With Profits Soaring, Tech Companies 'Won the Pandemic' (deccanherald.com) 107
In April of 2020, Jeff Bezos announced Amazon would spend their next quarter focusing on people instead of profits, remembers the New York Times:
At the end of July 2020, Amazon announced quarterly results. Rather than earning zero, as Mr. Bezos had predicted, it notched an operating profit of $5.8 billion — a record for the company. The months since have established new records. Amazon's margins, which measure the profit on every dollar of sales, are the highest in the history of the company, which is based in Seattle... Amazon's pandemic triumph was echoed all over the world of technology companies.
Even as 609,000 Americans have died and the Delta variant surges, as corporate bankruptcies hit a peak for the decade, as restaurants, airlines, gyms, conferences, museums, department stores, hotels, movie theaters and amusement parks shut down and as millions of workers found themselves unemployed, the tech industry flourished. The combined stock market valuation of Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook increased by about 70 percent to more than $10 trillion. That is roughly the size of the entire U.S. stock market in 2002. Apple alone has enough cash in its coffers to give $600 to every person in the United States. And in the next week, the big tech companies are expected to report earnings that will eclipse all previous windfalls.
Silicon Valley, still the world headquarters for tech start-ups, has never seen so much loot. More Valley companies went public in 2020 than in 2019, and they raised twice as much money when they did. Forbes calculates there are now 365 billionaires whose fortunes derive from tech, up from 241 before the virus.
No single industry has ever had such power over American life, dominating how we communicate, shop, learn about the world and seek distraction and joy. What will Silicon Valley do with this power? Who if anyone might restrain tech, and how much support will they have...? The biggest, and perhaps the only, threat to tech now is from government...
Beyond the threat of misuse of tech lurks an even darker possibility: a misplaced confidence in the ability of one loosely regulated sector to run so much of the world.
Even as 609,000 Americans have died and the Delta variant surges, as corporate bankruptcies hit a peak for the decade, as restaurants, airlines, gyms, conferences, museums, department stores, hotels, movie theaters and amusement parks shut down and as millions of workers found themselves unemployed, the tech industry flourished. The combined stock market valuation of Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook increased by about 70 percent to more than $10 trillion. That is roughly the size of the entire U.S. stock market in 2002. Apple alone has enough cash in its coffers to give $600 to every person in the United States. And in the next week, the big tech companies are expected to report earnings that will eclipse all previous windfalls.
Silicon Valley, still the world headquarters for tech start-ups, has never seen so much loot. More Valley companies went public in 2020 than in 2019, and they raised twice as much money when they did. Forbes calculates there are now 365 billionaires whose fortunes derive from tech, up from 241 before the virus.
No single industry has ever had such power over American life, dominating how we communicate, shop, learn about the world and seek distraction and joy. What will Silicon Valley do with this power? Who if anyone might restrain tech, and how much support will they have...? The biggest, and perhaps the only, threat to tech now is from government...
Beyond the threat of misuse of tech lurks an even darker possibility: a misplaced confidence in the ability of one loosely regulated sector to run so much of the world.
s/Won/Exploited/ (Score:1, Troll)
Re:s/Won/Exploited/ (Score:5, Insightful)
If Amazon was exploiting, then who were the exploited?
As an Amazon customer, I benefited from the convenience of online ordering. If I didn't feel I was getting value for my money, I would have bought elsewhere.
Re:s/Won/Exploited/ (Score:4, Informative)
People from big cities forget that for most people living in small towns and villages, Amazon is not just convenience, it's the ability to buy the product at all since it's not sold locally.
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True, but unlike say a Walmart, the internet makes it possible for the entire world to be ones "store". I can buy from every nation if I want.
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True, but unlike say a Walmart, the internet makes it possible for the entire world to be ones "store". I can buy from every nation if I want.
Except the ones Uncle Sam have said you can't like North Korea, Iran etc.
