Here's what Jeff Bezos says about Trump visiting Blue Origin the same day of the announcement that the WaPo would not make a presidential endorsement

The background is that, if accurate, the loss of subscribers is stunning:

NEWS: More than 200,000 subscribers have canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post after the revelation that owner Jeff Bezos blocked an endorsement of VP Harris.
That's about 8 percent of WaPo's subscriber base - a staggering sum
MOREhttps://t.co/nCJhJrmlq0

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) October 28, 2024

Far less dramatic than the WaPo number, but I’m told in the week since we reported that the LA Times would not endorse, over 7,000 LAT subscribers canceled and specifically cited editorial content as the reason. The total number of cancelations is significantly higher, I’m told.

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) October 28, 2024

Presumably because the type of people who pay for a LA Times or Washington Post subscription need to know which of these worlds the paper has decided to exist in:

Really, it's amazing. It's like there's an impermeable wall between them. pic.twitter.com/DeWAqNTBtR

— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) October 28, 2024

Here is the part of Bezos's new statement that stood out to me:

By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.

No details are provided as to the nature of that meeting (let alone explain why keeping the nature of that meeting secret is helpful for improving society's trust in the Washington Post). 

NY Times makes fun of Amazon's drone delivery service

I didn't realize it ever passed the hypothetical phase:

Amazon started thinking really long term. It envisioned, and got a patent for, a drone resupply vehicle that would hover in the sky at 45,000 feet. That’s above commercial airplanes, but Amazon said it could use the vehicles to deliver customers a hot dinner.

...

years later, drone delivery is a reality — kind of — on the outskirts of College Station, Texas, northwest of Houston. That is a major achievement for a program that has waxed and waned over the years and lost many of its early leaders to newer and more urgent projects.

Yet the venture as it currently exists is so underwhelming that Amazon can keep the drones in the air only by giving stuff away. Years of toil by top scientists and aviation specialists have yielded a program that flies Listerine Cool Mint Breath Strips or a can of Campbell’s Chunky Minestrone With Italian Sausage — but not both at once — to customers as gifts. If this is science fiction, it’s being played for laughs.

...

While it’s cool to have stuff literally land on your driveway, at least the first few times, there are many hurdles to getting stuff this way.

Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh over five pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.

...

The incentives, however, kept coming. The couple got an email the other day from Amazon pushing Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter, which usually costs $5.38 but was a “free gift” while supplies lasted. They ordered it, and a little while later a drone dropped a big box containing a small jar. Amazon said “some promotional items” are being offered “as a welcome.”

...

[A neighbor] also ordered the free Skippy peanut butter but forgot to put out the landing target, so the drone went away. 

Good example of a suspicious product listing at Amazon that looks like it's hijacked

The third result for "Airpods" for at least the last 24 hours is a suspiciously cheap option. Click through, scroll down, and you'll see customer questions concerning light bulbs, and customer reviews concerning watches, bulbs, and happy grandfathers.

How long until we hear more about the financials for the Whole Foods that Amazon "temporarily" closed in San Francisco (or the favors it expects to reopen)?

CBS headline yesterday:

Whole Foods closes flagship store in San Francisco for staff "safety"

...

Whole Foods did not elaborate on the specific conditions that led to the store's closing. The San Francisco Standard, an independent newspaper, reported that Whole Foods pointed to nearby crime and drug use as reasons for suspending operations, according to a City Hall source.

From the Standard's article cited by CBS

Since the start of the pandemic, Downtown has suffered a massive loss in foot traffic due to remote work. Many small businesses have shuttered, while examples of extreme poverty, drug use and mental illness on the street have become more apparent. Fears of a “doom loop” in which a cascade of negative financial impacts compound have spread across the city, and City Hall officials currently expect a nearly $800 million deficit in San Francisco’s budget.

Reuters in February:

Rival grocers like Kroger Co and Walmart Inc remain fearsome competition. Despite Amazon's large business from packaged food and other goods, it has yet to win significant market share in perishables, [Amazon's Chief Executive] said.

