New and Old #153
Friday roundup and commentary
Amazon’s Big Secret, The Atlantic, Stacy Mitchell, February 28, 2024
Stacy Mitchell is the co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. They’re a sort of left-inflected economic populist outfit which I first heard of when I came across some of their old material from the 1990s on Walmart hollowing out small towns.
This is the kind of “left” politics I can get behind—basically, a kind of civic localism and consumer advocacy. I’d slot it in the same slot as Ralph Nader’s work, right to repair, and stuff like that.
From the piece:
There’s something you won’t find in those materials, because it was deemed too sensitive to unredact: precisely how Amazon makes its money. Nearly 30 years after the company was founded, we still don’t really know. Amazon has long cultivated the impression that it operates its shopping platform at razor-thin margins, relying instead on its cloud division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), for much of its profit. And yet the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit contends that Amazon’s e-commerce business is, in fact, “enormously profitable.”
My dad and I used to follow e-commerce stuff a bit, and he used to say, “A brick-and-mortar company could never behave the way Amazon behaves.” He meant things like permitting counterfeit products on the sales platform, cancelling third-party seller accounts (or buyer accounts) without notice or explanation, etc. Stuff that allowed an online big-box store to behave like a tech platform rather than a store. Stacy’s piece makes me think of that general insight, and, I think, bears it out.
Here’s one of the mechanisms by which Amazon has (allegedly/possibly) concealed monopolistic power:
In practice, the SEC has given corporations “near total managerial discretion” to decide what counts as a segment, as a 2021 report from the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London put it. This has allowed them to lump together different business lines and report only aggregated data for the whole, making it possible to conceal that a division is generating the kind of jumbo profits that might alert antitrust enforcers to a lack of competition. It also allows corporations to hide sustained losses in particular divisions, which can be a sign of a monopoly in the making.
Indeed, for much of the 20th century, a top concern of antitrust was “cross-subsidization”—when a corporation uses excess profits obtained by monopolizing one market to fund large losses in another.
Read the whole thing.
How I Changed My Mind About Change, Affordable Swarthmore, Rachel Pastan, September 2, 2022
I’m not sharing this piece because it cites one of mine, but that’s nice!
I grew up outside Washington, D.C. Way outside. To get to our house, you drove past a small village center and kept going for miles, past horse farms and cow pastures, then turned onto a narrow dead-end road into the woods. My parents liked the trees and the quiet.
Gradually, sprawl surged toward us. New pricey developments branched off the main road. Cow pastures became the manicured grounds of gigantic mansions. The traffic got so bad my father shifted his schedule to go into work at off hours.
This demoralizing experience of development is one I think many people share, and it’s part of what makes us wish that house building could just stop.
But building homes can’t stop, because the number of households in the U.S. keeps growing. People need places to live.
The piece is not even about the D.C. area, but the same thing holds. Once you realize this dispiriting progression is sprawl and not people, suddenly you realize we can welcome people without degrading the experience of living in a place. It’s such a shame that because our land use dictates sprawl almost everywhere, most of us never feel that.
It’s a quick read but a personal “conversion” story, and very nice. Check it out.
Into the Grooves: Go Inside a Record Pressing Plant, Billboard, Samantha Xu, June 8, 2021
The vinyl stuff is interesting, but this sticks out to me:
Labels for the records need to be baked at 300 degrees for 15 hours before they are inserted in the pressing machine. This step takes moisture out of the labels to insure they will not peel off the record or discolor.
It’s mostly photos, and they’re cool—this looks like an old-school factory with some rough edges, not a huge, bright, automated space. I think the physicality of records is a real draw, at almost a physiological level, certainly well beyond just nostalgia.
Grizzly bear meat: is it fit for dinner?, MeatEater, Patrick Durkin, February 10, 2020
Sometimes I like to read about completely irrelevant (to me) topics, just to learn something. Vegetable gardening; tractors; in this case, hunting. Specifically: can you eat bear? I mean, I guess I know you can, but I was curious what some random hunting blog or site would say.
When Idaho and Wyoming tried opening limited hunting seasons for grizzly bears in fall 2018, opponents instantly dubbed them “trophy hunts.” They claimed no one hunts grizzlies for their meat, and charged that hunters only want the big bear’s skull, claws, and hide for rugs and decorations.
Those who supported the low-impact hunts—one tag in Idaho and 22 tags in Wyoming—felt stung by the sweeping accusations. Grizzlies hadn’t been hunted in the Lower 48 since 1974, and the proposed 2018 hunts were quickly killed in federal court, so who can say “no one eats grizzly meat?”
Look, I’m not a huge let’s-hunt-bears guy, but this is a common thing: something that is suppressed and therefore doesn’t happen much is then cited as reason why there’s no demand for that thing. Like, say, sprawl supporters saying “nobody wants dense urban living” while also supporting its prohibition in 95 percent of America’s developed land (see, I can make anything about land use).
Then there’s this:
Warren eats everything he kills, no matter the reputation of its meat: “I don’t take someone at their word when they say something is inedible,” he said. “When I ask if they’ve tried it, they usually say, ‘No, but that’s what I’ve heard.’ The first time I encountered that thinking was with javelinas. People called them ‘stink-pigs’ and said ‘no one eats them.’ That made me want to try one, and it’s one of the best meats I’ve eaten. And it’s not like I have desensitized taste buds. I know when something tastes bad.”
Don’t knock it till you try it.
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Any time anyone shows respect to hunting: you lose me. Sorry. Bye nye