People crucified Sears for making teams compete internally but that’s literally what’s happening at Amazon at a larger scale. Teams and orgs regularly push back against helping each other. Will not waste resources to help others.
I don’t believe Amazon has a good outlook over 5 years unless they get lucky with random bets. They no longer innovate, they just copy and try to compete with scale. Even then, it doesn’t work because no one working on that product actually cares about the problem so startups can easily outcompete with “customer obsession.”
Amazon is the same as Google, Meta, Twitter, etc in the sense that they have a couple of wildly profitable products that enables the company to 'play' at running some other businesses that might turn a profit eventually after investing fifty billion. For Amazon it's the retail business and AWS. For Google it's AdWords. For Meta it's Facebook Ads. These businesses will never die, or even face a threat to their futures, despite throwing billions at self-driving cars, AI, phones, VR, etc.
The only existential threat to FAANG companies is a shift in consumer behavior away from spending money on things they see ads for. That's quite unlikely.
Other retail giants had been seen as walking dead for decades in the 1970s and 1980s before finally falling.
Though drivers then and now may differ. Old-school retail benefitted from purchase contracts (dedicated suppliers, corporate buyers), as well as service contracts (for purchased kit). Back when durable goods might actually last 15, 20, 30 years, this meant that at least a trickle of income was still coming in. Sears rather famously botched this hard when it used its automotive repair unit to commit nationwide fraud, see in 1992: "Accusation Of Fraud At Sears" <https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/12/business/accusation-of-fr...>.
How durable Amazon might prove under similar mismanagement in the globalised Internet age is ... an interesting question.
Retail is extremely competitive. Amazon does not have the best prices, and has a horrible experience for shopping. It's basically a specialized search engine with lots of ads at this point. Also, the things which made Amazon shopping a no-brainer are gone. Items no longer always arrive within two days if you have Prime, there are lots of poor-quality items, and it's hard to find what you really want. Finally, it's obvious Amazon's retail employees are not customer obsessed. Look at the web site design, and ask yourself if you would design a retail web site like Amazon's?
My guess is Amazon's retail business will eventually start declining as customers discover it's relatively expensive, and it's too easy to buy low quality items.
Prime is Amazon's moat though. More than 100 million people subscribe to a service that locks them into choosing Amazon first. People with Prime choose Amazon over going to a physical store. It's what took Amazon out of being an e-commerce business and into being a retail business. Don't underestimate how important Prime is to Amazon - it's literally a vendor lock-in that generates billions directly through fees and tens of billions indirectly through additional sales.
It is until it isn’t. The value of prime has largely being hollowed out and competed away in the last five years, from my perspective as a recently-cancelled Prime member.
When the next recession comes, look for the diff in churn rate between Prime and Costco memberships.
I think an under appreciated part of their most is that people hate logging in to things and making new accounts.
I know there have been times where I see a product is a little cheaper on the actual brand website but I decide to just order with Amazon rather than creating an account to place a single order on the other site.
I tell myself that it’s about privacy and minimizing exposure to future breaches, but really it’s just that I don’t want to go through the whole create a password/enter your card and address/wait for marketing emails you need to unsubscribe from loop
For me it's just about time and laziness. I accept for large and specialized purchases, it's worth potentially going to someplace else to buy something. But for some run of the mill $20 item? I probably spend a few minutes on Amazon and call it a day. I usually get the item in a day or two and, if I don't? It's still probably faster than I would get it elsewhere and it probably doesn't matter.
Once you establish a monopoly, the consumer-friendly behaviors which enabled you to crush the competition no longer have a justification for their cost.
Amazon is hardly close to a monopoly no matter how much some political class and their big competitors want to hammer that point. In fact I rarely buy anything from them precisely because they suck quite a bit on retail and competitors have gotten better (and consciously want to take my business elsewhere because I don’t like to benefit AWS). Because they are not a monopoly I don’t feel particularly in pain not purchasing from them.
I suspect the cost structure and consumer behavior has forced their hand to be more restrictive on retail (and perhaps they no longer care as much either).
Yep I ordered a big jug of cleaning solution that showed up completely destroyed in a soaked and ruined box. Amazon refused to credit me a refund unless I returned the product to them, which was literally impossible. They have gotten big enough that they don't need to care about customers as much as they used to and, unfortunately, they might be right. The only solution is to not shop there any more.