[An analyst] said Amazon has itself to blame, having drawn consumers to online shopping decades ago.

"Retail is a tough business," he said. "They are flushing money down a toilet pursuing Amazon Fresh stores" and thinking "they can brand a new concept and capture share from retailers who have been successful for decades."

SF Chronicle:

The store’s modern finishes and plentiful parking made it more attractive than the other eight Whole Foods in the city

Citizen realizes police can get footage from his Ring cameras directly from Amazon and without his consent

Politico:

After sending the initial footage, [the citizen] started to find the police demands onerous. “He sent one asking for all the footage from October 25,” [the citizen] said. That was a far bigger ask, he said. [The citizen] told POLITICO that he has five cameras surrounding his house, which record in 5 to 15 second bursts whenever they’re activated. He also has three cameras inside his house, as well as 13 cameras inside the store that he owns, which is nowhere near his home. All of these cameras are connected to his Ring account.

He declined that request.

...

After he stopped cooperating, he didn’t hear from the detective again, until he received an email from Ring, notifying him that his account was the subject of a warrant from the Hamilton police department.

This time, [the citizen] wasn’t able to choose which cameras he could send videos from. The warrant included all five of his outdoor cameras, and also added a sixth camera that was inside his house, as well as any videos from cameras associated with his account, which would include the cameras in his store. It would include footage recorded from cameras he had in his living room and bedroom

"Amazon has been working closely with the Ukrainian government to download essential data and ferry it out of the country in suitcase-sized solid-state computer storage units called Snowball Edge"

Russ Mitchell for the LAT:

On Feb. 24, the day of the invasion, [the head of government transformation at Amazon Web Services] met for lunch with [the] Ukraine ambassador ... at the Ukraine Embassy in London.

They sketched out with pen and paper a list of the most essential data: the population register; land and property ownership records; tax payment records; bank records; education registries; anti-corruption databases, and more. The project involved 27 Ukrainian ministries, 18 Ukrainian universities, the country’s largest remote learning K–12 school serving hundreds of thousands of displaced children, and dozens of other private sector companies including Ukraine’s largest private financial institution, PrivatBank.

The Snowball units, in their ruggedized gray containers, were flown from Dublin to Krakow in Poland. Then the Ukrainians “spirited these devices over the border into the Ukraine”

...

The data, 10 million gigabytes so far, represent “critical information infrastructure. This is core for operation of the economy, of the tax system, of banks, and the government overall,” he said. The data also include property records whose safekeeping can help prevent theft of Ukrainian homes, businesses, and land.

Through history, invaders have “come in and staged fake referendum and parceled out the land to their chums,” said [the AWS representative]

...

Amazon didn’t have to worry about its relationship with Russia on the Snowball project. It doesn’t have one.

An allegation of "freakishly personal" retaliation by Substack; Amazon workers stage a walkout

"He responded by scolding us for our ingratitude"

Meanwhile in Southern California:

[Possibly over a hundred] Amazon employees at the company’s air hub in San Bernardino, Calif., on Monday abandoned their workstations mid-shift over low wages and concerns regarding heat safety.

The walkout in Southern California marks the first coordinated labor action in Amazon’s growing airfreight division, which uses Prime-branded planes to fly packages and goods around the country much like UPS or FedEx. The employees, who are independently organized, said they didn’t plan to return to work on Monday, in an effort to pressure Amazon to raise wages and improve safety.

"The merging of Comixology and Kindle has created a hell I'd like to escape"

The Verge:

Apparently, if you let one company acquire a near-monopoly in the digital books and comics spaces, it will do terrible things that make the experience worse.

It remains so bad in so many ways, it's as if they're trying to destroy the comics market. Or, as if some weird AI with no human oversight was allowed to consume Comixology and blend it into the Amazon blob. 