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True, you'll have to buy your Persian rugs else where. Luckily we still import them from whoever Iran sends them to.
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Can you not for one fucking second see why the tech corporations censored opposition to shutdowns and promoted content that promoted shutdowns. THEY DID IT ON FUCKING PURPOSE YOU FUCKING MORONS. Not one crap about health, all about profits at the expense of the entire rest of the community. Their fucking billions in profit and your fucking trillions in losses. You idiotic, gullible, stupid morons. They are fucking you on purpose to make more money. The executives should be investigated and prosecuted for ca
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People from big cities forget that for most people living in small towns and villages, Amazon is not just convenience, it's the ability to buy the product at all since it's not sold locally.
Gee. I wonder why local shops have vanished.
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By either not offering the products that people wanted, or not keeping them in stock. But the smaller the town is, the smaller the inventory and the selection needs to be.
Re:s/Won/Exploited/ (Score:5, Insightful)
Taxpayers [slashdot.org]. Also taxpayers [slashdot.org]. And taxpayers [forbes.com], and even taxpayers [theatlantic.com]. Because every tax dollar not taken from Amazon is a dollar taken from YOU some other way.
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every tax dollar not taken from Amazon is a dollar taken from YOU some other way.
That is only true if you assume government spending is fixed rather than expanding to fit the money available.
By lowering expenses, low taxes allow Amazon to offer lower prices, so more money in my pocket rather than more money in the government's pocket.
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Well it's a nice fantasy that government won't take its pound of flesh one way or another!
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Yeah, that's what Bork said.
Care to put a price tag on the freedom Amazon (and the google and Facebook and fiends) are removing from you?
Me? I value freedom. A lot. About 20 years since my last Amazon purchase. (Fooled me twice.)
Currently reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Not sure I can recommend it, though she makes a lot of good points and definitely includes a lot of interesting background information. I expect to finish today or tomorrow, but so far no sign of useful solut
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every tax dollar not taken from Amazon is a dollar taken from YOU some other way.
That is only true if you assume government spending is fixed rather than expanding to fit the money available.
By lowering expenses, low taxes allow Amazon to offer lower prices, so more money in my pocket rather than more money in the government's pocket.
The government actually doesn't have pockets. Tax receipts are all spent (and then some) on purchasing goods and services. They might not be the correct goods and services, or in the correct proportions, but basically all of the income flows back out into the broader economy rather than sitting in Ft Knox or something.
You are paying taxes to provide services (roadways, airports, international postal treaties, safe waterways, etc) which Amazon makes use of in the course of acquiring and delivering goods to
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If we're going to abandon the capitalist principle that prices should reflect marginal costs, then why stop at roads and airports? Let's also pay for electricity, water, rent, food, clothing, and healthcare out of our taxes, because everyone needs these things, right?
That's where your argument leads us whether you realize it or not.
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I mean we already pay for a number of the things you list through taxes, (e.g. subsidies for oil, coal, nukes, agriculture, etc; medicaid/medicare/NHS; and so on) so I don't know what your point is? I mean it shouldn't be a surprise that there are shared costs associated with living in a society.
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You are paying taxes to provide services (roadways, airports, international postal treaties, safe waterways, etc)
Paying for any of these with income taxes is idiotic. Roads should be financed with fuel taxes, vehicle registration fees, and gross-weight-based use fees. Airports should be financed with landing fees. Postal services should be financed with ... postage. Waterways should be paid for with freight taxes.
If services are financed by the people and companies that use them, there is an incentive to make them efficient, and there is no burden on those who don't use them.
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You are paying taxes to provide services (roadways, airports, international postal treaties, safe waterways, etc)
Paying for any of these with income taxes is idiotic. Roads should be financed with fuel taxes, vehicle registration fees, and gross-weight-based use fees. Airports should be financed with landing fees. Postal services should be financed with ... postage. Waterways should be paid for with freight taxes.
If services are financed by the people and companies that use them, there is an incentive to make them efficient, and there is no burden on those who don't use them.
