Sat Sep 8 13:45:00 EDT 2018 Stayed up late watching anime, woke up early and listened to podcasts for a couple hours, then fell back to sleep until after one o'clock. High of sixty-nine today and mostly cloudy. (Wow, Labor Day turned off summer like a switch!) Goals: - Mess around with a Golang thing A bit. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/monopoly-antitrust-lina-khan-amazon.html > Ms. Khan disagreed. Over 93 heavily footnoted pages, she presented the case that the company should not get a pass on anticompetitive behavior just because it makes customers happy. Once-robust monopoly laws have been marginalized, Ms. Khan wrote, and consequently Amazon is amassing structural power that lets it exert increasing control over many parts of the economy. > > Amazon has so much data on so many customers, it is so willing to forgo profits, it is so aggressive and has so many advantages from its shipping and warehouse infrastructure that it exerts an influence much broader than its market share. It resembles the all-powerful railroads of the Progressive Era, Ms. Khan wrote: “The thousands of retailers and independent businesses that must ride Amazon’s rails to reach market are increasingly dependent on their biggest competitor.” The _NYT_ must be underselling the argument, because duh. Isn't everyone waiting for Amazon's other shoe to drop — for them to begin aggressively abusing their unprecedented monopoly power? > Ida Tarbell, the journalist whose investigation of Standard Oil helped bring about its breakup, wrote this about John D. Rockefeller in 1905: > > “It takes time to crush men who are pursuing legitimate trade. But one of Mr. Rockefeller’s most impressive characteristics is patience. … He was like a general who, besieging a city surrounded by fortified hills, views from a balloon the whole great field, and sees how, this point taken, that must fall; this hill reached, that fort is commanded. And nothing was too small: the corner grocery in Browntown, the humble refining still on Oil Creek, the shortest private pipeline. Nothing, for little things grow.” > > When Ms. Khan read that, she thought: Jeff Bezos. Hovenkamp so badly misses the point by characterizing this as attacking Amazon "simply because their low prices hurt competitors". This isn't about leveling the playing field — it's about who owns the field. I'm enjoying Crunchyroll. _Interviews with Monster Girls_ is fun. Changed towels, vacuumed, wiped down kitchen counters, etc. Lunch: coffee, macaroni Dinner: Chinese