Today's funny posts

The Vikings called timeout because Kirk Cousins lined up behind the wrong lineman pic.twitter.com/mMX84ptC8T

— Vikings Blogger (@firstandskol) November 29, 2021

Venom and Gwen in their winter coats; CHOAM logo redesign; The ghost in GTA

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by InHyuk Lee (@leeinhyuk)

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A post shared by InHyuk Lee (@leeinhyuk)

pic.twitter.com/OuLOyZppSt

— 🌈 Xeans Icemane 💛🤍💜🖤 (@Xeans) November 11, 2021

What the heck's going on in the GTA Remaster? How does this even happen? (This was dropped in a discord I'm in, and I'm just baffled by it.) pic.twitter.com/BWB7yoWQfW

— Lekon! (@Lekonish) November 16, 2021

It's well-known that danmaku shmup bullets have forgiving hitboxes (a point that a Deltarune character emphasises) but having a spell card where the bullet hitboxes are fundamentally wrong, and then calling the card "Paranoia", is a sheer power move. pic.twitter.com/ym1gctp8Gu

— Leon ._. (@webbedspace) November 12, 2021

Some strong cover art (1917), #books #WWI (French indictment of German war practices.) pic.twitter.com/7ZthdcBGIN

— JF Ptak (@ptak) October 29, 2021

Amazon Prime train

I saw an Amazon Prime Train the other day and it really hammered home the vast scale of the company pic.twitter.com/XpYKos2StA

— alex hern (@alexhern) October 7, 2021

"Not naming names, but many FBA aggregators are getting WRECKED by supply chain issues"

Interesting thread about companies that gobbled up promising Amazon sellers and are now getting hammered by supply chain disruption. 

"The top 1% of Americans are avoiding paying an estimated $163 billion in taxes a year, according to the Treasury Department"

CBS:

That discrepancy is pushing the estimated tax gap, the amount of money owed by taxpayers that isn't collected, to nearly around $600 billion annually, and to approximately $7 trillion in lost revenue over the next decade, the Treasury Department finds.

Related:

These photos of a new Amazon warehouse in Tijuana, Mexico have been going viral as the "This is capitalism" picture of the year. But there's a lot more going on here than the picture can tell you. Let's trace the Amazon supply chain! A thread:👇 1/ pic.twitter.com/XDNC5XkvgV

— Charmaine Chua (@CharmaineSChua) September 7, 2021

But the Amazon networks' epicenter is starting to shift. Since Trump's trade war, there has been a total increase of about $200 billion in tariffs from China. For e-commerce companies, this means direct China-US trade has become too expensive. The solution? Mexico. 4/

— Charmaine Chua (@CharmaineSChua) September 7, 2021

For Amazon, this duty-free clause, set against the increase in China-US tariffs, provides a loophole. They will ship Chinese goods into Mexico, bring them to the Tijuana facility to process and break apart, then truck them in tote-bag sized, sub-$800 bundles to Otay Mesa FC 7/

— Charmaine Chua (@CharmaineSChua) September 7, 2021

Amazon's new video game might be bricking high end graphics cards during beta testing

Seems like something is wrong. PC Gamer:

EVGA has confirmed to us that every one of its GeForce RTX 3090 cards that have been killed by issues with the New World MMO closed beta will be replaced by the company: "Yes, all failed 3090’s are being replaced," a spokesman for the company has said. 

The developer, Amazon Games Studios, has now released a hotfix which clamps the FPS in the menu without affecting the rest of the game, despite assuring gamers that the closed beta was "safe to play" regardless of any patch.

"Amazon Calls Warehouse Workers 'Industrial Athletes' In Leaked Wellness Pamphlet"

Vice:

the company describes warehouse workers as “industrial athletes” and details how its Working Well program will help workers by laying out guidelines to “prepare their bodies” for walking “up to 13 miles a day” or lifting “a total of 20,000 pounds” during a shift.  

"Here at Amazon, you will become an industrial athlete. Just like an athlete who trains for an event, industrial athletes need to prepare their bodies to be able to perform their best at work," the pamphlet reads.

FYI for Amazon device owners, Amazon Sidewalk will automatically be switched on as of June 8, and will start connecting neighbors' Amazon devices to your WiFi

ArsTechnica:

If you use Alexa, Echo, or any other Amazon device, you have only 10 days to opt out of an experiment that leaves your personal privacy and security hanging in the balance.

