https://www.quora.com/How-did-Mark-Cuban-save-his-wealth-fro...

amazon.com -> the original trusted amazon, fulfilled by amazon with strict inventory management

marketplace.amazon.com -> wild west'e-bay style', 'get what you get and don't get upset' amazon

[Addition based on comment] Or maybe amazon-marketplace.com to further differentiate it. It'd be similar to how Netflix split into netflix.com and dvd.com (although I think they should have branded it netflix-dvd.com for branding purposes).

If I were say, Procter and Gamble/Clorox (Consumer Staples), Macy's (Consumer Discretionary), Visa/Fedex (E-Commerce), Aetna (Healthcare) if I were going to look at options for cloud, would I host my enterprise on Amazon who is actively trying compete with me and provide the end customer with alternatives to my product/services? Or would I go with a vertical pure play cloud services provider like Microsoft.

To a certain extent, Amazon's retail presence is 68% Marketplace (from the article). Marketplace is really just a very high scale website plus very high scale order fulfillment which nets an analogous 6%-15% fee for listing, inventory storage and shipping/returns.

Sometimes I shop at the local BestBuy to delay that inevitable day when Amazon is the only thing available.

Instead today, people fire up the AC on overdrive when they get home in the evening to cool/heat the place down/up. What happens if your Nest could just fired it up at 3pm while the sun was still shining.

In fact the opposite is done today to take advantage of early morning peak pricing, commercial buildings cool/heat at 3am to get optimal energy pricing.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/retired-cpuc-co...

However, at the macro level, the environmentalist in me worries, at the extreme end if wealth really was fully distributed and everyone was living like Richard Branson, Imelda Marcos, etc. with multiple houses in every city (each with a 4 bedroom layout, TVs and wet bar in every room and an SUV in every garage), a yacht, a private jet guzzles premium fuel and a private island, the environmental ramifications would be disastrous.

That said, this economist that some HN'er recommended seems to think earnings are strong and much of the buyback is funded by repatriated money if I understand him correctly.

http://blog.yardeni.com/2018/06/buyback-bonanza.html

You have to ask yourself, particularly as a shareholder but also a member of society, do you want the company to extend into other industries where they could not only be over-extending themselves beyond their core competency but also over-exposing themselves to macro-economics, geo-politics and anti-trust issues.

Do we want all companies to chase monopolies in multiple domains like Amazon? Should Verizon/Comcast/etc. use its monopoly profits from telecom to go after media, then cloud computing and then conquer consumer goods and healthcare or should it just return profits to share holders? If the money goes back to the shareholder, then the shareholder can go find the category leader in those other domains and invest it more wisely.

That said buybacks can definitely be manipulated by some management teams to game their compensation, which is a definitely bad thing.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/food-scientists-weig...

1.) The internet and computing has increased the flow of information. Investments in data mining and data science by the Fed lets it make better decisions and test stuff iteratively and react to changes faster. Companies can also track inventory in a more controlled manner and not build too much too fast. Employees can find prevailing wage information easier to find better, more productive jobs. Home buyers can see how overvalued their houses are relative to other cities.

The internet and computing is enabling a much higher control loop (a.k.a. a steeper gradient descent toward optimal economic output based on the production needs for the current population).

2.) Steady reduction in the reliance on oil and gas. Much of the crazy inflation in past cycles was due to oil and gas shortages.

Would love to get opinions and more cases for why its different.

Japanese Vending Machine Unboxing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Z80J3jOao

I have to imagine a big complication in starting an independent restaurant is the overhead of hiring/managing/supporting employees (i.e. wait staff, cooks, dishwashers, etc.). A large employee base probably requires a large franchise with economies of scale to distribute the cost of centralized HR over many restaurants.

Without that overhead, entrepreneurial restauranteurs can focus on differentiating the food, the location(s) of the restaurant and the ambiance.

I think that's actually a secret of Silicon Valley. If Apple needs to ask how a UI should be setup to handle the nuances from a certain country, they can go ask a person from that country. It'd be much harder trying to do that in Asia or even Europe.

If you are trying to train and prepare a student to lead global teams, set global government policy, guide diverse groups toward a common solution, etc., you will need exposure to a diverse set of ideas and a diverse future network of fellow alumni to debate ideas with during your formative undergraduate years.

Otherwise, might as well save the $0.25 million in tuition and indeed go to UCI instead because otherwise it really is the same lectures, reading material and tests!

The Rules for Rulers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs