Where cost of living numbers come from: Cost of Living Index. Consistently, five of the ten most expensive cities in the US to live in are in California. I live in Arlington County, Virginia which is consistently listed in the top 5 highest income counties in the US. It's expensive to live here, however it is still not as expensive as California. For comparison groceries and gas: Milk is $2.47 whole chicken is $1.90/lb 89 Octane Gas is $2.70 In an area that has the highest median income in the country, prices are 5-20% lower. That tells me the prices in California are out of line with prices in other places. A friend took a work promotion that moved him from Boulder, CO to Huntington Beach, CA eight years ago. The promotion included a pay raise well over $10k. Thanks to the higher taxes, his his take home in CA is less than it was in CO and even less once he included the higher cost of living.
I am sure all that is true, but remember, he is now living in Huntington Beach which may be one of the greatest places to live in Southern California and he is out of the hell hole that is Boulder, Colorado. Um yeah I am prejudiced in this situation.
So Trump is on a crusade against everything this morning. One of them being Amazon again. The thing about this is I agree with him on the surface. In the long run I see the growth of these large conglomerates as being extremely dangerous and will only continue the wealth disparity in this country. Where it goes from there, I really don’t know. His biggest complaints are they don’t pay their fair share of taxes. Which is comical because he went around during his campaign claiming he’s a genius for taking advantage of existing tax laws. They’re using USPS to deliver goods. So then change the rules of what companies can and can’t send through the postal service. the only way to prevent that is through the evil regulation that he spends his days raising against. “Market solutions” are all well and good in theory, but they only work under circumstances that don’t exist in reality (equal information for all, level playing fields that don’t exist because of the existing wealth disparities). And the other issue is that he’s only singling out Amazon because he doesn’t like Bezos because all the things he is raising against could be said about twenty other companies, but their owners don’t also own a newspaper that gives him negative press.
That's not what's comical. It's actually Trump's misunderstanding of how sales taxes work. Amazon collects sales tax in every state which has a state-wide sales tax, but they don't pay any sales taxes at all. The end consumer pays sales tax, and it's clearly printed on the receipt. Amazon is simply the pass-through collector of the tax. Trump's beef stems from the fact that many third-party sellers who sell through Amazon don't collect sales tax. In those cases Amazon isn't making the sale, the same as sellers on eBay. You would think: 1) The president of the U.S. would understand this simple concept; 2) He would be able to think of some mechanism to correct the situation, say, like passing a law in the Congress of which his own party controls both houses. But our president would rather stage a Twitter war than implement a solution.
He thinks he's actually doing something substantial when he's raging against something. Either that or something major that he doesn't like is about to drop soon...
Well he’s not taking credit for the stock market today (Yes I fully understand one day means absolutely nothing)
Doesn't everyone love Amazon? I feel like there are better targets for your anger. It is the one company that makes my life better in every way. It completely eliminates my need to go to wal-mart or the mall, almost ever.
Post office is only losing money because of a 2006 law that states they must pre-fund their benefits to the tune of some 75 billion, other than that they do just fine. Amazon plays by the same rules as everyone else. There's a bit of a misconception that they are killing retail. Not entirely true. They are killing bad and mediocre retail. Places like payless shoes or kmart that sells things you don't give a fuck about the experience of buying anyway. The run of restructuring for land use in the late 90s and early 2000s killed places like Sears and toys r us. Amazon didn't help, but on the whole their hands are clean. Amazon CAN kill retail but they really have no interest in it. Brick and mortar is still growing 3-4% a year. Amazon is choking ecommerce for sure. But most ecom sites weren't going to scale to be major players anyway and I think since the late 90s boom the industry has just been accustomed to a ton of churn. I used to work for an ecom start up focusing on retail and amazon was an orca: dangerous huge and hunting something very specific.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...-forcing-closure-stores-all-over-country.html Also this article from known Fox News where they quote post office officials stating that Amazon has greatly increased their revenues and as downndirty states the problems they have aren’t from operations. It’s just willful ignorance and outright lies. Which is what I look for in a president.
Totally agree with this. The dude (sorry, your President) just has no fucking clue and talks shit about shit that he makes up.
If Vanity Fair is to be believed, the Amazon roller coaster is just starting: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/trump-war-with-amazon-and-the-washington-post-is-personal
That’s a losing battle. Amazon is cost savings, time savings, and convenience. Outside of a candidate saying they want to take away everyone’s guns in America, I couldn’t think of a less popular thing to say than “Amazon is bad.”
Tesla took a shit recently and Elon Musk was the corn- https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-shares-sink-as-musk-jokes-about-bankruptcy-1522682691 I was a Musk fanboy, still am to some extent. But visionairies don’t always equate to successful entrepreneurs. He’s really a fan of revolutionlaizing infrastructure, which although is admirable, isn’t a good ROI in your lifetime. Then he also gives his technology away. Again, admirable but not necessarily the best for business. I have a feeling the big automakers are going to come in and dominate his market once he’s paved the way with good intentions.
Maybe his thought is he’s already too rich to give a shit about money. He now wants to see what he can leave his footprint in.
Yes, but when you can't fill orders in a timely fashion, people tend to get pissed and look elsewhere. The big firms are going to eat Tesla's lunch.
Also, I don’t think any other company can match the technology they have currently, nor do any others have anything near the supercharger network they are building out. So for all their flaws I think someone would have to buy them to overtake them.