digital remastering or restoration.

Life with Father (1947)
Screenshot from Life with Father (1947), with Irene Dunne and William Powell. Photo courtesy of Warner Brothers.

Like It’s a Wonderful Life, Life with Father had also fallen into the public domain; unlike It’s a Wonderful Life, Life with Father has not attracted anew the attention of the major studios. While Paramount has lavished care on restoring It’s a Wonderful Life, slapdash outfits have been appropriating Life with Father for the sales catalog, offering horrendously bad versions of it and relying on the phrases “digitally remastered” and “restored” to dupe the ignorant. They hope naive consumers will infer that “digitally remastered” means “improved”. It means no such thing; it means only that the film has been scanned to a digital format, a necessary step in making analog movie film available for home viewing on a DVD, Blu-ray, or 4K player. “Restored” is a relative term and can mean the absolute minimum amount of work was put into it, as is usually the case with the shadier outfits.

Robert Harris worked on this 2014 restoration and remastering of the 1964 film My Fair Lady, starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison.

Check reviews online, preferably not on Amazon because the reviewers there rarely get to the nitty gritty about the quality of the transfer, and instead prefer to bloviate about the movie itself, seeing it as their chance to be an authoritative movie reviewer like Roger Ebert. Better are the reviews on news sites or websites specializing in film industry or home theater matters because they generally do mention the quality of the transfer, though consumers still have to take some of those reviews with a grain of salt when they include affiliate links to sites selling copies of the movie. Be wary during research and you’ll have less chance to regret a purchase and better enjoyment of a great old movie given the attention it deserves.
— Techly

 

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Enough Is Never Enough

 

Amazon.com, the internet’s everything store, recently announced it will be opening two secondary headquarters, one in the New York City borough of Queens, and the other in the Arlington, Virginia, area near Washington, D.C.. City and state officials in both locations offered Amazon enormous benefits at taxpayers’ expense, though the exact amounts are unknown because officials claim they have a competitive advantage by keeping their bids secret.

 

Nonsense. It’s the taxpayers’ money and they have every right to know how officials spend it. The whole nationwide competition for Amazon’s secondary headquarters was a yearlong sham and circus, the kind of municipal debasement and looting that has become far too common as states and cities are pitted against each other for the dubious prize bestowed on them by corporate behemoths relocating or opening new places of business.

Caricature of "Organized Big Business Interests"
Caricature of “Organized Big Business Interests” illustrated by John Miller Baer (1886-1970) for part of the November 17, 1919 cover of The Nonpartisan Leader. Nearly one hundred years later, a caricature of a big business interest is more likely to appear trim and fit, wearing jeans and a turtleneck or other informal clothing.

Amazon is to labor practices and corporate citizenship as an internet business as Walmart is to labor practices and corporate citizenship among brick and mortar stores, which is to say they are leaders in their respective fields in abusing their lowest tier workers and siphoning funds away from local communities. Both Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon, and the Walton family at the head of Walmart are obscenely rich. They got that way because of their cleverness at exploiting the properties mentioned above, not because of their own virtuousness and hard work as they would have everyone believe. There are millions upon millions of people who are every bit as virtuous and hard working as Mr. Bezos and the Walton family, probably more so, and they are not obscenely rich, or even well off.

 

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Buy Nothing Day demonstration in San Francisco, California, in November 2000. Photo by Lars Aronsson.

Mr. Bezos and others like him are obscenely rich because they are, among their other qualities in starting and running a business, both good and bad, obscenely greedy. Shoppers visiting the Amazon website cannot be blamed for taking advantage of the low prices and good service. That would be a kind of “blaming the victim”. Besides, it is all too easy for shoppers to forget about or remain ignorant of Amazon’s bad labor practices and exploitative corporate citizenship since it does those things mostly out of sight and therefore out of mind, a benefit it has as an internet company that Walmart does not have as a brick and mortar outfit.

Shoppers might fairly ask themselves, however, that even if they are not entirely complicit in sustaining Mr. Bezos’s greed, perhaps their own much smaller proportion of greed is something worth examining. It is a form of greed that drives most purchases from Amazon. Amazon sells some necessities such as groceries, but then so do stores at neighborhood shopping centers throughout the country. Most of what Amazon sells are not necessities. They are convenient luxuries, great or small, delivered to the shopper’s door. With the enormous emphasis on shopping around Thanksgiving all but swallowing up the holiday and its meaning, people might want to step back from the shopping cart, both real and virtual, and reflect on how their own petty greed feeds the monstrous greed of Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires and millionaires, while around the world millions upon millions of decent people go hungry.
— Techly

 

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Breezin’ Along

 

Editor’s note: This post was scheduled to appear yesterday, April 15, but a severe weather outbreak in the eastern part of the country knocked out internet service in our vicinity, delaying it’s appearance until today.

 

Sales of recreational vehicles have been setting records in the past several years as the economy continues to rebound from the Great Recession of 2008, and as Baby Boomers retire and adopt the RV lifestyle either full or part time. It is considered a lifestyle by the people who live it, people who read magazines and websites devoted to their concerns, and who share information with each other concerning their rigs and travels, both in person when they meet at campsites and on internet forums. Really it has developed beyond a lifestyle to a subculture, ever since Wally Byam introduced the Airstream trailer in the 1930s, and especially so since after World War II.


The subculture of RVers should not be confused with people who dwell in mobile homes, the majority of which are mobile in name only. Recreational vehicles as a category include teardrop trailers, pop-up campers, and self-contained vehicles with all the amenities of a complete home except a permanent yard. They range in price from $10,000 to $1 million. Most of all, unlike their cousins the mobile homes, recreational vehicles stay on the move. RVers tour the country and stop for visits that are only temporary, even if they may stretch to months.

