emizeko

秦刚? 看起来更像《亲岗》对不对

Here is, specifically, what Bezos did:

• Recognize that an internet storefront could gather huge amounts of data on customers
• Recognize that by selling books, he could stock a non-perishable product that is attractive to upscale, middle-adopter consumers (i.e. the best for long term gains)
• Recognize that the big delivery-based operations like Sears had horrible logistics and poor delivery times and service

It all spun out from there. That's all he did, and he didn't even actually do that himself, he just got it started and built it beginning with a $250,000 "investment" from his parents.

Amazon did a lot of things since then- but Bezos didn't do them. Bezos hired people to create Amazon Web Services, to provide a product that alread existed on the market. He didn't invent eBooks or even popularize them; he paid people to come up with a way to exploit them and strongarm authors into submitting to unfair business practices.

He didn't invent or design or create anything. All of the creative work done at his company is done by other people.

Billionaires are all basically the same: Ruthless sociopaths who notice, and viciously exploit, a particular combination of business practices, products, and markets while taking credit for the actual work done by other people.

credit to u/catgirl_apocalypse

The Lobby - A Four-Part Investigation

In a four-part series, Al Jazeera goes undercover inside the Israel Lobby in Britain

• "Israel" sterilized without their consent Ethiopian Jews immigrating to Israel: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-ethiopians-fooled-into-birth-control-1.5226424

• "Israel" harvested dead body parts from Palestinians without the consent of family members: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34503294

• "Israel" established secret concentration camps for Palestinians in 1971: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-israel-secretly-detained-innocent-palestinians-in-desert-camps-in-1971-1.10050775

• "Israel" offered to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa in 1975: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/23/israel-south-africa-nuclear-weapons

On Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), in the scene where Bond is about to parachute jump into Vietnamese waters, [the Department of Defense liason] Strub successfully requested that a CIA agent not warn Bond: ‘You know what will happen. It will be war, and maybe this time we’ll win.’

from National Security Cinema by Alford & Secker [PDF]

Charlie Chaplin’s 2,000-page Bureau file shows that, as a result of his left-wing beliefs, the FBI conducted lengthy investigations into his politics and his sex life, including pursuing leads offered by anonymous sources, clairvoyants and gossip columnists. Destroying Chaplin’s iconic status became an obsession for the Bureau, who reached out to MI5 for help trying to dig dirt, though the British found nothing indicating he was a Communist, let alone a Soviet spy. In September 1952, Chaplin and his family left the US to go on a European tour to promote his new film, and, after consulting with Hoover, the Attorney General revoked Chaplin’s re-entry permit, banning him from the country. Even though the Bureau’s files concede that they had no evidence that could be presented in court to justify barring him from re-entering the US, Chaplin decided not to contest the decision and lived the final 25 years of his life in Switzerland. He did not return to America until 20 years later. In short, the FBI quietly ended the career of the greatest comedian of all time on the false grounds that he was a Communist.

from National Security Cinema by Alford & Secker [PDF]

(1) By reducing the worker’s need to the barest and most miserable level of physical subsistence, and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement; thus he says: Man has no other need either of activity or of enjoyment. For he declares that this life, too, is human life and existence.

(2) By counting the most meagre form of life (existence) as the standard, indeed, as the general standard – general because it is applicable to the mass of men. He turns the worker into an insensible being lacking all needs, just as he changes his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. To him, therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury. Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have that.

from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm

Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice.

from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm

deeply unserious

Yemen erasure

yeah but Trump would resurrect them and kill them again

Consider term limits. The US Constitution was amended to enforce term limits in direct response to FDR’s popular 12-year presidency (he died in office, going on for 16). As a policy, it is self-evidently quite anti-democratic (robbing the people of a choice), but nevertheless it has been conceptually naturalized to the extent that the 2019 coup against Evo Morales was premised explicitly on the idea that repeated popular electoral victories constituted a form of dictatorship. If rotation was important to avoid corruption or complacency, corporations and supreme courts would institute term limits too. Term limits ensure that in the miraculous scenario that a scrupulous, charismatic, and intelligent individual becomes a rebellious political executive, they won’t be in power long enough to meaningfully challenge the entrenched power of corporate vehicles manned by CEOs with decades of experience. Wolfgang Schäuble, a powerful advocate of austerity policy in Europe, succinctly summarized the extent to which electoral democracy is subordinate: “Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy.” One Party States and Democratic Centralism are not the result of lack of sophistication or cronyism, they are a proven bulwark that acknowledges that political power will often need to be exerted against the will of Capital, and so the wielders of said power must necessarily undergo a much more serious vetting process than a popularity contest.

from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/