Another behavior I started seeing a lot more of the past couple years was paid listings selling a product for 4-5x the normal price, mixed in with the organic results. The only purpose of those is to rip off people who are in a hurry or confused and miss that they are being taken advantage of. They must work often enough to pay for the ad placements and clearly Amazon doesn't have any interest in protecting their customers.
Even the chronic pain patients should not have had the amounts prescribed to them that they were. Doctors were incentivized to give as much as possible. Creating addicts in people who may otherwise would not have been.
I personally knew people getting more than a cancer patient should’ve been given for day to day chronic pain.
I’m sorry if you were personally affected by regulation but that doesn’t mean they didn’t cause the crisis.
None of that would’ve happened if they didn’t start the flood of opiates to begin with. It wasn’t a marginally increased issue, they flooded the market with it. People with minor pain were getting massive bottles of OxyContin and selling or using it. This led to pill mills and crooked doctors. You had normal people getting hooked on high dosages. These are not the people who were using opioids before that. Pills made it seem safer. Most users don’t start with heroin, they start with pills because of exactly that. “A doctor prescribed it, must be okay.”
This is some insane logic to absolve them of responsibility. I say this as someone who also saw the problem firsthand. Was regulation handled badly? Sure but there’s no way you can say they didn’t start the problem.
Not only that, some of the problem with addiction were directly caused by the dosage guidelines for oxycontin. They really wanted it to be a 12h drug, but it really isn't and it wears off after about 8 hours. Rather than admitting this and giving a smaller dosage more frequently they doubled down by using a larger dose and trying to keep with the 12h schedule.
This combination or larger dose followed by mild withdrawal then results in a higher likelihood to become addicted to opioids. So not only they marketed it heavily and got more people on opioids than necessary, they did it in a way that maximizes the likelihood of addiction.
A bartender mocked my brother for getting Aspirin for his broken arm.
"man you got nothin', you should get some oxy for that!"
I'd been living outside the US and this in my first few hours back on US soil. A few hours later my friend (working in criminal defense) explained how opiates accounted for roughly 1/3rd of his income (other sources: drunk driving and domestic abuse). They all followed the same trajectory: minor condition -> prescribed oxy -> illegally obtained oxy -> heroin when the money ran out.
This wasn't normal. It didn't happen anywhere else in the world at the time, or at least not where I was living.
Really sad to see something so amazing get picked apart for its value.
I really wish Paul set up endowments to continue his projects. I don’t know if he knew how his sister would handle his estate but it doesn’t seem like what he wanted.
Be careful what you wish for. Endowments and foundations aren’t really accountable to anyone and just end up getting taken over by people with their own agendas.
It's true. While we're complaining about his sister, we could easily be complaining about someone who came into power of a well-endowed foundation with an agenda we don't like. It doesn't take too much imagination to, say, imagine a climate extremist who blames all computers and cyberspace for consuming so much energy and destroying the planet.
One friend who toured Montechello recently said that there's so much emphasis on slavery that the house has been turned into a monument to the bad things that Thomas Jefferson did in his life. I'm not saying this is incorrect or bad. Only that I don't think this is how Thomas Jefferson imagined his house would be used after his death.
I have a hard time seeing how that's a worse outcome than Monticello (or the computer collection) not being preserved at all (which seems to be the implication of "be careful what you wish for"). A museum agenda you disagree with can be changed in the future by new management, but once the artifacts are gone, they are gone.
A historical site like Monticello needs to be preserved in place, but when it comes to museum collections, a lot of times it's just as well for stuff to end up in private collections. Collectors tend to care (sometimes to an obsessive degree) about whatever it is they collect; it's not just a job for them, nor do they get possessed by weird ulterior motives the way foundations can be.
As someone who has been on the periphery of non-profits for years, they easily become mostly employment sinecures for executive directors and others. I've actually seen foundations set up to formally wind down operations after some number of years for exactly this reason.
James Hoffman is a coffee YouTuber. From community post by James Hoffman:
I just wanted to write a quick update post about the Hames Joffmann channel. For those unfamiliar, it was a channel that recut and recomposed my videos delightfully and hilariously, and did so having asked and with my full permission. Recently, @YouTube removed the channel, citing a violation of its policy regarding impersonation. (Some people have asked if I had anything to do with the takedown - I did not.) The channel was clearly labelled as not being me, and they appealed against YouTube's decision. This was denied, and the channel was completely removed.