That's all been tried, many times, and it doesn't work. It's basically stone-age thinking.
These services and facilities are all inter-related and any system that treats each as individual silos will fail to get the value out of them, in many cases to the point where the service collapses. It's entirely possible - and likely - that allowing one of these components to run at a tax-supported loss will lead to a more efficient economy which ends up reducing the overall rate of tax or at the very least the effic
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I see, capitalism doesn't work and it's "stone-age thinking."
So maybe you can answer my earlier question [slashdot.org] that so far nobody has tried to answer. Will you be the first? Here it is again, quoted for your convenience:
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I see, capitalism doesn't work and it's "stone-age thinking."
So maybe you can answer my earlier question [slashdot.org] that so far nobody has tried to answer. Will you be the first? Here it is again, quoted for your convenience:
Why don't you answer it, because you're the one suggesting that we're going to abandon capitalist principles.
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Jeff Bezos!
Next question?
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True. That said, I'm not sure Americans should be too pissed about it. "No single industry has ever had such power over American life" ... this is missing that Silicon Valley has an influence on the whole world, siphoning the money from the whole world into the USA.
So sure, they don't pay taxes; neither do they pay taxes in other countries, but they bring a ton of money in the US which means jobs and afferent state and federal taxes. In the end, the US, thanks to Silicon Valley, keeps a considerable advant
Re: s/Won/Exploited/ (Score:2)
Amazon stepped in and delivered food as grocery stores and wal-mart ramped up for home delivery.
Question: with their stores shut and customers in quarantine, how were small retail businesses supposed to stay open?
Re: s/Won/Exploited/ (Score:2)
Wow, so when the physical (brick and mortar) economy shut down, the virtual economy took off? Shocking! (Not really.)
Save lives = make money (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously there are people behind the scenes of online shopping sites who did work and therefore were put at risk. Yes, not all jobs can be done online, and theirs is one. But in the past, none of them could be. It's strictly an improvement.
Re:Save lives = make money (Score:5, Informative)
oh, because we couldn't have masked up and distanced at work? bullshit, small and medium businesses were destroyed and big corps and their big boxes stayed open and got the benefit.
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oh, because we couldn't have masked up and distanced at work? bullshit, small and medium businesses were destroyed and big corps and their big boxes stayed open and got the benefit.
We could have. The correct question is whether we would have.
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people with a brain would have, just as people with a brain got vaxxed and aren't the ones making up 19 out of 20 hospital admissions for covid and even higher percentage of covid deaths.
just think if we get even more virulent version of virus with higher kill percent. half the populace will get booster shot tuned for it while the other half does the Darwin thing.
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Right because florida, texas, alabama, and ole miss are democratic strongholds. EVERY media source says you are a lying irresponsible sack of shit. Who posts as AC because you have no balls.
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Yay, cherry-picking.
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it's not the party line, unlike what the Republicans have become. A neocon moron isn't a conservative.
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So someone nearly 60 has to tell you this.
You're behind the times, Democrats endorsed nuclear power as of a year ago.
The rest of the stuff you list doesn't even matter.
There are studies that have found health issues in animals fed various GMO crops, you seem to be making an assertion about them devoid of science just wish.
Some forms of EM due cause cancer, hard UV, x-rays and gammas are all EM and are known to cause cancer.
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Vaccine hesitancy doesn't have anything to do with health care quality, especially when health care practitioners and organizations are going out of their way to make vaccines available and counter vaccine misinformation. It's about stupid people making stupid choices, regardless of whether they're a minority.
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Had government not started passing out money they wouldn't of had a choice. Work and maybe catch the virus, or quit working, and starve when your savings runs out. That or you start stealing from everyone else until you get killed.
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The possibility? Yes. But the concentration is not good at all.
