Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ya, that EA spouse thing totally didn't happen: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
The plural of anecdote is not data.
When did witness testimony become inadmissible evidence?
Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
641–650 of 865 posts
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#642https://twitter.com/dkberman/status/875701677504024576 "Amazon did not just buy Whole Foods grocery stores. It bought 431 upper-income, prime-location distribution nodes for everything it does."
Meh. This deal is about expansion, not about tapping into 431 measly location. Amazon knows they can set up satellite warehouses a lot faster and cheaper than they can create a store. Let's be clear. Whole Foods is not a commodity food supplier. They enjoy high margins because they have cultivated quality and consciousness into their products. They did to food what Apple did to computers. They added the right mix of…
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Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, for one, the employees are a huge part of why those shareholders get any returns in the first place.
And the shareholders are [usually/pretty much] the entire reason there is a company there for them to work at and potentially hold some shares in. There are two sides to that.
I disagree with that statement.
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#644Amazon is now (or more so now) like Evil Corp in the Mr. Robot kind of way. You can ship your Evil groceries via Evil Prime purchased via voice-command with your Evil assistant device paid for with your Evil credit-card. Evil. Frankly I don't buy as much from WF anymore considering that what they carry is much more like "organic junk-food" than actual food. If you really want to support the "cause", find yourself a l…
> what they carry is much more like "organic junk-food" than actual food.
There is truth to that. But the same guideline for healthy shopping applies as much to Whole Foods as any grocer:
"Buy most of your food from the perimeter of the store, less from the aisles."
i.e. Buy fresh, not processed, when possible. Exceptions noted in advance.
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#645HUGE news in the grocery delivery space. Groceries are one of the few large markets that require some proximity to customers due to costs and spoilage. Each grocery store is a type of mini-distribution center for grocery products. Shipt and Instacart have succeeded to date because they use existing distribution channels and set up marketplaces for the "last-mile" of delivery. This is in contrast to Webvan in the earl…
> I still believe that Instacart and Shipt can succeed Amazon could just buy Shipt and/or Instacart as well, barring FTC intervention. I'm not sure what B2B partners Shipt has, but I know they have a mobile app. Joining the mobile app to Amazon would give Shipt a boost and Amazon a start, I'd imagine. [I worked with one of Shipt's mobile developers at a previous position. Go Shipt!]
Why buy them when they can crush them?
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, for one, the employees are a huge part of why those shareholders get any returns in the first place.
And the ones who bought stock (including those that did so at the 85% discount) will get the value of their stock. However, shareholders aren't guaranteed any returns. If they bought their stock in 2013 they lost money. Employees who bought stock with the 85% discount won't be quite as bad off as non-employee shareholders. Imagine suggesting that any employee who was hired when the stock price was higher than the sel…
I reject that notion entirely. The employees are the reason why the store was able to do so well. They should get the bulk of the reward for that.
I flat out reject this idea that people should get the bulk of reward simply for already having money.
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#647HUGE news in the grocery delivery space. Groceries are one of the few large markets that require some proximity to customers due to costs and spoilage. Each grocery store is a type of mini-distribution center for grocery products. Shipt and Instacart have succeeded to date because they use existing distribution channels and set up marketplaces for the "last-mile" of delivery. This is in contrast to Webvan in the earl…
> I still believe that Instacart and Shipt can succeed Amazon could just buy Shipt and/or Instacart as well, barring FTC intervention. I'm not sure what B2B partners Shipt has, but I know they have a mobile app. Joining the mobile app to Amazon would give Shipt a boost and Amazon a start, I'd imagine. [I worked with one of Shipt's mobile developers at a previous position. Go Shipt!]
Serious question: would it be beneficial for Amazon to buy out an existing grocery distribution company like Instacart when Amazon is already an expert at distribution?
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#648Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth pointing out that the purchase, as based on today's price action, was effectively "free". Amazon market cap went up 3.5% as of the current tick, roughly $15.5B. The market effectively rewarded AMZN for the transaction far beyond the actual $13.7B tender offer!
No, they are paying in cash, not stock. The company sold the stock a long time ago, so whatever the stock does has no impact on the company. The stockholders, however, benefited 3.5%, assuming they sell now.
This is not accurate. Companies hold back some stock during their IPO for various reasons. Amazon held back 23 million shares. It also has repurchased a fair number of shares it holds as "treasury stock" on its balance sheet that appears to have netted them a few billion in appreciation.
This of course pales in comparison to the 478 million outstanding shares, so, you are correct: their shares don't appreciate nearly enough from the $15 billion surge in market cap to pay for the $13.7 billion purchase. However, to say "whatever the stock does has no impact on the company" is also inaccurate.
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
instant-runoff is sold on false premises. Advocates suggest that you can honestly vote and not see spoiler effects. But instant-runoff eliminates a candidate in each round, and when your 2nd choice gets eliminated before your 1st choice, your 2nd choice never gets counted. This results in a wide range of messed up results that spoil elections and can fall back to strategic voting. The best answer is Star voting (Scor…
No, STAR is not the best answer; it has the same problem as all scoring (instead of ranking) based methods—there's no clear mapping between actual subjective preferences (which can be consistently reduced to ordinal, but not interval, measures) and ballot markings, with the result that the same preferences by different voters produce different ballot markings. This is especially problematic in multicultural jurisdict…
> no clear mapping between actual subjective preferences (which can be consistently reduced to ordinal, but not interval, measures) and ballot markings, with the result that the same preferences by different voters produce different ballot markings
No, you completely misunderstand. There's no universal reference for what scores "mean". You can give candidates from, say 0-5 stars in terms of how much support you want to give them in the race. That's it. 5 = most support, 0 = no support. It's ONLY relative to the actual pool of candidates in the election. People can just learn to understand this clear fact, and ballots can be marked as such as "least support" to "full support". And educating people about this is easier than educating them about IRV and all it's weirdness (and more honest than making false claims about IRV). There are NO cultural issues or biases or problems here in terms of what a score "means".
> If you want to fix the problems caused by loser elimination in IRV…
I don't know what you mean here, but it isn't IRV, it's some other rank system. Tons have been proposed, none are perfect, all are far harder to calculate and understand than Star voting. Ranked Pairs is actually pretty good, probably the best way to handle ranked ballots. I'm not sure what you're proposing.
Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B
#650Bezos: "Alexa, buy me something from whole foods"
Alexa: "Buying Whole Foods"
Bezos: "Shit"