I contacted YouTube through my partner manager and through their support channels, explaining that they'd made a mistake and advocating for the channel's return. The response from YouTube kind of broke my brain.
I hope Hames has the masters and reuploads them to a new channel, but I'd understand if they didn't want to. It just seems very disappointing and also weird for YouTube to advocate taking legal action against them.
————
Response from YouTube:
Hi James,
I've followed up with our internal team regarding the channel (@hamesjoffmann). Unfortunately, it seems the best course of action is to file a formal legal appeal.
First, like most of the Japanese manufacturers, Mazda bet against electric vehicles. They focused R&D on improving engine efficiency and getting their engines to run on hydrogen. If Mazda wants to make electric vehicles now, they have to play catch-up, or license key technologies from other manufacturers.
Second, batteries are heavy. For sedans and mid-size crossovers, this isn't much of a problem. EVs of that class are about the same weight as combustion vehicles. But for a lightweight sports car with decent range, batteries would be a big chunk of the total weight. Tesla's 85kWh battery weighs around 1,200lbs. If your desired weight is 2,500lbs, that only leaves 1,300lbs for the actual car. Yes you can save some weight by making the battery part of the structure, and you don't need an exhaust system, engine block, alternator, intake, etc, but it's still a tough set of constraints to work within.
Why do customers want sports cars to be light? Well all else equal, a lighter vehicle will have better performance. But even when all else isn't equal, vehicle weight can drastically affect driving enjoyment. I have a 4,048lb Model 3 Performance and a 2,182lb Mazda Miata. In terms of specs, the Model 3 is better in every way. It can accelerate, brake, and turn better than the Miata. It even has more range than the Miata. But the Model 3 feels like it's using brute force to beat inertia into submission. (Don't get me wrong, that can be fun.) The Miata is the opposite. Its light weight means that there's very little inertia to overcome, and something about that is extremely satisfying. It's almost like having a street legal go-kart. Until battery technology improves, an electric version just won't have the same appeal.
I agree with the adage, but brute force seems to win in this specific case. Even though it's the lightest model made, my Miata only gets 0.82g on the skidpad.[1] The Model 3 Performance gets 0.96g thanks to its wide tires, which are needed to transfer all its power to the asphalt.[2] This difference isn't just due to the 1990 Miata's older suspension and tire technology. Even the latest Miatas only get 0.90g of lateral acceleration.[3]
> I agree with the adage, but brute force seems to win in this specific case. Even though it's the lightest model made, my Miata only gets 0.82g on the skidpad
The current ND2 (2019+) Miata regularly pulls ~0.95 stock in magazine tests, almost identical to your model 3 Performance number.
You can exceed 0.95 and get ~1 on an ND Miata with slightly wider than OEM tires (still on stock rims) and a little more negative camber, which is widely done to the car by the enthusiast community. Similarly, you can get more out of your very own NA (1990) Miata with simple tire/alignment changes, even more with cheap new sway bars or springs etc.
To use a more fitting Lotus example here, the ~900kg Lotus Elise (50% of the weight of the Model 3 Performance) pulls 1g when tested by Car and Driver:
Yes and you can modify the Model 3 to increase cornering ability, but like in the case of the Miata it means increased tire wear, worse comfort, and worse mileage. Not to mention money.
My point was simply that even if you know vehicle A is twice as heavy as vehicle B, you don’t know for sure which one is faster in the turns.
> increased tire wear, worse comfort, and worse mileage… Not to mention money
It literally means none of this to change a miata as I described - we are talking a single degree of camber here not a race car. An alignment is normal maintenance - no change in price - and tires stay the same price if you go up a single size, so if you do this when getting new tires anyway it costs essentially nothing.
It’s a minor camber change (done at a standard alignment as normal, no extra special bits - just ask tech nicely). The tires will last just as long for your driving style and gas mileage unaffected. Comfort unchanged - no spring, damper or tire pressure changes.
The point this all makes is simple factors beyond weight have a huge bearing on constant lateral load car will sustain, to the point it’s almost pointless to compare weight and max corner load. You will never see car enthusiasts comparing weights of their cars and arguing in favour of more weight, almost ever. This entire comparison is pretty odd. No one who knows what they are talking about is going to question the classic Colin Chapman quote because physics didn’t change since his death - the concept of same car but lighter was faster in the 60s and 70s, and is still faster round a circuit today. It’s why race cars set faster lap times as the fuel tank depletes, which proves the point beyond doubt.