Operating profit of $5.8 billion (Score:1)
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If $2 billion is zero (Score:4, Informative)
In federal I come taxes alone, Amazon paid about $2 billion in 2020. They paid more in futa taxes, real estate taxes, etc. For example, about a billion in federal employment taxes.
All told, what they paid in taxes is a bit more than what they made in profit.
They would have paid more in taxes if they hadn't been offered tax credits for solar, etc. When they spend $400 million putting solar panels on their roof, that's instead of spending that $400 million in taxes, because that's the tax law you guys wanted.
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When they spend $400 million putting solar panels on their roof, that's instead of spending that $400 million in taxes, because that's the tax law you guys wanted.
And one could argue that the $400milllion they spent on solar did more good for everyone else than the US Government spending $400 million extra tax dollars on the military.
Yeah, THAT'S why fuel usage goes down (Score:2)
Which do you think uses more fuel, and therefore produces more carbon
A) 100 people drive 100 cars a few miles to the store
B) 1 person drives one delivery van, dropping off everyone's purchases as they go by
Think about that for a bit and see what you think.
Hint: B is the one that uses a lot less fuel, and therefore releases a lot less carbon.
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Watching all the Amazon delivery trucks here, I'd say Amazon in making multiple trips to drop a package here and a package there.
There's maybe 2 dozen houses past mine and sure a lot of delivery vehicles going by.
Now if Amazon worked like I do, one trip to town a week, then you'd have an argument.
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> then you'd have an argument.
It's really not so much an argument as it's a fact.
It's been studied to death. This isn't just some idea I randomly pulled out my ass.
Turns out, delivery costs Amazon *money*.
It also turns out that Amazon is pretty good at saving themselves money.
Hence, they are pretty good at optimizing delivery costs.
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Ps - if Amazon delivered once a week, meaning the time from ordering to having the items was 10 days or so, the result would be that people drive to Best Buy or Home Depot to get an HDMI cable or a doorknob. Each person separately driving to the store to get that one item from Best Buy or whatever.
How do we know this? Because we tried 10-day delivery for a few decades. It was called the US Mail. People drove to Radio Shack for a resistor rather than wait for the delivery.
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Nice try, but no. One uses less gas than a hundred. A lot less.
If you wanted to, you could look this stuff up rather then believing whatever thought comes out of your ass.
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Ps, regarding "one item, you stupid fuck" - the truck actually carries more than one item.
It might be hard to believe, but your neighbors actually order from Amazon too. They don't actually make a trip to the warehouse, to your house, and back the warehouse with just your item. That's what YOU do when you drive YOUR car to Best Buy for an HDMI cable or whatever. The Amazon truck that drops off your HDMI cable has a hundred other items in there too.
Re: Yeah, THAT'S why fuel usage goes down (Score:2)
If you want to rail against Amazon, the proper attack vector is not their delivery service - they squeezed every penny out of their logistics, which has a side benefit of reducing fuel costs, carbon emissions, etc. No, the proper attack vector is the ungodly amount of cardboard boxes and plastic pouches they go they in a day.
Good point (Score:2)
Now that is a good point.
I noticed today an Amazon delivery my wife got and her last one, came in a plastic bad instead of a box with plastic padding inside. Just plastic is probably better than plastic + cardboard box, but still it's not good.
I wonder if their toughened plastic bags can be recycled alongside plastic grocery bags.
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Agreed. Government waste is incredible. Better to have programs that allow private companies to invest rather than trusting the government won't waste it. There are checks and balances here as well, because if Amazon were to lie then it'd be tax fraud with huge penalties. Contrary to gov contracts where companies shoot for the bare minimum required to not be liable, and try every legal option available to use the money for something else like bonuses.
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Perhaps Amazon isn't quite as bad as the others, but we are here talking about tech companies.
And plenty of them dodge tax liabilities by shoving hundreds of billions into that "mattress" we call Ireland.
Let's stop pretending otherwise.
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As far as I know these big companies have not been convicted of breaking the tax code.