DROPLET - beautiful
A modern teardrop camper trailer. Photo by PPILLON.

One rather surprising statistic about the recent boom in RV sales is how many of the vehicles are being bought by Millennials, the generation now in its teens, twenties, and thirties. RV ownership has typically been associated with retirees with a desire to travel, and it’s therefore not surprising that RV sales have increased as Baby Boomers, the largest generational share of the population, have reached retirement age since about 2010. There appears to be a different dynamic driving RV sales among Millennials, perhaps relating to the new fluidity in the service and internet economy, where jobs either are low paying and do not generate loyalty one way or the other, or the jobs are better paying in the technology sector and the workers can work from home, wherever that may be, whether near or far from corporate offices. In either case, for young people starting out and without a lot of funds, an inexpensive RV is adaptive to the modern economy while allowing them to travel and explore before settling down, if indeed they ever find the need to do so in the traditional sense of a house with a mortgage.

A montage of highlights from the 1953 film The Long, Long Trailer, directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, with music for the montage provided by Perry Como singing “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze”.

There are RVers, young and old, who pick up extra income by traveling to seasonal work such as at Amazon.com warehouses, and that kind of thing will probably increase as more people take to the lifestyle and require some funds beyond Social Security, pensions, or other temporary service sector work. The employers like the arrangement, particularly as applications outnumber positions, allowing them to keep wages low, and because they are typically hiring responsible individuals with a good work ethic, even if they are in many cases unprepared for extended physical labor. Once the work is ended, both parties cut loose from each other without any further commitments, and in this case that is probably salutary for all concerned. One last thing the curious may wonder about the RV lifestyle, and that is about the relative safety of being in a RV during a lightning storm, and the answer is that a recreational vehicle constructed largely of metal top to bottom will most likely conduct a lightning strike safely to ground, though it is perhaps not wise to invite disaster by parking on the highest, loneliest spot in the countryside, or near a tree that qualifies.
— Ed.

“Gypsy”, a 1982 song by Fleetwood Mac, written and sung by Stevie Nicks, may represent different things to Baby Boomers as they age. It certainly represented several things to Ms. Nicks over the years as she progressed from initial idea to performance.

 

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How the Mighty Have Fallen

 

Sears, once the largest retailer by sales volume in the country, has been in decline for the last twenty years and is on its way out of business. Some of its competitors in the brick and mortar and catalog sides of retail merchandising have either already gone out of business or are also on their way out. Sears failed to keep up with the online retail revolution, and a look around its sales website indicates that the company still doesn’t have a handle on it. Sears closed up its famous catalog in 1993, and since it never established itself online, it was left with brick and mortar stores which are not doing well.

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The Amtrak train The Cardinal departs Chicago in May, 2009, for points east. The Sears Tower, the tallest building in the skyline, was renamed the Willis Tower in 2009 by the Willis Group as part of its lease agreement. Photo by Russell Sekeet.

 

Throughout the first two thirds of the twentieth century, Sears was such a huge merchandiser that it accounted for about one percent of all retail sales nationwide. It was the Amazon.com of that time, which was no small feat considering the supply chain difficulties imposed by an infrastructure that would not become truly nationwide until the 1950s with the building of the interstate highway system. Sears made its name by using its catalogs to reach under served rural customers at a time when the majority of people lived outside of cities. Now online retailers can reach anyone with an internet connection, and shippers deliver directly to the consumer’s doorstep.

It was at this time of year, late summer or early autumn, that Sears used to issue its Wish Book, a shortened version of its catalog, with an emphasis on Christmas gift items. One of Sears’ competitors, Macy’s, still kicks off the Christmas shopping season by sponsoring a Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City, though it has also been closing stores around the country. The 2008 recession accelerated the decline of the big nationwide department stores after a slow slip in sales since the 1990s. Specialty stores with a national or regional presence, like Radio Shack and Circuit City, have also either shut down or are close to doing so. What’s most often left then for Christmas shoppers visiting a physical store are the big box retailers like Walmart and Target.

 

Or people could patronize locally owned shops. The prices may be higher because the small shops don’t have the supply chain advantages of their much larger competitors, but the local small business gives back to its community. In that sense, the two types of stores should not even be considered competitors. Over there are the big box retailers selling goods cheaply, but also taking advantage of communities with unethical employment and supply chain practices. And over here are small businesses that are answerable to the community, because without local support and good word of mouth they are doomed to fail.

Gimbels with Hearst antique NYWTS
Left to right: Adam Gimbel, Frederic Gimbel, and Bernard Gimbel looking at a Luca della Robbia (1400-1482) statue of Madonna and Child, from the art collection of William Randolph Hearst. Parts of Hearst’s collection were sold at the Gimbels department store in 1939-1940. Gimbels had stores in the northeast and the midwest, and a prized location next door to Macy’s in Herald Square in New York City. Photo by Edward Lynch of the New York World Telegram & Sun.


Edmund Gwenn stars as Santa Claus in the 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street. The film’s setting is Macy’s department store in New York City.

It could be that the failure of the old retail giants like Sears will prompt renewed interest in shopping at local stores. Online retailers and a few big box retailers have already usurped much of Sears’ more than one century old business model. Sears and J.C. Penney and a few other large department stores have anchored enclosed suburban shopping malls since they first started appearing in the 1950s and 1960s. Now that those stores are declining, perhaps small, locally owned shops will pick up more business. That would be a welcome development, and it might eventually boost Small Business Saturday to a level competitive with Black Friday (it’s antithesis is Buy Nothing Day) and Cyber Monday. Like it or not, Christmas has been a commercial proposition in America for a long time now, and if small businesses can bloom from the ashes of the old retail giants, then at least some good will have come from that mercantile aspect of the year end holidays.
― Vita

 

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