Amazon prevented us from lowering our direct prices.

I worked for a seller. We lowered the prices on our own website because our costs were so much lower without our Amazon fees (around 15% at the time). It turned out Amazon was watching out for sellers doing that, and within a month of our price reduction, Amazon sent us an only slightly ambiguous reminder that pricing our products lower than on Amazon was cause for them to terminate our selling privileges. We immediately raised our direct-to-customer prices to protect our Amazon sales.

And FYI: Amazon enforces its more unsavory practices by ambiguously pointing you to a very long list of rules without telling you which rule you violated. When they did that, we were never able to get them to tell us which rule we violated. Even after we fixed whatever violation we thought we had, they would never tell us that we got the right one or that we were in the clear.

Like a criminal enterprise, Amazon controls its sellers through fear and intimidation, and you could never catch them saying they did what they did or why they did it. You simply had your seller privileges revoked without explanation and there wasn't a human in the world who would explain it to you. No evidence, no claim.

...without any discussion of the costs or profitability. Wow. Three Cheers for the Peanut Gallery!!!

(Crawl back into your hole. You're not up to the challenge of sustaining a business.)

But very few people have the attention or interest in the details needed to specify solutions to real, significant problems. AI can't solve the problem for you (read: "write the program") if you can't even accurately describe the problem in adequate detail. (I see no reason that the portion of people willing to delve into such detail will change anytime soon. Capable programmers will likely continue to be in short supply.)

Thank g_d the people who brought us ever improving generations of charging ports, driven by competition, will now be tamed to heed the bureaucrats' superior vision of how their technology should work. This is a big win for consumers, who have had to put up with the likes of Google and Apple and their tone-deaf product designers.

This is the brilliance of government. (Or is it a meta-government?)

(The know-littles are taking control of the know-mores. Be afraid.)

The "platform" is not the most laborious nor costly part of a financial research terminal such as Bloomberg (or others such as FactSet, Capital IQ, or Refinitiv). It is the data, its scope, quality, assurance and delivery speed, that consume tremendous labor and ongoing delivery costs. The data includes hundreds/thousands of curated fundamental data points covering thousands of corporations globally spanning decades of history. All the history is easily merged through these platforms to be correlated with current, realtime, global market feeds that are no more difficult to consume than it is to drink water from a fire hose. (Be careful not to underestimate the service level expectations of current market data consumers; you do not have the sluggish luxury of taking minutes, or even seconds, to deliver all assured data to all customers [as close as possible to] NOW.)

"Openness" is already a highly valued and well-supported aspect of financial research platforms. Users of those platforms typically integrate third party data sets as well as their own data in order to build unique investment models. So in addition to supporting common user scripting mechanisms such as Excel/VBA, they serve up their data through well-documented API's scaled to satisfy vast needs at high speed to be consumed through whatever technical toolset a customer may choose. (Python? Okay. Are you sure it's not a job for c?)

Good luck competing with those guys. None of them is resting on their laurels, and they already stand atop many years of continuous investment in these highly sophisticated platforms and their ever-expanding data sets. The products are only sustained through 24x7 global research, aggregation and delivery services. Though those companies have been highly profitable, they're also highly competitive and not nearly as nearly as fat in their pricing as the article suggests.

I mean, everybody know that, right?

(right?)

(It's about time a political leader had the stones to commit to a COMPREHENSIVELY VIABLE alternative to carbon-based energy production.)

I noticed that too. It's nonsense. And nonsense is a common refuge for people who mean well, and most importantly, want you to know that.

Recycle more. Recycle less. What difference does it make? I *did* write an article about recycling, and *that's* what matters.

Wow! Look at all the additional energy the larger size turbine delivers. Energy, per turbine, goes up with size.

But they offer no news of the relative cost, per kilowatt hour, of the larger size?

Hmmm. Maybe the energy cost doesn't go down with the larger size? Maybe "economy of scale" isn't applicable here? (If the cost was lower, I'd expect that to be a near-the-top point in a puff piece like that. The absence of disclosure of relative cost looks telling to me.)

You ruined the name "Alexa."

Sincerely,
Karen

Seriously? There's a question of how much more influence Beijing can exert over ByteDance? I don't think so.

There is no limit to the influence the Chinese government can, and if it so chooses, WILL exert over any entity within its domain. The Party is superior, not only to all institutions, but to all principles including its own.

Are you sure sure? Or are you sure, like you didn't take the time to check, so you're speculating sure?

If the employee had likened a Democrat to a N_zi, that would not have been permissible.

You'll know you're seeing a CEO stand up for a principle when he/she decides to protect an employee's speech outside of work because he/she believes that: 1) free expression is a valuable way for a society, and 2) not every hour of an employee's life must be beholden to the reputational risk management concerns of his employer.

I'm sorry...did you allege there was a time in history when the U.S. Government's information technologies were characterized by "innovative and agile problem solving?"

I must be in the wrong universe.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 20.6% of all U.S. adults have some kind of mental illness. (See https://www.nimh.nih.gov/healt...).

Maybe that's a factor?

...but I couldn't quite catch the rhythm.