On June 8, the merchant, Web host, and entertainment behemoth will automatically enroll the devices in Amazon Sidewalk. The new wireless mesh service will share a small slice of your Internet bandwidth with nearby neighbors who don’t have connectivity and help you to their bandwidth when you don’t have a connection.

By default, Amazon devices including Alexa, Echo, Ring, security cams, outdoor lights, motion sensors, and Tile trackers will enroll in the system.

The anecdote that jumped out to me from Fast Company's new article about the history of design at Amazon

Long article about the Fire Phone, Dash Wand (?), and other devices. But this jumped out:

When Bezos was a fourth grader in Houston, he says he played Star Trek with his friends every day after school. Someone played Kirk, another person would be Spock. But usually, someone was the Computer, too.

Microsoft announces employee-monitoring software that includes "virtual commutes"; Amazon demands employees agree to "megacycle" graveyard shifts

Microsoft:

To help people achieve balance, collaborate smartly, and find focus wherever and whenever they need it, we’re excited to announce insights and experiences that are part of Microsoft Viva, the employee experience platform built on Microsoft 365 that empowers people and teams to be their best from wherever they work. 

...

Leaders will be able to more accurately identify where teams may be struggling, proactively adjust work norms, and then quantify the impact of those changes over time. 

...

In the coming months, updates to Viva Insights will bring additional personal wellbeing experiences, such as a virtual commute 

Vice:

On January 25, hundreds of workers at an Amazon warehouse in Chicago were presented with a baffling choice: sign up for a ten-and-a-half-hour graveyard shift, or lose your job.

Management informed workers that their warehouse, known as DCH1, would be shut down, and they were being offered a shift that runs from 1:20am to 11:50am, which is known as "megacycle," at a new Chicago warehouse. 

...

Workers at DCH1 were previously offered several different shift options, including an eight-hour overnight shift that ends at 4:45 am, a five-hour morning shift, and a four-hour morning shift. Going forward, rank-and-file DCH1 workers will only have the megacycle option at a new facility

Murderbot Diaries author Martha Wells recounts the trouble she's had removing pirated editions of her books from Amazon

From the thread:

Since then I've had to deal with lots of pirated editions on Amazon Kindle, Nook, Kobo etc. On 9/22/20 I reported 2 more pirated copies on Kindle, and they gave me a report claim number (@AmazonHelp) and then ignored me, as they still make money off pirates. 2/?

— Martha Wells (@marthawells1) January 1, 2021

Then yesterday I got a "quality issues" complaint on it and had to drop everything to deal with that (the reader reported archaic words as typos along with a few OCR errors). I got it fixed and now Amazon is saying they have an infringement claim filed against ME on the book. 3/?

— Martha Wells (@marthawells1) January 1, 2021

This is very common on Amazon. I don't know how self-published authors cope with all the theft and harassment, frankly. The theft and harassment aimed at traditionally published authors is bad enough with a publisher supporting you. 5/?

— Martha Wells (@marthawells1) January 1, 2021

Apparent SEO hacking has popularized a suspicious Barack Obama "biography" at Amazon

Slate looks at "Barack Obama Book: The Biography of Barack Obama"

Thanks to sponsored listings and canny search-engine optimization, the book appears above Barack Obama’s actual memoir if you search Amazon for—you guessed it—“barack obama book.”

...

Is Barack Obama Book written by an AI, or just by an awkward, occasionally confused human? I’m no expert. But the Giant Langage Model Test Room is an expert. GLTR, a tool developed by Harvard’s natural language learning project and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, helps to identify AI-written copy by comparing every word in a text to the words that common machine-learning algorithms would commonly predict would appear in that position. The more uncommon or unlikely the words in a text are, the more likely they were written by a human, not by a machine.

I fed a paragraph from Barack Obama Book into GLTR. It’s about Obama’s 2011 decision to launch a raid on the compound where intelligence suggested Osama bin Laden might be hiding. In this GLTR result, words highlighted in green and yellow are very common machine-language choices, while words highlighted in red and purple are uncommon.