That makes me feel a lot better. Much of Amazon is "worth nationalizing", but the is nothing I'd want from GM.
Saying "well GM is better to labor" I think is highly paternalistic. Labor was stronger in the postwar era, and the unionization of the auto industry is a holdover from that.
YMMV, but here in Australia we have strong consumer protection laws. I have way more hassle getting small mom and pop shops to follow the law than big corporate chains.
Isn't a lot of that older than Amazon? Walmart was already hard to compete against for family-owned retail businesses. Three Walton heirs are in the top 15 richest Americans, if you want to talk about distribution of wealth. To me Amazon seems like just the natural next generation of the Walmart model.
I don't know that bookstorez are dying, in the US. Amazon killed Borders, sure, and Barnes and Noble isn't as focused on books anymore. But independent bookstores have been doing okay afaict, though having to make changes.
It's possible that the bookstores are increasingly in big cities or something, but I don't think that's Amazon's fault.
A lot of this is just about certain commerce moving online, and books competing against more and more forms of content. Amazon can provide low prices, but does terrible at spontaneity or getting me to read something totally new to me.
Books have kind of also never been more available than they are today? We've come a long, long way from the heyday of Waldenbooks. I feel like I might rather be an author today than pre-Amazon.
My sense is that authors mostly make less money than they did 25 years ago, but only because there's so many more of them. And authors mostly didn't make much money to begin with.
As I was writing my first comment I kept thinking about how Walden and Borders are gone, but Half-Price Books seems to be doing well. I think a used book store is probably net better for an area than a Borders
ETA: one relevant market Amazon definitely created is ebook romance/erotica. Somehow the second page of results of any Amazon search contains $3 romance ebooks, whatever you were searching for. Those authors have never had it so good.
I think if you look at the number of bookstores that were in the US before Amazon, and compare that to now, you'll see that they're in a steep decline. Not all of this is due to Amazon, since much of the consolidation was from competition from Borders and B&N. But today's B&N is a far cry from what it used to be, Borders is gone, and Amazon is the 800lb gorilla.
If you can supply the data I'd be happy to look at it. I linked what data I managed to find. I think Amazon is largely responsible for ending borders, but less so the transformation of b&n. GameStop went through a similar crappification. That's just been retail.
I won't be surprised if there's a lot fewer book stores than there were 25 years ago. If we could break it out by big chain vs indie stores would be interesting. Because indie bookstores have been doing well in the last ten years (despite ebooks!). I was surprised by this. It didn't fit my mental model.
Maybe I don't remember well enough the pre-crappy versions of borders and b&n well enough, but I really don't feel strongly about them. Indie bookstores are where it's at for me.
I don’t agree with OP, but what they were trying to say is they’re killing open source business models. They take a popular open source project, turn it into an AWS offering and then crush any SaaS/cloud ambitions of the open source developers.
Ebooks killed book stores. Amazon was one of the many involved in that process. Like Pitney Bowes holding on to the printer industry for dear life. And stores sucked cause they charged ridiculous amounts of money for a glorified paperweight. Might as well scour Goodwill.
>Open Source
We live in a time with the most available and easily discovered open source code in the history of the world. This is nothing but false.
>Concentration of computer resources
Which is not a bad thing.
>American Cinema
That has been dominated well before Amazon came around.
When GM was "good for America", we pretty much lost public transportation, so what are we losing now?