251–260 of 410 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it's vendor. Wal-Mart is pretty infamous for squeezing suppliers & vendors on price and operating procedures. Hard.
"It also is not unheard of for Wal-Mart to demand to examine the private financial records of a supplier, and to insist that its margins are too high and must be cut." https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Amazon doesn't do this to their vendors.
They most certainly do and have. Take Books and Ebooks for a good example. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/cheap-words
Regarding the major book selling firms, Amazon are the good guys because a relatively few book firms control the market. Amazon is helping to improve the customer experience by lowering the price of books.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such as? Please provide some examples.
I don't know what the poster above you intended, but criticisms of anarcho-capitalism are a dime a dozen and largely ignored. It inevitably collapses into a feudalistic society. Can you point to an example of a sustained anarcho-capitalist society that had to maintain borders? Can't prove a negative, you know. You gotta prove positives.
It was originally alleged that corporations hold all the power in an economy unless they are kept in line by a powerful government. I countered, stating consumers actually are the holders of power in a free economy and provided some praxeological arguments to support that claim. @s73ver then made a generic claim that history refutes my argument, without providing a single example. One merely has to provide an example of a corporation which yielded more economic power than the consumer in a free-market economy.
> Can't prove a negative, you know. You gotta prove positives.
I really have no idea what negative you're talking about here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except you're imagining power in entirely the wrong place. It is the consumers who hold all the power within a free economy. Corporations only become large and profitable in a free economy when they meet the ever increasing demands of the consumers. To quote Ludwig von Mises: The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, deci…
That's a nice thought, but just about all of human history proves your entire thing wrong.
When Walmart sets aggressive standards for its suppliers, it does so in the interest of maintaining that position, because they know that the customer will not hesitate to switch to a retailer that they perceive as being more advantageous (which usually means cheaper).
It could even be seen as honorable that Walmart is on the ground doing the hard work of pressuring suppliers to ensure that they actually are able to offer rock-bottom prices, instead of just relying on marketing voodoo to create this as a phantom impression in the consumer's mind without actually attempting to affect it.
The system can either try to restrain this core human tendency to jump at the most advantageous thing, in the belief that such disloyalty is a primal impulse that does not belong in 'civil society', or it can attempt to recognize this tendency and account for it organically rather than ruling it out of bounds.
The extent of such tradeoffs, authoritative restriction meant to prevent damage v. organic re-routing such that damage is minimally disruptive, is always a matter of context and subjective judgment. We get into political snafus when we adopt one side of this scale as an ideal with near-religiosity and overemphasize the negative costs of the opposite side.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Azure is a better service imho, but is it actually succeeding? I'd argue it is not, yet.
Better service? That is highly arguable. What Azure and GCE both have over AWS is better performance and better cost. AWS on the other hand has more services that just work together. So you either choose ease of integration or better performance. My company chose ease of integration. Example, Amazon owns its CDN, Amazon owns all its services. Everything is in house, developed to work together, and just works out of t…
You shouldn't ding me on voicing a clearly labeled opinion as an opinion.
> but to say Azure is a better service is a lie.
Like you did here. This is ridiculous. You have your value judgement, I have mine. They're different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think concerns about Amazon becoming a monopoly are greatly exaggerated. They are getting attacked from all sides, by Microsoft in the cloud and Wal-Mart in ecommerce. As Microsoft grabs share from them in web services it'll reduce Amazon's ability to cross-subsidize its ecommerce business. As Wal-Mart and Costco continue to catch up in ecommerce and free two-day shipping becomes table stakes in ecommerce, Amazon's…
Valid point. I don't know why techies always like trying to fuck over (or over scrutinize) the tech companies they know/hear most about, while many offline-first companies never appear on our radar..
This is... Not the best? That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it's vendor. On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a ge…
I think concerns about Amazon becoming a monopoly are greatly exaggerated. They are getting attacked from all sides, by Microsoft in the cloud and Wal-Mart in ecommerce. As Microsoft grabs share from them in web services it'll reduce Amazon's ability to cross-subsidize its ecommerce business. As Wal-Mart and Costco continue to catch up in ecommerce and free two-day shipping becomes table stakes in ecommerce, Amazon's…
Oh yeah, Bing exists but are you really trying to say google doesn't dictate search?
I sold to Walmart for 4 years. In the beginning we believed we were lucky to become vendors. Then we realized how much stress they created. Every single year they would short pay our invoices. We would have to submit a claim with Walmart accounting. This process was completely and utterly time consuming. But the worst of it, they wouldn't pay the invoices owed until a year later. It's hard to float a $100,000 short p…