Source: Amazon’s New Customer – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
The key to understanding Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods is to understand that Amazon didn’t buy a retailer: the company bought a customer.
like AWS, the key to profitability is having a first-and-best customer able to utilize the massive investment necessary to build the service out in the first place
Source: Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars – Scientific American
RE: “Making Humanity a Multi-Planetary Species” by Elon Musk
Elon Musk has put his Mars-colonization vision to paper, and you can read it for free.
Musk’s Mars vision centers on a reusable rocket-and-spaceship combo that he’s dubbed the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS). … The ITS boosters will be designed to fly about 1,000 times each … Each ITS ship would probably be able to make 12 to 15 deep-space journeys during its operational life, Musk wrote, and each fuel tanker could likely fly to Earth orbit 100 or so times.
A South African human-rights lawyer advises the left on how to seek advancement in a democracy.
Source: How the Left Can Advance Its Cause – The Atlantic
Slavery, Nazism, apartheid and more. … A struggle against them was necessarily existential. They either had to be eliminated entirely, or suffered completely. A contrary view could neither be accepted nor tolerated. Its proponents had to be ruthlessly destroyed. In the battles listed above, that was the correct approach. … The nature of the struggle has changed. The goal is improving the peace that we have, not winning the war we are waging. The goal is to be able to live in the same street, not claim that street as ours.
brokering an agreement in a human rights matter can be the seed needed for trust to grow. That only comes through talking, listening, and respect. It isn’t flashy or dramatic, but it can be enduring.
Seeking the advancement of human rights in a democracy is like seeking a better marriage with your spouse. You should always seek a better marriage.
Sometimes, that results in a fight. The purpose of the fight should never be to destroy your spouse. The purpose of the fight is to keep living with your spouse. To do that, choose your disputes carefully and over only the most vital of matters. Accept that your spouse is seeking certainty and security, just as you are. If you believe in individual dignity, accept that their thoughts and actions may not reconcile with yours and that trying to shame them will make the relationship intolerable. Most importantly, once the fight is over, seek reconciliation. After all, you have to live with one another.
In a new book, a Brookings scholar argues that the upper-middle class has enriched itself and harmed economic mobility.
Source: The Hoarding of the American Dream – The Atlantic
“I am not suggesting that the top one percent should be left alone. They need to pay more tax, perhaps much more,” Reeves writes. “But if we are serious about narrowing the gap between ‘the rich’ and everybody else, we need a broader conception of what it means to be rich.”
the 20 percent are so much bigger than the one percent … dinging the top one percent won’t cut it: They are a lot richer, but a lot fewer in number. And if you are going to provide more opportunities in good neighborhoods, public schools, colleges, internship programs, and labor markets to lower-income families, it is the 20 percent that are going to have to give something up.
Source: Oath isn’t just a terrible name — it’s going to be a nightmare ad-tracking machine – The Verge
with the new privacy not-rules, Verizon is free to take the data generated from the tracking supercookies it imposes on its network customers, mash it up with AOL’s ad stack, and promise advertisers hyper-targeted marketing information that can’t be blocked or stopped because Verizon will own both the pipes and an enormous amount of the content flowing through it
Oath might fail the same way Go90 has failed; it’s not like AOL and Verizon are terrific at executing these content-based ideas. But this is Verizon’s next big plan to generate revenue and growth — it’s a lot cheaper and simpler to extract revenue from hyper-targeted ads on the world’s biggest content farm than it is to compete against AT&T and Comcast in broadband deployment.