Sure, if you ignore what has been talked about for nearly 20 years now, oil is great. No need to invest in any alternate energy production/manufacturing technology domestically. When oil is no longer king, we'll all just move to China.

How's "Drill, baby, drill!" working out for us as a domestic and foreign, energy and economic policy?

Is all the anti-green economy non-sense going to be good for future generations?

Late stage capitalism is thrown about when it looks like various business have run out of ideas to extract wealth from society and chose to reduce human capital, lower wages, pursue rent seeking behavior, and/or overtly buy government favor. They want to be Rent-A-Center, but not just for TVs and junk furniture, but for your whole life. If regular people don't have decent jobs, where is all that sweet, sweet rent money going to come from?

Yes, small business in the US is still incredibly important to overall economic health. We do see a small number of very large players; be it tech, auto, real estate, finance, media etc.; that are actively working to consolidate power through acquisitions (organic and inorganic) or the ability to create perpetual rent seeking/subscriptions and remove ownership from vast swaths of society. By reducing market players, the large players no longer need to respond to market competition and innovate; they look for safer alternatives to increase profit and/or revenue, like reducing human capital or removing ownership. Removing ownership means the renter can no longer participate in traditional markets that provide equity/gains on investment like real estate and public stocks.

The fear about AI in the US is probably that the work AI is assisting with or replacing is not then followed by another industry for effected/replaced humans to step or grow into. Late stage capitalism is simply trying to figure out how not pay Europeans and North Americans middle class wages with this new form of automation. Without the middle class, who is going to buy all the things business are selling? 100,000 wealthy families don't need 200,000,000 shiny new iPhones, 3,000,000 automobiles, or 100,000 flights per day.

Coach and whip makers were replaced by the automobile industry which employs millions of workers through it's massive and complex supply chain. No one was trying to make coaches and whips without humans to increase profit, it was subsumed by an entire other industry.

Weavers were replaced by automated weaving looms that made textiles incredibly affordable to most people spurring growth in upholstery/furniture and clothing. While the goal was to make textiles faster and consequently with fewer humans, it was a permanent boon to business that already used textiles, increasing economic opportunities for average people by providing less expensive goods and lowered the barrier to entry for textile based businesses.

It's real. Texas has banned it. A state run by so-called "pro-life" "Christians" who espouse "small and limited government" have, once again, overturned a life saving measures enacted by local city governments.

https://thehill.com/opinion/he...

Amazon mission statement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/ab...

"Earth’s most customer-centric company"

I guess than can be interpreted as "customers are the center of how we maximize wealth extraction". I can think that way too, but I mostly like humans over obscene profits and business individuals who can suspend their personal values in the name of the almighty dollar because it's legal and "doesn't represent who they are as a person".

I work for a small-ish publicly traded company and our CEO's annual compensation can buy my just below median value home every 6 weeks and the company made across the board layoffs this year. I complain about that too and openly discuss compensation at work hoping it gets around. It's likely a career limiting move.

This negates most of what I think you are arguing. If it's results based, effort does not matter. If my employer is paying for a result, and I produce in a day what they expect takes a week, then we're square. What I do with the remaining 4 days shouldn't matter.

You can argue there is a misalignment in the result to effort ratio, but that's entirely different.

This is why we can't have nice things, people often defend unethical, anti-consumer behavior for reasons I don't understand. Maybe they will one day be the billionaire class after they simply make all the correct decisions in their life and need to continue such behavior? So no need for consumer protections, like what defines a family, so a company can rake you over the coals; just make better choices. Don't worry, the existing billionaires can't wait to greet you!

Overly, narrowly defining a family as a means to increase revenue is despicable.

It was fun while it lasted!

Corporate America has found a way to undo 130 years of progress! From the end of the robber baron era in the late 1800s to probably 10 years ago, it was hard to stop workers from believing hard work would produce desired advancement and often did. The business class/corporate America has been fighting their entire existence against anything that requires safe, living wage jobs.

Exporting labor that could not be automated away to foreign countries with lower standards of living and cost has been the game plan for 50 years. More recently, it's been hitting middle-class, white collared jobs.

How many C-suite jobs get off-shored or out sourced to India, China, Brazil etc.?

Who is going to have all the disposable income to buy all the stuff that feeds the fat cats' wallets?

I suspect the payment information sharing is a way to discourage actually sharing your account.

Also, you can disable payment sharing, but then other members lose access to all benefits and digital content. So, I guess, see my first statement.

Also, what about your college kid in a dorm? By most state laws, out-of-state students do not qualify for local residency if they live on campus. I feel completely entitled to list them as a family member on Amazon Prime. But to the OP's comment, I don't want them to have access to all payment info.

FYI, we canceled our Prime membership some months ago for a number of reasons, but they keep offering 30 trials every so often. With a little discipline, you can add enough to your cart over a few days or weeks to get free shipping anyway.

But real people sometimes "forget" to present you with all the up sells... I mean value add options... or whatever they're masking it as this quarter.

In the US, some people in power see libraries as a waste of money and land because use is generally in decline. In my neck of the woods, a library and community center are being replace with business zoned or mixed use properties, because someone gets to make money moving the public resources elsewhere. Fortunately, the replacements are already constructed and slated to open very soon, but that's only because it's an affluent suburb.

So, if I'm a Chase bank customer (they make money off of my account) who approves one of these Fintech services to hook into my account and use my financial data (emphasis on MY FINANCIAL DATA), Chase wants to directly charge the Fintech also?

Is that a correct interpretation?

Or are the Fintechs somehow freely accessing vast troves of financial data without permission?

Until I can simply tell "AI" to give itself access to my company IDP and configure SSO for SaaS App XYZ, I'm not really interested.

Another good example I read about goes something like this:
"AI", highlight all ZIP codes for the western US in this spreadsheet. Then make a pivot table...

Summarizing information is nice and all, but I want it to do unique, detailed work at my command.

Too bad our government, state and national, are ineffectual when it comes most housing problems. This is mostly due to the profit motive of our home/apartment builders. They want to build high profit margin homes, which are not usually anything one would consider affordable housing. The city of Houston, TX overbuilt "luxury" apartments 10 or so years ago and could not fill them, so the developers just sat on the vacant apartments until the market was back in a place to make their margins.

Houston Chronicle (paywalled)
https://www.houstonchronicle.c...

"Not in my backyard" is also much of the problem. Additionally, too many new, single family homes are built across large tracts of land that are heavily deed restricted by legal entities tied to the individual properties that require additional yearly fees.