@snoopydawg

do millennials know that? Do they even know that the country wasn't at war every day of their lives before 9/11? Do they study the history of the 60's and the Vietnam war and anti war movement?

Part of being middle class is being educated and having non-work time to make oneself an informed citizen. Since college has become a credentialling mill (unless you go to an elite school, where the degree opens doors) which leaves you with massive debt, education has been made both unaffordable and, in some sense, undesirable. Then, they have used the "free" internet model to destroy journalism.

So, no info, and no education to process info. Presto. Instant proletariat. Bring the bread (pizza) and the circuses (Kardashians, Trump, IdPol).

The banks would love to see everyone have to use credit cards, Apple Pay and Google pay so they can ding people with their petty user fees. The IRS is in favor of it too because they want to be able to tax every penny people have. This is happening in some countries in Europe already, but people don't understand how bad of an idea it is.

I've noticed that when the PTB want something to happen they aren't looking to doing it to the current generation, but the one coming up. We know that being spied upon is against our rights, but do millennials know that? Do they even know that the country wasn't at war every day of their lives before 9/11? Do they study the history of the 60's and the Vietnam war and anti war movement?

The PTB have been very patient in destroying our liberties and our country with its asset stripping. Very patient.

@Centaurea

To think of Amazon as a retailer, though, is to profoundly misjudge the scope of what its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, has set out to do. It’s not simply that Amazon does so much more than sell stuff—that it also produces hit television shows and movies; publishes books; designs digital devices; underwrites loans; delivers restaurant orders; sells a growing share of the Web’s advertising; manages the data of US intelligence agencies; operates the world’s largest streaming video-game platform; manufactures a growing array of products, from blouses to batteries; and is even venturing into health care.

Instead, it’s that Bezos has designed his company for a far more radical goal than merely dominating markets; he’s built Amazon to replace them. His vision is for Amazon to become the underlying infrastructure that commerce runs on. Already, Amazon’s website is the dominant platform for online retail sales, attracting half of all online US shopping traffic and hosting thousands of third-party sellers. Its Amazon Web Services division provides 34 percent of the world’s cloud-computing capacity, handling the data of a long list of entities, from Netflix to Nordstrom, Comcast to Condé Nast to the CIA. Now, in a challenge to UPS and FedEx, Amazon is building out a vast shipping and delivery operation with the aim of handling both its own packages and those of other companies.

By controlling these essential pieces of infrastructure, Amazon can privilege its own products and services as they move through these pipelines, siphoning off the most lucrative currents of consumer demand for itself. And it can set the terms by which other companies have access to these pipelines, while also levying, through the fees it charges, a tax on their trade. In other words, it’s moving us away from a democratic political economy, in which commerce takes place in open markets governed by public rules, and toward a future in which the exchange of goods occurs in a private arena governed by Amazon. It’s a setup that inevitably transfers wealth to the few—and with it, the power over such crucial questions as which books and ideas get published and promoted, who may ply a trade and on what terms, and whether given communities will succeed or fail.

Amazon is “something radically new in the history of American business,” New Yorker writer George Packer has observed. But it’s not without antecedents. In the 19th century, men like Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller harnessed a disruptive new technology—the railroad—and used the control that it gave them over market access to weaken their industrial competitors and extort money from farmers and small businesses. Their actions sparked a broad movement against monopolies, which led, over the following decades, to the passage of a robust body of antitrust laws. The central purpose of these laws was to protect liberty and democracy from concentrated economic power, or what Franklin Roosevelt called “industrial dictatorship.”

Amazon Doesn’t Just Want to Dominate the Market—It Wants to Become the Market

I'm starting to think Bezos's end goal is to turn the entire planet into one gigantic company town. Amazon will be the sole employer, the sole landlord, the sole provider of healthcare and education and of whatever other services we might need.

We will be guarded and watched over by Amazon's security force, which will consist of former CIA and MI5 agents and a whole lot of robotic-AI devices.

And of course, all tangible goods, such as food and clothing, can only be purchased at the Amazon company store.

The exclusive legal tender in AmazonWorld will be Bezos Bucks, which will be digital, of course, not actual physical money.

A system of social credit will be in place to determine who gets what in AmazonWorld. A sort of dystopic "Amazon Prime", shall we say.

(I really wish I were being sarcastic here, but I'm not sure I am. What other end result is logical?)