Unfortunately the people in charge of that tax code are the same people who benefit the most from having the tax code the way it is.
With things the way they are I don't see any major reforms of the tax code ever.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
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"With things the way they are I don't see any major reforms of the tax code ever.
Don't hate the player, hate the game."
Bullshit. It is corrupt players who choose to make the game suck for everyone else. I'll hate the players. If they can't compete on a level playing field then they shouldn't be competing.
Re: People that thrive on people's misery... (Score:2)
no need for personal income tax (Score:1)
There would be no need for income tax on individuals at all if corporations and wall street were taxed and not allowed to do business in or with the USA if they moved away.
Education for all, healthcare including dental and eye care for all. Peanuts to pay for.
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There would be no need for income tax on individuals at all if corporations and wall street were taxed and not allowed to do business in or with the USA if they moved away.
Don't be surprised if they left.
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and leave the world's biggest market that gives them 40 percent plus their business? No they won't.
Re:no need for personal income tax (Score:5, Insightful)
There would be no need for income tax on individuals at all if corporations and wall street were taxed and not allowed to do business in or with the USA if they moved away.
Right! We could do away with graduated income taxes in favor of a regressive hidden tax on every product and service you buy. This is highly in favor of the rich, who won't much notice the difference, and screws the poor over like anything, but who cares about those slobs? The peasants are revolting.
I know, you were probably thinking that businesses wouldn't have to raise prices, because they keep billions of dollars in their attics as insulation, anyway.
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The costs will be passed on to the consumer. The poorest people will suffer the most. The rich won't care, you still need to buy the products. Poor people are exempt from most income taxes (besides social security and medicare.) The effect of taxing the corporations will be that products that poorer people want to buy will be more out-of-reach.
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False, the "costs" are minute fraction, that's the absurdity of arguments by the corporate fascism apologists with their greed.
What an incredibly stupid take (Score:5, Insightful)
Who if anyone might restrain tech, and how much support will they have?
Bro, the consumer has that power by not buying the products and services of these companies. No one is holding a gun to consumers' head and forcing them to buy from these tech companies.
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Maybe the scalpers "won"? They certainly exploited.
Re:What an incredibly stupid take (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, the ridiculously inflated stock market valuations are largely a result of government helicopter-drops of money. All the stimulus spending and quantitative easing had to go somewhere -- and an awful lot went into the stock market, because travel wasn't happening, local entertainment venues were restricted or closed, and rent payments could (in many places) be delayed indefinitely.
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The tech companies did not "win", nor did they "exploit", the 2020 pandemic. The pandemic accelerated a pre-existing macroeconomic trend where people work, buy, and communicate online, and these tech companies provided the goods and services to do so. All these companies, particularly Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, have been investing and developing digitalization products for the last decade. A company would be "exploiting" the pandemic if they released new crucial products at exorbitant prices, e.g. "Try our new Pandemic-safe iPhone for only $4000."
How ironic you use price gouging as a counter-argument, when plenty of 3rd party affiliates sponsored and hosted by Amazon did exactly that shit during the pandemic.
Who if anyone might restrain tech, and how much support will they have?
Bro, the consumer has that power by not buying the products and services of these companies. No one is holding a gun to consumers' head and forcing them to buy from these tech companies.
You have a rather cute way of ignoring mass addiction. Most of these "tech" companies are pimping that, and you are the product.
And to an extent, I agree with you regarding exploiting the pandemic. These companies weren't exactly barely scraping by before the virus came along, which tends to confirm addiction plays a much larger role here.
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How ironic you use price gouging as a counter-argument, when plenty of 3rd party affiliates sponsored and hosted by Amazon did exactly that shit during the pandemic.
And how is this related to Amazon per se? People can run whatever they want on their AWS services.
You have a rather cute way of ignoring mass addiction. Most of these "tech" companies are pimping that, and you are the product.