If you haven’t had a good alignment done to your NA recently get it done and don’t be scared of small adjustments, they won’t ruin anything - it does quite the opposite! - and the numbers that work great for all miatas are insanely well documented online. Steering feel will thank you for it. It’s the first thing I will have done to any generation of miata - they all benefit a lot, and usually arrive from factory not very accurately setup at all - you will see this when you have first alignment done and brand new car has initial numbers all over the place.
I’ve owned and maintained multiple examples of all four generations of the car over the last 20 years - a precision alignment with a touch more camber/toe is one of the easiest, best and cheapest (100-150 dollars typically in major US city) things you can do to the car - the miata is all about that steering feel which is easily corrupted.
Going with this theme, the idea of a battery car with longer range is appealing to me. However a smaller battery but quick charging would mostly remove the need.
I’m not sure I want to drive around with a capacitor in the boot, but a huge battery isn’t ideal either.
That's the whole thing right - most people don't actually care about having 600 miles of range, they care about being able to "refuel" quickly. My Mercedes AMG would only do like 200 miles on a tank of fuel and I don't ever recall having any kind of range anxiety with it, because you could gain all of it back within like 5 minutes and keep going.
It would be theoretically possible to have a small battery ("just a 60 mile/100km range, or even smaller) combined with a generator, but I don't know if markets would appreciate that.
This company Toyota started a pretty popular line of hybrid gas-electric cars, maybe 20 years ago, called Priuses. I think they sell pretty well. I see a lot of them running as taxis. The new ones can plug in and drive a few miles on the highway on pure electric before starting the gas engine.
Its called a series hybrid, there have been a small number of plug-in hybrids that used that design, they weren't successful in the US and are no longer in the US market. But that may not be anything particular about the technology; I wouldn't generalize from such a small set.
Our VW e-Up is just below 1200kg and has 150 miles range from a 36kWh battery, fits two of us, baby seat, and Costco shopping. You can absolutely have a lightweight electric car, just be realistic about what you're getting.
The Bugatti Veyron launched in 2005 with 1K horsepower and cost > $1M. As of last year, you could get a Dodge Challenger with 1K horsepower for <$100K. Those prices are unadjusted for inflation, so the price difference is even greater than 10x.
While it is not a guarantee, the innovations in today's supercars do tend to become much more common with time.
You’d think its a different time now that the kids who grew up lusting over these cars now have money for one, enough money to create a new car market where even a pickup truck can be almost six figures optioned out
I'm literally waiting for it, have been for quite a while. Small cars have numerous benefits over just being sporty. An electric, or even a hybrid 86/BRZ or miata would be great, but can't be compared to the mini or fiat, and while tesla might be fast, it's huge. Even with a price increase these could be more affordable than a lot of sports cars. The 86/BRZ has been a huge seller too.
The EV market is so frustrating right now. Everything seems to more or less be an SUV.
I wish someone would deliver something small, light, aerodynamic, stripped down and without features of marginal utility. Sportiness sort of comes for free.
The only important features for an EV are (excluding safety issues) are change speed and range. I might add a heat pump for the cabin (and battery in cold climes). Skip the screen and just let me use my phone and give me physical controls.
If a car marker thought seriously for a moment and resisted the full techno wank that is inflicted upon us at the moment, they'd make a lot of money.
It's a car, it's not that complicated, get back to basics.
I'm not really that interested in cars. We drive a Honda Fit (Jazz for the rest of the world). I was really excited 8+ years ago when Honda said they might do an EV version of the Fit/Jazz - just perfect for my wife and I, combining the great utility of the Fit/Jazz with our preferred power source, all in a reasonable sized and reasonably slick package (incredibly internal visibility also).
Not only has this not happened, Honda have even stopped selling the ICE version of the Fit in the USA. The closest thing to this concept - the Nissan Leaf - has also been discontinued in the N. American marketplace.
The court documents don’t name the store, so the reporters may not know the store. The company may have turned in the employee with the understanding they would just be “Company 1” in all court documents.
People crucified Sears for making teams compete internally but that’s literally what’s happening at Amazon at a larger scale. Teams and orgs regularly push back against helping each other. Will not waste resources to help others.
I don’t believe Amazon has a good outlook over 5 years unless they get lucky with random bets. They no longer innovate, they just copy and try to compete with scale. Even then, it doesn’t work because no one working on that product actually cares about the problem so startups can easily outcompete with “customer obsession.”