You have a rather unfounded way of stigmatizing successful products as addictions. Do you think people are addicted to using Google web search or maps? Do you think startup companies are addicted to using AWS or Azure? Do you think consumers are addicted to shopping online at Amazon?
Why do you hate companies' success? Instead of complaining about them, why not take advantage of these successes by using their
Re: What an incredibly stupid take (Score:2)
These companies weren't exactly barely scraping by before the virus came along, which tends to confirm addiction plays a much larger role here.
Or they have a successful business model, or isn't that a possibility?
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Call me back when people have a meaningful choice, instead of having a choice that sucks or doing without altogether.
Sort of like the job market.
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wrong, big corps won, getting bailouts by government and market pumping by fed reserve, while small and medium businesses shut down unnecessarily while the big corp's outlets where allowed to be open
No, C-Levels won the pandemic (Score:4, Informative)
Several of the airlines got billions in bailouts to save jobs, did they layoffs anyway, were only profitable because of the bailouts and are now complaining they don't have enough workers and they need more cheap H1 and H2-Bs because those workers couldn't wait a year and got new jobs.
I especially like how we've all forgotten about the news stories about how impossibly hard it was to get on unemployment. Or how few people are talking about this [cnbc.com]
One more thing (Score:2, Interesting)
Expect to see more and more of these. So instead of having an honest discussion about addressing misinformation (for example, by applying false advertising laws or by doing a massive campaign to teac
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People were laid off because there was no work to do. Your expectation is that the employees would what, get paid to have social gatherings in the lunch room? You know, it still costs money to maintain airports and planes even when they're not in regular use. Would you want to fly in a plane that has been sitting around for a year without the required checkups? To cry about layoffs when there isn't any work means that you don't understand the problem they every company was dealing with, even those who got g
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I read your link and no, that's not what it said. It talks about how people are still not applying for the available jobs in spite of cutting FEDERAL unemployment programs. The state programs are still there and people are content with those. The article is mostly an opinion piece. We KNOW that people are not going back to work because they don't want to, or they're ok with unemployment. This is what they're telling their managers. Blue news articles like CNBC give you half the truth and rewrite the other h
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Several countries managed to cough up at least a grand per month if not more for people that were idled. And guess what, it looks like their economies are doing just fine.
I think it's long past time for the US to have a "trickle up" economic policy. Lower and middle classes would be spending like crazy, thereby stimulating corporate america and the economy in a huge way.
Re: No, C-Levels won the pandemic (Score:2)
They were handed $5 trillion in bail outs and used it to buy up property from desperate ex-employees for pennies on the dollar.
What?
Who got $5 Trillion (citation please) and bought what (please, be specific) for "pennies on the dollar"?
We have yet to have approved $5 Trillion in Covid Recovery spending in total, and that includes countless billions in supplemental unemployment checks, stimulus checks, and countless billions more to bail out state governments, museums, and other non-"C-Level" handouts.
You are uninformed, your math is off , and your anger is mis-directed.
Just remember (Score:2)
Re: Just remember (Score:2)
How many jobs did Amazon create over the course of the pandemic? At least a half-million in 2020.
https://news.yahoo.com/jeff-be... [yahoo.com]
Tech companies (Score:2)
Many people own shares in tech companies, so I am not sure what the problem is. Every paid job that anyone does is exploiting the need of someone else. That's how things are going to have to be until we have UBI or some Star Trek shit happens.
not only tech companies (Score:2)
The makers of plexiglass were most likely the biggest winners.
Also Logistics companies ... (Score:2)
At this point Amazon is as much a logistics company as a tech company. They own warehouses, they have an airlift fleet and delivery vans (I'm waiting for them to start buying railroads and ships). Logistics companies Amazon, Fed ex, ups and warehousing companies also won the pandemic. They vacuumed up under paid ( and unemployed) food workers and turned them into warehousing and delivery folks. Instead of making minimum wage or less ( like waiters ) with no benefits, they are now making 14+ an hour w
More regulation? (Score:1)
AGREED (Score:1)